To Boldly Go: Why Star Trek is the New Star Wars

A man in a suit.

If you're wondering why J.J. Abrams' Star Trek is so fantastic, look no further than that above statement. Unlike the Star Wars prequels, which were suffocated with a balled up sheet of green screen by George Lucas, Mr. Abrams went decidedly lo-fi for his $150-million-plus budgeted space adventure. During a key scene on an ice planet (that is in no way supposed to remind you of Hoth--or so hope Mr. Abrams' lawyers), Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock-from-the-future (don't ask) go looking for old/new friend Scotty and encounter his companion: a child-sized alien with eyeballs that look like small tongues.

Now, if this was one of the Star Wars prequels--pick your poison, literally--this alien would have been a marvel of technological achievement: a motion-captured vision, as sharp and cutting edge as anything you've ever seen. But in Star Trek? It's basically a small man wearing a mask. Oh sure, maybe there are some fancy FX at work within the scene, but basically Kirk and Spock are talking to a Halloween costume. And you know what? It works like gangbusters. The man-in-a-suit adds something incredibly important to the proceedings: weight within the shot.

This is just one of the many reasons why Star Trek is the heir apparent to the original Star Wars, which, if you remember, had its fair share of men-in-suits. It's the type of film everyone who loves the Original Trilogy (TM) had hoped Mr. Lucas would create with the prequels; it's taken years, but our thirst has finally been quenched.

As I wrote today for The Observer, if you've seen Star Wars (and some of Empire Strikes Back), you've pretty much seen Star Trek already. Mr. Abrams doesn't hide his geek-love for the Rosetta Stone of populist science fiction. And that's fine: while Mr. Abrams and his frequent co-collaborators, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (the co-writers of Transformers, who work with Mr. Abrams on Fringe), don't necessarily have an original thing to say with Star Trek, they've seen Star Wars and the works of Young Steven Spielberg enough times to create their own mix tape of awesomeness.

If filmmaking in 2009 has degraded into some form of mimicry--the collected works of Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sam Mendes, and many others can be used as examples of this--then Star Trek might be the first true blockbuster of the Guitar Hero School of Cinema. Even if Mr. Abrams' film is only a superficial redux of Star Wars-via-Vintage-Spielberg, it doesn't matter because he's got the motions down so perfectly. Star Trek succeeds in ways that you can't even believe: it's visceral and intelligent; intimate and broad; expensive and cheap; futuristic and corny. And it flies along like the best works of Michael Bay (Mr. Abrams' directorial style is like Mr. Bay on Decaf). Wearing a seat belt isn't required for viewing, but it should be encouraged.

After The Dark Knight absolutely blew my mind last summer, I thought it would be years before another summer blockbuster reached such heights. Little did I know it would only take ten months. Oh sure, Star Trek isn't the type of thought-provoking and theatrical raison d'être that Christopher Nolan's seminal film was from a pure "filmmaking" level; but, it's also about fifty times more "fun" than The Dark Knight while never resorting to stupidity (like my recent favorite summer blockbuster, Transformers, does with frequency). If Mr. Abrams is indeed the future of populist entertainment, then I only have one thing to say:

Beam me up.