Star Trek

Franchise origin stories are inherently unsatisfying for fans of said franchise.  People who like, in this case, Star Trek, presumably enjoy the dynamics of the characters and the plot rhythms provided by the never ending mission provided by the Prime Directive.  To be sure, there's plenty of fun to be had in seeing how the original Trek crew came together in crisis, but the beats and character interplay that makes the series enduring are, by design, absent.  

Director J.J. Abrams is clearly taking the long view here.  His aim is to resurrect the moribund Trek brand as a durable, semi-yearly film series and the decision to start with an origin story was made not only to reintroduce the Trek universe to a new generation of film goers, but to demolish the continuity built up over the past forty years.  This will allow future entries in the series to develop unfettered by a confining Trek mythology.  One hopes that, in the future, Abrams isn't also going to jettison the time-tested Trek plot model of discovery and ethical crisis as he and his writing team did with this movie.  Star Trek is basically one long action sequence, with little time given over to the kind of thoughtful, allegorical science fiction that Trek has traditionally been known for.  Swap out the characters names and you'd be hard pressed to identify this film with the Trek canon.  

The brutally streamlined plot finds a young Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) fighting for command of the U.S.S. Enterprise's maiden voyage as they seek to stop a revenge-crazed Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana) from destroying the planets of the Federation with a portable black hole.  With no time for serious character interaction or the raising of ethical dilemmas, Star Trek lives or dies on the strength of its action scenes, which are by and large underwhelming.  The special effects are flawless, but Abrams doesn't have much of an eye for building a narrative with action.  Space battles and phaser shoot-outs are shot in a series of claustrophobic close-ups that deny the audience any sense of proportion or scale, and most of the set-pieces lack a rising action or ringing climax.  The exception is a rousing sequence in which Kirk and Sulu (John Cho) skydive onto a giant drilling platform and sword fight with Romulans.That scene works not only because it has a beginning, middle and end, but because the stakes for the characters are clearly defined.  Otherwise, a number of the action scenes feel like they exist only to pad the running time or provide missions for the inevitable video game, especially when Kirk is outrunning monsters on a ice planet.  

Most of the characters have to rely on their iconic names to provide definition, with so little running time devoted to allowing them to interact.  The exceptions are Karl Urban as ship doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy, who chews the scenery in a delightfully Deforrest Kelly-like manner, and Simon Pegg, whose Scotty is broad and jokey, but also a welcome relief after so much intense, two-fisted action.  Pine's Kirk has some steel in his spine, but is mostly defined by an off putting fratboy assholishness.  Quinto's Spock owns the film emotionally and intellectually. He's the one with the love interest (Zoe Salana's Uhura) and the dead family members to avenge, and Quinto brings a good mixture of gravity and trembling rage to the role, but how many Star Trek vehicles have to revolve around Spock struggling between his devotion to logic and his repressed emotions?  

Star Trek ends where you kind of wish it had begun, with Kirk, Bones, Spock, Chekov, Uhura, Sulu and Scotty all at their stations on the Enterprise, ready to "boldly go where no one's gone before."  Hopefully future installments will use their new found freedom to make the most of the franchise's potential for big-budget science fiction driven more by ideas than action scenes.