Star Trek

 Well, things seem to have changed a lot around here since my last visit; it's all so shiny and new here. Enough with these formalities, I have found something to post about, and it is also shiny and new. Spoilers abound within. 

First things first, I am a bit of Trek head and therefore was especially pained that I had to wait so long to see this movie, the weeks since it was released and the six and a half years since the last one came out . You know, the one that only I liked, with the clone of Picard. Since then, Star Trek has been in trouble. Not even Dr. Sam Beckett could save the latest TV series, Enterprise, from being a pretty monumental failure. It was with some trepidation that, even after reading a plethora of great reviews, I took my seat to watch this latest incarnation.

This new Trek is the product of JJ Abrams, who is either some kind of multitasking visionary with more fingers in more pies than another man might see in a lifetime, or a hack with an eye only for the dazzling, thin veneer of popular entertainment, depending on your point of view. In this case, he was the man chosen to bring Star Trek back to the big screens and into the 21st Century, with big explosions and Saturn's rings money shots. And Sylar, Eomer and Simon Pegg. To give him is dues, he obviously knew what he was taking on when he started. 

The plot is pretty classic Trek and involves such sturdy themes as time travel, alternate realities and revenge. We follow Kirk and Spock's early lives and their induction into Starfleet, before Eric Bana's Nero shows up on his revenge mission. He's out to destroy the Federation because (old) Spock failed to save Romulus from being destroyed by a supernova and got him sucked into the past. All this happened around 129 years after Kirk and (young) Spock entered Starfleet academy, probably some short time after Voyager finished. We follow all of the original characters as they are brought together by a chain of events begun many years after they died and have to do their best to save the Federation. Do keep up.

Abrams has grasped something that William Shatner never will, that Trek has always been about the ensemble, the interplay between characters. This new film captures the essence of the original series' characters and their relationships very well (apart from one change, see below). In this, Abrams is helped tremendously by his cast, who obviously did their homework. Pretty much everyone manages to bring their own take to their character, but also preserve what made us like them in the first place. Standouts are probably Karl Urban as McCoy and Zachary Quinto as Spock, who manage to near perfectly replicate the relationship their two characters had in the original series.

Not only this, but the director also knows both who is audience is and who the movie is trying to entice into cinemas. Thus we are bombarded with references to the original Trek but also with flashy special effects and popcorn action. Abrams has just about struck the fine balance of satisfying both fans and summer movie audiences; perhaps if you are not too familiar with Star Trek then there won't be enough character development for you. If you know a bit about Trek however, be prepared to laugh when others in the cinema don't.

Thus we come to the crux, that Abrams has managed to succeed where perhaps a great many doubted he would. This is a Trek movie, no doubt about it. It is both entertaining and modern, and a homage to what went before. There is only one major problem with it, and it stems from my own love of Trek, and Abram's own problems in scripting and plotting the film. Major spoilers ahead.

In order to reboot the franchise, we have gone back to the beginning, to Kirk's academy days. The problem that presented Abrams and his writers here was that Trek lore is pretty set in stone. Kirk was born on Earth in Iowa. Vulcan was not completely destroyed before Jean-Luc Picard was born. To circumvent these problems and portray the beginnings of the Star Trek universe essentially how they like, with no continuity errors, Abrams' team use a classic Trek plot device, they create a parallel timeline. As a Trek fan of many years standing, this left a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn't spit out. It means the possibility of more films, but to have so much love for the characters portrayed and to disregard the later series so callously, feels somewhat crass on the filmmaker's part.

To summarise, Abrams, for better or worse, has gone his own way and laid the ground for more movies. The film he has created is hugely entertaining and he genuinely has great affection for what he has been given charge of. Just shed a tear for Star Trek's greatest captain, Jean-Luc Picard, who now will probably not be born.