"Star Trek" -- Logical

Many of the recent spate of origins stories have been so fixated on the mythology of the characters that they have forgotten the most important thing: that the audience (other than the rabid fanboys) is there to see a story.

But the new "Star Trek" gets it right. It boldly goes where, say, "Batman Begins" does not -- it introduces the characters, sets up the conflict that will be resolved in later episodes and it tells a complete story with a beginning, a middle and an end. You can enjoy the new "Star Trek" without ever seeing any of the other movies or TV shows. And yet, it still satisfies the geeky need of some people to learn where James Tiberius Kirk got his middle name.

And if you are one of those people who needs to know where James Tiberius Kirk got his middle name, perhaps you might want to think about joining the real world soon.

Credit goes to director J.J. Abrams (of "Lost" and other water-cooler shows) and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (of "Transformers) for keeping focused. Their film is sometimes exciting, sometimes gripping, sometimes funny and sometimes emotionally satisfying. It is true that these scenes sometimes alternate with scenes that are considerably less interesting, but the overall effect is definitely positive.

Blue-eyed, thick-lipped Chris Pine stars as the young James T. Kirk, and his acting is, shall we say, Shatnerian. Young Kirk is a rebel, but he'll be understood; he was born during an evacuation of a starship heroically commanded by his father. As a boy, he takes a classic Corvette and drives it off a cliff -- and why people keep building these movie roads straight to the edge of cliffs, I'll never know. As a young man, he becomes involved in drunken bar fights. One of these fights leads him to being guilted into joining the Starfleet Academy ("Your father was captain of a starship for 12 minutes. In that time, he saved 800 lives, including your mother's and yours. I dare you to do better").

At the Academy, he meets and instantly dislikes the stuffy Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto, who is himself a little bit Nimoyish). He also meets most of the people who will later be his crew: Zoe Saldana as Uhuru, John Cho as Sulu, Karl Urban as Bones and Anton Yelchin as Chekhov, whose Russian accent is not initially understood by the computer. Only late in the film does Simon Pegg show up as Scotty, bringing with him a blast of fresh air. He's there for comic relief, and who does comedy better than Pegg?

Inevitably, the film comes with a huge budget for special effects, and this time the money is mostly well spent. The movie is a spectacle, with spaceships crashing into each other, planets imploding and even many of the sets created on a computer. Perhaps most impressive, from a technical standpoint, is a scene in which the iconic U.S.S. Enterprise weaves its way through a still-fresh debris field.

Old-school fans will be pleased to note that the camera shakes when the ship is attacked.

The film does suffer from one staggeringly unlikely coincidence and a bit too much backstory in a film that is, in itself, backstory. But it has enough heft, and the characters drawn well enough, that it can appeal to "Star Trek" fans and casual viewers alike.