I asked my wife on the way home, “Didn’t Spock go to Vulcan a bunch of times during the show?” She gave me that look that says, “You were lost, weren’t you?” And she was right; there is only so much alternative universe mumbo-jumbo I can take. I was lost – stranded in space by the creator of Lost (sorry, I couldn’t resist) – but happily so. I had a great time.
While my wife and brother-in-law were grumbling, my wife’s cousin and I bopped out of the theater grinning from ear to ear. This incarnation really takes advantage of its sizable budget. We’re space warps removed now from the cheesiness of the original series – although I did find it comforting that three people leaving the ship, two main characters and a guy in a red shirt, still means one of them is a goner. Guess which one?
And those opening sequences showing us the birth and boyhood of future Captain James Tiberius Kirk are just wow! This is the kind of fun that the Star Wars prequels should have been. It is an origin story that does much more than just show us how Bones got his name and how Scotty was always the geekiest engineer in the universe. It’s not your usual, inert, origin tale. It’s a story with things to do and places to go.
More than anything, the cast is fantastic. I could single out Chris Pine who, in moments of stress and trauma, seems a dead ringer for Shatner’s Kirk or Zachary Quinto who is Spock. But that would short change the others. I left the theater excited for the first time in ages at the promise of sequels to come. I can’t wait to explore new frontiers with them.
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