Boldly Go…

GIANT gets a sneak peek of footage from one of next summer’s biggest blockbusters.  Set phasers to sweet!

Paramount Pictures threw open the doors to the retrofitted Enterprise on Monday night when they screened about twenty minutes from their highly anticipated summer blockbuster, Star Trek, for a roomful of NYC journos.  Director J.J. Abrams was in the house for the event and discussed his reasons for agreeing to take on the thankless task of rebooting the stalled franchise for the 21st century.  “I’ve never been a fan of Star Trek,” he said off the top.  Not surprisingly, this remark elicited several boos from the crowd, which was filled with more than a few Trekkers.  But Abrams, who made his feature filmmaking debut with the better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Mission: Impossible III back in 2006, quickly hastened to add that, though the experience of making this movie, he fell in love with the concept that Gene Roddenberry dreamed up back in 1966.  “My goal was to make it legitimate,” he explained.  “Star Wars is set in a galaxy far, far away, but Star Trek is a version of our future.”

After his introduction, Abrams stuck around to set up each of the four scenes that we were going to see.  The first sequence introduced us to the new James Tiberius Kirk, played by relative newbie actor Chris Pine.  Since Abrams is basically making Star Trek Begins here, Kirk is still a thrill-seeking farm boy who has yet to don the Starfleet uniform.  The Federation has a training camp not too far from his home though and he spends most of his evenings at the local bar where cadets relax in their off-time.  It’s here that he first lays eyes on the lovely Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and gets his ass beat by four other tough-guy students for daring to flirt with her.  His moxy impresses Starfleet veteran Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who convinces the brash young kid to enlist.  The scene ends with Kirk throwing his duffel bag on a transport shuttle to the Academy, vowing to graduate in three years.

Scene #2 picks up with Starfleet facing a major crisis: Vulcan’s under attack and needs backup pronto.  So cadets and officers alike are loaded onto souped-up ships and sent into battle.  All except for Kirk that is, who is in the middle of his umpteenth suspension.  Fortunately, his doctor pal McCoy (Karl Urban) comes up with a way to smuggle him aboard Pike’s ship, the Enterprise.  Just as they’re about to warp to Vulcan, Kirk realizes they’re flying into an ambush and gets to Pike just in time to avoid the ship being blown to smithereens.

In the process, he makes an enemy of the captain’s first officer, Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto), which leads into Scene #3.  After Pike is incapacitated, Spock assumes command of the Enterprise and his first order as captain is to beam Kirk off the ship to a place where he can’t cause any more trouble.  That location turns out to be a deserted factory on a remote planet whose only inhabitant is a cranky Scotsman named–you guessed it!–Montgomery Scott (Simon Pegg).  Scotty’s been exiled by Starfleet because he keeps coming up with “crazy” theories, like being able to beam a person aboard a ship travelling at warp speed.  This is also the scene, by the way, where we got our first glimpse of Leonard Nimoy as the elderly Spock, who has travelled back in time to help Kirk avert an unspecified disaster that will alter the course of the furture.  With Spock’s help, Scotty is able to put his theory into action and gets Kirk back aboard the Enterprise.  But not before Nimoy gets a chance to deliver his signature line with his signature split-finger salute: “Live long and prosper.”

The fourth and final scene we saw was also the longest and most action-packed.  It begings with Kirk, Sulu (John Cho) and a redshirt base jumping off a small shuttle ship over Vulcan’s orbit and free-falling through the atmosphere, deploying parachutes at the last possible moment to land on a platform suspended high above the planet’s surface.  (In a development that shouldn’t surprise any Trekker, Kirk and Sulu make it, but the redshirt doesn’t.)  On the platform, the duo battle a few Romulans before falling off themselves.  This time though, their parachute is ripped away, so it’s up to Russian Enterprise officer Chekov (Anton Yelchin) to beam them back on board before they have an up close and personal encounter with one of Vulcan’s rocky mountain ranges.

And with that, our Star Trek experience was over and done.  Overall thoughts?  Well, first off, the scope of this thing is freakin’ enormous.  As Abrams described the plot to us (which I’m not going to reveal in detail here…gotta save some surprises for May, right?), I kept thinking, “All of this is really going to happen in one movie?”  Word is that Paramount has also invested around $150 million in Star Trek and you can definitely see every dollar onscreen.  The action is fast-paced, intense and mostly implausible–base jumping from outer space????—which makes the movie seem closer to classic Bond than classic Star Trek.  Visually, the film is unlike any of the previous Trek features; Abrams’ camera swoops and swirls around the action and the frame constantly jitters during the dialogue exchanges as well.  And while the director has retained the same costumes and basic ship design from the original series, the interiors of the Enterprise are vastly different.  Honestly, it was a little hard to wrap my head around at first.  Growing up on the show’s cardboard sets and cheap props, I had a hard time orienting myself on this Enterprise.

Getting used to the new cast was another hurdle.  Based on these twenty minutes, Urban, Pegg and Yelchin seem the most comfortable in their parts, although Urban needs to give the constant eyebrow-twitching a rest.  I also liked what I saw of Saldana’s Uhura, who basically comes across as a 23rd century version of Sydney Bristow from Abrams’ late, great spy series Alias.  Not registering as strongly are Cho and Greenwood, but perhaps they have better moments elsewhere in the movie.  As for Pine and Quinto…well the jury’s still out.  Fact is, these guys have the biggest shoes to fill and it’ll take more than four scenes to prove they can step in for the dynamic duo of Shatner and Nimoy.  Quinto at least bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Nimoy, but he doesn’t immediately command the same quiet authority.  In Pine’s case, he’s got Shatner’s golden-boy looks, but not the off-kilter sensibility that made the original Kirk much more than a bland action hero.  To Pine’s credit though, he’s not trying to do a lame Shatner impersonation.  He’s playing Kirk his way and I’m more than willing to keep an open mind when I walk into the theater to see the entire movie next May.