Star Trek

Terrific summer movie. JJ Abrams reboots the Star Trek franchise by starting, not at the very beginning, but before that: before the 1960’s TV series, before Kirk and Spock and the crew of the Starship Enterprise got acquainted, before the ship was voyaging. It’s clever stuff, because even though there have been ten Star Trek films – six with the original cast – this Star Trek seems like the original movie version of a much loved old story, like you’re seeing favorite characters come to life on screen for the very first time. Or anyway, a youngster version of them.

So we meet James Tiberius Kirk as a brash young man, oozing bad attitude but charming as hell; he gets into a bar brawl with a bunch of clean cut Starfleet recruits, and comes to the attention of Captain Christopher Pike, familiar to true Trekkies as the original commander of the starship Enterprise. Pike, it turns out, wrote his PhD thesis on Kirk’s father, a famously courageous starship captain who saved his crew (as well as his wife and son) by sacrificing himself in a battle with a very mysterious Romulan vessel. Who knew they had PhDs in space? Pike checks up on Kirk, discovers the young man is brilliant, if incorrigible, and talks him into joining Starfleet. “You’ll graduate in four years,” Pike says. “I’ll do it in three,” Kirk rashly responds. And away we go.

Chris Pine is dazzling as Captain Kirk; he deftly pulls out the swaggering essence of the legendary captain without a hint of imitation. Zachary Quinto is slightly less convincing as Spock, but that might be due to his suggestive scenes with the stunning Lt. Uhuru. No icy veined Vulcan there. Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy and Simon Pegg as Scotty both give nods to their legendary characters (very satisfying to Star Trek fans) but also bring a youthful energy – or in Pegg’s case, a youthful goofiness – to their roles.

Of course there’s a bad guy, in this case a Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana). Nero is seething with anger towards Spock; he holds the Vulcan responsible for the destruction of his home planet. He travels through space in a colossal, dangerously armed vessel, confronting Starfleet ships, seeking Spock, hoping to wreak his revenge. His quest is complicated, though, by a rift in the space time continuum that has altered hundreds of years of events. This creates confusion for Nero, and Spock, and occasionally the audience, but it’s still nifty stuff, since it pretty much changes the future, wiping out the adventures of the original Starship Enterprise. That means that this new Enterprise can boldly go where no crew has gone before. Good set up for sequels. Opened strong over Mother’s Day weekend and still playing everywhere. If you happen to catch it on IMAX, let me know what you thought.

Cranky mutant: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a prequel to the other X-Men films, telling the story of how Wolverine got his sharp silver claws, and his nickname, and all that. He’s a mutant, as are all the X-Men, each with a different but remarkable ability, and in the best X-Men stories you have big battles where the mutants team up and outsmart bad guys using their extraordinary talents. Cool stuff. Unfortunately, Wolverine has precious little of it. In the opening scenes we meet a cast of interesting mutant characters, played by interesting actors, like Dominic Monaghan and Will i Am; they are recruited along with Wolverine and his brother Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) for a mysterious government mission in Nigeria, but then Wolverine wearies of the random bloodshed and walks away. After that the story shifts to an idyllic cabin in the Canadian Rockies where our hero is living happily ever after with a pretty teacher, and mostly the rest of the X-Men fade away, showing up only in brief scattered scenes through the rest of the movie. But there’s plenty of slam bam action, because when Wolverine goes AWOL he irks the evil Sabretooth, who is really put out that little bro walked away from the family business. So he sets about trying to destroy Wolverine’s “normal life,” and then Wolverine gets all mad (his signature beserker rage) and agrees to an experimental process to have his skeleton coated with adamantium, because he wants to become indestructible and destroy Sabretooth. Sibling stuff, on a mutant scale.

To the film’s credit, there are plot twists that will surprise anyone who isn’t a diehard fan, and many of the action scenes are well staged and fun to watch. Hugh Jackman is terrific, and Lynn Collins, who plays Kayla (Silverfox to devotees), holds her own against him and brings a nice calm to the over amped proceedings. The portrayal of the foul, motor mouth, quick as lightning Deadpool has caused great angst among X-Men fans, but Ryan Reynolds is really entertaining in the role, and it’s a shame that we don’t get to see more of him. Equally fun is Gambit, a young dude who can turn any object into a deadly weapon; he’s played by Taylor Kitsch, the bad boy from Friday Night lights. X-Men: Origins is a decent popcorn picture, I’d give it a five on a scale of one to ten; it’s no Ironman, but if you’re in the mood for this kind of movie it’s not a bad way to go. Scored the top spot at the box office on its opening weekend, but it will slip against Star Trek come Friday. (Incidentally, if you’re a fan of the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, this one is supposed to be extra good.)