Back Rowe Reviews
Real Time Movie Reviews from the Back Row of a Theater

Star Trek (PG-13)

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Directed by: J.J. Abrams
Starring: Chris Pine
May 2009

“New Trek Frontier is More Commercial, Less Cerebral”


“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens’ famous line from A Tale of Two Cities, quoted near the beginning of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan during a great character moment between Kirk and Spock, had profound ramifications later in that film. Writer/director J.J. Abrams’ re-envisioned Star Trek, which comes seven years after its foundering forebear, Star Trek: Nemesis, and five years after the ill-fated TV series, Star Trek: Enterprise, is the very embodiment of Dickens’ ambivalent phrase.

Boldly going where viewers have already gone before (i.e., a prequel) is seldom a good idea and rarely produces positive results…I’ll use just three words in making my case,
The Phantom Menace (a.k.a. Star Wars: Episode One). But the new trend in Hollywood is to re-imagine, retool or reboot a decades-old movie or TV series, effectively breathing new life into a flatlined franchise. The Batman, Battlestar Galactica, Superman (Smallville, not the flop known as Superman Returns) and James Bond franchises have all garnered commercial success and critical praise for breaking with the established format while maintaining the essence of the original. This reinvention of Star Trek certainly falls into that exclusive cabal of resuscitated series that have found new life by slightly altering the formula.

The new
Star Trek is an origins tale or, more appropriately, an alternate origins tale. It’s readily apparent that Abrams and his crack writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, made it their mission to streamline and accelerate the story of how Kirk, Spock and the rest of the Enterprise crew first meet. The result is an ultra-convenient, yet easily accessible version of the crews’ introductions, which pretty much thumbs its nose at the series’ history and continuity. Such blatant disregard for the sacred Trek cannon runs the risk of creating mass riots by diehard fans, but the ever-clever Abrams has an ace up his sleeve. Returning to one of Trek’s classic conventions, Abrams’ stratagem is to employ time travel as a means of wiping the slate clean, thereby recreating the forty-three year old series in his image. A brilliant strategy! If the series should falter at some point in the future, Abrams can hit the reset button, restore the original Trek timeline and retire to some tropical island with smoke creatures and polar bears.

There’s no denying that this film marks a bold new direction for the franchise—which is exactly what it needed since the early demises of
Nemesis and Enterprise were directly attributable to fan fatigue. In order to regain the vitality it once possessed in spades the series would have to skew younger, feature more action sequences and tone down the lengthy stretches of expositional dialogue laced with techno-babble. Abrams accomplished all of this, and a great deal more, by presenting the most commercially viable Trek film to date. Unfortunately, harking back to Dickens’ best/worst dichotomy, Abrams’ Trek is also the least cerebral of the lot.

What shines even brighter than Abrams’ ubiquitous lens fares, which surely will annoy some spectators, is the cast. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are nothing short of astounding in their portrayals of Kirk and Spock, respectively. Pine and Quinto’s chemistry already rivals Shatner and Nimoy’s, which is quite a boast. Also, you can argue, correctly in either case, that Pine or Quinto anchors the film. Bruce Greenwood brings dignity, nobility and sagacity to the film as Captain Pike. Although frequently overshadowed by Pine and Quinto, Greenwood, who serves as seasoned veteran and elder statesman, skillfully dispenses nuggets of wisdom at crucial junctures in the film, most notably during Pike’s recruitment speech to the brash, black-and-blue Kirk after the hotheaded Iowan youth gets his butt kicked in a bar fight. Pike’s challenge to Kirk, “I dare you to do better,” is undeniably the finest line of dialog in the movie.

Zoe Saldana’s presence isn’t as keenly felt as Pine’s or Quinto’s, but her absence from the movie would’ve left a significant void, especially for female viewers. Saldana’s Uhura is the perfect blend of toughness and tenderness; Nichelle Nichols only exhibited the former on rare occasions (“Mirror, Mirror”). In the comic relief department, we have the bone-dry humor of Karl Urban (Dr. McCoy) and the rapier wit of Simon Pegg (Scotty), who steals the show with a steady stream of hilarious one-liners.

John Cho is a bit understated and underutilized as Sulu (although the “advanced combat training” gag is priceless) and Anton Yelchin’s is over-the-top as the ship’s callow navigator, Pavel Chekov. Yelchin’s
faux Russian accent generates patronizing chuckles from the audience, but it’s a mockery of Walter Koenig’s original portrayal of the character and of Russians by extension. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), when Chekov asked to see the “nuclear wessels” everyone in the audience laughed because we were still embroiled in the Cold War and Chekov is Russian (the hilarity of the situation and Keonig’s flawless delivery also added to the levity). By contrast, Yelchin’s Chekov tries too hard to generate laughter with his tongue-twisting lines. The scene where he broadcasts a message via intra-ship communications (why wouldn’t Uhura or another ranking officer do this?) is utterly silly. Other than the villain, Chekov’s accent is the only character miscue in the film.

And speaking of the movie’s nefarious one…Eric Bana, through no fault of his own, delivers the weakest performance of the movie as the megalomaniac Romulan, Nero. I say “no fault of his own” because: a. Bana is a capable actor (reference
The Other Boleyn Girl), and b. Orci and Kurtzman rendered Nero as a Muppet with aspirations of becoming Darth Vader. With sound-bite dialog, melodramatic acting and a strange speech impediment a la Christian Bale in The Dark Knight, being a believable baddie just wasn’t in the cards for Bana. Speaking of The Caped Crusader, Nero’s back story reminds me of villainous Mr. Freeze’s in the Batman mythos. Forever separated from his diseased and cryogenically frozen wife, Mr. Freeze frequently takes out his aggressions on Gotham City; but is everyone in Gotham responsible for his wife’s terminal condition? Likewise, Orci and Kurtzman attempt to provide their tragic antagonist with proper motivation, but the whole “You destroyed my planet, so I’m going to destroy yours!” rationale seems sophomoric and more than just a little contrived.

Ironically, as underdeveloped as Nero is, many other elements of the villain’s subplot are equally insipid. The interiors in Nero’s drab, industrialized vessel, Narada, are so similar to Shinzon’s Scimitar in
Nemesis that, at times, I had to remind myself that I was watching a new release and not an oldie-but-goodie on DVD. Clearly it’s time for a new vision in the villain vessel department. To extend the similarities of both movies to the villains themselves; both are bald, both have overzealous henchmen and both are acting outside of official Romulan channels…oh, and minor detail, both want to wipe out the Federation with scientifically advanced super-weapons.

What bogs down the story the most is the confusing and convoluted time travel subplot. A tangled yarn that needlessly hamstrings the plot with chunks of exposition (i.e., the mind-meld sequence, which catches us up on the back story involving Nero and the older Spock) while simultaneously opening a gigantic can of Regulan bloodworms, the plot does make sense if you reason it out…but who wants to put that much effort into a popcorn flick? Besides temporal quagmires, other snafus abound; i.e., can the pair-o-Spocks exist in the same place and time, and can you really see Vulcan explode with the naked eye while standing on Delta Vega (the two planets are in different solar systems)? Earth’s moon doesn’t appear as large in our sky as Vulcan does to Spock Prime as he stands on an icy plain on Delta Vega, which, incidentally, was a desert planet in the original TV series. Perhaps the most annoying sequence in the movie—which, admittedly, I would’ve loved as a boy—is the “There’s always a bigger fish” scene on Delta Vega where Kirk desperately sprints away from two carnivorous beasts. Those who’ve seen
The Phantom Menace will understand my reference…the sequence is such an obvious rip-off of the Naboo ocean scene, Abrams, a self-professed Star Wars fan, should be banished to Delta Vega for concocting such an utterly transparent and ultimately superfluous segment.

I don’t normally pick on movie merchandise in a review, but before the movie was released, I purchased one of the new phasers and thought the alternating blue (stun) and red (kill) settings were pretty ingenious. However, the phaser’s rotating ray emitter is a pathetic gimmick, especially during the film’s final battle on Nero’s vessel. Kirk cautiously moves through a darkened corridor, raises his phaser close to his face and depresses a button that sends the nozzle swiveling in a rapid 180-degree horizontal arch. As if in a Pavlovian trance, every young boy in every theater around the globe turned to his parents at this exact moment in the film and said, “I want one of those!” Shameless product placement? You bet! The worst part is…the phaser makes absolutely no sense from a functional standpoint. In the heat of battle, one might accidentally incinerate an enemy when he had only intended to momentarily paralyze his opponent or vice versa.

Star Trek walks a dangerous line between retro-cool and self-parody. The ship’s bridge looks like an Apple store, but for all of its glossy sleekness, its overall design still looks 60’s chic. There are plenty of self-references in the film—like arched eyebrows, catchphrases and inside gags—and a number of them feel forced. Similarly, classic lines delivered by the new actors probably sound just fine to those “outside of the body,” but diehard fans might struggle with Karl Urban exclaiming, “I’m a doctor not a…” The explanation of how Kirk came to call McCoy “Bones” is quite clever, though, and the “numb tongue” sequence is not to be missed.

If ever there’s been a movie that’s struck the zeitgeist bull’s-eye,
Star Trek is it. In the desperate times in which we live, indeed mirroring the late 60’s in myriad ways, Star Trek offers a ray of hope to our war torn, economically challenged world. Leading off a summer of dark, dismal and dystopian action-adventure flicks (Terminator 4, Transformers 2 and a still darker Harry Potter 6), Star Trek offers an alternate view of the future; if we work hard, keep our wits about us and seek peaceful co-existence with our neighbors. Unless I’ve missed my guess, Star Trek will be a welcome breath of fresh air for moviegoers up to their titanium-plated skullcaps in doom-and-gloom visions of the future. As such, blockbuster status is nearly assured.

Abrams’ first foray into the
Star Trek universe has more pluses than minuses and actually tells a more exciting origins tale than the one presented in the original series. Introducing an entire new generation to “The Wagon Train to the Stars,” Star Trek should spawn numerous sequels in the ensuing years. It’s cool, it’s hip, but it’s not quite Star Trek…at least not the Trek we’ve known.

And so the questions begin: has
Trek sacrificed its cerebral distinctive for mass appeal? Has Abrams, with his compressed story lines, ubiquitous lens flares, MTV style editing and young and sexy cast, bowed to the gods of pop culture? If it finds wide appeal across all demographics, cultures, etc, will Trek loose its cult status and be relegated to the ranks of generic science fiction?

Time will tell the answers to these questions, but what’s been established in this film is that
Star Trek no longer belongs solely to tech nerds, science geeks or fantasy-prone fanatics…it belongs to the masses. First era Star Trek fans now must learn to share their sacred pastime with a new generation of Trek fans who won’t know the difference between a Tribble and a Tricorder. As an acolyte of the Roddenberry/Berman epoch, there’s part of me that wishes Abrams had tampered with someone else’s universe. And yet…another part of me is gratified that Star Trek has finally found the commercial appeal it justly deserves. Oh how that confounding Dickens line vexes.

If
Star Trek has set the table for meatier, issues-driven films or even another TV series in the near future, it will have served its purpose. Fresh blood is just what the franchise needs. Make it so!

Rating: 3