STAR TREK IS COOL AGAIN
I was never a very serious Star Trek fan, mostly because I never got interested in any of the television series, although there was a time in the late 90s that I went through and watched all of the feature films. I think this was just before Insurrection was released and I liked them all, but I wouldn’t say enough to call myself a serious fan. Science fiction has never been my favorite genre, particularly the space-travel movies, even though I love Star Wars and I had a great time with movies like Event Horizon and even Space Truckers, but the new Star Trek is so brilliant and such an incredible thrill ride that it makes me wish I lived in the states and had access to Netflix so I could watch all the old movies and tv shows. This is the best film that has been released so far in 2009.There is a lot of time travel involved in the new Star Trek, and it is used to great advantage in showing us younger versions of all of the characters we have come to know and love but still providing an opportunity for a nearly 80-year-old Leonard Nimoy to make an appearance, still as Spock, and show that he's still got it. Fans of the series will be out of their seats when he shows up.
The movie starts out not unlike Orson Scott Card’s brilliant science fiction novel “Ender’s Game” (which is much better than the film version, Starship Troopers). We meet our well-known cast and crew as children being educated to prepare them for a life aboard Federation Starships. Spock is an emotionless young boy who ducks the insults of Vulcan bullies with stone-faced indifference, and Kirk is a wild kid who steals his dad’s antique Mustang and tears down the dirt roads of the southwest blasting the Beastie Boys and running from flying cops. See? I told you Star Trek was cool again!
Cut to some time later and they are young men and women being given their first assignments. Spock is awarded control of the Enterprise, but Kirk’s bar-hopping and womanizing (there’s a curious almost-love scene between Kirk and a pea-green hottie during which the movie comes dangerously close to campy cheesiness) has cost him a job on the coveted ship, forcing him to find other, less orthodox ways to get on board.
[caption id="attachment_33471" align="alignleft" width="369" caption="Kirk and Spock, the Next NEXT Generation."]
[/caption]Luckily the only other times when the movie is unintentionally funny are a few times when well-known lines are uttered, like "I'm givin' it all she's got, Captain!" and "Set lasers to stun!" and by far my favorite, "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a physicist!" I burst out laughing at that line, I couldn't help it. I've seen Ace Ventura far too many times and was unable to think of anything except Jim Carrey going "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a pool man!"
But once the movie gets going it never lets up, like a good horror movie, and you know how rare those are. A distress call has come from planet Vulcan, describing seismic activity and an ominous electrical storm in space, and the Enterprise is sent to investigate and evacuate if necessary. It turns out that a Romulan ship is there drilling to the planet’s core to build a black hole in the middle of it and suck the entire planet into oblivion, and all in order to seek vengeance for the destruction of Romulus, which happens I believe 128 years in the future.
But don't worry, that’s all I’m gonna say about the plot. When it comes to Star Trek movies, a synoptic outline of the story is pretty irrelevant. What matters is whether or not the effects are believable, the performances are good, and the movie flows along and tells the story well, and Star Trek ’09 does all of this and more.
[caption id="attachment_33472" align="alignright" width="269" caption="Eric Bana as the Romulan nemesis Nero, who is understandably upset that his planet has been destroyed and that he's named after some CD burning software."]
[/caption]I will say that Chris Pine’s performance as a young and cocky James Kirk was slightly off, although he does provide an outstanding image of a young William Shatner (keep in mind that William Shatner himself as a young man looked nothing at all like William Shatner. If you don’t believe me, watch the Twilight Zone episode “Nick of Time” from the original series). The problem is that Pine just looks too much like an all-American college boy. Granted, that’s basically what Kirk is, but when seen alongside Zachary Quinto, who gives an absolutely astonishing performance as the young Spock, Pine just looked a little too, ah, normal.
But of course I'm nitpicking. Mostly I’m just trying to find something in the movie to complain about to balance out my review, because I absolutely loved pretty much everything about it. I would say that it’s one of the two or three best science fiction movies released in the last decade, as far as story, performances, special effects (if the movie is not recognized at the Oscars next year for effects then I’ll know for sure that there is no longer any reason to trust the Academy anymore) and, believe it or not, screenwriting. This movie is so well-written that it competes with the best scripts out there, which is not common for a science fiction movie. In particular, notice how the rivalry between Spock and Kirk is written and the brevity and clarity of Spock’s descriptions of things like time travel paradoxes and how best to handle various problems faced by the crew of the Enterprise. Nobody in Hollywood is writing this good these days.
The movie is also so packed with spot-on performances that it makes me think that there should be more awards for casting agents. Why is there no Oscar for Best Casting? You have to sit through a lot of credits before you learn that the casting was done by April Webster and Alyssa Weinberg, two highly experienced casting directors and definitely the two really unsung heroes of the new Star Trek movie. They had a lot of pressure to cast the right people for everyone from 13-year-olds Jacob Kogan and Jimmy Bennet as the young Spock and Kirk to Simon Pegg as the infamous Scotty, and they hit the bulls-eye every time. Nice work, ladies! We here at Hollywire salute you!
[caption id="attachment_33474" align="alignleft" width="379" caption="Google Earth, one of the coolest things on the internet, has nothing on the new Star Trek."]
[/caption]Just go see the movie. For the first time in my life a science fiction movie didn’t make me imagine what it would be like were time travel and extensive space travel and whatnot possible, but it made me try to imagine how we can make better science fiction movies. What's coming next? We have perfected set design and are nearing perfection in special effects. Time travel is not possible and never will be (sorry kids, but if it were, it will not be Earth-dwelling humans that master it, otherwise don’t you think someone would have come back by now to stop people like Hitler and Stalin and Mao or, you know, warn us about September 11th or the dangers of another war in the middle East?), but the movie is a brilliant piece of entertainment, it’s a beacon from which science fiction movies of the future should learn and it gives us a quality level to which they should all aspire. Bravo!
[caption id="attachment_33476" align="aligncenter" width="499" caption="The Enterprise takes us where no Star Trek has gone before, leaving me dying to know, where do we go from here?"]
[/caption][caption id="attachment_33475" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Bean, the older brother of Ender himself, gives Star Trek 2009 a big 'Hell yes!'"]
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