MOVIE THOUGHTS: STAR TREK

Wow.  Just... Wow.  WOW.

The trailers looked promising.  But one never knows.  And those of us who paid out good money for some disappointing Star Trek movies in the past (Nemesis, anyone?) knew not to have our hopes too high.

Rebooting a franchise is always a difficult, delicate task.  And one with such expectations attached to it?  Yup.  Better not to have those hopes too high.

I walked into Star Trek as an ST fan, but not a full-on Trekker.  I've never owned a costume, never been to a convention.  Haven't bought the paperbacks.  Couldn't really tell you how stardates work.  I do not own a Klingon Bible.

But I do own a t-shirt or two, plus a cute teddy bear in a command uniform (a gift to one of the kids, I imagine).  I watched ST: The Original Series (in re-runs) and Next Generation faithfully (a huge Picard fan), watched Deep Space Nine and Voyager occasionally, and had the good sense to turn off Enterprise before the first episode was over.  I've seen all the movies, own the good ones.  I can recognize a redshirt when I see him, and know what pon farr and the Kobayashi Maru are.

...So when, still in the first act of Star Trek, I found myself smack in the middle of the Kobayashi Maru... I was delighted.  How that incident was handled, with delight and respect and wit and excitement, told me I was in for a spectacular ride indeed.

For my money, Star Trek hit all the right notes.  First, let's check back to the list of Elements of a Great Summer Movie I put together last summer after Iron Man came out:

1)  Spectacle we haven't seen before?  Check.  The planetary destruction (I'm being as spoiler-free as I can here).  The extended parachute sequence.  The very cool (very nasty) Romulan ship.  I could go on.  Good fight scenes (with a tip of the hat to the old human-vs.-alien slugfests of TOS).  Some awesome explosions.  Yeah.

2)  A good villain?  Um... close enough.  In ST, frankly, the villain is mostly an excuse to get all the heroes together on one ship.  Eric Bana does a fine job, has decent motivation for his heinous acts, and I think they chose wisely in making Romulans the villains.  (Klingons?  Been there, done that.  Since we're rebooting with the original characters, we can't go for a NG villain like the Borg; we need to stick to TOS villains.  And to make up a new villain from scratch would be an insult to the loyalists.)

3)  Good acting?  Oh yes!  And let me give props to my friend, casting director Alyssa Weisberg, for some of the most spot-on casting (in an incredibly difficult assignment!) we've ever seen.  Each of the main characters is right on the money in channeling either the TOS version of their characters (esp. Karl Urban as Bones), or giving us a deeper, more interesting yet totally familiar take (Zachary Quinto, riveting as Spock, Simon Pegg as Scotty, and especially Chris Pine as Kirk), or making their characters far more interesting than they were in TOS (especially Zoe Saldana as Uhura!).  In addition, Bruce Greenwood as Captain Pike gives a strong, grounding performance that makes me hope we see him in the next movie.

4)  Good vs. evil?  Good enough.  Star Trek has never been about tormented heroes making the big good/evil choice.  The Federation is good, that's a given, and there's hope in this universe that everyone, even the nasty Klingons and Romulans, will make the choice for good (much as in our own uiverse).  But the sense of good triumphant, and of the need to take on the responsibility that comes with the ability to do good is absolutely present here.

5)  Witty or iconic lines?  Oh yeah!  Star Trek had a mandate here, and doesn't disappoint.  "I'm giving her all she's got, Cap'n!"  "Fascinating."  "My God, Jim!"  They're all here.  And if they weren't, we'd have a right to be upset.

6)  Escape?  Yes, yes, yes.  And the best kind of escape:  Into a world we already know and long to return to.  A world filled with friends -- different, yet the same.  A world where we already know the rules.  A world of adventure and danger and challenge and friendship and loyalty.  

So Star Trek meets all the "good summer movie" prerequisites.  But it needs, of course, to do more.  It needs to respect and satisfy those of us who care about that world and those characters.

And it does.  The Kobayashi Maru.  Christopher Pike (who ends up just as he should).  Even putting the one character-we-don't-know-but-who-is-nevertheless-parachuting-down-with-the-two-stars-to-save-the-planet in a red jumpsuit.  ("Spoiler!"  I hear you cry.  "Now we know what happens to him!"  Ah, but you did already, didn't you?)

As for the time travel aspect of the movie -- I, like many others, am not a fan of the overuse of time travel in stories.  But here, I think it was a brilliant choice.  To dive into the Star Trek universe ready to start new stories from the beginning of the saga, yet shackled and bound by decades of "canon" (some of which is internally inconsistent itself!) would be stultifying, and would have killed the reboot of the franchise on the launch pad.

By handling the time travel twists as deftly as they did, by in essence throwing the whole story into an alternate universe, the filmmakers have allowed themselves to boldly go where no Star Trek has gone before, all while remaining faithful to the characters and to the heart of the series (and while also continuing to respect the existing canon, as would not have been done had they shredded it as if it didn't exist).  I do hope they never do a time travel story again.  But this time, this once, it was absolutely the right choice.

Star Trekis also fully satisfying on an emotional level.  I expect excitement at a summer blockbuster.  I do not expect to cry.  But one particular sequence had me in tears -- not welling up, but really crying.  Unexpected and wonderful.  Also, the portrayal of Spock as a young human/Vulcan trying to reconcile his two sides and learn how to deal with these nasty emotions that won't go away was, I thought, beautifully handled, both in the writing and in Quinto's acting.  Lovely.

I can't wait for the next one.  So I guess I'll just have to see this one again.  And buy it when it comes out.

They got it right.  What a way to start a summer!  What a way to start a series...

May the new Star Trek indeed live long.  And prosper.