Star Trek 2009

I swear it isn’t my intention to write a weekly movie review here at Suvudu. OTOH, the mere fact that there are enough science fiction, fantasy and comic book films coming out to make it a viable possibility is really kind of awesome. I love living in a world where the geeks have won.
Now, look. I go to movies to be entertained. I’m willing to forgive plot holes as long as they don’t distract me in the moment, and I’m almost always willing to be pleasantly surprised. I had hopes, but not much confidence, in Wolverine, and was, well, pleasantly surprised.
But Star Trek. Man. I remember watching the original episodes (in re-runs) when I was less than five years of age. I watched TNG and DS9 and most of Voyager and…hardly any Enterprise, honestly. I loved the even-numbered films, particularly Star Trek Saves The Whales and Star Trek Does Hamlet. So the possibility of JJ Abrams screwing this up was nerve-wracking to me. Forget half-naked Hugh Jackman; Star Trek was this summer’s must-see TV (as it were) for me, and I couldn’t restrain my hopes. I was either going to love it or be crushingly disappointed.
The fact that the trailers, right from the very first one with the Enterprise in spacedock and Leonard Nimoy’s “Space: the final frontier” voice-over, were apparently hard-wired to my tear ducts was both a positive and a negative sign. If I was that affected, maybe they were doing it right. But if I was that affected, holy crap, if they screwed up I was going to spend a week sobbing under the bed.
As far as I’m concerned, they hit it out of the ballpark. (Continued without spoilers below.)

It’s quite literally not your father’s Star Trek: the Trek universe as we know it is rewritten (again, quite literally) from the moment of James T. Kirk’s birth. This is not a reboot. It’s an alternate timeline. Trek’s got a long, long history of playing with time travel, so at this point they should know how to write a closed loop story–and they did. They delivered unto us a whole new Trek universe in the form of a fast-paced, effects-laden (in a *good* way), tongue-in-cheek, deeply heartfelt film.
There were things I didn’t like–the lens flares, especially! Argh!–and a somewhat over-the-top soundtrack (though once, early on, they used the soundtrack to such effect that I’m inclined to forgive them the fact that I actively noticed it other times, too), but there were more I did like. In one scene the Enterprise is hit by weapons fire and everybody lurched violently to the side, a la old school Trek: pure pandering to the fanboys, but also very funny), and there’s one particular relationship developing that, if you know anything about the on-set politics during filming of the original series, should please you enormously (I said cryptically), and if you don’t it won’t bother you at all. But the fact that it’s actually a rollicking good story is also kind of secondary to watching all-new people take the places of extremely beloved older actors.
That was always going to be the hard part. Spock never looked as fresh-faced as Zachary Quinto, DeForest Kelly was never as startlingly good-looking as Karl Urban, Uhura was never as … thin … as Zoe Saldana (okay, okay, I’m stretching there and I know it. Saldana and Nichelle Nichols are both beautiful women, and Saldana’s the only one in the whole cast who I said, when I saw her, “Oh yeah, that’ll work”). Poor Chris Pine had impossible shoes to fill, particularly given Shatner’s unique acting style–all the way through the cast, I just wasn’t quite sure.
But somewhere in there, I began to believe. In one way it was in the very first (heart-stopping, tear-jerking, non-stop) scene, when George Kirk, acting captain of the USS Kelvin, sat down in the bridge chair with exactly the same body language James T. Kirk would later employ. Just recognizing that–even though I *know* I was *supposed* to recognize it and I’m being manipulated all over the place–well, they had me at hello.
None of them–wisely, I suspect–tried to actually mimic their predecessors’ performances, though Urban came close, and was so very Bones-like in personality and mannerisms and speech that I found it disconcerting to look at Bones’s face and not see Kelley. My mind kept trying to re-write what it was seeing.
The lack of deliberate channeling made Kirk easier for me to accept (and I was pretty dubious about him, even though I kept thinking, “Well, he looks like Kirk would look if they cast him in 2008 instead of 1963…”), but it made Spock more difficult. He was always my favorite, and, well, I wanted my Spock, not some pretender. But bit by bit, not even consciously, I found myself coming around, until during one of the climactic scenes toward the end I was thinking, “That’s Spock! He looks like Spock!”, and by the end I was entirely on board. They’re never going to replace the originals, but they’ll be a fine new crew, boldly going where no one has gone before.