Star Trek ... the perfect movie?

I saw Star Trek tonight for the second time in 8 days. I was moved by it the first time, mostly because it was such a perfect rendition of the story (I was raised on the original series), and so I wanted to see if I felt the same way again.

I did.


The casting is perfect ... every actor fits the role perfectly, and none are so typecast as to be a burden. For me, the closest one to this line is John Cho, as I am a big fan of the Harold & Kumar movies. But I think he rose above ... the "advanced hand to hand combat" scene on the drill at planet Vulcan doing most of that work in my opinion.

The retconning of the original story line is handled deftly and even subtly. I was amazed at what I picked up on this viewing ... I was something like 1/3 of the way through last time before I even *realized* that they were retconning in the first place. The whole plot is based upon the creation of singularities from "red matter" and the passing through these event horizons by several key players ... Nero and Spock.

Later on in the movie, Spock Prime (played by Leonard Nemoy himself) is able to explain to Kirk how things have changed and Nero (the villain) is able to confirm to Kirk that he was a great man on the original time-line. This moment tweaked me for a moment, but then I realized that Nero had lived most of his life in the original time-line 129 years in the future, while only spending the last 25 years in the modified time line.

The love interest between Spock and Uhura adds massive spice to the story, and the choice of Simon Pegg to play Scottie could not have been better. The line "I like this ship .... it's exciting!" with a huge smile on his face really completes the creation of the original crew.

One of the best aspects of the movie is how each of the crew is given some moments of brilliance ... Chekov (Pavel Andreievich) performs the very last second rescue of Kirk and Sulu, Sulu proves to be a brilliant pilot and excellent swordsman -- saving Kirk's life at one point, Bones is older and almost immediately becomes chief medical officer through the death of the original, and so on. Scotty is done the best, as he is under punishment in a remote outpost and Spock is able to bring him back to his former glory in one quick moment by showing him the equation he invented for transport across vast distances and to ships moving at WARP.

My son found that last point to be a little too far off of Canon, as this concept has not appeared in any of the series before ... but I am not so picky. Retconning is a time-honored method for rejuvinating older works and these changes really work ...

Brilliant.

Anyway ... enough musing ... I think this movie is as close to perfect (for Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike) as any I have ever seen. Just see it. You are nuts if you miss this one just because there has been so much Star Trek done before.