As you can see from my earlier post, I was looking forward to the Star Trek reboot, in fact, there was no summer movie I anticipated more. Thus, the review that follows isn’t the rant of an aging Trekker who objects to any change in the frozen-in-amber canon of Star Trek lore. In fact, the film itself was great entertainment, a three out of four star success in reviving the spirit of the original series.
J. J. Abrams’production had a far bigger budget and it shows. The Trek universe hasn’t looked this good since the first film, 1979′s Star Trek: The Motion Picture which at that time had a record-breaking budget of $40 million and was still profitable due to pent-up fan anticipation despite the flat plotting and pretentious themes. Subsequent sequels were mid-range in price and modestly successful enough to continue for ten films. The Trek licensed merchandize lucratively added to Paramount’s bottom line until the franchise ran out of creative energy. Thus, the reboot is a corporate decision to sustain a strong revenue stream if the film succeeds in reviving Star Trek’s commercial and creative viability.
And that’s what seems to have happened. Most comments at one message board I read were positive and often giddy with bliss at seeing plausible replacements capturing the spirit of the original Enterprise crew. The film has already earned more than any of the earlier films and thus the relaunch of the Starship Enterprise has succeeded.
So, what follows is my description of my experience and a profound reservation I have about the price extracted to achieve this success and whether it is worth the cost. And there will be necessary SPOILERS simply because there’s no way to discuss these problems without looking at the relevant plot elements, so you should either have already seen it or simply not care to have these revealed before reading this.
Because the film was so dazzling in its production values, it took a while for certain questions to arise. Commenters have already mentioned issues like the implausibility of a supernova that threatens the galaxy (!?) (which brings in old Spock’s attempts to save Romulus but whose failure brings about Nero’s long road to revenge which brings about the planet Vulcan’s destruction. Along the way, when the USS Kelvin is attacked, James Kirk’s heroic father dies allowing the ship’s crew, including his mother, in labor with James, to escape. The boy grows up restless, troublesome and unguided until he meets Captain Christopher Pike who challenges him to fulfill his incredible potential by going to Starfleet Academy where his high aptitude will fast track him to the captain’s chair in only eight years. Ahem.
Anyway, after three years, through a series of plot contrivances, Kirk finds himself having met Spock, Uhura and others of the crew as he’s smuggled on board the maiden flight of the Enterprise to address a crisis at Vulcan.
Jumping ahead, Cadet Kirk’s interference with the chain of command during the crisis finally results in now-captain Spock’s jettisoning him to a conveniently nearby ice planet where he coincidentially finds a geriatric Vulcan, whom the film credits call Spock Prime, played by Leonard Nimoy. He takes this mid-point moment in the script to provide Kirk and the audience the exposition of what all this plane-destroying Nero’s motivations are. We learn that when the Kelvin was destoyed, the original historical timeline changed-Kirk was supposed to grow up guided by his father who will proudly see him take the helm of the Enterprise. But that chord of continuity has been cut and a new history has overwritten everything we knew about the Star Trek narrative.
That midpoint revelation is pretty surprising but nothing the series hadn’t done before in one of the several series. Except this time, the correct timeline isn’t fixed by the story’s end. In fact, Kirk’s reward for defeating Nero is–the captaincy of the Enterprise at age, what, 22?
As I said, so distracting were the film’s flash-cut editing (and sometimes incomprehensible) action sequences and all those bright lights on the Enterprise’s bridge consoles that I didn’t fully grasp the implications of the story. As the credits rolled, my 15-year old son, Benjamin asked us what we thought. My wife and I said we both liked it. He said he liked it but was sad. I began to realize that the Star Trek history had just been given an extreme blow to its vitals. Afterward in the lobby, my wife picked up on that and began to try to describe the ramifications of what we’d just seen. Then Benjamin said, “This is the first time that a reboot both respects and disrespects a franchise.” As my wife and son’s words sank in, I realized the radical nature of the movie’s changes.
With Vulcan destroyed years earlier, there will never be the classic episodes “Amok Time,” where Kirk is forced to fight Spock in their famous duel to the death, or “Journey to Babel,” where we meet Spock’s parents and learn of their son’s deep conflicts. In fact we know that the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and beginning of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home will never happen as they take place on Vulcan. Like a rock dropped into a lake, the waves from the new movie’s impact can be said to change everything from here on.
In fact, Star Trek essentially negates Star Trek: The Original Continuity. The ripple effects of that ending of continuity in favor of the new one is as radical as the effects of the Genesis device on a planet–its total destruction in favor of the new matrix of continuity. The writers and producers apparently felt it necessary to clear the old growth forest in favor of planting a new batch of seedlings–now they are unconstrained by whatever happened before and won’t bump into any conflicts with past continuity because there isn’t any. Because the original stories never happened.
This certainly address the logistical challenges of a new series of feature films but I question whether such a radical erasure was necessary. If we’re giving kid Kirk the keys to the car right past drinking age, the writers and producers have got plenty of time, probably a decade, more or less, to have three or four major films that have little to do with the five year mission that so may hold so dear.
Rather than this being a defender of the true-Trek rant (as a kid, I was there at the creation when it premiered on NBC in the 60s, but I’ve never been to a convention or been more than a devoted fan), but Star Trek has been a vital element in my imaginative life. Thousands, if not millions of fans have watched episodes repeatedly for decades and it is part of our societal lore–even non-fans know phrases like “Beam me up, Scotty,” and concepts like warp drive because the show permeated the culture. Now we can adapt one of those phrases to the nullified continuity: “It’s dead, Jim.”
And those who have said that it’s win-win because there are now two parallel universe continuities are wrong. The only vestige of the original is kept stored in old original Spock’s brain–only he remembers his long history with the Enterprise and knows that it’s gone and he stands alone as a reminder that there is only one Star Trek reality now–and he’s even pushed things along to make some of it happen as he remembers it happened, to rebuild a “prior” destiny of certain relationships.
But basically all this is a new owner coming into the house and gutting everything you liked about it in favor of new features that will sustain the franchise into the 21st century. How very like Star Trek to endorse the modern American sensibility of tearing down beautiful and historic old structures in favor of shiny new ones–thereby lessening our ability to appreciate and learn from the past.
Sure, some will say, “we’ll always have the videos of the prior stories, so it’s the Best of Both Worlds, right? All I can say is that I’m having trouble even listening to old Star Trek music soundtracks without being painfully reminded that the stories this music accompanied are no longer in canon because a screenwriter’s contrivance with studio approval winked them out of existence. I think this is a peculiarly commercial/corporate and Orwellian means of dealing with cultural memory–hit delete, on a person’s job, on facts, on anything that works against the bottom line.
Let me finish by offering another analogy. Astro City is a marvelous comic book series by Kurt Busiek that looks at superheroics in the titular city from the perspective of ordinary people. It allows readers to see familiar comic book conventions in a new light and enables the author to raise his stories to the level of literature. In one classic tale, “The Nearness of You,” a man is depressed because he cannot rid himself of a sense of loss, that something is missing from his life but there’s nothing he can put his finger on. He is near to suicidal desperation when readers learn that this is the result of a cosmic convulsion in the timeline from a major crisis brought on by the villainous Time Keeper, who brought about the dislocation of the series’history.
When the good guys came to the rescue, almost everything in the timeline is put back to where it was originally, but there is some collateral damage. The man’s wife fell through the temporal cracks of the near-catastrophe and was lost to reality–but though he can’t remember her, the man still feels her loss and not knowing why is driving him crazy with unexplained grief until one of the heroes, called The Hanged Man, intervenes.
Describing the cataclysm that explains his lost memories, the Hanged Man offers to erase his memories of his wife, but, now understanding their source in the past reality, the man decides to keep them as the only thing he has left of her. I suppose that’s the only way we can look at the new Star Trek timeline: though contrived for financial gain and narrative convenience by Paramount’s Time Keepers, we who understand that the original stories have been officially annulled, can still hold on to them as tales of a “forgotten” future we still remember and love, in a cynical present.
It’s really best to enjoy the new Star Trek with the understanding that there is Star Trek as we knew it, and then there is this new, other Star Trek. If Paramounts manifold random decisions about what they’ve done with Star Trek were a reason enough to despair, we’d have all locked ourselves in the basement decades ago (insert jokes about basement-dwelling fans here).
Just like any fandom, fans have chosen what to acknowledge and appreciate from the “official” canon they’ve been given, and what not to. In other words, they’ve chosen to customize their experience in a way that they found most enjoyable, which is only right. Paramount may not consider novelizations and comics “canon”, but really, the distinction is absurd to make. Fiction is fiction, and the kind written on pages is certainly “official” enough. There is nothing stopping one from deciding their preference for how they imagine the stories continue. For example, many (myself included), greatly enjoyed John Ford’s version of Klingon culture from “The Final Reflection” (much of which was in fact eventually co-opted in “official canon”). Then of course there is the whole business of Klingon ridges. The series Enterprise (which certainly massively overwrote much of continuity, if you believe in “canon” to that extent) had a decent explanation of it. But the great graphic novel Debt of Honor (which came years earlier) has a much better version of the story, and features the return of Dr. Carol Marcus to boot as well.
Star Wars fans have had to reconcile themselves to the abominations that are the Prequel movies, which among many, many other flaws, show that merit in the galaxy is all about eugenics and biological superiority (controlling the Force is suddenly based on “midichlorians”, which you must be born with, otherwise tough luck). Can you imagine, Star Trek suddenly being retroactively painted in a way that implies it’s all about being born a genetically superior ubermensch? Well, Lucas did it to Star Wars fans. And he didn’t make it an alternate universe. He made it part of the very same timeline.
Canon is a tricky thing to latch on to. The studios themselves have only a cursory belief in it. We could go on for pages listing all the contradictions in official canon.
Another good example of selective memory is the Alien series of movies. Alien & Aliens were fine works. Alien 3 & 4 were utter abominations (more so Alien 4). There are still plenty of fans out there who enjoy the franchise while completely ignoring the disagreeable elements.Interestingly enough, once again comics came to the rescue – Dark Horse has done some great work continuing the stories, any number of which would have made for a better third and fourth movie than were actually made.
The bottom line is that although the new movie represents a new, other Trek, it doesn’t wipe anything out. The existing continuity wasn’t nullified, it simply branched out. After all, every major historical event (and even relatively minor decision) creates a new time line. Traveling in time doesn’t erase and re-write, it takes the other fork in the road.
And if you still need proof the existing Star Trek continues, you need go no further than the bookstore. Random arbiters of “canon” may disagree, but most of us know better.
Comment by Emil P — May 14, 2009 @ 5:26 pm |
Thanks for you thoughtful comments, Emil. Yes, continuity is a minefield of creative, commercial and aesthetic factors, to say the least. In a modern (or post-modern) era of corporate level decision-making by publicly held companies, prior narratives exist, like long-time employees, on a razor’s edge of security–that is, there is none.
When DC decided in the 80′s to clean up their cluttered histories and myriad characters in Crisis on Infinite Earths, it was a practical strategy to simplify and rectify the confusing and hard-to-write for maze of decades of company titles. After creatively unifying their various storylines, they left the “original” Superman and Lois Lane in a private little world apart from the new single, sort of a sweet parting gift for years of faithful service, rather than Xing them out of existence or killing them off. But of course, that wasn’t the end, if you know of the travesty of Infinite Crisis where they were made the starting point of a botched cosmic catastrophe. There is no safe retirement in popular culture narratives when the editors and executives come calling.
Heck, Conan-Doyle couldn’t even kill off his own creation when fans outraged over Sherlock Holmes’death at Reichenbach Falls was reversed and a less inspired version character returned for many years afterward to please his public. So sometimes the public gets what it wants, more or less, or, in my case, has to settle with memories of Star Trek Prime.
Comment by Alex — May 15, 2009 @ 12:22 pm |
Alex, even though I’ve been a loyal comic book reader since I could read, and I’ve even worked as a professional comic book artist in recent years, I confess I’m not enthusiastic enough about the products (which alas is what they are now) of the “Big Two” to go for the recent spate of “event” comics. It’s really just a gimmick to have readers buy many alternate covers of each uninspired issue. And they don’t seem to be getting tired of it yet (the publishers, that is). Actually, it’s one of the many symptoms of how “mainstream” comics are becoming more and more insular and falling in on themselves like a black hole as the readership dwindles. After all, how could any new readers possibly decode the infinite nonsensical tangles of 40 or more years of utterly nonsensical back story and continuity? If you’re not in the club already, that sucks for you. Of course there are many, many great comics to choose from from beyond the Big Two these days, but unfortunately they’ve made a heroic effort to destroy competition through unsavory practices (i.e. flooding the shelves with reprints, alternate covers, etc), and most of what that’s doing is killing comics in general. They’re shooting themselves in the foot as well by killing comics that can actually attract new readers to the medium.
But never mind that, it’s a whole other axe to grind.
It’s funny you should mention DC’s attempt to deal with that problem of lengthy tangled continuity. I think it’s only fair to acknowledge that the makers of the new Star Trek have had that very same problem to deal with. To us as long-time fans it doesn’t seem like a problem, but for brand-new viewers, it’s fairly daunting. After all, to catch up with all previous Star Trek starting from zero, one would have to watch not only the 10 existing movies, but 716 episodes of the various TV series! That’s child’s play compared to trying to catch up on the X-men or Superman or Batman, sure, but it’s still quite a hefty amount of baggage. Now of course, if recent Star Trek movies had been much, much better, that wouldn’t have been so much of an issue. Fans of The Next Generation (like myself) were dealt a truly harsh blow with the horrifying spectacle of uncaring blah that was Nemesis, the tenth movie. And Insurrection was pretty meh, but it suddenly looks great compared to Nemesis… At least the original generation got a nice sendoff in Star Trek VI. The Next Generation got a kick in the face with Nemesis.
So, having thoroughly botched so much with a less-than-token effort in recent times (through the old calculation that fans are desperate, they’ll probably buy anything, which turned out not to be quite so true), they basically had to try and attract all-new, non-disgruntled viewers. And the only way to do that is to unburden them of trying to catch up on a lengthy and complicated continuity.
All that said, it is actually the official position of the screenwriters that this new Star Trek universe is indeed an Alternate time line, not a wipeout. Here is an exchange from an interview with screenwriter Alberto Orci (who incidentally respected TNG more in the Countdown comic prequel to the new movie more than Paramount did in Nemesis);
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Q: The history of Kirk’s predecessor, Capt. Christopher Pike (played by Bruce Greenwood) is also rewritten. Will that completely change his history as known to “Trek” fans?
A: Pike’s history is not completely different now, but it has certainly changed significantly, and that’s an example of our approach to time travel. Rather than stick to the familiar Einsteinian approach, our story is inspired by more current thinking in theoretical physics.
Q: You’re referring to the increasingly popular “many worlds” theory about the possible structure of the space-time continuum.
A: Exactly, and we chose that approach not only because it’s the most up-to-date speculation about time travel, but in terms of telling a time-travel story it inherently preserves the established events of “Star Trek” in an alternate reality, and that allows breathing room between those stories and what we’re doing now. It’s also really fun for us, as writers, because “Star Trek” got us into science and now science is helping us to preserve “Star Trek,” which is pretty amazing when you think about it.
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So there you have it. While I don’t disagree with what Stephanie said, this evolution was indeed reached through a remorseless logic that is hard to argue with, from a money-making product standpoint. And Alex, you are absolutely right that there is no safe retirement for narrative when money-making comes calling. After all, the avalanche of 80s-plundering movies coming up is ample proof of that.
But again, as far as Star Trek Prime (as you notably put it) goes, novelizations and comics remain
In conclusion, my apologies about making you endure the horror of my relentless run-on sentence habit.
Comment by Emil P — May 15, 2009 @ 5:33 pm
Your issue with the film is indicative of all that is going on in our society, is it not? Who needs a memory when we have 16 places to point and click to find the names, photos, and information that we value most? The less we use our memory, the less we value we collectively place on it. Seems the producers of the new Star Trek are simply capitalizing on the trend. Sad. Your review was thoughtful and informative. I will see the movie! Thanks, ALex
Comment by stephanie b — May 15, 2009 @ 8:15 am |
Yes, Stephanie, our selective retention was on my mind as I wrote this–I am really surprised that I haven’t yet come across a similar reaction to the setting aside of the original stories–those who have expressed any problems with changes have been criticized by one of the chief beneficiaries of fandom, Leonard Nimoy as anal losers stuck in the past. I’m not against change itself–it’s the cavalier disgarding of the inconvenient prior that is offensive.
Comment by Alex — May 15, 2009 @ 12:28 pm |
Reply to Emil’s most recent comment:
Thanks for the screenwriter’s interview clip–it sheds light on their thinking but I wish they had made it clear in the movie itself, which gave the clear indication that is erased. All we’re told in the script is that in the old history, Kirk new his father–but now that never happened thanks to Nero’s breaking into that moment in history. I think this multiple universes concept, whether or not it’s rooted in real science, is a pretty messy idea that may serve niche marketing strategies better than dramatic storytelling. But again, if they think the new movie is simply an alternate universe of new continuity, they should have said so–it’s certainly not unprecedented but maybe they thought it would undermine the strength of their new narrative–because having multiple versions of something lessens the value of the once unique original, or current one. But I certainly prefer alternate versions of continuity to the more apparent displacing of the old by the new.
Comment by Alex — May 16, 2009 @ 1:05 pm |