Stellar journey - Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Stellar journey

After 43 years, seven television series and 10 feature films, it’s a lot tougher for the legendary “Star Trek” franchise to continue boldly going where it has never gone before.

But “Star Trek,” the franchise’s eagerly awaited 11th big-screen outing, is built on a premise as brilliantly simplistic as it is completely irresistible:

Dig to the very roots to see how the original Enterprise crew — Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto, a dead ringer for a young Leonard Nimoy), McCoy (Karl Urban), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Chekov (Anton Yelchin) and Sulu (John Cho) — comes together for what has become a never-ending “five-year mission.”

Hollywood’s wildly hit-or-miss treatment of the previous 10 “Trek” films has conditioned fans to hold their collective breath for each new entry in the canon.

You can exhale now; this one is up there with the best of them, due in no small part to the skill with which director J.J. Abrams, of TV’s “Alias” and “Lost,” and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, both “Alias” alums, strike a near-perfect balance of reverent homage and irreverent wink-and-nod.

All seven iconic crew members get to riff on the personality traits that were their touchstones in the original TV series. The thrill, of course, is that here the characters are experiencing, for the first time, things that we’ve known about for more than four decades.

As such, when McCoy growls, “Damn it, man, I’m a doctor, not a physicist,” or when Scotty runs around the bowels of the ship trying to squeeze just a bit more power from his poor, overtaxed engines, the effect for fans is something much like catnip.

But Abrams and the writers don’t settle just for obvious riffs; they find new and clever ways to tweak some famous milestones, such as TV’s first interracial kiss between William Shatner’s Kirk and Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura. Here, we learn that Kirk isn’t the first Enterprise crew member with whom Uhura locks lips.

Same with the production design. It’s all familiar, but there are many fresh and subtle twists.

For example, the shimmery transporter process is different — because in the film’s setting, the technology is still in its relative infancy, and young Scotty hasn’t yet invented the groundbreaking advances that will push it several generations forward.

But the main lure here is seeing the origins of the bond between the fearless, reckless Kirk and the cool, logical Spock, with childhood scenes showing the formation of those personality traits — which had them loathing each other when they first met.

And then the film piles on bonuses; about halfway in, a beloved — and uncredited — “Trek” icon shows up to play a large role in the rest of the story.

Speaking of story, this one’s a beauty. A renegade Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana) is seeking vengeance against Spock, whom he blames for the destruction of the Romulan home world. Piloting an almost impossibly large and powerful warship, Nero first targets the planet Vulcan, and then zeros in on the half-human Spock’s adopted planet. That would be Earth.

It sounds more straightforward than it is; black holes are involved, which lead to rifts in that eternally pesky space-time continuum and allow the story to perform a whirlwind series of loops and barrel-rolls.

The action is virtually nonstop, with spectacular visuals such as the Enterprise dropping out of warp smack in the middle of the swirling debris field of six other Federation ships that Nero has just shredded into scrap.

And in a rarity for this kind of film, Abrams achieves a harmonic convergence of action and character development. Both barrel along at warp speed, neither impeding the other.

As sure as the Bajoran wormhole can pop you from the Alpha Quadrant to the Gamma Quadrant in the blink of an eye, the more obsessive-compulsive Trekkies in the vast fan base will find minuscule continuity details to tribble over.

That would be a serious case of missing the galaxy for the asteroids. The big, beautiful, hugely entertaining “Star Trek” is all anyone could have hoped for, and more — a rousing new chapter in one of the most durable pop-culture concepts in American history.

(Rated PG-13 for violence. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.)

THE FIRST WAVE

Two more high-profile, big-budget blockbuster hopefuls blow into the octoplex this month to kick off the summer movie season.

‘Angels & Demons’: May 15

Symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), who revealed one of history’s biggest cover-ups in “The DaVinci Code,” returns in “Angels & Demons,” which recounts the latest clash in an age-old war between the Catholic Church and the shadowy secret society known as the Illuminati.

The film’s trailer looks highly promising, with director Ron Howard adapting Dan Brown’s novel.

The story takes Langdon to the epicenter of the Catholic Church in Rome, where he joins forces with a beautiful and enigmatic Italian scientist.

It’s “a nonstop, action-packed hunt” through crypts, catacombs and cathedrals, and even to “the heart of the most secretive vault on earth,” following a “400-year-old trail of ancient symbols that mark the Vatican’s only hope for survival.”

‘Terminator Salvation’: May 21

No Schwarzenegger this time, but “Terminator Salvation” looks like it will pack a gut-punch nonetheless. The fourth film in this venerable franchise dives head-first into the territory only hinted at in the previous three — the future war between SkyNet’s vast machine army and the remnants of humanity.

It’s 2018, and humankind is outnumbered, outgunned and on the brink of extinction. Even John Connor (the always intense Christian Bale), the leader of the resistance, is losing faith.

Then something new happens — SkyNet begins taking human prisoners, replicating living tissue to create human-looking Terminators.

Grim, gritty and packed with wall-to-wall action, “Terminator Salvation” looks to be a welcome new chapter in this classic post-apocalyptic saga.

Related reading

• Troops get peek at ‘Star Trek’

• Nimoy passes ‘Star Trek’ torch

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