This new STAR TREK movie is a goof, a lark. It’s cinematic cotton candy that dissipates as soon as it strikes your eyeballs.

For cotton candy lovers, the memory of that short burst of taste lingers happily. For others, all that’s remembered of the spun sugar is the gritty residue stuck in your molars. Either way, there’s no denying this is one insubstantial movie. More jokey than suspenseful, it has twice as many laughs as scares. And even more surprisingly, it jettisons the traditional Star Trek moralizing that seems a hallmark of the franchise. This STAR TREK isn’t out to teach us anything or enlighten us. It’s got nothing more on its mind than to entertain us, with whatever it takes – from a sexier young cast to CGI dinosaur-monsters, from whiz-bang special effects to smart-aleck inside jokes. One’s enjoyment of this STAR TREK will most likely depend on one’s capacity to enjoy froth. I for one would prefer a little more gravitas, but I suspect that’s going to be a minority opinion.

That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate any number of the film’s Star Trek innovations. Most especially, the sexual tension between a randy young James Kirk and a hot young Uhura who only has eyes (and lips) for Spock. And it’s fun to see our Star Trek world turned upside down for a while with Spock acting as the Enterprise commander and bossing Kirk around for a change. And finally, the screenwriter’s idea of creating an alternate reality is ingenious for it allows future filmmakers to imagine enitirely new trajectories for all the characters, without disturbing the Star Trek canon.

But none of this can disguise the fact that the story line is rather ho-hum. It’s as if so much energy was put into re-introducing the characters, that the filmmakers never get around to giving them anything very substantial to do. Eric Bana is fine, for instance, as the time-travelling villain Nero but he’s given so little screentime, he seems but an afterthought. And the Enterprise crew is played for so many laughs that when it’s time to get serious, the characters don’t seem to have the necessary depth to make things interesting. For some reason, director J. J. Abrams who does such a brilliant job crafting finely nuanced characters in LOST can’t or won’t do the same thing for his Star Trek personnel. A perfect illustration of this occurs at a crucial moment in the film when Kirk baits Spock into an emotional over-reaction. It’s so broadly drawn and clunkily directed that it seems clear Abrams was more focused on the end result (getting Spock out of the commander’s chair and Kirk into in) than he was worried about how to get there. Despite the clear affection he has for the iconic Trek characters, I don’t think Abrams respects them enough to give them any psychological depth. And without an overarching theme or “message” to provide cover for these rather thin characters, this new STAR TREK seems needlessly slight.

I’ll grant you that, given how ponderous some of Star Trek’s “messages” have been in the past, it might not be such a bad thing to be freed from such a burden. But without it, Star Trek seems just like any other cowboys-in-space movie. I’m afraid the Star Trek franchise may have successfully revived itself at the expense of its soul. (Faust in space, anyone? Now there’s a theme worthy of the original series.)

Oddly, for a show that once took itself perhaps too seriously, now comes a film that doesn’t take itself seriously enough. Perhaps it’s taking the slogan “Live long and prosper” a little too literally.