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| A young James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto) clash repeatedly during their first mission together. |
Original Air Date: May 8, 2009. Written by: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman. Directed by: J. J. Abrams. Produced by: J. J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof.
THE PLOT:
2233: The USS Kelvin investigates a lightning storm in space. They expect to find an odd astronomical phenomenon. Instead, a singularity opens, and the Narada emerges - a massive Romulan ship from the distant future, under the command of the vengeful Nero (Eric Bana). The Narada opens fire, shredding the Kelvin and ultimately leaving its first officer, George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth), in charge.
Kirk is able to evacuate the Kelvin, including his pregnant wife. But with autopilot systems out, there is only one way to make sure his people survive: He stays on the bridge and rams the Narada, sacrificing himself to disable the enemy ship. As Capt. Pike (Bruce Greenwood) will later observe, George Kirk "was captain of a starship for twelve minutes (and) saved eight hundred lives."
2258: George Kirk's rebellious son, James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is on the cusp of graduating from Starfleet Academy - or possibly of getting kicked out, after he hacks into the simulator to change the conditions of the no-win Kobayashi Maru test. It's while his fate is being decided that Starfleet receives a distress call from Vulcan, home of Kirk's newest nemesis, Spock (Zachary Quinto), Pike's half-human First Officer on the starship Enterprise.
When Kirk learns that a lightning storm in space has occurred near Vulcan, he realizes that this is no natural disaster. The Narada has returned and is luring Starfleet into a trap, one that will forever change the fate of the entire galaxy...
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| A ship of cadets: The young crew of the USS Enterprise. |
CHARACTERS:
Kirk: I largely enjoy the 2009 Star Trek, but my enjoyment has one stumbling block: Its characterization of James T. Kirk. The Kirk of TOS and the movies could be arrogant, certainly, but he was also an often contemplative figure who understood the relationship between actions and consequences. This Kirk probably couldn't spell "contemplative." He flouts regulations, often on little more than a whim, and he faces approximately zero lasting consequences. This would be fine if only he showed some internal growth by the end, but that never happens. Chris Pine has plenty of screen presence, and he does well with what he's given... but the Kirk he's given to play seems like he'd be the jock villain of a mid-'80s teen comedy.
Spock: The script is actually far more centered around Spock than Kirk. Spock does receive a character arc, coming to terms with being a child of two worlds, and Zachary Quinto's very good performance evokes Leonard Nimoy's original without descending into mimicry. Spock is shown to be close to his human mother (Winona Ryder), with his shock decision to reject the offer to join the Vulcan Academy a direct result of her being labeled a "disadvantage" that he was forced to overcome. Quinto injects just the right amount of restrained scorn as he rejects the Academy's offer and tells the officials to "live long and prosper."
Dr. McCoy: Karl Urban channels DeForest Kelly in both voice and mannerisms, making his McCoy instantly recognizable to long-time viewers. He is a reluctant enlistee, joining Starfleet in the wake of a messy divorce. He immediately befriends Kirk, and he spends the next three years acting as an anchor for his young friend's recklessness. After Nero's attack, Spock informs him that he's now the chief medical officer. McCoy, already standing in the midst of wounded, snarls back to tell him something he doesn't know.
Uhura: Has been elevated from one of many members of TOS's ensemble to a semi-lead role. Zoe Saldana's Uhura is more assertive than her TOS counterpart, but the change works. This is partly because even 1960s Uhura had a core of steel, and partly because Zoe Saldana does an excellent job of balancing the assertiveness with a sense of compassion and humor. I enjoy the way she responds to Kirk's early attempts at flirtation. She never encourages his not-quite advances (which also never go too far)... but she seems more amused than annoyed, which helps to keep Kirk's antics just the right side of tolerable.
Capt. Pike: The ever-reliable Bruce Greenwood invests Pike with a sense of wisdom gained through experience. Pike wrote his thesis on George Kirk's brief but heroic tenure as captain of the Kelvin, and he is astonished to encounter his hero's grown son as a townie getting into a pointless bar brawl. He challenges the young Kirk to enter Starfleet, and he eventually puts Kirk directly below Spock in the Enterprise command structure. We see that he's a good captain through his actions. When Kirk bursts onto the bridge warning about a trap, Pike listens and confirms his data, and he is able to evade Nero's trap as a result.
Sarek: Just as Pike is Kirk's mentor figure for this film, Sarek is Spock's. An early scene, in which a young Spock has had an emotional outburst to a Vulcan bully, is followed by Sarek counseling his son on the benefits of an existence governed by logic: "Logic offers a serenity humans seldom experience. The control of feelings, so that they do not control you." Ben Cross, as good an actor as he is, simply cannot match the balance of stoicism and likability as brilliantly as the late Mark Lenard, but he does invest an inherent dignity that shows a man worthy of respect.
Nero: The villain of the piece is... well, present. There's nothing wrong with Eric Bana's performance, and Nero is visually imposing. But he's driven by hate for Spock, a hate that seems thinly motivated at best. Not helping the character is that key scenes were relegated to the cutting room floor. Or that his prime antagonism is with Spock, but his big final fight is against Kirk, a man he really doesn't care about. He's ultimately more of a plot device for resetting continuity than a proper character.
"Spock Prime": One of the film's masterstrokes is bringing in Leonard Nimoy to play the Spock from the original continuity. Nimoy's role is small, little more than a cameo, and much of his material amounts to an expositional infodump. But after decades of playing Spock on television and in movies, Nimoy has an innate understanding of the character. As brief as his time is, it's enough for Spock's resourcefulness, intelligence, and dry humor to come through, and his appearance is the movie's highlight.
Enterprise Crew: The film focuses heavily on Kirk and Spock, with McCoy and Uhura as each lead's primary support. The other regulars are in the background, though it's to the script's credit that each character gets something to do. All are noticeably amped up compared to their TOS counterparts, from Simon Pegg's Scotty (outright played for laughs) to Anton Yelchin's eager and frenetic Chekov. I actually liked John Cho's Sulu the best of the three, simply because he isn't scurrying all over the place like an overeager chipmunk. All three find at least one or two good moments to show that they can work in these roles... but in this film alone, none of them is completely "there" yet.
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| The original Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) delivers vital exposition ...and reassures fans that yes, this is "real" Star Trek. |
CINEMATIC JUNK FOOD - BUT GOOD JUNK FOOD:
I'm aware that I've already leveled some criticisms in the "Characters" section alone, and I will be doing more of that. So I want to take a moment to make one thing clear:
I think Star Trek (2009) is a good movie.
It is not a great one. Star Trek II and Star Trek: First Contact are also "Star Trek as action movie," and both feel more tense and substantial, not to mention better plotted. However, this is still an above-average summer action movie. It's made with considerable technical polish, and it maintains enough momentum that while you'll probably notice some iffy plotting and questionable character motivations, odds are that you won't care until after the ride is done.
Given the state of Star Trek after the failure of Nemesis and the cancellation of Enterprise, this was probably the only way Star Trek could have come back at that time: as popular, fast-paced mass entertainment. Is it cinematic junk food? Sure - but it's well-served junk food, engineered to satisfy as long as that's what you're in the mood for.
I'd like more from Star Trek as a rule, but I'm not going to argue that this film is anything other than highly watchable. It hits enough of the right beats to feel "right" for the franchise, and I recall leaving the theater in 2009 with a grin on my face, even as my brain started picking bits of it apart.
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| The Narada appears, dwarfing the USS Kelvin. |
NUTS-AND-BOLTS:
"Nero's very presence has altered the flow of history... Whatever our lives might have been, if the time continuum was disrupted, our destinies have changed."
-Spock (Zachary Quinto) explains the nature of the new film series.
In addition to being a fun ride, this movie has one brilliantly clever conceit. I am no fan of screenwriters Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman, but I have to give them credit for understanding the audience. Had they penned a simple reboot of classic Star Trek, fans might have rebelled. Instead, they found a way to make a film that was simultaneously a sequel and a prequel, as well as a reboot, allowing fans to boost its popular success and champion it as the triumphant return of Star Trek.
Much of the nuts-and-bolts construction is effective. The film opens at the exact point that Nero's ship arrives, complete with the visual of the massive Narada dwarfing the Kelvin in an ominous precursor to that first attack. The film doesn't worry about confusing the audience, given viewers just as much information as the characters have. Meanwhile, several beats in this sequence foreshadow similar moments later in the movie.
The incident with the Kelvin doesn't appear to do much to the timeline. Like a pebble thrown into a lake, there are ripples, but all the characters still end up exactly where they're supposed to be and doing the things they're meant to do. Kirk even cheats on the same test. At this point, it seems as if this alternative timeline is really just making for a slightly altered prequel.
Then, at the midpoint, Nero returns to the story - and this time, he's not tossing a pebble but instead catapulting in a boulder. The script doesn't shy away from following this to its logical conclusion, with the end result upending established continuity in a way that can't be handwaved away.
All of this is executed with absolute confidence. The movie whips along from one scene to the next, never slowing down, never seeming to worry much about minor details. It trusts that as long as it keeps its momentum going, the audience will follow - and for the most part, that trust isn't misplaced.
But it's in the details that I find the film stumbles a bit. There are a number of moments that I think could have been improved without sacrificing the pace or the fun factor.
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| Kirk and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) get their first look at the USS Enterprise. |
ISSUES:
"The test itself is a cheat. You programmed it to be unwinnable... I don't believe in no-win scenarios!"
-Kirk defends himself to Starfleet Academy.
I've already expressed my impatience with this movie's characterization of Kirk. One of the key scenes that cemented him as "Not My Kirk" is the Kobayashi Maru test. In Star Trek II, where Kirk's cheating on the test was introduced as backstory, the impression given was that he adjsuted the program to make it possible to win.
This movie portrays that incident. However, it does so in a way that just underlines his arrogance. He doesn't change the impossible into the difficult to show that he's capable... He programs in a video game cheat code that allows him to succeed with no effort at all. It says all the wrong things about the character at the exact point in the movie that we ideally should identify with him the most.
As I mentioned earlier, the script is centered far more around Spock than Kirk. Spock is the one who gets an actual character arc. Spock is the one the villain is fixated on. Most of the film's truly memorable moments belong not to Kirk, but to Spock. And yet the movie insists on making Kirk its primary hero - right down to him getting the final, face-to-face confrontation with Nero, when it would have been more dramatically satisfying for it to have been Spock.
Then there's the way "Spock Prime" enters the film. It's a great scene on its own, even with the expositional infodump. But as portrayed, it only occurs because of one whopper of a coincidence. Kirk just happens to be marooned on the same planet where Leonard Nimoy's Spock is, and the two just happen to be close enough in location on an entire planet for them to meet by pure chance. The momentum kept me from really thinking about it on first viewing - but it sticks out as a jaw-dropping bit of happenstance on rewatch.
This is also pretty easily fixable. Spock is resourceful. His infodump could reveal that instead of being captured by Nero and dumped onto this planet, he instead escaped in one of the Narada's shuttles and, in the wake of Mid-Film Events, followed the Enterprise. A couple of extra lines of dialogue would transform the least believable part of the movie into something that actually makes sense.
Oh, and while I'm nit-picking: The Narada appears to have been constructed in such a way as to ensure that crew members will regularly plummet to their deaths. We see the Romulan crew literally hopping from one platform to another. Apparently, catwalks and guardrails are for wimps and losers. I'm picturing one of those "X Days Since Last Fatal Accident" signs on one of the ship's walls.
Finally, while I generally don't get into "male gaze" discussions (heck, I'm male, and I'll admit to enjoying a bit of gazing), this film is too blatant about it. Kirk is with his latest conquest, who urges him to hide under the bed when her roommate comes home. Her roommate? Uhura, who drops some important plot information for Kirk to overhear. So far, no problem. Except that she proceeds to undress while Kirk leers, practically before she has time to take a breath, all for the benefit of the viewer. This wouldn't be out of place as a setup for a porno scene, and it actually takes me out of the story for a moment - and this isn't the only example of such a moment!
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| A pre-Starfleet Kirk looks at the USS Enterprise, still under construction. |
OVERALL:
Star Trek (2009) succeeds at being an above-average action movie, and it captures enough of the atmosphere of 1960s Star Trek that I can't help but like it. It also does an admirable job of resetting continuity while at the same time still building on what's come before. It's Star Trek as action movie, with yet another vengeful villain, but it works on its own terms.
Star Trek's return to prominence as a franchise started here. And while I have my issues with the movie, I still have to admit that it does its job well, holding up as an engaging action picture today. I might wish that I didn't have to switch my brain off to enjoy it - but I do, at least, find it enjoyable.
Overall Rating: 7/10.
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