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Clarence Tsui

Starring: Chris  Pine, Zachary  Quinto,  Eric  Bana, Simon Pegg
Director: J.J. Abrams  
Category: IIA
The  relaunch of the  43-year-old Star Trek franchise is a loud, engaging and vibrant affair.  
J.J.  Abrams' prequel  is much more than a spin-off milking this pop-culture institution's past glories as it  boasts a plot that  accommodates both Trekkies and newcomers alike, and imagery which allows the film to shake off the shackles of its small-screen roots.
Rather than providing new adventures for the crew of the Enterprise, Star Trek returns to the franchise's origins by telling the story of how the crew - Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu and Chekov  - came together.  Abrams' action approach is plain from the start:  the film's vociferous pre-title sequence  sees the Earth's Starfleet in an all-out battle with a warship from Romulus; amid deafening explosions and people being sucked into space is George Kirk (Chris  Hemsworth) saving his crew by crashing his evacuated vessel into the Romulan spacecraft just as his wife gives birth to a son. 
That baby would eventually grow up to become James  Tiberius Kirk (Chris  Pine), the character William Shatner played in the original Star Trek series. 
By making him a fatherless child, Abrams  reshapes James  into a young, rebellious tearaway, giving him a  back story crucial to the  future of Star Trek  in the years ahead.  And there's a lot of character histories being rewritten here - for example, the  mentality of the brainy and logical Spock (Zachary Quinto) is explained away by his human ancestry (in the form of his human mother, played by Winona  Ryder). 
Time travel and alternate realities are fundamental to  this film,  with the main plot revolving around how the Romulan warrior  Nero  (Eric  Bana) journeys back to the past  (and the story's present) to save his planet  from destruction - and  how Nero unleashes a revenge plot on Spock, who he believes was the person behind the attack on his planet. 
It's  through this canny ploy that Abrams pulls off the film's ultimate coup, with Leonard Nimoy reprising his role in the original Star Trek series, playing an aged Spock who follows Nero through time and eventually meets up with the young Kirk and finally the younger version of himself.
But there's more to Star Trek than Abrams' clever narrative.  The director is very much aware that the whole franchise is  mainly about the personal conflict between the story's two leading protagonists, so the filmmaker  conjures scenarios which  allow sparks to fly between the unruly Kirk and the lucid Spock. 
Pine and Quinto (above)  acquit themselves well, delivering performances which  heighten the traits of their characters, thus providing a fresh and more human take on the  two men. The same  can also be said of  other  cast members in the film, from John Cho's reinterpretation of the masterly helmsman Sulu as a  young crewman prone to error, to Simon Pegg's hilarious comic reinvention of the oddball engineer Scotty.
Not that Star Trek doesn't have its flaws - the film could have done  with more  real emotions exhibited by its characters in a time when action films are all about troubled superheroes. 
However, unlike the glib Superman Returns or the increasingly insipid Star Wars spin-offs, Star Trek stands a good chance of living long and prospering in the future.
Star Trek opens today



Star Trek