Although I saw Star Trek about a month ago, I rewatched it last night as part of a double feature with The Hangover (which was fun, but not spectacular) and am using this opportunity to write about it since the movie is fresh in my mind.
If you have been reading my blog, or if you know me personally, you know that I love Star Trek in all of its incarnations. Although I have a preference for The Next Generation because of my youth, I greatly enjoy the original movies (at least the non terrible ones) and have even dabbled in Voyager and Deep Space Nine. I have not seen much of the original series, owing to the fact that I never had cable and now the DVDs are way too expensive, but I am pretty well versed in the characters and Gene Roddenberry's original vision. It's this 'vision' that I will spend most of this review discussing. I don't want to come across as some kind of anal 'uber-nerd' like the comic book store owner in The Simpsons, but I think it's important to discuss what Star Trek' was intended to be, and how that relates to modern sci-fi and more specifically the 2009 version of Star Trek.
First things first, this movie was fun as hell. When I had to describe to Lindsay how I felt after seeing it the first time, I immediately said 'stressful'. Not that it was emotionally draining or tough, but there is just so much that happens you never have a chance to catch your breath. There are few sequences where this becomes overbearing and kind of annoying (the Hoth planet Cloverfield monster chase and the scene where Scotty gets stuck in the cooling system for the engine of the Enterprise) but overall I think the pacing helps the movie. It helps it not necessarily in making it a better film, but in making it more accessible to the public. As much as trekies would like films made specifically for them, the only way large budget sci-fi movies are going to get made is if they appeal to the public en masse and make boatlaods of money. I will gladly accept a less nerdy Star Trek if it means that they keep getting made.
That being said, someties this movie could be serviced by being a littler nerdier. Although some of the previous movies have quite a bit of action, Star Trek at its core was always a story about internal and external discovery, diplomacy, and stargazing. I will have to rely on my experience with The Next Generation here, but most of the TV episodes involve either the Enterprise acting as an ambassador or peacekeeper for The Federation, or crew members experiencing some sort of personal ordeal that leads them to discover something about themselves or humanity as a whole. Very rare are there any spaceship battles or fight scenes, which makes their rare occurance a very exciting thing. I always like to think of Star Trek as Carl Sagan's kind of sci-fi. It's not Star Wars or the new Battlestar Galactica; Star Trek never lived off explosions and physical conflict. Although it could be preachy at times (check out this AV Club inventory list for a couple of examples) I loved the fact that Star Trek was more than just about spaceships and explosions.
This is where the new movie comes in. I'm not someone who cares much about minor or often major continuity issues (even though the plot of this movie gets rid of those problems in an obvious way), but I do care about the 'essence' of the series. This is where Star Trek kind of fails. It's an exciting, fun, and entertaining movie, but in many ways its not really a Star Trek movie. The fact that I was going into this movie ready to hate it, and have actually seen it twice lets you know that I do indeed like it, I just don't think it has the same soul as its predecessors.
The characters are all cast very well. They almost uniformly come off as interesting takes of the familiar characters without resorting to imitations or impersonations of the original cast. I especially liked the fact that Uhura was given something to do besides answer the phone and thought that Zachary Quinto was excellent as Spock. The movie was well shot (even if the cuts were a little quick) and looked great. It's just a little sad that the original feeling of the show had to be lost in order to appeal to the short attention span of our current culture.
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