Star Trek

Trekkies and civilians alike can rejoice: Retooling Gene Roddenberry’s hoary, winded pop-cultural warhorse, J.J. Abrams has scrubbed, polished, and turned the volume up to 11 with admiration and affection for the original series, but little of the die-hard’s encased-in-amber reverence. All at once, he’s revived the corpse but wiped clean its memory—a fresh start. Its story is no more complicated than that of your best Trek TV episode: A bad Romulan (Eric Bana, sporting the full Mike Tyson face tattoo) has come from the future in a tricked-out spaceship to destroy the past—specifically, planets Vulcan and Earth. But he exists solely to bring together on the bridge of the Enterprise Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), McCoy (Karl Urban), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho), and Chekov (Anton Yelchin), who—at warp factor 10, red alert, damn the photon torpedoes—must save the universe, this time for the very first time. Spock is the centerpiece—not only as played by Quinto as the tormented youth in revolt, but also in the form of Leonard Nimoy, the once-dead first officer who’s lived long enough to travel back in time to offer sage advice to old friends in need of, dare one say it, the human touch. It’s enough to move even a Star Wars fan to tears.
Thu., July 30, 7 & 9:35 p.m.; Fri., July 31, 7 & 9:35 p.m.; Sat., Aug. 1, 2, 4:20, 7 & 9:35 p.m., 2009