Beam Me Up, I’m On Board For This One

I became familiar with Star Trek the original TV series simply because of exposure from my more geeky classmates. But I was a bigger fan of Space: 1999 because that series looked way cooler—it was shot in the 70s so the production design was more modern-looking, while the Gene Roddenberry series was shot in the 60s and was in black and white. Still I consider myself a fan of the series. I watched all the Star Trek movies (even the excruciatingly dragging Star Trek: The Motion Picture) when they came out in the cinemas. I followed Star Trek: The Next Generation and Voyager, the two spin-off series that kept me hooked on this vision of the future. I’m not a rabid Star Trek purist, but I know enough of the mythology.

So it was a pleasant surprise to watch JJ Abrams’ reboot of the series in Star Trek: The Future Begins. The task was difficult: how to energize a series for a new set of fans who grew up on Star Wars, jaw-dropping CG images, and a heart-pounding film pacing more suitable to a summer Hollywood blockbuster than sedate ruminations on time-space singularities, while keeping its current fan base happy. Luckily JJ Abrams is more a Star Wars fan, so he had the distance needed to take an iconic sci-fi series and turn it on its head.

I promise I will try to avoid any spoilers here.

The movie happily retains the characters and the qualities that endeared them to fans, yet updates them so that they offer a new take which may (or may not) generate new interest for the fans. I especially liked how they re-imagined Uhura, the communications officer of the USS Enterprise who, in the series and the movies, has been relegated to mostly being a glorified telephone operator (she’s the precursor of call center agents in years to come). What’s more, they further upped the ante on Spock’s conflicted nature being half-human and half-Vulcan. And the tweak they added between these two characters? Haylaveth!

Having Leonard Nimoy as Spock appear in the movie is a great way to bridge the two generations of Enterprise crews. It is both a wise tip of the hat to the original cast, while at the same time offering a clever way to incorporate this current movie into the existing Star Trek universe. It’s a simple twist, done many times over in the Star Trek series as well as other sci-fi series. Yet it works wonders here. Maybe because the casting is so spot-on; it’s seeing old familiar faces but in an interesting new light.

JJ Abrams’ experience with Alias, Lost, Mission: Impossible and even Cloverfield suits him well to be able to keep this movie visually interesting and action-packed to lure a new set of audience in. I must admit I find the action set pieces a little too “summer blockbuster-y” but, hey, those are the filmmakers’ marching orders, right? And like any obedient Starfleet crew, they are just carrying out the commands. I also found Eric Bana’s villain, and the way he’s out to “destroy worlds”, a bit of a sci-fi cliché. As a villain, he doesn’t rank up there with Khan, the Borg or even Q (yeah, yeah, I know Q’s technically not a villain); you’ll forget his character the moment the movie ends.

But I guess that’s okay, because really, it’s the “new” old characters that I fell in love with all over again. And I suppose that’s really what’s more important, creating characters that moviegoers will want to watch again and again and again. And this smart reboot of an old series will hopefully lure a new batch of moviegoers—as well as old fans like me—to follow the USS Enterprise to boldly go where no one has gone before.

This is Star Trek: For The Next Generation.