Blogorium Review: Star Trek

As promised: you voted for it, I watched it. Here's the Cap'n's review of the reboot of Star Trek.

JJ Abrams’ Star Trek shouldn’t work. It’s a minor miracle that it does, because the film relies so much on the goodwill of the audience to overlook things that shouldn’t make sense. He earns the goodwill by giving you a tightly paced movie that’s a lot of fun, has some great acting chemistry, and somehow manages to still be a Star Trek movie without feeling hokey or stilted. I know I shouldn’t have liked the movie this much, but this the most fun I’ve had since “Trials and Tribble-ations.”

It wasn’t until well after finishing the movie that it occurred to me just how much Star Trek never addresses about its plot. I knew that reading Countdown would be helpful but I had no idea just HOW helpful it would be considering that it answers a number of questions the movie never even tries to answer:

- Why does a Romulan mining ship need to be as gigantic or imposing as the Narada? (answer: it was originally much smaller but fitted with Romulan appropriated Borg technology, which is why it looks the way it does inside and out)

- Why is Nero so angry at Spock? (answer: Spock approached Nero to help him mine the Red Matter in order to prevent the sun from going supernova and then inadvertently prevented Nero from saving his wife and, in a broader sense, Romulus)

- Why is the first thing Nero does attack a Federation starship after coming out of the “singularity”? (answer: before being sucked into the singularity, Nero had attacked the Enterprise and other Federation ships for helping Spock)

- How the hell does Nero know who James Kirk is? (answer: he had access to the Enterprise’s database while Spock dilly-dally-ed around with the Vulcan High Council)

There are a handful of other things that Countdown does, particularly in fleshing out the character of Nero, who doesn’t register much in the movie but is actually something of a tragic figure. He’s just a miner who was recruited to do something simple to help save his planet and he ends up losing everything because of galactic red tape. Star Trek doesn’t really give you much time to understand why he’s so angry or what’s behind all of this revenge, so I can totally understand why people think Nero’s a “weak” villain.

Nevertheless, this whole business of plot holes and lacking motivations didn’t register while I was watching Star Trek, so I have to wonder: why not? I came up with the following reasons:

The cast is uniformly great, even when I wasn’t expecting them to be. I suppose I owe the biggest apology to Chris Pine, who just rubbed me the wrong way in the trailers and in photographs. It wasn’t that he didn’t seem like Kirk, I just got this “d-bag” impression from him, and not in the way I would associate with Shatner. It turns out I was very mistaken. From the first scene he appears in (the bar), Pine owns the character of James T. Kirk in a way I was totally not suspecting. Yes he’s cocky, he speaks his mind a little too much but Pine plays Kirk in such a way that you believe he can back it up that gravitas, even against four Red Shirts.

The rest of the cast is no small potatoes, either: I give big ups to Simon Pegg who manages to make Scotty feel new without changing the character too radically. Anton Yelchin’s Chekov feels more like the Walter Koenig of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home ("nuclear wessels!") but there’s a “boy genius” element that finally gives him more depth. John Cho doesn’t have a lot to do with Sulu but he still finds a way to register, and none of the characters feel like they’re forced to do something to involve the Enterprise crew.

I want to draw special attention to Karl Urban, who evokes DeForrest Kelley in such a way that I simply accepted him as McCoy without question. I love the explanation for his nickname, by the way. Urban also gets major points for effortlessly using all of McCoy’s signature lines without making big moments out of them. I actually didn’t realize he’d said “dammit Jim!” until a few minutes after it happened. Normally things like that stick out like a sore thumb, but the “geek moments” are integrated pretty seamlessly into the film (more on that in a moment.)

The casting wasn’t all aces, I’m afraid. It’s not just the Heroes effect, but Zachary Quinto just was a little “off” as Spock. Part of that may have been the Leonard Nimoy effect: Nimoy’s version of Spock and Quinto’s version don’t really jibe, and it isn’t merely that Nimoy has been Spock for longer and was able to soften the character up over a series of films. I don’t have any problem with Quinto’s hyper-logical version of Spock, even if it resembles what Jolene Blalock did in the first season of Enterprise. Part of it is that we’ve never been exposed to that side of Spock, one so uncomfortable in his skin; the other problem is how the script shoehorns contrivances in order to drive Kirk and Spock against each other that just ring hollow.

But back to things I enjoyed, because the Spock problem doesn’t really stand out while you’re watching the movie. I wanted to get back to the “geek” moments because Abrams weaves them throughout the film in such a way that casual viewers won’t feel like they’re missing out on the reference but Trekkies can have a chuckle or point them out to each other later. It’s perfectly easy not to catch the Cardassian Ale reference or the Tribble behind Scotty in the outpost.

You don’t need to have seen Enterprise or know who Captain Archer or his beagle were for Scotty’s “accident” to be amusing, but I would kind of like to see Scott Bakula in future movies as Admiral Archer, since they mentioned it. The way Pike ends up in a wheelchair is organic enough to the story that it doesn’t feel like the movie shoehorns that echo to “The Menagerie”, or the outfit he’s wearing that looks suspiciously like the Star Trek: The Motion Picture wardrobe. I liked hearing Majel Barret’s voice as the Enterprise computer, and Kirk’s green-skinned Orion girlfriend, or the quick reference to Nurse Chapel while Kirk’s in sickbay. They’re all little things that don’t draw attention to themselves but throw a bone to the long time fans. It may not be your father’s Star Trek but that doesn’t mean he won’t enjoy it.

Oh, and Star Trek might have the best Red Shirt death in the history of the series. I won’t spoil it for you because it’s impossible to miss.

This is not to say that I loved everything. JJ Abrams had some kind of obsession with lens flares on Star Trek, because they’re all over this movie, to the point that it becomes distracting. The following YouTube clip is somewhat of a joke but it’s really not fair off from how many unnecessary lens flares are in the movie.

Still, Star Trek breezes by and incorporates action into the series in a way that Trek never really has (remember that all of the action in Wrath of Khan takes place between two ships. Kirk and Khan are never actually in the same room together), and if you’d told me that Abrams would find a way to put a Beastie Boys song in a Trek film and not make it stupid, I don’t think I would’ve believed you. And yet, there it is. Despite the fact that is just barely holds together under serious scrutiny, Star Trek was a film that made me excited about (arguably) the dorkiest Sci-Fi series that ever was. That’s quite a feat.