Lewis Beale speaks for me in his piece, "How 'Star Wars' ruined sci-fi." A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back were the only films in the series worth watching. After that, George Lucas turned to making 2-hour ads for marketing action figures like Ewoks and (heaven help us) Jar Jar Binks with silly names like Salacious Crumb and General Grievous. After waiting decades for the prequel trilogy, I was disappointed to find that Lucas had lost all artistic sense. His characters are either too florid or too flat, and pacing is so swift that one never gets the chance to give a damn about the characters anyway. Luke gets his hand chopped off... kind of a drag, but ZAP to the next scene. Anakin gets his hand chopped off, too... no big deal, he's feeling up Amidala with his synthetic hand a moment or two later. Anakin gets everything else chopped off and is horribly burned… that must smart a little, but PRESTO! he's suddenly Darth Vader. We are supposed to laugh when C-3PO gets dismembered; when humans are similarly dismembered we're supposed to... what? Does anyone really care that Amidala dies in childbirth? Before very long I'm numbed from the sensory overload of the senselessly overdone. There's far more feeling in a Terry Gilliam animation.
Hollywood studios appear be locked in an arms race to develop devastating weapons of mass distraction that are ever louder and more furious, signifying less and less. The epitome of this was Gravity. I heard all this hype about it, and when Amazon finally delivered the DVD to my Third World backwater cottage, it rejuvenated my childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut someday... I wanted to toss the damned thing out the airlock. I want to fly a space mission just so I can enjoy the privilege of doing that.
An unwavering trekker since that glorious evening of 8 September 1966, I haven't been all that wild about J. J. Abrams's ballyhooed "reboot." He dragged Star Trek into the same arms race and turned the franchise into a live-action travesty far worse than The Animated Series. Is there really a ditch in Iowa big enough to plunge a Corvette into? I could have done without the slapstick of Scotty getting pumped through the plumbing of the Brew Pub Enterprise. If Spock From the Future could see Vulcan implode from his backyard on Delta Vega, why did he need to teach Scotty some fancy trans-warp matter transporter equation to beam onto the Enterprise? And WTF, over? An Englishman as Khan? The film should have been called Star Trek Into Whiteness. Abrams couldn't find some bhenchod from the Punjab to make Star Trek's iconic arch-villain believable? Maybe he thought that a South Asian actor would insist on at least one song and dance scene. Actually, that might have helped... and it would have been no more out of place than the wholly gratuitous "blonde in her underwear" scene.
It didn't break my heart when Abrams jumped ship to make the next Star Wars farce will be with you always. If he can screw up Star Wars any worse than it already is, I really don't care. No doubt it's also good riddance that Roberto Orci just stepped down as director given his rapport with Star Trek fans. I'm damned proud to be a shitty Star Trek fan. I've been one since before Orci was born.
The personnel shuffle probably comes too late to rescue "Star Trek 3" from more of the same old schlock and aw geez, but I'll hang tough in hope of a worthy "Star Trek 4." I dearly hope that the next in line will steer the Enterprise back to its original course. I want to contemplate the separated components of the human soul as in "The Enemy Within," or the rights of a sentient android as in "The Measure of a Man," or weep for a dying android as in "The Offspring," or for a long dead planet as in "The Inner Light," or for a daughter caught in a universe that ceases to exist as in "World Enough and Time." Make me feel something human or make this human feel what it might be like to be the alien, as opposed to feeling just plain alienated. Make me feel something other than rage at having been bilked yet again out of the price of a ticket and two precious hours of whatever life remains to me.
The question is whether a theater audience would sit through two hours of that. I think so. Plenty of Shakespeare's plays have been put to film. Let's not forget that Forbidden Planet featured a Trekesque ensemble of a captain, first officer, surgeon, and chief engineer in a retelling of The Tempest. (I think of this as the pre-Roddenberry Star Trek film.) But these days Hollywood would rather dazzle and din the audience with cinematic analogs of flash-bang grenades.
Which suggests that Star Trek needs to return to television where it began life half a century ago. It was in the process of returning to small screen in the late 1970s until Paramount saw Star Trek as its vehicle to cash in on the Star Wars bonanza, forcing Gene Roddenberry to transform a one-hour television script into "The Slow Motion Picture" padded with tedious special effects sequences. But Star Trek and Star Wars are two entirely different universes, and they appeal to very different audiences. When it is true to itself, Star Trek is about exploration, not only of outer space but of the human soul; the alien is an intriguing foil for inspecting the familiar in our existence that is too much taken for granted. That is science fiction. Star Wars is about light saber swordplay and mystic mumbo jumbo with fifteen minutes of script and the best special effects money can buy to deceive the audience into believing that it is watching something more meaningful than a fireworks display; it is space opera mixed with sword and sorcery, and it examines nothing that is not better illuminated in other genres.
It was a mistake for Paramount to transport Star Trek into an alternative universe where theater audiences aren't supposed to think, and after nearly forty years, only a few Star Trek films such as The Wrath of Khan and First Contact can stand alongside the best television episodes. Fortunately, Paramount also did return Star Trek to television with The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. Even so, flash-bang blow-back from the big screen made serious incursions into Star Trek television in the form of the Dominion War and the Xindi War; Enterprise was fatally wounded by the Xindi War cycle in its third season, which pandered shamelessly to post-9/11 American angst, and died after a fourth season that was considerably better.
Meanwhile, Star Trek fan films have flourished. They do so because they deliver to audiences what Paramount does not: exploration, thoughtfulness, sentiment. I have mentioned a Phase II episode in which Sulu raised a daughter, only to watch her wink out of existence; another episode worth mentioning is "Coward's Death" from Hidden Frontier, in which a crewman suffers brain damage that results in a permanent case of clinical depression. Some enduring stories have been written by people who care more about the vision of Trek than making money from dreck.
Star Trek should leave the big screen to Star Wars and go back to being what it was at its best: tight, hard-hitting scripts that tug at the mind and touch the heart. Put simply, it needs to get out of the Wars and back to the Trek.
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