on Star Trek

While not really straying into "trekkie" levels, having never dressed up or gone to a con, I consider myself a fan (and would choose it over Star Wars, given that particular false dilemma).

So of course the latest Star Trek movie has been on my radar for a while, and having seen it this weekend, I've been thinking about how it relates to the rest of the Trek universe. I appreciate that they've set the reboot in an alternate timeline - it does give them the freedom to make some nice mirror-moments relative to the original, though it also invites plenty of comparison (which may end up being dangerous for the reboot, as I'll try to explain).  Slight spoilers follow.

First off, a bit about the Star Trek shows, for the uninitiated: it was a pretty unique show back when The Original Series aired in 1966-68, and while The Next Generation was a bit more conservative, Deep Space Nine was darker, Voyager and Enterprise only slightly less silly than TOS - the Trek series have always been a good exploration of everything from lofty ideas about what makes one "human," to holodeck mishaps. TOS is famous for having the first interracial kiss on TV, TNG had androgynous relationships, DS9 had gender-bending symbiotes, and of course Voyager had the first female captain (as well as the first holographic Doctor, hehe). The Star Treks have all tried to emphasize the good sides of humanity - peaceful exploration, ingenuity, diversity, and strong senses of independence and justice, but also community and mercy.

Each series incarnation has had its own strengths and weaknesses, of course. So it makes sense to look at the J.J. Abrams reboot on its own merits. And the two movies aren't bad relative to movies in general, of course. My thesis then, is that they have erred towards opposite extremes than the series, and that (in my opinion) the change in priorities that this represents makes them worse movies, and worse Trek movies in particular. The reboot movies tend to succeed in places where they go back to themes in the Star Trek shows, and fail in the places they've tried to over-correct for the shows' weak points.

Good points first: the themes of friendship, self-sacrifice, and peaceful responses to acts of violence are all classic Star Trek, and the reboot movies are great in this regard. Kirk and crew are shown as "Neutral Good" - valuing the rule of law only insofar as it lets them avoid violence and loss of life. They're never the first ones to fire phasers, and even when faced with evil they don't respond to it with further evil.

Some of the differences, though, between the reboot and classic Trek are things I'm sad to see go - diversity, for instance, has kinda gone out the airlock in the reboots. Sure, Uhura is still there, and Sulu, but aside from a couple of very minor roles, there's not much representation of minorities. Green-skinned Orions or Kirk's latest bit-of-tails don't count, of course, since we're talking diversity *within* humanity. I think it has to do with larger trends in Hollywood of not wanting to seem like they're just putting in "token" characters or making the brown guys the villains... but when the result is making all the main characters white (even ones who had been Latino in an earlier version, say, cough cough), that's straying towards the area of going against Trek's own values. TOS may have had token ethnicities represented... but at least they were there, which was already very controversial for the time, and making valuable contributions as all part of the same crew. In the reboots, the female characters are barely given chances to contribute and the minority characters are basically (sometimes literally) benchwarmers. (Personally, I was really hoping for some backstory on the butch black woman who took over Ops, she seemed cool - she got a line, at least, thankfully). [Spoilers/]If they had put in just *one* more line in which Uhura succeeds with the Klingons, and *then* Cumberbatch attacked, it would have felt like she actually had a moment. As is, though... well, she'd be right to be pissed about being interrupted.[/Spoilers]

Another big difference is in the area of ingenuity - Kirk has always been a just-punch-'em kind of hero, but his most memorable moments are those in which he's wound up outsmarting the foe, whether it's Khan and his 2-D tactics, the Corbomite Maneuver, or building a cannon out of random crap (using the power of Chemistry!). The reboots are willing to get a tiny bit intellectual with their discussion on the coincidentally contemporary issues around drone strikes and responses to terror attacks, but even some of the sketchier technobabble in the TV shows has been dumbed down to just "it's out of alignment and needs to get kicked back into alignment." Shatner's Kirk had plenty of flaws, but at least he knew the ins-and-outs of shield codes.

The last big difference I've seen that is too bad is, ironically, the special effects. I know they've got 3D to play around with now, but some of the stuff is pretty gratuitous in the latest movie. And rather than make flying through space a little more realistic (see also: BSG), or more majestic (as in the original Star Trek movie, or WALL-E), or even more tactical (as in the Star Wars trilogy), here, it's just more hectic and oriented in ways such that the 3D comes into play more. They pause on the Enterprise maybe once in the movie, and only briefly - if it weren't for a certain top-down silhouette, I might not have even noticed the funny close-together-nacelles in the new design. (I'm surprised the people doing the drawing had time to see it, hehe.)

Anyhow, they're not bad movies, as I said. They hold some of the Star Trek values very loosely, tending towards less representation, less bookishness, and less respect for their audience - and these make for inferior movies (though perhaps about average for movies based on Star Trek). They could have been much more - where the first Star Trek II pulled heavily from Tale of Two Cities, the reboot settles for pulling heavily from previous Trek movies, and its strengths are merely in how it plays with being a very loose remake. Imagine even the following minor improvements (in my humble opinion) [Spoilers/]Chris Pine faces off with Antonio Banderas, who's blown up an archive housing military secrets he'd helped develop, stopping work on the Dreadnought. Adm. Marcus sends Carol along with Pike to fetch "John Harrison" from the Klingon homeworld, where he's been apprehended. Pike sends Kirk down to the planet, Uhura negotiates with the Klingons when they get stopped, and Khan has a master plan of escaping from the Klingons that he dupes Kirk into helping him with. He gets Kirk to thaw out a few of his crew from the torpedoes he'd loaded on the Enterprise, then kills Pike in some drawn out earworm-like fashion, and sets a final goal of vengeance on Marcus using the Dreadnought, destroying San Francisco in the process. He keeps Scotty and Sulu around to help fix and pilot it. Kirk, having gone from jailer to jailed, finds some way to escape out into space with Carol and majestically swoop over to the Dreadnought. Fighting ensues, Spock retakes Enterprise, Carol disables Khan's weapons temporarily, John Cho and Antonio Banderas fence, etc., Enterprise escapes to beneath the SF Bay, and Kirk disables the Dreadnought much in the manner he fixed the Enterprise in the actual movie. Khan and his people wind up exiled on the Botany Bay II. Kirk keeps the tribble as a memento and jokes about using it as a toupee. ;-)  [/Spoilers]

Well, it's no instant classic. But sadly, the actual movie isn't really one, either.