Non-fan or Trekkie or die-hard J.J. Abrams was the perfect choice for Star Trek, and did a great job restarting the franchise anew with old characters. (Heck he did pretty well with MI3, not his fault it was tainted by off screen nonsense.)
The biggest cheat in this is the Sci-Fi fallback of that wacky space-time continuum. Since most folks in the audience probably cannot handle Einstein, never studied quantum mechanics or passed calculus, it is an easy cheat to do the time travel thing.
But for this one it works. It allows for some creative retcon, and changes to the story without tinkering with the canon too much.
First off we meet villain Nero (Eric Bana) and see how young Kirk is born, gets his name and all that. We meet a young Spock; learn that Vulcan boys can be Mean Girls just like anyone else.
Fast forward a couple decades and you meet the main players and the future Enterprise crew. Overall Star Trek has good pacing, storytelling and acting. As has leaked, the casting was solid across the board with some pleasant surprises.
Zachary Quinto (Heroes) is perfect as Spock. Bruce Greenwood (Capt. Pike), the Checkov kid and John Cho as Sulu all work well. Uhura trivia: Zoe Saldana played a Trekkie in The Terminal.
- Surprise one: Kirk. Chris Pine did not try to Shatner it. And it worked, he had all the bravado and gravitas without being an imitation.
- Surprise two: McCoy. Who knew Karl Urban could do funny? Dead on impression of, without being a copycat, impersonation or some crappy caricature (think Julia Roberts in Charlie Wilson’s War), he was perfect as Doc Bones McCoy.
Whereas Wolverine was IMO a boring Origins story as we been there, done that, know where it goes, Star Trek has lots of action and interesting changes to the story – which I will not spoil – really lets us start all over again.
Smells like: we’ve boldly been here before, but not like this. So the old is new again, and it will be fun to watch. (And for scientific correctness, no smell?)