Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the franchise Star Trek; it’s continuing mission to seek out lucrative licensing opportunities. To blandly go where there has been a comfortable encampment for decades!
To be honest, I didn’t hate the new Star Trek movie. It looked really pretty. There were some decent performances… It didn’t poison any significant memories of my childhood. And did I mention it was pretty? Oh, and hopefully it will stir the exploratory spirit of the movie-going world and fuel a resurgent space age, one which will carry a united humankind into it’s interplanetary adolescence.
High hopes, I admit… But what Trek was to me, both TOS and TNG (to toss around Trekkie shorthand) was optimism. It was a positive furture created by and for sentient beings out of enlightened self-interest, intellectual curiosity and a genuine desire for the betterment of all peoples. A utopian future that looked hoplessly naive, but was the better for it. However, what I disliked about this new chapter was not the perceived misinterpretation of Trekness; it was the accurate interpretation of crappymovieness.
JJ Abrams doesn’t like to earn his drama. He seems to like to jump over all the “character building” and “plot development” by playing on the archtypes and stereotypes that have been built by generations of American popular culture and expecting the media reflexes of his audience to close the gap. Sadly, I can’t say for sure if that is a terrible thing, or a brilliant one. I don’t know whether this is a symptom of a lazy media production/consumption cycle or a sign of an emerging metaphorical syntax (akin to the Tamarians from that episode of ST:TNG… you know, “Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra”, etc). Most likely it’s both. A distressing simplification AND an evolutionary storytelling technique. Curse you grey area! Curse you for not letting me loathe JJ Abrams with the purity to which I am accustomed by our nuanceless mediascape.
And the thing about Star Trek is it’s full of enough archtypal characters to make Joseph Campbell masturbate into the nearest clean sock. This allows JJ Abrams to hit certain story markers in dull, mechanical stride and make you think that he’s woven a story. You’re familar with how these people *should* relate to one another, and how these events *should* play out, so you think you’ve seen a coherent story. It’s a multilayered illusion that seems, at a distance, to be a movie. But the longer you look, the more you ask, “What the fuck”? This new Trek is scifi by art students instead of science wonks.
So, the Enterprise was built on Earth, not in some sort of orbiting spacedock. WTF? Kirk and most of the crew of the Enterprise were all in the same class at Starfleet academy. WTF? An emergency comes up and the only available crew are academy-fresh cadets, so Starfleet gives them the new flagship. WTF? And it continues like this through the whole movie. Small discrepencies and nonsenses that slowly build dissonance in the brain, dissonance which requires a mighty suspension of disbelief (or simple inattention) for the movie to be digested.
Part of what made the ST:TOS endearing was what it was surmounting. It was on TV when TV was cheap. It was compelling anyway. It sneakily promoted racial equiality when race was a taboo topic. It pointed at the wars of the 20th century and called them madness. It promoted a core idealogy of optimistic freedom and social duty. It had it’s flaws, but it pointed to a future where humanity was going to be better than we are now.
This incarnation of Trek has no lofty ideals to inspire. Kirk seems not rakish but reckless. This can all be explained away by the plot I suppose, a divergent timeline. Sure. But it’s not the Trek I have loved. JJ Abrams may have pulled the Trek universe back from the brink Brannon Braga pushed it to, but it was already a hollow shell of a franchise by then anyway. It’s pretty much what I was expecting, but I was hoping against past experience that I would be wowed out of my trousers by a bold new Trek. No luck.
Still, the product placement wasn’t nearly as bad as it could’ve been. A Nokia central computer in a 300 year old gas burning Ford Mustang and “Budweiser Classic” ordered at a bar… both plausibly vestigal corporate identities on the future Earth of Star Trek, where they don’t even have money, goddammit! But hey… Bruce Greenwood ROCKED. Sylar and Harold were decent, and the other folks weren’t bad. When Simon Pegg appeared, Scottie-ing it up, it seemed like everyone else turned to cardboard… That guy is fun to watch. The design was mostly nice; Old Spock’s Hoth-coat was rad. The Enterprise herself looked nice enough, some proportions altered, but nothing distracting.
So, overall, not too bad, but not Star Trek. Or, not *my* Star Trek anyway. It was like Star Trek’s dumb cousin who loves football and Jerry Bruckheimer movies got into Star Trek’s wardrobe and did some role playing. But it was watchable, as are Jerry Bruckheimer movies. Accompanied by the appropriate intoxicants it should be VERY watchable. But there’s no depth, no substance. Lastly, my strongest hope for this movie, I shit you not, is still that people love it and are inspired by it and that interest in the exploration of space is reinvigorated by it. Because mankind’s future is among the stars, and if JJ Abrams can push us just a little closer to that Trekkish future by making Star Trek cool, then all his other transgressions can be forgiven. Even Cloverfield.
Youtube – The most cogent visual analysis of New Trek I could find
No related posts.