The world of Star Trek has been tractor-beaming audiences from whatever else they’re doing and holding them in their chairs for four decades.  The charm of the show is its endless faith in humanity’s ability to come to harmonious solutions to the problems it encounters out there in the galaxy.  Many of the shows from the first classic series are parables, tales about how to do the right thing in a universe where things get pretty darn strange at times.  Though not so strange that Kirk can’t sort them out with a biff or a snog, more often than not.

Later series depart from that set-up, and tend to suffer for it, though some of the individual episodes are gems.  And in some ways the newer series have aged worse than the classic show: Next Generation was never far from a tiresome homily about parents and children, and the fact that the crew included a touchy-feely empath rather than a logical Vulcan signalled that we’d entered the age of the inner child and the meaningful hug.  Ick.

The show’s film spin-offs have been a mixed bag too.  True fans can argue the details, but common sense has it that for non-addicts pretty much the only tolerable one is the fourth, featuring the Enterprise crew coming back to contemporary Earth, lured by whalesong.  The others are pretty much for devotees only.

And now we have a new film, helmed by Lost creator JJ Abrams, and the good news is it’s a doozy.  Abrams has chosen to set the story way back when our heroes — the proper ones that is, Kirk and Spock and Scotty and Bones etc — were at the start of their careers.  Well, before that even, as the wonderful sequence with a pre-adolescent Kirk at the wheel of a sportscar demonstrates.  It’s a bold move, but it works a treat: the old icons are back, but this time they’re played by considerably better actors than those whose shoes they’re stepping into.

If you’ve got any affection for the show at all — and I mean as a regular viewer and not a Trek obsessive — you’ll find this a hugely enjoyable spectacle.  The story rightly belongs to Kirk and Spock, finding their feet in their own lives and with regard to one another, and all the others get appropriate look-ins for good measure.  It’s good-humoured stuff, and moves like shit off a shovel, Abrams realising that a contemporary audience for a science fiction film is not going to take kindly to soliloquies about temporal paradoxes unless they’re accompanied by cool action sequences and interesting camerawork.  All of which it delivers in abundance.

The film ticks off every box it needs to, and I don’t mean that in a cynical fashion.  When you’re re-presenting characters that an audience has real fondness for, do so by showing respect to the icons.  Let them say the lines you know people are waiting to hear, and then by all means add a twist, whether a moment of comedy, or a new spin on old material: Uhuru and Spock being in a relationship is a cool new touch.  There’s also a clever use of a classic Trek trope, when Kirk is abandoned on a planet of ice, and encounters first a fearsome beast, then its even scarier predator, before meeting an old friend…a very old friend.

The look and feel of the film is terrific.  Rather than the anaemic future often postulated in Trek, this one is visceral and convincing.  When the Enterprise hits warp speed it’s like a bullet from a gun.  Similarly, the interiors are credible — the engine rooms have a scale they’ve not had before, which makes Scotty’s job all the more demanding as he runs round them trying to eek out another few mph out of the dilithium crystals — and the digital effects are seamlessly integrated into the whole, rather than looking like dodgy airbrushing.

If 60s Trek was all about American foreign policy in outer space, and by the 90s it had become about a ship of therapy victims resolving their issues, the new Star Trek film is very much a product of the Obama presidency: full of promise, and wearing the lessons of the past lightly while treading towards an uncertain future.  I for one will be sticking around for any sequels.