By Stuart Harlan Cone

SPOILER NOTE: There are very minor spoilers in the general review, but a clearly marked SPOILER SECTION towards the end.  Read at your own risk.

STAR TREK
Directed by: J.J. Abrams
Written by: Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci
Based on: “Star Trek” created by Gene Roddenberry

The Enterprise, as Gorgeous as Ever!

Let me just start off here not with a confession but with a declaration:  I love STAR TREK.  I discovered The Next Generation when I was a kid.  My local FOX affiliate ran old episodes Monday-Thursday at 5 PM, and on Friday they ran the newest episode.  Oh, syndication, how I love you!

I came in late in TNG’s run.  Early ’93 or so.  Seasons Six and Seven were pretty awesome, it had found itself well before this and was running on all cylinders.  I discovered that another local channel was running it at 7PM weeknights too.  I watched a lot of STAR TREK.  Soon FOX began running The Original Series and Deep Space Nine.  I didn’t come to appreciate DS9 or Voyager until much later, but I eventually did.  I now think DS9 was brilliant and the closest thing to TOS since TOS.  TNG is wonderful, but sometimes preachy and sometimes sterile and predictable.  Trek inherently needs a shot of testosterone that TNG sometimes lacked.  Voyager, I thought, held the promise of TOS but never quite delivered.  But it was always watchable and often enjoyable.

And Avery Brooks is one of the coolest people alive, no matter what.

So… I’ve been in the Trek game for a long time.  I have a pretty good shot at winning a Trek trivia game and I have strong opinions on what Trek is and should be.  I’m a nerd that could easily be angered if you screw around with his Trek too much.

But, I’m also a writer.  I’m not as avid a reader as I used to be, but I still read quite a bit.  I got into film making in college and hung out with a theater crowd.  My ideas about storytelling evolved away from just holding tight to what I love to thinking about the ways it could be different, or maybe even better.  I like a good reinvention, but those are hard to do.  Ron Moore (a TNG and DS9 alum) hit it out of the park with his Battlestar Galactica reboot, and I felt that JJ Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III and Cloverfield were incredibly fun movies that knew their genres well.

When word started infecting the internets that he was putting together a Star Trek reboot, I was intrigued, hopeful but also skeptical.  I, of course, began digging up whatever I could about it.  When Roberto Orci began dropping by the trekmovie.com forums, I became even more hopeful.  He was pretty versed in Trek lore and clearly had a love for it.  I felt that the fact that Abrams knew little of Trek and others involved ranged from knowing little to knowing Trek peripherally was a good thing.

STAR TREK, as a franchise, had been on life support.  TNG and DS9 had been successes, but Voyager had started a decline that Enterprise finished off.  After three series that ran for 7 seasons each (a big deal in television), Enterprise ran only 4, and was panned by many.  I had been excited about Scott Bakula playing the Captain, but found the show to be stiff and wooden – nothing like what a Trek prequel should have been.  The Original Series was like a western, full of danger and adventure.  I found Enterprise to be a cardboard cutout of that idea.  It has a couple of moments, like it’s two Mirror Universe episodes, but on the whole I haven’t liked it much.  I don’t hate it, but I seem to fall into the category of the majority – it just kind of existed.

Then, the feature film Star Trek: Nemesis bombed theatrically.  I liked it, and still do, but it’s not a great movie and it’s not a great STAR TREK movie.  It had a lot of potential but ultimately it felt like a really big episode, the same trap that its predecessor, Insurrection had fallen into.  Generations wasn’t great, but it feels like a movie and First Contact is pretty great, but the final entries of the TNG movies are just okay.

STAR TREK was in trouble.  No matter how rabid a fan base is, no studio is going to continue to sink money into a black hole.  Why should they?  Trek fans had, at that point, five shows, three of which had around 154 hours of programming each.  There were also ten feature films at this point.  TREK had a long life that at times was groundbreaking.  How many other franchises have been around this long?

But whatever powers that be decided to give it one more go.

I’m glad they did.

Mister Abrams knocked it out of the park.  Not only did he, Kurtzman and Orci make an outstanding adventure in itself, but they did it in a way that doesn’t snub everything that came before.  Rest easy, fellow fans, all that you know still matters – and we still get all new adventures to come.

But I don’t want to spoil it.

The cast is wonderful.  I thought Chris Pine would have an uphill battle ahead of him to create a Kirk that was distinctly Kirk but not Bill Shatner.  Mister Shatner played the character for a long time, and Mister Shatner is quite a character himself.  Finding the essence of Kirk beneath Shatner would be difficult for any actor.  But Pine makes it look easy, and I think it’s because he didn’t really try to do that.  In interviews, he’s said that he watched a bit of TOS, but decided to stop so he could do his Kirk.  Now, I feel that part of his success here comes in the strength of the writing.

The second time I watched the movie it was with a more critical eye as a writer and film maker.  And listening to the dialogue I realized that Orci and Kurtzman really did a great job of replicating the rhythms of the original characters.  Kirk said Kirk things, not Shatner things.  It might have been easy to ham that up some, but they didn’t.  They wrote Kirk.  And that paved the way for Pine to run with it.  There’s an impishness to Kirk throughout the Original Series that gets kind of lost in the Classic Movies sometimes.  A little gleam in his mind when he sees a chance to take a good-natured jab at Spock or McCoy.  It’s definitely present here, especially when Kirk calls McCoy “Bones” towards the end.

Kirk and McCoy Meet the Big E

Zachary Quinto not only nails Spock’s rhythms, but actually adds an underlying struggle to his delivery that is brilliant.  When he tells the Science Council to “Live long and prosper,” there’s something of a, “you bastards,” underneath it.  It is never melodramatic, but always played with a delicate tension.  I couldn’t have asked for better.

Karl Urban was, in a word, inspired.  One of the joys I’ve had both times while watching the movie is just listening to the dialogue delivery of these actors.  I’ve always got a hint of a smile when McCoy opens his mouth here.  Not only because the writing is spot on, but because Urban seems to have somehow absorbed the essence of Deforest Kelley.  It’s almost bizarre, but way too fun.  I’m totally won over to the character about ten seconds after meeting him.

Nichelle Nichols always brought us a beautiful, intelligent, at times fiery woman.  Her scene with “Mister Adventure” in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock is one of my favorites.  She brought a tenderness to the boys in TOS when she could.  Zoe Saldana brings an edge, but a brilliance and, at just the right moment, a very wonderful, soft motherliness.  Her portrayal is indeed everything we know of Uhura, but the writers also reminded us that Uhura is a brilliant officer in her field.  Miss Saldana managed it all with attitude and grace.

John Cho and Anton Yelchin as Sulu an Chekhov respectively don’t get as much screen time this round, but when they do it’s a lot of fun.  Sulu’s fencing skills and world class piloting abilities are brought to the fore more than once, and they’ve given Chekhov a new spin on his youthfulness here that is, well, let’s say genius.  The Russian jokes are around, but not overdone, thankfully.  These two demonstrate a real strength of the writing, which is that no character is just given service – everyone contributes to moving the story forward and solving problems.  This is also true of Simon Pegg’s Montgomery Scott, who doesn’t appear for a while but is both hilarious and energetic as soon as he does.  Without Scott, a couple of moments in the film would have turned disastrous.

The villains are a point of contention for me.  Eric Bana’s “Nero” is flirting with Khan territory as far as anger and threat, but I wish he would have had more to do.  Having read the prequel comic books, I knew where he was coming from but I don’t know how well it translates to the film’s stripped down exposition of the back story.  But he’s set up as a big, nasty threat off the bat and that’s probably all a general audience really needs.  We get a little more to help humanize him a bit, so I suspect it works but I wish they had given it just a little screen time to make it work better.  His crew and chief henchman don’t get a whole lot of motivation.  I have no reason to not accept their allegiance to him given the circumstances, but there’s a little crew of generally evil Romulans there.  I think that, thematically, in a movie that is setting Kirk up as a legend in the making it might have been interesting to play that against Nero as a Captain gone over the edge.  Ah, well.

While this review is running long, I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up Bruce Greenwood.  I’m a big fan of his, starting with his turn as President Kennedy in Thirteen Days.  He’s kind of mesmerizing in the part, even if the Kennedy New England accent is inherently kind of goofy.  But everyone in the movie is stuck with that – he manages to rise above it.  There’s a fatherly, commanding presence about Mister Greenwood that I can’t quite get enough of.  His turn as Pike doesn’t disappoint.  He’s not around for long but he turns to story towards what it needs to be and delivers some of my favorite lines in the movie.  The second time we saw it, I leaned over and said to my wife that I bet Pike was a handful when he was younger.  His talk about Starfleet needing a more fearless breed of officer, combined with the little moments of jock and maverick playfulness point to a guy who has probably been in an awesome scrape or two.  When he’s in the Captain’s Chair, there’s a kind of ownership to it that we don’t see from Kirk until the very end of the movie – but it seems to be something great Captains need.  I’d like to see a movie just about Greenwood’s Pike.

Yes, Star Trek’s plot turns on a coincidence or two, but a pretty big part of TREK history does too.  I can pretty easily point out big coincidences in each Classic movie, and probably the TNG movies if I thought about it.  Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock and The Voyage Home each turn on some pretty huge coincidences, not to mention Spock just happening to make a pretty important preemptive decision to tag Kirk with a tracker, for no apparent reason, in The Undiscovered Country.  It’s a part of Trek, but perhaps more acceptable here.  Here’s why I think so:

Spoilers Here!

I read in an interview with Orci and Kurtzman that there was a scene in an earlier draft where Spock Prime theorizes that perhaps there is some kind of destiny at work in the way that the new time line is playing out.  That it is trying to mend itself.  This crew is still coming together on this ship – perhaps they are meant to.  That didn’t make it to the final production, but I really think it should have, and here’s why:

In The Undiscovered Country, Spock tells Valeris that she should have faith that “the universe will unfold as it should.”  Something I think he came to after his death and resurrection.  In the new movie, he tells his younger self something about faith, but it’s not as clear as I think it should have been.

I like the idea that this crew is legendary.  That history turns around them to a degree.  That they must be together aboard the Enterprise.  It is their destiny.  A call back to Spock’s belief that the universe unfolds as it should in reference to the odd way the new time line is mending itself would have been pitch perfect here, and a nice nugget for long time TREK fans.  It also would have turned apparent coincidence into destiny, which would have added a level of depth to everything that happens that would have made the narrative truly great.  As it is, I get it, and I buy that it was implied, but I wish it would have been just a dash more explicit for non-TREK fans.

Spoilers End!

All in all, Star Trek is a fantastic adventure movie with a lot of heart.  Most everyone should enjoy it.  As a Trek movie, it not only returns the franchise to its western-like action/adventure roots but it is also optimistic and fun.  It’s easy, as TNG, DS9 and VOY at times did, to make that optimism into a grim kind of set of convictions that aren’t as spirited or fun.  It’s an easy trap to fall into, and the best of the spinoffs did it – but The Original Series was always truly free spirited and optimistic, even in its darkest moments.  I give DS9 a pass because they were exploring the darkness artistically – TNG and VOY just felt bored and resigned about their convictions at times.

Due to some minor things above, I can’t give Star Trek a perfect TEN, but it comes incredibly close.

FINAL VERDICT:  8.5/10

By Harlan Cone

If you don’t know the name Michael Giacchino, you will.

With Star Trek, Mister Giacchino bravely steps into the shoes of a couple of the greats. You know, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner. Alexander Courage. Those guys.

And the shoes fit pretty comfortably as far as I can tell.

When I first heard that Giacchino was going to be the music man for Trek’s 11^th outing (or 1^st, depending on how you want to look at it), I was incredibly excited. When I fell in love with Speed Racer, it was half because of his excellent, fun work on the score. He took the established themes of the cartoon series and wove them into an energetic, fun score for that film, capturing the heart and the innocence of the world while still creating a real sense of danger when appropriate.

Star Trek is no different. But it is more epic.

There’s a big heart at the center of every piece; a depth of emotional resonance on a wide scale. A heroic theme that is completely new but at once reminiscent of James Horner’s work on The Wrath of Khan opens the CD. It repeats often throughout, and seems to go on an arc from the mournful way it feels in Star Trek to increasingly confident strides. By the time we come to Enterprising Young Men it is outright prideful. Hopeful. And it sweeps through the rest of the score, bringing a sense of adventure wherever it goes. In fact, there’s a hint of a western attitude about many of the adventuresome pieces that I really liked.

I was very intrigued and moved by a theme played seemingly by a lone viola. It created a sense of longing that was very beautiful and, at times, dovetailed into the film’s main theme wonderfully, as in That New Car Smell.

Something my wife and I both noticed on the initial ride back from purchasing it at Best Buy was that it is very optimistic. This is perfect, of course. The Original Series had a wonderful sense of optimism at its core that has been discussed by this film’s director and writers. Like in Speed Racer, Mister Giacchino manages to create real menace for themes centering on the film’s villain, Nero. But it never broods, never sulks, and never becomes dark or pessimistic. There is no dread, but there is danger in tracks like Nero Sighted. Yes, the heroic beats often move between bombastic and longing, but it never feels down about it. It feels honest, and there’s a world of difference between honesty and pessimism.

At the end of Nero Death Experience I was glad to hear the familial tinkles that fans of The Original Series know so well. But they are just a wink, coming when you least expect it, like an old friend. But the real fun comes with To Boldly Go and End Credits, where Giacchino cements this as STAR TREK, once and for all. His arrangement for Alexander Courage’s Original Series theme is both fresh and exactly as I loved it before, only bigger. I was hoping he would do for Mister Courage’s theme what he did for Nobuyoshi Koshibe’s Speed Racer theme; updating, expanding and preserving it. I got exactly what I was hoping for.

I can’t speak for the movie yet, but if this is the future of Star Trek music, I’m on board and I am very, very happy. My only real complaint is that the tracks are pretty short, some less than a minute. The short experience robs it of a whole star for me.

4/5 Stars

I wanted to create a site for people like me.  I grew up on science fiction and fantasy, and became a Christian later in life.  I have a college education in Bible and Communications, and have experienced the shock that is generated by people who think Hollywood is evil – Why would you want to work there?!

Because art is powerful.  It’s exciting!  There’s nothing like a midnight crowd at an awesome movie to me.  I think film is the most powerful medium on earth (though some of my friends and fellow contributors have their own specializations and may disagree with me).  I think all media can communicate things to us in ways that conversation, preaching and teaching never can.

So I’ll make a promise.  A guiding light for this site.

I will never shy away from watching or reviewing any movie.  I may not always agree with it, but I’ll give it a fair shake.  If there’s a particular movie you’d like to see reviewed, email me.  shc at asael-media dot com.

Later today I’ll have a review up of Michael Giacchino’s new score for the upcoming Star Trek, and later this week I’ll have a review up of the movie, too.

In the mean time, I’ll be bringing other contributors in for the site to try and staff out the other sections, though any of us might wander into another territory every now and then.

Harlan