STAR TREK review: to boldly go where everyone has gone before

Star Trek was the movie your dad dreaded: the reboot of a sacred icon of American 60s television, a show which spawned a mixed bag of sequel/prequel shows and a whole subculture of fanatical followers. And JJ Abrams, the man at the helm, is the guy your dad hates–the fellow behind the shaky-cam bullshit of Cloverfield and Mission Impossible 3 and the never-ending closure-less island soap Lost, right? Hmph.

Nevertheless, Star Trek took the world (and your dad) by surprise by not being a total failure. In fact, it’s a pretty good movie.

We open with something straight out of Star Wars: an epic space battle complete with lasers and digital starships and unrealistic explosions and sound effects, but Trek differentiates itself instantly with its unique visual style, which I’ll attempt to summarise as ‘dynamic’ (more on that later), and its sheer exuberance and energy.

We get a feel for what the rest of the film is going to be like from this opening sequence–dynamic camera, shallow but strangely effective character drama, and a classy and optimistic vision of the future, split from the prism of a tightly-wound plot.

After this bravura opening, we are trickled a few increasingly brief character introductions. The characters are as important as the world they inhabit, and thankfully, Trek doesn’t disappoint–mostly.

Chris Pine plays Captain James Tiberius Kirk, a jackass who was miraculously born during the aforementioned eclectic space-massacre, and manages to do something extremely tricky (and impressive): he inhabits the character of Kirk, without ever aping or even imitating William Shatner’s performance of the character. He even, in a couple of awesome moments, manages to generate a feeling that this could even be the Shat’s Kirk as a younger man. Either Chris Pine is a natural-born genius, or JJ Abrams is one of the world’s greatest directors for teasing this out of him (it’s probably a gentle compromise between those two extremes, in reality).

Zachary Quinto plays erstwhile captain of the USS Enterprise and all-around hard-arse Spock, er, Spock. Quinto makes the delicate balance between emotion and cold logic Spock is supposed to convey look incredibly easy, and it’s only after the credits roll that you realise Quinto was acting his heart out the whole time–and pulling it off.

Then there’s Doctor Leonard ”Bones” McCoy, played here by Karl Urban, who seems to be phoning in a pretty ugly impersonation of the real McCoy; Zoe Saldana attempts to be taken seriously as the miniskirt-wearing xenolinguistics expert Uhura, the only female officer of prominence; Anton Yelchin pops up as the cheery comic relief foreigner Chekov; John Cho randomly appears in a semi-serious movie as Sulu; and Simon Pegg looks awfully self-conscious as shrill engineer Scotty.

These actors serve to flesh out the cast and provide ample room for movement in the inevitable train of sequels around the corner, but they are all underutilised, with Bones disappearing for a good hour of the movie, only to reapper as if to say ‘Hey! I’m totally still in this movie!’

Now we’ve plunged into the movie proper, I’ll expand on the ‘dynamic’ visual style I mentioned before: exterior shots of ships are deliciously askew, punching things into corners and being generally pleasant to look at; shots taken from ‘space’ are complete with incidental things like lens flares and dusty lenses; shots taken from interiors are rarely static, swooping and spinning and tilting all over the place; and the whole thing comes off as audaciously kinetic.

A few people I know take issue with this style, especially the ubiqutous lens flares, but I think they add to, rather than detract from, the shiny, busy, exciting vision of the future Abrams is trying to bring us (which is not too far removed, I think, from the future Gene Roddenberry originally envisioned). The movement, especially, helps build momentum, and helps to set this reboot far apart from the locked-off, tripod style of the original show.

So we follow Pine as Kirk from Skywalker-esque beginnnings on a backwater farming project to unlikely captain of the Enterprise, with a good deal of action scenes and time-travelling head-sratchers along the way. This is a delicate balance that Trek maintains pretty well: the movie needs to be short and sharp, but no Star Trek iteration would be complete without a few pure sci-fi Ideas thrown in for good measure.

The film’s only major faults are a couple of redundant action scenes thrown into the middle to help maintain the short attention span of all the moronic children apparently in the audience, and the way the first two acts built momentum and bristle with fresh ideas but smack violently into a cookie-cutter ending complete with death-defying stunts and only-in-Hollywood one-liners.

The first problem could easily be fixed by cutting one or both of the following scenes: ‘Kirk is chased by some bullshit Hollywood monster with a billion eyes and precisely zero evolutionary believability into a cave inhabited by deus ex machina’; and ‘Scott is accidentally teleported into a water tank–hilarity ensues’. These two scenes add nothing to the film, and actually get in the way of the temporary relaxation period the audience has surely earned by this point.

The second problem could be fixed by, I dunno, writing a logical conclusion and not a paint-by-numbers boss battle, or something. But the main problem is that Star Trek’s opening sequence smashes out of the gate kicking and screaming, smacking you to the ground and beating you around the head a little, before disappearing off into the night, leaving you with the not inaccurate feeling that the rest of the film can’t possibly live up to that stellar opening. But I wouldn’t sacrifice that opening jolt either, so who am I to complain?

A lot of people tell me that to enjoy movies like Transformers and GI Joe, all I have to do is switch my brain off. I don’t know about you, but I am physically incapable of consciously facilitating the cessation of activity in my cerebellum, and I think if you did manage that, you’d slip into what’s known in medical circles as a coma.

Star Trek flip-flops with clock-like regularity between eye-blasting action scenes and thoughtful character /plot scenes. This is what the human brain needs–to be pushed gently but regularly along in neutral–for me to enjoy big dumb action movies like this one. You have to counter every noisy action scene with an equally thoughtful character moment, so your mind is refreshed and you’re ready for more. Not, as Michael Bay seems to think, a repeated skull-bashing interspersed with slightly quieter skull-bashings.

So overall this is, in fact, an extremely competent film, and, more importantly, a downright fun one. The way the old series is swept under the rug is particularly elegant; the back-and-forth relationship between Kirk and Spock is satisfying and well-performed; and the visual style and coiled-like-a-spring plot all come together so satisfyingly that you can’t deny you had a fun time watching this film. I’m sorry to tell your dad, but it seems like Abrams set out to completely refresh and reinvigorate a stale and dying franchise–and nailed it to the wall.

88/100

Abrams to VFX team: "Needs more lens flares."

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