Film review: Star Trek (12A)

Published on Friday 24 April 2009 16:13

STAR TREK (12A) Director: JJ Abrams ***

"A wagon Train to the stars." That's how Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek to TV execs. Forty-three years later, Trek can be found in every corner of our culture. Nowadays, however, its United Nations-in-space world feels badly time-warped, its future being light years away from the dark dreadful circumstances explored by modern Terminators, Battlestar Galacticas or even Doctor Who.

In reviving Trek, Lost creator JJ Abrams has boldly gone where no edition of the franchise has gone before – younger, sending the "original" crew of the USS Enterprise back to the beginning of their Starfleet careers.

By rebooting the series, Star Trek smartly pitches itself to an audience with no knowledge of the old Trekkie lore, using quantum physics hokum to create a new set of future tensions. Even at the start of the picture, the circumstances of James Kirk's birth is rewritten into something violent and emotionally wrenching.

The disruptions are down to a Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana), who has a hate-on for the planet Vulcan. One consequence of his time-space meddling is that everything – including the TV series plus the 10 previous films – gets shuffled sideways into a parallel reality. This neatly liberates the film from troublingly dated Trek tropes, such as the tentative race relations lessons and the gollygosh of Seeing Women Working. Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is no longer a 23rd century space receptionist but a shrewd polylinguist who has a thing going on with Mr Spock – a plot point once hinted at in early TV episodes, but discarded. Yet the film also acknowledges the needs of the many older Trekkies by bringing in Leonard Nimoy as a wizened elder Spock: wise but unable to do anything about some ill-fitting Vulcan teeth.

History may be mutable in the new Star Trek, but some things don't change. Spock is logical, the female officers wear miniskirts and Scotty (Simon Pegg) complains about the ship's overworked engines. Chris Pine's baby Kirk doesn't yet have the eccentric charisma of William Shatner, but who knew Bones McCoy (Karl Urban) was so raffish, while Zachary Quinto's Spock is an uncanny emulation of the original without becoming a karaoke turn.

It helps that the new Kirk-Spock dynamic isn't yet one of warm friendship. Instead, Spock's logic and Kirk's rebelliousness clash, and it is Spock who captains the Enterprise. "Out of the chair," the Vulcan wearily instructs James T Cuckoo. The story may be the least interesting aspect but New Star Trek, like Old Trek, invests in creating engaging relationships and rivalries that are more engaging than many recent films firmly placed on this planet.

On general release from May 8 www.startrekmovie.com