Star Trek hits 94 on Metacritic

Only 8 reviews so far (about 25% of the usual number received by a film in wide-release), but the interesting thing is that, as more critics weigh in, the average is going up instead down. Over the past couple of days the score has gone from 89 to 91 to 94. This number might represent a peak we’ll see fall some tomorrow, but it’s reason enough for us to excerpt a few more quotes.

(100) Ty Burr, The Boston Globe:

“Star Trek the Franchise Reboot” – approaches the late Gene Roddenberry’s original science fiction world not on bended knee but with fresh eyes, a spring in its step, and the understanding that we know these people better than they know themselves. Indeed, much of the vast pleasure of this movie comes from characters suddenly discovering things about each other that we learned watching TV four decades ago.

There are certain pop duos that have become cultural institutions and about whom it’s endlessly enjoyable to speculate… Pine makes a fine, brash boy Kirk, but Quinto’s Spock is something special – an eerily calm figure freighted with a heavier sadness than Roddenberry’s original. The two ground each other and point toward all the stories yet to come.

(100) Robert Wilonsky, The Village Voice:

Retooling Gene Roddenberry’s hoary, winded pop-cultural warhorse, Abrams has scrubbed, polished, and turned the volume up to 11 with admiration and affection for the original series, but little of the die-hard’s encased-in-amber reverence. All at once, he’s revived the corpse but wiped clean its memory‚Äìa fresh start. Star Trek is like all of the best offerings in the big-screen Trek series: “wonderful dumb fun,” as Pauline Kael wrote in her glowing review of 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the franchise’s high point…”

(Don’t read the last paragraph of the Voice review unless you want one of the most emotional moments of the movie spoiled. Why do critics feel the need to reveal the best moments?)

(80) David Edelstein, New York Magazine:

The original Trek gave us mixed-race, sexually active Cold Warriors (it was the Marshall Plan in space, with Klingons standing in for Soviets); the next generation was mostly Clintonesque policy wonks and technocrats (plus an unhappy post-Soviet/Klingon). What political assumptions prop up the newest armada?

Hard to say, since the focus is more on mismatched buddies: Young rule-breaker Kirk and young by-the-book Spock loathe each other on sight and spend much of the film as antagonists. We’re always on Kirk’s side, though. Behind those impudent baby blues, young Pine mugs like mad, but there’s wit in the way he seizes the space: He seems to be both channeling and poking fun at William Shatner’s mighty ego. He leads with his appetites.

(80) Colin Kennedy, Empire:

Very much like its dynamic young cast, this Trek is physical and emotional, sexy and vital even, but it is not cerebral. The movie is not exactly empty-headed; indeed it has some smarts, but it doesn‚Äôt live up to the high-mindedness that was part of Gene Roddenberry‚Äôs original mission statement…

Ultimately, any boldness one can attach to the going here really belongs to the rescue of the Trek franchise from cultural irrelevance. This is a not insignificant achievement. As Abrams has noted himself, making 45 year-old tricorders desirable for the iPhone generation is a hell of a tough gig. Doing this while simultaneously pandering to the doctorates in Klingon is a task of Herculean, nay Sisyphean, proportions.

But Abrams and his crew pull it off.