It’s Star Trek, Jim, but not as we know it. This one’s bigger, brasher and more exciting than everything that’s gone before.

JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost and Alias, has very boldly gone and breathed new life into a franchise that’s already had more deaths and rebirths — from the indifferent to the inspired — than the comparable but smaller-scale Doctor Who.

Abrams’s version of Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic space western isn’t perfect. But it is confident, clever and above all spectacular enough to please die-hard fans and newcomers alike.

The blockbuster film, which has its West End premiere tonight, is a prequel to the original Sixties TV series. Watching the first 15 minutes is like being stabbed in the heart with an adrenaline injection. The cataclysmic space battle that heralds the birth of James T Kirk gives us a taste of the spectacular effects to come. It’s followed by a brilliantly pacy sketch of the boyhoods that formed the headstrong human Kirk and the coldly logical half-Vulcan Spock.

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In no time, Chris Pine’s cocksure Kirk is enlisting in Starfleet after failing to pick up Zoe Saldana’s absurdly slinky communications wizard Uhura in a bar. All it takes is the arrival of a wrathful, time-travelling Romulan for him, her, Spock, old Uncle Bones McCoy and all to find themselves prematurely in charge of the Starship Enterprise, and of saving the universe.

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Throughout, Abrams and his writers Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman adhere to the three driving forces of Roddenberry’s series: action, character, and smuggled-in, high-minded morality. The pace rarely lets up, and when it does, midway through, the story starts to look thin. Everyone jabbers about falling through black holes and “red matter” until the fighting and the whipcrack dialogue crank up again.

To be honest, the plot is secondary. What’s dazzling is the way the film-makers have taken ownership of a phenomenon.

The young crew’s rough-edged relationships work in their own right and as backstories for characters we already know well. Abrams puts in plenty of witty homages to the past without overegging it. Even Simon Pegg’s comic turn as Scotty is nicely judged.

There are a couple of brilliant twists involving Spock and Uhura that even a Vulcan mind meld won’t get out of me. And Star Trek’s message of pacifism and tolerance — even if achieved with phasers and fists — is so ingrained that alien Enterprise crew members appear without comment. (Though not, it must be said, in senior positions or speaking roles. And miniskirts are still de rigueur for female officers, it seems.)

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Chris Pine is an attractive, energetic hero but doesn’t perhaps bring the same eccentric swagger to the captain’s chair as predecessors William Shatner or Patrick Stewart.

Eric Bana is also effective if two-dimensional as the villain, Nero. But Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban are superb as Spock and McCoy and together the crew makes a formidable ensemble. Sequels will surely follow. Full ahead, maximum warp.
Star Trek opens on Friday 8 May.