Film Review: 'Star Trek'

In some ways, J.J. Abrams's decision to direct the film that would 're-boot' the 'Star Trek' franchise was a thankless undertaking. Too many departures from the conventions of either the original television series or the previous films, and you antagonize the acne-pocked misfits who form the sub-culture, bordering on minor cult, that forms your core audience. Excessive fidelity on the other hand, would forfeit the interest of the wider public that craves something new, and has only dim recollections of the series that inflicted on an unsuspecting world some forty years of an increasingly self-parodic William Shatner.

As Anthony Lane observed in the New Yorker, Abrams (whose previous films are 'Mission Impossible: III' and 'Cloverfield', an intermittently clever pastiche of the monster genre; he is better known for his television creations 'Alias' and 'Lost') possesses that limited, but by no means contemptible, talent better fitted to reworking a pre-existing story than truly original creation. On the whole, he has struck the right balance here, and by sensibly distinguishing what is integral to the original's appeal from that which could be dispensed with or could not be duplicated. It is a commonplace that for the generations who have grown up in a world where at any given time there was a re-run on at least one local tv channel, no matter where you happened to be, 'Star Trek' has the generic resonance of mythology. Abrams and his co-scenarists Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzmann, have understood the mythic core of the original more adeptly than the creators of the previous films, and they have embedded it within the framework of another narrative of mythic simplicity.

One key to understanding 'Star Trek' is that neither Kirk nor Spock is a fully satisfactory hero in his own right. The former is commanding but headstrong, the latter cerebral but tone-deaf to the unpredictability of events and the emotional dynamics of leadership. The division between the two obviously reflects the divide between man's animal and rational facets. And the successful pooling of their talents not only provides an object lesson in overcoming that divide, it shows two flawed individuals forming an integrated hero between them. The device of the 'backstory', used with mixed success in recent efforts to reactivate gasping franchises, is here used to good effect. The emphasis on how Kirk and Spock became their familiar selves, and groped towards mutual comprehension and cooperation allows Abrams to exploit the potential of the relationship more thoroughly than it has been done before.

By taking the story back to Kirk and Spock's early days, Abrams makes of 'Star Trek' a joint bildungsroman, a chronicle of the psychological and social formation of the two young protagonists. In the opening sequence, the starship Kelvin is ambushed and destroyed by a Romulan craft commanded by a Captain Nero (Eric Bana), its captain conducting a delaying action that allows him to send most of the crew (and his own pregnant wife and then infant son)to safety in shuttle craft. The baby becomes James T. Kirk, who is soon stealing antique hot rods as a boy, and then smart-mouthing his way through bar-fights as an Iowa adolescent. A surrogate father, his actual father's colleague Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), challenges him to enroll in Starfleet, telling him "your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including yours. I dare you to do better." The next day Kirk signs up. We meet Spock as a bullied child on Vulcan, picked upon for his half-human ancestry; he deliberately distances himself from his Vulcan half by opting for Starfleet over the Vulcan Science Academy after his having a human mother is described as a disadvantage by a high-ranking Vulcan official.

As formula requires, the two take a visceral dislike to each another, with Kirk re-programming a computer to succeed in the Kobayashi Maru command exercise Spock has designed. The resultant disciplinary hearing is interrupted by the lightning storms around Vulcan that herald Nero's return. What follows hinges upon the familiar devices of time travel and parallel universes, with a much older Spock (incarnated by Leonard Nimoy)coming from the future to instruct the young Kirk through Vulcan mind-meld that he must displace the younger Spock as commander of the Enterprise in order to thwart Nero's plan to destroy Vulcan. Kirk and Spock will enter, the older Vulcan says, "a friendship that will define you both."

To thwart Nero, Kirk and Spock must not only work with each other, but draw upon the talents of the familiar characters from the original series. In each case, the defining mannerisms are present, but with the performances never becoming mere imitation. A delightfully manic Karl Urban reworks Dr. McCoy's familiar irritability, and Zoe Saldana provides a predictably poised (and less predictably sensuous) Uhura. John Cho's Sulu, Simon Pegg's Scotty, and Anton Yelchin's Chekhov are less successful, too often becoming mired in laboured dialect humour. (Though one of the better action sequences, a fight on a drilling platform inserting a destructive 'red matter' in Vulcan, has Sulu engage in a well-choreographed sword fight.) An unexpected treat is Bana's puckish rendition of Nero, proof that an intelligent actor can still make a one-dimensional villain more captivating on the screen than one assumes he was on the page.

Abrams also shows himself attentive to those elements of Gene Roddenberry's original conception that have not worn well. Shatner's Kirk embodied a distinctly American swagger that is less appealing now than in 1966, and his aggressive womanizing no doubt grates on some contemporary sensibilities. As played here by Chris Pine, the smart-alecky and often horny Kirk is as often rebuffed as accepted, and frequently finds himself on the losing end of pick-up banter.

Spock's struggle with his opposing human and Vulcan characteristics is, for the first time, consistently in the foreground of the story, and is embodied by Zachary Quinto with an understated and effective nervosity. That Spock faces reflexive disdain for humanity among Vulcans is one point on which Abrams's conception is less dewy-eyed than Roddenberry's. Where the latter, at the high point of America's civil rights activism, posited a future in which antipathies not only of race but of species are overcome within the Federation, the more realistic sensibility of the latter assumes slower, more partial progress towards quasi-universal fraternity.

Anyone who grew up on 'Star Trek' reruns can certainly remember chortling over the spray-painted styrofoam rocks and rudimentary special effects. Abrams and his colleagues make proficient use of CGI and other current technologies; moreover, the many vivid action scenes are presented without the automatic resort to slo-mo that seems, in the wake of the 'Matrix' trilogy, tiresomely de rigeur. More surprising yet, Abrams reveals a previously unsuspected knack for composition, with a number of memorable images, including the annihilation of the Kelvin, the implosion of Vulcan, and the lovely iconic scene in which Kirk rides his motorbike through the Iowa night to look at the Enterprise under construction. (Equally striking footage of the ship's construction that was included in an early trailer is not, regrettably, in the film itself.)

Perhaps the worst mistake one might make with this material would be to treat it too seriously, and for the most part Abrams avoids that. Indeed, on many an occasion he and his collaborators invite the viewer's amused complicity, quoting familiar lines with an obvious wink, and they sometimes upend familiar motifs, as when Spock enjoys the romantic success with Uhura that Kirk sought, only to be effortlessly rejected. That the partnership of the two leads is closer to an equal one than we have seen before is nicely exemplified by the fact that the one gets the Enterprise, the other the girl.

The adroit use of the backstory here is likely to prove something of a one-off, though it seems that at least one sequel is already in the works. It would seem, then, that in business terms Abrams's 'retcon'(it is more that than a true re-boot)has revived the 'Star Trek' franchise as hoped. Those who predicted the death of the franchise upon the cancellation of Enterprise a few years ago would seem to have been proven wrong. In commercial terms it may yet live long, though I am yet to be convinced that, in artistic ones, it will prosper.