3 stars out of 4

Good – strictly as a Star Trek film

4 stars out of 4

Shockingly Good – compared to all films[1]

Bottom Line: The plot’s rubbish, but the characters shine, so who cares?  We’re back, baby!

Probably the most important thing about this movie wasn’t what was happening on the screen.  It was what happened after the screen went dark.  Being the creep that I am, I hung around my local two-screen theater for about twenty minutes after the show, trying to look inconspicious while I eavesdropped on half-a-dozen different conversations.  What I heard amazed me.

First, there were the brothers who wandered out and said, with that sort of cynicism-in-training that only a pre-adolescent can muster, “That bad guy was pretty lame.”

“Yeah,” his younger brother agreed.  “But the creatures on that ice planet were cool!  The spider?”

“Oh, that wasn’t a spider!  It was like a spider crossed with a T-Rex!”[2]

“When it had him by the leg and was pulling him in?”

“Aw, yeah!”

At this point another older boy whom I can only believe to have been yet another brother wandered over and informed the other two that the Delta Vega ice-spider scene “could be taken as a metaphor for when they almost get pulled into the black hole at the end of the movie.”  He must have been a seventh grader.  (I hate seventh graders.[3])

It took me a minute to realize what I had just seen: school-age children—school-age children not wearing glasses!—talking openly about Star Trek.  Specifically, about how much they liked it.

In that moment, I realized that Star Trek 2009 hadn’t just forever altered the fictional world of Trek canon that we’ve all spent far[4] too much time memorizing.  Just as radically, this movie has changed our world.  To be a Star Trek fan tonight, May 8^th, means something entirely different from what it meant twenty-four hours ago.  This is big.

As I wandered the theater, I continued to see things to surprise and astonish the stoniest soul.  Take the entire row of high school girls I saw leaving.  Girls!  In Star Trek of their own free will!  Now, it is a nasty stereotype that Trek appeals only to men.  The large majority of the fandom in the 1970’s and a significant minority of the fandom today have to sit down when they go to the restroom.[5]  But women haven’t been open about enjoying Star Trek since the Carter Administration.  This is big.

As I walked out during the final chords of the closing credits, I saw a woman, seventy-five or eighty years old, explaining to the man who could only be her husband what had just happened.  “…no, it was because Romulus got destroyed in the future, so, when Nero came back in time, no one could have known except Spock that…”  I wanted to hug them.  I have never seen anyone over the age of fifty-five express any opinion about Star Trek except a confused, glazed stare.  I’ve certainly never seen a senior citizen at an actual Trek movie before.  This is big.

Outside, I pretended to wait for a ride for a few minutes in the light rain while I quietly listened to two friends talking.  One was a baseball-cap-wearing young father, an old-style casual fan who had watched the original series and The Next Generation, but who hadn’t watched any Trek since First Contact—all of which had faded to a dim memory.  The other, a shorter, skinnier, beardier man, was pretty clearly a hardcore fan of remarkable depth, by which I mean that he had seen all four seasons of Enterprise.  He was trying to carry on a conversation with his casual friend in the usual way we hardcores speak to casuals: by pretending that their casual opinions are something other than very obvious and very old; by holding our tongues when they (understandably) get their temporal mechanics or warp field theory criss-crossed; and especially by feigning that we know much less about our fandom than we actually do, by pretending to search our memories for names and titles that we already know and insinuating that we have only brief, undeveloped, one-sentence opinions about episodes when we have actually practically written doctoral theses on them.  I’ve had those conversations many times.  No doubt most of you have, as well.  You don’t want to overwhelm anyone—especially your friends—with your Trekkiness.  You don’t want to flaunt it, and you don’t want to make the conversation so one-sided that it stops being a conversation.  Even with friends who accept that you’re a humongous Trek fan, you have to learn how and when to keep a lid on it.

Here’s the difference of May 8^th: as I watched this conversation unfold, the casual dad asked the hardcore fan questions—about canon, about series, about favorite villains—and was genuinely interested in the answers.  The hardcore fan opened up, just a little bit, and talked, freely, on a rainy street corner, with a casual fan, about whether First Contact or “The Best of Both Worlds” was the superior Trek.  I haven’t seen that happen in almost twenty years.

This is big.

No matter who you are—no matter whether you loved this movie or boycotted it, no matter whether you’ve turned your basement into a shrine to J.J. Abrams or the headquarters of the terrorist cell where you plot his humiliation, no matter whether you’ve read every novel since The Entropy Effect[6] or still can’t quite remember the name of the helm officer on Enterprise (it’s Hoshi Sato[7])—this movie changes how you, as a Trekkie, will interact with the world, and how the world will interact with you.  For at least the next few years, we will find ourselves within a delicate cultural window in which we will not be automatically dismissed as socially-challenged nose-picking man-boys who can’t hold a job or a girlfriend.  Though I’m not in the advice business, I will say this: the Trekkie stereotype is not true and never has been.  We are better educated, more diverse, and more likely to be married, as a group, than the national average.[8]  Take advantage of this chance to overthrow the stereotype, and be grateful to this movie for giving you the chance.[9]

This movie has won a lot of hearts for this alone.  Rightly so.  It feels good to be enjoying something that, for the first time in a long time, everyone else seems to be enjoying, too.  We see the 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes and are so overjoyed by the implications for us and for our beloved franchise that we have a hard time even thinking about whether the movie really deserves those scores.  There’s too much sunlight coming in the window for us to clearly see out to the garage.

Window, meet drapes.  Star Trek, meet W. Joseph Thomas.

There are two things which make Star Trek a successful franchise: its characters and its vision.  Star Trek 2009 gets that exactly half right.  More importantly, the half it got right in this movie was the half that it absolutely had to get right in this particular movie at this particular moment in history.

Which is to say: it nailed the characters.  That fact dominates this film.

Chris Pine’s absolute self-certainty (read: brash arrogance) during the Kobayashi Maru test, punctuated by those wonderful one-liners (“Don’t worry about it.”), inserted him indelibly into the great myth of James T. Kirk.  When Pine-Kirk pulled out an apple and chomped into it in exactly the same manner that Shatner-Kirk did when, in The Wrath of Khan, he had finished explaining this exact moment to David Marcus, it only sealed the deal.  My friends, we’ve come home.

I can point to similar moments for the others in the Big Three:  nuSpock became Spock for me before Zachary Quinto even appeared on screen, as soon as Jacob Kogan’s Young Spock said, “I presume you have prepared additional insults for today?” in his utterly adorable young voice.  (Incidentally, I was pleased that the Vulcan quiz bowls included questions on moral philosophy.  Kudos to the producers for not forgetting this important part of Vulcan logic.  Double kudos for using what sounded like Aristotle, an eminently Vulcan thinker.)  This new Spock is without a doubt more internally conflicted than his older counterpart played by Leonard Nimoy, and stands in even sharper contrast to the staid Spock of the the original series, but, given the timeframe for this movie (not to mention the events of said movie), it makes good sense for this Mr. Spock to wear his emotions a little closer to his surface.  Despite some fan crticism, Spock acts no more out-of-character in this movie than he did in “This Side of Paradise.”  Plus, who didn’t love it when he turned down the Vulcan Science Academy—and managed to come off as a better adherent of cthia^[10] than the Academy elders?

And Karl Urban was McCoy the moment he opened his mouth.  No further comment.

Though the Big Three were no doubt the most important parts, writers and actors alike deserve tremendous credit for giving every member of the Big Seven something interesting to do.  No other Star Trek movie has made every member of the main cast important except The Voyage Home—the movie this newest film most resembles.  (Surprised?  More on that later.)  The Trek films that have suffered most heavily at the hands of the critics are those that gave its ensemble little or nothing to do.  The most egregious example of this was Nemesis, which was a fine movie on its own terms, but which gave no emotionally important tasks to anybody except Picard and Data.  In fact, this can be said of most of the Next Generation movies (and I say this as one who enjoyed Nemesis and adored Insurrection). 

Of course, on the other hand, The Wrath of Khan, which has been declared almost universally to be the best of the first ten films, was almost exclusively about Kirk and Spock.  It was important for this movie to break from Khan in that respect.  On May 8^th, we needed more than a chance to see Kirk and Spock back in action.  We needed a chance to reacquaint ourselves with the whole crew and their new actors.  In fact, after seeing what the filmmakers can do just by bringing the decades-old Kirk/Spock/Uhura subtext into the open (and resolving it in a way that no network censor would have allowed in 1968), or giving an endearingly enthusiastic, chipper Chekov some previously unknown transporter skills, I wish they’d broken away from the Khan paradigm in more ways than just this.

That’s because the plot of this movie is also Khan, except Khan’s was good and this was rubbish.  In case you haven’t seen it yet[11], here’s how it runs: in the future, Romulus gets blown up.  Spock tries to help and fails.  So this crazy Romulan miner dude with this ridiculously large mining vessel[12] decides to kill Spock and destroy every planet in the Federation.  For one reason or another, both he and Spock end up in the past[13], where he (the Romulan) blows up Vulcan before Kirk and Spock blow him up.   To death.

That’s really it.  There’s no thrill of the Genesis Device here, folks, no Chekov being used as a catspaw[14], and extremely little clever give-and-take between the heroes and Nero.  There’s no prefix code, no “hours could seem like days,” no three-dimensional thinking, no Mutara Nebula, and very little consistent emotional subtext to hold the movie together à la Spock, A Tale of Two Cities, and the Kobayashi Maru in Khan.  In fact, unlike Khan, a movie which becomes more and more clever as you peel back the layers of it (and which thus improves on multiple viewings), Star Trek 2009’s story becomes more and more ridiculous the more you describe it.

For instance, consider the following sentence: “The supernova threatened the galaxy.”  If you know anything about astronomy, then you know that everything about that statement is wrong.  I consulted my local ninth-grade family member—a young woman who much prefers English to Science—and she giggled at the very idea.  Now the following sentences: “There was no time.  I had to act.  So I fired the red matter into the supernova.  The resulting singularity absorbed the supernova, and the galaxy was saved.”[15]  How in the heck will a black hole fired into the edge of a supernova destroy the entire nova?  In order to do that, it would have to have an overwhelming gravitational pull with a radius at least twice that of the targeted supernova—which no black hole could possibly have, even if this weren’t the über-nova from the ninth circle of Hell. To illustrate the scientific absurdity here, consider a massive tsunami radiating outwards from Hawaii in all directions.  You, standing in the Phillipines, see the wave approaching and throw a two-mile-long boulder at it.  (The idea of a two-mile-long boulder is absurd, but no moreso than “red matter” generating a black hole.)  Congratulations.  You may have just saved a tiny, tiny part of the Phillipines from total destruction.  But you’ve had no effect on the wave that’s about to hit and destroy California.  The only way you could stop the entire tsunami from the Phllipines would be to use an object twice the size of the Pacific Basin, in which case you’re hurling a moon-sized object at the Earth, in which case you have much bigger problems than a tsunami.  There are literally dozens of other serious scientific absurdities that riddle this movie, from the drill to the way black holes work, but for the most part, I don’t care.

What?  W. Joseph Thomas isn’t going to take this opportunity to beat a movie into the ground despite being given the clear opportunity?  No, audience, W. Joseph Thomas is not.  Because, in the final analysis, scientific consistency is not what Star Trek is about, and the last thing I wanted to see in this movie was Ayel and Nero having a little con-fab on the bridge of the Narada chatting about how their laser beam was going to drill through Vulcan’s mantle.  It was a huge laser beam, okay?  It made a hole in the planet.  I can live with that, especially if it means I get spared some of the especially obnoxious “excuse technobabble” that characterized many of the Andre Bormanis years.  Star Trek’s been doing time travel through “black stars” since “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and, heck, it’s a show that relies on warp drive.  We’re not exactly hard sci-fi as it is.

However—and this is a big however—though it has always come up short in a lot of places, Star Trek has always, from its inception, made a special effort to achieve scientific consistency.  Star Trek, much as Scotty might like to argue otherwise, does care about the laws of physics.  It is a show that has always lived slightly higher on the Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness than its competition.[16]  It has always dreamed of big ideas—communicators, transporters, talking computers—but it has tried its hardest to make the human future it depicts possible.  After all, Star Trek is not just space fantasy.  It’s a vision and a hope.  If the future of Star Trek is impossible, then Gene’s vision is degraded beyond recovery.  This movie wasn’t just making mistakes or glossing over minor inconsistencies; it was clear that the writers could not have cared less about ensuring that the science of their movie made the tiniest bit of sense.

But this took a heavier toll on the movie beyond offending against my peculiar idea of a “vision” behind Star Trek.  For one, it was darned distracting to anyone with even an elementary knowledge of astronomy.  It was akin to the Warp 10 de-evolution we saw in Voyager’s “Threshold,” or the “genetic memory” concept postulated in “Extinction” and “Similitude.”  In all three of those cases, certain fans found the science so distractingly nonsensical that it was very hard for them to give the episodes a fair hearing.  Now, granted, “Threshold” was pants, but “Similitude” was, science aside, one of the best twenty episodes ever written, and it deserved not to get hung up by sloppy science.  The same is true here, except the concept of “galaxy-destroying supernova” is more immediately, obviously insane, I think, than anything we have seen in Star Trek in a very, very long time—perhaps ever.

What’s more, running on such a shoddy premise hamstrung the story.  But, now that I think about it, maybe that isn’t just the science’s fault.  Maybe my irritation with the Hobus supernova has more to do with the fact that it made Nero into such a stupid villain.

Yeah, yeah, Eric Bana did great with what little he had, and everyone loved “Hellooooo… Hi, Christopher!  I’m Nero!”  But the character?  Khan had something resembling a case against Kirk.  Khan was a pre-established megalomaniac, of course, but, more than that, he’d been stranded on hell for many years, his wife was dead, and he had very personal reasons to hate James T. Kirk.  Nero just kinda took a hate on Spock (and all the rest of the Vulcans) because Spock’s plan failed.  Indeed, not even because Spock’s plan had failed—but because it didn’t succeed quickly enough and cost Nero something very dear to him.[17]  He lashes out irrationally against those he cannot possibly hold even slightly responsible for what has happened to him, who, indeed, tried with every fiber of their being to help him, and then he goes back to the past and lashes out against a race that won’t even hear of the Hobus supernova for another century and a quarter.  In fact, the only motivation the audience can conceive for Nero’s action is “because we writers needed somebody who wants to blow up Earth.”  Does this remind anyone of another cape-wearing Romulan villain from a twenty-first century Star Trek film?

The important difference between Nero and Shinzon[18] was dimension.  Though just a bare spattering, Shinzon had a bit.  Nero is the flattest Trek villain ever to cross the silver screen, and I am including Kruge in this count.  I cannot comprehend those who are hailing this man as a new Khan.  He doesn’t have the villain cred to star as the sidekick to Ru’afo’s sidekick.[19]  All I can say is that the Trek fan base is given to strong emotions, and those emotions are directly tied to actual or expected box office returns.  Contrary to the pop culture stereotype,[20] ninety percent of Trekkies will give an automatic personal bonus to anything that earns money, and an automatic personal distrust to anything that loses it.  Star Trek 2009 is earning huge piles of money—gobs, to use a personal term—and therefore certain Trekkies can not conceive that any part of the movie is imperfect.  This is the only way to account for Nero’s appeal, limited though it may be.

To the filmmakers, I can only ask: wouldn’t it have been a more interesting movie if there had actually been something to Nero’s charges against Spock?  Wouldn’t it be neat to find out that Spock and the Vulcan Science Academy had deliberately caused an über-nova for some reason?  Perhaps to alter the course of, oh, let’s say, just picking anomaly names out of a hat here, the Nexus?  And even if it wasn’t all a bring-back-Kirk scheme[21] gone horribly, horribly wrong, wouldn’t it just be great for Nero and for Spock Prime if their relationship was a little more complicated than “crazy dude took a hate on me, yo”?

Still, though anyone who enjoyed the Nero character beyond his handful of good lines and Eric Bana’s general attitude of cheeky villain’s casual Friday is simply incorrect, the Trekkies aren’t wrong to enjoy the other original characters in Star Trek 2009.  I went into this knowing that Captain Robau was a badass.  I was blown away by just how much of a badass he was.  Captain Robau was a consummate commander throughout the Kelvin crisis, and Faran Tahir and J.J. Abrams can share the credit for making his absolute certainty and apparent fearlessness in the face of certain death (eat that, Spock!) come to life on screen.  I can think of no higher compliment to pay him except that I would love to see a Primeverse[22] television series based around the adventures of Captain Robau.

In fact, I could go on gushing about the casting and characters for the next several pages.  (In an early version of this review, that’s exactly what I did.)  But there’s only so much that can productively be said here.  The Kelvin scene worked on the strength of not just Robau, but the tearful (and tear-jerking) exchange between George and Winona Kirk as Jim was born.  My girlfriend, who for years has mocked Captain Kirk’s middle name as “completely ridiculous,” described herself as “vindicated” when she learned that George Kirk entirely agreed.  I have heard wide agreement (and I concur) that the opening was the emotionally strongest moment of the movie.

But the brilliant characters go beyond the Starship Kelvin.  I think it’s safe to say that there’s not one bad casting choice in this film.  Sure, there are better and worse choices—I give worst acting to Ben Cross as Sarek and weirdest portrayal to Simon Pegg’s Scotty (did Scotty and Chekov switch brains for this movie or something?  Scotty was unnaturally silly and Chekov uncommonly brilliant)—but these judgments I can only make in the comparative.  In and of themselves, everyone did wonderfully with whatever lines they were handed, from Captain Pike right down to Admiral Nensei Chandra.[23]  Even Nero.

And, what’s more, just about everyone—Nero aside—had nothing but good lines to deliver.  There were no failed jokes, no awkward silences in the theater like there were during Insurrection, Nemesis, and… well, come to think of it, during every other Trek movie going back to The Voyage Home.  Even in the rather unenthusiastic theater where I first attended (c’mon, guys, no applause for Nimoy’s arrival?), moments like Spock’s “Please!  I apologize. The complexity of human pranks escape me,” had them in stitches.

In fact, in some cases, it was the non-fans who were more responsive to the movie than the oldline ear-wearing, uniform-sporting Trekkers.[24]  This was because, while everyone else was enjoying a good movie going on on screen, the Trekkies were staring wide-eyed in confusion as they tried to decide whether or not this movie made proper sacrifice to that strange Trekkie totem called “canon”—and, more importantly, whether or not they cared anymore.

According to the best statistics I have available, roughly 40% of you did not want to see the word “canon” in this review, and you’d like for me to stop talking about it right now before I risk saying something negative.  Another 8% of you are sitting in your chairs shivering—as you have been since you saw the movie—as you finally reach the bit where I vindicate your rage.  As you regular readers know, of course, I like nothing more than generating hate mail for my employer, Mr. Roger Noriega, to deal with, so, of course, I’m going to say a few words about canon.

Canon, for the two of you who haven’t logged onto a Star Trek message board since September 1994[25], is a word Trek borrowed from Roman Catholicism, the only other religion in the world that approaches the rigidity of Trekdom.  Canon refers to the body of continuity within Star Trek—all the television shows and movies, which, taken together, constitute the “official” Star Trek universe.[26]  Fans have invested a great deal of love and learning in this universe over the last forty years, and, as it has become more and more difficult to maintain continuity with the enormous universe of Trek[27], “canonicity” has become more and more of a concern within the fanbase.

That may sound ridiculous to an outsider, but I agree with these fans.  One of the things that has made Star Trek special is the fact that it is, by far, the largest and most successful shared universe ever constructed.  It’s a playground for millions, from the producers to the authors to the readers to the fan film producers (reviews of whom earn me my paycheck) right down to the fanfic writers and roleplayers.  More: the shared universe of Star Trek, while it can feel like an overwhelming, suffocating restriction to a fresh writer, is almost infinitely rich with ideas and possibilities once you get to know her.  Thanks to canon, you can tell stories in Star Trek that you simply can’t tell anywhere else.  Regardless of what the “jack-booted rebooters”[28] keep saying, canon is good in itself.  More: the existence of canon keeps Trek tied to its history.  This functions not just to hold future writers to remember that no human saw a Romulan before 2265 (and lived to tell about it), but it keeps writers ever tied to Gene Roddenberry’s original vision of Star Trek as a place where ideas come out to play.  Continuity doesn’t just mean loyalty to arcane fictional facts.  It also means loyalty to an idea that is all too hard to find in modern media.  Canon plays no small part in keeping Star Trek above the level of the cheap (if fun) entertainment that Star Wars so perfectly embodies.  We should value canon.

At the same time… I think the new movie does value canon.  In fact, I think that, in order to believe otherwise, you’d have to be seeing five lights.[29]  Altered timeline aside, look what this movie gave us: McCoy’s ex-wife.  How long has that been bouncing around in non-canon?  Since the “Joanna” script was rejected in 1967?  This movie finally put that firmly in the “canon” box.  How about Uhura’s first name?  They took a joke that’s been floating around Trek boards for forty years and made it into a major plot point!  How cool is that?

Did you catch those forty-seven references?  I saw two.  How about the Saurian Brandy in the bar fight?  The tribble on Scotty’s desk?  The Federation emblems scattered throughout the movie?  Spock paying back Scotty for the transparent aluminum incident in The Voyage Home by giving him the formula for transwarp beaming?  Oh, and, speaking of Spock, did I mention that Leonard Nimoy is playing Spock in this film?

When I hear fans complaining about this movie’s supposed disrespect for canon, I can only recall the exchange between McCoy and Spock in “The City on the Edge of Forever,” right after Kirk prevents McCoy from saving Edith Keeler—the woman Kirk loves—from her destined death in a car accident:

“I could have saved her! Do you know what you just did?"
"He knows, Doctor...  He knows."

Indeed.  Whatever else we say of the filmmakers… they knew, Doctor.  They knew.  But they did what they had to do.  What they always do: turned death into a fighting chance to live.

No, I don’t like the altered timeline.  I don’t like the idea that all Star Trek from here on out takes place in some other universe that doesn’t “count” as part of the old one we all learned and loved.  The filmmakers clearly decided that forking canon into a whole new universe with a clean slate was the lesser of two evils—and, any time a reviewer writes the phrase “lesser of two evils” in a review, it means that something wasn’t working.  As a big fan of “my” continuity, which I now apparently have to call the “primeverse,” it bothers me and even makes me a little nervous to think that I may never see an official Star Trek work set in that infinitely deeper, infinitely richer Star Trek universe again.  Reboots, as DC comic fans should know all too well, have a bad tendency of succeeding for a few years… until someone gets the reboot itch again.  After that, continuity begins to fall apart entirely, and things become more confusing, not less so.

But, though I do have serious and real reservations about this course, some of my initial negative reaction (“You blew up Vulcan?”) was due to my own inflexibility.  I knew going into this that, just as with Enterprise and Voyager before it, this movie would challenge my imagination and its fairly rigid rules of what you can and can’t do in Star Trek.  It took me a little while after the movie to sit down, put it all in perspective, and realize that the filmmakers had actually given us a great gift.

Ha.  Bet the shivering canonistas didn’t see that word coming.  Yes, a gift.  Look at what this could have been.  In fact, scratch that: look at what this movie would have been under almost any creative team, just based on the successful reboots of the past ten years (Spider-Man, Batman, Battlestar Galactica).  Everything that was our canon would have been thrown out the window like dead gagh, never to be heard from again, and Star Trek as we know it would be either badly wounded or dead.

That’s not what Star Trek 2009 did.  Looked at from a wide angle, with a view to what the filmmakers are no doubt planning next, the theme of Star Trek 2009, the emotional subtext that I earlier complained was failing to hold the film together, is really very simple: Star Trek 2009 bridges the old universe to the new one.  It is astonishing that the filmmakers were able to convince Paramount to spend $150 million to create this incredibly convoluted (and deeply flawed) time travel story for essentially no other reason than to enshrine, forever, at the very heart of the new universe, its deep and essential origin from events in the old.  That’s why Nimoy is here.  That’s why the Enterprise computer is still voiced by Majel Barret Roddenberry, why Nurse Chapel pops up in the background, why Porthos’s obituary is written by none other than Montgomery Scott.[30]  That’s why we have black holes and red matter and all these other ridiculous contortions wrenching Spock, Nero, and time travel into the story: to emphasize, now and forever, how important canon is in Star Trek.

Maybe this is too radical an idea to be true, but I propose it anyway: Star Trek 2009, the supposed death knell of the Trek canon, is in fact the most elegant paean to canon ever composed.  I might not like all of it—the underlying assumption that Star Trek needs to escape its parent material in order to be truly free is, I maintain, deeply flawed—but that changes the generosity and, yes, the cleverness of it not one iota.  Everyone who loves canon should go give screenwriters Orci and Kurtzman a great big hug.

Oh—and, whoever on staff was responsible for product-placing Nokia and Budweiser into the film?  They should be run through with Nero’s Debrune Teral’n.[31]  I don’t care if the decision was made by J.J. Abrams himself: it was utterly jarring and not the least bit funny.  There’s a big difference between creating a realistic, “gritty” Star Trek universe and trying to get your audience to buy stuff.  And, yes, we do know the difference, and, yes, it does outrage Trekkies in particular.  There’s still considerable debate over whether and how currency exists in the future of Star Trek, but one thing all Trek fans are long agreed on is that, regardless of whether or not money itself will or should suvive, we firmly believe that the mankind of Gene Roddenberry’s universe will one day be freed from the slavery of materialist commercialism.  Star Trek is a place where we escape the slaveries that hold the minds, hearts, bodies, and souls of modern humankind in bondage.  The brand-name appearances shoved us straight back into this world in all its ugliness—and made Trek a part of the problem rather than the solution.

I know that makes me sound like an ideological nut whining about little things, but that brings me to the second main point I mentioned long, long ago at the outset of this review: the vision of Star Trek.

While Star Trek 2009 landed the characters spot-on, ten out of ten, gold medal in theatrical gymnastics, characters are not the only entities that have made Star Trek a success these past four decades.  At the same time, Star Trek has always been about giving ideas—big ideas, small ideas, dumb ideas, old ideas, great ideas—a place to come out and play.  That is to say, Star Trek has always provided a haven for the most naïve, high-minded, and idealistic of ideological nuts (that is to say, the most dangerous kind of nut alive) to whine about society or speculate about the nature of human existence. 

People complain sometimes that Star Trek has too many speeches, and they point to Captain Kirk’s infamous “Constitution speech” from “The Omega Glory,” dismiss the idea as “heavy-handed social messaging,” and call it a point proven.  But, for reasons mysterious to me, people seem to forget that the greatest moments of Star Trek—and I do not mean “fan favorite” moments, but those moments objectively and universally recognized as the moments when Star Trek transcended the popular medium and became literature—are speeches.  Whether Kirk’s eulogy of Spock in The Wrath of Khan or Picard’s stirring defense of Data’s human rights in “The Measure of a Man,” whether Q’s final discourse on the nature of Star Trek in “All Good Things…” or Sisko’s dark reflection at the close of “In the Pale Moonlight,” from McCoy’s “three million Earth-type planets” warning to Kirk in “Balance of Terror” to Picard’s “line must be drawn here!” tirade in First Contact, Star Trek has always found its heart, not on the bridge, not mapping stars and studying nebula, and only rarely in the grit and terror of pure combat… but in the simple interactions of one or two or more people, sitting in a room, grappling with ideas mankind has faced since its birth.  Star Trek lives not in its special effects nor in its budget nor even its acting, but in the scenes where “one man with a vision” changes the present, and, in so doing, summons the future—both for the fictional world of Star Trek and for we who experience it.

Star Trek 2009 had no such depth.  It occasionally seemed as if the filmmakers thought they were creating depth, but this could only be the case if the writers were confusing depth with emotion—a mistake that it is sadly on the rise in these times.  Sure, I teared up when Spock lost his mother.  I thrilled when Kirk offered Nero terms of rescue—and then pummeled to him destruction upon refusal.  (It was eminently Kirkian of him, as was Spock’s reaction.)  I applauded when Spock Prime quoted himself from Star Trek II: “I have been, and ever shall be, your friend.”  Felt great.  Like I said at great length earlier in this review, the characters in this film sang for me.  But, aside from the handful of fascinating lines exchanged between Spock and Sarek in the transporter room, I would not confuse any of these moments with presenting any sort of fresh idea to me, or even presenting any old idea to me in a fresh way.

Take the first three Star Trek films.  Each had something important to say.  They said what they had to say well or poorly, but they all had something to them.  The Motion Picture: “The human adventure is just beginning.™”  The Wrath of Khan: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few… or the one.”  The Search for Spock: “The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the few… or the many.”  Virtually every Trek movie, every good Trek episode, does this in one capacity or another.  It has been called, not unfairly, the “Soul of Star Trek.”[32]

Except this new movie.  There’s nothing here.  Nothing holds this film together—except, like I said earlier, a love for the shared universe and some really neat action.  This leads me to a conclusion that will put me in stark disagreement with many other commentators of the moment: this movie is forgettable.

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t very good (it is), nor that it won’t be a wonderful viewing experience for fans and newbies alike several times over (it is).  But, in ten years, if you ask me what the plot details of this movie were, I think I’ll probably prefer that you ask me about Nemesis instead (theme: an exploration of the “mirror” between Picard/Shinzon and Data/B4).  This movie will come up in my head as a confused mish-mash of characters, sequences, and explosions in my poor, overworked, and very aged head.  It will recall itself as rapid-fire spaghetti with jokes.

It was important that this movie get the characters right.  But if these guys want to do Star Trek – and not some derivative, lower common denominator action-franchise that won’t be watched five years after the final film of their stewardship – then the next film had better find some big ideas and embrace the hell out of them.  Remember the words of NBC’s rejection of the first Star Trek pilot: “Too cerebral.”  Star Trek can never be too cerebral.   It can be too boring, slow-paced, talky, and didactic,[33] and the filmmakers ought to work to correct that.  But too much brain-food in a Star Trek movie?  No such thing.  If you are in doubt, Mr. Orci and Mr. Kurtzman, go watch Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country again, since you clearly enjoyed them both so much while you were writing Trek ’09.  It’s much more fun picking through the ethics of Kirk’s “Let them die!” speech in Six than picking at the scabs of overused cliff-hanging set pieces and confusing instant promotions to captain in Eleven.

Still and all, this is a very good movie, and the above can be taken not as mortal criticisms of Eleven but as very strong advice about Twelve.  After all, this is not the first Trek movie to lack the soul of Roddenberry.  The Voyage Home, one of the most popular films in the series, really wasn’t about any idea (except, loosely, “Save the Whales!”, but this idea was explored at such a shallow level that I pay it no mind).  It was about characters.  Specifically, “characters getting together to solve a problem,” which I believe were Nimoy’s exact words about Trek 2009 in an interview a few weeks ago.  Throw in jokes, and, whether your “problem” is a thinly-motivated Romulan blowing up planets or an alien probe ravaging the Earth with, of all things, whalesong, you can get away with skirting the deep ideas every few movies and still come away with a deserving hit.  This is why Star Trek 2009 is the spiritual daughter of neither of the films its creators were so clearly emulating (Khan and Country[34]), but is instead heir to “the funny one.”  The one that eschewed depth to spend its energies on characters we could love and emotions we could feel.  The one that brought an earlier film series to completion, and set a new course for the future.  Oh, and, of course: the one that made a ton of money.

I should say a few words about production, but, as it is the least important part of this movie, I will restrict myself to those few.

Star Trek has never looked so good.  The artists at ILM and elsewhere are brilliant and deserve no end of praise for bringing the incredible demands of this script to life in full and appropriately saturated color.  More than one person I talked to claimed that, in a lesser movie, the black hole science would have driven them nuts, but the black holes in Trek 2009 were just so darned pretty that they couldn’t find it in themselves to care.  The destruction of Vulcan is the moment I wanted to hate more than any other… but it’s just so well done.  Starbases, space battles, ship interiors, space debris, warp speed, sound design, landscapes… you name it, Star Trek has never done it this well.

I can’t say I like the new Enterprise.  With apologies to Ryan Church, I did my very best to get into it, even had a very pretty desktop installed for a few months to get me used to it, but those ridiculous nacelles and silly proportions ruin it for me every time.  I think reboot fever must have been a factor here – anybody with clear eyes would have seen that the Consitution-refit of The Motion Picture was a much prettier ship than this black sheep of the Enterprise family.

I did, however, come to enjoy the interior sets.  Though skeptical of the bridge set, I’ve come to like it now that I’ve seen it in motion.  Would have liked a bit less white, but now I’m just being an old fogie.  It’s filmable and easy on the eyes.  The young will especially like it.  This is basically my impression of all the Enterprise sets… except the engineering sections, which look like they were filmed in a brewery.[35]  Again, J.J., there’s a line between “realistic grit” and breaking our suspension of disbelief through force of juxtaposition.  The engineering decks looked like something out of a fan film that couldn’t afford better, not something you’d build and film by choice on a hundred-fifty million dollar budget.  Even if you insist on valves and pipes and things (and you should – I like grit, too), there should be some sense that we’re in the beating heart of a twenty-third century spacecraft capable of breaking every law of physics we currently know.  Everything else, set-wise, was fine.

Michael Giachinno’s score had to grow on me.  The first time I heard it, all I heard was the same repeating handful of notes and cues that reminded me of his LOST scores (of which I am a considerable fan).  I had expected the introduction of a major new theme, something like what Jerry Goldsmith gave us in The Motion Picture which redefined Trek music for the next thirty years.  Since this movie marks a revolution in Trek similar to that caused by the 1979 movie, it seemed like an appropriate place to revolutionize the music as well.  In my opinion, that didn’t happen, but, on further listenings, I’ve realized that Giachinno passed up the introduction of a completely new and instantly identifiable theme to instead establish a new musical style.  Have you ever heard music in Trek that remotely resembles “Labor of Love” (the sequence where Jim Kirk is born and George Kirk sacrifices himself)?  I sure haven’t.  There’s certainly the seedling of a thematic revolution in that sixteen-note sequence that opens the film and keeps popping up throughout (most coherently in “Enterprising Young Men”).  So, yeah, it’s grown on me.  I plan to purchase the soundtrack shortly.

This is an outstanding film amid the usual entertaining but unfulfilling dreck Hollywood pumps out in an average year (I’m looking both at Transformers[36] and at supposedly intelligent films like Milk[37]).  It puts Star Trek, reports of whose demise were greatly exaggerated, back in the front and center of the popular mind.  It gives fans and newbies alike something wonderful to experience.  It recasts ancient and much-loved characters with a degree of perfection that would have been called impossible by even the most optimistic observers a year ago.  It makes us laugh, it makes us cry, and it makes us remember why the names Kirk, Spock, and Star Trek have resonated down through four decades and three generations of American life.  In short, this movie succeeds, and, where it fails, it usually fails quietly enough that only a critical eye will notice or care.  It doesn’t give us any ideas as deep as “The human adventure is just beginning,” but it is itself a human adventure—and it is clearly just beginning.

May this new era of Star Trek live long and—actually, no.  Scratch that.

As my customary farewell would seem somewhat cliché, I will say only this to our boldly going franchise as it once again presses toward the frontier where no one has gone before:

Good luck.