This one comes with such good spirit that reviewing it is entirely a waste of time … but I’ll do my best to recount my experience as always. I came to this, the first midnight screening available locally, not quite knowing if it’d be the biggest cinematic misstep I could make in 2009 or if, in fact, I might actually be the ideal audience for JJ Abrams’ approach to resurrecting the franchise. I’ve never been a huge Trekkie by any stretch, always citing the over-attentiveness to the details the show and movies seemed to have compared to more frivolous sci-fi outings like Star Wars, for example; I never really watched any of the TV series for any great amount of time, but I have seen all of the movies, even on the big screen, and with the possible exception of Final Frontier, I enjoyed them.

The biggest barrier for me here from what I’d seen in the small clips that had been released to the public seemed to the cast, in particular the two most important characters Spock and Kirk played by Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine. What I’d seen made the new crew look horribly fratboy-ish and to my mind horribly unbelievable in terms of their becoming the Enterprise crew of the original series. To make a wild comparison, like the Tinkerbell movie of last year, it looked like it wouldn’t matter how great the movie looked, no matter how they served it up, and even though like I say I was never even a fan, I would just never buy this crew as that crew.

How unwarranted could my worries have been? Though I still have my misgivings about Quinto in the Spock role (I don’t know, there’s something about his face like Casey Affleck that makes me feel like he’s constantly making private mockery of the material), the character here I found more “fascinating” than ever. The emotional content of this movie absolutely bowled me over and a lot of it centers around Spock of all creatures. Add to that of course (I’m sure you’ve heard) the presence of Leonard Nimoy who lends the movie an all-important sense of authenticity (I won’t touch on the what-where-how of why he’s there except to say sequel-prequel-wise this movie is insanely clever) and I can easily forgive this piece of casting. Chris Pine along with the rest of the main crew are another story entirely. Simon Pegg’s accent notwithstanding, I adjusted to them all almost immediately. Pine almost weirdly channels Shatner at some points, and like a lot of the could-be-awfully-cringeworthy-but-we-have-to-do-it-anyway moments, the balance struck is near perfect.

One of the things I always did love about Star Trek was the music and it was always gonna be interesting to see what happened after Jerry Goldsmith’s death. I was surprised to find nary a hint (at least until the glorious end) of Star Trek music past in Michael Giacchino’s score here and he dives in boldly creating the kind of score that overhypes the imagery that I’m usually averse to, yet he somehow gets away with it so much does the imagery live up to his hype. The visuals here are stunning – I was so afraid I would come away from it saying something along the lines of, “it’s good, but it’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” but I think I can say for sure that there were things here I really hadn’t seen before.

In short, it’s a stunning creation. It stands alone and it fits in with what came before. I don’t know if it fits in enough for some fans, but then I wouldn’t know that, but they do a valiant job of showing they care a little about those fans. Again, I won’t hint at the plot and how it ties in etc, but I want to point out again how incredible this movie is in terms of being a part of everything that came before it. It is not another reboot (god, how I hate that word applied to cinema), it’s much more than that, it’s almost dare I say genius. Just in purely objective terms this must be one of the cleverest and smoothest continuations of a long-running franchise that has ever hit our screens. The more I think about it the more impressed I am. The Nimoy factor is the icing on the cake. At the risk of being corny, may it live long and prosper.

Tags: prequel, sci-fi, sequel, TV

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 6:10 am and is filed under 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.