Star Trek

**** Stars

Star Trek is the perfect summer movie, perfect in its understanding of being purely fun and exhilarating and perfect in its ability to avoid reducing itself to cheesy melodrama. Action, humor, story, visual effects, Eric Bana, excitement, and Leonard Nimoy? Star Trek works for everyone. J.J Abrams’s reboot of the historic science fiction franchise is the best time I’ve had at the movies all year.

Now you wouldn’t expect this right away would you? But the forty-year-old franchise that skidded to a halt (after its last film Nemesis made a dismal $43 million at the box office in 2002) is resurrected. And to many people’s surprise, they may discover this to be the best blockbuster since The Dark Knight.

Now for the record, I will not say this is “The Dark Knight of 2009” (because I hate when critics compare films like that unless you’re referring to box-office statistics) but I will say that Star Trek is the best time at the movies since The Dark Knight. Star Trek is two hours of everything a movie should be.

The story begins in riveting fashion, an introduction that stands among the greatest space sequences this side of 2001: A Space Odyssey. We begin with the story of George Kirk (the father of James T. Kirk) and his acts of heroism that saved 800 lives in only 12 minutes. Pardon the Star Trek linguistics here: When The Federation Starship USS Kelvin travels to investigate a lightning storm in space and discovers that it is in fact a black hole, it becomes under attack by a Romulan mining vessel. After the Federation’s captain is captured and killed by the Romulan captain Nero (the extraordinarily talented Eric Bana) Kirk is put in charge to save the ship and its crew. Unfortunately, he must sacrifice himself to save everyone. In doing so, his wife and newly born child escape the ship without harm.

Then the infamous origin story of the famous Star Trek characters begins. James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is a troubled kid from Iowa and Spock (Zachary Quinto) is a confused adolescent on his home planet Vulcan. As they grow up, the two meet after Kirk beats Spock’s unbeatable training program for the Starfleet Academy. The term “opposite’s attract” is full-boat here in this fascinating friendship that soon turns to adventure on the infamous USS Enterprise.

The cast is phenomenal. Along side Pine and Quinto are Bruce Greenwood, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, and Leonard Nimoy as the key ingredients that make up the past and future crew of the Enterprise. Counterbalancing with a villain is Bana, who I think should be in every movie. His portrayal of the evil Nero is spot on. We never suspect him as a mere rip-off of a standardized villain, but rather a saddened and lost character that comes across the agony of losing the ones he has loved. This is a space opera, one that will simply take your breath away.

You could not find a better director to take over Star Trek than J.J Abrams (who is responsible for ABC’s Lost and the very underrated Mission Impossible III). He injects life into a franchise that I thought could never be what it has become. He has found a way to make optimism cool again. Sure, his newest film if filled with dark elements, but we are never taken into a cynical and haunting territory.

And in today’s world, our society can be a cynical and haunting territory. We are at what feels to be an endless war and our economy has passed the point of a recession. Yet there are still moments in our lives that keep us going. For me, Star Trek is one of them. Within its two-hour runtime, I forgot the morose of our country’s faults. I experienced a breath of fresh air. And I say our country must launch a new campaign to the public, one whose slogan should give Star Trek an underdog chance of becoming a potential Best Picture nominee. Note to the Academy: Admit it. You screwed up your nominees last year and told The Dark Knight to step off. Now you have yet another chance to redeem yourself. Make J.J Abrams’s Star Trek, your redemption.