Peter Suderman has mixed feelings about the new Star Trek:

[T]here are things to love in Abrams’s Star Trek, yet very little of the original series’ appeal remains. Rather than concern itself with politics, ethics, or social organization, Abrams’s Star Trek focuses on familiar quests for individual self-discovery. Like so many successful comic-book movies, it’s about adolescent heroes coming to terms with themselves and their pasts, struggling with friends, rivals, and enemies while searching for power and place in the world. Where the original was poorly fashioned and outwardly focused, this one is gorgeously designed and self-obsessed. It’s personal rather than political, aesthetically pleasing at the expense of conceptual depth.

There are several things I disliked about Star Trek. The narrative advances inorganically, with plot points driven by outlandish coincidences and resolved by magic. There is something forced and unnatural about the way that the film insists on shoehorning every familiar rhetorical trope from the Star Trek universe into the dialogue, from Spock ordering “set phasers to stun” to Scottie yelling “I’m giving her all she’s got” while Kirk demands more power. The casting is passable but rarely stellar; the only standout performance is Zachary Quinto’s Spock. In particular, Karl Urban’s portrayal of “Bones” McCoy feels less like a reinterpretation than a parody of the original character - the equivalent of hiring Leslie Nielsen to play Don Corleone in a remake of The Godfather.

However, the lack of conceptual depth identified by Suderman did not bother me in the least. Movies, even ones with a running time of 127 minutes, are a poor vehicle for exploring “grand visions” and “big ideas”. Fans of introspective science fiction do not want for choice; it’s just that they are better-served by the long-form medium of television, which has given us the likes of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly.

What matters more in a movie - especially one that aspires to blockbuster status, as Star Trek clearly does - is pacing and spectacle, and it is here that Abrams’s incarnation of Star Trek excels. The film might not have depth, but it certainly has density. Excepting a brief setup period early on, every minute of screentime is filled with interesting and engaging things. The plot is frequently nonsensical, and the motivations of the characters sometimes unclear, but the movie throws new situations and new emotions at the audience with such rapidity that the viewer never has enough time to stop and reflect on the inconsistencies. It is instructive to compare the film to Wolverine, also a big-budget effects-driven movie, but one with frequent and inexcusable lapses into inactivity. Maintaining a level of excitement that is both consistent and high is no easy task, but Star Trek succeeds admirably.