Review: STAR TREK (2009)

[Darren Provine]

The situation with the "Star Trek" franchise has been shaky; the last
feature wasn't a success, and the most recent TV incarnation fizzled
out.  So, following the "reboot" of the Batman movies, the James Bond
movies, and "Battlestar Galactica" on television, the powers that be
decided to give "Star Trek" the same treatment.

One reason this works is that as the technology becomes increasingly
powerful, it's harder and harder to write a good story in which the
characters are in danger.  The best "Star Trek" movie so far was the
second "Wrath of Khan", in which both the Enterprise and Khan's ship
suffer battle damage early on.  Both ships are crippled, which puts more
stress on the people than they would otherwise have.  Moving farther
forward in time with the "Star Trek" we know would raise the technology
levels so much that there might not be anything for the people to do at
all.  Going back lets the moviemakers use ships that are less powerful,
and thus tell stories that are more interesting.  This is easily the
best "Star Trek" movie in quite some time, if not quite as good as
"Wrath of Khan".  But it does have some problems.

When we meet the main hero, he's a 20ish blond-haired boy-not-yet-a-man
whose father died in space years earlier.  He lives in a farming area,
and at one point gets into a fight at the local bar, which is populated
by weird aliens.  He's saved from a serious pounding by an older, wiser,
grey-haired man who inspires him to leave the farm and go on to greater
things, and he ends up fighting an evil man with a gigantic spacecraft
that can destroy a planet.  No, I'm thinking of "Star Wars".  You know
the bad guy is evil because he has weird patterns of tattoos on his
face.  No, that's Darth Maul.  Later, the hero gets stuck in an icy
wasteland where he's attacked by a huge animal -- no, that's Luke
Skywalker on Hoth.  There's a complex time-travel story, where an enemy
from the future goes into the past to interfere with Federation history
and destroy it before it rises to power, and -- and now I'm thinking of
"Star Trek: First Contact".

The motivation for the bad guy doesn't make much sense, since he's in a
position to fix what he's angry about.  Why not just fix it?  It's not
as if he's got any of the usual science-fiction worries about changing
his own timeline, so there's no apparent obstacle to just changing
what's got him upset, instead of destroying stuff several steps removed
from what went wrong.  None of the destruction he's doing is going to
make his own life better, which he could easily do if he wanted to.
Yes, in the moment of crisis people do illogical things.  But he's had
25 years to think about it, and over a 25-year span he never calms down
enough to think out his situation, and nobody on board his ship points
out the obvious solution to his troubles?  How did such an unthinking
doofus ever get command of a huge spaceship?

On the subject of unbelievable commanding officers, partway through the
movie Kirk is a cadet at Starfleet Academy, and he's facing a hearing
on academic dishonesty.  72 hours later, he's been promoted to Captain
and given command of a starship.  Yes, he saved the day (the first of
many times), but no actual fleet is run that way.  No midshipman, no
matter how brilliant he is or how heroic his actions, is ever going to
go from "still at the Naval Academy in Annapolis" to "commanding
officer of the USS Ronald Reagan" in only 72 hours.  Given that a
starship has something like 10,000 times the destructive power of an
aircraft carrier, it seems to me that it should be that much harder to
get command of one.

The academic dishonesty charge itself is a disappointment.  In "Wrath
of Khan", we find out about a test at Starfleet Academy called the
"Kobayashi Maru", which is a simulation that cannot be won.  Then we
find out that Kirk is the only one who ever passed it, which he did by
reprogramming it.  Nothing they show us can be as interesting as what we
imagine for that, so revisiting it in detail is clearly a mistake.  Some
side reference about Kirk having to take it, and him smirking and saying
"Well, I have some ideas..." would have been enough of a nod to the
other movie.  And if they were determined to do it, they should have
done it better than they did -- Kirk just programs in a simple bug to
make it trivially easy to beat, and then spends the simulation munching
an apple and acting as if he knows he's going to win.  The tone of this
was all wrong; it played out like a silly prank.  They should have had
him program in a 1% chance of victory, or something, so there'd still be
a challenge.  Maybe he doesn't believe in the no-win situation, but
surely he does believe in the not-much-chance-of-winning situation.

Two other things go wrong with revisiting the Kobayashi Maru, both a
result of a poor decision to have Spock be the one who programmed it.
This makes the Star Trek world smaller; instead of being populated with
lots of characters who have lots of different ideas who we have to
imagine because we never see them, it turns out that it was just
somebody we already knew.  Even worse, in "Wrath of Khan", Spock says
that he never faced the Kobayashi Maru, and asks Kirk for an opinion
about his solution to the no-win situation.  That exchange is much
less interesting if Spock's the one who programmed the simulation in
the first place.

Even with everything that's wrong with it, it's still far better and
more entertaining than the last two Star Trek movies, as well as the
first, the fifth, and the seventh.  Yes, it's derivative, has a
nonsensical time-travel plot, includes completely implausible
elements, and undermines some of what was interesting about other Star
Trek movies.  And those are all noteworthy negatives.  But it's never
boring; it holds your interest from start to finish, and one reason we
go to movies is to be entertained.

"Star Trek" falls in the category I call "good dumb fun".  The acting
is good and the characterizations are well done; you really do feel as
though these are the characters we've known all along.  The dialogue is
free of the leaden writing that did in the "Star Wars" prequels.  The
funny parts are really funny and the action is exciting.  The special
effects, as should be expected, are flawless.

It's a fun bit of popcorn excitement.  There's some disappointment in
that it could have been better, but if you're looking for some light
entertainment and rock-em sock-em action, this movie delivers.