The Haute Critique

Star Trek

It is a wonderful thing to see what a talented director of Generation X can do with a piece of media.  In some ways JJ Abrams’ Star Trek is a revelation.  In other ways it is a vastly missed opportunity.

First the good part.  This haute critic had the good fortune to view the film in IMAX and it benefits from the facelift.  The visuals are (for the most part) gorgeous – filled with inspired architecture of what an optimistic and very human future might look like.  Abrams takes the look and feel of vintage 60′s Trek and resurrects it boldly into the 21st century.  Costumes have just the right flush of color to give you the feel that you are watching “in real life” what the folks captured “on TV” in the 60′s.  And the characters go there as well.  Abrams fully modern touch hangs real psychological depth on our once legendary two dimensional favorites.  Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Uhura.  Even Checkov, Scotty and Sulu come to us now suddenly as real people with real motivations behind their actions and desires.  The essence of the new generation.  In this dimension, Star Trek might even exceed Batman Begins and Spiderman – now, finally, you can understand Kirk’s almost salacious womanizing and fire-from-the-hip (lack of) strategy.  Bones’ growling and eye-bulging become the natural expressions of a real person from a real place that seems plausible.  The Shatner, Nimoy, Kelly characters presumably came from somewhere, but the GI Generation templates that must have been impressed on Gene Roddenberry’s mind in a flying fortress over the Pacific couldn’t translate through the stock personalities available in the 60′s.  Abrams seamlessly accelerates our favorite characters into his mythical universe without spilling a drop.

And, in a way, that is the bad part.  At the end of the day, Abrams fails to take advantage of the real power and heritage of Star Trek: it is the expression of a personal experience and vision from a generation that is almost fully passed from the Earth.  The greasemonkeys who looked back on the collapsing 19th Century world of their parents with confusion and dismay and forward to the Final Frontier that science, technology and American Gusto could bring to bear left their collective fingerprints all over Star Trek.  Hatching in the last warm glow before the tumult of the mid 60′s, Star Trek unselfconsciously and unashamedly projected a confident (even cocky) view of what the kids of WWII aspired for in a human future.  And from its earliest beginnings Trek managed to catch enough to keep it renewed and relevant through more than four decades — as the rest of the culture warped and spun all over the place.  There is a message to be found there – somehow more vital and alive than most that have managed to survive into our era.   In many ways Star Trek represents the last breath of a pure optimism from our pop culture – importantly birthed out of the lived experience of people who were children in the Great Depression and youths in World War II.

Its easy to dismiss Trek.  Its linear extrapolation of 50′s society and technology into a decently distant future seems absurd and implausible.  Vernor Vinge‘s singularity compression curve makes us all too painfully aware of how near the future is and how implausible that the future will look anything at all like today.  But lest we forget – for the past four decades, that Roddenberry vision has been the ultimate self-creating future: generations of inspired kids have been working hard to make real that portion of Star Trek that most captured their imagination.  The deep sprit of Trek goes far beyond Klingons, communicators and transporter beams into a comprehensive vision of how we can go about building what we imagine to build.

FInding that deep spirit, reaching down into it and giving new life to it in a way that works for the children of a New Millenium; that would have been a true gift.  And the opportunity was there – Abrams had the opportunity to (and did) reboot the entire Star Trek concept – and he did so with style, panache and a real sense for the aesthetic of the world.  Unfortunately, he didn’t really take his shot.  The story was very much a re-tread and clearly was little more than an excuse for Abrams to fulfill his visual intent.  There aren’t that many Star Treks left in the world.  The door isn’t closed on what can be done with the franchise, but it will take a real effort to craft the right depth of story and sense to match the potential of what could be done.

A quality experience for the initiated, but nothing compared to the Watchmen and one suspects upcoming fare (Terminator, Harry Potter, Nine) will have more to offer those looking for a fully baked theatrical experience.

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