Yesterday's Enterprise

Important Note: For anyone who actually reads this, please be advised that I am going to talk about the new Star Trek movie. I am not going to discuss key plot twists, or even the story line in general, but if you don’t want to know anything about the movie because you haven’t seen it, or you don’t really care, move on to something else. Thanks.

J.J. Abrams has quite a varied resume as an actor, writer, producer and director. He is the principle creative mind behind Lost, which I must confess I have never seen, Fringe, which I unfortunately have seen, and a host of other well known projects. In fairness, I must say I greatly enjoyed Cloverfield, which was an interesting twist on the Godzilla theme, Joy Ride, which was a purely guilty pleasure in a gory sort of way, and even Forever Young, despite the fact that it was a contrived, syrupy piece of crap. Not much to my credit, I even liked Mission Impossible III, which I boycotted for some time because of my pathological dislike of Scientology.

With Star Trek, Mr. Abrams has truly outdone himself. It is a magnificent two hour and eight minute escape from the mundane reality of our short, nasty, solitary, brutish and poor existences which takes us to a world where even misguided, sociopathic mass murderers have some honor, and sentient beings work together under the most difficult of circumstances to accomplish great things. As benefits a prequel that takes place 250 years in the future, the movie both looks back with appropriately irreverent reverence and flies forward at warp speed into a new telling of an old tale. This is a New Year’s Eve of a movie where we are invited to reflect on what has gone before and encouraged to hope for even better things to come.

The casting meets the challenge of carefully walking the tightrope between honoring the faces and personas many of us have come to adore, and injecting youth and vigor into a mythology that entropy has been assaulting for some years now. Actors both familiar and unfamiliar reprise the roles established by other actors who over the decades have become iconic, and it all hangs together such that you could really foresee Simon Pegg evolving into James Doohan (although perhaps Mr. Pegg might take exception to that). And, as is required of all Trek, the green babe is smoking hot.

The movie is a masterpiece of movement with just the right element of optical confusion and fuzzy focus to imitate a real visual experience (it should be noted, I watched it in Imax).Putting aside biology, it is sort of like Michael Bay and David Lynch had a baby and it was called Star Trek. Everything just looks really cool, but familiar. The pace of the movie is excellent, such that 128 minutes fly by, but adequate attention is given to important plot elements, so even Trek novices are not lost. You never get the sense that the story is dragging or spinning out of control and you are allowed to know everything you need to know to know you like what you know, ya know? There are adequate allusions to persons and events in the established Star Trek universe to allow those of us in the know to feel completely superior to the average ignorant citizen, but not such that our clueless friends ever get the “what the hell was that all about” feeling.

Of course, as with all Trek, there is enough technological psychosis to make a physicist blush. Putting aside all the time travel paradoxes, we are actually asked to believe that creating a massive energy release through a matter and anti-matter annihilation will create enough force to drive a metallic object past the closed, time-like curve of a singularity’s event horizon without degrading the integrity of the object itself. Can you imagine? The device the villain uses to perpetrate his evil is at once low-tech, no-tech and whoa!-tech, and I had to ask, why such a complicated process? But the bad guy is just using the tools at hand and it all makes sense when you think about it.

What the movie does not do is overwhelm its audience with quantum gobbledygook and graduate level theory; it is plain and simple a story of loss and revenge, self discovery and platonic bonding, and the courage of youth making peace with the wisdom of age. There is nothing here that the Ancient Greeks (and Gene Roddenberry, and Rick Berman) had not already done to death, but baby’s got a new pair of shoes and J.J. Abrams has polished them nicely.

Star Trek
128 minutes
Rated PG-13
In theaters now.