lazypadawan | Aw geez, not this @#$@ again

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Aw geez, not this @#$@ again

With New!Trek upon us, the ugliest rivalry since the Yankees and the Red Sox could flare up again. First to light a fire and throw in some kerosene is our old buddy Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty in the flick. Pegg is famously a PT basher but now he thinks SW has no integrity!! From an interview with New York Timeout's website:

Star Trek, in the end, seems to have won the war, because it maintained its integrity, and now the effects are catching up as well. So you sort of get your Star Trek cake and eat it, too. I'm sure Star Wars fans around the world will want to kill me for saying that, and see me as a traitor, because I've always been a very outspoken fan of Star Wars, but I've never been publicly keen on the new ones.

It makes you want to look up at the ceiling and yell, "KHAAAAAAN!!!" Integrity? WTF is he talking about? Lucas made the movies he wanted to make, not kowtowing to fanboy nation or movie critics or internet dweebs. That's integrity.

Please tell me again why do people at Lucasfilm suck up to this guy?

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I have to say up front, I'm a big fan of Simon Pegg. I have been for years now. I remember when he was on Big Train and Brass Eye (the Paedophile sketch in particular was cutting and hilarious), I loved Spaced which he co-wrote and co-starred in with the wonderful Jessica Stevenson (now Hynes - and something of a *soft* prequels defender - which is to say she's admitted to liking them), I enjoyed his appearance on Doctor Who, own both Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead on DVD, and am very much looking forward to his next flick.

That being said every statement he makes about Star Wars, including the one above, is crap. He's little more than a bitter fanboy when it comes to this particular topic. He didn't like episode's I-III, thats fine, but there seems to be a real sourness to him in relation to this, and as a fan of his it really disappoints me. In fairness, he isn't blind to it, he did take the piss out of himself in the second season of Spaced for it. But not without getting a few licks in against Lucas. So we needn't be too fair.

As for the new Star Trek. I haven't seen it yet. I'm a huge fan of Trek (and I mean a proper book buying, list making, OCD fighting FAN) and when I was offered tickets to a preview a couple of weeks ago, my reaction was - and I hate this term, so forgive me but - *meh*.

Now in the intervening weeks I've come round. It actually looks like a good fun, action, adventure flick. I still hold reservations: Kirk's character seems drawn from the consensus caricature, rebel-without-a-cause misconception of who Kirk is, rather than the man William Shatner actually played. Young Kirk was always described as bookish, academic, and ambitious; not reckless, callous, and (at least to begin with) directionless, as he seems to be in this movie. In fact the Kirk I'm seeing in these trailers seems more akin to how Jean-Luc Picard was supposed to have been in his youth.

One old friend of Kirk's actually described him as being "a stack of books with legs" while at the academy.

Should this matter? Not really. No. Its been a bit of a pet peeve of mine that the character has been consistently misread over the years, and I do find the original version more interesting, but this shouldn't affect the quality of the movie.

The other thing though, is the tone I'm picking up off the trailers. This feels - dare I say it - like Star Wars in Star Trek's clothing. For all the nonsense rivalry between the two franchises they are, but for having Star in their titles and being set in space, completely different. I got the impression that Abrams (who I like) is making the Star Wars picture he's always wanted to make, but calling it Trek.

Star Trek always had that Cowboys & Indians flavour to it, that was part of its appeal. But it was always more sedate, cerebral (Star Wars goes more for the heart, the blood, at least up front), and majesterial. This film seems not to get that. Of course you need the sturm and drang to get the joe soapers interested. I just hope there's a bit more substance in there when all's said and done.

My favourite thing about Star Trek is the sense of exploration. If humankind ever does it; launches massive, three and four hundred staffed starships into the depths of unknown space, just to see what's out there, it will be the best thing we ever do. That feeling, that sense of seizing the future, of 'boldly going where no one has gone before', that is what Star Trek is about. Explosions, and outer space battles... these things are nice, but not really part of the program.

In the end Lucas's saga might aim to get the blood pumping, but it's not only concerned with that. There are deeper themes at work. I hope that Abrams, in trying to map some Wars onto Trek, remembered that at least.

I agree with you completely (except for being a Pegg fan).

Granted, since this is a "reboot," I know certain specifics aren't going to be the same as the original canon, even in characterizations. Though, as the Batman reboot proved, you don't have to reboot the essence of the main character, which it does appear they're doing with Kirk - who I agree seems more like what we know of young JLP, not young James T. Add in that Pine is modeling his performance off of Han... I really don't know. He does seem to at least recognize his limits, that he can't duplicate Shatner, but in lieu of that I'm not certain Han was the best template to work from.

But even with that, so long as the original's spirit - the core themes of exploration and humanity striving to better itself - are basically intact, then the rest is basically gravy. But I'm not sure JJ is even going for that. He himself said he thought TOS was too much on the "talk" and not enough on the "action" - which (aside from being a criticism I would have more expected to be leveled at TNG) more or less proved to me that he just really doesn't get it.

I've seen it now. Annnd... I'm disappointed.

It's a bloody good movie, and I defy anyone to not have a good time with it. But - and this I know is a somewhat sweeping statement - it's not Star Trek.

Without going into a full bore analysis, my only real issues with the flick (Kirk is something of a cartoon its true, with little approaching an actual character arc, but he's likable and Pine does well with it so that part's okay) boils down to two things. Roddenberry's socialist utopia is nowhere to be found, which would be okay if they'd at least gotten Starfleet right.

The primary function of Starfleet is - all together now - exploration! "To boldly go where no one has gone before." Here its remit is one of "peacekeeping and defense". And thats a quote, Captain Christopher Pike lays it out for us. Now Starfleet always had a military angle to it, it acted in defense of the Federation, but that was always its secondary purpose (one I used to like to imagine arose following the Romulan war. But that's just idle speculation), in fact Roddenberry had originally imagined it as a civilian organization, evolving say out of NASA. In Abrams movie though, Starfleet is wholly military, with any mandate toward space exploration seemingly absent. So when Leonard Nimoy speaks that famous phrase ("... to boldly go...") at the end (and it really should be Pine's speech, but no matter) it seems incongruous with the film we just watched, and one wonders if those words haven't now become little more than familiar phonetics, something that must be there even while their meaning has been ignored or not understood.

And this matters, because if we're rebooting Trek (and thats what this is. don't listen to any waffle about altered timelines, this is a new universe. Vulcan's blue-not-orange sky and money being used in the Federation is testament to that.) then it's important that we recognize what the thing is at its core.

Random example: When Brian Michael Bendis started Ultimate Spider-Man, essentially a reboot of the Marvel comic book, he made sure that at its centre was a bookish, neurotic teenager that is granted amazing powers which only serve to make his life more difficult. After that everything else is up for grabs.

Rebooting Trek requires that you do the same. Give me a group of scientists, artists, explorers, and yes... fighters, stuff them into a giant state-of-the-art star ship, and blast them into the unknown. After that everything else is up for grabs. Other Star Trek movies have been about battle and spectacle (though none quite as hysterically as this one) but have managed it without rejecting the core idea of exploration.

To be fair maybe the exploratory aspect hasn't been rejected, they do use the 'boldly go' bit at the end, however incongruously. Maybe they needed the empty sturm and drang to entice back the masses, but exploration is what Star Trek is all about, it should have been front and centre in what is essentially supposed to be a re-introduction to the franchise. Who knows though, maybe next time Star Trek will show up.

Your comment lays out almost exactly my concerns about what this movie would be - that it may be a good movie, but not really Trek.

Retconning the entire purpose of the Federation/Starfleet? That pisses me off. (And making superfluous changes to things like Vulcan - what's the point?)

More and more it does indeed seem like this is JJA trying to live out his wanna-make-a-SW-movie fantasy, but I'll still see it at least once, to give it as fair a shake as I can.

Edited 2009-05-09 19:03 (UTC)

I actually liked how Vulcan was handled. The skies should have been orange, but thats a nit-pick. The way they handle the teasing - okay outright verbal abuse - that young Spock is subjected to is particularly clever. I've always had difficulty making the emotionless, stringently logical Vulcan discipline parse with the idea that Spock was jeered and bullied in school for being different. Abrams and Co. find a way to do it and have it make sense. This was probably my favorite moment in the whole flick.

But thats what's frustrating. The moments where they get it right. It's in those moments that I see a Star Trek reboot (something I've been a vocal, and my friends will say tedious, advocate of for years now) that I might have loved. I so wanted Star Trek back. After suffering through Voyager and Enterprise (apologies to any who like those shows) it would have been nice to find Trek that I could get excited about again. It looks now like I never will. But there's always hope I suppose...

So the film is indeed a reboot then, right? It exists in a different reality/universe/continuity from Shatner and Nimoy's Kirk and Spock?

(Critics and journalists seem to be confused over whether the film is a prequel or a reboot. I've even come across an item in which a journalist describes the film as both a prequel AND a reboot. Well, it can be either a prequel or reboot. It can't be both.)

The skies should have been orange, but thats a nit-pick.

Yes, that's what I was referring to - while a seemingly minor thing, yes, what was the point of such a change? How hard would it be in this day and age to make an orange/red sky?

I can't really comment on the rest, as I still haven't seen the movie yet.

After suffering through Voyager and Enterprise (apologies to any who like those shows) it would have been nice to find Trek that I could get excited about again.

I liked the first few seasons of Voyager okay enough - it had a good premise, truly "where no man has gone before" - but grew annoyed with their falling back on the Borg so much, and I never got into Enterprise. (Seeing one of the actors viciously bash AOTC at a con didn't encourage me to, either.) I know what you mean, though - I think the last time I was really "excited" for new Trek was First Contact. Which was... 13 years ago? Part of why I really, really want to like this movie.

*So the film is indeed a reboot then, right? It exists in a different reality/universe/continuity from Shatner and Nimoy's Kirk and Spock? (Critics and journalists seem to be confused over whether the film is a prequel or a reboot. I've even come across an item in which a journalist describes the film as both a prequel AND a reboot. Well, it can be either a prequel or reboot. It can't be both.)*

It is, in my opinion, definitely a reboot. There are enough differences between this version and the original that it can only be read that way for me. I think the intention of the filmmakers was to re-write Trek history, mapping this new version onto the old, thus supplanting it. In that they have, mercifully, failed. You can set your old Trek DVD’s on the shelf, that universe is done, this is another place.

It is also however, a prequel. Because it is set in these characters early years, showing how they progress ( with baffling speed) from cadets to officers and star ship crew, it can be read as a sort of Star Trek begins as well.

*What was the point of such a change? How hard would it be in this day and age to make an orange/red sky?*

I don't think it was a conscious change. To be fair, I don’t think anyone stood up and said; “I don’t like this orange sky hooey. I want it blue. BLUE! Damn it to hell…” I think they just got it wrong.

*... I really, really want to like this movie.*

I hope that you do. Genuinely!

I do intend seeing it again. I want to try and find a way to get past some of the things that really do bother me, get over myself, and try and develop an appreciation for whats been done here. Because it is a good movie. The cast are uniformly good, to great. The script is, honestly, a little ropey in places, and wouldn’t really hold up to stress testing, but Abrams direction smooths over most of it and keeps the whole thing screaming along with lots of pace and energy. If I wasn’t such a fan of Star Trek, and so trenchent in what I think it is, and how it should be assembled, I would probably have loved it. As it is it waddles and quacks, but for me it just doesn’t have the duck’s soul.

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Aw geez, not this @#$@ again

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