Star Trek (2009)

Star Trek: Nemesis has the dubious honor of being the movie that killed Star Trek as a cinematic experience.  At least for a while, that is.  Neither William Shatner nor Leonard Nimoy thought there would be a sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier came close to bringing the original cast movies to a screeching halt.  In both cases the series recovered and came back with some of its strongest entries.  However, none of them had as much money dumped into them as Nemesis with such a massive lack of return.

Looking back, Nemesis isn't that terrible, at least when compared with The Final Frontier.  Unfortunately, it made for a rocky farewell to the Next Generation cast, as there were plans to do something similar to what Star Trek: Generations did and hand the series over to the casts of Deep Space Nine and Voyager.  Nemesis pretty much made sure this didn't happen, as did the lackluster reception of the television show Enterprise, which though looked back on a bit more fondly these days suffered from a rocky first season and just fatigue with the franchise in general.

It would be seven years before Star Trek returned to the big screen, and this time under the direction of nostalgia peddler J. J. Abrams.  Instead of continuing where Nemesis left off we get an entirely new cast playing younger versions of the original series crew.  On the surface this initially seemed like it was going to be Star Trek: 90210 or a Muppet Babies version of the series, but surprisingly Abrams, in contrast with the mess he made of the Star Wars sequels, managed to revitalize the franchise as well as appeal to a wider audience.

When a large ship appears out of a strange anomaly near Klingon space the U.S.S. Kelvin finds itself under sudden attack.  The ship turns out to be Romulan, led by a commander named Nero (Eric Bana).  In a desperate attempt to get his crew evacuated, acting captain George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth) sacrifices himself.  This allows his wife and his unborn child, James, to escape.  Without his father around to care for him James (Chris Pine) grows up rebellious, constantly getting into fights, and only joins Starfleet when encouraged by Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who recognizes the potential in him.  Three years later he encounters Spock (Zachary Quinto), a Vulcan Starfleet officer who has designed the Kobayashi-Maru scenario, which, in typical Kirk fashion, James cheats.

Brought up on charges of academic malfeasance, Kirk's disciplinary hearing is interrupted by the reappearance of Nero's ship near Vulcan.  Kirk's friend Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban) gets James on the Enterprise under false medical pretenses due to the fact that the young cadet recognizes this to be the ship that destroyed the Kelvin.  He turns out to be right, as the planet Vulcan is soon destroyed.  With Pike captured by Nero, Spock is acting captain, and initially clashes with Kirk's desire to pursue Nero's ship, which appears to be headed for Earth next.  Put off the ship and stranded, Kirk soon finds out the reason for Nero's one-man war against the Federation, and conspires to find a way to make Spock see reason before Earth is destroyed as well. 

Although all the characters from the original series - including Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Scotty (Simon Pegg) - eventually come together on the Enterprise, it is under much different circumstances than happened originally.  In what is known as the "Prime" universe, Kirk took over the Enterprise at the age of 30 from Captain Pike, with Spock being promoted to his first officer.  Chekov showed up on board in the second season of the original series, and Sulu, before becoming a helmsman, was a botanist.  Thus Kirk, despite being the roguish lady's man he was in the series and in the original Star Trek films, was a fully trained and disciplined Starfleet officer, following in the footsteps of his father.  In addition, the crew on the Enterprise had years of experience on that ship and others.  What writers Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman did right was, with the appearance of Nero's ship, completely change the timeline.  While the characters are generally the same their experiences are different, and Kirk is thrown into a position of responsibility much earlier in his life and while under fire. 

The reason this was a smart idea can be seen in the recent Star Trek: Discovery series where not so much care was taken in keeping continuity, resulting in having to fix things later to match what is canon due to fan outcry.  The Kelvin Universe (as Abrams's series came to be known) doesn't have to play by any preset rules other than simply not ruining the characters.  Chris Pine's version of Kirk may be a bit wilder than Shatner's, but his core values are still there.  Quinto is surprisingly good as Spock, revealing a bit more of his human side than Nimoy's version, but then again that Spock never had to deal with the potential extinction of his race.  Simon Pegg captures the essence of Scotty, but at this point it's hard to say where John Cho and Anton Yelchin were going to go with the two helmsmen.  In this, like other versions of Star Trek, Sulu and Chekov are given a few key things to do (Both Sulu and Chekov get to save Kirk at one point), but little else.

The one character that does get more development is Uhura.  Zoe Saldana is allowed to play her more the way she should have been - a communications officer with a specialty in xenolinguistics, not as someone who has to bring out the Klingon-English dictionary when faced with difficulty - and made a significant member of the crew.  It's understandable that Nichelle Nichols was slightly played down at the time of the original series - having a woman, and even more so a black woman, playing an officer part was unheard of.  Saldana was a rising stat at the time, and it is nice to see Uhura as a constant foil for Kirk, especially when her romantic intentions toward another crew member are made known. 

The effects look great, considering this is now over a decade old and, unlike a lot of other J. J. Abrams stuff, I don't mind the fan service.  Star Trek is decades upon decades of fan service no matter who is in charge and, as Alex Kurtzman (who is now in control of the current flock of television shows) has learned, "subverting expectations" is less appreciated in Trek than it is in Star Wars.  While Orci and Kurtzman wrote the script the director always has a lot of input in what goes into the movie once the cameras get running, and Abrams loves those little moments where someone recognizes a reference no matter how obscure - an off-hand remark by Scotty that references Enterprise, for instance.  What doesn't look great, though, are the lens flares.  Star Trek takes a lot of heat for Abrams's constant use of lens flares throughout, and watching it one finds that it is not an exaggeration.  It sometimes feels like this movie requires the audience to be wearing sunglasses.  It's something Abrams has backed off on in recent years, and I have never understood this artistic choice.

The lens flares aren't the only bad choice in the film.  Nero is a terrible villain, and Eric Bana is awkward in the role.  None of the supposed pain he feels due to the destruction of Romulus comes through; it feels like someone reading lines in an industrial film.  It's a bland performance for someone who is supposed to be so driven by anger that they will sit around waiting for 25 years for his true foe to show up so he can get his revenge.  Also, the name is terrible, revealing a problem that many fans have had with Kurtzman in not quite understanding Trek like he should.  Orci, from what I understand, was the big fan, where Kurtzman seemed less concerned about canon.  For instance,  naming a Romulan villain "Nero" just seems like someone thinking, "So these guys are vaguely Roman, right?" instead of realizing that these were concepts translated into English by a universal translator device that would have tried to frame things as close as possible, and which often has problems getting concepts right even if it translates the words.  

This may be a bit more of an action film than many old-school fans would have liked, but even the best of the old Trek movies seem old-fashioned now.  Still, the action is clear, the space battles work, and Kirk gets to do a lot of punching - just not that old Trek-fu style.  The one time Sulu does get to do anything it's with swords, which means someone was paying attention, and as an origin film to bring the crew together in an alternate timeline - hinting at a sort of order to the multiverse, since the Mirror Universe also had largely the same people interacting - and get the audience used to the new actors, it works.  

Star Trek (2009)

Time: 127 minutes

Starring: Eric Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Bruce Greenwood, Eric Bana

Director: J. J. Abrams