J. J. Abrams’s thriller Star Trek is the first tent-pole film that has made me sob with pure pleasure. The 42-year-old boldly goes where no other Star Trek director in his right mind has gone before. He goes backwards. To those heady days when James Tiberius Kirk was a teenage rebel who styled himself on James Dean, and when the young Spock was being bullied at school.

Abrams charts the traumatic events that blooded and bonded the original crew of the USS Enterprise. There is nothing wildly original about the story: the ugly Romulans want to reduce the Starfleet to dust. What’s remarkable is the exhilarating pace — and the instant smash-and-grab personality contest — in which the egos of the two most famous heroes collide like wrecking balls. Kirk and Spock hate each other.

The film tells how the two most gifted space cadets in the history of Starfleet muscle their way to the top. But it’s the chippy antipathy between the gung-ho Kirk and the hugely irritated, and far more intelligent, Spock, that brings tears of joy. Chris Pine’s red-necked Kirk has a swagger as wide as Texas. Zachary Quinto’s fresh-faced Vulcan is a ghastly stickler for school rules. (He’s also a considerably better actor than Leonard Nimoy.) The two lock horns like a pair of frisky stags. There’s a sublime moment on the bridge when Spock almost gleefully drops the interfering Kirk with his famous Vulcan grip. But both heroes have personal issues, the death of their parents, which gnaw away at their differences, and c hoices, to illuminating effect.

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This is exactly where the psychopathic villain, a bald-headed Romulan called Nero (played with bald-headed East End menace by Eric Bana), cashes in on the personality conflict between the two stars.

The plot itself is a fast and furious intergalactic shoot-out with Nero, which bounces between the future, the past, and an alternate world on the flip side of a black hole. The special effects are marvellous, from the implosion of entire planets to the spectacle of Romulan space ships that look like magnified fleas. The stunts and combat are comparable with anything that Star Wars can dish out.

But it’s the vintage gripes and emotional chemistry on the Enterprise that make this film such a comic joy. The lasting irony of the televised Star Trek series was the way it wrestled brilliantly with irrational human behaviour — which is partly why the franchise deteriorated so tragically into barely watchable daytime soap.

What Abrams recovers is that almost religious sense of emotional turmoil. Karl Urban’s alcoholic Dr McCoy distrusts Spock the moment he claps eyes on him. A bolshy Scotty (Simon Pegg) blunders around the engine room in a blind panic. But the real hot and taboo crisis is supplied by Zoe Saldana’s sexy Lieutenant Uhura. The spiky communications officer is far more enamoured of Spock than she is of Pine’s arrogant and jealous Kirk.

What will thrill jaded science-fiction fans is the grungy, pig-iron feel of the film. There’s a touch of retro-Alien about the industrial guts of the Enterprise; a dash of Judge Dredd about the futuristic planet Earth. But the animal magic of Abrams’s film lies in the old-school stitching. Classic Trek punchlines and catchphrases (“I’m giving her all she’s got”) are delivered tongue-in-cheek, mostly in the middle of a catastrophe. If the greatest romance one can ever have is with the past, then Trek fans are in for an incomparable treat.

12A, 125mins

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