(originally published in
The Outreach Connection in June 2009)
I was pretty big into
the original Star Trek for a few
years – enough that at one time I could reel off all 79 episodes in order of
their first airing (nowadays I can just recall bits of it, the major
scaffolding having long eroded); I owned a Star Trek encyclopedia and various
other long-vanished books. Later I bought maybe twelve of the episodes on
video, in the days when owning anything on video seemed like a thrill. But by
then my interests had broadened considerably and any adherence to Star Trek was purely nostalgic. When the
franchise gained new life with Next
Generation and the other TV spin-offs, I responded (in
that-never-join-a-club-that-would-have-me-as-a-member way of mine) by largely
jettisoning all remaining interest. I haven’t seen an episode now for well over
a decade. But I did get a big kick out of Leonard Nimoy’s recent vacation back
in the spotlight – doing the top ten on Letterman,
a walk-on on Saturday Night Live, a
cameo on the hot new show Fringe.
The Appeal Of Star Trek
Spock was definitely a
big part of the mystique for me – offering, to a teenager struggling with his
own emotions and social skills, a fascinating proposition in triumphantly
assimilating the ultimate nerdy outsider. I loved his clashes with Dr. McCoy,
as a primal dialectic on the confounding question of how to go about this whole
adult thing. Star Trek felt adult –
the diversity among the crew was always very striking, and there was a rich
contour to many of the relationships - but the sense of discovery and
exploration differentiated it from the grim, washed-out adulthood I mostly saw
around me. Even something as giddy as the colour coding of the uniforms (red,
yellow, sky-blue), if mysterious, was a happy, life-enhancing kind of enigma.
And the show was good at crafting accessible allegories and philosophical
challenges. It might seem trite now, but I still remember how the episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (the
one where two guys, each divided down the middle into white and black, carry out
an endless race war, based on which colour goes on which side) helped me
clarify my own feelings about prejudice (a diversity-free Welsh village wasn’t
much of a location from which to become progressive on that topic).
I was as excited as
anyone when the original cast reunited for a series of movies, starting in 1979
and continuing for a decade or so (I do recall there might at one point have
been a school essay in which I referred to Star
Trek: The Motion Picture as the best film ever made, a judgment I’ve since
revised a little bit). The movies offered some pleasures, but never really
achieved an inherent sense of purpose. When they announced a year or two ago
that J. J. Abrams (creator of Lost
and Alias) was reviving, or (as they
like to say now) rebooting the (as they like to say now) franchise, I didn’t
have much reaction. I mean, there’s nothing very mysterious about the
calculation there: take a property with enormous name recognition, bring in a
young master of the new vernacular, and just watch the curiosity value
skyrocket.
Star
Trek
Rebooted
Recently, as regular
readers will know, I’ve become tired of Hollywood’s weekly parade of mechanical
marvels, and by the time Abrams’ movie actually opened, I might well have
decided to skip it. Good reviews, and the Nimoy victory tour I mentioned,
tipped the balance. Half an hour into the movie though, I was already tired of
it, and going through my ‘how do I keep falling for this stuff’ internal
conversation. The scenes setting up the young Kirk are so raucous they hurt my
head; those setting up the young Spock are boring.
It gets better, once it
settles into what we’re all there for. The cast is almost uniformly strong,
whether they’re somewhat reinventing their characters (Chris Pine as Kirk, Zoe
Saldana as Uhura), working more in straight evocation mode (Karl Urban as
McCoy, Zachary Quinto as Spock), or doing their own sweet thing (Simon Pegg as
Scott). Although there is no plausible way in this world (nor in one of those
alternate universes so beloved of modern mythmakers) to explain how a bunch of
kids (a drop down the age scale was an inevitable part of the reboot) gets to
run the show on a piece of technology as stunning as the Enterprise, the movie
probably does as well with this as it possibly could. And the use of Nimoy as
the old Spock is certainly one of the better time-travel contrivances.
As it often did in the
show, the use of the “transporter” as a plot short cut is jarring; whether or
not that’s a plausible technology, it certainly doesn’t seem feasible within
the universe depicted. I could go on. But as you see, I am merely reduced here
to reeling off my own subjective debits and credits, measured against the
original series. If you ask the broader question, whether the film achieves any
kind of valuable distinct presence, then I’m afraid it’s a pretty clear no. The
more it revs itself up into the mother of all cosmos-eating,
mankind-threatening, time-and-space-whipping extravaganzas, the clearer it is
it’s about next to nothing at all.
At Least It’s Fun
Well, you say, there’s
that all-important commodity, fun. But when you look at the immense increase in
our fun-gleaning options over the last decade, from PVRs to smart phones, it
gets awfully hard to rationalize how any of us can possibly need the minimal
additional stimulation represented by whatever Hollywood’s peddling this week.
If we do need it, then surely it’s only at the cost of admitting that this
explosion of possibility has failed us, that instead of being better able to
craft our own menu of choices (as the hype tells us) we’re merely better placed
to be manipulated into the next narrative of supposedly necessary cultural
consumption.
That famous opening
voiceover - “Space, the final frontier…to boldly go where no man has gone
before”- is easily parodied, but then you think about those times. The moon was
yet to be conquered, all manner of social progression barely yet envisaged. Star Trek perceived and dramatized these
as two sides of the same urgent renewal; it was fun, as an engaged conversation
is fun; it delivered easy entertainment, but persistently reached further. The
new movie has resources and possibilities they couldn’t have imagined back
then, but they also couldn’t have imagined that surviving for this long would count
for so little.
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