I’m a second-generation Star Trek nerd. There exists a photo–I’ve got to ask my mom to dig it up, so I can scan it and post it here–of my dad and a bunch of his college friends in full classic Trek uniforms. This past Christmas, I gave him the Diamond Select replica communicator & phaser set, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never given him a gift he liked that much before. Ever.

Which explains why, in 1987, my dad was watching a new show called Star Trek: The Next Generation when his eight-year-old son wandered in. Catching sight of a man in a colorful uniform with some sort of strange robotic visor, who was in shock at the discovery of a frozen corpse, the son sat down and began a lifelong love affair with that which Gene Roddenberry had wrought.

I was always more of a Next Generation guy, and to this day some of the Trek books written by novelist Peter David have honored places on my bookshelf (particularly Q-Squared, my copy of which was signed by Mr. David himself a couple years ago). But that doesn’t mean I didn’t appreciate the earlier Trek as well. My dad had a number of old classic Trek books, including an awesome technical manual with all sorts of statistics on the various starships.

I’ve seen every Star Trek film in the theater since The Final Frontier (yes, of all Trek films, that was my first), and I’ve watched as the franchise slowly declined from its height in the mid-’90s to the incredibly disappointing Nemesis and the mediocre Enterprise (which, like Voyager, I never even watched).

If any franchise was in desperate need of fresh blood, it’s Star Trek. And shockingly, where Star Wars has foundered since the dreadful prequels, Star Trek may have just become the new cool science fiction franchise.

First, full disclosure: I’ve never watched Lost or Alias, and I thought Cloverfield was enjoyable but no masterpiece, so I really wasn’t sure what to expect from J.J. Abrams. I wasn’t worried about Abrams’s admitted lack of Trek knowledge–that would almost undoubtedly prove a plus–but I did worry the film would try so hard to be “cool” it would have virtually nothing in common with what I thought of as Star Trek (see Transformers and the upcoming G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra).

I needn’t have worried. Abrams has reinvented Star Trek for not just a new generation, but for everyone. I loved it; my father loved it; my wife, who’s not really a Trekkie at all, loved it.

I imagine seeing Star Trek today is like seeing the original series for the first time back in 1967, before Star Trek had all the baggage it has now. Abrams makes it all seem fresh and new, and not just because the actors aren’t, in the words of Mike Nelson, “as old as rocks” this time around (with the exception of Leonard Nimoy, who is actually older than the granite his face is evidently chiseled from).

In revamping the original series’ characters, Abrams and his actors have carefully chosen the right paths. Zachary Quinto’s Spock is very faithful to Nimoy’s original portrayal of the character, while amping up the emotional voltage just a wee bit. Chris Pine wisely avoids any hint of Shatner’s oft-parodied mannerisms while retaining the character’s devil-may-care attitude. Karl Urban does such a good McCoy–he’s not DeForest Kelley doing McCoy, he is McCoy–that I wish he’d gotten more screen time, and I hope we get more of the classic Kirk-Spock-McCoy trio in the sequel.

Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, and Scotty (Zoe Saldana, John Cho, Anton Yelchin and Simon Pegg, respectively) each get at least one moment to shine, making Star Trek feel more like an ensemble piece than previous films–heck, I think McCoy gets less screen time than Scotty or Uhura.

The story satisfactorily ties in to the original series’ continuity while making it very clear that a new, tangential timeline has been created (there is one event in the film, which I won’t spoil, that changes everything about the future history of the Federation at one fell swoop).

The film does have a few disappointments. Kirk’s famous victory in the Kobayashi Maru “no-win scenario” has been depicted much more cleverly in other media (particularly the novel of the same name by Julia Ecklar). The choice of Winona Ryder to play Spock’s mother is mystifying–her performance lacks the quiet dignity of Jane Wyatt, and she has to spend most of her time in age make-up that’s noticeable on such a youthful-looking actress.

The story also has a hard time making Eric Bana’s Captain Nero anything more than your usual evil megalomaniac, and I found him disturbingly similar to Tom Hardy’s scenery-chewing Shinzon in Star Trek Nemesis. (Honestly, the Star Trek films haven’t had a good, compelling villain since Khan.) The entire Nero subplot serves only as the catalyst for the franchise reboot, which, frankly, is all it really needed to do for this movie.

Star Trek also has the most blatant use of applied phlebotinum I’ve ever seen in the franchise (and man, is that saying a lot) in the form of “red matter” (Abrams’s beloved red ball again).

But these are mostly minor nitpicks. I think what I enjoyed most about Star Trek was how fun it was. The swashbuckling spirit of the original series was somewhat lost over the years, from Next Generation on (which is why the most popular films are The Wrath of Khan and First Contact).

While I can’t rate this film above Wrath of Khan–I’m just not familiar enough with this particular blend of actors and characters enough to be as emotionally invested as I was with Khan, plus there’s that compelling villain issue–it may very well rank just below Khan as my #2 favorite. I plan to see it again in the theater soon, and since I go to the movies maybe a handful of times a year, that’s about as big a recommendation I can make these days.