The new Star Trek movie sucks. The plot is virtually incomprehensible, and in fact, the movie would be equally good if the entire plot were removed. Yes, the new cast is very good, and there are some delightful moments in it—even some excellent moments. But as a movie, it is only eye-candy. No—not even that; it is a sugar cube for the eye, that dissolves without giving the satisfaction of real candy. Why is this?
The bottom line is that the movie’s producers—and this is true of more than just Star Trek—just do not trust the fans. They do not believe that an audience can sit still for more than a minute and a half without being hit by some outlandish new blast of something or other, which is as quickly forgotten as it is seen. Kirk is attacked by some spectacular monster in the snowy wasteland…. Why? Because it’s cool to see; nothing more. Scotty is accidentally beamed into a water-filled tube…. Why? Because it’s supposed to be funny. Well, these things are great—but they do not make a movie. Captain Pike falls victim to a nasty alien insect that can dig into your body and take over your mind.... Not only did Star Trek II do that to death, but in this film we never see this bug again—the entire plot element is thrown in for no apparent reason. And God help you if you try to figure out just who’s doing what to whom and why. It kind of makes sense, if you don’t think too hard.
This movie, like so many others—especially like the sewage that Michael Bay throws at us every few months—has ADD. It would have been immensely better if the producers had taken a relaxing vacation and written us a script that had some meat on it. Something slow. Something real. What are the best moments in Star Trek? They’re when Kirk and McCoy and Spock are sitting around the campfire in Yosemite, or when Kirk and McCoy are talking about old age in Kirk’s apartment on his birthday, or when Spock says his final words to Kirk in the engine room, when he recognizes Kirk in Star Trek III. They could have made this whole movie about Kirk defeating the Kobayashi Maru simulator. They could have made the whole movie about Spock and Uhura’s relationship. Either would have been infinitely better than this hollow mirrorball of a movie, and they would have taken advantage of the genuinely talented actors who appear in it. Space battles are fun, but movies—and Star Trek films particularly—are supposed to be about humanity. There’s a little humanity in this movie, but it is sliced paper thin and spread far apart. I kept thinking to myself, “Could this be the same franchise that once gave us stories written by Harlan Ellison, D.C. Fontana, and David Gerrold?”
I’m sorry to say that the worst thing of all is the inclusion of Leonard Nimoy. Of course we all love Spock, and we love seeing Nimoy, who somehow only gets better with age. But his role in this movie is so obvious an attempt to ransom this movie to fans who might otherwise see through its vacuous flashiness, that it really suggests to us what has happened to the franchise: it doesn’t trust its fans. This is exactly what happened to the Next Generation franchise. They didn’t trust fans to see the first Next Generation movie unless they included Captain Kirk somehow—and the result was the Achilles heel of a script that otherwise could have stood very well on its own. Here, this pathetic ploy has taken another step down: a script that might have been written with a random-scene generator, and Nimoy dumped in to make the water seem more like soup. It’s just sad.
If they’re going to re-imagine Star Trek, let them do it. Let them have the guts to play with the myth, break the rules—we Star Trek fans can take it. We’ve grown up a lot since Shatner’s “Get A Life” sketch, and we can live with some tweaking of the canon. But do it with some integrity, with some seriousness. To feed us a meaningless collection of spectacular space battles and hope it can be held together by Leonard Nimoy’s cameo is not movie-making. At best, it’s Hollywood cheapness; at worst, it’s exploitation.
Update: John Varley gets it right:
A lot has been made of this J.J Abrams dude “re-booting” this weary old franchise, using younger characters to appeal to a younger audience. It probably will, since this is definitely a short-attention-span movie, and it helps if you can’t actually think. I was just looking over the man’s credits. There are some TV shows I never watched, and then there was Mission: Impossible III, a pretty bad movie, and Armageddon, one of the worst “science fiction” movies of the later part of the last century. God help you, Trekkies. He’s already signed up to make another one.
Aside from a younger cast, he seems to be pioneering a new technique that I’m going to call “mind dazzle.” In the scenes where no frenetic action was taking place—only about twenty minutes of screen time, but it seems longer—I kept seeing bright lights flashing in my eyes, about every five seconds. That, or a bleed of white light at the edge of the frame, like a car had turned its headlights at the screen or the film had been badly overexposed. I finally realized it was being caused by bright lights that had been arranged all over the walls of most of the interior sets, most especially on the bridge, to shine directly into the sets. (Well, if you were designing the bridge of a fighting vessel, wouldn’t you be sure to have bright lights shining into the crew’s eyes at all times?) More important, I figured out why those lights were there. See, the action had slowed. A good part of the audience was getting antsy, almost falling asleep, because the camera was hardly shaking at all and many of the cuts were longer than one second. The lights were to assure them that they were still watching a motion picture. Short attention span. Gotta love it. The total effect was sort of like having a bright flashlight shined in your eyes for half an hour. Try it. It pretty much guarantees a splitting headache.
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