Star Trek

It’s hard not to feel guilty about how much I enjoyed J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek. As a (reasonably) mature adult who is serious about movies, one of my pet peeves about the state of modern cinema is the studios’ penchant for assuming every project would be improved by making the stars younger and prettier. This explains the rise of Ashton Kutcher, the mind-numbing stupidity of replacing Harrison Ford with Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears, and the heartbreaking new direct-to-video career of Michelle Pfeiffer. It sells audiences short, and turns smart screenplays stupid. You can be over 30 and still do interesting things, even in the movies; and by gum, you can be under 30 and still want to see those movies, if they’re well done.

But. BUT. Star Trek has never really worked on the big screen before now, and it took Abrams and a cast of pretty, youthful Trek neophytes to fix what has been essentially broken for three decades. (Send hate mail to info@rochesterfilm.com.) Worse still, that’s not even a coincidence. Follow.

By the time the original Trek crew beamed up to feature films, the cast was already past their prime. Star Trek – The Motion Picture (1979) is universally derided these days, but in truth it set the tone fairly well for what was to follow: a new series – this time in movie theaters instead of on TV – featuring aging actors famed for playing one role apiece, returning to their skintight uniforms and revisiting the space opera they had perfected more than a decade earlier. If the 1960s TV series was a long-running Broadway show, then the first seven feature films were the touring versions of that show: dinner theater in a Boca Raton playhouse. Usually they were fun, but in ways that never really transcended our obligatory expectations. And when they were bad, they were awful.

When the cast of TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation eventually replaced the original crew of the Enterprise, the effect was one of stasis: The really really old guys were phased out in favor of, well, the next generation of aging actors resurrecting the same role they had already perfected on TV. Lather, rinse, repeat. Diehard fans have never cared, but those fans are in many ways the problem: Such an ardent, recognized fan base has rarely been encountered in modern pop culture – and it’s always been hard for studios to pass up the opportunity to create a piece of entertainment with proven appeal to at least one demographic. But Trekkies are a dying breed; and anyway, what about everyone else? Shouldn’t there be room for a Trek that could actually get newcomers excited?

Now there is. By re-booting the series, Abrams has given Star Trek room to breathe – but he’s done it in a way that has its Romulan ale and drinks it too, by acknowledging the heritage of the franchise while still respectfully showing it the door. Despite myself, I was more than a little thrilled to “meet” younger versions of Kirk and Spock (Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto), the oil-and-water Starfleet cadets now brimming with potential instead of resting on their laurels. The rest of the cast is equally familiar yet new: ship’s doctor McCoy (Karl Urban), communications officer Uhuru (Zoe Saldana), engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg), and navigator Chekov and helmsman Sulu (Anton Yelchin, John Cho). All offer bracing reinterpretations of the characters we already know – they’re together again, for the first time – and their tentative yet easy camaraderie (bolstered by a serviceable script by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) fits the film’s goals perfectly.

Plot particulars involve old Trek canards: There’s some time travel, and some Starfleet bickering, and a nasty rogue Romulan (Eric Bana) who prefers to settle his scores by annihilating the universe. (Must everyone in the 23rd century overreact? Sheesh.) But all that is secondary next to the importance of properly setting the stage. The new faces of the Enterprise crew actually seem capable of getting stuff done, as opposed to standing on the deck of a ship’s bridge and gnashing their teeth. By ratcheting up the physicality and the pace, Abrams has turned Trek into an actual action franchise – boldly going where no one has gone before. And he’s given me the opportunity to type words I never thought would emerge from my keyboard: I can’t wait to see the next Star Trek movie.  9

Erich Van Dussen is managing editor of Rochester Film Journal. Write to him at info@rochesterfilm.com.