No, I’m not going to take on the whole saga in one post. I’m referring here to the 2009 film that stripped away all the subtitles and numbers back to a title as simple as the original ‘60s TV show that has since become a staple of Western civilization.
It was bar-none the biggest hit of the entire Star Trek franchise which had, to that date, spawned: five live-action television series for a total of 27 seasons; ten feature films with a cumulative box office gross in excess of a billion dollars; countless merchandising tie-ins from video games to collectible toys; and fully 23% of the jokes on The Big Bang Theory.
Now, here’s where things get complicated. The film was a sequel to both the original series set in the 23rd century and the follow-up series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was terribly named because it was set 75 years later in the 24th century (I guess the name Star Trek: Like Three Generations Later didn’t focus-group too well), because the original series character Spock (as played by Leonard Nimoy) who was Vulcan (everybody knows they have pointy ears, green blood, and stuffy dialogue, but not everyone realizes that they live much longer than we puny humans) and lived long enough to appear on The Next Generation. After that appearance, he got mixed up in the politics of a generally unpleasant planet named Romulus (where people also have pointy ears and green blood…but generally more bombastic dialogue) and, according to the back-story of Star Trek (the 2009 movie, I mean, do try to keep up) he tried valiantly to protect the planet Romulus from a supernova, but failed. In the process he, and one really cheesed off Romulan mining captain named Nero, are hurled back in time.
So, it’s strictly speaking a sequel…except when Spock and the Romulans are shot back in time, they arrive before the events of the original series, changing all of the rather voluminous history of the saga (except, regrettably, the really ill-advised prequel series Enterprise, which deserved to be erased from all of time). So, in this regard, the movie also serves as a reboot of the Star Trek series…with hot, young actors thrown in for good measure. In a way, though, it is also a new prequel. So we’ll call it a represequel.
Ratings:
The purpose of this represeboot is basically to get more money pouring into the Paramount coffers via a hot new version of the franchise. Central to that agenda were younger versions of the beloved Star Trek characters. Instead of wheeling out the geriatric cast of The Next Generation one more time, the time travel trope let director J.J. Abrams (who, with Star Trek, Star Wars, and Mission Impossible under his direct sway, is apparently intent on controlling every movie franchise imaginable–be watching for his version of Fast and the Furious 8, Harry Potter 9: A New Beginning, and J.J. Abram’s Presents Tyler Perry’s Madea Into Darkness) and his screenwriters infuse new life into the worn out characters of the original series. Young Kirk, Young Spock, Young (and smokin’ hot) Uhura, and Younger McCoy all meet anew in this alternate universe and (mostly by luck) defeat the sort of lame threat presented by Nero. Now, here’s the thing about these characters. They’re classics! They’re icons! They weren’t ever really that great to begin with. Yes, I said it. So basically, there was room for improvement. Chris Pine’s Kirk and Zachary Quinto’s Spock are fun interpretations, but there is one cast member who really adds something to the cast. It’s well known among Trek geeks that the original Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, was dissatisfied by her role on the original series because the writers gave her so little to work with and had to be talked out of quitting the show by none other than the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. Zoe Saldana’s Uhura, though, doesn’t seem to be suffering that difficulty and she runs away with just about every scene she’s in. Her interactions with Quinto’s Spock–fleshing out a tiny, teeny, almost imperceptible hint in the original series that the two were close–are absolutely electric. Judging from the trailers and promotional material for the sequel due out…um, yesterday (NO, I haven’t seen it yet. Dammit.) she has replaced stodgy Dr. McCoy as the third main character in the series.
Characters …8
Plot …4
The story, such that it is, quickly pulls the crew together and throws them in the face of a universe-shattering threat…from a disgruntled jack-hammer operator. Nero is not exactly the most intriguing foe imaginable (something the screenwriters seem bent on addressing through the mysterious villain in the sequel played by Sherlock-star and Skeletor-stand-in Bennedict Cumberbutch). He really only poses a threat because he has managed to capture Spock’s snazzy little jellyfish spaceship with its ultra-dangerous payload of “red matter.” This stuff is never even given a single line of techno-babble to explain its awesome destructive power. Suffice it to say, if you have red matter, you really jump up the payscale of nefarious intergalactic ne’er do wells. I’m only going to give him a decent rating here because he actually did manage to blow up the planet Vulcan and totally mess with the continuity of the Star Trek universe in the process.
Antagonist …6
Of course, we Trek geeks are notorious for our attention to detail. J.J. Abrams, though, wanted to take some liberties with the universe through his sequeboot. One of the biggest is the beloved Enterprise herself. Trekkies know that the old lady Enterprise was already a well-worn ship when James T. Kirk becomes the youngest captain in Star Fleet sometime before the first episode of the original series. Not good enough, says J.J. (Expect a shiny new Millennium Falcon in Episode VII, Star War nerds) So in the revised timeline of the new movies, Star Fleet changes all of its construction plans because of the brief appearance of Nero’s ship in the past and waits twenty some odd years to build the Enterprise. But that’s okay because when they do, she looks ginormously huger (with some giant open spaces inside) and a gleaming Apple store for a bridge. Now, there have been many Enterprises throughout the history of the Star Trek saga. I’ll spare you the inventory of all of them and their merits; my son and I go on and on about how to rank the various incarnations, but what’s important here is that we agree the new 2009 version is really, super-duper pretty.
The Ship …8
In fact, the whole movie looks great. I love Abram’s choice to over-light everything. He takes the visual lens flares of Firefly and spins the dial ‘till it won’t turn no more. His thinking: he wanted to depict a future so bright that it was, like, literally bright. This amounts to about his only nod to Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future in Star Trek. Roddenberry originally forbid his writers from depicting any conflicts between human beings. He very consciously wanted to portray a future for the human race in which we had gotten our $#!% together and become responsible galactic citizens in the United Federation of Planets–a sort of United States in space except without the nasty history of slavery and genocide at the outset. Obviously, Abrams chose not to honor this tenet of the Star Trek canon (in his defense, it hasn’t been the law of the land since Star Trek II). Kirk begins as a reprobate and a “repeat offender” (crime was “cured” in the original series) and he gets into fist fights on Earth with beefy cadets who call him “cupcake.” This may seem like a quibble, but fealty to what makes Trek special is important. It’s not just an action franchise. The original Star Trek meant something. It was landmark television because of Roddenberry’s vision, which also led to a diverse cast (and American television’s first interracial kiss) promoting a vision of multicultural cooperation. It was that vision that allowed the show to comment on both political and philosophical issues throughout its best incarnations. The fact that J.J. Abrams chooses to say exactly nothing in this movie is significant. I suspect I’ll have something more to say on this when the sequel comes out…er, I mean, when I get to the theater Sunday.
Theme …1
Grand total: 27
Nitpicks:
- Romulans are named after Romulus, their home planet, which, apparently in a cosmic coincidence, has a twin planet named Remus (established in Star Trek: Nemesis). So it makes sense that a lowly Romulan mining captain would have a fitting Roman name like Nero. Oh, wait: NO, IT FRICKIN’ DOESN’T! One of the conceits of the series is the “universal translator,” which now apparently also chooses cultural allusions when assigning pronounceable names to aliens you meet.
- Like I said, Nero only poses a threat to the galaxy and our heroes because he has that red matter stuff. The question is, though, how’d he get it exactly. We see later in the film that Spock’s little jellyfish-shaped spaceship is ridiculously maneuverable and wicked fast. How exactly did this lame-ass mining ship (that’s big, slow, and plodding) capture the nimble little thing and its omnipotent payload in the first place? We conveniently don’t see that actual moment in Spock’s flashback-via-mindmeld, but I also have to wonder, why was Spock carrying so much of this red matter stuff? One drop created a wormhole back in time, yet he’s carting around enough to wipe out Vulcan, Earth, and heaven-knows-how-many other planets.
- Through a cosmic coincidence (which a cut line of dialogue explained as the timeline trying to restore itself) Kirk actually bumps into trusty engineer extraordinaire Montgomery Scott and old Spock is able to use technical knowledge from the future to get Kirk back into the game. Spock tells Scott that this “trans-warp beaming” technology is actually his design from the future. Brilliant plot twist, J.J. Except, again, we Trekkies pay attention to detail. There was no trans-warp beaming in The Next Generation. Granted, Scotty was resurrected through a trick of transporter technology in the 24th century, so I guess it’s possible that he used his sabbatical in the future to mull over transporter technology and that Spock heard about his later, innovative work…or it could be that the writers just made some nonsensical thing up to get Kirk back on the Enterprise after Spock jettisoned him in complete violation of the code of military justice.
- So at the end of the movie, all the pieces are in place. Kirk is on the bridge as captain, Spock is at his side. (“Ah, Spock, old buddy, remember that time you almost crushed my trachea? Ah, good times, good times.”) Except, um, Kirk was a FREAKING CADET before this mission!?! He just jumped five officer grades to take command. The writers were really playing fast and loose with Starfleet’s rules for field promotions here. Though we never–I mean, never–saw a single captain leave his bridge and actually field promote his subordinate to captain in any of the series, we see it happen twice in this movie. I get that Starfleet would be grateful for Kirk leading the mission (in, um, defiance of orders from his superiors) that saved the planet Earth, but let’s look at what he really did: He psychologically tortured his bereaved commanding officer to get command, and then rushed in–balls to the wall–and basically lucked into a plan that disabled the enemy ship. That sort of bravado might deserve one promotion, but five simultaneous promotions?!? Maybe if he’d managed to save Vulcan, too, it would be warranted, but he totally didn’t. This is becoming a bad habit with these prequels. They’re always in a rush to set the stage exactly the way it needs to be at the ostensible “beginning” of the story they’re trying to connect with. Take X-Men First Class. Instead of being patient and leaving some loose threads for subsequent movies to tie up, that movie–like Star Trek–improbably rushes everyone into their starting positions for the first X-men movie…which is set at least thirty years later. I’m surprised they didn’t have Professor X lose all his hair from fright in the last frame of the film.
That’ll do it for this chapter. By the way, I’m noticing that these silly sci-fi posts are regularly breaking 1,500 words (this one’s 2000?!?) when my posts about politics and such are usually about 500. What does that say about me?
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