It was undoubtedly a tough assignment: how do you revive a moribund 40-year-old franchise in such a way that young bums will be planted firmly on cinema seats this summer? For most other fictional worlds, the answer would have been to simply hit the reboot button and start from scratch. But this is Star Trek – not just any old fictional world but an entire and richly detailed universe with a legion of fiercely protective fans for whom the scent of heresy is never far away. Assuaging these continuity freaks (or canonistas as they’re known) and attracting the new youthful audience that a blockbuster movie needs in order to succeed must have seemed like squaring the circle. The solution adopted by the new Star Trek film is an elegant one: introduce an incursion from the future – from where the current Trek timeline ends in the late 24th century – into a point decades before the original series began and you’ve remained true to ‘canon’ while simultaneously changing everything. In other words, this is a Star Trek that takes place in an alternate timeline, one where the characters we know and love have taken different paths to become who they are, and whose destiny may well be quite different from what we’re familiar with; after all, it’s a concept that any Trekkie or SF fan can understand. So while the Trek universe remains in its essential details, the problem of its being hemmed in by all that’s gone before is summarily dealt with, and the curse of a prequel like the TV series Enterprise neatly avoided. The future is once more unwritten, and there is indeed new life on the final frontier; anything could happen from now on.

The film’s opening ten minutes certainly raise hopes for something special – the USS Kelvin comes up against a huge and scary-looking alien ship in an immersive, adrenaline-fuelled, effects-heavy rollercoaster of a sequence that nails you to your seat. It’s how Star Trek was surely always meant to look – recognisable, but enriched by state of the art effects, rapid-fire editing and the smell of more money than we’ve seen thrown at a Trek film since The Motion Picture 30 years ago.

The rest of the film follows a similar trajectory – introducing familiar characters or concepts but giving them a new, 21st century sheen and moving everything along with the kind of breathless speed that contemporary action movies mistake for pacing. We get some glimpses of Kirk and Spock’s childhood and youth, worlds away from one another but linked by their sense of difference and rebellion. While Spock’s backstory is pure Trek canon, Kirk now follows a very different path to Starfleet Academy, to which we next pay a brief visit. There’s some fun, fan-pleasing stuff here – like finding out just how Kirk beat the famous Kobayashi Maru test – and then it’s off to space as a bunch of cadets must save the universe before graduating. In other words, Abrams and his writers have managed to assemble their Enterprise ‘A-Team’ quickly as well as at a much younger age than in the original series (Chekhov is a mere 17 years old) and let them loose with a starship they’ve never seen before (Sulu’s debut as helmsman is an embarrassing false start).

From this point, it’s all good fun – and sometimes very funny – and races toward its inevitable conclusion without a care in the world. But there are some problems. Altered timeline or not, the overall storyline is both thin and rushed, and the credulity-straining coincidences and sizeable black holes in it are troubling if you ever pause to think about them (which I did during a couple of action sequences that outstayed their welcome). Eric Bana’s Romulan bad guy Nero is either just really stupid or badly underwritten, his motivation for wanting to destroy an entire galaxy based on something as fundamentally undramatic as a simple misunderstanding of the facts.

While the special effects – particularly ship exteriors – are mightily impressive, interior design isn’t this Trek’s strongpoint. The bridge is bright and white, and seems to have been created with the primary aim of making the crew look beautiful, while Scotty’s beloved engineering looks like a cross between an Ikea warehouse and a gigantic brewery.

The biggest problem with JJ Abrams’ Trek, though, is that it squanders the very opportunity it has created, offering a souped-up remix of greatest hits from Trek movies past rather than any sense of boldly going anywhere new. Implacable maniac out for revenge? (Wrath of Khan, Nemesis) Check. Big, scary spaceship-eating thing heading for Earth? (The Motion Picture, The Voyage Home) Check. Enterprise the only ship in quadrant and/or manned by a rookie crew? (The Motion Picture, The Wrath of Khan) Check. The blame for this must fall on writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman who, while obviously feeling the need to chuck crumbs of Trek-lore to the fans in their allusive script, also have form when it comes to ‘borrowing’ bits of other peoples’ movies; take a look at The Island’s blatant but uncredited remaking of 1979’s Clonus for instance.

In the end, though, it’s not the writers, the designers, or JJ Abrams – a brand name to conjure with but a workaday director with little feel for a film’s overall architecture – but the cast who bring this Star Trek to life.

Fans will enjoy seeing Leonard Nimoy (never say never) coaxed out of retirement to play Spock once again; he brings a much needed warmth and short-lived still centre to the film at its midpoint, even if the script requires him to deliver some pretty atrocious dialogue that the younger Nimoy would probably have rewritten himself.

The new cast fare better in many ways. Zachary Quinto’s Spock is genuinely interesting, disconcertingly prim and geeky in a way that Nimoy’s never was, while at the same time showing a good deal more emotion than we’re used to. Karl Urban comes closest to doing an impersonation of the original with his McCoy, relying on a Southern accent and some typical grumbling to bring Bones to life, but with more to do could be a triumph. Chris Pine’s Kirk is probably the biggest surprise and perhaps the most successful thing in the whole film; he may start out as an aimless brawler who happens to look like a male model, but by the end of the film you begin to believe that he is becoming Captain Kirk before your very eyes. While avoiding all of William Shatner’s much-loved mannerisms, Pine begins to channel something of the arrogance, the roguish twinkle and the indefinable ‘Kirkness’ of the character.

Away from the central trio, Bruce Greenwood is splendid as Captain Christopher Pike, Anton Yelchin’s puppyish Chekhov amusing and likeable, John Cho’s Sulu true to the original in the unfortunate sense that, once again, the writers have forgotten to give him anything to do and Simon Pegg’s comic turn as Scotty (along with his inexplicable George Lucas-ish alien sidekick) perhaps best forgotten. The attempt to remodel Zoe Saldana’s Uhura as a modern, independent female also backfires, though through no fault of the actress; while Nichelle Nichols admittedly spent a lot of time opening hailing frequencies and saying “Captain, I’m scared”, her character was at least present on the bridge solely as a professional rather than as love interest for the lead actors.

It’s these sorts of retrogressive tendencies that might scare away the old guard of Trekkers, for whom all Abrams’ talk of Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic vision will ring slightly hollow when they see what is undeniably a dumbed-down, action-oriented, popcorn movie with nothing much to say about anything in particular. Abrams’ Star Trek – in its overwhelming desire to be sexy – has forgotten that precisely what was sexy about the show in the 1960s was that it was smart. Star Trek’s villain Nero uses a mysterious substance called ‘red matter’ to destroy planets; if Abrams and his team had just employed a bit more of the grey variety, this really could have been the movie he’d like us to believe it is.

So, a fast-paced, enjoyable, and slightly stupid Star Trek for our age, looking nostalgically back to the days before franchise fatigue set in and optimistically forward to box office revenues new. Whether we’ll remember it once the Paramount hype-machine has finally been switched off and the dust has settled, I don’t know. But it would be nice to think that Star Trek lives again. With a new, young crew assembled on the bridge, their own futures before them, I’d like to see where they boldly go next; hopefully somewhere more interesting where there are bigger adventures, and even, perhaps, new worlds and new civilisations. It’s that promise that will see people queuing up for the next Star Trek movie.