So Star Trek Isn’t Star Trek Anymore
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Like so many successful comic-book movies, it’s about adolescent heroes coming to terms with themselves and their pasts, struggling with friends, rivals, and enemies while searching for power and place in the world. Where the original was poorly fashioned and outwardly focused, this one is gorgeously designed and self-obsessed. It’s personal rather than political, aesthetically pleasing at the expense of conceptual depth. Star Trek, then, is continuing its mission: boldly going where the franchise has never gone before, seeking out new fans and new pop culture relevance. But it may lead fans of the original into unfamiliar space, struggling to come to terms with a series that, for the first time in more than four decades, feels strangely alien. ~Peter Suderman
I have to confess to being a life-long watcher of Star Trek and something of a fan, at least during its better moments, so I have viewed the new prequel/remake with a certain dread. The last time a Star Trek film involved Romulans was not that long ago, and it was possibly one of the worst movies of the last decade. To call that one Clive Barker’s Star Trek would be an insult to Hellraiser fans (and it is debatable whether the ninth movie is more like a bad horror flick than the tenth), but that is what has always come to mind when I think about it. In other words, I am not sorry that there will be no more TNG-based movies.
Now J.J. Abrams promises/threatens to do to an old, admittedly creaky and tired franchise what he does in pretty much every movie he directs: blow up a lot of things, including any pretensions the franchise has ever had to being something more than a violent space opera. For most people, this will come as a relief, but I am not one of them. The insufferably cerebral and moralistic elements of Star Trek have been bad enough to make even devoted fans wince many, many times, and if the acting often seemed weak it might have been because so few actors can credibly recite some of the drivel generations of actors have been forced to say over the decades. However, stripping Star Trek of those things isn’t to create a new, reimagined Star Trek, but simply to slap the old names on something entirely different and pretend that annihilation is the same as renovation. Of course, I have found almost every assumption that undergirds the old Star Trek universe utterly ridiculous and unrealistic even by sci-fi standards. It is indeed the meliorist’s and progressive’s dream come true, which is another way of saying that it is impossible. There is almost nothing in the franchise’s politics that I find attractive, and the regular sermonizing was at times very unpleasant*. Yet I learned to like it not just in spite of its preachiness and precious political correctness, but also partly because those were constants one could rely on.
Even though these were the things from which the franchise had to keep redeeming itself, it would have been indistinguishable from every other action/adventure story set in space if it did not have them. I have heard it said that the new Bond films have created a Bond in many ways much closer to Ian Fleming’s conception of the character; I find it hard to imagine anyone saying the same thing about the new crew of the Enterprise and Roddenberry. Very few, aside from Dirk Benedict, really miss the old Battlestar Galactica that Ron Moore’s re-creation has completely surpassed and, despite its final missteps, almost obliterated from memory. Millions of people who grew up with the hokey, earnest and ridiculous Star Trek will miss it when it is permanently replaced by its “self-obsessed” namesake.
* This is balanced by the strange fact that the most absurdly political, preachy film of them all, The Voyage Home, was also by far the funniest.
21 Responses to “So Star Trek Isn’t Star Trek Anymore”
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I was always more of a Babylon 5 fan myself, and would love to see a movie about the Dilgar War.
I always enjoyed B-5 much more as well. Its political angle wasn’t all that different, but the storytelling was far superior. Incidentally, I can’t be the only one to see more than a passing resemblance between President Clarke and Dick Cheney, right?
The review is mostly wrong. While it goes somewhat light on the political/preachy elements (though that’s not entirely missing either), everything else that made the original what it was is there – the characters, the idealism, the teamwork, the optimism is all there. It really captures the spirit of the original quite well IMO.
Some of the plot elements are kind of creaky, but that was true in the original as well.
The original Star Trek had one thing going for it. It had a sense of the crew as operating on a frontier beyond which, anything might be encountered and anything might happen. Despite the cheap sets and production values, one had a real sense of the immensity of space. Curiously, in all the new series space seems smaller. Kirk and company were recognizably post war American in style if not in name. You could relate to their puzzlement in the face of the odd plots. The next generation crews were in a way more alien than the aliens. You never got to understand what made them tick. In the federation, their every need was provided so we were meant to believe that they travel the Galaxy in a quest for self fulfillment.
As you say, the politically correct mentality on display in The Next Generation was off-putting. They were truly on a mission to go forth and nurture the universe.
My impression is that the Next Generation was pitched to a multi-generational audience, so the storylines had to appeal to 30 year old Trekkies and 12 year old kids. Not a formula for success. All the follow-on Star Treks suffered from this PC and kiddy curse. The Exception was the last one, Enterprise. It was darker with a sense of space being immense and dangerous. It has the all too human-like aliens and hookie plots but I liked it better for getting back to the original feel. Scott Bacula was a believable captain and Jolene Blalock was very easy on the eye.
I’m about halfway through the third season of Battlestar Galactica now, and at times, I’m really missing Babylon 5’s coherent storytelling. BSG is far superior in many ways, but it seems to often substitute intensity for coherence.
To be honest, the more TV shows I watch, the more I realize how odd and wonderful Babylon 5 was with its insistence on having fully realize plotline and universe.
Although the politics of the fourth and fifth season, with the Rangers become the galaxy’s police force and that being an unmitigated Good Thing was rather uncomfortable.
As a long time Star Trek fan, my feelings about the new movie are mixed. On the plus side, I was happy to see that most of the insufferable preachy pc moments so typical of Voyager and the ill-fated Enterprise are gone. The special effects were also nice. It was a very pretty movie graphics wise.
On the other hand, it does come across as another action flick with a very weak villain. The initial battle scene was cluttered and hard to follow. In this way, it reminded me of Star Wars, but I guess that was the intended effect.
I just hope it makes enough money to revive the franchise. Maybe we will get another series out of it.
“On the other hand, it does come across as another action flick with a very weak villain.”
There is something else that puzzles me about this story. As I understand it, the villain is avenging the destruction of the Romulan homeworld by going back in time to destroy Earth, right? This actually seems to make him less than a villain (except, no doubt, the Romulans deserved what they got–don’t they always?). Maybe I’ve missed something.
The villain was weak. But I think that Khan kind of obscures the fact that, with a very few memorable exceptions the original tv series tended to have very weak villains as well.
That’s true. Speaking of movie villains, the Borg queen wasn’t bad but ultimately even she was not very compelling. The reason Khan was so much more interesting is that he wasn’t motivated by grand schemes of domination/destruction, which are a dime a dozen in sci-fi and action genres, but by simple, old-fashioned revenge and hatred. No other villain could rise to that level because there is no other villain in the Trek universe who has the established story that Khan did. Plus, Montalban was perfect for that character.
*mild spoilers*
Re; Nero
Nero does target Vulcan and ultimately the rest of the Federation for revenge, b/c of the destruction of Romulus. (Vulcan first b/c he thought they were directly responsible by witholding the technology needed to save Romulus.) The travelling back in time wasn’t something he had planned, it just happened to him (and Ambassador Spock) after Spock collapsed the supernova that destroyed Romulus. (This is covered in the Star Trek: Countdown comic book.)
iirc, the Borg Queen was created so the audience could identify a ‘main’ villain, because the Borg collective was just too much.
Oh. That makes him seem even less villainous. Also, Nero seems an oddly inappropriate name for an antagonist who makes an effort to defend/avenge his planet.
Curious: Why does Nero seem less villainous for being motivated by “…simple, old-fashioned revenge and hatred” but Khan more villainous for having the same motivations?
Re: the movie in general:
I’m a Star Trek fan going all the way back to the original series when it was originally on. TOS and TNG are the two top-quality (not necessarily in terms of sheer film-making but in terms of provoking thought) series; the others fizzled–each one successively less interesting than the previous one. Enterprise had great promise, but they wasted it. That could have been the series wherein the characters (and Earth and the Federation) had to learn how to deal with other beings and in which they had to make all the rules that we became so familiar with later (in timeline terms), but it seemed to thrash endlessly about without finding a focus. I have long had little hope of ever again getting a Star Trek to match those early efforts.
I have only really liked a couple of the films–Voyage Home and First Contact, and I was leary about this one, based on what I saw in advance, but on the advice of a friend, who saw it last night and is a much more passionate Trekkie than I, I went this morning and loved it. I gather that some people feel that the creation of the new timeline deprives them of the old one, but I don’t see it that way. To my mind, we get it both ways. The old timeline happened; they even refer to it in the new timeline. The old Spock remembers and validates it and passes along some of the mythology. Presumably this can happen again. At the same time, someone has found a smart way to be able to use the most beloved characters all over again.
I am a high school teacher. For the first decade or so that I taught, I had Star Trek fans in my classes–students familiar with TOS and TNG. But since TNG went off the air, and since my students now are so young that some of them were born after it went off the air, I have not encountered a single Star Trek fan in my classroom in the last decade or so. The latter series did not generate new fans. If the franchise is going to survive (and of course there is no reason it has to do so, but assuming that someone does want it to), then something had to be done to bring in new viewers in the younger generation–people who have no history with Star Trek at all. Bringing back the most dynamic and appealing characters and giving them a whole new opportunity to explore the universe seems to me a brilliant way to do that.
What amazed me is that they managed to do it without necessarily completely alienating all the old Star Trek fans. There were enough goodies (Kirk eating an apple during Kobayashi Maru; the origin of “Bones,” the obsession with Uhura’s first name, and so on) to show that the writers know the canon, and the characters are drawn beautifully, so that despite new and younger actors in the role, we recognize them as true to the ones we all remember.
Purists who won’t accept any alteration to the timeline won’t accept any alteration to the timeline, but if you think about it, there was no way to use these characters in any kind of ongoing effort. Maybe they could have made one movie of Kirk et al at this age, and they could have carefully crafted the story to be totally true in every detail to canon (eliminating the coincidences of the lot of them ending up at Starfleet Academy at once, for example), and the long-time fans would have loved it, but then it would have been over. It seems to me totally unrealistic to try to suggest that it would have been possible to write a number of movies or a series using these characters and finding a way to fit every episode into the spaces between the old episodes without ever violating canon. It would have been a long painful process accompanied by constant haggling over whether they got some detail right or wrong. The new timeline strategy wipes the slate clean, gives us back the old characters and frees up the franchise to do whatever any writer wants with future adventures.
Tom Wolfe famously told us that you can’t go home again, but Abrams and co. have spun the storyline so that we can go home again–at least in terms of getting back the characters that we have come to accept as long dead and gone. I have to think that most of the die hard fans (and so far ALL those I know agree, though that is admittedly not a huge number) are going to be thrilled at the chance to live through another whole series (in film or television) with the characters that they have loved for better than 40 years.
I disagree that there is nothing left for this to be but a “violent space opera”; this movie was designed to make the transition from the old Star Trek universe to the new, and to garner a lot of attention with the idea of jump starting a whole new generation of Trek fans. I think it does that. But it did also lay the groundwork for a lot more of the kind of soul-searching that TOS and TNG did, and which, far more than the heavy-handed political messages (which, though I tend to agree with all of them, were absurdly unsubtle!), gave the two great series their appeal. For me, at least, it was the internal battles that were always the most interesting–the demands made on people who couldn’t possibly be ready to face them (because they had never been encountered before by anyone) always meant revelation of the most basic quality of the self. It was the psychological exploration that made the old shows interesting, and though there was not a lot of it here, there was enough to set us up for a great deal more in the future: a new Spock forced earlier and more powerfully to try to cope with his little-understood human half, a young Kirk still angry about having never had a father and having to deal, instead, with an unsympathetic and demanding step-father, a divorced McCoy leaving (literally) his old world behind him to try to figure out some new way to live, and so on. The mix of characters has, successfully, I think, set us up to believe that the friendships and the conflicts that we remember so well will arise again, regardless of the details of the missions the crew ends up on.
Given the hallowed, even mythological, ground on which Abrams, Orci, and Kurtzman were treading, the most likely outcome was that they would either appease the old die-hard fans and fail to generate any new interest or (most likely) drive away all the die-hard fans but develop a new following. I think they did a quite astonishingly good job of finding a middle way. Some fans will be angry and write the whole thing off, but a whole lot more will be more than willing to overlook a few violations of canonical details and will eagerly accept the new timeline strategy as a reasonable price to pay for the chance at another whole incarnation of a story they thought would be forever limited to 80 episodes from the 1960’s.
P.S. I have recently begun watching Battlestar Gallactica, in part due to the conversation on this blog. We don’t get the Sci Fi channel, so I had to wait for DVD anyway. So far, I am finding it quite fascinating–for much the same reasons I always loved Star Trek: a bunch of people suddenly called upon to cope with the unimaginable. There are some questionable decisions, but on balance, I find it quite smart and provocative. I LOATHED the old one, so this is a pleasant surprise.
“As I understand it, the villain is avenging the destruction of the Romulan homeworld by going back in time to destroy Earth, right? This actually seems to make him less than a villain (except, no doubt, the Romulans deserved what they got–don’t they always?)”
SPOILERS
Romulus is destroyed by a natural phenomenon; Spock, under the auspices of the Federation, was on his way to avert the disaster but was too late. Unless I missed something, Nero just assumed that the Federation wanted Romulus destroyed; hence his vendetta. So he’s acting on an incorrect (and pretty much baseless) assumption. He also seems to know that, since the disaster wasn’t CAUSED by the Federation, destroying the Federation in the past won’t actually save Romulus. So he’s motivated by revenge, not by the desire to defend Romulus or save Romulan lives.
(What’s not clear to me is why Nero would assume that the Federation screwed over Romulus on purpose–why would they send Spock in a ship designed to avert the disaster if their intention was to let it happen? But… whatever.)
As villainous motivations go that’s not a bad one; it’s nice when the villain has a reason for his actions beyond simple malevolence. Bana’s good in it, but the movie doesn’t give him much to do.
Tom Wolfe famously told us that you can’t go home again,
Thomas Wolfe.
But Tom Wolfe famously told us that we can never have the right stuff again.
Re: motivations
Kahn had love of his wife, and to a lesser extent, his people. Nero had [some sort of] patriotism. along with love of his wife and unborn child, who were killed on Romulus.
You might find John Scalzi’s take on the previous Trek movies amusing, especially since they’re rendered in haiku
http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2009/05/star-trek-movie-plots.php
Though I love SF, I was never a fan of any of the shows. This makes the reboot easier to take – and, considered as a reboot, I think it is pretty successful . Academy Award for best visual effects goes to the lady playing Uhura.
The script is absurd, even for a Star Trek flick…..the only possible reaction is a big “say what”?. The scientific and technical gibberish is, as usual, side-splitting.
It does lack the endearing, innocent “space race” naivete of the original series. Perhaps a better creative team could play that for ironic distance a la Mad Men. As it is, I just enjoyed the explosions and, of course, the miniskirts and go-go boots.
This actually seems to make him less than a villain
I hazily recall that it’s not an uncommon Star Trek device to have us understand the villains, and to that extent “see where they’re coming from” even where the villain must be defeated. Cf. “Cold War.”
Nero fell into that mold. I mean, he was just the captain of a mining veseel, right? His response was fairly sophisticated under the circumstances.
… I liked the movie well enough — good, but not great. The opening sequence was remarkable, or maybe I’m just getting sentimental in my middle age — it jerked a tear out of me.
I finally had the chance to go see the new Star Trek film this weekend and I have to say that I am disappointed. I found it to be a well crafted but unremarkable sci-fi action flick marred by some rather poor writing.
My first and foremost problem with the writing in this film was the constant use of fate and destiny to draw the main characters together. It is just lazy writing. This may have been forgivable – particularly to fans familiar with the characters – if they hadn’t made such a mess of Kirk in this film. Rather than show how Kirk earned his command, or provide some glimpse of his abilities, they simply shoehorn him into the role because of who he is – or perhaps who’s son he is. Again, acceptable only because much of the audience is familiar with the continuity. Having him (a stowaway) be made second in command on his first voyage just strains the credibility of the film. Having him become captain of the flagship of the federation after having usurped command of it completely shatters that credibility.
Maybe these seem like strange criticisms to make of a sci-fi product, but I find the mounting pile of coincidences and “wtf” moments really make it hard to suspend disbelief and get into the movie. Fan service alone doth not a good movie make; especially when they seemed to ignore the yeoman’s work done on the Kirk character in the earlier movies and recast him as a one-dimensional young maverick with more cohones than ability.
I don’t know… it is possible that I was expecting too much, but it seems to me that they could have done much better with this opportunity. They had an opportunity to re-introduce the concept and characters to a new generation but the film came across as shallow and slick. Worse, despite “rebooting” the franchise they still fell into the same rhetorical holes that the ST writers have been for the last 8-10 years. Every threat *has* to hold the fate of the entire federation in the balance. Every foe *has* to have the crew/ship totally outmatched. Thinking like that just shrinks the Star Trek universe.
So yes, I agree that it was an entertaining enough film. I did in fact enjoy it. In hindsight, I am disappointed. I think it says something about the quality of previous Trek movies that this offering can be realistically called the best Trek movie since The Voyage Home, or possibly since Wrath of Khan.
Cheers.
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