by Joe Murray

Created on: May 14, 2009

"Star Trek" wastes exactly zero time pitching us into the middle of a interstellar battle between an outmatched Federation starship, the USS Kelvin, and a gigantic Romulan spacecraft that's shaped like a predatory weed, and no faster than you can say "self-sacrifice" then the Kelvin's Captain is swept aside, and his Number One orders a desperate and potentially tragic evacuation under the guns, er plasma cannons, of an enemy who seems to take more pleasure in sadistic duplicity than mercy.

Indeed, one of the Kelvin's passengers is a young woman in labor and about to give birth to a major character in the franchise as a spoiler I cannot give away, suffice that it's a character that will take the most clueless of Trekkies a nanosecond to figure out.

But the film's Cold Open demands another selfless act (what would Freud make of the penchant for suicide in the Star Trek universe?) which disables the Romulan dreadnought for a flotilla of shuttlecraft to propel themselves to safety.

CUE TITLE.

The very first thing I noticed of J. J. Abrams' "Star Trek" is how very crisp the visual effects are. You can peer right into the Kelvin's windows and see its brightly lit interiors, an effect I haven't seen since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." And it's been, what, 40 years since they made that?

My second impression was just how organically the ensemble cast interacted with each other, as if they really had spent quite a few months in the isolation of space and could finish each other's sentences; another propitious skill in Abrams already ample toolbox. James Cameron, are you taking notes?

The third thing that struck me was just how dead-on the characters were. No other actor could've played young Kirk's mentor, Capt. Christopher Pike, to the series' persistent standards than Bruce Greenwood. As Leonard McCoy, actor Karl Urban is so dead-on he could've been Deforest Kelley's son, right down to the Gulf Coast drawl and the technophobic paranoia. Zoe Zaldana was picture perfect as my mental image of a very young, very leggy Lt. Uhura. (If the women's Starfleet uniforms were any shorter, this film would've snared an R-rating.) And Zachary Quinto (currently the villainous Sylar on NBC's "Heroes") was BORN to play Spock. Let me rephrase in case you've fallen asleep during the last sentence. Among the nails most driven dead-on in this effort, Quinto's Spock is so dead-on this nail was driven flush to the facing with one blow. And

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