Star Trek. When someone speaks this name, various images, ideas, characters and phrases come to mind. I know they certainly do with me. Characters such as Kirk, Spock, Picard, Data, Janeway, Seven of Nine; ideas like the prime directive; phrases like “Live long and Prosper”, “Good God Jim, I’m a doctor not a….”. I wouldn’t consider myself a “Trekkie”, but I do have a deep affection for this series and world.
As the story goes, Nero is furious at Spock, and by extension his whole race of Vulcans, because Spock did not get to Romulus’ star in time to save it from super nova, which destroyed his planet and all those he loved and cared for. In the process both he and Spock are sucked into a black hole and spit out the other side well in the past, except at different times, Nero 25 years before Spock. In waiting 25 years for Spock to come through the black hole as he had, Nero and his crew seethe with rage and plot their revenge against Spock and his evil race of Vulcans.
Using a plot device bring Nero, into the film, the writers Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman maintain canon. While Trekkers will whinge about many things here no more canon contradiction happens here than in the Trek series following TOS. Instead of merely rebooting the series entirely and creating an entirely separate canon, the writers have fairly deftly worked this film into the existing Star Trek universe. It’s an alternate (not mirror) universe story done well except that the writers was trying to “re-imagining” Star Trek by destroying the Planet Vulcan. I had expected that Kirk and Spock would restore the time-line at the end, but no they let this stand. Still a great deal to enjoy for Trekkers with throwbacks to the originals but there’s also a lot to satisfy summer movie-goers. It’s a very, very fast-paced film, the action scenes are exhilarating (and you can actually keep track of them), and there’s a great deal of humor
However, the new James T. Kirk looks like a young William Shatner but he too lacks the charm of the original. More could have done with Kirk’s early days on Earth especially in showing how the future might look. I liked the cop on the flying motorcycle but a peek at a future ‘watering hole’ seemed quite derivative (check out the first Star Wars where Harrison Ford struts through the intergalactic bar). Depicting Kirk as a rebellious hothead seems part of the original Star Trek lore, but the humor is missing.
The new Spock doesn’t at all measure up to the old Spock. The early scene where a very young Spock confronts a group of Vulcan ‘bullies’ was cute but after that it was all downhill. The problem is that the Kirk-Spock relationship is too heavy-handed. It’s one thing to show conflict between the two but when they come to blows, it just seemed so un-Spocklike. Contrast that with Spock’s decision to disobey Kirk’s command at the end of the “Wrath of Khan”. Kirk and Spock are noble characters and somehow the conflict between them seems juvenile and trivial. Or maybe it was a matter of the plot where the stakes weren’t high enough. The writers simply did not give the characters an opportunity to display the complexity of the relationship. It was nice seeing Leonard Nimoy reprising the role of the original Spock but I was sad to see just how much the actor has aged. Contrary to all the hype, the new Star Trek lacks the charm, humor and complexity of the some of the earlier incarnations. Go back and check out Wrath of Khan and some of the best of the Star Trek episodes from television.
All in All, i enjoyed this movie, however the original series was a vision for the future…a larger, more interesting future. The new movie is a vision of the past trying to be an interesting future.
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