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'Star Trek' prequel glimmers greatness
Paramount Pictures
Zachary Quinto as Spock, left, and Chris Pine as James T. Kirk won't disappoint hardcore or casual Star Trek fans.
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Published: May 6, 2009
Achieving summer movie greatness has become about as elusive as achieving "serious" film greatness. There's too much reliance on special effects, for one thing, or too much drag from bad acting. Or there's a plot so ridiculous it pulls you out of the movie and makes you check your watch. Repeatedly.
So it's high praise to write that "Star Trek" achieves, at times, summer movie greatness.
It's funny, for one thing, which is a bit of surprise. Apparently director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orco and Alex Kurtzman learned the lesson supplied by one of the more successful, and funny, "Star Trek" films, "The Voyage Home."
Abrams and the largely unknown cast deliver a giddy two hours of fun, action and references to the old show that will please casual fans (more on the serious fans in a moment). Don't expect to see an exploration of man's dark side (like "The Dark Knight") or a dystopian future (like the "Terminator" films). "Star Trek" is a bright bauble of entertainment, and it delivers far, far better than we had the right to expect.
Serious fans, however, are already complaining. Abrams and his writers have tinkered with the "Star Trek" mythology by creating an alternate time line for its main characters. My advice to those fans: Chill. Without this film, the "Star Trek" franchise would likely be dead. Take what pleasure you can from it and be happy.
As for the rest of us, go out and enjoy what will likely be the movie of the summer.
The film opens as a Starfleet ship is attacked by a mining vessel. A young man sacrifices himself to save 800 people. As it turns out, that young man is the father of James T. Kirk. It also turns out that the mining vessel is crewed by Romulans, a species that often played the bad guys in the television series. They are led by Nero (Eric Bana), who is obsessed with finding a Vulcan named Spock.
More importantly, Nero and his ship are from the future, where Spock (played again by Leonard Nimoy) is old.
At this point, I could go into a long paragraph about the paradoxes of time travel and the creation of alternate realties, but the movie doesn't burden you much with this sort of thing, so why should I?
The fun starts as the film follows the converging paths of young Kirk (Chris Pine), who is growing up in Iowa, and Spock (Zachary Quinto), who is growing up on Vulcan. They eventually collide at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco, where Kirk has cheated to beat a famous test designed by Spock (a test mentioned back in 1982's "Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn" film).
Picking up plot threads like that is fun, as is the way the movie incorporates sounds from the original movie (that computer "ping" whenever they are on the ship's bridge) or old jokes about the series (Kirk's habit of trying to bed every female of every alien species, even those with green skin).
But what's even better is watching Pine, Quinto and the rest of the cast give life to characters made famous by others. Karl Urban has a particularly great entrance as Leonard "Bones" McCoy, the doctor famous for being a bit prickly. Nyota Uhura (Zoe Saldana) has a larger role than before, which Saldana handles well, and comedian Simon Pegg is perfectly cast as engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott. John Cho gives helmsman Hikaru Sulu a new dimension as a great fighter.
Through twists and turns I won't give away here, the crew eventually comes together and attempt to stop Nero before he (you guessed it) destroys Earth.
Quibble all you want with the details, but "Star Trek" provides what summer movies (especially this summer) should provide — a two-hour escape from reality with a heavy dose of adventure and laughter. The formula is not difficult and hasn't changed. "Iron Man" got it right last year. "Star Trek" does the same.
MOVIE REVIEW
Star Trek ***
MOVIE BOARD RATING: PG-13; sci-fi action and violence, and brief sexual content
STARS: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Bana, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho
DIRECTOR: J.J. Abrams
LOCATION: See movie times, Page 9, for local showtimes.
PLOT SUMMARY: In this prequel to the 1960s television series, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise — including a rebellious young James Kirk and a conflicted Spock — meet at Starfleet Academy and are thrown into their first adventure together.
RUNNING TIME: 126 minutes
ON THE WEB: www.startrekmovie.com
Movies are rated on a scale of zero to four stars.
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