Movie Review: Star Trek

Before the new franchise re-boot of Star Trek actually began, I sat through several previews of what looked like egregiously awful movies that would be coming out throughout the rest of the summer. These previews sunk my movie-going spirits and confirmed my worst suspicions that mainstream Hollywood simply does not know to how make good movies anymore. Fortunately, once the actual movie began, I decided that at least three people in mainstream Hollywood know how to create 2 hours of good old-fashioned, summer popcorn movie fun: the director/producer and the two screenwriters of Star Trek.
The biggest compliments I can give this movie are that it had everything I wanted out of a summer movie and even left me wanting more. The idea of resuscitating and re-enervating a franchise has achieved great popularity in the last few years: Casino Royale, Batman Begins, Superman Returns, the new Indiana Jones. Franchises such as these depend much more on character than they do plot. In fact, most plots in James Bond movies and superhero movies are essentially the same but with the names changed. Audiences do not keeping paying ever-rising movie prices to see ridiculous and derivative plots; instead, they keep coming back because of the characters. Audiences like to see how these characters grow and evolve, or in the case of James Bond, stay exactly the same.
Star Trek achieves a nearly impossible task: staying true to the characters whom millions of fans have come to love over the decades, while enticing new audiences with those same characters. The movie did have a retro look, helped mostly by the delightfully 60s-style costumes and production design. This is your mother’s Star Trek, but new details here and there, plus fantastic visuals, also make it the younger generation’s Star Trek. We get the same lines that even non-Trekkies know—“Live long and prosper,” “Beam me up Scotty,”—but we also get a new and interesting angle on Spock’s internal struggle, a la Batman or Spiderman, and a plot centering on the actual use of the heavily loaded word “genocide.”
I said that this movie had everything I wanted in a summer movie, and it did: laughs, explosions, hot guys, beautiful women, great one-liners, profound father-son moments, high-speed chases, emotional outbursts, and world-saving. Star Trek keeps a perfectly balanced tone between light-hearted humor, action-adventure adrenaline rushes, and final frontier-style profundity. In this mixture of tones, it most closely resembles the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. Unlike the deadly dreary new Batman movies, this new voyage of the Enterprise managed to produce in me a decidedly non-Vulcan range of emotions—both out-loud laughter and tears. Before this era of oh-so-serious superheroes, our biggest action star was Harrison Ford, who, whether out in space or in the Well of Souls, seemed to deliver all of his heroic lines with a humorous, sexy, swagger. As played by Chris Pine, Captain Kirk most resembles Captain Solo, a bona-fide space cowboy.
This movie made me wonder why all the humor has gone out of action/adventure movies. I don’t want slapstick and I don’t necessarily need belly laughs, but a little levity actually can increase the suspense of an action sequence or enhance the poignancy of a conversational symbolic exchange. Christopher Nolan, the director of the new Batman movies, could learn a thing or two from J.J. Abrams, the director of Star Trek.
Before seeing this movie, I had never seen a single Star Trek episode or movie, and yet this movie made me interested in the whole Star Trek world. I left wanting to know more about Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest of the gang. And isn’t this precisely the purpose of a franchise opener—to make you want a second movie? I’m not saying that I have become a Trekkie over night—nothing that drastic has happened. I’m just saying that I can now see why some people do become such dedicated fans of Star Trek. I have a mild curiosity, which I see as a sure sign of movie success.