My thoughts on Star Trek, round one
This is spoiler-free, because I’m not really reviewing the movie per se — more talking about why I never cared about Star Trek (in any of its incarnations), and why this movie managed to hook me where the previous attempts failed. I’ll still put it behind a cut, though, for length.
Let me say up front what my familiarity with the franchise consists of: the most recent four or five movies, The Wrath of Khan, and a double handful of random eps of the different series (TOS, TNG, Voyager, Enterprise — the only one I’ve missed entirely is DS9, which ironically is the one I’d probably like best). So if you find yourself wanting to make a comment in the vein of “but you’re wrong, they did that thing over here in this part of that series,” consider it made. I’m talking about my perception of the show, not an exhaustive survey of its texts.
Having said that: the future of Star Trek just never interested me.
I read a recent article by one of the old TNG writers, and discovered that one of my main gripes was no accident; it was fiat from On High, i.e. Gene Roddenberry. Namely, the lack of internal conflict. The guy actually believed (or at least dictated for his setting) that by the twenty-fourth century, the human race would have evolved past social conflict. No, really. And the instant I read that, I thought, huh — no wonder the Federation always bored me.
Don’t get me wrong; if I had to pick a future to live in for real, that one sounds pretty nice. But I don’t believe in it, and I don’t much care about it, because if you have no internal conflict then it all has to be external (evil aliens! moster of the week!), and that gets old for me real fast. I want both. I want political disagreements and philosophical disagreements and characters who plain don’t like each other and never will, without it being a matter of villainy. Which is not to say I require bleak and gritty futures, either — I like a balance. And that’s what I got here. Two responses friends of mine have made to the movie pulled out the exact words I was looking for, which is to say that this film came across as optimistic, but not utopian. Star Trek always felt too utopian to me, the Federation too perfect, for it to engage my interest.
It manifests in small ways, too. One of the things I loved about Firefly was that the world of the narrative looked lived-in: things got scratched and dirty (and not just in climactic battles), rooms looked inhabited, clothes looked like people actually wore them. Star Trek’s locations always looked like sets to me, and the clothes always looked like costumes. This is partly a matter of budget, of course, and when you get down to it I wasn’t a fan of the new movie’s Starfleet uniforms, which pretty much looked like long-sleeved shirts. (I liked the cadet uniforms, though, because the fabric was heavy enough not to rumple.) But the mechanical underbellies of the ships, the scratches on the shuttles, the Academy dorm room . . . those things looked more real to me in this iteration. Less utopian. Less fake.
When Enterprise got canceled, I got into a discussion with some friends about these reasons for my disinterest in Star Trek, and what I would love to see out of an ST series. You see, I’d read a very salient argument from someone, that the dedicated fanbase was too attached to a rigid model for the premise: a series has to feature a ship, which travels around to different places encountering aliens they have conflicts with, and the protagonists are the ship’s top officers. DS9’s the only one to substantially break that model, and only partly then. But that premise limits the stories you can tell, and to some extent requires a consistent bit of illogic: in reality, as people have often pointed out, the top officers are not going to be the ones beaming down to a planet to go exploring. You can do political plots with them (as BSG did, quite well), but not so much with adventure. Therefore, what I really wanted to see was a series about a group of hotshot young ensigns fresh out of the Academy and bent on making names for themselves in the Fleet.
Mind you, every time I say this, people respond in horror: “You want an entire series of WESLEY CRUSHER?” Which, no. But that character type doesn’t have to be annoying. And the advantage of it is that you have characters with ambition and room to grow — which means you’ve given them personal goals — and limited resources, influence, authority, with which to achieve them — now you’ve created obstacles. They’ll be inexperienced, they’ll doubt themselves, they’ll try for and sometimes achieve the impossible because they don’t know it can’t be done.
In other words, this movie.
And that’s the biggest selling point for me. That’s what’s fresh. I adore watching people prove themselves for the first time; I live for the moments when they get to take their native talent and untested education and see just what they’re capable of. It isn’t the only kind of story I can enjoy, of course, but it’s a new angle for Star Trek (at least in TV and film, though I understand the books have covered it), and it’s one with the power to hook me. Give me a universe with prejudice, conflicts of authority, fistfights in bars — all the interpersonal and intrasocietal conflict that always seemed to be lacking — and a bunch of characters with a whole arc of growth ahead of them, and I’m halfway bought already.
Which is why this is the first Star Trek film ever that I was actively excited to go see. And I enjoyed it very much.
I’ll probably post more of a review-type response later, talking about specific details and how they struck me (mostly good, a couple of bad, several highly interesting, especially from a writing-craft standpoint). But I wanted to toss that out there. The things I liked are probably the very aspects pissing off the purists, but hey. If they want to relaunch the franchise, they need a fresh expansion of their audience. And for my own part, if they do more movies or a TV show that take this as their starting point, I’ll be in the theatre or on my couch, ready to be entertained.
