Aren’t remakes just dreadful? How many good remakes have there been, really? (The correct answer, I believe, is one – The Thing.) And that’s just films that have been updated or ported over to another setting or time or something – what about the relatively new trend in films to try and take the essence of some old TV series and make it hip and cool again? This isn’t your dad’s Miami Vice! Forget everything you knew about 21 Jump Street! These films wager their popularity on name recognition alone and are almost to a fault terrible, making references a new audience won’t get in a style old fans won’t recognise.
So, it’s a good thing that J.J. Abrams‘ reboot of Star Trek is nothing like that.
Taking place in a divergent timeline from the future universe created in Star Trek: The Original Series and expanded with five spin-off series and ten films, the story has the crew of the Enterprise assembling for the first time to face off against an enemy displaced in time seeking revenge for a disaster in the far future. The cast does an admirable job at preserving the spirit of each character from the television series; the film expands the roles of the bridge crew so they have as much to contribute as Kirk (Chris Pine in William Shatner‘s role), Spock (Zachary Quinto doing an excellent Leonard Nimoy impression), and Bones (Karl Urban, immediately identifiable as a Trekkie having an absolute blast getting to play DeForest Kelley‘s part). The choices made for fresh versions of such an iconic cast make it easy to overlook that nearly nothing else about the film makes it feel like Star Trek – there’s no moral quandaries, no technobabble, no hope in the general awesomeness of humanity. In many ways, though, that’s a positive – many of the things that ‘define’ Star Trek are cultural leftovers that don’t make that much sense outside of the 1960s, so I’ll take something that tries to stick to the spirit (Deep Space Nine) rather than something that mimics what’s come before (Voyager).
I do have some issue with this film being classed as one of the best of all time, though, because it’s pretty clearly not. It’s a solid popcorn film if you don’t know much about Star Trek and don’t mind a bit of light science-fiction, and it’s a blast if you’re going to get the jokes about Sulu fencing and Kirk sleeping with green women, but it’s not much beyond that. Fun, but not the stuff of great cinema.
It is the best Star Trek film made so far, so perhaps after ten other attempts it deserves to keep its spot on IMDb’s big list for a while longer just for finally getting it right.
sarcasmbeast 