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.
