I don’t normally see movies on opening night, or without reading any reviews, but the fact that Star Trek opened on my birthday seemed like the call of destiny, or something. Anyway, Lee saw a preview and enjoyed it, so I figured at least it wouldn’t suck.

I remember when Lee and I were discussing the movie I said I hoped it would regain the sense of fun the original series had, managing to be both serious sci-fi and a boyish fantasy of space adventure. The movie does get its fun back, though it’s a distinctly 21st-century version of fun — the very first scene plunges into battle, and the action doesn’t stop, nor does the camera stop moving, until the end credits. I enjoyed it while it lasted, but when I left the theater I was very happy to get back on terra firma.

I did know enough about the movie to hear that it involved some time-travel device that would bring in the elderly Leonard Nimoy Spock. I thought that would be an annoying gimmick, but actually I respect what the filmmakers did here. The movie has been called a prequel, but it’s really a sequel to the last thing we saw Spock in (TNG’s “Unification” episodes) which ends up creating an alternate timeline in which the original crew grows up and gets together. I think that this was a clever way of avoiding the arrogance of creating new “canon” for a series that had long since become community property; the new movie is really fan fiction, with no greater presumption to authority than any other fan fiction set in an alternate universe. Since the reality of alternate timelines was already well established in the Trek universe, it was a very faithful way of being unfaithful.

Having said that, I don’t especially look forward to more movies in this universe (which the ending, not surprisingly, sets us up for). The movie brings back the fun but not much else, and what seemed especially lacking to me was any real sense that we’re in the future. Granted, the previous shows always were timid about portraying an Earth society radically different from our own — the world is a peaceful utopia, but it still has everything modern middle-class Americans are attached to. But in this movie, I felt like they weren’t even trying. Kirk is first seen hot-rodding around in a car(!) and later a motorcycle(!!). These things are referred to as “antiques,” but really, having Kirk be into them makes about as much sense as a present-day X-gamer having a passion for curricles.

The treatment of Uhura shows a deeper aspect of this problem. The TV series didn’t do anything with her character, but one thing it was very clear about was that she was African. To Gene Roddenberry, this signified that any future for humankind will be globalized (a point that seems even more inarguable today). In this movie she has a lot more to do, but you’d never know she was from anywhere but America. She’s basically just a hot, ambitious black chick, without any of the enigmatic dignity that made the original Uhura seem like an actual foreigner.

I suppose it’s plausible that in the future the entire world will be Americanized, but it’s rather hard to believe it could stay that stable for 300 years. One interesting little cultural comment buried in the movie comes from the alternate personality of Kirk. In the original timeline, his father was an officer who inspired him to join Starfleet. In the alterna-timeline, his father is killed the day he’s born (not a spoiler, that happens in the first five minutes), and he grows up an undisciplined hellraiser until surrogate father Captain Pike comes along. The assumption that fatherlessness has such a large negative impact on a person is a pretty sharp indictment of Roddenberry’s utopia, especially when you consider the number of fatherless children in the earlier shows and movies (including Kirk’s own).

But such big-picture questions never have time to enter this movie’s frantic storyline. The reality of the unified Earth, the Federation and Starfleet are all simply givens in the film, which the characters navigate for their own personal reasons. I guess that for the generation that grew up in a Trek-happy culture, that’s what the Star Trek universe seems like — just there. But if that’s the case, it would take more than this film to revitalize it.