Justin does Star Trek

“I like this ship! It’s exciting!”

The Scoop: 2009 PG-13, directed by J.J. Abrams and starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban

Tagline: The future begins.

Summary Capsule: Star Trek gets a reboot/prequel/sequel of sorts… but it’s all good (mostly).

Justin’s Rating: Star Trekkin’ across the universe… boldly going forward because we can’t find reverse!

Justin’s Review: Blasphemy or necessary? Reboot or sideboot? Homage or theft? A new beginning or a one-shot blockbuster spectacle?

I suppose time will tell what Star Trek ends up being, for both the Trek franchise and the pop culture medium at large, but as a former Trekkie and a current movie savant, I feel pulled back and forth between feelings (illogical as they may be).

There’s no doubt that something radical needed to happen for Trek following Star Trek Nemesis’ bombing at the box office in 2002 and Star Trek: Enterprise’s dismal fall from grace at the end of its series in 2005. The franchise was bloated beyond belief with too much technobabble, too much history, and too little “direction” by ham-handed hacks Brannon Braga and Rick Berman. This was compounded by the rise of many other svelte, sexy scifi platforms, such as Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica and – of course – According to Jim. Wisely, Paramount let Trek lie fallow for years until a new strategy could be devised to put Star Trek back on the map: a massive comeback motion picture based on the original Star Trek series (with Captain Kirk and company) and helmed by golden boy J. J. Abrams (Lost, Cloverfield).

Yet as Star Trek: Enterprise proved, doing a prequel to hundreds of years of established scifi history is a recipe for a major headache of details, not to mention apathy on the part of the fan base, who would rather see things progress forward, not back. Many die-hard Trekkies were considerably disturbed by the notion of other actors stepping into the roles made famous by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, et all. Abrams had to make this new movie palpable to two diverse audiences – Trekkies and your average popcorn-munching moviegoer – in order to call it a success.

The solution he came up with is elegant, but not without a few serious ramifications. Abrams yanks a few old chestnuts from Star Trek’s underwear drawer – a little time travel from Star Trek IV, Romulans with their big bad starships as enemies from Star Trek X – and devised a way to sort-of reboot the franchise without completely negating everything that had come before. How? By imagining a “what if?” tale for an alternate Star Trek timeline – what if a Romulan brought massive hardware back from the future to the time of Jim Kirk’s infancy, and by doing so disrupted the established events of the Trek timeline? What if Jim Kirk grew up without a father, angry and rebellious instead of naturally heroic? What if the Romulans would majorly reshape the course of the Federation in one fell swoop? What if the original series’ crew were to get together anyway, but under completely different circumstances?

It’s interesting. It doesn’t wipe out the rest of Trek, which sits happily in a separate timeline, but creates a new world for Abrams to play in without expectations of where it may lead. His re-envisioning of the 23rd century is similar yet not to the old series and subsequent movies, but he walks the fine line of placating the Trek base with in-the-know references (Sulu fences! Kobyashi Maru! “Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a…!”) while throwing us through a fast-paced, explodey-prone flick that cuddles up to quotable one-liners instead of any actual conversations. I mean, I liked it, I really did – but I also sincerely missed the character-building moments from the old days that showed us a little past one-note personalities. Star Trek is the thinking man’s scifi to Star Wars’ action man’s scifi, and perhaps they should’ve stuck with a bit of that depth before trying to cash it in for a slice of the summer blockbuster gross.

The story goes something like this: somehow, a Romulan named Nero (who kills Christians and watches Rome burn, no doubt) jets back in time to establish a dominant hold on the past. This being Star Trek, where characters frequently hop back and forth in the timestream as easily as you or I might visit a 7-11 (and with far less danger on their part), we’re well aware of the consequences of such actions. Yet instead of Marty McFly getting his parents to hook up at the prom and re-establishing the right course of events, Nero makes everything go horribly wrong.

Due to his actions, Kirk becomes an instable hothead, Spock gets a little more frisky with his human emotions, Scotty is marooned on an ice ball, and the Enterprise ends up being a cross between an Apple store and a nuclear reactor plant. Kirk still makes friends with McCoy at Starfleet academy and establishes himself as a bit of a legend, but we’re aware that this isn’t the same guy, not exactly.

Starfleet, the same in any timeline, has no experienced starships on hand when Nero besieges Vulcan, and therefore shoves all these wet-behind-the-ears cadets on the ships (it’s Star Trek II! And V!) and sends them on their merry way to doom and destruction. Only the Enterprise with its rowdy bunch of rascals are able to make a dent in the Nero offensive, mostly because it’s really cool that they do so instead of some other faceless starship crew. Things keep exploding and Kirk butts heads with Spock until they become both friends and slightly brain damaged. There’s also a green girl in underwear, just like Kyle’s bedroom every Saturday night. It’s all quite entertaining.

By and large, Star Trek doesn’t give us time to really think through all these details, because it’s occupied with keeping us entertained. It really is quite funny, adrenaline-pumping and different, and I couldn’t wait to go see it again. Perhaps all the rest of my reservations melt in the face of that, perhaps not.

It’s Star Trek and yet it’s not, and while the media may mock Trekkies for being agitated at the changes, I can’t quite blame them. There’s something disquieting about the restructuring of the Trek universe for this film, and it begs the big question – where do we go from here? Will Star Trek continue as a movie series with the same characters, or was this a one night stand that will be the final word on the franchise? Will we ever see another series, and if so, which timeline will it be in? Like the cause and effect of time travel in the film, where one action has massive consequences, so too might the release of this film completely change where Trek might or might not go for the next fifty years.

But hey, like Spock said in Star Trek IV, these are not the hell your whales. Er, series. Er, franchise. Really, the guy was a bit cryptic at times, so who knows what he meant.

P.S. – I’d like to form an exploratory committee on just how much this film owes to, of all things, Galaxy Quest. The more I think about the looks and concepts, the more it’s nagging me. The big lever for warp drive? The water turbines that are there for no other reason than to be dangerous?

'There are some things in life that are just fact; and one of those facts is that every odd-numbered Star Trek movies is s**t. ...Wait, what movie am I in?'

Didja Notice?

• The eyes of the alien doctor who delivers Kirk? Freaky!

• Hehe… Chekov can’t say his V’s in this timeline either
• Is that fold-up sword Starfleet issue?
• Vulcans have six billion people on their home planet, yet they’ve established no colonies before this point? That’s… odd.
• The groan-worthy Nokia product placement
• Green girls go for Kirk, 9 times out of 10
• Um, what is “red matter” and why do you never, ever explain it, other than it makes black holes and we have twenty kilograms of it in a lightly shielded chamber?
• So… what DID Nero do for those 25 years other than just hang around?
• Uhura’s first name
• The tribble on Scotty’s desk
• Christopher Doohan, the son of the late James Doohan (Scotty from the original series), appears alongside the new Scotty, Simon Pegg, in the transporter room.
• The little nod to Star Trek: Enterprise (Archer and his beagle)
• In the scene where Kirk is taking the Kobayashi Maru test, he is eating an apple, which is also what he is eating while recounting his tale of taking the Kobayashi Maru test in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan

Intermission!

The idea of a young James T. Kirk and young Spock meeting at the Academy was considered as early as 1968, announced by Gene Roddenberry at the World Science Fiction Convention.

The “Trek” movie with the longest hiatus to date since the last motion picture (7 years). Of the now 11 films, this is the most expensive “Star Trek” film by far ($140 million).

This is Leonard Nimoy’s first live-action film role since Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991).

Majel Barrett, the wife of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, has a role in this film as the voice of the Enterprise computer. She completed filming two weeks before her death on December 18, 2008.

Spoiler alert – The Enterprise is, at the time, the brand-new flagship of Starfleet. And they just let a cadet jump from a pre-ensign rank to full-fledged captain on the basis of one really good mission? Buh?

Another spoiler – Is it just me, or does the Spock/Uhura hookup seem to be there solely to provide ‘shippers something to squeal over? They never explain why it happened or give the relationship any depth beyond a bit of smooching (which, coming from Spock, is profoundly disturbing).

Final spoiler – will Future Spock be equally free to distribute future technology to this past timeline as he did with the transporters? And what does that mean to this universe?

Groovy Quotes

Scotty: I like this ship! It’s exciting!

McCoy: Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.

Sarek: [to Spock] You will always be a child of two worlds, and fully capable of deciding your own destiny. The question you face is: which path will you choose?

Spock: Are you a member of Starfleet?
Scotty: Uh, yes. Can I get a towel?

McCoy: We’ve got no Captain and no First Officer to replace him.
Kirk: Yeah, we do.

If You Liked This Movie, Try These:

• Star Trek IV

• Star Trek II
• Galaxy Quest