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Zachary Quinto as Spock and Chris Pine as James T Kirk in the latest outing for the crew of the Starship Enterprise |
Kirk and Spock beamed back to the beginning
STAR TREK
Directed by JJ Abrams
Certificate 15
WHILE there have been 10 Star Trek films of varying quality, this latest offering from the crew of the Enterprise brings back the old and much-loved characters and tells us the story of how the career of Captain Kirk began.
It uses a silly tale of a rogue mining ship crewed by a facial tattoo-loving alien called Nero as an excuse for some big bangs. But the interesting bit is the back story of how Kirk and Spock became best mates and won the love and respect of such staple characters as Scotty, Sulu, Uhuru and Chekhov.
We meet Kirk as a rebellious teen, zooming through the empty, straight roads of Iowa. He lacks direction, but is the son of a famed space pilot who sacrificed his life to save his crew and passengers.
After a bar-room brawl with a gang of space cadets, he is persuaded that his destiny lies on the bridge of a starship.
Meanwhile, we meet the young Spock, who is on planet Vulcan. Never quite accepted by his peers – he has a human mother – he witnesses the destruction of his planet by baddie Romulan Nero (Eric Bana). The chase is then on to stop Nero before he destroys other planets in revenge for the destruction of his own world.
This Star Trek film lacks the wobbly sets I loved as a child. It is grand, brash, and well designed. Scotty – played by Simon Pegg, has a great-looking engine room to play in. It was filmed in a Budweiser factory and leads to odd product placements as the young Kirk gets drunk on something called Bud Classic.
The costumes are as we remember them and the actors picked to play the crew we know so well are instantly recognisable. Leonard Nimoy – the original Spock – even makes an appearance.
But what is most enjoyable is the upbeat message the film sends, and this comes directly from the TV series.
The first episode, broadcast in 1966, started with the words: “Space, the final frontier”, and we followed Kirk, Spock, and the like as they visited new worlds and flew through the Cosmos bringing peace across the universe, driven by a pioneering spirit of exploration.
Star Trek caught the zeitgeist: the world was watching as the US and USSR poured millions into their space programmes, publicly to further scientific knowledge and whip up pride over human endeavour, while in fact much of it was seen to have a military aspect and was simply a way of taking the arms race upwards.
The American space programme was the subject of Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff, which recounted the story of how the US airforce had become involved in the mission to put a man on the Moon. His lucid writing revealed the reasons behind the space race and highlighted what it meant to America. Star Trek, broadcast three years before the Moon mission, was the latest TV series to encapsulate that excitement. It brought a big dollop of optimism and the makers clearly hope to show that. So often when you see a sci-fi set in the future, it is bleak and dismal, featuring a planet ruined by technological progress.
Instead, Star Trek was about co-operation and intergalactic happiness.
It has been some time since sci-fi has taken on such a rosy hue. |
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