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Star Trek

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Cert: 12A

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Dir: JJ Abrams. Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Eric Bana, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Bruce Greenwood, John Cho, Leonard Nimoy, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin

 

Description: Big budget re-imagining of the science fiction franchise, exploring the formative years of the popular characters. Following a family tragedy that scars him for life, James T Kirk enrols at Starfleet Academy. Impetuous, flirtatious and partial to a drink, he soon clashes with Captain Christopher Pike, who has the unenviable task of polishing the raw recruits into gallant crew members. In turn, Kirk forges alliances with Spock, Uhura, Chekhov, Scotty and Bones as they lead the heavily armed USS Enterprise into battle against Romulan despot Nero and his denizens, risking everything to save the Vulcan homeland from annihilation.

Country: US. 2009. 126mins

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Star Trek is back from the future

 

Boldly going: Chris Pine as farm-hand Kirk, left, and Zachary Quinto as Spock, a half-human Vulcan

Out of this world: the remodelled USS Enterprise

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Let me make a terrible confession. Twenty minutes into JJ Abrams’s lively reinvention of the Trekkie franchise that some are calling the best prequel of all time (surely an insult to the Old Testament), I found myself missing the camp old farts who inhabited the old series. Where, oh where, was the pseudo philosophy that some of us thought so strangely relevant? What about those spacey suits that seemed to have been stitched on to the regulars like Old Mother Riley’s winter drawers?

This, however, was before Leonard Nimoy appears as old Spock, back from the future, his eloquently wrinkled face and gleamingly perfect American teeth seeming to emphasise his deep-set pinpoint eyes. “I’ve just lost my planet,” he tells Kirk (Chris Pine) when they meet in a remote solar system after the Captain-to-be is ejected from the Starship Enterprise by young Spock (Zachary Quinto) for persistent brawling. “I can tell you,” Old Spock moans, “I’m emotionally compromised.”

Aren’t we all when faced with this now apparently unending series? Either we cleave to the old style or hail the new, which I have to say is more than well cooked, though it is perfectly clear that JJ was not brought up in a Trekkie household. The creator of American TV series Lost, Alias and Fringe, was obviously more affected by The Twilight Zone, though I’d think the Tarkovsky of Solaris would be a little beyond him. What aren’t over his head are the special delights of Hollywood space travel where everything but the kitchen sink, and sometimes that too, tend to be thrown at heroic intergalactic travellers. The action sequences speak for themselves, getting better as the film progresses.

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The travellers here are young and handsome and the scene is not set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but in the Earth’s distant future. We have a hopeful vision of mankind ultimately defeating wickedness even though it is much more likely that wickedness will cause mankind to defeat itself.

The fate of the galaxy rests in the sometimes clammy hands of young Kirk and Spock back aboard the Enterprise, competitive opposites if not bitter rivals. Kirk is a delinquent Iowa farmhand who could, with a little more discipline, become a leader of men. Spock is, of course, a half-human Vulcan, an outcast who yet becomes the first of his kind to be accepted into the Starfleet Academy (which seems like a cross between a religious convention and one of those awful American rah-rah forcing houses).

One is driven by passion and keeps getting into fist fights he can’t win; the other is driven by the kind of logic that doesn’t really make sense but sounds like the wisdom of ages. One tries to have sex with a woman painted green, who then screams and disappears from the movie; the other looks upon such things as beyond his ken and probably retrograde.

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The women are supposed to have better roles this time round but I can’t see it. The black communications officer Uhura (Zoe Saldana), who once caused a fearful furore by kissing on primetime American TV, has little to work with and Winona Ryder as Spock’s human mother is practically invisible after a while.

Bruce Greenwood is steady Captain Pike; Karl Urban is Bones McCoy, a medic who keeps injecting the volatile Kirk in the neck with sedatives; Simon Pegg is the interminably jokey Scotty and Anton Yelchin is Chekov, the 17-year-old whiz-kid who, despite his name, seems to speak with the accent of a Mexican cook suffering from the after-effects of swine flu. I haven’t forgotten Eric Bana, the villain of the piece — but then, like the women, he doesn’t have an awful lot to do except, in his case, look grim and sweaty.

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All the cast members do well enough with the halfway-decent screenplay, wrapped as it is around Abrams’s flailing but highly professional direction and Dan Mindel’s interestingly different cinematography, which contrasts using close-ups with the wide open spaces of the world beyond our own with diligent virtuosity. Industrial Light and Magic does the rest.

You do get a sense, despite all the other attempts to re-do Star Trek, that this lot boldly go where no man has gone before, and that Abrams has reinvented the series without murdering everything that has gone before. Only a silly old recidivist like me would feel nostalgic for what was often rubbish.

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