If I had to compare JJ Abrams to any Star Trek crewmember, it would probably have to be Scotty. Like the Enterprise's engineer, Abrams has shown himself to be a bit of a miracle worker with his new movie. But instead of finding a workaround for the dilithium crystals or a way to jump start the warp core, Abrams has taken a script that is so bad and so dumb as to be almost a disaster and made a movie that's a lot of fun and actually quite good from it.

When I went in to my screening of Star Trek I figured I would have to see the film twice to give a fair review. After all, I'm a big fan of the original series and I've been quite vocally critical of the film throughout the production process. I imagined I would need one viewing to just get used to the new crew and the new look and the changes in continuity and that my second screening would be the one where I could actually view it as a movie. But after a marvelous opening sequence and a rough patch of utterly unneeded prologue, Star Trek settles into its groove and makes some things very clear: this crew is great, even the dreaded Zachary Quinto; this is a Star Trek movie, through and through, but filtered through a slightly more modern filmmaking sensibility; and I would probably never need to see this film again. I mean, I'd watch it if it was on television, but Star Trek is a one and done film, a movie that's barely a movie and more an elongated pilot episode. You like what you see and what's been set up, but you're really more interested in seeing where things go from here.

But that script. Jesus. It's the film's real villain (especially since writers Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman have seen fit to feature what might be the second worst villain in Trek movie history (no one will ever top the sheer shittiness of Star Trek: Insurrection), and it's trying to derail the new adventures of the starship Enterprise almost from the start. The script relies endlessly on coincidence and happenstance. In one scene young Kirk is marooned on a frozen planet. Chased by a succession of monsters (shades of going through the Core in Phantom Menace, but thankfully the only place where Star Trek compares to that film), he ends up in a random ice cave... where a Spock from a hundred years in the future happens to have taken refuge. Oh, and they find Scotty 14 miles away. Lucky! The whole movie is like that, partially because the movie has a burning desire to be the most origin story of all origin stories (we see Kirk born, for the love of God. I'm shocked Abrams didn't start us off at the Big Bang. And I don't mean Kirk's conception) and partially because Orci and Kurtzman are the laziest , hackiest writers going today. The uber-origin aspects means that the movie can't simply begin with the crew meeting on the bridge by assignment or something, and the lazy writers means that they crew meets one by one in a series of asinine reveals.

Even with that, Abrams makes it sing. He's assembled a cast that is terrific, and - for the first time in Trek history - actually gives each and every one of them something to do that helps define them as characters. They don't always feel quite like the classic characters (John Cho, for instance, really has his own take on Sulu, and I wouldn't even have guessed that Zoe Saldana is playing Uhura if the movie hadn't told me. Simon Pegg is hilarious as Scotty, but his slightly manic version of the character doesn't really gibe with the laid back, always a little toasted version from the show and the original movies. But whatever, he's great and he makes the character work), and they don't always quite hit the mark (Quinto, while not being bad, just barely works as Spock. A friend really nailed it: Nimoy played Spock as a Zen master, while Quinto plays him as almost a sociopath. He's simply unsettling), but they're all pretty damn good. Karl Urban is astonishing as Bones; he gets the elements of DeForest Kelly's performance that made Bones so iconic and he nails those things, but in his own way. And Chris Pine, after a shaky start (the scene where Kirk beats the Kobyashi Maru (which, by the coincidental way, was programmed by Spock. That's a cheap, lazy screenwriter gimmick to create tension between Kirk and Spock throughout the movie. There's one other, even worse, screenwriter gimmick that's employed, but I won't spoil it. Suffice it to say that I hated it) is atrocious; it has Kirk lounging in the captain's chair eating an apple, being snotty. I just don't buy Kirk being a prick about that) really blossoms into the role and makes it his own. At the end of the movie, as he walks onto the bridge of the Enterprise in that yellow tunic, Chris Pine IS Captain Kirk.

And Star Trek IS Star Trek. The film doesn't go out of its way to throw in a bunch of whiz-bang battles; the action sequences all grow naturally from the story, and even when some action is shoe-horned in (Scotty accidentally beams himself into the Enterprise's coolant system and gets sucked through a series of tubes) there's a quality to it that doesn't violate the hard to define feeling of Star Trek. While the film isn't about exploration (a subject matter that almost none of the movies have really addressed anyway) it does feel like classic Trek, like it's concerned with the characters first and foremost and about adventure - and not action (and there is a difference) - second.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Star Trek looks like a movie. There were a lot of problems with Mission: Impossible 3, but one of the biggest was the limited scope of Abrams' vision as a director. He had simply spent too much time in TV and was looking at his frame from that point of view. Even the big action sequences in that movie feel constrained and small, but Trek never feels small. The film is huge, and epic in scope. Abrams' camera is active (maybe a little too active - he puts the camera on cranes and rigs that allow it to rotate all over the place for no good reason, simply because he can) and his shot composition is expansive. The Enterprise's bridge really lends itself to widescreen imagery, and Abrams takes advantage of it. Sure, the new version of the bridge looks like the SS Apple Store, but it's a buzzing SS Apple Store that feels like the command center of a huge ship. Star Trek marks a really big step in the career of JJ Abrams: on his second feature directorial gig he's finally become a filmmaker.

I can't wait to see what he does next with the franchise. Hopefully he'll make sure his movie has a reasonable villain. For reasons that I cannot even begin to fathom this movie was greenlit with a central villain who is a space miner who ACCIDENTALLY comes back in time. He doesn't even have a plan; he simply shows up. The casting of Eric Bana as Nero gave everyone some hope that we'd see a really formidable villain here, but the actor is given almost nothing to do. I'm sure an attempt to recreate the Wrath of Khan dynamic is why the script keeps Nero on his own ship the whole movie, shouting at people over viewscreens, but it just doesn't work. Your villain simply can't be Some Guy. He needs to have something going on, something deeper and more interesting. The movie actually gives him this - in the opening scene of the movie Nero (coincidentally. Agh!) kills Kirk's father, completely changing the timeline and forcing the entire film into an alternate continuity, but the script never uses this. Nero hates Spock, and this gives Kirk a reason to hate Nero, but the movie seems unwilling to give Kirk much in the way of angst or anger about the whole matter; when Kirk and Nero meet face to face at the end the fight feels perfunctory, and like any standard hero vs villain fight. It's very disappointing.

Also hurting Nero is the decision to cut a key sequence from the movie. As the film stands now, Nero appears 25 years before the film's present and kills Kirk's father. It then skips ahead 25 years where Nero comes out of nowhere in an attempt to kill Spock from the future, who is also time traveling by accident. Audiences have to wonder 'What the fuck has Nero been doing for the last quarter of a century? Just sitting around?' It turns out he was captured by Klingons and held on their prison planet; test audiences didn't like the scenes about the Klingons so Abrams cut them, turning a villain who was already weak into a villain who is also lazy and stupid. It's a shockingly bad decision, and I think indicative of the problems with the test screening process.

That said, cutting the scene probably did streamline the movie, and one of Abrams' goals with Star Trek seems to be to make a film that's almost breathless in its pacing. And once the really redundant series of prologues end (honestly, why would anyone think we needed to see kiddie Spock? The scene exists as lazy screenwriter shorthand to set up a pivotal plot moment later, but it's a scene that, in the hands of better writers, would have been cut at draft two in favor of working the necessary information into the film through character beats) the movie takes off, rocketing forward with excitement and fun.

Star Trek is the quintessential pretty good movie. It works, it's a fun time in the theater, the cast is great, and the visuals dazzle. But even now, weeks after the screening, my opinion hasn't changed one bit. The movie hasn't sunk or risen in my estimation. It's a movie that gets the job done, often with more quality than it needed to bring, but it's just the table setting for the real films that come next. I wish that there had been more time to work on the script before shooting (the strike hit just as they started production), because with another two drafts Star Trek could have been something special instead of something that simply works. Please, JJ, keep Orci and Kurtzman away from Star Trek 2.

Note on the score below: I think that Star Trek is really a 7 out of 10 movie, but I've bumped it up to 8 because the elements that work work so well that while you're watching it, before you've had a chance to think about the numerous and idiotic plot holes and writing deficiencies.

8 out of 10