Star Trek Review

I'm a huge Star Trek fan, having watched nearly every episode of all the TV series, starting with the original on NBC so many years ago. I've also seen all the movies, including the latest, which is simply called Star Trek. No numbers, no colon with a following phrase such as "The Wrath of Khan" or "The Voyage Home." It takes a lot of chutzpah to call your film "Star Trek" when those two words have been painstakingly defined over the past 40-odd years.

Star Trek has that chutzpah in abundance. What it doesn't have is much originality.

Star Trek starts by resetting the original Star Trek characters, including James T. Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Dr. McCoy, Sulu, Uhura and Chekov. In the case of Kirk and Spock, it goes back to their childhoods, all the way to birth in the case of Kirk. Then it figures out a way for Kirk to break every rule and still get into the captain's seat of the Enterprise at an impossibly young age. Therefore we see Kirk at age 10 screaming down the highway in a stolen Corvette and evading the cops, a pointless scene that could be cut with no loss to the overall story.

Kirk breaks the rules and schemes his way onto the Enterprise as it is sent off to do battle with a rogue Romulan, only to be ejected from the ship, return, and somehow end up the acting captain. And this is on his first mission out of Star Fleet Academy. This is preposterous from a military/command standpoint, but Star Trek makes Kirk out to be a hero among heros, and you can't be a Hollywood hero unless you thumb your nose at the very command structure you hope to serve.

The other classic Trek characters are there, although only Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) get a real workout. And Uhura mostly exists to be the romantic interest in the film, which is a poor use of her character. I would rather have seen her with an interesting hobby and interacting with the crew as one of the guys, instead of the hot babe who has her choice of suitors. Maybe have her punch a bad guy in the nose. Why does there need to be a romance in this film? The mundane answer is that all big-budget Hollywood films must have a romance, so Star Trek must have a romance. Star Trek the 1966 TV show broke traditions in its day, but Star Trek the 2009 movie is shackled by convention.

There is a lot of action, a cartoonishly bad megalomaniac villian, plenty of explosions and a small bit of humor sprinkled in. In that sense, it was a pretty good movie. However, there was no thoughtful point driving Star Trek, as there was in so many of the original TV shows and a couple of the films. All that money spent on sets, action and effects, and its only point is... the bad guy gets it in the end. There is little camaraderie among the crew, as Kirk schemes and breaks any rule to acquire the captain's chair. I didn't get any feel that the rest of the crew was more than an assortment of people thrown together -- this Star Trek is about Kirk, the whole Kirk and nothing but Kirk. (Okay, there's a little background about Spock but not much.)

Star Trek has a couple surprises and some good action, so overall I recommend it. However, it's not nearly as good as Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which remains my favorite of the movies. And Star Trek is not nearly as good as any of 20 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is however, loud. Really, really loud -- at least in the theater in which I saw it.

There's a little bit of rough language and one bedroom scene in Star Trek, but no nudity. It's probably fine for 13-year-olds and up.

I give a mild recommendation to Star Trek. It's not nearly as witty and thoughtful as I was expecting. It's all about action and is good enough for a mild recommendation in that regard.