Broken Frontier

It may have seemed a daunting task to revitalize Star Trek after five live-action television series, 10 feature films and over 40 years of continuity, but director J.J. Abrams has done just that. His new film is a powerhouse, honoring established Trek lore while opening up brand-new storytelling possibilities for its inevitable sequels.

This is how you reboot a series.

While some might mistakenly assume Star Trek is a prequel, they’d only be half right. Yes, this is an origin story. However, thanks to the reckless intervention of time-traveling Romulan villain Nero (Eric Bana), it exists on an alternate timeline than that of the original films and television shows. Clunky? It should have been.

However, screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman actually make time travel work. This rebooted Star Trek franchise is not shackled to previous continuity, meaning that it won’t be hindered by the inevitability that plagued the Star Wars prequels. Star Trek revolves a great deal around fate and destiny—as explained by the aged Spock Prime (Leonard Nimoy)—but the film never gives the audience the impression that it’s hurtling toward a foregone conclusion. 

The film opens with an explosive space battle between the Kelvin—a Federation starship—and a mysterious Romulan vessel, the Narada. During the frenzied evacuation of the Kelvin we see Acting Captain George Kirk staying behind to fight while his wife gives birth in a fleeing shuttlecraft. That baby’s name? James Tiberius Kirk.

We later catch up with Kirk as a rebellious young man, left parentless following the attack on the Kelvin. Played by Chris Pine, Kirk is a barroom brawler with an eye for the ladies. But he’s got potential for greatness, as pointed out by Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) during a chance encounter. Citing Kirk’s wasted talents, Pike urges the reckless youth to join Starfleet. There, he meets up with Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban), Nyoto Uhura (Zoë Saldana), Pavel Chekov (Anton Yelchin), Hikaru Sulu (John Cho) and the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto). The film wastes little time in getting the crew aboard the iconic Enterprise and into the thick of things, as the ship is called into action in response to a distress signal from the planet Vulcan.

Boldly going where other actors have gone before, this young cast is spot on. Without devolving into a broad William Shatner impersonation, Pine oozes swaggering bravado as Kirk while Quinto brings to Spock a new edginess that was not apparent in Nimoy's original series portrayal. That unstable human undercurrent is necessary, as this film is as much about the conflict between Kirk and Spock as it is about the Enterprise versus Nero’s Narada. Both actors are simply a joy to watch.

Urban’s McCoy is also endlessly entertaining as he seems to channel the late DeForest Kelley every moment he’s onscreen. It’s just about impossible not to cheer or at least crack a smile when he at one point exclaims, “I’m a doctor, not a physicist!”

Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, played by Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), is introduced far later in the film than his crewmates, but he makes the most of his screentime with some welcome comic relief.  Pegg is a scene stealer who’s clearly “giving her all she’s got,” yet another trademark Star Trek utterance that gleefully made its way into the script.

Action has always factored into previous Star Trek adventures to some degree, but the franchise has never approached this latest film’s level of pulse-pounding excitement.  With some excellent visual effects work by Industrial Light & Magic, Star Trek is relentlessly exhilarating from its frantic ship-to-ship space battles to a breakneck skydiving sequence to its awe-inspiring shots of the Enterprise—arguably the real star of the saga.

As phenomenal as this film is, it’s not perfect. Nero is more of a plot device than a credible villain and the film at times grinds to a halt in order to explain itself. Also, one particular sequence  featuring a prepubescent Kirk hot-rodding around Iowa in a stolen car is borderline unnecessary and dilutes the narrative early on. Nevertheless, these flaws are minor and shouldn’t impact one’s enjoyment of this movie.

It’s been quite some time since Star Trek appealed to both hardcore Trekkers and mainstream audiences, but this is a phenomenal space adventure for everyone. This latest Trek deserves a round of applause—or perhaps more appropriately, a Vulcan salute.