'Star Trek' time travels in to save our day!

I used to work with a man who looked and acted deliberately like Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He later moved onto vampires but I did agree with him that our office would be more fun if we all wore the uniforms like those on the show. Yet TNG movies were too serious and more of a bore than their predecessors in the eighties with the classic original cast. Although those films got worse with each entry and began to look like 'beer bellies in space', they still retained that sense of wonderful cheesiness of the original series. In the fab sixties, Kirk and the crew which included plenty of mini-skirted fembots conquered the universe. Shatner kicked ass with a shoulder-rolling brawl set to a blazing horn section; A cosmic Don Draper. He also would bed down multi-colored alien babes as Spock and Bones argued logic versus emotion like a classic psych exam. My elder brother was an old school Trekkie and I recall as a boy going to a local mall to see Leonard Nimoy. (We didn't get close).

I didn't really watch TNG or the other spin-offs much. Yet I had "Star Trek" imbedded in my brain, a cultural touchstone and an example of how sci-fi could be fun as well as cerebral. Last year as I looked around an Apple Store one of the clerks (er Associates) was running down the features and programs of a Mac, when he asked casually "Hey have you seen this?" and played the new Star Trek trailer in Hi-def. I had no idea it was being remade. Suddenly it was all there in that three minute clip: JJ Abrams of "Lost", "Alias" and "Cloverfield" fame had rebooted the franchise with an origins story. Uhura was a super hottie! The guy from "Heroes" as Spock? 'Harold' from "Harold and Kumar" as Sulu? "Shaun of the Dead" as friggin Scotty? Leonard Nimoy - Are you serious? The original sounds effects even sounded hip. We both looked at each other in a WTF moment of nerdy joy. I saw the film as soon as it opened.

This would have been so easy to mess up but outside of one CGI snow monster that didn't thrill me as necessary, I am pleased to say that Abrams and company really nailed this! Chris Pine had extra large space shoes to fill with Kirk but has done it and here is the young captain, complete with his bar fights and the bedding of green girls, fully intact. He subverts authority follows his instincts and is brutally loyal to his team who form before our delighted eyes. Spock, Bones, Chekov, Uhura, Sulu and Scotty here are all thrown together for the first time and have their own heroic moments to shine. Eric Bana as Nero is the best villain since Khan and then there's the space-time continuum, the sci-fi device that opens the parallel universe and gets old and new Trek to fit together as it should. Zachary Quinto as Spock and Karl Urban as Bones stand out and really channel their TV counterparts. So loyal to the original campy Trek but retrofitted with added adrenalin, it is as fun as the original series and is as movies should be. In these hard times it is so timely to see Gene Rodenberry's original vision of a diverse crew of young explorers attempting to right the wrongs of a sometimes evil universe. Fun for mind, body and soul, "Star Trek" is one of the best DVDs of the year.