Yesterday I attended a special Star Trek event at Paramount Studios where they showed us 20 minutes of footage from J.J. Abrams’ upcoming reboot of the classic sci fi series, much like Warner Bros. did with Watchmen recently. While the footage was already screened in London and New York, this was the first time I’ve had a chance to see it, and I didn’t read any of the other reports so I could go in fresh with my somewhat jaded fanboy eyes and ears.

While it looks fairly slick and high-tech (and yes, the bridge of the Enterprise does indeed look like the inside of an Apple Store), I was more interested with how they treated the development of characters that have been around since 1966. It’s hard to judge the film based on the four scenes we saw; it’s a bit like reading four random chapters of a book and being asked to write a report about it. But, with that in mind, I definitely have some thoughts about it. One thing is for sure: it looks a lot better than the scenes we saw from The Spirit at Comic-Con.

Check out the breakdown below of the scenes from a Star Trek movie that will probably draw a line right down the middle of hardcore Trek fans, but will draw a lot of people who have never seen the TV shows or the previous films into theaters. And just as a note, Abrams sides with the Trekkers in the “Trekkies vs. Trekkers” debate.

Kirk Gets In A Bar Fight

In the first scene, a leather-jacketed Kirk, pre-Starfleet, is in a bar trying his best to flirt with Uhura. Apparently this is a speakeasy frequented by Starfleet cadets, who turn their noses up at the “townies” who wander in. Uhura orders several drinks, including three “Budweiser Classics” and a Slusho, while Kirk tries to put his moves on her. He fails to impress Uhura until she tells him that she’s studying Xenolinguistics, which she doubts he knows the meaning of. He shoots back with a textbook definition, and adds “That means you have a talented tongue.” Zing.

A big and beefy Starfleet bruiser asks Uhura if Kirk is bothering her, and of course a slugfest breaks out. Kirk manages to hold his own against four or more other Starfleet meatheads, but eventually gets his face pummeled into ground meat which is why he looks beat up in the new trailer. Bruce Greenwood, as Captain Pike (who hardcore nerds like me know was the first captain of the Enterprise), breaks things up, and proceeds to lecture Kirk. He tells him he shoudl join Starfleet if he wants to be anything like his old man. Kirk laughs him off, but of course he speeds his motorcycle down to the shipyards the next morning, Top Gun style, and signs up.

• During the fight, Kirk accidentally grabs Uhura’s boobs and leers at her. She slugs him.
• Pike tells Kirk “Your father was captain of a Starship for 12 minutes. He saved 800 lives, including your mothers, and yours. I dare you to do better.”
• Kirk’s motorcycle had no spokes, and nothing connecting the wheels to the frames. Ooooh, how space age!

Kirk and the Very Fat Hands

Kirk’s buddy Bones (who later becomes Dr. McCoy) injects him with something that gives him the syptoms of a disease so he can sneak him aboard the Enterprise as a sick patient. After he passes out in sickbay, the scene shifts to the bridge where Ensign Pavel Chekov is logging into the ship’s computers. Since he’s Russian and has a thick accent, the computer can’t understand it when he says the letter V. Hilarity, right? It’s a play on the famous “Nuclear Wessels” scene from Star Trek IV, and he goes on to say “Wulcan” and “ewacuations” several times during a message to the crew. We get it. I’m just surprised that in the future the computer can’t detect dialects. Get an upgrade, Starfleet.

Kirk overhears Chekov’s message and stumbles his way to the bridge while suffering an allergic reaction to the sedative McCoy gave him. His hands swell up to the size of canned hams, as does his tongue. He’s trying to tell Uhura that it’s actually Romulans attacking Vulcan, and not a spatial anomaly, but she has a hard time understanding his swollen organ. Isn’t she a linguistics expert? They speed up to the bridge and Kirk yells for them to stop. Both Spock and Captain Pike are doubtful, but he reminds them another anomaly happened like this the day his father died. Spock says, “The cadet’s logic is sound” and they continue in with shields up. As they drop out of warp, they appear right in the midst of a Romulan battle. Oops.

• Karl Urban as McCoy delivers a pretty excellent, “Good god, man!” line in true DeForest Kelley style when he notices Kirk’s hands.
• Kirk’s dad died on the same day Kirk was born, during a similar “lightning storm in space” before a heavily armed Romulan warship attacked the U.S.S. Kelvin, which is probably the ship Kirk’s dad was captaining. Kirk remembers this, but Pike doesn’t? Seems odd given the fact that Pike wrote a dissertation on the event.
• The Enterprise’s communications officer can’t speak Romulan, so Uhura replaces him because she speaks all three dialects. That other guy had some pretty poor training for a pretty important position.

Old Spock and Scotty (and his Pet Alien Midget Thingy)

Kirk is on a snowy planet with Old Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, and they find Scotty, who has apparently been stuck here for six months as punishment for a failed transporter experiment involving an admiral’s prize pet beagle. With him is a sort of bizarre looking alien, who looks like he’s made out of tree bark. Spock seems surprised to meet Scotty, and since this Spock (arguably) knew young Scotty, there must be some sort of alternate reality timestream thing going on here.

Spock gives Scotty some equations and scientific mumbo-jumbo that allow him to upgrade the transporter technology to transport people to a ship moving at warp speed, so Kirk and Scotty can head off to the Enterprise. Before they leave, Spock tells Kirk not to let the other Spock (young Spock) know that he (old Spock) exists. He also tells Kirk he’ll have to get Spock to show he’s emotionally too attached to what’s happening on Vulcan, so Kirk can relieve him of command. Unfortunately tree bark alien guy has to stay behind. Hopefully Spock can keep him company by playing some Tri-dimensional Chess or something.

• Simon Pegg really hams up the Scottish accent as Scotty. I have no doubt that he’s going to be the comic foil in this movie (along with Chekov’s accent), especially after seeing him spout “This is exciting!” in the trailer.
• Spock tells Kirk that the other Spock can’t know anything about this Spock’s existence. Probably because you’re not supposed to muck about with the space time continuum.
• Kirk asks Spock if him telling Scotty about the transporter is “cheating.” Spock tells him that cheating is something he learned from an old friend.” Somewhere, a single tear is running down a Trek fan’s face.
• Leonard Nimoy still has it. As Kirk beams out, he gives him the Vulcan gang sign along with his famous “Live long and prosper.”

Skydiving Red Shirt Dies, or The Only Action Scene We Saw

Captain Pike marches down a hallway spouting orders to Kirk, telling him that while he takes a shuttle over to the Romulan ship, Kirk, Sulu, and a poor guy who isn’t destined to live long will have to parachute down to a drilling platform and stop the Romulans from drilling into the planet. He promotes Kirk to first officer, over Spock’s protests, and makes Spock the acting captain. Kirk and company don primary color friendly spacesuits, and jettison from Pike’s shuttle. They freefall at extreme speed, but super-eager redshirt guy opens his chute too late and gets sucked into the drilling laser. Oops again.

Sulu and Kirk are met by some Romulan baddies, and they get into an all-out brawl on the drilling platform. Despite the fact that the Romulans have some pretty heavy-duty laser rifles, it turns into a swordfight when Sulu whips out a knife that morphs into a sword. After some rough and tumble, they defeat the baddies and disable the drilling laser with the rifles that the Romulans discarded. But it’s no matter, because the drill had already punched through to the proper depth. The Romulan ship launches some sort of giant, multi-bladed spinning thing that flies through the hole.

Chekov realizes that they’re trying to create a black hole in Vulcan’s core, and Sulu falls off the drilling platform. Kirk, knowing that Sulu’s chute was damaged in the initial descent, jumps off after him and catches him, but then Kirk’s chute fails, leaving them in freefall. Kirk radios up asking to be beamed out, but the poor transporter operator can’t get a lock on them. “I CAN DO DEES!” shouts Chekov, and he runs pell-mell down several decks to the tranporter room, somehow manages to lock onto them, and beams them out just before they hit the rocks below and turn into paste. It’s not revealed why Chekov, who seems like some sort of wunderkind, is the only one who can do this. That boy needs a promotion, asap.

• I’m not sure if it was covered in cadet training, but Kirk and his shipmates are pretty damned adept at this mid-air parachuting operation.
• We get our first glimpse of Eric Bana as Nero, the bad guy Romulan, and he looks unrecognizable with all the latex.
• Besides operating the transporter, and figuring out the whole black hole situation, Chekov also narrates a play by play of most of the events in this sequence. Is there anything he can’t do?

Impressions? Despite some of the cheesy lines in the bar fight, that was easily my favorite scene. It did some great character establishing groundwork, and the scene between Kirk and Pike is awesome. I had my doubts about Chris Pine, but he definitely seems like movie star material, without all the baggage. He has Kirk’s swagger, and manages to seem vulnerable as well. He’s also not doing a William Shatner impersonation, which would have been too easy to fall into.

I had a lot of doubts about this new Trek, given things I’d been reading and the J.J. Abrams effect: lots of bombast and weak on story. These new scenes haven’t sold me completely, but I’m actually more excited about seeing the finished film next year now that I’ve seen them. I just need something to really shove me over the edge into fangasm territory.