Sunday, June 7, 2009

Julian Perez Goes to the Movies: Star Trek






As this is a pop culture and adventure fiction blog, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the biggest pop culture and adventure fiction event of summer 2009, the STAR TREK movie.

The long and the short of it was that it was pretty darn good. For J.J. Abrams and his writing staff to devote time and effort to setting this movie up as an "alternate timeline" with an actual relationship to traditional Star Trek (as opposed to just a cold reset-button pushing) was a pretty classy decision that respected Trek. I didn't realize this at the time, obviously, but I later read that they even put an effort to keep the stardates in this film consistent with the stardates in the original series. What's more, the movie had a sense of humor and the characters were recognizably themselves...everyone felt "on."

My favorite character from the series, Dr. McCoy, was played with a snap and teeth by Karl Urban, who plays him as a cynical, sarcastic guy and easily the most entertaining member of the crew. Chris Pine does a bang-up job as a Captain Kirk, though I always thought Shatner was a campy, hammy actor, sort of like Adam West only without the comic timing, so he had pretty small shoes to fill there.

In the wake of all the branched-off Trek series like Enterprise and Voyager that just exhausted everyone, it was easy to forget exactly what it was that made Star Trek so great in the first place: the characters. People like the characters and root for them. I've often wondered why Star Trek had such a downright unreally huge set of fans, when other shows from its era (even science fiction shows) have mostly been forgotten (for instance, who today watches, or even remembers, the Ron Ely Tarzan, which premiered the same evening that Trek did?). I think part of it had to have been the great chemistry the actors had, the friendship and warmth and sense of cameraderie. Experiencing this sort of feeling, even vicariously, can be very, very powerful to lots of young people. As Fry put it in FUTURAMA, "Growing up, I didn't have any friends, but STAR TREK made me feel like I did."


Roger Ebert wrote a great review of Star Trek Nemesis where he wrote about how just plain tired all this stuff had gotten. One example he used was the damn forcefield around the Enterprise, where every battle seemed to involve someone counting down the percentage ("shields at 30%!") and how they had to reroute power from the sides to the forward deflector shields or whatever the hell. In this movie, Star Trek is actually exciting: space battles cause explosions and fireball death, and instead of just shaking the camera, cracks form in the metal of the ship itself. Even Warp Speed feels new: the jump effect, in addition to the "thump" sound, actually made the standard jump visually intriguing for the first time. One of my personal favorite effects, and a deliberate throwback to the original series, was the scale-placement of a tiny USS Enterprise near huge, monstrous spaceships and other objects to emphasize the Enterprise's comparative smallness.

The movie was obviously written by a fan. They remembered Sulu was a skilled fencer with a love of swashbuckling, and give him a great sword to boot. They remember that Christopher Pike was the first Enterprise Captain, or Uhura's little silver earring that she wore as a part of her communications duties. A red-shirted crewman gets vaporized as a part of the landing party. They even have a few gags based on Kirk's middle name being Tiberius (a gift given by the Animated Series, incidentally, but more on that later).

It was great they had Uhura as a competent, smart character that actually plays a role in the story as opposed to being a glorified secretary.





The one casting choice that disappointed me was the one I was the most excited about in the beginning, namely Zachary Quinto (Sylar!) as Spock. I didn't realize it until Leonard Nimoy himself showed up, but Quinto lacks Spock's deep voice that lent gravitas to the character, as well as Nimoy's oddball creepiness that made him a natural for unsolved mystery show host duties. Instead of the contained rage that made Nimoy so successful, Quinto more openly expressed emotion to the point where Spock felt more uptight than self-controlled. Worse, except for one great scene at the beginning, Spock just didn't feel all that alienated and lonely: whereas he often stood apart from the Enterprise's mostly human crew if not actively resented (have a look at at "The Galileo Seven"), here Spock is a mostly respected mentor-figure.

The other actor I didn't much care for was Simon Pegg. While the very skilled Karl Urban made a real attempt to duplicate McCoy faithfully, and all the other characters from Pine to Quinto made an attempt to play their characters consistently with their previous characterizations, Simon Pegg went off in a totally different direction that was so "movie comic relief" that he didn't feel like Scotty at all.

The narrative conceit of time travel creating a new timeline felt hoary and overdone, but at least it energized the series with a real sense anything could happen. The movie was truly unpredictable. The one character I fingered as a dead man walking was Christopher Pike...and astonishingly, he actually lives to the end. Christopher Pike lived and Vulcan was destroyed, which is the exact reverse of what I expected would happen.

(I usually try to keep these spoiler-free, but I'm doing this review late so everybody that has an interest in seeing it has probably seen it by now.)

One of the great rules of writing tie-in novels was that you couldn't actually destroy anything important. The decision to blow up Vulcan midway through the film was shocking, because I thought the planet wasn't in danger.

All in all, STAR TREK reminded me of why I like this stuff in the first place. It actually got me scrambling to watch DVDs and list my favorite Trek moments.


GREATEST STAR TREK MOMENTS

1. "Haven"

Part of the reason the Troi-Riker relationship never went anywhere was because how little chemistry there was between Marina Sirtis and John Frakes. Don't get me wrong, both of them are skilled actors, but chemistry requires something unpredictable that those two just didn't have.

The reason I liked Haven was not because of the one thing about it that everyone remembers, namely the introduction of Lwaxana Troi. Lots of people found her annoying. I feel the same way, but that actually works for the character: she reminds me of some of my own relatives. The element of Haven I thought that worked the most was the story involving Wyatt teleporting over to the ship containing the last of the Tarellians, who were all dying of an infectious plague, in the hopes of curing them. I thought it was an extremely powerful ending, but more than that, has greater than normal potential for sequels. What happened to Wyatt and the Tarellians? Did he cure them? Did he die with them? What?

2. The Animated Series


What I always found surprising was that the Animated Series wasn't considered canon over at Paramount. Downright shocking, even, because it was a denial of reality: the animated series introduced valuable pieces of information that have been gospel as it gets ever since, from Spock's childhood (the city he grew up in has been mentioned frequently, as has Spock's pet giant teddy bear) to Robert T. April, to the idea that Tiberius was James Kirk's middle name.

The lack of canonicity of the Animated Series was in general, part of the overall shabby treatment that incarnation of Trek received. It was totally ignored and not even mentioned once, even in passing, in the 25th Anniversary Special and the 30th Anniversary celebration. Leonard Nimoy doesn't even mention it in I AM SPOCK. I have yet to read a single Trek behind-the-scenes book that had the decency to talk to Lou Scheimer about his contributions to the Star Trek legend. In general, the overall narrative among Star Trek fans is that the seventies was a "lost decade" where Trek only had syndicated reruns, conventions and no new material to slake their thirst for things Trek. An astonishing attitude, considering an entire series was produced in that era.

This view of Trek history, nothing more than chauvanism to a "mere cartoon," becomes even more startling when you consider the original cast played their original roles, the series was made under Gene Roddenberry's watch, and many scripts were written by original series writers like David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana (and even science fiction great Larry Niven). All of them were writing and working at the best of their ability and produced brassy, thick science fiction of a kind not seen since the show's second season. What's more, the animated series featured Trek standbys like Harry Mudd, Cyrano Jones, and the Guardian of Forever. The animated series obsessively duplicated the details of the bridge and the look of the ship, and created something near-identical to its visual look. For heaven's sake, this show was even set during the original 5-year mission. If this stuff isn't canon, then nothing is.

In some ways, this series is something of an improvement over the original Trek. For one thing, animation has an infinite special effects budget, and this series showed it: with monsters like the slug creatures that thought the Enterprise crew were pets, to the winged snake-god Kukulkan who looks like an airbrushed van design mixed with a peyote-hallucination (only in the seventies!) and other winged, fanged things that fly and slither on all-water planets and hostile volcanic ones. The episode set on the living, corpuscle-filled organic spaceship made the wobbly sand-filled sets of the original even more embarassing. I have no idea why the series is ignored: animation has a real ability to bring Star Trek to life in a way even live action can't.


3. My brother IRL-Trolls Wil Wheaton


According to the way he tells the story, around the early to mid nineties back when the family still lived in New York, my brother was taking a cab down Lexington Avenue. Because the traffic was intense, the car stopped frequently, and once stopped beside a couple movie theaters. Out of one of them, my brother saw Wil Wheaton, Wesley Crusher, the most hated character in the history of Star Trek, emerge from a movie theater with his date.

My brother unrolled the windows and cried, "Hey, Wil Wheaton!"

The little dweeb turned around and grinned, thrilled to be recognized, especially in front of a date.

To which my brother shortly after shouted "...you fucking putz!"



4. Maurishka Taliaferro





Maurishka Taliaferro, credited on-screen as Maurishka, may be one of the most historically significant guest-stars in Trek history. Maurishka was an exotic and successful model that was a huge fan of the series, who used her clout to get herself a role on the show itself, the relatively unmemorable Yeoman Zahra. What was even more amazing is, this was all the way back in Operation: Annihilate, the last episode of the very first season!

Maurishka was the first celebrity to use their clout to get a cameo role on Star Trek, a category that would later include Mick Fleetwood, Whoopi Goldberg, the Rock, and Tyler Perry.


5. Della van Hise's KILLING TIME






It's no secret that lots of the writers of the first wave of Star Trek novels got their start as writers of homoerotic slashfic. In fact, it's actually pretty amazing, since the writers of the series were overwhelmingly female. In fact, the term "Trekkie" originally started with writers of slash, a variation on "groupie." This, incidentally, is why many male fans prefer the more masculine "Trekker."

What was even most astonishing is that the first draft of Della van Hiise's manuscript was accidentally published, which was not only unintentionally, hilariously amateur in craft, but also sported tons of slash elements in an actual, mainstream novel: the warmth of Kirk and Spock's fingers as they mind-meld, and the stated idea that Kirk was Spock's true love. Creepy and hilarious, it is definitely one of the top Trek moments.



6. "Who Watches the Watchers?"








One theme of Trek that I always responded to was the idea that religion and superstition was pretty much flim-flam holding mankind's potential back. Trek operated under the humanistic view: mankind isn't perfect but it's the best we've got and we have nearly limitless potential. This view was articulated over and over, but never so explicitly as in "Who Watches the Watchers," a TNG episode that was, in its way, far more shocking than even the "queer" episode with the genderless aliens.

This is the one where a Starfleet observation post is discovered by Bronze-Age aliens who believe Picard is an omnipotent god and turn to worship him. Picard shows them the error of their ways. There was even a moment where an anthropologist encouraged Picard to abandon the Mintakans to their rediscovery of religion. Picard's eloquent response?

"Horrifying... Dr. Barron, your report describes how rational these people are. Millennia ago, they abandoned their belief in the supernatural. Now you are asking me to sabotage that achievement, to send them back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear? No!"








6 comments:

David said...

I agree with a lot of your points on the new film; overall the casting is good, with Urban's McCoy being the standout. Also like you I was initially excited about Quinto's casting but found him underwhelming on screen, especially once Nimoy showed up. As you say, his voice has a lot to do with it, but Quinto also lacks what Herb Solow recently called "the wisdom of a thousand years" in his eyes, a quality Nimoy had in spades. Nimoy's Spock was so interesting (or is that "fascinating"?) because of what was held back; we always felt there was a lot going on under the surface, depths of thought and feeling we could only guess at. In this he was perfectly paired with Shatner's Kirk, who held back nothing; love him or hate him, I think we can all agree "subtlety" was never his thing.

Quinto's Spock doesn't have nearly this kind of depth, and he's not helped by a script that makes him deal with the loss of his birth world and mother and a passionate affair with Uhura. For a Vulcan, he wears his heart on his sleeve, and it's not nearly as interesting.

Pine won me over big time, which is saying something considering I'm a lot more attached to Shatner than you are, and there's really nothing in his (Pine's) resume to have suggested he could pull off the charismatic action hero role. I was worried about some of his remarks in interviews that he'd be channeling Harrison Ford's Han Solo, but now that I've seen the film I see what he was getting at.

One upside of this "alternate reality" stuff is that some characters, like Pike, get a second chance at a happy ending, which is nice. Also we can hope for a more fitting end for Kirk when the time finally comes (not that I'm in a hurry).

If I had a gripe, its with the Galactica-like approach to special effects during space battles, which left me disoriented and thus unmoved. But then you already know I'm resistant to progress. :-)

Your observation re: Star Trek vs Tarzan is interesting. I read an article once that posited the best-loved and most enduring shows are those that create a sense of family, like Star Trek, as opposed to those with a dominating single lead, like Tarzan. With Trek-like shows, we have those "relationship bits" to keep us watching and coming back even when individual scripts let us down, whereas a show like "The Fugitive" can earn huge ratings on a first run based on suspense, but there's little reason to ever watch it again once we know how it all turns out. The ensemble-ish "Gunsmoke" endures while single-lead "Bat Masterson" is a footnote, etc.

It's interesting you say that "they remember that Christopher Pike was the first Enterprise Captain" and then go on to say that The Animated Series' additions to Trek lore have "been gospel as it gets ever since," citing Captain April. In the film, the Enterprise has just been built with Pike already in the center seat, so obviously April is no longer canon, if he ever was.

What I liked most about the film is that it recreated a feeling absent since the earliest days of TOS, the feeling that drew me in in the first place. And that is that space is deadly and scary and hostile and not a place for the faint of heart. Pretty much everything Bones says it is in his "hello" speech to Kirk. This got lost with TNG, where Picard "commanded" by committee from the comfort of a love seat on a bridge that looked like a lounge at the Hilton, and the "problem of the week" usually involved some technical malfunction that brought the show closer in spirit to "Car Talk" than "The Twilight Zone". I'm glad to see that old edge back (even with the dreaded "shaky-cams", and hope they keep it up.

What didn't ring so true was the ending. "Great job, cadet Kirk. Here's your diploma and your commission as captain of the finest ship in the fleet." Yeah, right. Even James T. Kirk ought to have to work his way up through the ranks.

Julian Perez said...

Okay, it occurs to me I was a little harsh to Shatner in the post above. For what it's worth, I think Shatner was the right guy for the right job: energetic and Errol Flynn-like, he was a good contrast to Spock. There was a chemistry there that made Shatner a lot greater than the sum of his parts.

As entertaining as I find the idea of Jesus Christ (!) being the Captain of the Enterprise (and THE SEARCHERS is my favorite Western of all time), I can't imagine Jeffrey Hunter having that kind of sizzle with the rest of the cast. Watching the Menagerie is like watching the first season of Next Generation, where they hadn't figured things out and the dynamics of the characters were pretty clumsy and dull to watch. Almost from the instant Shatner was added, he changed the chemical equation of the show, and you can see that in the second pilot.

I always liked the idea of a Starfleet captain that was an intense, dark figure that confided in no one. One thing I liked about Deep Space Nine was how much Sisko reminded me of Captain Pike.

If I had a gripe, its with the Galactica-like approach to special effects during space battles, which left me disoriented and thus unmoved.

To each their own. Personally, I always thought the default "look" of space opera was pretty tired even a decade ago: i.e. the big orchestral score, the whooshy sound when something passes by, the lasers that fly by insanely slowly, the WWII-esque method of shooting battles. I like that they made an effort to not have sound in space (which is actually pretty dramatic when you go from sound to vacuum), that they made an effort to use three-dimensions.

Perhaps I'm wrong and the Galactica-style shaky-cam is everywhere these days and is just as tired as the orchestra-heavy style it replaced. I wouldn't know, because in all honesty I just don't watch a lot of TV...a while back you made an attempt to mock me by saying I was a big fan of Joss Whedon. In truth, I don't think I've ever watched anything by him in my entire life.

One upside of this "alternate reality" stuff is that some characters, like Pike, get a second chance at a happy ending, which is nice. Also we can hope for a more fitting end for Kirk when the time finally comes (not that I'm in a hurry).

Yeah, that's another thing I find exciting. With something like Vulcan being destroyed, anything can really happen! In fact there's an interesting comparison here to superhero comics, actually. It's become cliche to complain about writers killing characters off and destroying something important, but there's something to be said for these techniques, because the worst possible feeling in a story is the idea some things are "safe" and aren't in danger, or just won't happen.

In the film, the Enterprise has just been built with Pike already in the center seat, so obviously April is no longer canon, if he ever was.

The absence of Robert April definitely bugged me. This is the first time that his absence has been definitively stated.

This got lost with TNG, where Picard "commanded" by committee from the comfort of a love seat on a bridge that looked like a lounge at the Hilton, and the "problem of the week" usually involved some technical malfunction

You keep on saying that, that TNG had an over-reliance on technical malfunctions...but I can't think of a story where the technical problems were the sole conflict in a story. There was the one where Geordi had to team up with that hologram that in a creepy turn, he fell in love with...and that seventh season episode where Troi, of all people, had to take command. Now that I think about it, there was also one in the second season where the Enterprise had inherited a computer virus from the sister ship, but that one had a historical mystery and Romulans to keep things interesting (though I have to say, that one was not one of my favorites).

Perhaps you mean the holodeck stories. Personally, I'd love to see an episode entitled "The Holodeck Works Just Fine."

David said...

Nice to see we agree on a few things, anyway. :-)

Almost from the instant Shatner was added, he changed the chemical equation of the show, and you can see that in the second pilot.

Very true. One of if not the greatest "what if" attached to TOS is what if Pike continued on as captain? I think the show might have gone in a more thoughtful and darker direction, which might have been cool. But it also might not have found an audience. As soon as the network rejected "The Cage" as "too cerebral," the move to action and melodrama was assured, and the Shat was perfect for that.

Hunter's Pike was a strong character, fascinating and dark and with his brooding and self-doubt probably closer to Roddenberry's ideal of Hornblower (Kirk is more like Captain Blood), but would a 60s TV audience really want to see that? If Star Trek is really about optimism and positivity, as is so often stressed, then Shatner's Kirk is key.

Also, while I'm willing to cede Shatner's eventual slide into overblown theatrics, he really does do some remarkable work early in the series. In his movements, his inflections and his (originally more restrained) expressions he creates the image of a formidable mind and spirit, a real leader. The trouble is he makes it look easy, so one doesn't always appreciate it. All you have to do is see poor Scott Bakula attempt the same feats in "Enterprise" to realize just how great Shatner was at it. Brent Spiner once said that for an actor, Star Trek was a cross between Shakespeare and running around the kitchen with a towel tied around your neck. Some actors can pull that off, but it's not as easy as it looks.

To each their own. Personally, I always thought the default "look" of space opera was pretty tired even a decade ago: i.e. the big orchestral score, the whooshy sound when something passes by, the lasers that fly by insanely slowly, the WWII-esque method of shooting battles.

I don't need them to do it exactly as it's always been done, but it would be nice if I could at least tell what's happening. The last movie I saw in the theater was Quantum of Solace, wall to wall action I couldn't even begin to figure out, thanks to crazy editing and camera work. The previews before my viewing of Trek were for Transformers 2 and GI Joe, and again I had no idea what I was looking at. I'm beginning to realize that modern films are made for a generation with brains wired differently from my own. I liked the dialog scenes, though. :-)

The absence of Robert April definitely bugged me. This is the first time that his absence has been definitively stated.

Unless you count the cartoon, it's the first time the issue has been addressed at all in canon. But if you're miffed as one of the world's few Robert April fans, consider how the Pike fans feel now that his tenure aboard the Enterprise has been reduced to a few hours!

If it's any consolation, though, the absence of Pike in this new continuity doesn't preclude his existence in the old one. For all we know, he was aboard the Kelvin when it went down. Indeed, the movie Enterprise isn't even built until about 10 years after Robert April was supposed to have commanded it, so maybe he's out there on another ship.

David said...

Sorry, that should have been "the absence of April."

Julian Perez said...

Unless you count the cartoon, it's the first time the issue has been addressed at all in canon. But if you're miffed as one of the world's few Robert April fans,

I was going to respond to this, but then it hit me: I was a little bit annoyed that they didn't have Robert April in the movie.

This officially makes me the biggest Robert T. April fan in the entire universe!

For the record, I do think the Animated Series is canon - not just for the examples cited above, but because of all the Animated references in DS9 and Enterprise. The evidence for its canonicity is pretty overwhelming at this point.

I don't need them to do it exactly as it's always been done, but it would be nice if I could at least tell what's happening. The last movie I saw in the theater was Quantum of Solace, wall to wall action I couldn't even begin to figure out, thanks to crazy editing and camera work.

If it helps, it's my understanding that fast-cutting action doesn't work when shown on IMAX screens. IMAX is a medium sort of like the theater, in many ways: the screen is so huge you focus on details instead of what's going on in the picture overall. My friends that saw The Dark Knight on IMAX were often confused by what was going on in some scenes. When they saw the same movie again in a regular theater, they left going "Ohhhhh, THAT'S what we saw!"

Hunter's Pike was a strong character, fascinating and dark and with his brooding and self-doubt probably closer to Roddenberry's ideal of Hornblower (Kirk is more like Captain Blood), but would a 60s TV audience really want to see that? If Star Trek is really about optimism and positivity, as is so often stressed, then Shatner's Kirk is key.

My counterpoint would be that Leonard Nimoy's Spock was ultimately much more popular than Shatner's Kirk, and he was a character that was very self-controlled, intense, and driven by inner conflict. In other words, the most popular and emblematic character of the show was very much like Captain Pike. I'm not entirely sure that means the series would flop without Shatner.

I thought "The Cage" was fascinating, but I dislike "Where No Man Has Gone Before." I understand it was created to sell the series, so it was made by-the-numbers action, something sellable and traditional, betraying a concept as weird and original as "My friend gets godlike superpowers," with a Bonanza-style bareknuckle fistfight that solves the problem at the end.

It reminds me a little of the movie Stargate: here's the weirdest concept they can possibly think of, but it devolved into action movie cliches like stopping a bomb with a digital countdown.

All you have to do is see poor Scott Bakula attempt the same feats in "Enterprise" to realize just how great Shatner was at it. Brent Spiner once said that for an actor, Star Trek was a cross between Shakespeare and running around the kitchen with a towel tied around your neck. Some actors can pull that off, but it's not as easy as it looks.

One of the things I always liked about TNG was Patrick Stewart, an actor from the old school that despite the fact he was in a science fiction series, refused to slum, and always put forward a high level of craft. In Encounter at Farpoint, for instance, when he lets Wes Crusher on the bridge, you could see what he was thinking: as if he was remembering Wes's father and trying to see Jack Crusher in the young man in front of him.

I agree with you about Bakula, though. He tried his darndest, but he was never as larger-than-life as Kirk was, who was a ballsy guy that had the chutzpah to regularly mouth off to godlike beings. Shatner does deserve a great deal of credit for this.

Eduardo M. said...

I already told you Julian but I hope you don't mind me sharing this with the rest of the blog.

Apparently as of 2007, the animated series is now canon. According to what I read on wikipedia, the animated series started being covered on the official Trek site and the rules are anything covered on the official site is canon.