Star Trek is one of those weird movies that isn't quite a prequel, isn't quite a sequel, and isn't quite a reboot either. In fact, it's all of those things and none of them at the same time. Even when the movie was first coming out in theatres, the writers of the movie, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, were very vague as to what the movie was. It wasn't Batman Begins or Casino Royale and it also wasn't Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace either. It simply was it's own movie.
This movie was a huge gamble for Paramount Pictures because Star Trek wasn't as profitable for them as it had been in the early to mid-'90s when Star Trek: The Next Generation was on and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was starting, and the original characters were sacred. So to reboot them while still maintaining a connection to the source material by having Leonard Nimoy reprise his role as Spock, was risky. Somehow the risk paid off. While Trekkies were split on the movie, non-Star Trek fans gave the Star Trek franchise a boost at the box office and Star Trek made $385.7 million, which is the highest amount of money that a Star Trek movie had made since Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home had come out in 1986.
Despite having been a Trekkie my whole life, this was the first Star Trek movie I'd ever seen in theatres. I'd seen the previous ten movies on VHS and DVD throughout my childhood and between my dad and I we owned all ten movies on VHS, but I never got see any of them on the big screen. I have to be honest that I was mixed on this movie, both before and after I saw it. On the one hand it was a really good movie, but on the other, it wasn't Star Trek. It was Star Trek trying to be Star Wars and that just doesn't work very well. Star Trek has always had a good mix of action thrown in, because it's primarily been a TV show franchise, and it'd make for pretty boring Television if there wasn't some sort of action included, but this movie was devoid of the introspection, intelligence and hopefulness that makes Star Trek what it is. And that's not the fault of the movie. It's the fault of the writers and director, J.J. Abrams because they didn't sit down to watch any of the episodes of the TV series before they wrote the movie. Instead, they read books like the Star Trek Encyclopedia and the Star Trek Chronology as well as Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki to get their information. Which is not how a movie should be made if it's based on a TV show or another movie.
This is a well made movie, but it's not a good Star Trek movie. In fact it feels more like a fan service film than anything else. Because Orci, Kurtzman and Abrams read the Star Trek Encyclopedia it felt like everything that non-Star Trek fans think of when they think of Star Trek, particularly Star Trek: The Original Series, is in this movie. Even things that aren't actually true. For example, I think at one point Kirk says, "Beam us up Scotty!" even though he never actually said that on the show. It was usually, "Kirk to Enterprise! Beam the landing party back to the ship" or something along those lines. Which is kind of frustrating because this movie had potential to really go places that TOS never could in exploring the crew and their relationships with each other. Instead they squandered it with a prequel plot and then lost that prequel plot with so many callbacks and fan service moments.
Everyone complains about Abrams's tendency to use lens flairs in his movies. And I have to agree with them. There are certain scenes in this movie where he uses lens flairs and they were absolutely unnecessary. In fact there is exactly one scene where a lens flair was necessary and that was in the very opening of the movie when the Kelvin is near that sun before it encounters Nero's ship. And maybe one more as the sun is coming up as Kirk arrives at the shipyard to be shuttled to Starfleet Academy and he sees the Enterprise under construction there. Not almost every single shot. Especially ones where they're in an interior of a ship.
The best part of this movie for me is the cast. This was my first time encountering the majority of them, including Chris Hemsworth, who was only two years away from becoming famous for playing Thor, Son of Odin in Thor (2011). There were only two or three cast members, aside from Nimoy, that I was actually familiar with. Winona Ryder, as I saw her as Lydia in Beetlejuice (1988) and as Adam Sandler's girlfriend in Mr. Deeds (2002), Bruce Greenwood, as I'd seen him as John F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days (2000), and Eric Bana, as I'd seen him as Bruce Banner/the Hulk in Ang Lee's 2003 movie Hulk. It was my first time seeing everyone else, including Jennifer Morrison because Once Upon a Time wouldn't start until 2011, two years after this movie came out. All of them did such a great job at portraying the iconic Star Trek characters. The problem with the characters, at least with some of them, is in the writing, not in the acting.
For example, Chris Pine played an awesome Captain Kirk. However, he isn't quite Captain Kirk. In fact he's the Kirk that non-Trekkies think Shatner played on the TV show and the first seven movies. Shatner's Kirk was always a more complicated character than this movie portrays him as. There are very few episodes where Kirk hits on women, let alone sleeps with them. The only time he broke the rules was when a member of his crew or the ship itself needed saving. And even then Kirk weighed the pros and cons of each decision he made before he made it. And often times Kirk doubted himself. In the episode "Balance of Terror" there's a scene in the Captain's Quarters, where Kirk and McCoy talk and Kirk says that the Bridge crew look to him for guidance and then asks McCoy, "What if I'm wrong?". This Kirk, even in the next two movies, doesn't have moments like that. I get he's supposed to be young in this incarnation, but even the younger Captain Kirk in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" had to decide whether or not to strand Gary Mitchell to prevent him from destroying the Enterprise as he became a God.
The characters that I like the most in this movie are Scotty and Spock. Simon Pegg is such a great actor and I have loved everything that he's been in that I've seen. His portrayal of Scotty is so close to the way James Doohan played the character in the TV show and earlier movies, and yet is so different too. He is much more willing to interact with people in this movie than he was on the show. Like in "The Trouble with Tribbles" Kirk had to force Scotty to go to the Starbase for shore leave and when Kirk punished Scotty for getting into the fight with the Klingons at the bar, confining him to his quarters, it actually pleased Scotty so he could get back to his technical manuals, which Kirk had torn him away from earlier in the episode. Here though, Scotty is the kind of guy who is a bit more balanced between his job as an engineer and having a social life. Which I appreciated greatly.
Spock is the most fascinating (pun intended) character in this movie. While we kind of explored his struggle between his Vulcan and Human halves on the TV show and the first four movies, we never dove too deeply into it. Here though it's basically the entire plot of the movie. We'd always been told how difficult Spock's childhood was on the show, but to see it firsthand, even though it was in an alternate reality, is pretty cool, and it really does help inform who Spock is as a character and how hard he tries to control his emotions and follow the Vulcan way, despite being half-Human. The way Zachary Quinto played the character kind of reminded me of how Nimoy played the character in the pilots and the first few episodes of the TV show. His emotions came up to the surface a bit more in those early episodes, and that's how Quinto played him here. Which is a stark contrast to the more cool and collected version that Leonard Nimoy portrayed in this movie as well.
Final Thoughts and Rating: Overall Star Trek is a very good movie. It has a difficult time deciding whether it's a Star Trek movie or not, but in a way that's the charm of the film. There's a lot here for Trekkies to enjoy without totally wrecking previously established canon, which is why they went with the parallel universe thing rather than a simple prequel or complete reboot. But there's also a lot here for non-Star Trek fans to latch onto here. Especially those people who prefer more action in their Science Fiction. I have my problems with this movie, as I laid out in this review, but those are problems related to it being a Star Trek movie, not problems with the movie as a movie. I'm giving Star Trek 7/10 stars as it's a good movie but it's not a very good Star Trek movie.
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