So J. J. Abrams has reimagined (“rebooted” is the popular term) the Star Trek franchise by starting over with a whole new cast playing James T. Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Spock, and Sulu — now with twice the macho gayness. The movie purports to tell the story of how Kirk and Spock became friends and how Kirk became captain of the Enterprise. In order to placate the fan base, Abrams uses a time-travel gimmick that preserves the original Trek universe somewhat.
If you don’t know that much, you’re probably not reading this article. And if you are reading it and didn’t know, you probably don’t care too much. Still, I’ll save the spoilers for the end of page two (you’ll be warned).
Actually, let me just dispense with the people who only want to know if they should see it. The answer is, Yes. It’s an enjoyable, good sci-fi action movie. The cast is surprisingly good — particularly Karl Urban, who plays McCoy. It helps to have passing familiarity with the TV show, but it’s far from required. Indeed, in a sense, less is more — because the more you know about the Trek canon, the more likely it is you’ll have problems with the movie.
Okay, now, back to the important stuff.
The do-over debate has been intense. It’s been “amok time” for Trekkies and the “Red Hour” festival for Trekkers. Now, strictly speaking I am neither a Trekkie nor a Trekker (think, roughly, Shia vs. Sunni), in that I neither own an authentic Star Trek uniform nor have I even read a single Trek book, never mind committed them to memory (like so many Trekkian hadiths). But I am something of a Trek fundamentalist. By that, I simply mean that I take internal consistency seriously.
I don’t mean to sound like Christopher Lloyd in Taxi whining that Gene Roddenberry had Romulans do “things no Romulan would ever do,” but consistency matters. Successful artistic realms — be it Narnia or Middle Earth, Arrakis or that faraway galaxy a long time ago — seduce us and hold our loyalty by seeming possible, plausible . . . real. It’s easy to mock fans who get too caught up in the “it could really happen!” spirit, but last I checked, plausibility was a major aspiration of art and even good entertainment (if “art” is too snooty for this discussion). And for the Star Trek franchise, internal consistency is a big part of the show’s success. By staying somewhat loyal to the details, or what some call “the canon,” the franchise has earned the loyalty of generations of Trek fans
And that’s why I was so annoyed with renowned Orthodox Jewish soft-porn photographer Leonard Nimoy’s statement that fans need to “open their minds.” “Canon,” Nimoy explains, “is only important to certain people because they have to cling to their knowledge of the minutiae.”
This creeping Obamaism annoyed me greatly. Recall how last spring, then-senator Obama explained that those stupid hicks in Western Pennsylvania wouldn’t vote for him because they were too busy clinging to their skygod and boomsticks, not to mention their bigotry and xenophobia? It seems in Nimoy’s view, the people who made him a rich celebrity rather than the second fiddle has-been on a short-lived sci-fi TV show 40 years ago need to get over themselves. How convenient he tells us this at age 78, after a lifetime of cashing in on those silly minutiae-clingers.
Nonetheless, I was willing to entertain the idea of a Star Trek 2.0. This sort of thing has been a trend for a while now. James Bond, Superman, Batman — just to name a few — have been reinvented or updated in recent years, mostly with very good results. Why not Star Trek? Particularly since almost all of the Star Trek films suffered from what professional cineastes call extreme suckitude. The result couldn’t possibly be that much worse than the first, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or ninth Star Trek films. And guess what? The new Star Trek movie is better than all of those films.
Still, I was prepared to be furious at all of the heresies, but for the most part I wasn’t. I enjoyed the movie. Although, I will defend my peeves against all enemies.
For instance, one of the silliest things about the original Star Trek was the habit of having the most important and most senior officers — Kirk, Spock, and McCoy; and sometimes Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov — always performing the most dangerous tasks (indeed, if you actually belonged on an away mission — particularly if you wore a red shirt — odds are you were doomed to die a horrible death). There are hundreds of people on board, and yet the captain and first officer are the ones who always have to fight this alien or go undercover on the Nazi planet. (I always wanted to write an SNL skit called “What if Gene Roddenberry Wrote World War II.” The whole war would involve Churchill and FDR karate chopping or neck-pinching their way across Europe, all the way to Hitler’s bunker, where FDR and Hitler would find it necessary to fight in a gladiatorial pit with long spears.) Abrams builds on this tradition, and has Kirk, Uhura, Sulu, and a 17-year-old Chekov not only take over the flagship of the Federation fleet almost minutes after graduation from Star Fleet Academy, but then in the case of Kirk and Spock, immediately run out and do all the fighting.
Also, I agree entirely with John Podhoretz that the use of time travel has gotten completely out of hand. Traditionally, sci-fi has considered mucking about with the past to be a major no-no. In the Trek spin-offs, however, the device essentially became a means to indulge bored writers and/or let male fans see some of the hotter female characters put their parallel-universe slut hats on. You see, by taking a different fork in the road of the space-time continuum, you create alternative realities. It’s just a coincidence that in most of these alternative realities, the chicks dress like Christina Aguilera in a guest appearance on Xena: Warrior Princess and have completely rejected all of their Judeo-Christian-Bajoran-Vulcan inhibitions. Call it transdimensional roofie. You know what they say, what happens in a parallel universe stays in a parallel universe.
Anyway, this is what J. J. Abrams has done. By setting it up so that Spock and some renegade Romulans go back in time from the “real” Trek universe, they create a whole new timeline. This allows Abrams to deviate from the canon in important ways without insulting the close-minded canon-clingers. The device hardly works perfectly, and I’m sure there are fan sites out there listing all of the problems. But it works well enough.
Except . . . Leonard Nimoy nearly ruins the whole thing.
This is the great irony of the movie. Leonard Nimoy mocks devotion to the “canon,” and J. J. Abrams’s one tangible bow to the canon — putting Nimoy in the movie — nearly capsizes the whole thing.
Literally, in every scene Nimoy’s Spock — “Spock Prime,” as he’s called in the credits — makes the movie worse, the plot less plausible, the experience less enjoyable. Everything Spock says and does lowers the IQ not just of Spock, but of everyone in earshot, including his fellow cast members, the writers, the director, the audience, and the movie-theater ushers. The black hole of Leonard Nimoy’s Spock is so staggeringly asinine, so stupefyingly insulting to the audience’s intelligence, if the movie could achieve escape velocity from its gravitational pull it would slingshot back in time to an age when Teri Garr wore mini-skirts, Klingons were just white guys with brown-shoe-polished faces, and William Shatner’s hair was his own.
Warning Real Spoilers Ahead
The first 40 minutes or so of the movie are pretty engrossing. You’re trying to figure out what’s going on and laughing in all the right places, and the action is just zipping by. Then, in a scene that baldly rips off elements of at least three Star Wars movies, a young Jim Kirk is banished to an ice planet. He’s chased by a monster, which is then attacked by another monster, and then a hooded Spock emerges like Obi-Wan Kenobi to scare off the monster with a teensy-weensy torch.
Spock then explains the whole plot of the movie to Kirk and the audience. The problem is that the story he tells is just awfully, profoundly stupid. I don’t want to pile on the spoilers, but the science is crazy (a supernova threatened to destroy the whole galaxy!) and the back story is idiotic. Worse, there’s something about Nimoy’s mere presence that makes the other actors worse. In every scene where Kirk and Nimoy speak, Kirk becomes a really dumb frat guy.
Spock Prime tells Kirk what he must do to save Earth from total destruction. Kirk must take back the Enterprise from young-Spock. He must fight the evil time-traveling Romulans, and so on. Young-Spock will never believe me, Kirk objects. Why don’t you save time, and ensure Earth’s survival, by coming back with me. You could explain everything. Oh no, Spock Prime warns, I cannot meet my younger self. Moreover, you must not tell the young me any of this. Spock Prime suggests that horrible some space-time-continuum götterdämmerung will ensue (cats and dogs, Klingons and tribbles, all living together!) if Kirk doesn’t keep the secret of Spock Prime’s existence.
So the movie unfolds. Kirk goes back, bringing Scotty with him but leaving Spock behind. Then, at the end of the film, we see Spock again, where he meets the younger him, played very well by Zachary Quinto. In this scene, Nimoy explains to Quinto that everything he told Kirk was nonsense. Basically old-Spock thought sending Kirk back alone was the only way to ensure that Spock and James T. become good friends in this timeline. That this decision put Earth and the Federation in grave peril mattered not a whit to the supposedly logical and ethical Spock. After all, what’s the existence of humanity compared to the value of the 23rd century’s greatest bromosexual relationship?
But, you know what? If you think back to all of the previous Star Trek films with Nimoy in them, they were all terrible, save for Star Trek II, in which Nimoy died. (Full disclosure: I pretty much cried when that happened.) Nimoy kept coming back, in no small part because the canon-clingers demanded it. If only we could go back in time and reverse that decision.