Director: J.J. Abrams
Writers: Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
Release Date: 8 May 2009
Cast:
Chris Pine ... James T. Kirk
Zachary Quinto ... Spock
Leonard Nimoy ... Spock Prime
Eric Bana ... Nero
Bruce Greenwood ... Capt. Christopher Pike
Karl Urban ... Dr. Leonard 'Bones' McCoy
Zoe Saldana ... Nyota Uhura
Simon Pegg ... Scotty
John Cho ... Hikaru Sulu
Anton Yelchin ... Pavel Chekov
Ben Cross ... Sarek
Winona Ryder ... Amanda Grayson
Chris Hemsworth ... George Kirk
Jennifer Morrison ... Winona Kirk
Rachel Nichols ... Gaila
MPAA: Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action and violence, and brief sexual content.
Runtime: 126 min
Filming Locations: Bakersfield, California, USA
Company: Bad Robot
AKA: Madea Goes to Starfleet Academy
Again, this is a review of the movie and contains all sorts of plot and character spoilers. Never read this blog before seeing the movie unless you don’t mind knowing what I know about it.
WTF is this shite???
Here’s what we know:
On Television-
Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) 1966-1969
Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) 1987-1994
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9) 1993-1999
Star Trek: Voyager (VOY) 1995-2001
Star Trek: Enterprise (ENT) 2001-2005
At the Movies-
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (I) 1979
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (II) 1982
Star Trek: The Search for Spock (III) 1984
Star Trek: The Voyage Home (IV) 1986
Star Trek: The Final Frontier (V) 1989
Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country (VI) 1991
Star Trek: Generations (VII) 1994
Star Trek: First Contact (VIII) 1996
Star Trek: Insurrection (IX) 1998
Star Trek: Nemesis (X) 2002
So this is the eleventh “Star Trek” movie and as such would fall under the even/odd mythology as a bad Star Trek movie. It kind of lives up to that billing.
First of all if you don’t know anything about the entirety of the Star Trek universe this movie does absolutely nothing to bring you into it. The backgrounds of the main characters, and the way this movie lays out there are only two characters, are told in a very snapshot-like manner. Not a ton of depth and no establishment of the universe for newbies, so you have to have a very open mind to sit through the rest of the story. In fact I can’t imagine a worse way to reboot, relaunch, reimagine or re-anything a franchise like Star Trek with its forty plus years of material then the makers of this movie managed to do.
If you are a Star Trek fan and a devotee of all things Trek, then you probably walked out of this movie feeling confused, violated and a little bit angry. It has been forever (almost five years since ENT left the airwaves) since we’ve had new Trek. This is new Trek. And by new I mean it has almost no resemblance to anything that has come before. You are watching a bad re-enactment of an old Star Trek episode where the characters have familiar names and there are a few familiar motifs but nothing else is quite right.
The story kills me. It is terrible at its core and that destroys the entire emotion that the movie attempts to establish at the very beginning. Here’s the nutshell: Romulus has been destroyed by a star that has gone supernova. Now that is a completely natural event, at least we’ll assume it is at this point. This causes a captain of a mining vessel, a MINING vessel, to go completely insane. He’s pissed because his wife and daughter died and Spock, who had promised to help with what I can only call the most retarded nonsense I have ever heard – he was going to create a singularity (a black hole) to collapse the exploding star before it reached Romulus, is the man he blames. The method involves red matter and Spock does create the black hole. But don’t you still end up with a black hole like right by Romulus? Also, there are a ton of warning signs regarding a star going Supernova and the Romulans have been a space-faring race for a long time. So why the hell are they still on Romulus? They could have and should have evacuated well ahead of any explosion.
Both Spock in his ultra-fancy Vulcan science vessel and crazy Capt. Nero in his less than state of the art mining vessel go through the black hole and back in time. Oh my god! Can there be a more contrived method for faking time travel? I submit to you that there cannot be. The Romulans arrive in a time and place where a single Federation vessel happens to be and this mining vessel is Romulan so I suppose that it is armed with missiles and disruptors isn’t all that surprising. The Romulan mining ship destroys a top of the line Federation vessel in a few minutes. None of this would matter except the First Officer on this ship happens to be James T. Kirk’s dad and he dies saving his wife and his just born son. This part is actually pretty awesome as a beginning scene for the movie, if you don’t know the why of Nero’s appearance.
Forward a few years and see young Spock and young Kirk being all rebellious. Not really sure of the aging process for Vulcans in that they are very long lived, but I am not sure if that means their childhoods are really long, normal – human, or abbreviated like Spock –reborn in III. Anyways, they flash forward to teen Kirk and Spock still being rebellious and yet managing to both find their ways to Starfleet. Flash forward three years and teacher Spock and (yes, still rebellious) student Kirk are far from friends when Kirk is before a disciplinary committee for cheating on Spock’s test (???). Then word comes that there is trouble on Vulcan.
Students are rushed to waiting ships because the main Federation fleet is in some other part of space doing something that they cannot break away from. Kirk isn’t supposed to go, but he’s - ya know – rebellious and Bones gets him on board Enterprise. Now it’s getting cool because we get to meet young Chekov and kind of young Sulu. We also get to see Uhura take her seat at the communications chair and Capt. Pike running the whole ship. The gang’s not quite all here and our backgrounds on Chekov, Sulu, Uhura, Bones and later Scotty left me a little bit disappointed. Still as a buddy picture (Spock and Kirk) we’ve got all the players together at about an hour in.
Kirk knows what’s what, gets made first officer when Pike leaves Spock in command while Pike negotiates with the Mad Nero (very ancient Rome for a space opera). Things go bad on Vulcan and bad on Nero’s ship. Kirk gets jettisoned from Enterprise (huh?) and lands on a planet that has not only old man Spock after Nero left him there to watch Vulcan turn into a black hole (where again I am confused about the astrophysics involving the gravity of a black hole and its effects on nearby planets), but also a certain engineer with a Scottish brogue and a few ideas about teleporting at warp speeds. Talk about your crazy coincidences.
Scotty and Kirk get back to Enterprise in time to make Spock angry, and when he’s angry he gets relieved of command. (Oh, that’s why Kirk calls him MISTER Spock?) The crew gets behind the regimen change and head to Earth to stop the psychotic Romulan from imploding the planet and creating about black hole just like Vulcan. That red matter is some dangerous crap.
Wham, Bam, thank you Ma’am. And then there is the not so happy but we still saved Earth ending. The universe is still mostly similar to the TOS universe except instead of six billion or more Vulcans running around we have closer to ten thousand. Not much if any of the future tech survived the singularity at the end, but we have Spock (Prime?) and we have Spock (Alpha?) meeting at the end and giving a quick wrap up. Kirk goes from disgraced cadet to savior of the Earth and the Federation. He ends up beating Spock’s no win scenario and taking over command of the Enterprise after Pike’s advancement to Admiral.
Like I said the details of the story are pure crap. And if you are going to see Star Trek for a rock solid science fiction story then you are going to be disappointed. This is the start of the summer movie releases, or so I’ve read and this movie does deliver a ton of action, dumb jokes, huge explosions AND implosions – you don’t get a lot of those, and some very pretty people in costumes.
The pretty people aren’t that bad either. In fact a big redeemer for this movie is the cast who I would pay to see in another Star Trek movie or two. After all this ends up being the odd numbered Trek movie, so you have to let them put in an even numbered one to get the truly spectacular one. Chris Pine as James T. Kirk is brash and bold. He might be smart, but he doesn’t let his brains get in the way of his fists. In all he’s a more than worthy portrayer of this Starfleet Captain. Zachary Quinto is eerily good as Spock. His Sylar on “Heroes” has served him well in carrying a ton of information in a glare. His relationship with Uhuru (again not really explained in the movie) carries more weight for the tortured looks Spock throws around under his demeanor of cool logic.
Damn it, Jim! We needed more Karl Urban as McCoy. He did what he could in his few scenes to dance between the conflicts of Spock and Kirk and in all established his place as best he could in the time Abrams allowed. Same with Uhuru. Zoe “MmmMmm Good” Saldana was efficient and competent as the communications officer, but there isn’t quite the tensions there would have been in the 60s of seeing a woman, much less a black woman, running a major part of what is essentially a warship. More of Zoe in the next installment. Scotty shows up around the halfway point and Simon Pegg delivers what has to be considered an understated performance. Not too overbearing in his role, but he’s still mostly an outsider by the end of the film. And did he have a Tribble on that ice planet?
The rest were nearly awesome and borderline awful at the same time. Poor Anton Yelchin as Chekov has the unenviable task of recreating one of the worst stereotyped characters in all of science fiction, the Russian who speaks really horrible English. And I almost bought it with his pronouncing V as a W (Victor becomes Whictor). Until the part where he says “away team” because then the bastard says- I swear to god- “avay team” making a perfect Vee sound. Somebody should have said something about that. John Cho is Sulu and he’s also doing comic relief in a bit where he forgets to release the parking brake before going to light speed. He’s a fighter (because he took fencing classes) and that’s about it for his character development. That’s it for the main crew and I know it’s tough in a two hour movie to delve into all the characters from birth to their appearances on the deck of Enterprise, but really could have used some help there. And final Nero was played by Eric Bana in more makeup then you can justify for such a handsome man. He’s wasted in the underdeveloped villain role and my god I almost forgot the James Bond villain moment. Hack effing writing as Nero has Kirk dead to rights and then walks away without finishing him. Insane or not, come on!
And that is the movie in a nutshell.
J.J. isn’t a great director. He does a ton of TV where he’s rarely behind the camera and it shows with the lens issues here. Maybe he’ll blame Dan Mindel the cinematographer. You might not notice those problems the first time you see the movie because it runs at a pretty fast pace to hide the holes in dialogue and plot, but it will make second and third viewings more painful. Maybe he can produce and let someone else handle the day to day?
These are the writers that brought you MI:3 and Transformers so you kind of have to expect a terribly shallow script. Your expectations are met. Again with so much time spent on Kirk and Spock back-stories, we could have used a few minutes to establish Nero somewhere. Or go with some better-known bad guys, which is where I hope the sequel goes. This is the time of conflict with the Klingons. At least if we skip the stuff from ENT it is. I mean wouldn’t this altered timeline be the perfect place for Koloth, Kang and Kor to meet up with Kirk and crew for some rocking good space fightin’? Doesn’t Koloth deserve his chance to face Kirk in the field of battle?
Anyway, like Eddie Murphy once opined, if a man is in the desert for weeks and is then offered a cracker, that cracker will be the best damn cracker he’s ever eaten. This movie ain’t no Ritz cracker, but for Star Trek fans left in the desert for the last four years it’s better than nothing.
See it and try to enjoy the whiz bang explosions, but remember these are the same guys who wrote last year’s “Transformers” and really can you expect cool effects and a good story?
