It did not suck.
All three of us went to see it Saturday afternoon at the nearby IMAX theater, since I had been smart enough to pre-buy the tickets online. By that time, there had been enough positive word-of-mouth from trusted friends as well as the glowing professional reviews that I felt reasonably confident we would not be seeing a stinkbomb, but I was still delighted and surprised at how much fun the film was. Charlotte, who has never seen a single episode of any version of Star Trek in her entire life, was totally taken with it, and Bridget, who has had to put up with me being a fanboy all these years but isn’t much of a Trekker herself, still keeps saying two days later how much she liked the movie. I think the three of us represent the exact target audience J.J. Abrams needed to hit: the hardcore Trekker, the newbie, and the average moviegoer. How you could expect to please all three seems to be an impossible task, and yet he managed it.
Now that I’ve had a couple of days to percolate about it a bit, I realize that as much fun as it was to watch, it doesn’t hold up to much careful scrutiny at all. To it’s credit, you can sit through the entire movie and just be a part of the experience without once being distracted by the weaknesses of the film, but be warned that if you are one of those people who likes to pick apart a film as you’re watching it you will see the problems and it will spoil the watching for you. Just let yourself be swept up for the 120 minutes and enjoy it as an ephemeral pleasure and save the analysis for later. That’s working for me.
At this point I’ll pause for any of you who choose to take that advice and stop reading, then I’ll share some of my critical observations with you. Noo ni noo noo…….
Okay, so on with the criticism. We’ll start with the problems from the perspective of its place in the Star Trek Canon and then move on to the problems from the perspective of the filmmaking. From the moment this film was announced as being in development, we all knew the problem would be recasting the characters and re-introducing the series without totally demolishing 40 years’ worth of carefully crafted backstory and utter worship of the original cast. Hollywood has done an utterly TERRIBLE job with every movie they’ve made based on some beloved TV show of the 1960s and 1970s, and the fear early on was that this would be no exception. What ultimately saves the bacon of this movie is that the casting of the primary roles is slam-dunk flawless. All seven of the main cast roles are so fucking awesome that it almost doesn’t matter how stupid the rest of the movie is. Chris Pine channels just enough of Bill Shatner’s swagger and charm but never seems like a caricature or a parody. There are one or two moments when Zack Quinto’s Spock is a little too much like Sylar (the character he plays on “Heroes”), but his intensity seems just right for a young Spock who has not yet mastered his unflappable demeanor. The rest of the cast get a little more leeway to bring new interpretations to their characters, especially Uhura (Zoe Saldana), although poor Scotty (Simon Pegg) gets stuck with the comic relief a wee bit too heavily, and every single one succeeds. Even Bruce Greenwood as Captain Pike is great.
But my first and most serious criticism as a Star Trek fan is that they actually had TOO MUCH from established canon in the film. Every character got to utter at least one of their best-known catchphrases, and though each line got a bit laugh from the audience, after the first one or two I found myself just waiting for somebody to say the next one. Trekkers usually love lots of inside jokes or subtle references to bits and pieces of other episodes, but especially considering that the idea was to “reboot” the series, by the last couple of scenes it was just too much for my taste.
And that dovetails with my other biggest criticism from a fan standpoint: they went too far in establishing the story as an “alternate reality” that ties the new cast firmly to the entire canon of Star Trek. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Seems to me they did it to buy some legitimacy from the existing fanbase: “See, you nerds, it’s not THAT different!” It also made the inclusion of Leonard Nimoy’s Spock a viability. But that viability also represents a liability for future movies to have to continue to justify the existence of their diagetic universe by explaining it in the context of the original series. Along that same line of reasoning, I don’t see how they could have worked in a similar role for Shatner as Kirk within the narrative they ended up using, so I’m glad that didn’t come to happen no matter how pissy Shatner has been about it.
So here are my carps about it as a film on its own merits:
The whole film is simply an extended action sequence. One chase scene after another, with barely any time to catch one’s breath. It’s fun, but it’s extremely superficial. Abrams doesn’t make the slightest effort to do any character development or storytelling, he simply relies on the fact that 80% of the audience know these characters inside and out already and that he hasn’t changed anything significant about any of them. So, fire forward phasers, Mr. Sulu and get us out of here, warp factor seven! The villian is utterly generic — angry bad guy with a powerful spaceship who wants to destroy Earth — yeah, right, we all saw Star Trek IV already. He’s as much of a throwaway as the guy in the red uniform who buys it on the away team mission. All he does is enable the conceit of the “alternate timeline” element. A really good Star Trek bad guy has to imply some serious peril to the Federation that maybe the Enterprise can’t stop. That’s why the Borg were such a good nemesis and why Q could keep coming back again and again. In other words, if this wasn’t a Star Trek movie, it would be an utterly forgettable generic summer action movie. A fun bit of entertainment and nothing more.
But you KNOW how these things work. Without question, all the primary cast members had to sign a multi-picture contract, and the writing team is well into a late-stage draft of the next movie so they can go into pre-production this year and have a finished film ready for release late next year. My guess is that there will be at least three movies with this cast, if not four, to pretty much fill up the release calendar clear through the next decade. So they have the opportunity to cover some ground in that time in terms of working out some more substantial storytelling and original character development. OR they could go down the path that most movie series take these days and simply cash in on all the catchphrases and shtick that worked in the first movie and repeat them endlessly until the last film goes straight to DVD.
Personally, I am at a point in my life as a fanboy to appreciate the film from a very superficial level of enjoyment. In fact, I liked it enough that I plan to go see it again, probably without the wimmins. I think it is worth recommending to anyone, be they a trufan or not. Just try not to think about it too much.
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