Secrets and Lies: SNOWDEN

Edward Snowden makes perfect sense as an Oliver Stone protagonist. Like JFK’s dogged district attorney Jim Garrison or Born on the Fourth of July’s veteran turned war protestor Ron Kovic, Snowden is a man whose pursuit of what he sees as unambiguous and truthful duty to country causes him to endure outer skepticism and scorn, and inner destabilizing life changes. Like Savages, The Doors, Platoon, and two Wall Streets, it’s about a young person drawn into a career with exciting upsides, but with downsides readily apparent as well. Like Nixon and W. and World Trade Center and Alexander it’s about a man driven by and ultimately fated to be crushed under the weight of history and expectation. But unlike those previous movies, Snowden finds Stone at his most restrained. He views the proceedings from a remove, not digging into the psychology as deeply, or using filmmaking flash as ostentatiously. It’s a movie that sees the spreading web of surveillance with a mournful paranoia. Look at what our government can do and has done, it says, lauding its hero while wondering if what he did will actually matter in the long run.

To best make the case for their protagonist as a misunderstood hero, Stone and co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald (The Homesman) begin by showing us Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at the point of his earliest civic duty. In 2004 he’s discharged from boot camp after a painful leg injury, after which his drive to serve his country leads him to transfer to the C.I.A. He’s a smart, unassumingly confident computer nerd who defends George W. Bush, gently teases his liberal girlfriend (Shailene Woodley) about her beliefs, and admits to a fondness for Ayn Rand. (It’s not hard to read this material as Stone inviting conservatives into the story with a “See? He’s one of you?”) The movie then follows Snowden’s gradual disillusionment with the intelligence community as he moves from one contract job to the next, finding increasingly shadier tactics used in gathering and deploying data scooped up from a global dragnet. Each new revelation gives him waves of anxiety that seem to pass, but slowly and steadily accrues in the back of his mind until he has to act.

The movie becomes a portrait of a man whose work anxiety grows so potent his only recourse is to exorcise it by releasing it into the world. There’s something of the terror I remember feeling then to this telling now. (If his revelations about the wide-ranging surveillance tactics at the fingertips of our country (and others) didn’t have you slap a piece of tape over your webcam, I don’t know what would.) Because we know what Snowden did – and what we don’t know remains Top Secret and therefore a ripe target for Stone’s mythologizing speculation – there’s little surprise to the film. It’s even structured as flashbacks around scenes of documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) filming Snowden’s secret whistleblower interview with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), footage which would become the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour. This creates a strangely sedate sense of dutiful reenactment, making the characters mere pawns in historical inevitability. Gone is the volatile conspiratorial frenzy of Stone’s heated political films or the schlocky gusto of his genre fare. Here there’s an almost serene sense of data flowing, history written in bits and clicks, coded to produce this outcome.

This calm befits what is Stone’s fastest turnaround for contemplation on a flashpoint in modern American history, beating WTC (another of his eerie calm films) by two years. Anthony Dod Mantle (frequent Danny Boyle collaborator) makes images of clean simplicity, cut with occasional smeary doubling or reflections through layers of screens and glass. Snowden is trapped in a digital world made tangible, with information glowing and streaming, collected and collated. His personal dramas – simple fights with his girlfriend, a late-breaking health issue – are halfhearted, well-acted but beside the point. The most vivid crisis points are when his work life intrudes with unwelcome force on his home life. He can’t take his medication to prevent seizures because it slows his response time. A woozy snap zoom interrupts a heated love scene as he catches the unblinking cam eye of an open laptop, the extreme close up of the tiny black circle showing their nakedness reflected in it. There are standard thriller elements of people avoiding surveillance, befitting a news story that’s already informed dozens of action movies from Jason Bourne to Captain America 2 and Furious 7. Its tension remains at a constant low-boil, mystery dulled by unavoidable outcomes.

It all adds up to a movie that’s vital and turgid, obvious but with flickers of surprise and life. The known facts of the story are bulked up with lesser-known or fictionalized incidents, inconvenient truths and convenient fictions pumped through with enjoyable personalities. Around even corner is a likable recognizable face bringing fine energy opposite their scene partners. Part of the fun is wondering who’ll show up next: Rhys Ifans, Nicolas Cage, Timothy Olyphant, Scott Eastwood, Keith Stanfield, Logan Marshall-Green, Ben Schnetzer. Each is used by Stone to keep interest and curiosity flowing, never quite sure whether each new co-worker is a sympathetic ear or a reason to raise Snowden’s disillusionment. They create a pattern to the movie’s pulsing compelling/dull, scary/stale info-dumps (the best of which is an abstract swirling animation of social media chatter and secret metadata flowing into a black hole that slowly forms an eye, the sort of image so hypnotizing it doesn’t matter how blatant the symbolism), playing key roles in the process and personifications of various view points.

In the end it’s another Stone movie of weary patriotism. It’s about the burden of being a good American, about loving the country so much it’s worth wishing it were better. Clinging stubbornly to ideals is difficult, especially when calling into question the ratio of security to liberty from within the government can make you a target for, at best, criticism and stress, and at worst jail or exile. Stone makes Snowden a figure unambiguously good, leaking information as a last-ditch effort to improve what he sees as a slippery slope to tyranny. After the deed is done he literally has Snowden walk out of the dark data center into gleaming white sunlight. And yet the unsettled aftermath – stuck in Russia, communicating in warnings from a robotic screen – creates uncertainty, ending on a slightly more ambiguous note. He receives applause and attention, yes, but isolation and confusion, too. He thought it was important we hear what was happening. Now we know. Now what?

To Infinity and STAR TREK BEYOND

Star Trek Beyond is a fine entry in a venerable franchise that’s celebrating its fiftieth year. The movie is colorful and clever, with effective adventure sequences, cool visual concepts, and the core intelligence mixed with compassionate character moments that have allowed this whole endeavor to endure, from its original 1966 TV show through five more series and 13 movies with more on the way. Through its ups and downs, the late Gene Roddenberry’s creation remains sci-fi’s shining beacon of utopian spirit. What a pleasure in these dark times, when the world feels irreparably torn by forces of division, hatred, fear, and anti-intellectualism, to settle in for a journey to a possible future where the values of science, progress, and unity have built a better society. The values are comforting, but no less an adventure when the noble crew of the starship Enterprise find themselves drawn into a conflict in uncharted space. It’s a series that dares to dream of a better tomorrow, not one without conflict, but one in which the better angels of our nature can succeed through cooperation between heart and logic.

Beyond continues the recent string of Treks set in an alternate timeline of the first series, with J.J. Abrams’ 2009 entry sending time travel ripples imagining new rebooted, recast stories for familiar characters while avoiding tampering with or otherwise erasing classic lore. This time around director Justin Lin, fresh from making four Fast & Furious movies (including a few of that series’ best), takes a step back from his predecessor’s Into Darkness, a fast, exciting movie that was nonetheless more militarized, destructive, and paranoid than the franchise’s comfort zone. Lin’s film is more in line with the show’s original goals – to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before – in a movie that’s slightly smaller in scale, like a pleasing two-part episode with action blown out to blockbuster proportions between small character work and a journey through an alien landscape. Lin gets the spirit of the enterprise, and the simple appeal of sending a likable crew into a difficult situation and watching them think their way out.

It begins with Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) feeling that life in year three of their five-year exploration mission is growing “episodic.” (That’s a cute meta wink.) He’s starting to doubt his desire to captain. Likewise, his crewmates, like stoic half-Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto) and irascible doctor McCoy (Karl Urban), wear the weariness of space heavily on their shoulders. The ship docks at a Federation station in deep space – a wondrously imagined thing that’s an idealized spacious metropolis complicatedly constructed on the inside arcs of a gigantic sphere, the tops of skyscrapers nearly meeting in the middle – for some rest and relaxation. But they must cut their vacation short when a distress call comes in from beyond an uncharted nebula. Duty calls, and so off they go, Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and the rest, straight into an ambush. A mysterious creature calling himself Krall (Idris Elba under layers of grayish-blue makeup) attacks them with swarms of bug-like ships, which results in the crash of the starship and the capture of most of the crew.

The screenplay by Pegg and Doug Jung is a little undercooked, but still a cleverly paired down and contained conflict of a familiar Trek kind. The crew must learn about this strange villain’s behavior – why has he captured them? what does he want? where is his army headed next? – and explore the planet to figure out how best to escape and warn Starfleet that this unknown being is bent on its destruction. There are lengthy sequences of dazzling spectacle, Lin bringing considerable visual energy with shiny future surfaces, baroque CG fleets of vessels, and complicated layers of lights and screens. With his usual cinematographer Stephen F. Windon he finds freedom in the floating vacuum of space to turn the camera topsy-turvy, then locks down in the craggy terrain of the unknown planet. But it all depends in the downtimes on the chemistry between the loyal friends aboard the Enterprise, separated in the crash and trying to reunite with each other, trade the information they’ve gleaned, and escape the villain’s evil clutches.

Through three films together, this cast has gelled naturally. Pine’s brash Kirk, Quinto’s logical Spock, and Urban’s crackling McCoy are a perfect Trek trinity, not merely resting on nostalgia for the old cast’s interpretations, but with distinct familiarity of their own. Cho’s Sulu and Saldana’s Uhura are allowed shadings and complications on the margins that make them fresh, while Yelchin (despite his appearance tinged with melancholy brought on by his untimely death) is fun comic relief as the lively and irrepressible Chekov. He gets a moment where he taps his foot to a catchy tune while he confidently pilots the Enterprise just ahead of a wave of fiery doom, a fun needle-drop melded with a fleeting grace note. Lin’s confidence as an action filmmaker is easy to spot, but it’s his light touches with actors that really animates the thrills. Here it’s a pleasure to see this ensemble reunite, and new additions – like a young tough alien scavenger woman also marooned on this planet (Sofia Boutella) – quickly fit right in with the team. Even Elba is allowed just enough brief moments to take a seemingly one-dimensional MacGuffin hunter under a pile of makeup and project his charisma and compelling fascination through it.

Lin knows it’s the eye on humanity that makes for good Star Trek and here he delivers the goods. Beyond might be smaller and thinner than you’d expect after the more slam-bang large-scale entries that came before, but there’s a bright throwback appeal and energy to the whole piece similar to spotting an old rerun while flipping channels. The characters and their world are so engaging that I couldn’t help but be drawn in, intrigued to see how they were going to outsmart their attackers and keep the galaxy safe. In the end the dazzling action climax – zipping in and around an outer space locale in supremely clever use of its lovingly imagined structure – isn’t only about shooting and punching, but more importantly thinking through the best course of action and executing it to perfection by luck and by pluck. There are no grand character arcs or overly heavy thematic preoccupations. It’s simply good old-fashioned space adventure that’s light on its feet, loves its characters, and can tap into the uniquely Star Trek sense of exploring the galaxy with a group of likeminded individuals committed to caring.

6 Things to Hate About HITMAN: AGENT 47

It would be a stretch to say Hitman: Agent 47 is everything wrong with Hollywood filmmaking these days. But it does certainly check off more than its fair share of the boxes on the list. The soulless result is the sort of deeply and completely uninvolving movie that barely seems to exist beyond the corporate and commercial whims that spat it up. It seems only right to enumerate my complaints in list form, if only to grasp for listicle clicks as shamelessly as the filmmakers tried to cash in on a dormant dud idea.

1. It’s a mercenary remake of 2007’s based-on-a-video-game flop Hitman, made presumably so 20th Century Fox can say the rights haven’t lapsed. The little-loved original was a grim gory shoot-‘em-up about which I remember only distaste. This new version connects to the original in merely the most general ways despite adapting the same property. You’d think we’d have one good video game movie by now, but every one (with the exception of Need for Speed, the Tomb Raiders, and the Resident Evils, which aren’t great, but have their charms) plays like a garbage attempt to get money out of a familiar property’s name.

2. It’s an effort in franchise building despite murky mythology, scattered backstory, and nonsense lore. A tedious voice over during the opening credits spells out pro forma junk about supposedly cancelled secret government super-agent programs and evil corporate overlords, but the following film remains so vague about the specifics it’s like screenwriters Skip Woods (A Good Day to Die Hard) and Michael Finch (The November Man) knew we’d seen this sort of thing before and could roll with it. So what if it’s impossible to tell who wants what or why? We’re just supposed to accept that some people with guns need to shoot at other people with guns. Got it.

3. It has a faux-expensive-looking CGI sheen over painfully anonymous glass and steel blues and whites, the better to render, I suppose. We go from Berlin to Singapore and in the process find similar warehouses and foyers, long grey hallways and vast cavernous spaces in which to careen digital danger and phony explosions. There’s never any sense for why we’re going to any particular building, just that we’re going there to blow it up or repulsively splatter its occupants against the walls.

4. It features near constant deadening action. Rounds of ammunition are expended casually and endlessly, turning every opportunity for excitement into a gross and weirdly passive shooting gallery. We often see characters turning in slow motion from high angles, spinning and firing two weapons at once with all the precision of a button-masher on easy mode. This never feels dangerous. Even car stunts and a helicopter rototilling the side of a skyscraper feel antiseptic. Watch poor Zachary Quinto scowl his way through the role of an indestructible henchman, bouncing up for more glowering after every blow, for a personification of futility.

5. It casts a co-lead as a Strong Female (Hannah Ware) who is important to the plot’s machinations, and yet is only there to be a pawn or a prop for male characters who remove her agency whenever convenient for their plans. She’s a MacGuffin. The story concerns her efforts to locate her long-lost father (Ciarán Hinds) while being alternately pursued and assisted by two guys. For all the fighting she gets to do, she’s also constantly imperiled, and has a scene in a bikini that makes no sense either practically – where did she get it? – or plot wise – why go swimming when the bad guy is still in close pursuit?

6. It’s a movie that takes its protagonist, the eponymous Agent 47 (Rupert Friend, a long way from Starred Up), and makes him the literal embodiment of bland white male default blahs. He strides through the scenery without any apparent motivation or characterization, recognizable only by his simple constant style: a gleaming bald head with a barcode tattoo, a nondescript black suit, and a blood red tie. What’s he up to?  By the time it’s clear, it’s too late to care. All we know is that he’s good at shooting people while looking and moving like he’s in a perfume commercial.

There’s as much reason to see Hitman: Agent 47 as there was to make it. Less, actually, because although the studio clearly thought they could get people to pay good money to see it, there’s no such profit motive for you. I can’t say I blame anyone involved, from first-time director Aleksander Bach, who must’ve thought a relatively big studio picture would make a cushy debut, to the craftspeople who were presumably paid good money to design this contraption. And hopefully the actors had some good catered lunches. But there's no need for anyone to actually see this empty fun-free zone. Prospective audience members should stay home and eat a sandwich instead. At least that’d have some flavor and purpose.

Top Warp Speed: STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

Undoubtedly the most breathless of all Star Trek pictures, Star Trek Into Darkness is a nonstop barrage of spectacle, movement, and noise. It’s manipulative, relentless and a fun time at the movies. It gets the job done. With 2009’s Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams got a great deal of entertainment value out of dropping a wormhole into Trek continuity, scattering the familiar pieces every which way and providing a shock of delight as the pieces snapped back into place. It’s about as clever as a combination sequel, prequel, reboot, and remake of a nearly 50-year-old franchise could be. While Into Darkness can’t have the same pleasurable jolts of fresh perspective, what it lacks in discovery it makes up for in chemistry. The cast crackles through energetic banter and terse exposition as they’re forever running up and down the gleaming corridors of the starship Enterprise, desperate to solve the latest crisis in which they’ve found themselves.

With a plot that’s in some ways an extended riff on a classic bit of Trek – to even say whether it’s a movie or a TV episode would probably be enough for Trekkers to spring the film’s secrets sight unseen – the screenplay by longtime Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof is packed with dramatic incidents and fan-friendly winking. It’s an expertly calibrated event picture that hurtles from one bit of action or humor into the next without any room to slow down. We start urgently in the middle of a high-energy action sequence with Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) fleeing an angry alien tribe while Spock (Zachary Quinto) proceeds logically into a volcano to shut it down and save this foreign world. As the sequence plays out, all of the returning cast – Zoe Saldana’s Uhura, Simon Pegg’s Scotty, John Cho’s Sulu, and Anton Yelchin’s Chekov – get their little moments to shine. It’s like stumbling into the last few exciting minutes at the end of an episode and then sticking around for the next couple in the marathon. There’s recognizability and comfortability the cast has in the roles and with each other that provides an instant anchor and funny rapport amidst the chaos around them.

Chaos quickly comes in the form of a terrorist attack on Earth that blows up a Starfleet base in London. The man responsible is John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), one of their own who clearly has his secret motives for turning against them. The scheming scenes leading up to and including these surprise attacks have a scary edge. As the film progresses and Cumberbatch gets to put his sonorous voice into full intimidating villainy, the relationships his character develops take a few interesting twists and turns. Meanwhile, back at Starfleet, the good admiral (Bruce Greenwood) and crusty admiral (Peter Weller) agree to let Kirk take the Enterprise after the attacker in a rare show of force from this research and peacekeeping group that finds a new science officer (Alice Eve) escorting top secret missiles on board. They’re not out boldly going where no man has gone before. They’re on a manhunt.

This streamlined feature slams through its sequences of energetic intensity with sensational special effects and top-notch sound design expected from a Hollywood blockbuster in this budget range. Abrams, not particularly invested in the more cerebral, allegorical aspects of Trek lore, sees fit to deliver a slam-bang spectacle with phaser battles, whooshing warp drives, and brusque threats around every corner. This leaves plenty of time for the film’s politics to be a little muddled, if benign, with the exception of a weirdly misjudged bit of disaster overkill in the final stretch. It’s one thing for a movie like this to destroy a chunk of a metropolis, sending skyscrapers crumbling to the ground. It’s another thing entirely to do so almost off-handedly, skip the aftermath, and then put a strange title card in the end credits proclaiming tribute to post-9/11 workers. (Seriously, what’s going on there?) It’s a film that summons up War on Terror paranoia (potential drone strikes, brief pointed debates about killing terrorists without trial) and twisty conspiracy theories, but uses it only as set dressing for a plot that’s all present tense forward movement. Gone is the Cold War-era utopian optimism of Roddenberry’s original concept. This time it’s all about fear, dread, and explosions.

But it’s amazing how far momentum alone can take you. Abrams has made a film that’s a crackling roller coaster that’s all dips, dives, drops, and top-speed loops with an excellent, blaring score from the ever-reliable Michael Giacchino. The intensity never slows, even when the movie self-consciously incorporates a debate with itself about what kind of mission this Trek is following. “This is clearly a military operation,” Scotty disappointedly tells Kirk. “Is that what we are now? I thought we were explorers.” The fact of the matter is that Trek on TV had room to be as eggheaded as it wanted (at best, thrilling so), whereas the movies have always largely been about elaborate revenge schemes and potentially world-ending super-calamities. This just happens to be a particularly single-minded action adventure that’s constantly chasing the next thrill. And that works.

It works not just because Abrams and crew are skilled technicians, but because of the people on screen as well, with characters filled wonderfully by the talented cast working from borrowed cultural awareness without much original characterization in this particular script. (There’s an assumption, rightly or wrongly, that the audience will know who these characters are and what they mean to each other, so that all emotional development can be left to shorthand.) These characters have lived long and prospered in the cultural imagination for a good reason. The core of the film is the crew, the group of professionals thrown together by duty, bound together by the friendships that developed. Even at their prickliest, when Kirk and Spock speak sharply to each other, engaging in their expected debate between reason and emotion, there’s a core of respect and love that’s a comfort and a constant, even when everything is constantly blowing up around them.

A Company on the Verge of a Breakdown: MARGIN CALL

The entirety of J.C. Chandor’s debut feature Margin Call plays like the first act of a disaster movie, the moments when the experts slowly become aware that things are about to go very wrong, that the world of the film is about to explode. In this case, the disaster is all too real, has already occurred, and we’re still living in its aftermath. Set in the fall of 2008, the film takes place over 24 hours in a big financial firm as one analyst figures out just how bad things are going to get. The shocking truth he discovers is that risky bets on mortgage-backed securities and the like are about to come up for big losses. The company is over leveraged. The decisions that are made this night will mean the difference between the life and death of the company, of its workers’ and their families’ finances, and probably for the entire American economy, if not the world’s. Sound familiar?

The film starts with a fired risk analyst (Stanley Tucci) giving a flash drive to one of his youngish employees (Zachary Quinto). It contains the formulas that predict impending devastation, the keys to understanding the suddenly very real possibility of complete and total financial ruin for the firm. He passes this information along to his boss (Paul Bettany), who passes it along to his boss (Kevin Spacey), who gives it to analysts (Demi Moore and Aasif Mandvi), who give it to their boss (Simon Baker), who calls in the CEO (Jeremy Irons). It’s an all-star cast (or a close-enough approximation of all-star) ready and waiting for the disaster to strike, repetitively going over their options and weighing consequences. They can see it coming, they can try and slow its approach, but this thing is going to hit and hit hard.

Chandor fills the film with tense boardroom scenes and jargon-filled power plays, along with brief moments that play almost like asides, sketching themes too concretely. At one point, during a rooftop smoke break, one suit actually peers over the edge and says, “It’s a long way down.” What this screenplay could have used was characters who were more than just symbols and with more bluntly clever macho Mametian rat race rat-a-tat in their dialogue. (Paddy Chayefsky and Aaron Sorkin are further good examples of the kind of character-driven satirical spark technical talk can sometimes have). The actors – most of them pretty great – are ready to sink their teeth into meatier roles than are provided.

This is a film that tries to create characters that are understandable, relatable even, in a film that looks to find empathy but not excuses. It gets there, but it’s all so heavy handed. I believed these actors were the kinds of serious suits who would soberly and gravely use bursts of business speak to tersely and tensely discuss risky financial deals. What I didn’t believe were the moments like the ones when Bettany gives a remorseless little monologue about how people say they want a fair world but “nobody actually wants that,” when Tucci trots out a wistful bridge-building anecdote to make the point that Wall Street produces nothing of tangible value, or when Spacey reveals he has a symbolically significant dying dog at home. The small details of the film are so convincing – the jargon, the drab gray production design, and the simple modern costumes – but the words spoken are so often flat that, try as I might, I simply couldn’t believe the big picture.

Star Trek (2009)

It’s refreshing, after all these years of diminishing returns and dormancy, to see Star Trek back and as good as it has ever been (which, for me, is the second film Wrath of Kahn and TV series The Next Generation, although that's certainly not all I've enjoyed). The new movie is both an excellent starting point for people whose relationship with the franchise is little to none and a great chance for rediscovery for those, like me, whose interest has waned some in the years since the franchise last churned out interesting product. It is a fast-paced (I’ve seen it two times in two days now and, boy, does this thing move) crowd-pleaser of the summer-popcorn variety and a great revival of these classic characters.

The movie is a reintroduction to the general public, focusing mostly on young Kirk and young Spock, at least at the beginning of the film. Chris Pine (as Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (as Spock) create distinct performances, respectful without ever copying the original performances. Quinto, especially, seems to get into the core of Spock, his Vulcan calm hiding tumultuous humanity. It’s a testament to his performance that when, through a time-warp, Leonard Nimoy shows up playing Spock, Quinto’s portrayal does not seem any less true.

I know it’s traditional for reviews to set up the plot of the film but the movie is so startlingly solid that I hesitate to reveal much at all. The movie’s actual plot (by which I mean the villain’s evil plot) is the weakest link, but it’s not terrible and we needed some way to explain away inconsistencies, round up the characters into one place and show us why we liked these characters to begin with, even all the way back to 1966 when they were first revealed. Director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have allowed the movie to create charges of recognition as the plot gathers steam. I never thought it could be so exciting just to hear the word “phasers” shouted again. Uhura (now Zoe Saldana) is just as striking, but with more emotional complications. That has to be McCoy; Karl Urban’s doing a great job matching DeForest Kelly’s intense yet jovial mannerisms. There’s the Enterprise! It looks great! Now we’re on the bridge. There’s Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin). Where’s Scotty? Don’t worry; he’ll show up, and Simon Pegg will play him perfectly.

The movie gives great moments to all the cast members and I was so grateful for it and the great rush of nostalgia the movie gave me. This is the kind of big-budget science-fiction space opera movie I’ve been loving since I was a kid, the kind of movie that is fast, loud, colorful fun, by turns funny and suspenseful, filled with the latest, greatest bells and whistles and stuffed full of surprising and delightful turns of events. My first viewing I was distracted by catching all the in-jokes, the winks (look at the member of the away team in the red jumpsuit, ha ha), and the recognitions that I ended up nitpicking the movie as I watched it, wondering if the chances taken with the established back-story were paying off, questioning if the surprising wholesale destruction of a major element of the universe was worth it. And is it just me or is the middle of the film a bit soggy?

My second viewing dissolved all such doubts. This movie works as fast and as successfully as it moves, propelled along by great visuals and a great score (by Michael Giacchino, who has fast become one of my favorite composers). Abrams finds room in the pacing for beautiful shots amid some unfortunately blurry action. Early there’s a wide-angle shot of a line of shuttles moving away from a wounded ship which will be echoed later with a similar shot of a line of missiles moving towards a ship.

So it looks great, sounds great, and moves along quickly. I guess that means the movie is very satisfying, and a total blast to boot. It’s one of the most welcome and enjoyable franchise reboots and, unlike Bond and Batman, doesn’t exist completely outside the established canon. By the end of the movie, I’m energized (no pun intended) and ready for more Trek. I can’t wait to see where the franchise will go after this most promising start. It's okay that they left out Klingons and the reflections of contemporary social issues. They had to leave room to grow.