Review: Star Trek

MightyThor’s Rating: 4 / 5 Starfleet Insignias

On Friday night I did something I haven’t done in some time: I braved the opening night crowds to see a major summer blockbuster, in this case the new Star Trek from J.J. Abrams.  The question you, Word readers, are surely asking is, “Was it worth it?”

I’d have to say yes it was.

I’ve heard this film referred to as this year’s Iron Man, and that’s a description that I can get on board with, because like last year’s Iron Man, this was a big summer blockbuster that had some flaws, but overall was really entertaining.  It was very well-cast, well-paced, funny at times, and full of good action.  It avoided getting too heavy or philosophical, which would have been easy to do.  It made fun of its own ancestry in a respectful way.  But the main reason that I liked it was that it was bold. Unfortunately, this also led to one of the main things I disliked about it.

When I say Star Trek was bold I mean that Abrams and his crew had an early decision to make: they could tell an origin story that would have to conform to all the pre-existing, but post-dated material that’s already been established out there for years, or they could fly in the face of everything else that’s been said and done in the Star Trek universe and execute a complete re-boot on the franchise, and the latter is what they went with.  That decision made the film a lot more interesting and surprising than it likely would have been otherwise, and it let them take a cast of well-known characters and give them a new lease on life to take in whatever direction they choose.  This made for a few startling twists and events that made the movie very intriguing, because nothing that had once been set in stone could be considered untouchable anymore.  So bravo to Abrams for taking that kind of leap.

Now, unfortunately for me, I’m not a big fan in general of the plot device employed to pull this bold re-hash off: MINOR SPOILER ALERT (highlight for the info, which I promise is not giving away much): the plot pivots on a time-travel premise, spinning off an alternate universe than the one we have seen previously.  I’m not a fan of time-travel stories by rule, they’re always messy and seem to have a million logic holes.

Still, in spite of this one area that was a sticky point for me, the story was engaging and interesting throughout.

Perhaps the biggest victory for the whole enterprise (get it) was the casting of the principal characters, those we know from the old days.  I thought the young actors, Chris Pine in particular, did a fantastic job of bringing these characters to life in a realistic way, when it would have been all too easy to just do a hammy imitation of the old crew members.  It’s hard to describe this except to say that I felt like the actors got to know the motives behind the mannerisms and portrayed the characters from those much deeper waters, rather than just regurgitating the same old well-known quips and cliches, although the most famous lines found their way in appropriately.  So it was really fun to watch the young versions of those characters bloom as the story unfolded.  Of all of them, I thought Karl Urban’s Dr. “Bones” McCoy was the most copycat, which bugged me just a bit at first, but grew on me as the film progressed and he settled into the role.  Sulu, Uhura, Scotty, Spock and Kirk all did a great job of painting the picture of what these familiar characters might have been like at the beginning, and I think they did right by the material.

Star Trek was a big undertaking, and unlike some other properties of like magnitude that were reborn with less than stellar results, this one looks to have been given some new legs.  I hope Abrams and those who follow him take it down the path of some of the recent more successful rebirths so Star Trek will keep looking better than ever with age.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 5:21 pm and is filed under MightyThor, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.