Ben Saw: Star Trek

Because I am a lazy jerk, I want to make a few points as opposed to doing a proper review.



I'm going to direct you to Henry's review of Star Trek if you're looking for a proper review. While Henry eschews the plot summary, the thing's an experience far more than a story telling exercise so I really don't think he needed to include one. I do plan on coming back to the story though.....

Anyway, when I work out I usually have a movie going while I'm on the bike (the magic of cheap portable dvd players). This allows me to rip through a whole bunch of movies that I haven't seen and often (let's be honest) I wouldn't otherwise have bothered with. Star Trek is a movie I actually would have 'bothered with' absent the bike, but I watched it there and I've had a bit of a sci-fi kick going since then. As a disclaimer, I never really enjoyed anything I encountered of the old 'Trek'; I was too young for the campy original show to fill me with a sense of wonder or nostalgia and the movies I saw were basically all the cinematic equivalent of Ambien. I didn't have some great hatred for 'Star Trek', but I avoided it in all its forms.

This all gets to the question: is the new 'Star Trek' good? And that's easy: yes. Yes it is. It's fun, light, charming and exciting. It gets capable performances out of its cast (with the guy playing Spock,Zachary Quinto, serving as the highlight for me) and has a really terrific blend of CGI and practical effects. The pratical effects were very welcome, by the way, and I really hope they make a comeback in this kind of movie. My movie-making gripes would be 1. that the cinematography was a little dull and was further hobbled in post-production by some clod with an unhealty obsession with lens flare effects, 2. the movie doesn't feel long but it's not tightly edited enough and 3. there are some pretty exciting action scenes, but none of the space battles were particularly gripping for me (more on this later).

Like I said earlier though, I have to come back to the story because that's where I was most drawn to nitpick........

*Spoilers ahead!* You see, J.J. Abrams needed to make the new 'Star Trek' exciting so he just remade 'Star Wars' (I am certainly not the first person to make this observation) and I was reminded of this CONSTANTLY while I was watching the movie from the very beginning (the big villain attacks a much smaller ship looking for a main character who's ostensible on a diplomatic mission) until the very end (medals are given out in a big ceremony! Chewbacca should have been there to bellow). Like the video I linked to suggests, the basic plots are the same (villain in planet destroying ship hunts down the heroes and does bad stuff), as are many of the key characters (Kirk is a combination of Luke and Han, Spock is effectively a combination of Leia and Chewbacca) but, more distractingly, Abrams borrowed a lot of much smaller moments from 'Star Wars'. The villain brutally kills the commanding officer in the opening scene, the hero fights a big monster on an ice planet and has a key plot reveal in an ice cave (and then they interact with an 'Obi-Wan' character) a la 'Empire Strikes Back', the 'Leia' character's home planet is destroyed while he/she is forced to watch and, to my immense amusement, 'Return of the Jedi' is invoked when the good fleet finds itself heading in to a much more dangerous situation than it anticipated ('It's a Trap!!!'). A lot of shots and movie-making techniques get swiped in the process, from the way that big ships first get visually introduced to entire FRAMES from 'Empire Strikes Back' when the culminating hand-to-hand fight occurs.

I really can't fault Abrams too much for this, he's working from a disadvantage just by dint of history. 'Star Wars' is not sacrosanct and it introduced much of the cinematic vocabulary that this genre in general (and Abrams in particular) draws from. You don't always need to reinvent the wheel and you can get high marks simply giving a fresh spin to a classic approach, especially if your script is sharp and you use your effects well (more or less true for 'Trek' on both counts). Another small disadvantage is the type of action: 'Star Wars' always drew much of its action from World War 2 whereas 'Trek's' historical inspiration for its action was more the adventures of the George-ian to Victorian-era British fleet; while both can be exciting, I'll take WW2-era dogfights any day and that's why the space battles lacked the punch they could have had.

All of the above was a bit distracting for me, but I mostly felt it just needed to be pointed out. Probably the true 'biggest problem' is that while they have Eric Bana's character play the Darth Vader-role, his character doesn't have 1/100th the presence or the menace of Vader. That's a very high bar, granted, but this is still a real drawback because it lowers the tension every time there's a hint of conflict between the opposing forces. It's not that Bana's bad per se, but the character's underwritten and underwhelming and, when you just have Eric Bana yelling in silly make-up, the threat just isn't there. I never appreciate how much a good villain provides the dramatic heart of a story more than when one is absent.

Anyway this comes across as critical, but Star Trek really is a good movie. It should be. After all, it's cribbing from the best..........................

Grade: A-