No fussy colons or over-long subtitles for the new Star Trek movie, which is called simply that. It’s an origins story, like Wolverine, but it seems so confident of its purchase on the public imagination that it can simply appropriate the title of the original late-1960s series — it doesn’t even have ”The Movie” appended.
This Star Trek is what is called, in Hollywood parlance, a ”reboot”. After the belated popularity of the original series, and its later spin-offs, including 10 movies and several new TV series, it’s time to go back to the beginning. Trouble is, of course, that — like the Star Wars saga — the parts that are supposedly earlier in time are going to look much later simply because the technology for making movies has moved on. But I presume we can make that imaginative leap, and this Star Trek barely needs any familiarity with the series or other movies to work.
You do need some sense of the legendary pairing of Spock (he hasn’t got a ”Mr” yet, here — do Vulcans have surnames?) and Captain Kirk. Spock is the highly intelligent alien who is second-in-command to Kirk, and this movie tells us how things got to be that way. It gets surprisingly complicated about it, too.
At the start, we’re right in at the birth of Kirk. Then he’s a boy, stealing cars, then he’s a tearaway young rebel, getting into fights in bars. Who knew, from William Shatner’s rather stolid Kirk, that he was such a wild thing when he was young? A vigorous Chris Pine certainly gives the younger Kirk a rough edge — his pretty face is seldom to be seen in this movie without a dash of blood, a bruise or two, or at least a few residual scrapes.
Spock, by contrast, doesn’t get quite so much backstory; a couple of key things are rather skimmed over. Played here by Zachary Quinto as well as, in his aged incarnation, Leonard Nimoy himself, Spock has to deal with the difficulty of being the child of a mixed-race couple — that is, he’s half human and half Vulcan. I didn’t know they could interbreed, but there you go. Apart from the Vulcan trademarks of pointy ears and skew eyebrows (away from which you cannot tear your eyes), he looks pretty human to me. He also has emotional problems, or problems with the expression of emotion.
Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto in Star Trek So much for character. Basically the film is about Kirk and Spock growing up, getting to know each other, and earning their spurs, as it were. Oh, and saving the galaxy or something. But there’s also much to do for the beloved subsidiary characters — Bones the doctor, Scotty the engineer, Sulu, Chekhov and Uhura, who is the communications officer and, not coincidentally, a black babe. They each get key moments and funny lines. Casting Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame as Scotty is inspired. He’s the one to whom the words ”Beam me up” are addressed, and there couldn’t be a better addressee. (Incidentally, I hope I’ve misconstrued the apparent hints that, in future sequels, a tortuous love-triangle thing àla Spider-Man III will develop between Spock, Kirk and Uhura.)
All this is wrapped up in a helter-skelter plot that has to do with a vengeful Romulan space captain (Romulans are kind of humanish Mad Max types with Maori-style tattoos), the destruction of an entire planet, time-travel, black holes and whatnot.
It’s filmed with what looks like Steadicam all the way through. Director JJ Abrams obviously can’t possibly cut to anything if he could zip-pan all the way across a room. He used this technique a lot in Mission: Impossible III, which did have an unnecessary colon and was about Tom Cruise doing a lot of running. It works pretty well for this kind of movie, if you don’t easily get headaches.
Mostly, there is much great CGI to gawk at. There are starry vistas and floating planets and, yes indeed, a black hole. The spaceships look superb, inside and out: that Sixtiesish retro feel has been retained for the Starship Enterprise, but the Romulans get a delightfully gothic-insect sort of ship and milieu — so much funkier than the rather anodyne Enterprise, despite its new range of blinking lights and flashy screens. The future has always looked strangely like the past; now the past is beginning to look like the future.