I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was a kid. I used to spend every summer at 5 PM watching the original series. When Star Trek: The Next Generation came out it was one of the only times of the week my entire family would gather together. But that was a long time ago.

In the years since, Paramount and Rick Berman (the guy who took over after Gene Roddenberry died) took the original concept of social commentary, exploration and understand of the human condition and milked every ounce of goodness out of it. By turning Star Trek into a franchise they pummeled us with ridiculous concepts and plots until we could no long remember what it was that we liked about the original show in the first place.

(Luckily out of this “dark era” it brought about two great anti-Trek’s: Galaxy Quest, a perfect parody of what the Trek franchise had become, and Battlestar Galactica, where creator Ron Moore, frustrated with working on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, created a vision for what a space opera could be.)

With the highly anticipated reboot of Star Trek, helmed by J.J. Abrams and the crew that brought us Alias, Lost, Fringe, Transformers, Mission: Impossible 3 and others, we see an entirely new world in which to create stories from. I wouldn’t call it a remake, or even a reboot, rather this new Star Trek is more like an adaptation of a novel. All the character names are the same, they still fly around in a ship called Enterprise, there are plenty of lines you would recognize from original material, but they are set in a new context. Everything feels original and new.

You let go of everything you expect after seeing the gripping segment before the title card. The movie hasn’t even started yet and you are thinking, “I haven’t seen anything like this in a sci-fi movie before.” And from then on in, you go for a roller coaster ride the likes I have never participated in with any Trek film… hell, I can’t even remember the last summer movie this action packed.

Gone is everything that wore down the Star Trek franchise, and what’s left is a new Star Trek for a new era, but with the underpinnings of what made the original series a popular culture phenomenon still there. One that I completely forgot about. That different perspectives of how people perceive the events around them, how they work together to solve insurmountable problems. This is what space travel is about. This is what exploration is about. This is what people are about.

I actually think there is still a statement about today’s society in the new Star Trek somewhere, but I was having too much fun to want to figure out what it was.