Star Trek (2009)

The questions surrounding the new “Star Trek” film directed by J. J. Abrams are legion: Can it revive a beloved-but-musty franchise? Will it keep old fans and bring in new ones? Can it succeed with only one original crew member involved? Can other actors inhabit arguably the most well-known science-fiction roles of all time? Most of all, is it entertaining? I’ll leave it to those more attuned to “Trek” lore and box office receipts to answer most of these, but the last one is easy: yes, it is.

“Reboot” movies seem to be the hot commodity of the day. It worked for Bond and Batman, and so it’s only fair for Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and their intrepid crew to get a chance at a new lease—or, perhaps, a new reel—on life as well. The marriage of the popular “origin story” and the (until recently) highly successful Trek universe is, from a box-office standpoint, logical (as Spock might say). But it’s also full of dangers. Star Trek is a cultural icon. People who don’t know a black hole from a Black Russian still know who Kirk and Spock are, and our slang is rife with Trek nods (“Beam me up, Scotty,” “I’m a doctor, not a [some other occupation],” just to name two). How much change in these iconic characters will people accept? Star Trek’s screenwriters thus make the wise decision to tell us less about how these familiar people came to be who they are than about how they came to all be together as the iconic Enterprise crew.

The two we follow in are James T. Kirk and Spock, who are, we both learn, more or less outsiders. Kirk (Chris Pine) is a cocky farmboy trying to live down (or drink down, the film would have us believe) his starship-captain father’s self-sacrificing legacy. Spock (Zachary Quinto) is an uptight space nerd trying to deal with his mixed-species background on Vulcan, where his emotional human side makes him an object of prejudice. Both determine, for different reasons, to work out their ancestral grudges by joining Starfleet. At the Starfleet Academy, they study starship stuff alongside other familiar space cadets, such as sexy language expert Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and cranky medical man Leonard “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban). Of course we know that Kirk and Spock will be standouts at opposite ends of the logical spectrum. And of course we know that this will lead to a confrontation. But before this can fully play out, the cadets are rushed into action to save the planet Vulcan from an attack. The culprit is a vengeful Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana, in a return to onscreen villainy), who has a planet-sized axe to grind with Starfleet in general and the Vulcans in particular. Soon Spock (by orders) and Kirk (by trickery) find themselves, along with Uhura, McCoy, and guys named Sulu and Chekov, onboard the USS Enterprise, a brand-new ship commanded by Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood). When Nero captures Pike, it’s up to the junior officers to save their captain and stop the Romulan rampage…if only they can learn to work together. Fortunately, they get a big assist from a certain pointy-eared officer of the future (or, in cinematic terms, the past) who has traveled back in time in order to…

Never mind. The technical aspects of “Star Trek” plots have always bordered on the ridiculous, and never more so than when they deal with timeline shenanigans. I’ve given up trying to figure out time-travel in the “Trek” universe(s). I just accept it, like the endless flimsy gender-swap disguises in Shakespeare, and move on. Its inclusion here does three things: it gives a big goofy nod to the temporal hijinks of the original TV series, it allows for an uncertainty element lacking (for example) in the recent “Wolverine” prequel, and it allows Abrams and his writers to rewrite Trek history as they see fit. And they do so well. The key part of the story—the genesis of the Enterprise crew as we know it—is solidly handled, and the pacing is kept brisk enough that the sillier aspects of the story aren’t obvious while the movie is running. Character, not realistic science, has always been the heart of Trek’s appeal, and the movie spends the right amount of time developing its cast. The movie makes us care enough about Kirk, Spock, Bones, and the rest to have a stake in what happens to them. They’re likable on their own, not just because they are familiar names. It’s in the movie’s favor that it makes memorable characters out of so many people in such short time. Our cultural memory helps, of course, but some thought went into the writing here and it shows.

The main acting ensemble has big shoes to fill. Fortunately, like the young crew they play, they’re up to a challenge. Again, someone made some wise choices here: all the actors bear a decent physical resemblance to their “classic selves,” and no one is allowed to get away with straight-up imitation. Pine captures the swagger and charm the young William Shatner brought to Kirk while still being his own man, and Quinto has the right mannerisms for Spock, even if his take on the character is softer in certain ways than Leonard Nimoy’s (that he survives onscreen comparison with Nimoy here is achievement enough). Most of the film’s comic relief comes from Urban (allowed to play a real character and not an action figure for once) as the cranky McCoy and from Simon Pegg as dependable-but-beleaguered engineer Montgomery Scott (yes, he gets to beam people up). Saldana’s Uhura has more to do than she used to on TV, though not much more once things get going, and John Cho and Anton Yelchin settle nicely into the bridge swivel chairs as, respectively, pilot-cum-swordsman Sulu and heavily-accented math whiz/navigator Chekov. Leonard Nimoy, who has been doing this forever, adds a nice graceful touch, as well as an implicit seal of approval, as the future Spock. Eric Bana’s Nero will not go down in the Star Trek villain hall of fame, but that’s not really the fault of his performance. The character is underwritten and is mostly a personified threat—he has motive and some wicked tattoos, but not much depth.

Best of all, the movie captures the original Trek spirit whereby the human (or Vulcan or whatever) element trumps the whiz-bang element. At their best, the assorted Trek TV series used their sci-fi trappings to engage real issues, from race relations to politics to environmental concerns and so on. This movie doesn’t go quite that deep, but the beginnings are there, and themes of responsibility and identity bubble along beneath the surface along with the much-discussed-in-the-present-moment Trek hopefulness about people and species working well together. Yes, this is a big shiny franchise machine, but there’s a soul in it. Shatner and the rest have been icons (and objects of occasional fun) for so long that we forget that people love and relate to the Trek characters for a reason. There is something about having new faces in the old roles that reminds us of that. Of course, humor always was a key part of the Trek formula, too (tribbles, anyone?), and the movie has its fair share. It’s sprinkled through with sly references to the original series for those who can spot them. Just as “Shakespeare in Love” was funny, but funnier the more you knew about the Bard of Avon, “Star Trek” is fun, but more fun the more you know about its TV source.

The movie is not perfect. Some action sequences are oddly edited in that now-popular way that really should have been brought to heel after the first “Bourne” movie, I’m not sure the ice-planet beastie needed to chase Kirk for so long, and the Romulans do get a raw deal (in several ways) from the screenplay. But like Kirk and his crew of ace cadets, the film ultimately does many more things right than wrong. This is the first really good big-ticket film of the summer (that I’ve seen, anyway), and it’s worth boldly going to see.