Star Trek blithely goes where many blockbusters have gone before. And, by God, if that experience comes with a few drinks, a greasy bucket of popcorn, a drive-in theater, and some person(s) with whom to nuzzle, then it’s sure to be a blissfully dunderheaded time.

I must preface this review with my bias: There remains a vestigial Trekkie within me. That said, however, I’m sensitive to the franchise’s need for detox; its last film, which was released in 2002, was a crusty clunker in which the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation seemed ready to punch out their time cards. Offering the captain’s chair to J. J. Abrams (Alias, Lost, Mission: Impossible III) was a sure-fire way to inject speed into the veins of an intergalactic corpse. This isn’t like the reboots of the “James Bond” or “Batman” franchises, which make their subjects “darker” and more “cerebral”; as directed and produced by Abrams—working with a script by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (both of Transformers)—this new “Trek” prequel is denatured by being high on action and low on intelligence.

Its convoluted story opens with the hagiographic birth of James T. Kirk, whose father sacrifices himself by crashing his starship into that of Nero (Eric Bana), a Romulan who has traveled from the 24th century into the 23rd to avenge the destruction of his home world. Kirk (Chris Pine) is your typical restless youth from Iowa—getting into bar fights, driving sports cars off cliffs at age eight, etc.—until Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) recommends he enlist in the Starfleet Academy. There, in a nod to events referenced in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Kirk cheats on a flight-simulator exam, which happens to have been programmed by the half-Vulcan, half-human Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto). The two must begrudgingly work together onboard the Starship Enterprise, and warp off to intercept Nero at planet Vulcan. Alas, Nero’s ship destroys Spock’s home world, leaving its inhabitants an “endangered species.”

Orci and Kurtzman finagle into this scenario younger versions of the other characters who’ve been familiar to audiences since the 1966-9 TV show: peevish Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban), helmsman Sulu (John Cho), Russian navigator Chekov (Anton Yelchin), communications officer Uhura (Zoe Saldana), and engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg). Leonard Nimoy also appears as 24th-century-refugee Ambassador Spock, whom Nero blames for destroying his planet. (Hence, the destruction of Vulcan.) Nero nearly demolishes Earth, too, but is vanquished thanks to red matter—or something like that. His ship is finally blown to smithereens by the Enterprise—though it’s a rather unnecessary and brutal assault, seeing as Nero’s claw-like space tanker was already being spaghettified by a black hole.

Abrams keeps the action moving, and one cannot fault him for that. Even when the quantum mechanics have you scratching your head, you’re constantly engaged. Our familiarity with the characters is a lovely device: The whole movie is a setup for fanboy jokes. Seemingly aware of this, the cast is more than happy to provide punchlines. Yelchin stumbles on his consonants; Urban emphasizes the anachronism of having a country doctor practice in space (though his lilt seems more Jack Nicholson or Jimmy Stewart than DeForest Kelley); Saldana plays a sexy, feminist tomboy (clearly a stand-in for Princess Leia); Sulu swishes his epée in Vulcan’s stratosphere; and when we first meet Scotty (who, when played by James Doohan, rounded out with age), the marvelous Simon Pegg complains about being deprived of rations. Zingers are Orci and Kurtzman’s specialty—developed characters are not. Similarly, Abrams métier is cliffhangers, not narrative flow. It is their fault that the funky Nero gets almost no screen time and never builds as a threat; and that Quinto seems too human as the famously stoic Spock; and that Pine’s Kirk is so fatuously a rebel-without-a-cause. A screenplay like this requires very little “acting”—the dramaturgy is covered in mold—so the players’ timing is paramount; fortunately, they horse around like a seasoned comedy troupe.

The director is a good comic, too—but not always intentionally. Abrams stages a great farcical sequence when Kirk’s body rejects a vaccine, but when the director plays his C.G. explosions in slow-mo while opera singers wail on the soundtrack, you can’t help but roll your eyes. Despite his hyperbolic birth, Kirk (unlike Anakin Skywalker) isn’t a Christ figure—thank God. But, in scenes such as the one in which Kirk’s eight-year-old self zooms past in his uncle’s antique 20th-century hot rod, the movie crashes: That “badass” cliché is as old to us as that car is to Kirk. Similarly, when Orci and Kurtzman borrow devices from old “Trek” movies to forward their plot, one isn’t sure whether it’s an in-joke or a rip-off. (Not that the two are mutually exclusive…)

The franchise was understandably resurrected for maximum commercial appeal, so Star Trek uses the preexisting character dynamics as an anchor while forsaking all those darn sci-fi ideas that were at the center of the previous films. It embraces the franchise’s heart, but rejects its mind. In the past, that “heady” material was either transparent in an affably hokey way—like William Shatner’s acting—or integrated so cleverly that the narratives transcended their cheesiness. The creative team here toys with time travel and black holes, but beyond their event horizons lies nothing but expediency. This prequel (which precedes all prior “Trek” films and television series, save one) is rigged so that the damage Nero inflicts goes uncorrected. In layman’s terms, the writers have wiped the slate clean—all obstacles the writers faced in maintaining fidelity to the established order of the “Trek” universe have been obliterated. Their choice certainly affords them wiggle room, but it’s a cheat; it’s as if they’re erasing the shared experiences of millions of fans from existence.

I understand the need for this rupture, but find the methodology crass. To clarify my grievance—and prove that my uncloseted dorkhood in these matters is less singularly sentimental than you might think—I’ll use a topical analogy. Because of recent Republican behavior, political conservatives now find themselves at a crossroads: To get votes in the short term, they’ll have to alter their platform; but if they changed their core values, would they think their platform worth fighting for? The presence of an embalmed Leonard Nimoy—whose smirks and joshes are a parody of Spock rather than a portrayal—is meant to be reassuring; but when this Spock shrugs off the mutated timeline (not to mention the wanton destruction of his home planet), it goes against the grain of any “Trek” temporal-distortion episode ever. As mindless trash entertainment, this doofy, befuddled sci-fi-comedy is positively dank; but would successive movies like this under the “Star Trek” label justify the need for that idiosyncratic franchise to live long and prosper? Star Trek lives, but “Star Trek” may be dead.