One man, John Harrison by name, has declared war on Star Fleet. It goes without saying that "John Harrison" is not his real name, and it turns out that he has, at least in his own mind, good reasons. Who he is and what his reasons are provide the basis of the story, as Capt. James T. Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise start off in pursuit, armed with 72 specially modified torpedoes. Their orders are simple: find him (he happens to be on the Klingon homeworld) and eliminate him. It's not going to be easy to pull this off: the likelihood of open war between the Klingon Empire and the Federation is all too high if they're discovered.
And don't think that possibility hasn't occurred to more than one person.
It's hard to know where to start with this one. I haven't been following the various Star Trek spin-offs on TV, or the films, so I'm just going to take this as a stand-alone, pretty much, except where it butts up against memory. (And yes, I realize this is a sequel, and I have since laid hands on the first one in this series, which I may review at some point.)
Let's start with the bones of the thing. The script is admirable, tight and focused, and the subplots are kept firmly under control. And we have preparation for the revelations (and hoo, boy! are there ever revelations!) and the reversals (plenty of those, too), not blatant, but they're there. One never gets the feeling that the writers reached into their handy-dandy bag of plot twists to keep the story going.
There's a good balance to the mood and tone, enough so that the funny parts are funny, the poignant parts grab at you, and the edge-of-the-seat parts keep you right where they want you.
Which brings us to the cast. Stellar. This is a younger Enterprise crew, and there's less of that "professional cool" I remember from the early TV series and films. Chris Pine's Kirk is not William Shatner's Kirk -- more openly headstrong, more openly rebellious, and equally stubborn, with a heavy dose of idealism. The same goes for Zachary Quinto's Spock -- yes, it's Spock, but not the Spock I remember. Anton Yelchin as Chekhov made quite an impression: he's young, he finds himself thrown into a situation in which he's barely treading water, and it's all there, the insecurity, the determination, the panic, the overriding need to handle it. And I have to mention Benedict Cumberbatch, who is a major reason I wanted to see this one. (I think I'm turning into a groupie.) Spoiler alert, although I don't know that I'm giving anything away here: Cumberbatch's Khan is not Montalban's Khan. Cumberbatch doesn't bother with bluster, and he's really, really scary: he's a portrait of cold purpose fueled by deep anger, driven past the point where questions of honor and fair play might matter.
Director J. J. Abrams has kept this one on course. There are a couple of scenes that could have been tighter, where the momentum falters, but only by a little: the film grabs you and holds you from the earliest scenes, clues are apparent without being blatant, the emotional continuity is coherent and believable. It's a beautifully constructed film, and it's to Abrams' credit that no single element rean away with it.
Random Observations:
I suppose the casting directors took into account the physical resemblances between this cast and the original cast. It's there -- Pine looks more and more like Shatner as the film progresses, Quinto bears an even stronger resemblance to Nimoy (who makes a guest appearance), even to the timbre of the voice, and Karl Urban could actually be a younger DeForest Kelley.
There is an intensely emotional scene between Spock and Kirk that is the culmination of the relationship we've seen throughout the film. I don't know that I'd call it "homoerotic" particularly -- I think that misses the point. It struck me as a comment on the human capacity for love (and remember, Spock is half human), with the conclusion that the boundaries of love are marked mainly by social conventions.
A thought on Star Trek: Those who follow science fiction have generally thrown up their hands at its various translations to film and television. Those adaptations often wound up being formulaic, trite, and not very imaginative, and all too often missed the most important thing: science fiction has always been a literature of ideas, of explorations starting with the question "What if. . . ?" Gene Roddenberry managed the substance, posing sometimes difficult questions in the context of space opera, not usually considered the most profound of sub-genres. It works.
(Paramount Picture, Skydance, Bad Robot, 2013) PG-13, 2 hr. 12 min.
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