MadCap's Reel Thoughts - "Star Trek" (2009)

So, for seven years after we said goodbye to the crew of The Next Generation, the Star Trek franchise languished... in the movies, at least. On television, Star Trek: Enterprise was still going... or Enterprise as it was called, then. Rather than being in the same time period with its contemporaries like Deep Space Nine or Voyager, Executive Producer Rick Berman decided in his infinite Jeri Ryan-strangling wisdom to set a new series in the past rather than the present.

Yep! It was prequel time! Because that worked so well for George Lucas.

Enterprise is a discussion for another day. Needless to say, with the cancellation of that show, the Star Trek franchise had nothing new. No new movies, no new series. Nothing. This doesn't seem so strange until you realize that The Next Generation debuted in 1987, meaning that Star Trek had been on television in one form or another for eighteen years! If you go with the movies, even longer than that, given that something involving Star Trek had been in production or released fairly consistently since 1979, and now there was... nothing. Paramount decided to fix that problem and tasked Berman with getting the job done. After a great deal of issues between CBS and Paramount that I don't have the time, patience, or inclination to get into here, they got a hold of Alex Kurtzman, Robert Orci, and JJ Abrams.

This has made a lot of people very angry and has widely regarded as a bad move.

Watching Star Trek 2009 in the time it was released, you wouldn't know that. Sure we can look back on it with the benefit of time and seeing where the franchise has gone since this and seeing the flaws, but in 2009? This was a pretty damn good movie. Is it perfect? No, not at all. Is it a pretty fun action-adventure film? Absolutely, and we'll be getting into why right here and right now.

So, Star Trek (I'll be removing the 2009 suffix from here on out) begins with the USS Kelvin, a Federation ship, investigating a "lightning storm in space". A Romulan ship emerges from the ship and, after kidnapping the leader of the Ten Rings from Iron Man for questioning, George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth) takes on a one-man suicide mission to stop Nero (Eric Bana) while the rest of the crew can escape, including his in-labor wife (Jennifer Morrison) who gives birth to their son: James Tiberius Kirk.

Running parallel to this, a young Spock is bullied by his peers for being half-human. When he grows up (Zachary Quinto), Spock is admitted to the Vulcan Science Academy. When he learns what he's known for his entire life - namely that the Vulcans are racist as hell - he turns it down and instead joins Starfleet. We'll be getting back to the Vulcans in a bit.

Frat Boy. Captain Frat Boy.

Fast forward to several years later and Kirk (Chris Pine) is a brilliant, but incredibly lazy and reckless asshole who chats up women in bars - in particularly Uhura (Zoe Saldana) - and gets into fights in said bars with Starfleet cadets. Picked up by one Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), Kirk is encouraged to enlist in Starfleet Academy. It is here that we get some of the first instances of a phenomenon that I like to call "Kirk wasn't born in Iowa!", which I still apply to this day. Allow me to demonstrate.

Why was Uhura in some random bar in the Midwest? Because Kirk wasn't born in Iowa!

Why did Nero wait for twenty-five years in the middle of nowhere space instead of warning Romulus about the imminent destruction of their planet? Because Kirk wasn't born in Iowa!

Why did Spock become an instructor at the Academy and become the one to create the Kobayashi Maru test? Because Kirk wasn't born in Iowa!

Why are Spock and Uhura dating? Because Kirk wasn't born in Iowa!

Really, there are lot of things in this movie that make absolutely no sense if you give them any thought in terms of how the timeline has been changed. Ignoring also that the way it's presented in this film is not how time travel works in Star Trek and never has been, the point of divergence is the Kelvin being attacked by Nero's ship and thus Kirk went to Iowa and was born there, along with his father having survived to see him grow up and eventually take command of the Enterprise. So everything before that went as it always had, with the only changes coming after that.

Things that change in this timeline... make no sense, thus I have to assume that Kirk being born in Iowa is some kind of fixed point in time that averted some sort of great cataclysm... in particular, Star Trek Into Darkness.

I joke, but we'll get to that later.

Spock's kind of a major asshole as well, but Quinto plays him well.

Getting back to the plot, however, Kirk rigs the Kobayashi Maru test to be solveable as he did in the main timeline, but Spock immediately wants to put him on the Starfleet shit list for it. Only a distress call from Vulcan, and Kirk being snuck onboard the Enterprise by Bones (Karl Urban), prevents this from happening. Kirk's knowledge of his father's death - namely the "lightning storm in space" effect - saves the Enterprise from rushing right into a trap but is unable to save the rest of the fleet, who get annihilated by Nero when they arrive. In the struggle that follows, while they are able to save the Vulcan High Command, Spock's mother Amanda (Winona Ryder) and indeed the entire planet of Vulcan are lost.

Who is Nero, exactly? Well, he takes a strange interest in Spock in particular despite the two not having met "yet". The truth is only revealed to Kirk after Pike is captured (after promoting Kirk to First Officer under Spock) and Spock sends him away to an ice planet where he meets... Spock. Or, rather, Spock Prime (Leonard Nimoy). As I said before, this is a time travel story, and Spock Prime and Nero both come from the future - 2387. Apparently, eight years after everything seemed hunky dory between the Federation and the Romulans, Romulus got blown up in a supernova. Oops! I'm sure this plot point will never be touched upon again.

Spock Prime attempted to stop it with red matter, but failed. His ship and Nero's ship were both pulled into the black hole that formed, drawing both into the past but at different points in the timestream. Nero arrived 25 years earlier, meeting the Kelvin and altering the timeline. Spock Prime arrived only recently and was trapped on this ice world by Nero. Vulcan was destroyed to get revenge on him, specifically. Spock Prime assists Kirk in finding his way to Scotty (Simon Pegg), who helps him return to the Enterprise to challenge Spock for command and take the ship into a final head to head confrontation with Nero to save the Federation!

Given the two sequels that follow this, I'm pretty sure I don't have to tell you who wins. What I will tell you is some of the pros and cons of this movie, so here we go.

First off... I like most of the Enterprise crew, even if I'm not entirely pleased with some of the things they did with them. Zachary Quinto does an amazing Spock, so much so that Leonard Nimoy gave his stamp of approval. As he did to Karl Urban as Bones, giving a performance that DeForrest Kelley would have been proud of. Zoe Saldana does great as Uhura and is actually given more to do than her television counterpart... even if what she's given to do is Spock. The late Anton Yelchin does a very good Chekov and John Cho does pretty alright for the few scenes as Sulu, though him using a katana instead of a rapier is kind of... odd and weirdly a bit racist given that Cho himself is Korean and not of Japanese descent like Sulu's original actor George Takei.

...also, he's just allowed to bring a sword on away missions? What's up with that?

Nero? Ner-no.

However, one part of the crew I just really can't enjoy... is Chris Pine as Kirk, and it is a problem that drags the film down at least for me. I'll be the last one to praise William Shatner's acting, but the character of Kirk in the Original Series and the movies actually had some layers and complexity to him. Where that does come across for pretty much every other member of the crew that the film focuses on, it never really does for me with Pine's Kirk. This wouldn't be a problem if he were A) the one we spend the most time on and B) the actual lead of the entire movie.

As I said above, Zachary Quinto as Spock does well. The problem I have with his character isn't him... but how the Vulcans are portrayed in this film is just weird. True, Spock in the original series suffered persecution due to his half-human heritage ("Journey to Babel", "The Balance of Terror", et al.), but that still doesn't make a great deal of sense given the Vulcan culture is literally based on logic, and bigotry is not logical. I can almost understand the kids doing this, but the adults do it as well, as we see when Spock is admitted to the Vulcan Science Academy. It just smacks of being more than a little ridiculous. Then again, Enterprise proved the Vulcans are just as much assholes as the Humans, so maybe it's more fitting than I thought.

The last issue with the cast comes in the form of Nero... who just isn't great. Eric Bana either wasn't a good fit for this or received some terrible direction from Abrams, but he comes off more as a petulant child than some sort of intimidating, revenge-crazed supervillain. He's also a complete moron, hiding out for 25 years in the hopes of enacting a massive revenge plot on Spock Prime instead of getting to Romulus to try and save his planet. He's dumb. And he's not particularly well acted which, as we've established, doesn't help us see him for what he's supposed to be.

For some more positive points, composer Michael Giacchino does an absolutely amazing score for the film. His style fits right in with Star Trek, evoking that feeling of excitement and adventure that goes with a space adventure like this. Needless to say, it's abundantly clear why this man keeps getting work as a composer for film and television. He really does hit the right notes - pun entirely intended - to bring the point across in every scene.

In space, no one can hear the fantastic score.

Seriously, I'm a big fan of the guy's work. I can't praise it enough.

Another thing that has been hotly contested by the moviegoing public is the design of the ships and the lens flares. Let's tackle the second thing first: the lens flares were bad and they shouldn't have been included, it's a little ridiculous that they're everywhere. As for the redesign of the Enterprise and other ships... they're okay. I'm aware that technology marches on both in and out of universe, and there have been someone explanations for why things look different/more advanced given in Expanded Universe material, but it's kind of iffy for me in the same way technology looking better in the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy is. I get why they look that way... out of universe, anyway. In universe, I have no understanding why things are looking better than they did in pretty much all of the Next Generation films.

Yeah, I'm going there. This film visually is a lot more appealing than pretty much everything in the previous four movies in the franchise. Eat me.

To sum up, because this review is already over-long, Star Trek is not a bad movie. It has some problems and some inconsistencies that take way, way too much time or headcanoning to make sense of - or liberal use of the "Kirk wasn't born in Iowa!" principle - but overall those can be mostly overlooked and the film enjoyed for what it is. This is not a statement that I can say about the next film in the franchise. I'm just going to go ahead and say this for you all to hear... or, rather, read.

I. HATE. Star Trek Into Darkness.

I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.

I touched upon this eight years ago, but I feel that some time and some patience and a little bit more of a tighter focus on my critiquing skills means that a proper review of it is long, long overdue. Next time we touch upon the Star Trek franchise, we'll be going Into Darkness.

Be there!

Star Trek is brought to us by Paramount Pictures, Spyglass Entertainment, and Bad Robot Productions.