Preview: Star Trek

Boldly going where plenty of other blogs are also going this week.

The trailer for J.J. Abrams’ $150 million reboot of the beloved, maligned Star Trek franchise debuted this past week, igniting lots of controversy but promising at least plenty of curiosity. Going on the two slam bang minutes of the trailer alone, we can already see lots of potential and maybe a couple of problems. (Update: read our review here.)

The original geek culture obsessoin, the Star Trek franchise – six televisions series, ten movies, innumerable novels – has a well-established continuity and canon that’s revered, to put it politely, by its tens of millions of fans. (Memory Alpha, the leviathan Trek wiki, is the gold standard to which all other fan wikis aspire.) Abrams and his fellow producers have avowed to keep as much of the original TV series’ continuity as possible (though they’ve apparently already written out Kirk’s best friend) while making the basic premise more contemporary. That seems like a good thing and a bad thing. Probably no ”trekker” is interested in seeing a sexier Enterprise crew flit about in a generic space-opera adventure. On the other hand, and to be bluntly honest, a lot of the original 1960s series looks dated as all hell when viewed today. The film will have to strike that fine balance to really please longtime fans while bring in new ones. To speculate wildly, it looks to do just that… but only barely.

The film’s story circles around the earliest days of the starship Enterprise, when it was still under the command of Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood, The Sweet Hereafter). Starships are under attack by a Romulan aggressor named Nero (Eric Bana, Munich), including the ship commanded by James T. Kirk’s (Chris Pine, Bottle Shock) father. Kirk, a lifetime discipline case, is at Starfleet Academy but wants to get out and fight as soon as possible. The Enterprise,  with Kirk stowed away, races to stop Nero.

In the continuity of the television series, the Romulan Star Empire (like the Klingons, but smarter and based on the Roman Empire) fought a long and mutually devastating war with Earth, a war that ultimately led to an uneasy peace and the founding of the United Federation of Planets. Unlike the Klingons, the Romulans never really show their soft, honorable center or come around to being good guys after all. They’re are bent on continuous Imperial expansion, including Earth and its allies, such as Spock’s home planet of Vulcan. Basically, they’re the worst kind of scary adversaries, more so than the Klingons for their intelligence and guile. (Read our recent feature Great Trekspectations for a more in-depth explanation of the war.)

The trailer looks to get that spirit of a Federation just asserting itself, and of a glittering 23rd Century, even if the use of antique sportscars and gratuitous flashes of lingerie look, well, stupid. In fact the trailer’s whole prelude, with a prebuscent Kirk slo-diving out of a convertible, seems a little ridiculous. We’re also not sure showing the Enterprise getting built on Earth is a smart idea. We understand Abrams’ point that the movie has to get grounded on Earth before heading off into space, but the ship looks weird and awkward half-built in a field. Besides which, the unveiling of each new Enterprise in spacedock is sort of a Trek tradition, and ignoring it means turning the film’s back on many a fan’s warm memories.

On a brighter level, while Pine is still something of an unknown commodity some of the other casting is nothing short of inspired. Zachary Quinto (Heroes) looks born to play Spock, and Greenwood is an excellent choice to play the doomed Captain Pike, a role played on the TV series by Jeffrey Hunter (The Searchers). Simon Pegg as Scotty and Karl Urban as Bones McCoy have reportedly built their performances as tribute to, respectively, James Doohan and DeForest Kelley. Bana has never really gotten the attention he deserves, but Abrams and co-producer Damon Lindelof love their villains – look how Lost has turned into The Aventures of Ben Linus, Super Genius - so Nero’s character almost certainly won’t suffer for depth or screen time. And of course, Leonard Nemoy will return in a time-travel sequence, though The Shat has sadly opted not to participate.

So, the trailer. It’s a little too action-packed, maybe, but that’s what early teaser trailers are supposed to be. In particular, watch for the images of the Enterprise corridors, which look gorgeously futuristic, and listen for Pegg’s Scottish cadences. They’re the parts that will relieve old-school Trek fans while possibly exciting newcomers to the franchise. The film opens May 8, 2009.

- Michael Kabel

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