Star Trek

This movie actually works, and I’m a little bit flabbergasted by that fact. It’s possible that most of the young, hip people expected this. I don’t know. They might have known as soon as J.J. Abrams signed up, but I’ve never watched Lost, and I thought Alias sucked. I also think Heroes sucks, so seeing that that show’s bad guy was going to play Spock didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. And the trailer made it clear that this was going to be one of those movies just chock full of explosions and special effects, which are feeble quasi-cinematic devices designed to appeal to the kinds of people who think that John Grisham writes great literature and that the puzzles on Wheel Of Fortune are too hard.

And yet...the movie works. The effects are just effects - there’s nothing special about them. They make you feel sort of like you’re on a safe roller coaster ride. I still don’t know enough about Abrams to say that his direction turned the trick here - and so much of the movie is digital that calling what he did “direction” sort of feels like it cheats all the men and women out there who actually direct movies and don’t just string together a series of Flash animations inside Final Cut Pro while incorrectly believing that what they are doing is creating art.

Zachary Quinto, on the other hand, makes up in one fell swoop for all of the suckage that is Heroes. His Spock is precise and (largely) controlled, and does a tremendous job of toeing the line between Vulcan and human - between repressing emotion and allowing emotion to show. The original television series - and the opening scenes of this new picture - establish that Spock is a character of tremendous ability. What is less emphasized is Spock’s physical power, which Quinto demonstrates with wonderful aplomb in this new film.

The cast, to a person, is pretty solid, even if Karl Urban isn’t quite world-weary enough to be completely convincing as Dr. McCoy; it’s more than made up for in Simon Pegg’s boyish enthusiasm as Scotty, Anton Yelchin’s frenetically cool-headed Chekov - and even in Chris Pine’s smoothly arrogant Kirk. But for all of the ensemble’s excellence, this is Quinto’s - and, by extension, Spock’s - film, and he takes the lead and runs with it. Just to judge by the silly trailer, this might well have been nothing more than an effects-laden indulgence in geeky excess - a prequel made for the sake of making a prequel - but Quinto does an admirable (and dare I say...award-worthy?) job of injecting into this fanboy orgy an element of character-driven acting that elevates this summer popcorn production - if only slightly - above the other films of its ilk.

I don’t think there’s much point in talking about the story - a massive contrivance involving pissed-off Romulans, wormholes, black holes, Red Matter, and time travel in order to create an alternate reality where these versions of the original show’s characters can exist - because there’s no value in trying to make sense of its twists and turns, insofar as the story only exists as a catalyst to get the explosions and witty bon mots underway. (The entire concept of story and plot as the MacGuffin - how’s that for a damning indictment of the typical movie Hollywood churns out between Easter and Labor Day?)

The core of the story is the development of the professional relationship and eventual friendship between Kirk and Spock, which puts the lion’s share of the responsibility for the film’s success on the shoulders of Pine and Quinto; and while I think that Quinto is more than equal to the task, I’m less convinced that Pine succeeds with his task of getting into Kirk’s skin. In his defense, though, it’s a tougher job than Quinto’s getting into Spock’s skin. The original Star Trek series was Kirk’s show, with Spock as the amusing alien sidekick; here, even after Kirk assumes the captaincy of the Enterprise, that hierarchy is subverted - Spock begins the journey as captain of the Federation’s new flagship. And trying to fill the space left by William Shatner’s ego is surely no small feat; and perhaps no one could have done it in such a way that we really get the sense of the TV Kirk - but Pine gets full marks for giving it the old college try.

That leaves just the Shatner Issue to be touched on before closing this little discussion of the new Star Trek film - and I haven’t read enough of the behind-the-scenes stuff to know what the current rumors are concerning why Abrams and company left Shatner out of this film, but I do have a couple of ideas that I will float. The first concerns the story, which is complicated enough to begin with that figuring out how to fit the Kirk from the original reality into the new reality while maintaining any kind of reasonable continuity would surely have brought about insurrection (heh...get it?) during the film’s writing phase.

But that’s pretty geekified. I think the real reason is much simpler - namely, that Shatner’s ego would have doomed the picture. Shatner would have forced his presence on too much of the creative development and would have pushed too hard to make the movie more about Kirk than it is (or ought to be). This film is being billed as a “re-boot” of the Star Trek franchise, a franchise whose specific culture emanates - rightly or wrongly - from Kirk; but to give the franchise a fresh start would require putting the focus on a character other than Kirk. In that case, the...erm, logical...choice would be Spock. Including Shatner would have ruined what they set out to do, and would almost certainly have resulted in a truly horrible movie.

Instead, what they have crafted is summer popcorn fare that is just smart enough to be taken seriously, while also being explosion-y enough to satisfy the nitwits who think that that sort of thing is high art. I don’t think this is a great movie by any stretch of the imagination; but it is much, much better than I thought it was going to be - and much, much better than movies of its kind usually are.