So, Star Trek. It’s genuinely difficult to know how to approach a film like this. For most people, the name alone is enough. Star Trek has always seemed a peculiarly, almost a jealously, insular franchise. Either the thought of a new film fills you with joy; or it doesn’t.
Or maybe that’s an old fashioned way of looking at it. After all, the point of JJ Abrams coming on board is to ‘reboot’ the series – open it up to new fans by playing down the whole Trekker mythology, and making a simple, honest-to-goodness giant sci-fi flick, the likes of which are getting rarer and rarer these days.
At least, that’s the impression that both the man and his movie gave in London this morning, although both of them failed to be entirely convincing.
Abrams himself got up to introduce four clips from the new film, due for a release in May 2009. He began by protesting that he’d never been a fan of the original series, and how, if he’d been told it was the eleventh film in the franchise, he’d never have agreed to do it.
That he did agree to do it was, he revealed, down to the fact that, once signed on as producer, the script he received from Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman was so good that he would have been jealous of the filmmaker that got the chance to direct it.
He’s an engaging speaker, although you get the sense that his anti-Star Trek vibe is all part of the film’s big sell; the clean break it’s making with its past. Only it isn’t. As became apparent when watching the footage.
The footage… Four clips from disparate parts of the film that gave an inkling of the plot, but were much more about showcasing the mood, tone, performances and special effects of the package.
The first clip was all about Chris Pine’s Kirk – an all attitude roughneck with ‘ap-ti-tood abilities off the chart’, but a problem with authority. We see him get into a bar fight over Uhura, before being convinced to join Star Fleet by his dead dad’s old buddy, Commander Pike. In the second clip Kirk is seen onboard the Enterprise for the first time, where we’re introduced to Spock (Zachary Quinto), Bones (Karl Urban) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin – who apparently is genuinely Russian, but you’d swear he’s doing a bad impression of one). Here we see Kirk’s maverick streak clashing with Spock’s cold logic over whether or not the Enterprise is heading into a Romulan trap. The final two clips were more about showcasing some stunning effects work, with Kirk and a team assaulting a Romulan space drill; and introducing Simon Pegg’s Scotty. Pegg was at the event too, helpfully describing the feeling of playing Scotty as ‘indescribable’.
First of all: the good. I like Abrams as a filmmaker. I like his style – he’s kind of old fashioned, or perhaps Spielbergian, in that he believes in the power of the image over the edit. The footage on display here was full of gorgeous wide angles and panoramic alien vistas, allowing you to really drink in the quality effects work and the stunning architecture of the action sequences. It made me hopeful that we might be presented with a truly authentic-seeming futuristic world, one that gets the nuts and bolts detail right. I’m not sure we’ve seen one of those since Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
Chris Pine oozes charisma as Kirk. This is no William Shatner impression – in fact, there may be something too modern and bratish about the performance, unless we see him really begin to learn the gravitas and authority of a leader.
The shots of the Enterprise – mostly interiors – were mixed. It looked very clean and sparkly, as befits the just-finished flagship of Star Fleet, but it might not have the charm of, say, the Millennium Falcon, the classic ‘bucket o’ bolts’ style spaceship we’re used to.
But the main problem with Star Trek, although you don’t want to be too down about something based on an incomplete series of clips, is a very simple fact: it simply isn’t possible to divest yourself of 50 years of history. And even if you wanted to (and I don’t think Abrams really does) the fans wouldn’t let you. To that end, a cameo by Leonard Nimoy and several performances that feel bogged down in pastiche (Bones especially), add to an inescapable sense of ennui. This is a shiny new Star Trek, but it’s still Star Trek, and quite what that means in the twenty-first century is difficult to pin down.
God, this all sounds a bit serious doesn’t it based on less than half an hour of footage? Let’s be clear: it all looked slick and fancy and – most of all – expensive. All the god-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars are up there cascading from the screen in finely rendered fireworks. It’s just that I thought we lived in a post-Star Trek world, where the future looked like Serenity, or hopefully even Avatar. Abrams seems to acknowledge that too, but however much he plays with the same kind of broad, ironic humour as Joss Whedon, he’s forever lumbered with a heritage that even he professes not to want.
All in all, this film remains a fascinating proposition. Abrams and the other head honchos certainly seemed pleased with the reception. I was eavesdropping on their conversation outside the cinema, where Abrams declared himself happy with the response, ‘especially from a Brit audience’. If we’ve got one tip for Abrams and the Paramount brass, it’s simply this: don’t leave your three gigantic Mercedes waiting for you in Soho. It plays murder with the traffic.
