STOLE A THOUSAND BEGGAR'S CHANGE

- I feared the worst with Star Trek when it was announced that it was being directed by J. J. Abrams and being written by the guys who wrote the, completely godawful, 2007 Transformers film. And when I saw the first trailer, it seemed to confirm a lot of my fears: too-big special effects, unnecessary sex appeal, stony serious-mindedness, broad comic relief of the annoying variety. My thoughts going into the theatre were basically "well, it can't be as bad as Transformers and it has Simon Pegg in it". Make no mistake, I was really looking forward to this film but only really because it was an updated Star Trek (I'm not what you'd call a Trekkie, but I like the original series pretty well and thought it could do with a new coat of paint) and not due to a true liking of any of the creative talent involved. For my money, the best thing Abrams ever did with his life was being vaguely involved with Lost as none of his other things, whether TV (I didn't care for Alias, Fringe is okay) or film (Cloverfield is gimmicky, MI:3 is a decent action movie greatly improved by Philip Seymour Hoffman) have really impressed me. Also, I don't really care what else screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have written because they wrote Transformers and I still want to kill them for that.

However, against all those odds, they pulled this one off. It's got enough of a hip sensibility to not seem dated but the thing I love the most is how the movie doesn't ignore the essential optimism at the heart of the Trek world in favour of post-modern deconstructionism. It would be very easy to make this movie "dark" and "edgy" (a sort of Dark Knight take on Trek) and call it at that but, thankfully, the writers don't do that. They do add bigger, more SFX-heavy action sequences (the best of which is a thrilling space-skydive set piece, which includes a redshirt, natch), some romantic tension between Uhura and Spock and a more general light-hearted approach to the material (technobabble is kept to a minimum). The only real issues with the film are a weak villian and that the middle section is a bit slow. Also, no Shatner cameo, but Nimoy has a pretty big part, so, it's forgivable. In fact, with it's general good-heartedness, as opposed to the oppressive darkness of the recent Batman films, and lack of prejudice (especially surprising coming from the scribes of Transformers, which may be the most racially-backwards mainstream film of the past decade) Star Trek might be the first blockbuster for the Obama-era and it'll be interesting to see if this becomes the biggest earner of the summer because of that. Its we're-in-this-together spirit and sense of maybe-this-will-all-work-out embodies a new hope, in the same way that Dark Knight's moral chaos and breakdown of order was a wail from Bush's tail-end.

More importantly than that, though, it's well-acted, well-directed (albeit with a bit too much use of close-ups during action scenes, probably learned from working of TV shows), has excellent special effects (especially coming after Wolverine's cheap green-screened look) and respects the earlier Trek (particularly in terms of character personas/quirks) works without being slavishly beholden to them. It's something that you can love whether you're a Trekkie or someone with no idea of the story beyond the multitude of parodies. It's a big, fun, sloppy space adventure with loads of humour and, even if the actual plot is a little weak, it sets the franchise up for many further adventures with this crew, which I, for one, would be happy to take.