Star Trek

Mister Tee
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Post by Mister Tee »

And Screen Daily concurs

Star Trek
Mike Goodridge in Los Angeles
22 Apr 2009 09:39

Dir: JJ Abrams. US. 2009. 125 mins.

JJ Abrams injects a gigantic dose of energy into this long-running franchise to bring it roaring back to life with an immensely satisfying Star Trek prequel. Going boldly where many have been before, the talented film and TV-maker hardly puts a foot wrong in his quest for renewal, creating a new mythology complete with pin-up stars, invigorating humour and juicy on-board melodrama. Destined to be the summer's first and one of its biggest global hits, Star Trek essentially paves the way for a brand new series of films and will keep Paramount in summer tentpoles for years to come.

For over three decades, since Star Wars took over the inter-galactic crown in 1977, Star Trek has been a sci-fi poor relation. The first film from the series directed by Robert Wise in 1979 was dull and failed to capitalise on the Star Wars fallout. The subsequent film series, although often cheesily enjoyable (and 1998's Star Trek: Insurrection managed to top the $110m worldwide mark), ground to a halt with 2002's Nemesis which sputtered out with a $67.3m worldwide gross.

Perhaps influenced by Warner Bros' success in rebooting the Batman franchise just eight years after Batman & Robin, Paramount's first masterstroke here is in telling the story from the start, wiping the slate clean of previous actors and incarnations while respectfully doffing its cap to the legacy of the property. The studio's second masterstroke was in hiring Abrams – the man behind TV's Lost and Alias whose feature directorial debut was the efficient Mission: Impossible III in 2006. Abrams understands today's young audiences and not just the action/sci-fi-loving boys – he also created teenage romantic TV favourite Felicity. His casting and updating of the Star Trek characters is perfectly attuned to a teen demographic impatient with the ancient lore of a 1960s TV series.

The beauty of this reinvention is that lovers of the Star Trek franchise from 1966 onwards will appreciate Abrams' work here as well. From the powerful presence of Leonard Nimoy to the sign-off in which the TV intro is read out (by Nimoy) and the old theme tune blares, this Star Trek will be equally enjoyable to the 30-plus audience who still have a soft spot for the show.

The film gets off to a swift and effective start with a prologue in which USS starship Kelvin is attacked by a huge Romulan ship. While the captain is lured to the enemy ship and killed by its commander Nero (Bana), the first officer George Kirk stays on board to protect the evacuating crew including his own pregnant wife.

While he dies, she gives birth to their son Jim (aka James T Kirk).

We see Kirk grow up to be an angry rebel (Pine) in Iowa just as we see Spock (Quinto) as a troubled teen on the planet Vulcan, torn between his Vulcan and human genetics and opting for a life in Starfleet rather than among the Vulcans who will always view his human mother (Ryder) as a disadvantage.

Urged on by a commander (Greenwood) who admired his father, Kirk joins Starfleet as a cadet, and, although he is by now a cocky womanizer, he excels at the Academy. We see his first encounters with Uhura (Saldana) and Bones (Urban) and his first clashes with Spock whose logical approach is at odds with his instinctual one.

The adventure begins when all the Academy's cadets are called out to answer a plea for help from the planet Vulcan. Kirk, on board the fleet's newest ship USS Enterprise, is the first to recognise that the situation bears eerie similarities to the attack on his father's ship 25 years previously.

From then on, the action barely lets up and, with the assistance of stunning special effects, Abrams creates several breathtaking sequences which will win applause even from today's seen- it-all-before audiences. But the director and his writers - longtime collaborators Orci & Kurtzman (who wrote M:I III and Transformers) – cleverly manage to elicit as much excitement from the inter-character dramas as the face-off with Nero. Indeed the Nero threat often serves merely as a catalyst to further Kirk and Spock's personal journeys, develop Spock's attraction to Uhura, and introduce Chekov (Yelchin) and Scottie (Pegg) not to mention Spock from the future in the inimitable shape of Nimoy.

Much of the film's success is down to its casting. Particularly impressive are Pine and Quinto. Pine – perhaps best known to date as Lindsay Lohan's man-candy in Just My Luck – shows considerable charisma as Kirk, his character and looks more edgy and less clean-cut than William Shatner's. Heroes alumnus Quinto, whose role is as large if not larger than Pine's, is also a strong screen presence beyond his striking physical resemblance to Nimoy. The chemistry between all the young actors bodes well for multiple sequels.

Indeed, for the first time, Star Trek looks as if it might have more of a future than Star Wars.
Mister Tee
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Post by Mister Tee »

Good god, it may be necessary to see this film. (I like Abrams' work well enough, but will this franchise never die?)


Star Trek
By TODD MCCARTHY

A Paramount release of a Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment presentation of a Bad Robot production. Produced by J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof. Executive producers, Bryan Burk, Jeffrey Chernov, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman. Co-producer, David Witz. Directed by J.J. Abrams. Screenplay, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, based on "Star Trek" created by Gene Roddenberry.

James Tiberius Kirk - Chris Pine
Spock - Zachary Quinto
Spock Prime - Leonard Nimoy
Capt. Nero - Eric Bana
Capt. Christopher Pike - Bruce Greenwood
Leonard "Bones" McCoy - Karl Urban
Uhura - Zoe Saldana
Montgomery "Scotty" Scott - Simon Pegg
Sulu - John Cho
Chekov - Anton Yelchin
Sarek - Ben Cross
Amanda Grayson - Winona Ryder
George Kirk - Chris Hemsworth
Winona Kirk - Jennifer Morrison
Gaila - Rachel Nichols
Capt. Robau - Faran Tahir
Ayel - Clifton Collins Jr.

Blasting onto the screen at warp speed and remaining there for two hours, the new and improved "Star Trek" will transport fans to sci-fi nirvana. Faithful enough to the spirit and key particulars of Gene Roddenberry's original conception to keep its torchbearers happy but, more crucially, exciting on its own terms in a way that makes familiarity with the franchise irrelevant, J.J. Abrams' smart and breathless space adventure feels like a summer blockbuster that just couldn't stay in the box another month. Paramount won't need any economic stimulus package with all the money it'll rake in with this one globally, and a follow-up won't arrive soon enough.
"Star Trek" here joins the James Bond series as the long-term '60s franchises that have been most successfully rebooted, although the current accomplishment is the more surprising since, after 10 films and a succession of TV series, "Star Trek" was widely thought to have exhausted itself. While respectfully handling the Roddenberry DNA, Abrams and longtime writing cohorts Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have successfully transferred it to a trim new body that hums with youthful energy.

As happened with Bond and "Casino Royale," the Abrams team decided it would be best to go back to the beginning — earlier, in fact, than the first TV show did in 1966 — to show the origins of James Kirk and Spock and the launch of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Stir in a well-chosen cast of relative unknowns, a strong new villain, vastly updated special effects and a dynamic style that makes "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" look 60 years old rather than just 30, and you've planted the seed to create a whole new generation of Trekkies.

A wham-bang 12-minute action prologue both clears the palette of residual series expectations and sets the table for the kind of excitement that's amply in store. Script brims with backstory and future-story, but never loses track of the present, in which young James Tiberius Kirk (Chris Pine), a wild Iowa boy whose father sacrificed himself at the helm of a spaceship at the very moment the child was being born, is convinced by Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) to attend the Starfleet Academy with an eye to joining the crew of the Enterprise.

Headed for the same destination but on a different track is Spock (Zachary Quinto), whose troubled background as a half-human, half-Vulcan is deftly sketched in, as he's bullied by other students and struggles to suppress his emotional side to achieve the Vulcan ideal of pure logic. If the script has an overriding concern, it's to map out how, after a shaky beginning, these two very opposite figures become mutually trusted colleagues, a key not only to this film but the entire series, past and future.

By the time Captain Pike says "Let's punch it" at the 40-minute mark, the key crew is rounded out by professional pessimist Leonard "Bones" McCoy (Karl Urban), nobody's fool Uhura (Zoe Saldana), the valued Sulu (John Cho) and a 17-year-old Russian brain named Chekov (Anton Yelchin) whose thick accent renders "Vulcan" as "Woolcan."

Longtime fans will feel comfortable on board the new Enterprise, which might be compared to the new Yankee Stadium — it's spiffier and technically more up-to-date, but has a familiar ambiance. The costumes — red for the principal officers — are similarly not out of place, but have been stripped of the dorky look that always seemed borderline laughable on TV, at least.

More adventurous is the design for the space-borne behemoth called home by the ferocious Nero (Eric Bana). Resembling a tattooed, grizzled brother of Ralph Fiennes' Voldemort in the "Harry Potter" series, Nero travels about in a fearsomely armed ship that has the physical bearing of a prickly, tentacled squid; he harbors deep resentment, for which he feels total annihilation of the Federated planets, notably Vulcan and Earth, is the only proper response.

Unfortunately, Nero has the means to accomplish this in the form of drills that, when sent to a planet, can burrow deep down and make it implode into its own black hole. One of the film's most spectacular setpieces has Kirk leading two others in a free-fall dive from space down to the platform for one of these drills, then fighting off two big goons as the fate of a heavily populated planet hangs in the balance.

Exile to an ice planet, Delta Vega, which is home to a couple of particularly gruesome hungry creatures, enables Kirk to do some inadvertent time-traveling and meet an older version of Spock (Leonard Nimoy, back for another go-round in much more than a brief cameo), a happenstance that complicates matters on the time-space continuum.

"Star Trek" rockets along like a beautifully engineered vehicle you can't help but admire for its design and performance. It shifts gears often but always smoothly, and accelerates again and yet again when you suspect it might be tempted to ease up for good. The series trappings remain, but this reincarnation is dynamic where the old one was often stodgy, stylish instead of a bit square.

Pine's Kirk exhibits an early tendency toward undue cockiness but suffers enough setbacks and rough surprises that the actor is forced into more varied and thoughtful responses. (Someone should decide about his hair color, however, as it varies from reddish to blond in different scenes.) Quinto makes for a very good young Spock, a man trying to define and perfect the kind of man he wants to be. Urban shows comic promise as the medic; Yelchin and Simon Pegg, the latter as a reputedly brainy engineer, prompt some real laughs; and Saldana is vibrant as the female crew member who bestows her favors on one officer to the exasperation of another. Bana is memorably scary as the villain.

Production and effects values are top-notch. Michael Giacchino's score soars — occasionally a bit too much, perhaps — with real character and vigor.
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Post by OscarGuy »

Winona Ryder is in the movie? Weird. I was not aware of that...

As for the article, I must admit that if a group of fans sitting down to celebrate Wrath of Khan can feel excited about the new Star Trek movie, it does give me a small glimmer of hope that it won't be nearly as bad as I'm dreading it will be.
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Post by Zahveed »

As interesting as this premiere news is, for some reason I was more surprised Winona Ryder was in a movie.
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Post by Sonic Youth »

I don't personally have any interest in the film, but I thought this was very nice.

Spock gives fans Star Trek treat
BBC News



Spock actor Leonard Nimoy set his phasers to stun at a movie screening on Monday when he switched 1982's Wrath of Khan for the new Star Trek film.

Sci-fi enthusiasts in Austin, Texas turned up for the classic film only to find Nimoy introducing the first public showing of director JJ Abrams' prequel. The film was given a six minute standing ovation and one filmgoer said fans were "crying they were so happy."

Star Trek, the 11th film in the franchise, is due for release on 8 May. It follows James T Kirk as he graduates from Star Fleet Academy and becomes captain of the starship Enterprise. Chris Pine takes over the role of Kirk which was played by William Shatner in the 1960s television series and seven of the films.

The prequel had its official world premiere in Sydney, Australia on Tuesday night.

Film company Paramount arranged for Nimoy, along with the film's writers and its producers to unveil the film to hardcore fans first and the audience from Monday's unexpected showing immediately started posting reviews on Twitter. One fan called it "the best Star Trek movie ever" adding, "yes, it even beat Wrath of Khan". Another said, "the cast is superb, the story is compelling, the action is exciting". Another simply added: "Just saw the new Star Trek movie and it MELTED MY PANTS!!!!!"

The enthusiasm carried over to the Sydney Opera House premiere, where one viewer reported "there were a lot of moments where the audience spontaneously burst into applause".

Nimoy, who played Vulcan crew member Spock in the television series and several films, has a role in the prequel.

Heroes actor Zachary Quinto, who plays the younger Spock, commented at the premiere: "Leonard and I have become very close in this process and his experience has been unique to him and mine will be unique to me."

The new cast also features Winona Ryder, Eric Bana and, as the younger version of Scotty, British actor Simon Pegg.
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