Star Trek (2009)

[M.Thorsen]

Some people may consider this review a tissue of spoilers. Tough. The STAR TREK movie has been in the theatres for over 4 weeks now, and anyone calling himself a science fiction fan who hasn't gone to see it by this time may as well turn in his union card. (Your choice as to which union.)

There is a lot to like about this new vision of ST, and also a fair amount to dislike. For example, I liked the stirring portrayal of George Kirk (Jim's father) and his first (and last) command, executed in the finest tradition of Starfleet. I liked the intercutting between Jim Kirk's and Spock's childhoods, revealing them to be (each in his own way) wild and rebellious youths with a great deal of future potential waiting to be put to positive use.

I liked the performances of the principal cast, including Bruce Greenwood (Nowhere Man) as Captain Pike and Zachary Quinto ("Sylar" from Heroes) as Spock. I liked that the producers chose to cripple Captain Pike in an heroic manner (holding out against torture and interrogation by hostile aliens), rather than by him just standing in the wrong place at the wrong time when a reactor ruptured as the original series producers had conceived. Pike is a battle-hardened man of action who deserves better than to be cut down like a bundle of straw.

I liked that Sulu, in this rendition, is an actual swordsman and martial artist, not just some asian guy with a goofy grin and a Dartagnan fantasy. He also turns out to be a decent starship pilot, despite a bit of low humor at his expense the first time he sits down at the Enterprise's helm.

I liked that Chekov didn't have to wear the stupid Prince Valiant wig, and that his thick russian accent bollixed the Enterprise's voice-activated computer. I liked that Olsen, the doomed engineer who pulled his ripcord too late, was wearing a red shirt. I liked the fact that McCoy's nickname has nothing to do with the standard perjorative term for a military physician, "Sawbones".

I liked the rendition of the Enterprise itself. It's a good split-the-difference between the rickety plywood and plastic model ship from the original series and the computer-generated ships of the later movies. Less evolved without looking fragile or incapable.

I liked the fact that a shuttlecraft now seats twenty, with safety harnesses, and that Enterprise carries enough of them to completely evacuate her crew should the need arise. And it somewhat appeals to me that the flight deck is now cram-packed like a sardine can. Using a hangar bay the size of the Superdome to store and launch one little auxiliary vehicle always seemed a bit wasteful to me.

As far as my dislikes go, I should point out that my principal peeve where stories are concerned is usually revisionist history, wherein a significant change is made in the way things are meant to unfold, and we are told "It was always that way" when we know damned well it was not. The Star Trek movie is based on the premise that the classic timeline has been irreparably damaged by interlopers from the future. At least this time they have the stones to admit it, unlike on the "ST: Enterprise" series, in which they put forth one blatant revision after the next and pretended that that was the way it always was.

(In the series, the main ship should have been the USS Horizon. The first spaceship to bear the name Enterprise was meant to have been an interstellar starliner, launched after the founding of the Federation. The Vulcans, Klingons, Gorn, Tholians, Denobulans, etc, should not have been even encountered yet, let alone have been regular fixtures from the get-go. Starfleet should not have been utterly outclassed by every alien species in the galaxy. The high technology enjoyed by the Vulcans, the Klingons, the Soolabong, and virtually every other race encountered should not have been even invented until 2 centuries later. The whole point of the Federation was meant to be that interspecies cooperation yields much richer rewards than any single species could accomplish on their own. .....But I digress.)

So, having portrayed visitors from a far-flung future arriving and making significant and irreversible changes, the film then acknowledges that changes have been made and that they cannot be unmade, via Spock explaining that the future-people's knowledge of the timeline had become moot the moment they began changing the past. Some things (perhaps many) will now unfold in an entirely different way.

So I'm ambivalent about the revisionism in this film. It's disappointing they chose to go that route, but at least they didn't deny they were changing things. There were a few issues, however, that I did very much dislike:

The bad camera work pissed me off. In the bar scene, where Pike tries to sell Kirk on a life in Starfleet, the whole exchange is done in close-up shots, all apparently in tight zoom, all handheld, with no steadicam. That's a classic newbie mistake, and it made the whole sequence look like it was shot while the San Andreas Fault was letting go. Very, very annoying.

Also annoying was the sight just after that scene, of the Enterprise being constructed on Earth's surface. And, exactly how did they get it out of the gravity well? We'll never know.

The Enterprise's bridge controls are too futuristic for the era. By stark contrast, however, Engineering was too primitive. The engine room has concrete floors, and far too many pipes and fittings and catwalks. It looks more like a brewery than an antimatter power-generation and control chamber.

Scotty having the significant major innovation of his young career handed to him by a visitor from the future left a bad taste in my mouth. Miracle-worker my arse. He's now Montgomery Scott, trans-temporal plagiarist. We may hope that a visitor from the future will always be on hand to just give him the right answers from now on, since he's clearly incapable of coming up with them himself.

Uhura having gotten posted to the Enterprise by sleeping with the teacher (Spock, of all people). In the classic timeline, Uhura worked her butt off to be at the top of the communications game. She didn't take cheap shortcuts like some brainless, oversexed cheerleader. Many of us in organized fandom have heard Nichelle Nichols' account of how, when she told him she planned to quit the series, Martin Luther King Jr. practically forbade her to do so, because Uhura represented a future in which a black woman could hold a post of significant rank and authority, and function as an unquestioned equal with her white fellow crewmembers. I somehow doubt Dr. King would have cared as much about the current Uhura.

It would have been so easy, and so utterly awesome, if they had arranged for Kirk and Bones, while having an argument during a stroll across the quad at Starfleet Academy, to pass near a groundskeeper with the nametag "Boothby". Sadly, they either didn't think of it, or chose not to. (Probably the former.)

While it is nice that the movie contained a minimum of "Treknobabble", it would also have been nice if they had spent a sentence on exposition, just to say that "red matter" was a substance discovered in the future, and that it had special properties which allowed the creation of black holes on demand. Spock of timeline-prime had meant to use a droplet of the stuff to stop a sun going supernova (how a black hole would have been a better outcome than an exploding solar system was not explained). Well, okay, I guess I was spoonfed just enough to understand, sort of, how they got to where they were. What I couldn't figure out was why Spock-prime had a 50-gallon container of "red matter"on board his ship if all it took was a droplet of it to make the magic happen. Was he planning on creating thousands of black holes somewhere?

Kirk, on his third run at the Kobayashi Maru test, rewrites the program to allow himself to emerge unscathed. This much we already knew from The Wrath of Khan, so no surprise there. What was surprising (unpleasantly so) was how clumsily he did it. No special sequence of odd commands to trigger a plausible avenue of unexpected success. No effort at all to conceal his contempt for the whole proceeding. Big freaking glitch on every viewscreen, just as the hack engages. The "Kirk Solution" would have been more impressive if less obvious. The new James T. Kirk is apparently not terribly big on subtlety. How this will affect his skill at important games like chess, poker, and fizzbinn is anybody's guess.

Kirk and Spock, while coming from very different environs, are really very similar personalities. It is therefore inevitable that when initially thrust into close company, they would at first utterly despise each other. On the Enterprise, Spock is willing to give Kirk the benefit of the doubt right up until Pike leaves the ship, giving Spock the hot seat. Spock then quickly tires of Kirk's constant outgassing and orders him put off the ship. In deep space. Near a newly-formed black hole. On a hostile ice planet filled with hungry predators. With no provisions or weapons of any sort. On the one hand, it would probably have been more efficient to have just flushed Kirk out the nearest airlock sans breathing gear. On the other, I have to ask: What is this thing they call "The Brig", and why is the Enterprise equipped with one? Surely it presents a better option for dealing with annoying cadets than by sentencing them to death.

When the inevitable black hole attempts inevitably to swallow Enterprise, Scotty (in true NextGen fashion)proposes detonating the engine core to vastly increase propulsion. Anyone reading this, think back to the last time you had car trouble. Does your vehicle generally travel faster with, or without, its engine? Will we ever manage to divorce the suits at Paramount from the notion that blowing up your engine makes your ship go faster?

Finally, I personally don't care how many times you save the ship, Starfleet, and all life in the galaxy before lunchtime. No one. NO ONE!!! EVER gets promoted from cadet directly to Captain. It NEVER happens! In timeline-prime, Kirk earned the distinction of being the youngest starship captain ever, at age 35, having previously served on other ships as a crewman, an Ensign, a Lieutenant, a Lt. Commander, and a full Commander. He dealt with battles and monsters and all manner of trouble situations, and made hard decisions and gave and carried out difficult orders and took full responsibility for his outlandish actions, covering his chest with medals in the doing, until at last he was promoted to the top seat of Starfleet's workhorse heavy cruiser. Even though he still had all his hair and teeth, he was unquestionably "The Old Man" of the Enterprise, her most valuable and most experienced officer. The new Captain Kirk, by contrast, has experienced NOTHING, except for the events portrayed in the movie. He's gone from drunken bar-brawling to commanding a starship, with nothing in between except an incomplete program of classroom exercises he completely missed the point of anyway.

It is widely conjectured that the idea of the new Star Trek movie is to pilot yet another Star Trek TV series. Well, if that happens, perhaps Koloth's first officer will finally get his wish....

(A no-prize to the first reader to spot the reference.)