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Star Trek

Chris Pine, Eric Bana, Karl Urban, Zachary Quinto

Hello, my name is Trevor and I am a Trekkie.

Hello, Trevor.

It has been four years since my last fix, a really bad trip called “Enterprise.” I mean, my God, the captain watched water polo, water polo, yet I continued to watch. Each week I would find myself sobbing in front of my television, promising myself it would be my last and the next week would roll around and I would waste another hour of my life. But, it was okay because I did not have to pay for it… then I remembered that last movie. I spent money on that thing. I still wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat over that thing. Data was supposed to die, but he had a twin brother who they transferred his memories into. What the hell? Don’t get me started on that campy Deanna Troi mind rape scene. Even Jesus would have stayed in his grave an extra day to avoid watching that thing. Then just like that, it was over. Star Trek was no more. The air seemed cleaner. Food tasted better. But, I felt the Jones last week and slipped. The newest Star Trek movie was being previewed and I went.

If a franchise is cancelled and no one notices, has it really been canceled at all? Except for a few guys sitting in their parents’ basements debating on the Internet who would look better in a bikini, Power Girl or Wonder Woman, almost no one noticed four years ago, one of the most popular franchises in recent memory, a franchise credited with inspiring modern cell phones, PDAs, Tablet PC, and MRI machines, a franchise pointed to by most of our current astronauts and scientists with getting them interested in science, a franchise with maybe the largest subculture following ever, quietly disappeared from the public eye. No more “Beam me up, Scotty.” No more “Make it so #1.” No more Orion slave girls. No more Ferengi. Except for reruns on basic cable, Gene Roddenberry’s creation had assumed room temperature. The last of the five Star Trek television series, Enterprise, lost over three-fourths of its audience, close to nine million viewers, over its four year run. The last big screen movie did not even cover its $60 million production cost, taking in just over $43 million in domestic box office. Numbers hard to believe for a franchise that well over a quarter of the US population claims to be a fan of. What happened?

Some critics believe that Star Trek had worn out its welcome, become tired and worn out, like a ten-year old pair of pants. Roger Ebert declared, “Star Trek is over for me. I’ve looked at these stories for half a lifetime, and, let’s face it, they’re out of gas.” Others, like executive producer Rick Berman, blamed the competition of other movies and television series. Others pointed to parodies like Galaxy Quest as helping lead the franchise to slaughter. Fanboys even rumbled about a conspiracy among Paramount executives to kill the franchise. While I would like to believe Ebert, Berman, and others about what was the stake in the heart of the franchise, there are whole galaxies of stories that can be told in the Star Trek universe and the best science fiction writers in the world would give their eye teeth to leave their imprint on the franchise, so it can not be the lack of interesting stories. The James Bond franchise has shown that a brand name can continue to rumble decades after a spoof like Peter Sellers’ Casino Royale or even the latter Austin Powers trilogy. Even when Bond appeared on his last legs, it was simply a change in actors, first with Pierce Brosnan and later with Daniel Craig, that made 007 cool again. It cannot even be that people are not interested in watching sci-fi stories as the success of the awfully run Sci-Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica has proven. (When you are a network devoted to science fiction and your highest-rated show every week is professional wrestling and your Saturday movies are a universal joke, every executive there should be fired and a priest should be called to rid the place of whatever bad mojo is there.)

Franchises die for a whole host of reasons, from the get attached to a particular actor like Dirty Harry or Lethal Weapon, they cannot make the transition to a new medium like The Shadow, sensibilities change like what happened to Charlie Chan. But most of the time when a beloved franchise dies it is because of poor decision making and bad story telling and Star Trek is the classic example. Star Trek has always been the intellectual alternative to Star Wars. Instead of happening in a galaxy far, far, away, Trek envisions what is possible from the best of humanity as we travel out into the stars, leaving behind greed, racism, sexism, hostility, and our baser instincts. While most sci-fi is apocalyptic, Star Trek is hopefull. No matter how bad things look today, a person can watch Roddenberry’s creation and believe that things will be better in the future. The problem was with each successive series since Next Generation came on in 1987, the quality of storytelling with each successive series devolved. Instead of accepting scripts from outside sources and consulting award-winning science fiction writers, by the time Enterprise rolled around, producers decided a closed room of writers was needed. Instead of improving the quality of scripts when the rating began to slide, producers turned to gimmicks like big breasted women padded with foam in outfits that looked like they had been painted on, fan favorite alien races, and major events that petered out fast. Bad storylines equal boring and by the time Enterprise rolled around, the entire crew had become a Pat Boone look-a-like contest with no charisma and nothing interesting about them, bland, forgettable, just wonder bread sailing through space. Much like how Han Solo’s joy and excitement made the franchise, not all the talk of the force, when a person watched the original series, there was a sense that James T. Kirk, as hammy and over acting as he was, was having fun. A kid watching it wanted to be sitting in the Captain’s chair, romancing green-skinned slave girls and mixing it up with Klingons and Romulans. Almost 40 years later, the crews seemed as exciting as a church council meeting entering its third hour. At the movies, bad writing also ruled the day.

Just a few years after Enterprise and Nemesis crashed and burned under the weight of their own stupidity, Paramount wants its golden goose back and smartly turned to a man who seems to understand why science fiction works, the creator of “Alias” and “Lost,” J.J. Abrams, to save their bacon and did he. Hit the angel chorus. In a summer that is almost superhero free, Abrams put on a cap and saved an entire Star Fleet. In my opinion he has given us the second or third best Star Trek movie ever made.

Abrams takes the franchise back to its roots, a reboot, back to James T. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and Scotty. The characters that so many loved for so long are back. The movie opens with an amazing action sequence involving Kirk’s father on the starship Kelvin. The audience is allowed to see glimpses of Spock, Kirk, and McCoy’s lives before Star Fleet. But this is a reboot where things are slightly different, characters slightly different, events different, and fanboys need not worry, the timeline has been disturbed by Nero of the Romulan (Eric Bana). Take a deep breath from your inhaler, just go with it, trust me, greatness is ahead for you. Most of the time when I do a review I try to give as little of the plot away as possible because I believe people should enjoy themselves and not know what lies ahead. Reviewers and previews too often ruin movies and this is one movie I do not want to ruin. Buy your ticket now. Geeks put on your communicator badges. Put your phasers on stun. Kiss a Klingon. Star Trek is the summer blockbuster.

Verdict: Home Run