The announcement that J. J. Abrams was filming a new Star Trek movie was ground for dread as well as hope. In the forty-plus years since the original show went off the air, it's inspired the creation of some unworthy successors. No doubt there are some fans who like every version of Star Trek; for example, I liked Star Trek: The Motion Picture for its lyrical eroticization of technology, which seems to be a minority opinion. But not many of the recent versions have inspired general praise or enthusiasm.

Abrams made one big right decision about this film: starting it before the original series, making it in effect a new origin story for the Enterprise of that series. The weight of previous continuity burdened both the later films about the original crew, and the later series in the same franchise. Abrams' story starts out before any of that history. And as the viewer discovers, he doesn't feel bound to retell it. This new film offers what comics fans call ‘retcon’ (for retroactive continuity): it says that certain things we all know about from earlier stories never actually happened. This is a science fiction film, so Abrams provides a science-fictional explanation of why this is so, and in fact makes it a key to his plot—but the freedom to envision things differently would have helped this film even without a justification of that sort. The very choice of title—not Star Trek: Descriptive Phrase but just Star Trek—conveys that Abrams is out to create a new starting point, not just a continuation of what has gone before.

Similarly, the characters are nearly all changed, though in different ways and to different degrees James T. Kirk, the central figure, more than any other. Rather than older versions of the central characters, at later stages in their careers, and played by the same, but now older actors, we get an entirely new cast. This worked a lot better than I anticipated; what the actors and writers gave us was new interpretations of the same people, not just entirely different people who happened to have the same names. I was especially impressed by Zachary Quinto's ability to hint at what was going on below Spock's surface, which made it subtler than the sharp duality of reason and emotion in the original series, so that he came through as a Spock whose depths were more visible. On the other hand, this film's Kirk is a more overtly and somewhat disturbingly different character—but for reasons that make sense in the context of the story.

The story itself seems to have a lot more action than classic treatments did; sometimes it seemed that the film was a constant rush from one fast-paced conflict to another. I'm not sure that was a good choice, at least for fans of the older films and television series, though it may have been well planned to draw in a new generation of younger fans. The original series was a balance of action, characterization, and sense of wonder, and of these, in some ways the action was the least important. The more relentless action of this film sometimes seemed inadequately motivated, especially the scenes of Kirk struggling to survive in a glacial wilderness. The characterization was sound, but I could have used a little more sense of wonder.

An interesting aspect of the action, and one relevant to libertarian concerns, was the nature of the antagonist. Traditional Star Trek stories tended to be about military conflicts between Starfleet and aggressive alien societies, or about diplomatic crises and alien customs. This film's antagonist, Nero, despite being a Romulan, is not acting as a soldier, or as a representative of his race. Rather, he's a private citizen obsessed with revenge. Conceivably his name, one letter away from “Nemo,” could be a hint at this. But confronting the Enterprise with this kind of antagonist turns this, on one hand, into a classic pulp or superhero story with a mad, obsessed supervillain, and on the other, into a story about terrorism. In a way, Abrams is exploring the same theme Vernor Vinge examined in Rainbows End, whose heroes have to deal with a world where a small, sufficiently angry private group can destroy a city—but in Abrams's future, such a villain can threaten entire planets. How to maintain a free society, or any kind of civilization, when initiation of force on that scale is possible, is an unsolved problem, one that the developed world is struggling with already. So this Star Trek is as much a project of the issues of our time as the original was of the issues of the 1960s.

I can think of points to criticize in this film; to name just one, I was taken aback when I saw footage in the previews of Kirk riding a motorcycle past a half-constructed starship. What kind of fool, I thought, would build that sort of structure in a one-g field? But when you come right down to it, none of these things prevented my enjoying the film…more than I've enjoyed any version of Star Trek for quite a while. This film actually made me look forward to a possible sequel, rather than dreading that the creators would go on dragging out a failed enterprise that was ready to be scrapped. It's not flawless, but its flaws are small and its merits considerably larger.