In boldly taking the aged Star Trek franchise where it has never been before, director J.J. Abrams ends up in a place we are all too familiar with – the deep-space vacuum of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Charged with re-energising the big-screen adventures of the Star Ship Enterprise and reuniting the fractured fan base, which has been fragmented into DS9/Voyager/Next Gen camps, Abrams has chosen to give the series new life by giving the series a new life – a baby, called James Tiberius Kirk.
Born into outer-space adventure (literally – Mrs. Kirk goes into labour with lil’ Jim as they flee a Romulan attack), Kirk grows into a reckless borderline-drunk living in the shadows of Starfleet in Midwestern Iowa. Urged by father-figure and Starfleet Commander Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), Kirk accepts the ill-fated nature of his life on Earth and takes to the stars, joining Starfleet recruits including Nyota Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Dr Leonard 'Bones’ McCoy (Karl Urban).
An exemplary but rebellious student, Kirk (played with a jaunty, playboy glint-in-his-eye by apple-pie-American Chris Pine) is soon in conflict with the brilliant Mr. Spock (a terrific Zachary Quinto), himself outcast from a home life on planet Vulcan due to the duality of his lineage – a Vulcan father (Ben Cross) and a human mother (Winona Ryder). The two are thrown together, joining Uhura, Bones and fellow newbies Pavel Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) and Hikaru Sulu (John Cho) under Commander Pike on the U.S.S. Enterprise.
The film is starting to show the strain at this point. The father/son character-building subplots are well-handled but overstated; Pine’s Kirk gets a little too leery and insufferably cocky (he loudly chews on an apple while passing the toughest test the Academy asks of its students). Worst of all, it seems a long time since the film’s opening battle sequence and a restlessness settled in, as if the characters we’ve loved for the last 40 years were revealing themselves to be not very interesting or likable after all.
Thank goodness for the Romulan warlord Nero! Played by an unrecognisable Eric Bana with a venomous, reptilian stealth that instantly puts him in the pantheon of great Trek villains, Nero and his Romulan hordes unleash the might of their massive ship, the Narada, on Starfleet and in doing so, takes the film into that bigger, faster, flashier universe we all really came to experience. It is a superbly-designed movie, the special effects flawless and innovative, the unparalleled skill of Hollywood’s best craftsmen up on the screen in every detail. This 35-minute sequence, involving Kirk and Sulu parachuting to a drilling platform and culminating in Spock’s return to the Vulcan landscape one last time, is the film’s highlight – a pulsating, thrilling unfolding of action and the imagination.
Sadly, momentum suffers irretrievably when Kirk is sent off ship and the grand old man of Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy, is introduced. In a passage that stumbles awkwardly in pacing and exposition, there is some unnecessary Cloverfield-like monster action, we meet Scotty (Simon Pegg, playing to the back row with a loud performance almost from another film entirely) and must endure the convoluted machinations of an alternate-universe/matter-transportation subplot that is meant to conveniently explain away some illogical story threads (which it doesn’t really do).
The film veers back on track as the final conflict comes into focus, but it never fully re-engages. Character arcs are undercooked, especially Karl Urban’s McCoy, his performance worthy of more than the handful of reaction shots he is laboured with during the film’s latter stages (though he gets the biggest laugh in the film with his 'Dammit, I’m a doctor, man..." line-reading). Zoe Saldana’s Uhura is another part that promises early on much more than it delivers.
J.J. Abrams proved with Mission Impossible III that he could stage action set-pieces with aplomb and he doesn’t let the thrill-seeking audience down with Star Trek. But like the great ship The U.S.S. Enterprise, his film is very much constructed of a production line – this time, Hollywood’s. Its surface is shiny and it goes fast, but there is an over-reliance on little moments that create gasps or giggles at the expense of dialogue or character interaction that has resonance. Perhaps we should stop asking that Hollywood hits provide those deeper moments, but the old Star Trek is still loved not because of its hardware, but because of the camaraderie, the personalities and the integrity of its characters. In taking on the formation of these iconic 'people’, Abrams had a responsibility that most other action film directors never need to worry about. He succeeds in parts, maybe enough for the young, modern audiences for whom the film has been made, but old Trekkies may have some issues.
With all involved signed to three-picture deals, Paramount Pictures are confident the new crew of The Enterprise will live long and prosper. The final iconic shot of the crew suggests they are now, finally, ready to accept the adulatory mantle created by their older selves. I hope they discover the depth and maturity required of them as the series progresses, too.
