When I heard that J. J. Abrams directed the new Star Trek movie I was worried. Between Lost, Cloverfield, and Fringe J. J. doesn’t seem to know how to end stories. He relies too heavily on cliff-hangers.

But J. J. does know how to do sound. Star Trek successfully mixes the suffocating silence of the vacuum transparently with the pew-pew of futuristic space weapons, and the scene with young Kirk blasting the 200-year old Sabotage by the Beasties reminded me of Alex’s Beethoven obsession in A Clockwork Orange. “Wow, this classical music is the perfect soundtrack for my crime spree.”

The CG is great. There are some nice space battles, as expected. The hulking sci-fi structures in the haze of Iowa’s horizon give a nice sense of a real place in another time. I just wish the camera stayed still long enough for us to enjoy the effects. The movie uses a lot of fast cuts, more Star Wars than Space Odyssey, more popcorn action flick than sci-fi film.

Actually, this Star Trek owes quite a bit to Star Wars: the farm boy gets into a bar fight at his backwater spaceport; warp drives boom suddenly as ships blast off; cute, Ewok-style aliens annoy the characters. The villain, Nero, even travels around in what is essentially a Death Star.

Nero stops the film from being truly great. Bad guys can’t be pure evil, they end up looking like cardboard cutouts. Even Darth Vader said he was sorry in the end. Nero’s redeeming qualities are glossed over too quickly for me to empathize with the guy. Fans of the prequel comic, Star Trek: Countdown, got his tragic backstory fully: Blue-collar guy loses family, wants revenge. In the film, apart from a brief mention of his wife, Nero is a caricature of evil.

Good heroes need great villains. Nero’s weaknesses as a character reflect poorly on Kirk.

That aside, I thought the story was decent, and J. J. didn’t disappoint me: the plot comes to a satisfying conclusion — no cliff-hangers! If you’re looking for a Transformers-style sci-fi romp, you won’t be disappointed. 8 of 10.

Written for Edge News Vancouver. Cross-posted to MPF.