Star Trek Review

Some time after the year 1989, the year in which William Shatner's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier put a brake on the movie series' seemingly endless run of box office successes, executive producer Harve Bennett came up with a radical idea to save Paramount's premier franchise from extinction.

Knowing that Star Trek's 25th Anniversary was going to be celebrated in 1991 and that the studio was considering, albeit with some hesitation, a sixth feature film based on the television series created by Gene Roddenberry, Bennett and screenwriter David Loughery pitched a story titled Starfleet Academy.

Its exact storyline has never been revealed because Paramount was determined to close out the Original Series-derived film cycle with Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, De Forest Kelley, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols and George Takei aboard the USS Enterprise, but Starfleet Academy would have focused on how a young and rebellious James T. Kirk and a half-Vulcan, half-human Starfleet officer named Spock met during Kirk's Starfleet Academy days before the famous five-year mission to "explore strange new worlds...to boldly go where no man has gone before."

Starfleet Academy would have, of course, required the casting of an all-new ensemble of young actors in their late teens and early 20s, and perhaps even a cameo or two by Shatner and/or Nimoy, since it would have been made before Star Trek Generations and the fates of the Original Series crew were still unresolved (except for Dr. Leonard McCoy, who had made a brief appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation's  pilot episode. 

But the tricky issue of dealing with opposition from the established cast and the crucial "dollars and cents" question of possible box-office rejection by audiences pushed Paramount Pictures to the path of least resistance and the film which eventually became Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and Bennett walked away from the franchise he had helped save by producing Star Trek II and three other movies.

Rebooting Star Trek

Interestingly enough, director J.J. Abrams (Mission Impossible III) takes the basic premise of Bennett's Starfleet Academy project and marries it to a plot device used in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek: First Contact - saving civilization as we know it through time travel.

Star Trek begins in the early 23rd Century as the U.S.S. Kelvin is in deep space investigating a freaky lightning storm.  Unfortunately for the Kelvin, this phenomenon is not natural but is the precursor to the appearance of an artificially-generated black hole.

Out of this black hole emerges the Romulan mining ship Narada, which  attacks the overmatched Kelvin.  In a valiant but ill-fated effort to end the confrontation, Captain Robau (Faran Tahir) agrees to board the Narada to negotiate with Romulan commander Nero (Eric Bana)...and is killed by the Romulans.

This leaves First Officer George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth) in command, but his captaincy of the Kelvin is short lived; realizing that the Narada is hell-bent on attacking the Federation, Kirk orders the evacuation of his new command, which means placing his pregnant wife Winona (House's Jennifer Morrison) aboard one of the shuttles even though she's in labor.

Even as Kirk proceeds with his "Charge of the Light Brigade"-type attack on the huge Romulan vessel, Winona gives birth to James Tiberius Kirk.

Star Trek then flashes forward in time a few times, once showing us a very precocious James T. Kirk as a car-stealing pre-teen (played by Jimmy Bennett) in rural Iowa, then finally settling into the 2250s-era where he's now in his early 20s and a somewhat rebellious Starfleet Academy cadet (Chris Pine)

By then, the film has already given us glimpses at Spock's childhood on Vulcan, which (thanks to Star Trek: The Animated Series) has previously been glimpsed and alluded to in both the Original Series and The Next Generation.  We first see him as a child (Jacob Kogan), facing off against three fully Vulcan bullies and interacting with his dad Sarek (Ben Cross) and mom Amanda (Winona Ryder). then as a somewhat rebellious Vulcan teenager (Zachary Quinto) who turns down an appointment to the Vulcan Science Academy in order to apply to Starfleet Academy.

Although Star Trek borrows from both the original series and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (we finally see Kirk "beating" the Kobayashi Maru test), the film's main story (which involves that somewhat overused "time travel" plot device) takes the younger versions of the familiar Star Trek: TOS characters into a somewhat different ongoing mission aboard the still-new Enterprise.

 My Viewpoint

Considering that there are going to beTrek fans who will dislike the  changes Abrams & Co. have made to the "established" timeline, the 2009 reimagining of Roddenberry's "Wagon Train to the Stars"  concept is nevertheless worth seeing, no matter if one is a fan of long-standing or a Star Trek-phobe who much prefers the Classic Star Wars Trilogy.

As a viewer, the fact that Star Trek heavily depends on the time travel scenario makes its radical changes to Trek lore more palatable.  After all, if someone or something from the 24th Century (say, Leonard Nimoy's "Spock Prime") travels back to the early 23rd Century and changes one event, does that not, logically, change one possible timeline completely?

And while I was  initially taken aback by some of the film's "alterations" to the familiar version of James T. Kirk's back-story (the messiest in the Star Trek canon), if I buy into the time travel-as-catalyst business, I can therefore accept the new version of the "origins of Star Trek" story without all the angst expressed by Trekkies regarding all the "mistakes" that tick them off.

The most appealing aspect of Abrams' Star Trek, to me, anyway, is the cast he and the casting department assembled to basically give the Enterprise a new lease on life.

Pine and Quinto - whose motion picture debut this is - acquit themselves quite well as Kirk and Spock.  There is no attempt by either actor to imitate the well-known performances of William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy; nevertheless, there's a certain chemistry between the two actors that eerily mirrors the Kirk-Spock relationship familiar to even the most casual of Star Trek watchers.

Equally fascinating was Karl Urban (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) as the recently divorced Dr. Leonard McCoy, MD;  he also refrains from trying to imitate the late DeForest Kelley, yet manages to capture the essence of "Bones".   McCoy gets off some the best comedic lines and proves to be pivotal in shaping young Kirk's "first, best destiny" as a Starfleet officer.

Also interesting were the performances of Simon Pegg (Scotty), John Cho (Sulu) and Zoe Saldana as a very modern and sexy Uhura, whose first name is finally revealed onscreen. 

Unlike the ponderous Star Trek: The Motion Picture of 30 years ago or the more light-hearted eco-adventure of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Abrams's Star Trek is more action-adventure than it is about Roddenberry's concept for the television series, which cleverly mixed relevant topics such as social changes, the morality of war, racial prejudice and the role of women in society with futuristic (and utiopian) science fiction.

Yes, it does make some points about the futility of revenge and the importance of teamwork, as well as the fact that Kirk's first best destiny is command of the Enterprise, but essentially 2009's Star Trek follows the pattern set by Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and gives audiences adrenaline-pumping, high-octane (or dilithium) space battles are more akin to Star Wars.

And, as in most of the Star Trek films (and even the various TV shows), don't expect to find realistic science-based scenes here, either.  Screenwriters  Roberto Orci (Fringe, Alias) and Alex Kurtzman (Alias, Xena: Warrior Princess) are good storytellers indeed, but they have depicted black holes, time travelling spacecraft and other Star Trek "scientific" concepts in a purely dramatic fashion that isn't exactly accurate.

But Star Trek, of course, is myth (or, if you prefer, technomyth), and its mission isn't to turn us all into astronomers or physicists, so scientific accuracy isn't a problem for me. 

It may not be perfect, and it may not be your father's Star Trek, but this high-energy reboot from the creator of Alias and Lost proves there's still life in that proud but battered franchise created by Gene Roddenberry in the mid-1960s. 

May it live long and prosper......