As you may have heard, Paramount is hoping to revive its venerable — and highly profitable — Star Trek franchise with yet another feature-film adventure for the original Enterprise crew, i.e., Kirk, Spock, etc., only this time there will be a whole new gang of young actors playing the iconic characters. J.J. Abrams, the creator of Lost and Alias, is writing and directing, and the final member of the core cast was announced just last week. Here’s the run-down:

• Chris Pine (Kirk)
• Zachary Quinto (Spock)
• Simon Pegg (Scotty)
• Zoe Saldana (Nyota Uhura)
• Karl Urban (Leonard “Bones” McCoy)
• Anton Yelchin (Pavel Chekov)
• John Cho (Sulu)

The photoshopped image above (courtesy of ScreenRant.com) provides an idea of how the newbies may look in their roles as well as how they compare to the original actors. As usual, give it a click it to blow it up larger.

In addition to the core cast above, Eric Bana will be playing a villain named Nero, who is rumored to be a Romulan (plausible, considering the name and the fact that the Romulan culture of the original Trek was modelled on ancient Rome), and Leonard Nimoy is said to be appearing as a more, ahem, mature Spock in a brief cameo. That last bit suggests we can expect either a time-travel story (another one? Ho-hum…) or a frame story of some kind, no doubt intended to help legitimize the new cast by having one of the classic actors “identify” them as his old friends.

Based on what I’ve seen out there on the blogs, people seem to be generally positive about this effort to reboot Star Trek, with opinions ranging from flat-out enthusiastic to cautiously optimistic. I, however, am far more dubious of the whole — forgive the pun — enterprise.

There are hopeful signs here. The new cast looks okay, although I have to admit I’m only familiar with Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, and John Cho. Of those three, I’d say Urban is the one who immediately strikes me as the perfect fit for his character. Dr. McCoy’s strongest qualities are irritability mixed with a strong, humanistic sense of decency and compassion, and I saw those qualities in Urban’s portrayal of Eomer in the Lord of the Rings movies.

I like Simon Pegg, best known in this country for the hilarious and surprisingly emotional zombie flick Shaun of the Dead, very much, but I can’t quite imagine him playing Scotty. I don’t know why; he just seems an odd choice for the role. Although his Scottish accent will probably be more authentic than Jimmy Doohan’s. (I’ve long rationalized that what Doohan was doing was a 23rd Century version of a Scots accent, because, you know, accents drift and evolve over time…)

And then there’s John Cho. The only film of his I’ve seen is Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. Oh, and I remember him from a bit part in American Pie. I’m not saying he can’t do drama, because I honestly don’t know, but having him and Pegg in this film make me wonder just how straight this one is going to be played. Although the original Star Trek always had plenty of humor in it — it was the later incarnations that seemed to become too self-important for laughter — it was not a comedy, and I’ve got no interest in seeing my old heroes turned into spoofs.

As for the rest of the cast’s relative anonymity, that’s probably a positive as well. They’re going to have a hard enough time with people comparing them to the original actors; they don’t need the burden of their own celebrity on top of that. For example, it was briefly rumored that Matt Damon would be playing Captain Kirk. That never would’ve worked, because everyone would spend the whole movie thinking either, “Hey, that’s not William Shatner playing Kirk,” or “Hey, that’s Matt Damon playing Kirk.” It would be too hard to look beyond the actor and simply see Kirk.

Speaking of Kirk, Chris Pine is probably my greatest concern with this new cast. He just doesn’t look very heroic to me. The image above doesn’t help, because his face has been smashed onto Shatner’s head and the end result is kind of… goofy. But even looking at his portfolio over on IMDB, all I’m seeing is a nice-looking young man who looks pretty much like all the other nice young men currently trying to break into stardom. No disrespect intended to anyone, but I have a hard time telling all the twentysomething male actors apart these days.

Moving on, J.J. Abrams is a good writer who has made some things I’ve liked, but the rumor mill makes it sound as if his take on Star Trek is very reminiscent of the old “Starfleet Academy” concept pitched by Harve Bennett all the way back in 1981, i.e., the “how did Young Kirk meet Young Spock and assemble the Young Crew.” I really hope that is just a rumor, because it was a sucky idea back in the ’80s, and I think it’s still a sucky idea. Between the Star Wars prequels and the formulaic sameness of all the recent comic-book movies, I’m pretty burned out on the “origin story.” When you get right down to it, it doesn’t much matter how all this stuff began, because what’s interesting is almost always the story that comes after the beginning. Whatever happened to stories that began in media res, right in the middle of the action, movies that immediately sweep you up into a fully formed universe and let you figure out what was going on as you went along? The original Star Wars did that. So did Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s a lost art, it seems.

Really, though, my biggest qualm with a Star Trek reboot is the question I seem to be asking of so many movie projects these days: why? Why is it necessary to do another Star Trek, especially one featuring the original characters? What possibly can be left to say or do in this universe that hasn’t been fully explored over five TV series and ten feature films? The cynical answer is, of course, that there are still bucks to be made off the legions of Trek fans who will surely be unable to resist their curiosity about another trip around the galaxy. From a business perspective, it’s simply figuring out a new way to leverage a familiar brand, same as any other remake.

But the thing I don’t get is why so many fans seem to be supportive of this project, Why, after the glut of Trek in all its incarnations during the ’90s, are so many still asking for more? What am I missing, me, a proud Trekkie for literally as far back as I can remember? Why am I content to let the whole damn thing simply fade back into the primordial pop-cultural mists from whence it came when so many others are not?

I don’t have the answers to those questions, except to say that, as far as I’m concerned, Star Trek ended a long time ago. For me, it is what it’s always been: a classic television series from the 1960s that unexpectedly spawned a whole lot of spin-offs, some of them good, many of them very bad. I am utterly indifferent to a remake, or reboot, or reimagining, or “re” anything, because for me, there’s really only ever been one Star Trek and I still find it perfectly acceptable, with no need for updating. I liked The Next Gen and Deep Space Nine, and the first four feature films (I would’ve ended the movie series with The Voyage Home, myself. It was perfect: everyone still looked relatively young and healthy, Spock was back, the Earth was saved, and they had a brand-spanking-new ship. But no, the cash register beckoned…). But, as I wrote a few years ago:

…the only Star Trek that really mattered all that much, culturally speaking, is the original one. Today it gets mocked because of the broad acting style, the primitive special effects, the velour shirts and miniskirts… but like it or not, that was the essence of Star Trek. That relic of the 1960s was the show that first advanced the ideas we Trekkies hold dear, of valuing diversity and finding fulfillment through exploration. At its best, the original Star Trek ranks with the finest drama ever put on television. And at its worst, it was still a lot more fun than anything I personally saw of its just-cancelled descendant, Enterprise.

To that, I will just add now that it was the original ’60s Trek that added all those catch phrases to our cultural toolkit, and which inspired a generation of scientists and engineers to create the technological future we’re living in now. And it was the original cast that brought the icons to life. William Shatner is Kirk to me, and some characters simply can’t be reinterpreted by anyone else. Does anyone except hard-core trivia hounds remember that David Soul played Richard Blaine in a short-lived TV version of Casablanca? Of course not… Humphrey Bogart was, is, and always will be the one and only Rick. And I personally think Star Trek is the same thing. Abrams’ reboot may make a ton of money. But it won’t really be Star Trek in my book…