If there’s one thing movie geeks love to do it is to create lists. Everyone’s doing them. Top ten of the year. Top ten of the decade. Top ten blockbusters with the worst CGI. It’s completely perfunctory of course, and ranking them is, especially, absurd. But it satisfies our natural human instinct to ensure everything is categorized and easily referenced. With that spirit in mind, I will be revealing my Top Ten Films of 2009, in order, each weekday, beginning now with J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek.
10. Star Trek
From the outset of 2009, Star Trek as a film series, and as a TV franchise, was dead. The last two films (Insurrection and Nemesis) were awful, and Enterprise was a valiant, but failed attempt to make hip a property widely known for the opposite. Leave it to J.J. Abrams, the skilful TV auteur behind Alias and Lost, Mi:III and, in concept at least, Cloverfield, to achieve just what Enterprise failed to do: make Star Trek cool again.
Hardcore fans may be upset that Abrams has fashioned Trek into an action-driven space-opera more akin to its fanboy rival, Star Wars. I am not, nor have ever been a serious Trek fan, my familiarity with series extending no further than many: First Contact, The Wrath of Khan and the odd episode of TNG or DS9. In other words, precisely the audience at which the 2009 revisioning takes aim.
With a gleeful energy and abundance of lens flares, this new Trek seamlessly blends thrilling action with a well drawn Spock/Kirk origin story. After Abrams, it is a success is largely because of its cast, especially Chris Pine as Kirk, paying homage to Shatner but making it his own, and Zachary Quinto, a surprisingly good Spock given his bland work as Sylar on the troubled Heroes.
The screenplay (by blockbuster go-to team Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) has its contrivances, but it’s also deft at establishing over a half dozen characters, and doing so with clever nods to the original series. Star Trek is not a great film, but it’s an exciting and polished refashioning of a beloved property, and that’s why it’s my tenth best film of the year.
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