Star Trek

All of our favourite characters return with a little help from director JJ Abrams. One for the real fans among us 1 Reviews

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There’s an old adage pertaining to films in the Star Trek franchise: the odd numbered films (The Motion Picture, The Search For Spock and the abysmal, William Shatner-directed Final Frontier) always pale in comparison with the even-numbered entries (The Wrath Of Khan, good-natured whale-centric farce The Voyage Home). So when the 10th film in the series, 2002’s Nemesis, finally broke the trend by being both even-numbered and unwatchable, this seemed to spell a fitting end for a series which has spanned five decades, and two entirely different starship crews.

All of which means that JJ Abrams’s much-anticipated reboot – going back to the series’ ’60s roots by depicting the formative experiences of legendary heroes Kirk and Spock – faces a double dilemma. If we take it as simply the latest film in an ongoing franchise, it becomes Star Trek 11. If we see it – as Abrams would no doubt want us to – as the first part in an entirely new series, it’s equally odd-numbered. Online fans were quick to put the boot in – when do they not? – charging that the cast was inexperienced and the director more suited to TV. The ‘prequel’ idea, they asserted, had wrecked the previously unimpeachable Star Wars saga – why should Star Trek fare any differently?

So it’s a genuine pleasure to report that Abrams’s Star Trek is a winner on almost all fronts. The cast – from Chris Pine’s whisky-soaked, pugilistic lothario Kirk, through Bruce Greenwood’s commanding Pike, to Simon Pegg’s overenthusiastic Scotty – are almost flawless. Perhaps the hardest task goes to Zachary Quinto, not just essaying the series’ most iconic character, Spock, but face-to-face with his predecessor Leonard Nimoy, thanks to the film’s time-mangling plotline. Luckily, Quinto delivers a note-perfect performance, managing, as Nimoy did before him, to make this taciturn, officious, archly superior lifeform enormously likeable.

The film has its flaws. The baddies are unmemorable, despite the presence of Eric Bana as a tattooed, spit-flecked Romulan psychopath. The climax is similarly limp, opting for the traditional one-on-one space battle rather than something more dynamic and explosive. But these are minor qualms. Abrams directs with consummate flair, from epic intergalactic vistas to the beautifully designed, pop-art interiors. Perhaps most remarkably, the film truly feels like Star Trek, with a boyish zeal bordering on camp and wry humour bordering on self parody, all backed up with a real sense of adventure and a boundless affection for its progenitors. But perhaps the best summary of the film comes from James T Kirk himself, dying on the side of a rock many decades later: ‘It was… fun’.

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