Star Trek (2009)

The new 2009 Star Trek film is an absolutely incredible reboot of the franchise; I daresay it was the best film I have seen in the theatre in years.

I used to watch the original 1960s Star Trek series on Saturday mornings as a kid, and always enjoyed it. Later, I really came to love The Next Generation in the early 90s, and Deep Space Nine in the late 90s, and read many of the paperbacks based on those series. Unfortunately, Voyager and Enterprise were both huge disappointments to me; I always hoped for them to try something new with the franchise, as they had with DS9… would have loved to see the long-rumoured Star Fleet Academy series, for example.

The films have always been really hit-or-miss — The Wrath of Khan and First Contact are my favourites, and the only ones I rewatch regularly. When I heard that J.J. Abrams of Lost fame was going to reboot the Star Trek franchise, I definitely took interest. The early trailers and promotional material looked very promising, and definitely got my hopes up that we could finally see Star Trek done right.

I walked into the new film with high expectations, and still managed to come out of it completely blown away. It returns to the action-packed roots of the original television show, with a relentless pace and some fantastic action set pieces. The casting is pretty much perfect: Chris Pine is a fantastically watchable Kirk, and works very well in the slightly more Indiana Jones-style role (meaning, as a believable hero who doesn’t always win fist fights). Although I was worried about Zachary Quinto (Sylar on Heroes) playing Spock, I found him totally believable in the role, and not at all distracting. Karl Urban (Eomer in The Lord of the Rings) was a lot of fun as Bones, and a great choice. The remaining characters were clearly cast with less of a worry about them being carbon-copies of the original actors, and that’s probably a good thing; definitely look forward to getting more time with them in future films.

The story is pretty tight the whole way through; very well focused on Kirk and Spock’s stories, though mainly from Kirk’s point of view. There are some plot points that strain credulity a bit if you think about them, but in all cases you can see that they are done for the sake of keeping the story moving. To my surprise, I think the only aspect I found less than awesome was the elder Spock’s presence in the film — maybe we’ve just done this with Leonard Nimoy one too many times? — but I do appreciate that it was mainly intended as “fan service” to tie the original franchise and new film together.

It’s definitely worth seeing this film in the theatre; there have been so many films lately that have seemed overhyped to me when I finally saw them… but Star Trek does not disappoint. I cannot wait to own this on DVD, and am already eagerly awaiting more films with this cast.