Hey there, internets. Here it is, my first honest to gods review in, well... it has been a while. But let's move on.

STAR TREK was not the unmitigated disaster that its trailers predicted.

There was a lot of enthusiastic praise for the movie being bandied around the webs this weekend – it has an astonishing 96% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes – but I gotta wonder if these folks saw the same movie I did. Don't get me wrong, Star Trek ain't bad, but I'm hesitant to praise or even recommend it. As a summer action movie, it gets the job done: it's a noisy, brightly colored series of set pieces and space battles with an enjoyable cast and little expectations of its audience. It's also relentlessly stupid.

I know, it's hard to see that as anything other than a negative review, but it is. This isn't a bold new direction on the franchise, it's Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with spaceships. JJ's new Trek looks and sounds like the original, but only briefly and rarely touches the feel of the original.

Like with last year's Old Man Indy, I'm overall fairly apathetic about 2009's Star Trek. As a child raised on Trek in the 80s (namely The Next Generation and the Kirk-era movies), that I had no real emotional reaction to the reboot/relaunch is either JJ & co's greatest success or failure (I'm sure their $70+ million haul this weekend ranks slightly higher on their list of accomplishments than any accolade I could offer, but fuck 'em). New Trek didn't filled me with giddy, nostalgic geek joy, nor did it enrage my fiercest nerd sensibilities. It was there, and from time to time it was enjoyable, though never engaging.

The whole premise of the movie irks me in its artificiality. If you hadn't heard, this isn't a straight re-make ala Batman Begins or Casino Royale. The entire narrative is structured around relaunching the franchise with a new cast without rewriting the last 40 years of Trek cannon. Honestly, for as much as I dislike the rationale behind the story, I have to admire it. The folks behind this new one (Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman, or Paramount) built their movie around a needless and silly time-travel gimmick as to avoid offending the die hard Trekkies who kept the franchise on life support for the last ten years. And while my jaded heart is genuinely warmed by the gesture, it sure as shit doesn't make for a compelling story. Well, it could have – but it didn't. In preserving the franchise's legacy, the makers of this Trek have failed to make an actual movie. This film is all convoluted and empty set-up for a new franchise and not a movie that stands on its own merits. I would much rather have seen a straight-up reboot than this apologetic and uninteresting mess.*

In the least spoilery language possible, the basic premise of the movie is thus: Nero (Eric Bana), a tattooed and cantankerous Romulan, travels back through time to fuck shit up (which he does). In doing so, he alters history and creates a timeline separate from the one starring Shatner, Nimoy and the rest. Hence, the franchise is born anew and the old-canon adventures are protected (but are still fair game for the remaking). But these exhaustive attempts to be excruciatingly faithful to the source material by not doing all the things a typical reboot does fall apart when they do all the things a typical reboot does. I know it's nitpicky, but it seems silly to insist on tying this obvious (and necessary) reboot to the old canon while still being a reboot in every way. The technology, ships, uniforms and locations have all been updated, as has the cast, but we're still meant to assume that Chris Pine is the same Kirk that Shatner was. I realize this requires a fairly meager suspension of disbelief from the audience, but that inconsistency underlines how needless the rebootquel setup is. Audiences like reboots an inexplicably love origin stories – why not give them just that and scrap the religious devotion to what's come before?

There's a lot that does work, though, especially the cast. Most of them, at least. Chris Pine (who I've only seen in the especially mediocre Bottle Shock, in which he was especially mediocre) more than acquits himself as Jim Kirk. Even when he was given transparently expository dialog or a handful or lousy one-liners, he was good. He even threw a few welcome Shatnerisms into the mix. Karl and the Urban Rock Doom, who's been lousy in a string of post-Lord of the Rings flops, absolutely owns Bones McCoy. He's the only member of the new cast who attempts to mimic his predecessor, and he pulls it off quite well. Of the few laughs that the movie managed to elicit from me, half went to Urban. I just wish he did more than be a first-act sidekick for Kirk and then vanish for the rest of the movie. The other half of the laughs went to Simon Pegg's Scotty. The only part of the movie's initial casting to excite me was Pegg – anybody who's ever seen his work with Edgar Wright (or even last year's under appreciated How to Lose Friends & Alienate People) knows the guy is a terrific comic actor, but that's not the Pegg we get here. Instead, recall the Pegg from JJ's M:I3: funny and watchable in a completely throwaway character, Pegg elevates lousy material simply by virtue of being smarter than the script. His Scott is, alongside Urban's McCoy, one of this film's only real standouts, even when he's delivering shit double-entendre's about the Enterprise' “ample nacelles, if you know what I mean” (we do) or trading barbs with a muppet (seriously).

The one cast member I won't comment on is Zachary Quinto as Spock. He's either acceptably bland or astoundingly bad, I really can't decide. Regardless, his frequent smirking is unsettling. His Spock could flip out at any moment and choke a bitch, and that just ain't Spock-like.

The rest of the cast does what they can with the script (which gives them nothing to work with), but they're all sadly forgettable. Zoe Saldana Uhura, while sexy as hell, adds nothing to the movie but a great set of legs. I say that in defense of the actress, mind you; she's good in the movie as the confident 23rd century career woman, but a romantic entanglement with one of the main three (hint: it ain't Kirk) does not constitute a character arc, even a shitty one. John Cho's Sulu is even more one-note. The script succumbs to that age-old screenwriting cliche, which is that All Asian People Know Martial Arts. He has essentially two scenes in the movie, neither of which ask any more of Cho than to be Asian. Also, George Takei? Japanese. Sulu? Japanese. Cho? Yeah. And Anton Yeltzin's defining characteristic as Chekov is possessing an incomprehensible (and not at all convincing) Russian accent. Like Sulu and, to a lesser extent, Scott, Chekov is comic relief not because his character is inherently funny, but because funny (in a Paul Blart: Mall Cop way) things happen to him. They're the butt of the jokes.

It's that sense of humor that bugs me the most about the movie. The action is all very exciting, if never wholly original, and the cast for the most part works. But the humor aims too damn low to be actually funny. Instead of getting clever jokes and exchanges derived from character and circumstance, Orci and Kurtzman inundate us with cheap sight gags, easy jokes and some embarrassingly dumb “comic” beats, all of which come not from the characters but at their expense. Chekov's inability to give the computer recognizable voice commands is an unfunny rip on a gag in Star Trek IV, and it wasn' terribly amusing then, either. Sulu's failure to disengage the ship's parking break when disembarking spacedock is both asinine and worthless (except for providing an amateur plot convenience, but more on that later). Worst of all must be Kirk's “hilarious” allergic reaction to a shot Bones gives him, a gag borrowed from the seminal Will Smith comedy Hitch. Having seen only that film's trailer, I can only assume (rightly I'd wajor) that the gag is just as retarded in a romantic comedy as it is in science fiction.

The movie also features not only a Red Shirt (whose death is telegraphed and uninteresting), but also the old Trek staple, inexplicable death trap in the bowels of the Enterprise. I get the desire to embrace all aspects of old school Trek, but incorporating two widely-ridiculed (and repeated) devices is just damn stupid.***

There's just so much potential squandered by a lazy, seemingly-incomplete script. There were moments when I felt like I was watching place-holder scenes, where the writers dumped in cliché and archetypes, intending to replace them in later drafts with, y'know, writing. I realize Orci and Kurtzman (Transformers) aren't Tom Stoppard or William Monaghan (or even Paul Haggis), but even by their low standard this is lazy writing. Star Trek screams “strike movie,” even more so than the abhorrently bad Wolverine did, and it's frustrating - because, unlike that movie, this Trek is actually halfway decent.

*Why in the hell did this have to happen? Why did Paramount think that the Star Trek fans wouldn't accept a remake, which has become a fairly common storytelling aberration in the last decade. The James Bond and Batman fans swallowed it just fine, and like in Star Trek, there's more bad in those franchises than good.

**SPOILER! This problem (which could likely just be my problem) is brought to a head when Nimoy appears as old Spock, traveled back from the future. He looks at Pine and recognizes Kirk – obviously Pine couldn't and shouldn't appear exactly like The Shat, but Spock Prime's recognition is jarring. Not nearly as jarring as a scene he has with Quinto's Spock, though.

***Especially considering that JJ's own Lost self-consciously does Red Shirts A. more often, and B. more lazily than Roddenberry's Trek ever did.