Tom McGee's Blog

The LF and I went out to see the new Star Trek pic Saturday night. The local theater at Essex Green was showing it on its biggest screen, which was especially nice.

But does it live up to the hype? Largely yes. We enjoyed it from start to finish. It’s a nice young cast, with a good script, and out-of-this-world special effects. The list of “digital artists” in the closing credits was daunting — there must have been hundreds of them.

Spoilers Below

We got especially interested in seeing it (well, we would have seen it anyway) after watching J.J. Abrams on Charlie Rose a few nights earlier. He confessed that he wasn’t a real Trek aficionado, and didn’t follow the mythology all that closely. So the trick he pulls out of his sleeve is actually perfect.

The whole movie is what they call in sci-fi parlance an “alternate timeline.” In the first scene the Romulan Nero goes back in time 150 years or so and changes history. Everything that happens thereafter is a byproduct. The characters are all there but their back stories, along with the back stories of Star Fleet, are all different.

So presto — no carping about how this or the other thing isn’t like in the Original Series. It has to be different.

The other question is I suppose can you watch this and understand what’s going on without having seen the original episodes? Largely, yes. It’s hard for me to judge of course, having seen them all multiple times. I can’t really put them out-of-mind while watching. But the action is good and the script is pretty coherent. A lot of the characters have become enough a part of the popular zeitgeist — Kirk’s womanizing, Spock’s logic-vs-emotion conundrum — that you’ll be able to pick it up. Other in-jokes are there for the benefits of us who saw it way back when, but I think they’re funny enough anyway.

So if your a Trek fan willing to put aside prejudices of what’s supposed to be where — and you have to because this is an alternate timeline — by all means go. And if you’re just an average citizen looking for a fun space opera, go as well. Abrams has done a good enough job with rebooting the franchise that I’m sure we’re going to see more in this series.