Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Maximum
Warp
(Star Trek, 5/18/09)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Shortly
before the premiere of the new Star Trek movie, CNN presented
the spectacle of President Obama and Vice President Biden trekking to
Ray's Hell Burger in Virginia for a quick lunch. Biden picked his meal
and beverage in exactly 12 seconds. Obama's order, however, was an epic
discourse: "I want a basic cheddar cheese burger…medium well…[strangely
ponderous pause]…with mustard, no ketchup…you got some kind
of spicy mustard?…a dijon mustard or something like that?…lettuce
[and] tomato…and how are your fries? Can you vouch for them?…we'll
take one order of that…we'll check that out…" It was
only about a patty on a bun, but Obama might as well have been Spock
talking Scotty through a tricky matter-anti-matter intermix in the Enterprise's
warp drive core. Yet for all that, when the food came, Obama thought
Biden's burger looked better. Maybe Obama should have forgotten logic
and trusted his feelings.
All of which is to say that the
comparisons between the new Star Trek and the fledgling administration
are right on the mark. Like the raft of problems facing the president,
director J. J. Abrams (Lost, Cloverfield) had his hands
full when he commenced to reboot the old franchise: he had to attract
new viewers to a venerable legend among all visual media, yet not alienate
one of the most vociferous of all fan bases; with a new, little-known
cast, he had to update characters who were cultural archetypes AND closely
associated with the same actors for more than forty years; he had to
make all of it ring true to the optimism and humanistic values that
had always informed Star Trek, even in the context of the summer
silly season, when audiences have been trained to expect vivid, consequenceless
havoc.
Overall, he did pretty well. On
the first two counts—updating the series and casting new cast members—the
new Star Trek is an overwhelming success. As an unapologetic
Trekkie from the last century, I was surprised to find how easy it was
to accept Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, et al. as Kirk, Spock,
Scotty and the rest, even though each actor did not emulate his or her
predecessor as much as deliver a reinterpretation. The script by Robert
Orci and Alex Kurtzman moves very fast—almost as if the filmmakers
are afraid of losing the audience if they let up a second. From the
bulked-up engine nacelles on the new Enterprise to Uhura 2.0's (Zoe
Saldana's) sleeker gams, Abrams has produced a Star Trek that
is faster, lighter, seamlessly reflecting modern tastes. It's also infectiously
entertaining: there haven't been many movies so engrossing this reviewer
forgot to take notes.
Arguably, the show deserved a more
than a summer popcorn pleaser. On the task of remaining true to Star
Trek's humanistic and intellectual pedigree, the reboot is something
less than a total success. Pine's Kirk, for instance, is not the soldier-philosopher
of the old show, but a bike-ridin', bar-brawlin', bird-doggin' rabble-rouser
of the kind you might expect the young Nicolas Cage to play. He's nothing
like "the stack of books with legs" he was described to be
in the show's second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before."
Zachary Quinto does better as Spock, conveying a volcanic emotional
center than Leonard Nimoy's cooler, more cerebral version. Nimoy himself
turns up as Spock-from-the-future (aka "Spock Prime"), but
his presence seems shoehorned into the plot, and Nimoy's acting, alas,
has only become stiffer with age.
But the biggest problem is the script.
The straightforward revenge story involving a sulky, bitter Romulan
captain (Eric Bana) and his planet-munching superweapon, can't be accused
of taxing anybody's intellect—unless you count trying to wrap your
head about the many conundrums needlessly injected by its time-travel
premise. Keeping the story moving at warp speed makes its flaws less
obvious, but it doesn't fix them.
Insofar as it spectacular resurrects
a stale franchise, Abrams' Star Trek is analogous to the movie
that saved James Bond, 2006's Casino Royale. After this good
start, we can only hope that, next voyage, Abrams will take time to
reflect the virtues that made the original series worth revisiting in
the first place.
©2009 Nicholas Nicastro
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