There’s no doubt that Star Trek has had a profound influence on pop culture, but in the doc How William Shatner Changed the World, filmmaker Julian Jones and Shatner himself argue that its impact went even further. The movie originally aired on the Discovery Channel and is supposedly based on Shatner’s book, though an Amazon search comes up with nothing of that title (and no How I Changed the World, which would be more appropriate, either). Nevertheless, it’s an amusing, if goofy documentary, hosted and narrated by the Montreal native, who took second place in this year’s Best Actor category in the Best of Montreal, and who spends most of this flick cracking jokes from behind the wheel of his convertible and tooling around L.A.

The rest of the movie is spent talking to people whose lives or careers were influenced in some way by Star Trek. There’s a charmingly geeky NASA engineer and ST fanatic responsible for sending probes into deep space and the dude who invented the cellular phone, who was inspired by the show’s communication devices. But there are also folks inspired by the show’s vision of a racially harmonious future, like Dr. Mae Jemison, America’s first black woman astronaut. If you’re a hardcore Trekkie, you might enjoy this good-natured nerdathon; if not, it probably won’t do much for you.

by MARK SLUTSKY