Star Trek: The Future Begins

Star Trek: The Future Begins is promising and highly entertaining and moderately clever in the first hour but falls apart in the second. I loved it for the visuals and the fast-paced action; I laughed at it for the bad science, ridiculous plot, and weak writing. But for the sci-fi genre, it’s really not doing much worse in the laughable department than the majority of summer actions flicks. The first hour is wonderfully paced. We cut quickly between the dialogue, plot exposition, and character development, and the awe-inspiring fast-paced action adventure scenes with some of the best visual effects and CGI I’ve ever seen on the big screen. There’s so much momentum here, so much to look at, so many different locations, that even if stupid things are being said or the plot is dumb, who cares? It’s fun. The second half requires much more effort to suspend your disbelief, and at times it was rough but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I enjoyed it immensely in many ways.

Admittedly, I walked into Star Trek: The Future Begins expecting to be unimpressed. After all, it was directed by J.J. Abrams who made his name by making a series of terrible television shows like “Felicity”, the ridiculous “Alias”, “Lost”, and more recently “Fringe”. I am not a trekkie, a trekker, or a “Star Trek” fan of any level. I haven’t even seen a single episode of any of the “Star Trek” shows. But while the writing is thin  (it’s no surprise that these are the very same writers who worked on Alias), Abrams does a darn good job directing material on the big screen. And I actually enjoyed myself – well, mostly. I sighed and groaned and moaned a lot, especially in the second half, but nowhere near as much as I had expected would be necessary, and to be fair, much less than I have in many other recent sci-fi or action movies.

Abrams has never been good with plot – in his television series Felicity, an entire episode was dedicated to the title character cutting her hair – but he is good with character. And this sensitivity for character shines through in Star Trek. We meet the young rebel James Kirk (Chris Pine), before he even had dreams of going into space. He’s cocky, womanizing, conceited, handsome, and almost unbearably likeable. We also meet the other hero of the film, the young Mr Spock (Zachary Quinto) whose schoolmates are attempting to bully him, or as he puts it, something on the lines of failing time and time again to elicit an emotional response from him. His first encounter with Kirk is when Kirk smugly beats Spock’s impassable test. Spock is cool, reserved, incredibly nerdy, and irritating, yet likeable. Abrams makes us care about these characters early on so we can root for them as the plot develops.

There’s also the snarky Dr Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban), who jabs a needle into Kirk to give him some kind of horrible set of symptoms, including hands the size of a Buick, in order to get Kirk onto the Enterprise when he was banned, so that he would “stop looking so pathetic”. And McCoy jabs a series of medicinal needles into Kirk in a hilarious fashion over the course of the next 15 or so minutes. And Simon Pegg shows up as Scotty, stealing every scene he’s in.

Abrams sets the scene nicely, too. The first act reminded me a bit of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which so carefully introduced us to a new world, with new rules and painted it all with such rich texture and complexity. Abrams finds that rich texture in the beginning of Star Trek, too. I love the scene where Spock and the other Vulcans are passing their exams inside their own individual little high-tech pits in a multimedia exam. It’s a short scene but the setting is so rich, and the payoff is magnificent.

I walked in ready to dismiss the film, and twenty-minutes in, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, thinking the film could be quite good, and enjoying myself immensely. Unfortunately, Abrams and his screenwriters do not stick with this attention to character or setting. Instead they throw in the usual sci-fi plot fare where action happens and people do cool stuff, but the plot is preposterous. They even throw in some ridiculous plotline involving some weird time warp as an excuse to bring in the original Spock, Leondard Nimoy. The plot becomes so convoluted that only the crack team from “Alias” could have come up with it – and the screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are veteran writers from that J.J. Abrams train wreck of a show.

Nevertheless, if we are doomed to a pointless plot, at least it looks damn good. Space hasn’t looked this good in a sci-fi since Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The deep space shots of the U.S.S. Enterprise and the shots of various planets look impressively realistic. Perhaps this is thanks to the impressive recruiting of Carolyn Porco, the leader of the imaging team of the Cassini voyage to Saturn, as the scientific consultant of the movie, a woman who really knows her stuff when it comes to space. The interiors of the U.S.S. Enterprise and the other locations are replete with dazzling colour and provide a wonderful visual spectacle at all times. Cinematographer Daniel Mendel really knows how to light this movie and it looks good. The sets are also very detailed and this adds to the visual appeal of the film.

I almost always complain that CGI looks fake and takes away from the experience of any movie it’s used extensively in, like last summer’s Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and The Dark Knight. However, in Star Trek it’s unobtrusive and not obvious. If I didn’t logically know that what I was watching was fantasy, I might believe that what I was looking at was real. Consider the alien creature that Kirk encounters on this gorgeously icy hostile planet. This would be an easy way for the CGI to look wildly unrealistic, but it doesn’t. This creature is fleshy and real.

This is not to say that the science is often good. The enemy spaceship, the Romulan spaceship’s external design, looks like a hundred sets of Edward Scissorhands’s hands attached to a big scary metallic ball as its tail. The interior is better. It’s entirely dark and cavernous, replete with green smoke and murky waters. It also appears to be like a huge abyss with lily-pad like levels that you can jump between if you’re careful enough not to misstep, especially in battle, and tumble far far down to your ultimate death. It’s a spaceship that has clearly been designed for the sole purpose of having silly James Bond-like fight scenes with no concern for actual functionality. But as silly as it is, I suppose we need some kind of extreme pathetic fallacy in our set to tell us just how evil the Romulans are: even their spaceship design is evil. The evil weapon involves a contraption, which can create black holes with “red matter”, a small little blob of what looks like red dye from a lava lamp, which is “deadly”. There’s also some weird time warping going on which is dumb on so many levels it escapes description and isn’t worth bothering to attempt to explain. The science made me laugh. A lot.  I can only assume that the filmmakers blatantly ignored Carolyn Porco’s sage advice on these plot points or were so aware of their stupidity to begin with that they were too embarrassed to consult her in the first place.

The plot, too, had its major issues, at times. When Kirk and his comrade (John Cho) land on the enemy ship with a plan to take out the enemy in hand-to-hand combat so that they can ultimately take out the enemy’s evil technology, the enemy comes at them one-at-a-time. In fact, the bad guys are even so courteous as to only send out one Romulan to fight Kirk when he lands on their ship, only sending out a second when his comrade also arrives. There are also several unbearable “emotional” scenes involving James Kirk’s birth – and his parents arguing over what to name him – and Spock’s “heartwarming” chat with his mother (Winona Ryder) about what life path to take. I mean, seriously, why must we sit through this crap? No one wanted to sit there and watch Padme walk around looking worried while pregnant with child in the last Star Wars and no one needs to or wants to see these pointless heartwarming scenes of heartwrenchingly terrible dialogue.

But these, sadly, are to be expected from the genre, so it’s really no more stupid than the next film. As a Star Trek neophyte, I did not feel out of the loop when watching the movie because of my ignorance of the franchise; it’s highly accessible. If anything, I actually left moderately curious about checking out other Star Trek fare. Yes, I groaned and I laughed at unintentionally funny parts of the film, and I sighed and I maybe even ruined the film for my Star Trek-loving companion that I saw the film with. Yes, the film deserved every groan it got. And even though the last half hour or so dragged and dragged, I was still dazzled by the visuals, taken in by the young Kirk and Spock, when the filmmakers gave me the opportunity to really watch them, and absolutely floored by the visuals.

This is a film that takes place in space where outer space looks just as outer space should. For a sci-fi summer release, this film comes very close to transcending the genre. Even the trekkie girlfriends can enjoy themselves. And I could even be convinced to see it again.