Looking for a movie to watch this weekend, I saw that a theater near me was showing the 2009 Star Trek. I’ve been meaning to watch the movie again, I remember loving it; though not being much of a Trek fan at the time. It was cool and it’s much of the reason I was optimistic when J. J. Abrams was announced as the director of the then-untitled Star Wars: Episode VII. But it’s been fourteen years (!!!) since it came out, and probably a decade since I’ve seen it and lately I’ve been wondering if it held up. What way better to find out than to watch it on a big screen?
And, man, it does hold up.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s very 2009. There are some off-putting gender politics in play and there’s a surprising amount of machismo and brawling in it (turns out, a lot of problems can be resolved with some fisticuffs). But for the most part, it still really works!
It feels like really good space-opera science-fiction, with grand spectacles and thrilling heroics. The spaceships are cool, planets exciting. It’s all wrapped up in a movie that moves at an almost breakneck speed, paced so that you’re just able to catch up on what’s happened when there’s another curveball thrown that pushes it along. You don’t feel lost in it, though, since the movie’s main characters, Kirk and Spock, are compelling enough that they anchor you throughout the action. The other characters (including a woefully shafted Uhura) exist in broad strokes and round out the adventure, with just enough character to keep them rememberable and recognizable.
But watching this movie fourteen years later and after having watched some actual Star Trek (and absolutely loving the recent Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds), I do see the validity of the 2009 Star Trek not really feeling like Star Trek. Oh sure, there’s the Enterprise and the optimism and the characters — that’s all there and the movie does a good job of capturing it all. When compared to the others, though, this movie’s more brash; there’s a bigger focus on action and doing things and less on figuring things out and thinking out a solution. It’s still a lot of fun, but it does certainly feel like an answer to the question “What if the original Enterprise crew were in a Star Wars?” That answer certainly worked to get my eighteen-year-old self in the theater back then.
At the end of it all, it was a joy revisiting Star Trek in theaters. Yeah, it’s not perfect (it’s a letdown that the climax is a vague gunfight), but it’s a movie where I was grinning for swatches of time. It’s fun, it’s grandiose, it’s great science-fiction! And man, I’ve been humming that score for the last few hours
Essays, Not Rants! 