It's the Muppet Babies version of Star Trek, as we go back to the very beginning to see how Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the Enterprise gang came together. Except that it's not quite the Enterprise gang we already knew, because Abrams cleverly re-boots the franchise by making this a time-travel story, thus creating an alternate history in which events are free to develop differently than they did in the original version.
The personalities are essentially the same, though, which poses a particularly nasty challenge for the actors -- how to evoke the original cast without falling into slavish imitation or caricature -- and most of the cast succeed very well. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto as Kirk and Spock come off best (thank goodness, since they have the largest roles). Pine gets the cocky arrogance of Kirk just right, and Quinto's Spock is perfect as a young man who hasn't quite yet found the balance between his human and Vulcan sides.
As McCoy, Karl Urban gives the most cartoonish imitation of his predecessor, and Anton Yelchin's Chekov is embarassing, though in fairness, the script doesn't give him much more to do than a few "victor/wictor" accent jokes, so he's playing them for all they're worth (which isn't much).
Our villain this time is Eric Bana, as a pissed-off Romulan named Nero, who's traveled back in time to wreak vengeance on the men who destroyed his planet. Bana's trying to make Nero a larger-than-life figure, striving for the same sort of operatic tragic figure that Ricardo Montalban created in The Wrath of Khan, and he never quite gets there; all of his flailing about and yelling ultimately just seems a little silly.
But a Star Trek movie is never really about the bad guy, anyway; it's about the relationships among those core characters, and Abrams gets those relationships just right; Pine and Quinto have moments when you forget that you're not watching Shatner and Nimoy. The tone of the movie also captures the original series perfectly, with a precisely calibrated blend of earnestness, camaraderie, humor that walks the is-it-or-isn't-it line of deliberate campiness, and hope that humanity might actually find itself in this wonderful world someday.
The special effects are very well done, though Abrams is overly fond on phony light flares on the lens. Michael Giacchino's score is marvelous; I was reminded at various points of Holst, or of a more brutal and percussive Hovhaness. (And Alexander Courage's original theme music is brought in at exactly the right moment.)
Does the story hold up? Well, not really; time travel stories rarely do if you examine them too closely. But things move along quickly enough that you don't have time to worry about the paradoxes and loopholes until after the movie's over, and the main goal -- giving the series a fresh start and freeing it from the fanboy tyranny of Official Star Trek Canon -- is accomplished with great efficiency. A fine new start for the series.
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