Star Trek Sundays: "Star Trek" 2009 is fast, aggressive, and hollow
J.J. Abrams' bombastic blockbuster has aged to mixed results
It’s Sunday, and we’re going through all 13 theatrical STAR TREK films, a series that includes a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with the first in the modern reboot trilogy, simply titled STAR TREK. Enjoy…
Star Trek
2009, Dir. J.J. Abrams
Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on notes from 2022, and incorporating excerpts published May 8th, 2009
When J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot came out in summer 2009, I went mad for it, seeing it five times in theaters, and several more on the excellent, fully-featured Blu-ray package released later that year (one of the first truly great releases I owned on that format). I have a lot of memories tied up in the film – for instance, this was one of the very first films I ever saw projected digitally, back when my local multiplex only had one DCP-equipped screen and it was something of a novelty – and it was the first moment in my life when Star Trek was a vital, omnipresent, and cool part of the pop-culture conversation. Here is some of what I wrote back then:
J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek is an absolutely phenomenal film on all levels, one that is both a Trekkie’s dream come true and a revelation for those unfamiliar with the franchise. [Writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman] came up with a truly brilliant story and a top-notch script, and Abrams has brought that script to life with more energy and vibrancy than Trek has ever had.
I’m not going to discuss the plot—this is one you have to see for yourself, and I would be doing my readers a disservice by describing any of it here. Suffice to say, while many have been calling this movie a ‘reboot,’ using that term is missing the point. Star Trek is actually a sequel [while also serving as] a new beginning: the most brilliant thing Orci and Kurtzman have done in their script is to introduce a plot device that allows them to create their own, new continuity, thereby respecting and keeping in-tact everything that has come before it, while simultaneously allowing them to do whatever they want with the story and characters. I know it doesn’t make much sense, but trust me: it’s simply brilliant in the context of the film.
… Abrams has assembled a perfect team of actors here, and this was a nearly impossible task. The actors chosen have to convincingly portray characters played by the same legendary group of stars for decades, and at the same time, they can’t make you think about the original actors. Because if you do, you aren’t drawn into the movie. This cast fills these requirements and then some, and there is only one word for it: perfection.
There are parts of that review I would still enthusiastically sign off on today, like the general excellence of the cast, and some I would not. Watching the film now, the storytelling is a lot messier than I remembered, though I will agree with my younger self that the film’s time travel gambit is a smart way to thread the needle between respecting Star Trek continuity and having license to freely invent; even just to give Chris Pine more room to make Kirk his own, a character inspired by William Shatner but clearly distinct in so many ways, makes the whole ‘Kelvin Timeline’ idea worth it.
Abrams and company certainly go too far with that freedom in places, though, and the destruction of Vulcan really rubs me the wrong way now. I get what they were going for – this is a way to fundamentally alter Spock’s timeline and character alongside Kirk’s – but it is such an exponentially greater trauma to visit upon Spock (and the universe at large) than anything Kirk suffers, while being given equal or less weight in the plot as the deviation in Kirk’s timeline (which happens when he is, quite literally, a newborn). If you have even a mild appreciation of Star Trek lore, you would know blowing up Vulcan is one of the most destabilizing things that could happen to the Federation – in a real Star Trek story, the entire narrative would have to subsequently revolve around the fallout of the Federation’s bedrock species nearly going extinct – and the film just has no way to account for the enormity of the trauma that is the on-screen deaths of 6 billion people, a problem Abrams would run into again with the destructive finale of Star Trek Into Darkness, and then take to a whole new level with the destruction of an entire star system in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
My central reaction to this Star Trek now is that, for better and for worse, this sucker moves, and it does so extremely aggressively. It is very fast, very frenetic, and more or less always dialed up to 11 in volume and pace, which makes it quite exciting at times (and helps paper over the ever-widening plot contrivances the film’s action is built on), but also pretty exhausting at others. It never slows down, even when it clearly should – like when 6 billion Vulcans get vaporized right before our eyes – and while I will take this over the first three Next Generation movies that never put their foot to the gas at all, it is hard for there to be real standout moments when the film is just barreling full-tilt at all times. It leads to some truly zany plot contortions, like Spock, in a fit of post-Vulcan-genocide pique, marooning Kirk in the middle of an uninhabitable ice planet (a summary death sentence, basically), where Kirk is chased by a big CGI beast and randomly runs into old-man Spock (the Leonard Nimoy version), who with Kirk then runs into a young Scottie so they can “trans warp beam” (not a thing) back to the Enterprise. It is an entertaining set of scenes, to be sure, but also one that breaks the brain if you think about it at all.
The only scene that I think wholly lands on its own terms, that is given the space to develop and breathe such that it feels like a fully articulated piece of filmmaking, is the Prologue aboard the Kelvin, a scene for which I refuse to feign any ironic detachment. It is still one of the best things to come out of any Hollywood blockbuster made in my lifetime, a beautifully constructed short film about a man facing down an impossible challenge and managing to save everyone but himself. A pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth walks out of those first ten minutes an honest-to-God movie star, destined for greatness; the film’s entire, extremely ambitious visual style is ferociously established immediately; and Michael Giacchino seamlessly graduates from television’s best composer to Hollywood’s most in-demand musician. It works, more or less flawlessly, and remains the best thing J.J. Abrams has ever directed.
What also works, of course, is the cast, who are terrific from start to finish, commanding our attention even when the script is straining. I spent about two pages singing their praises back in 2009, and here’s an excerpt of that on the main trio:
Chris Pine stars as James T. Kirk, and while a few days ago I might have said that no actor could make me forget about Shatner [in this role], Pine has proven me wrong. From the moment he appears on screen, Pine is Kirk, no doubt about it. His swagger; his arrogance; his empathy; his love for a good adventure. It’s all there in his first scene, and Pine plays it beautifully. Throughout, Pine does a number of things with the character Shatner never did, and yet they all feel organic to who Kirk is. As leading men go, Pine is one of the most effective in recent film history, a hero you can root for, laugh at, and ultimately connect with. Apart from a few mannerisms, Pine doesn’t imitate Shatner, and that’s a good thing; he makes the character his own, and I hope he continues to play Kirk for years to come.
I do not envy Zachary Quinto, who plays Spock; his role in the film was arguably the toughest, for a number of reasons. First, Leonard Nimoy was the best actor from the original cast, and the one that has proven the most endearing to both Trekkies and casual fans. Second, Leonard Nimoy is in this friggin’ movie! Not only does Quinto have to make the role his own, he has to do it while sharing screen time with the man who created the role. Quinto pulls it off, to put it mildly. I wasn’t so sure at the beginning, but about a third of the way through, he does the eyebrow raise, and I was sold … Quinto and Nimoy have one scene together, at the end of the film, and this was where I realized how great a job Quinto had done. I truly believed that he would grow up to be Leonard Nimoy, and I can’t think of higher praise.
To fill out Star Trek’s holy trinity, there’s Karl Urban as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy. There are plenty of funny scenes in this movie, but the biggest laugh-out-loud moment came early on when McCoy first appears, but you can only hear his voice; despite that, you know right off the bat who it is. Throughout the movie, the writing for the character is spot on, and Urban nails every line. He truly feels like a young DeForest Kelly; he sounds the same, he looks similar, and he even moves his mouth in the same way. It’s just terrific.
I would happily second everything I wrote then today, and as much as I love Pine and Urban, I was actually struck most this time by Quinto, who is great not just in spite of the challenges I wrote about in 2009, but also the fact that he’s fighting against some frequently terrible writing. I have problems with how all of modern Star Trek writes the Vulcan characters, but it is particularly rough here, with the characters talking like robots, akin to Data in The Next Generation – answering “Affirmative” instead of “Yes,” or Spock saying “May I ask you a personal query?” The writing for the child Vulcans in Spock’s introductions sounds closer to Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory than anything from the original Star Trek, and Spock telling Kirk near the climax that “the statistical likelihood that our plan will work is less than 4.3%" shoots straight past Data to sound like a C-3P0 line from Star Wars. Spock is not and never was a computer, and the writing misses all the warmth and sly humor Leonard Nimoy built into the role from the beginning.
And yet, even with the script often giving him real garbage to work with, Quinto still makes it work, in a way Ethan Peck’s Spock from Discovery and Strange New Worlds – plagued by similar writing issues – never came together for me. Quinto isn’t quite doing a Nimoy impression, but he gets a lot in the physicality – like the raised eyebrow I noticed back in 2009 – that evokes the character beautifully, and he really gets the sly, somewhat playful wit that was key to Nimoy’s characterization. It’s impressive work, and when we do see Leonard Nimoy himself, he is simply wonderful. The rest of the film could be a flaming dumpster fire, and the chance to see Nimoy do this one last time – and have as fulsome a command of the character, of Spock’s compassion and good humor, as ever before – would still make this better than all four Next Generation films combined.
The list of great performances extends far beyond the main three, of course. Even those who are underserved by the script, like Zoe Saldaña and John Cho, melt into their roles pretty effortlessly, while Simon Pegg and Anton Yelchin (gone much, much, much too soon) dominate every scene they’re in. I also love Bruce Greenwood’s Captain Pike; there is something about that character that rewards continual reinvention, as Anson Mount has proven on Strange New Worlds, and I’ve always wished this movie ended with Pike as Captain and Kirk as his Number One, with the sequel giving us an adventure where Kirk learns under him before the baton is passed. The only cast member who really has a rough go of it is poor Eric Bana, who joins the ranks of great actors like Malcolm McDowell and F. Murray Abraham as Star Trek movie villains utterly abandoned under bad make-up and overly-affected direction to create a totally forgettable, weightless villain; at least he’s in good company.
Actually, strike that – there are other actors who have a rough go of it here, and they’re the women of the film, who Abrams, in what we can say with 2023 hindsight is a very pronounced trend, uniformly abandons and/or leers at. Why you would cast someone as cool as Winona Ryder as Spock’s mom only to kill her before she’s said more than five words is beyond me, and the film’s only ideas for Uhura are to have her kiss Spock and be generically annoyed at Kirk; Saldaña is good enough to make an impression anyway, but it’s in spite of Abrams’ and the screenplay’s efforts, not because they do anything to lift her up. And between Kirk peeping on Uhura from under the bed here and the extremely bizarre undressing scene with Alice Eve in Into Darkness, Abrams’ love for watching his female stars gratuitously undress at totally random moments stands out as particularly gross (I am guessing the only reason we never got something similar in his Star Wars films is because Disney treats sex and cigarettes as equally taboo).
Fourteen years later, there are definite cracks in the surface of Abrams’ Star Trek. It is too frenetic and hyperactive for my tastes now, especially after revisiting the six Original Series films and seeing how many ways they found to translate the TV formula to the silver screen without losing sight of the characters and themes. I still like the visuals, I absolutely love Giacchino’s music, and the cast is, again, terrific; this is a reasonably fun two hours at the movies, and an obvious cut above any of the Next Generation films. It’s better than either of Abrams’ Star Wars movies, too, even as, like a lot of his work, it has not aged completely gracefully.
How does it compare to its immediate successor, though, also directed by Abrams? Well, that’s a more complicated question – and I suspect this next review is going to take a while…
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