Meet a rebellious young Kirk and see Spock’s human side in a movie that even a non-Trekkie will enjoy
'Star Trek': Beam us back — prequel delights
You don’t have to be a Trekkie to like the new “Star Trek.” In its first hour, in fact, you might even love the film a little bit. That’s when we find out what James T. Kirk and Spock were like, first as little tykes and then as young adults.
STAR TREK
Three and a half stars (Out of four)
Rated: PG-13
Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Eric Bana, Bruce Greenwood, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, Winona Ryder, John Cho and Anton Yelchin in J.J. Abrams’ prequel to the saga of James T. Kirk, Spock and their pals aboard the space ship Enterprise. Opening tonight in area theaters.
In Kirk’s case, he’s a rebellious Iowa brat who takes stepdad’s “antique” Corvette for a joyride as a kid; and, in Spock’s, a tempestuous scrapper ready to put up his dukes with any snide subteen Vulcan who says nasty Vulcan things about his mixed-marriage parents (Dad’s Vulcan, Mom’s an Earthling).
Kirk grows up to be an impetuous, insubordinate, lecherous post-teen jerk who brawls in bars and constantly leers and comes on to young women. Actor Chris Pine may look nothing like William Shatner (he looks more like a combination of Brad Pitt and James Dean) but, as the young James Tiberius Kirk is delightfully written, he’s almost obnoxious enough to grow up to do Priceline Commercials and Comedy Central Friar’s Club roasts.
Spock becomes the cold, imperious, post-teen logic machine we all know and love — until, that is, his planet Vulcan is destroyed and his emotional human side comes out.
And that’s, frankly, where the jolliest plot wrinkle in all of J.J. Abrams’ extremely entertaining new blockbuster comes. It seems that Spock’s human side had, in youth, an altogether gorgeous weakness none of us ever knew before.
Her name was Uhura. That’s right, Uhura.
I tell you, you could have knocked me over with a phaser.
To put it mildly, I’m far from a Trekkie. I never watched the show regularly the first time around or any other time either. I never watched its “Next Generation” at all and I always avoided all the films unless life or occupational circumstances dictated that I simply couldn’t. (The only one I ever assigned myself to review before now was the immortal “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan” in which, to my shock, Ricardo Montalban’s decolletage vastly exceeded any plunging neckline ever seen at the Oscars and not only in hirsuteness.)
But you really do have to be from another planet not to be familiar with “Star Trek” mythology. If you’re an American between the ages of 13 and 80, you probably know who Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty, Bones, Chekov and Sulu are (the first two at the very least).
Abrams’ new “Star Trek” isn’t on the “Dark Knight” level, to be sure, but it’s never less than good fun and it’s occasionally even great fun. It turns a little plot-thick in the middle. And there’s some time travel razzle dazzle in it that, frankly, I’m not smart enough to understand (Einsteinian matters slow my brain down to a caterpillar crawl; I need a lot of time to digest them.) But they result in plot wrinkles that are so amusing that I didn’t give a fig whether I understood them and I doubt you will either.
One thing they mean, by the way, is that Leonard Nimoy has a nice lovely chunk of screen time at the age of 78. If you’ve been following any of the advance publicity at all, you know that fact has apparently driven William Shatner — who is only four days older than Nimoy — halfway up a wall. But then, when a movie is as entertaining as this one is onscreen, why shouldn’t it be entertaining off-screen, too?
The news is much spottier with the cast playing these roles which have become archetypes in the modern American imagination whether we like it or not.
Heaven knows Zachary Quinto looks like a young Nimoy but, frankly, he doesn’t sound like him at all. He just doesn’t have that loose-dentured basso so familiar to us all. Nor does he always sound, as Nimoy does, as if he’s in desperate need of a glass of orange juice. I’ll leave you to judge whether he looks like someone whose father is played by Ben Cross and mother by Winona Ryder.
Chris Pine, as Kirk, resembles Shatner not at all, but he’s so good for the young, cocky, pain in the rear Kirk is, as written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, that he’ll be launched quite nicely, thank you, by this film’s success.
Best of all, by far, are Simon Pegg as Scotty, with all the old catch phrases but a few new young man wisecracks and Karl Urban, as a hypochondriac, nervous Nellie “Bones,” who’s not above a few nips from his hip flask at takeoff time.
Zoe Saldana as Uhura isn’t quite as voluptuous as Nichelle Nichols of yore, but she’s probably a far better actress.
The special effects are quite smashing and there are a couple of action scenes that are as exciting as summer blockbuster action is supposed to be.
And you’ll find the unintentional hilarity of Anton Yelchin’s godawful Russian accent as Chekhov — the worst I have ever heard, without doubt — so uproarious that you’ll relish every line of dialogue he’s given to say.
Director Abrams has long since turned into one of the most fascinating and capable talents in Hollywood. After the movie of his first produced script, “Regarding Henry,” I would gladly have seen him banished to a desert island and devoured by sharks. I’d have been very wrong.
I haven’t always loved everything he’s done on television, to be sure. But in film, “Mission Impossible III” was the first film in Tom Cruise’s big money series to be as coherent as it was exciting and action-packed. And “Cloverfield,” which he produced, is probably one of the most underrated American films of the past five years, a terrifying horror movie which somehow gets away with combining the hand-held micro-budget, pseudo-documentary camera work of “The Blair Witch Project” with state-of-the-art megabudget special effects. The end result, I think, was a genuinely visionary film.
His Lazarus revival of a decidedly moribund “Star Trek” franchise isn’t up to that level but, despite absurdities and occasional tedium, it’s exactly the kind of big, bursting buffet of thrills, sights and gags that audiences hope summer blockbusters will be.
“Wolverine” may stumble badly at the end but, “Star Trek,” despite the occasional dip and unintended giggle, is summertime splash start to finish.
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