Movie Review Star Trek

Noncommercials between tonight and next Wednesday night seem to be limited to the series at the Blank Page gallery Tuesday night; I guess the River Festival scared everybody else off. But the Blank Page is showing one of the rare American movies about the history of labor, and one of the best, the 1977 Academy Award documentary Harlan County USA, shows at 7:30 Tuesday in the Blank Page gallery, 917 West Douglas.
And commercially, we have a pretty good series sci-fi movie in the new Star Trek. I've only seen four of the Star Trek movies and only really admired one, The Wrath of Khan, and don't recall seeing any of the television versions, including spinoffs; I don't favor sci-fi movies or series movies, or action movies in general. But I was fairly well entertained, perhaps having been conditioned by last week's dreadful Wolverine.
Star Trek is nothing new, even to me, and includes a fair number of the things that turn me off: the apparently dead turning out to be alive, young males driving recklessly as if it were a heroic thing, tilted frames, edited fights with a separate shot for each punch, swords in one holster and rayguns in the other, homages to other movies, quotations from popular literature as if they prove the audience has culture, and dialogue like, "Veeblefetz the fershulgginger neobab?" "But won't that arberfarble the schemeckenzooner?" "No; I added bubblefibber to the barfengroner!" which is supposed to persuade us that this is science fiction, not pure fantasy like The Wizard of Oz.
But Star Trek isn't particularly loaded with these things, and within its own generic limitations, Star Trek makes pretty good sense and tells a pretty clear story. I had a problem with the bit where Scotty seemed to know the future, but things involving time travel never make much sense to me, and that was the only real illogicality I spotted, within the generic limits.
Star Trek is about relations between characters more than anything else, and while this theme is somewhat handicapped by the fact that we know the outcomes, the various stories are well integrated and well told, the individual characters are interesting and the relationships between them are considerably more so, special effects and other visuals are interesting and often spectacular, and while Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly suggests that the story could have been a little more logical, the main thread of it was not part of his objection, and seemed clear enough for me, even if some of the details weren't, especially how the equipment operated, and I was just as glad to be spared a lot of exposition about that.
There may be as much action in Star Trek as in Wolverine, but Star Trek never seems to consist ONLY of action for its own sake. Spock and Uhura are given dimensions beyond what I am familiar with, but I am not aware of any accusations by those who know better than I that the treatments go beyond what precedent allows. The general impression seems to be that the established material of Star Trek has been well respected. My only cavil is that some of Spock's apparently uncomprehending reactions to the actions of Kirk and others, including some good laughs in the past and at least one here, are somewhat undercut.
In sum, my guess is that the new Star Trek will satisfy old Star Trek fans and maintain interest in the series. For a franchise over forty years old, that's doing pretty well.