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!"