We've Gone Here Before, But It's Still Fun: Star Trek.

For the second year in a row, Corey and I celebrated our anniversary by indulging in that most indulgent of luxuries: a movie in a real live theatre. This year, the early-season sci-fi blockbuster in question was J.J. Abram's Star Trek.

A little personal background: I like Star Trek. Always have, probably always will. I don't like it in the Trekkie, hobbyist sense; I do have limits (*coughEnterprise!*cough* see also: Voyager). That being said, from my first glimpses of The Next Generation, which premiered around the same time I hit grade school, and the original series, which was airing concurrently on Saturday mornings on the CBC, I was hooked. TNG and Deep Space Nine - particularly the former - remain some very fine examples of television sci-fi, and you know what, so does the original series, in its own way. As funtastic as it was, it still had meat.

And that's a good way to think of Abrams' Star Trek: a funtastic sci-fi/action flick that's got just enough ballast to avoid being total popcorn. The plot is familiar to Trek fans, involving time-travel and vengeance, and the whole thing plays like the best of the Next Generation episodes. What really makes this film shine, aside from a stunning introduction that left me fighting back tears (I kid you not, I'm getting sappy in my old age), is the character interaction. I've yet to see a film directed or produced by J.J. Abrams in which the casting was not spot-on, and Star Trek is no exception. John Cho as Sulu may be an exception, but it's hard to tell, as we see so little of him outside of a ludicrous fencing match that's heavily tinted with shades of Kirk Fu (See: Sulu's not-quite-a flying roundhouse as a method of closing with his opponent. As a one-time provincial medalist, I don't give a lot of quarter to bad on-screen fencing). However, it's the Big Three that are important, and Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto) and McCoy (Karl Urban) don't disappoint. Who knew Heroes' Quinto was in fact a good actor on a crap program? I would have liked a slightly higher ratio of interaction to action, because the writers had some great stuff going on here - this may be a situation that would actually tempt me to read the novelization, by the reigning king of sci-fi novelizations, Alan Dean Foster. The great casting goes through to important secondary characters as well, especially Bruce Greenwood's Captain Pike, and the background is littered with familiar TV and sci-fi faces eager to get in on the quasi-historic action. Fun fact: Faran Tahir, who played the captain of the U.S.S. Kelvin, was also in the movie we saw for our last anniversary, Iron Man, as the leader of the rebels who ambushed Tony Stark's convoy. If he's not in next year's anniversary flick, I'm going to be disappointed.

The disappointments of Star Trek are pretty minor, all things considered. For all the ad campaigns about this being "not your father's Star Trek", the film has at least 60% too much Old Spock, and the whole plot ultimately revolves around him. Irony! On the same note, if you're trying to avoid being "father's Star Trek", then would someone please explain to me why female naval officers are still rocking the minidresses and go-go boots? Otherwise, the film divorced itself from camp pretty well, except for a cheap "sentient but pet-like alien" gag that may work in Star Wars, but is kind of anathema to Star Trek's core ideologies of equality and respect as pertains to diversity. On a separate note, there's some blatant ripping-off of the Terminator musical theme at critical points in the action, particularly tacky considering the timing of the release. And the uber-fast editing style for action sequences, popularized by the Bourne films but rarely used well, is so poorly employed here that it not only turns otherwise good action into a blurry mess, it also left both of us with sore eyes by the end.

Otherwise, it would seem Abrams and co. have finally broken the odd-numbers curse. It was a nice use of a Saturday, and I'd happily see a second film with the same cast.