Let’s call this Turtle Trek.

Yeah, you heard that right. The Star Trek universe has been Turtledoved. I guess it had to happen. They’ve backfilled just about everything. There wasn’t anywhere left to go but forward or sideways. (Well, that’s not completely true. I suppose they could still put together a Young James T. Kirk, directed by Barry Levinson, modeled on his 1985 hit Young Sherlock Holmes. It could be set at an elite Starfleet boarding school on Mars, or maybe at futuristic Eton. A comically brash, teenaged Kirk might crack some campus-wide Klingon conspiracy, with the help of a fiercely logical but hormonally-seething Spock, and a prematurely cynical Bones. Another option, digging a little deeper, might be an animated Rugrats Star Trek Adventure, with Kirk and McCoy in the Tommy and Chuckie roles, and Spock as Angelica.)

Anyway.

Forward was obviously out. Too chancy. Too delicate. Too visionary. That’s the next Big Step in the Trekverse and is going to require the combined brain power of all of Roddenberry’s successors.

No, it was sideways. Had to be. Best to play it safe in these things, no?

If you aren’t clear on the Turtledove reference, I’m talking about Harry Turtledove, author of countless best-selling Alternate History novels. His stories are big-canvas What-Ifs. What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. What if the Earth had been invaded by aliens during World War II. Stuff like that.

This latest Star Trek flick is just such a What-If. What if a crazy, bald Romulan with a very serious ax to grind travels back from the future and corrupts the original Star Trek time line so that Kirk’s progression into Starfleet, and the lives and trajectories of his original Enterprise crew, are interestingly but not fatally skewed.

That’s admittedly a rather tired concept. But J.J. Abrams, creator of the TV Show Lost, director of the slick but soulless monster flick Cloverfield, and celebrated pop reimagineer, makes the most of it. Wait. Strike that. He makes quite a bit out of it. Making the most of it would have required the intervention of maybe Harlan Ellison as master story editor, and a phalanx of nameless internal continuity advisors. But that’s beside the point.

No one is ever going to accuse this film of science fictional sophistication, or its script of clear-eyed storycraft. Few will leave truly impressed with its muddled temporal anomaly conceit, or the black-hole-as-time-machine plate it is served up on. Fewer still will come away with a desire to see Red Matter reappear in the Trekverse ever again.

But Abrams himself, the P.T. Barnum of post-9/11 American screen-based entertainment, he shall reap rich accolades for this uncut diamond of retro alternality.

And deservedly so. Because while he has made a circus of the franchise, it’s a fun one.

This is a hugely enjoyable movie, despite its parsec-sized faults.

Whoa, hang on there. Slow down for a minute. I hear you. All of you. Yes, it’s Trek lite. I agree. Ridiculous at times. Even Ensign Chekov, with his questionable skills at the helm, could fly the Enterprise through some of its plot holes. There are so many, I won’t even try to list them all. I probably missed some myself. My favorites? What the devil were the bald Romulans doing for all those years while they waited for Spock Prime to pop through the black hole? Getting new tattoos? Buying new black overcoats? And more importantly why in God’s name didn’t they simply fly to Romulus, which, of course, still existed at the time of their arrival, and warn the poor bastards? Also, think about the lightning storm and its recurrence. What exactly is recurring?

It’s customary in these things to hand readers a thumbnail of the story.

So, here we go:

Roughly twenty five years before the real story commences, Kirk’s father George (well played by Chris Hemsworth) is the Executive Officer on the Starship Kelvin. The Kelvin is observing a vast and inexplicable cosmic phenomenon, something they liken to a lightning storm in space. As they’re watching, what appears to be an enormous set of black gardening tools emerges from the phenomenon’s bubbling surface. Spades, hoes, saws, clippers, rakes writ large. These gardening tools resolve into a humongous, gothic-flavored space ship. This ship quickly proves it has the firepower to destroy the Kelvin at will. A bald, tattooed and very angry Romulan hails the Kelvin and demands that its captain fly over for an audience. This occurs. But when the Kelvin’s Captain Robau indicates that he doesn’t know who this mysterious Spock they keep referring to is, and informs the ship’s Dark City-reject Captain Nero (Eric Bana) of the actual stardate, he is summarily executed by non-specific black tool impalement.

The Romulan ship renews its attack.

George Kirk assumes command. He immediately orders the evacuation of the Kelvin. This includes his pregnant wife (Jennifer Morrison, of House fame), who has chosen this particular moment to deliver little Jimmy. Despite the racket and the explosions, Mr. and Mrs. Kirk manage to carve out some quality time for a little eleventh hour name selection. For family reasons, they settle on James Tiberius.

The scene ends as you know it must: with Kirk ramming the Kelvin into the much larger Romulan ship, sacrificing himself and thereby providing the cover necessary for his crew (and wife and child) to escape by shuttlecraft.

The death of Kirk’s father is the film’s Turtledove turning point. From that point forward, we are boldly going where no one has ever gone before.

Sideways.

The movie flashes ahead, music-montaging us with a few minor, page-filling images of a rebellious, semi-delinquent little boy version of Kirk getting himself into trouble with the law.

The main story starts twenty five years after the destruction of the Kelvin. Kirk is now a dissolute, cynical loner. A textbook underachiever, going nowhere fast, spinning his wheels – literally – out on the storybook flatness of the Great American heartland. After failing to pick-up a hot but cold Uhura (the talented Zoe Saldana), Kirk winds up in a barfight with a gang of beefy cadets from the nearby Starfleet land base. This fight turns the bar upside down and brings in the base commander Christopher Pike (the indefatigable and always reliable Bruce Greenwood). After performing a background check on this “townie” who almost single-handedly sidelines several of his cadets, Pike learns Kirk’s true identity. This allows him to hunker down at a table and regale us with the incontrovertible facts of Kirk’s off-the-charts but unschooled brilliance. Pike exhorts the young Kirk to enlist in Starfleet, to follow his father’s footsteps to greatness.

This completes the archetypal picture of Kirk the music-montaging started.

At this stage, Abram’s Kirk strongly resembles the young Roy Hobbs from Barry Levinson’s (not Bernard Malamud’s) The Natural. Both are golden and homespun. Both epitomize raw, unrefined promise. Like Hobbs, Kirk is blessed with a gift. For Hobbs, that gift is baseball. For Kirk, it is leadership. Hobbs represents the raw promise of America. Kirk represents the raw promise of humanity.

Needless to say, Kirk joins up and heads off to Starfleet Academy. On the way, he is befriended by the older, wiser and infinitely more grown-up McCoy (Karl Urban). Uhura is there, as is the outwardly taciturn and austere Spock (Zachary Quinto). In his third year, Kirk engages in his fabled routing of the Kobayashi Maru test. Spock, architect of the no-win scenario, is furious and brings him up on charges of cheating. Kirk is summoned before a disciplinary tribunal. An emergency communication from Vulcan interrupts this bit of unpleasantness. The report indicates that the planet is being ravaged by some mighty but, they think, natural phenomenon – a lightning storm in space.

Sound familiar?

I had a much longer explication in here; a discussion of how the movie plays out, what all this means. It explained how Kirk meets Scotty (Simon Pegg), Chekov (Anton Yelchin) and Sulu (John Cho, interestingly enough, a Korean actor), how and why the future Spock (called Spock Prime in the promo material, and played gloriously by Leonard Nimoy) is involved. It even reveals what the Romulans are all about. But I have deleted it. You need to find that for yourself.

Suffice it to say, what comes after this is fun, exciting, but fundamentally brainless SF.

In spite of that, the film works. And here are six reasons why:

First, Zachary Quinto as the new Spock. Quinto, one of Abrams’s growing stable of young, driven and alarmingly talented actors, has studied the Vulcan portrayal handbook with some diligence. He’s got the original Spock’s rigidity down, and he’s captured the barely perceptible, throbbing intensity that always lurked beneath the science officer’s uniform. But more importantly, Quinto has brought a strangely peevish sexuality to the role. Yes, blast it all, he has a libido, but it pisses him off, and what pisses him off even more is the fact that he can’t show just how pissed off he is deep inside. That’s fun to watch. His discreet love affair with Zoe Saldana’s beautiful and attitudinal Uhura is one of the most memorable aspects of the film.

Second, Chris Pine as Kirk. Pine is an alley cat turned human. Rough, tousled, and perpetually ready to bare his fangs when challenged. Feral. Despite the film’s repeated references to this alternate Kirk’s brilliance, Pine actually plays him as a two-fisted, instinct-driven leader not far removed from the shoot-first, read-the-treaty-later interpretation William Shatner gave us forty years ago. He elevates brashness to new, almost incendiary levels. He nails the tricky balance of self-deprecation and animal arrogance that defines the character. However, I would have liked to see real self-doubt, or actual fear in Pine’s Kirk, not serio-comic posturing. But that’s more the fault of the script writers, not the actor. One small personal disappointment: the Kobayashi Maru Test. Kirk was far too cavalier, chomping on his apple, smirking. I was hoping for something more dramatic.

Third, Karl Urban as Bones. I understand Urban has taken a lot of heat for his performance. Not sure why. Don’t particularly care. He’s ideal for the part. Maybe better than DeForest Kelley. Sacrilege? So be it. He’s a far better actor than Kelley. His grizzled, plain-speaking dependability rang true for me. Did he have one too many laugh-triggering audience-pleasers? You bet. But his clean and lean delivery was a major benefit to the movie. And, unlike the more mercurial Quinto and Pine, he provided a palpable maturity and measure to his scenes.

Fourth, the Look. The Look is a character itself in this picture. How shall I describe it? How about: Sharply defined, not remotely fanciful, strictly American Future in design, brightly lit, and imminently real. This smacks of core Abrams. The Abrams of Lost. Everything is crisp and reach-out-and-touchable. Nothing is dreamy or diaphanous. The Look is, more than anything else, solid. Rock solid.

Fifth, the locomotive pacing. This film roars like a freight train on a downhill grade. It’s loud, full of youthful bluster, belching clouds of confusing smoke, and seemingly unstoppable. When you’re holding onto the armrests of your seat for dear life, plot glitches cease to be relevant. All that matters is living through to the credits.

Sixth, the nice little things. I’m talking about things like having Captain Pike wind up in a wheelchair, or giving Kirk a buxom, green-skinned lust interest, or bringing in top-shelfers like Ben Cross and Winona Ryder for the small but crucial roles of Spock’s parents, or any number of thoughtful touches, many of which I probably didn’t even catch.

The biggest problem with this movie, aside from its glaring narrative gaps, is the weakness of its antagonists. These renegade Romulans just don’t seem sharp enough to be taken seriously. They’re basically blue-collar schmoes working on a super-high tech earth mover. Yes, they visit the same bad guy tailor as half the villains in science fiction cinema history. Long black coat? Check. Heavy-duty, thick-soled British punk boots? Check. High, semi-Dracula collars? Check. Oversized and funny shaped bladed weapons? Check. But fashion alone does not an arch-nemesis make. Star Trek works best when Kirk squares off against a genius, not a clod with a big gun. This is why The Wrath of Khan and, to a lesser degree, The Undiscovered Country worked so well. The former had Ricardo Montalban as the formidable though insane super-intellect Khan, the latter Christopher Plummer as the Shakespeare-quoting Klingon General Chang. These were villains Kirk and the audience could respect.

Here, Eric Bana, a truly superior Australian actor, is simply not menacing enough as Nero. He’s crazy with grief over the deaths of his wife and unborn child, and he’s got a big black ship from the future with a million guns, and he’s bald and unshaven. But he’s not cunning, and he doesn’t have a real plan. He never out-thinks anyone. He never corners and bests Kirk. All he has is a driving need to punish those he (wrongly) believes caused his pain.

The other significant problem is that the entire story motif has a fanficish feel to it. This is almost Mary Sue Star Trek. It’s the sort of thing a literate Trekkie would come up with on a tribute site. It feels almost like a role-playing game. Hey, let’s pretend that Kirk’s father died the day he was born and that he almost didn’t make it into Starfleet. Sounds great, can I be Sulu? In that regard, it seems beneath the dignity of the canon.

I don’t want to sound too sour on this picture, because I really did enjoy it. It’s well worth your time and trouble. It’s a gorgeous flick, and it thunders along at warp speed. But it’s not the film it should have been. The makers, Abrams in particular, should have sat down and really thought out the logic of the story. As a lifetime science fiction fan, I can and regularly do “go along” with just about any conceit. All I ask is that it hold together internally; that the decisions of the characters, and the development of the plot, make sense.

I can suspend my disbelief of the fantastic, just not the stupid.               

So we’re left with one fundamental question: Why did Abrams bother to give us this two-hour long Turtle Trek? It adds nothing to the series’s overarching meta-narrative. Indeed, in my opinion, it’s a hundred million dollar detour.

The answer, according to most, can be found at the box office.

But that can’t be true.

Audiences came to see Abrams’s vision of Star Trek. That vision could just as easily have been a canon-compliant, but equally exciting story about how the original crew came together. The alternate reality story is irrelevant to the bottom line.

No, the real answer is ego. Abrams wanted to make his own distinctive mark, not join the ranks of the series’s prior directors, people like Robert Wise and Nicholas Meyer, who were content to merely labor for the general advancement of that meta-narrative.

That’s a shame, when you think about.

Imagine what a man with Abrams’s skill could have done for us if he had only been a tad more humble.

Star Trek
U.S. Release Date: May 8, 2009
Director: J.J. Abrams
Screen writers: Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
Running Time: 127 minutes