boldly starting over
I'm actually kind of tired and out of it, but I feel like I ought to say something. (And by the way, SPOILERS.) I saw Star Trek tonight, and found myself pretty excited to do so. (It's been a real Star Trek day actually, as earlier today Jeff totally nailed an audition for none other than Jonathan Frakes, who's in town directing an episode of Leverage.) Star Trek is one of the Four Horseman of Full-on Geekery (Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons... pretty sure everything else is secondary... sorry Harry Potter and Dr. Who fans), and of those Four, I'm not going to lie to you, it's my personal favorite. The world of Star Wars is pretty exciting (I can still sit through the bad parts of the prequels just for exploring that world again) and no question it's got a special place in my heart, something from childhood I'll never part with, but Star Trek has been the venue for my two favorite things: Big Ideas and Character Development. The series at their best (TOS, TNG, DS9... if you don't know those letters you might as well stop now; I'll keep this brief but I'm not about to apologize for any of what follows) were (very) thinly veiled stages for exploring moral, philosophical or political questions, with a deep humanist bent and an optimism that could easily be labeled naivete -- but what a tempting naivete it was! A world where man had done away with hate, with money, with war, with crime and all the rest of it? Not good for drama (but like Superman in the comics, nothing shows off a good writer's chops like that kind of near-impossible challenge) but good for What We Want Humanity To Become. The series was all Big Ideas. The movies -- the good ones (II, VI, First Contact... IV and Generations can sneak in as well) -- were mostly character-driven experiences. Star Wars is neither big on ideas nor on character, and so it shouldn't be any wonder why I kept gravitating back to Trek.
And so. Tonight I saw the new, much-hyped, huge-gamble, not-just-for-fans movie that J.J. "Still Gets Credit For Lost And Nobody Ever Mentions Mission Impossible 3" Abrams brought about: The Reboot.
It was officially not terrible.
Like I said, I'm pretty tired and out of it, and so instead of paragraphs and prose I'm going to resort to the old standby, lists! To wit:
- Things I hated
- The Bayesque cinematography. Seriously? Handheld is one thing, if it's BSG or The Office style, that sort of not-quite-documentary, not-quite-fly-on-the-wall way of making the unreal and CG'd feel more real. I'm okay with that. But if you're on a tight lens and you want to spin and bounce and whip-pan around a room full of shadows and lens flares, I'm going to hate you for it. There were entire sequences that were clearly shot with the small screen in mind, tight on the action with so many moves and jerks that, like my biggest complaint about the shitty, shitty movie Transformers, I know that action is happening but I am only marginally aware what action that is. People are fighting, the stakes seem high, a weapon seems to be involved, and I assume the good guy will win. Also: the DP clearly has a problem with lens flares, in that he loves them way too much.
- A couple of the actors. Performances I couldn't buy: the dude playing Sarek, John Cho as Sulu, and I'm sorry but Simon Pegg played Scotty like a cartoon character, too broad even by Star Trek standards.
- Too much "What Happens Next?", not enough "What's It All Mean?" I know, I'm the jerk who wants layers and themes and meanings, but for a story with a fairly well-handled complex time travel plot and enough epic layers of Father and Sons, Historic Meetings, and even an unavoidable and probably accidental theme of Manifest Destiny (no matter how much you change things, certain things stay the same), the story was really just this: Here is a threat, that threat is basically a Deus Ex Machina to your universe, since it's from 129 years in your future, and each time you meet that threat the stakes are bigger than the last time (first your father, then your captain, then a planet, then your planet) -- none of it really struck me as Big Idea material, or real-world-parallel material. It's okay to weigh fun over commentary but any story, Star Trek or otherwise, is a little better when you take something more from it than "Man, that was fun, and Spock sure was neat, huh?"
- Another kind-of lame villain. The only good Star Trek movie villains ever were Khan (of course), the Borg Queen, and the bald klingon general (Chang, played by Christopher Plummer) from Star Trek VI. Star Trek's done okay with force-of-nature/monster villains (Motion Picture, IV) but here we waste Bana in the same manner we've already wasted F. Murray Abraham, Christopher Lloyd, Malcolm McDowell, and Tom Hardy. I never really feared him, even though his powers were pretty incredible. His only scenes involved ripping off a Khan trick (mind-control earwigs again? less creepy this time) and yelling a lot about being a miner before the Good Guys didn't save his planet from exploding and so he'll show them real good. Like Nemesis and Generations, we have a wounded villain whose wound we never really feel and whose problem isn't actually that personal with our crew (despite reassurances that Spock is why this is all happening, I didn't buy it: THE FUCKER TRIED, DIDN'T HE?).
- Things I really liked
- The script and dialogue. Despite everything I said above, the script really works. The action scenes are exciting and plot-driven. The dialogue is spot-on and clever, calling back to the source material when appropriate, pushing the story ahead with a minimal amount of exposition (except for That One Scene, time-travel movies always have to have That One Scene of exposition, don't they?) and a maximum amount of personality. For being a lot of set-up for action setpiece after action setpiece, they did it well and I never felt cheated from character moments, not really.
- A couple of the actors. Most deserving of praise are Zachary Quinto, who looked so Spock-y that I was having a hard time remembering him without the ears and bowl-cut (much like how I feel watching Nimoy play Spock), and Karl Urban, who channels McCoy beautifully, oh so beautifully. I wanted more Bones (actually, I almost always want more Bones... that guy ruled) -- oh, and I loved the one-line explanation of why he's called Bones. Other notable performances: Chris Pine was good, in fact very good, but not quite Kirk-y somehow... I think there is something literally unbelievable about Shatner's Kirk, that he was never quite in that good of shape or that handsome or that charming when he tried, but he believed he was and he had great presence. I love Shatner's Kirk, old and young incarnations, but it was always based a little bit on Shatner's inability to erase himself, wasn't it? Pine was Kirk, but he just wasn't Shatner's Kirk. Also Zoe Saldana played a nuanced, fascinating Uhura (though I feel pretty mixed about a certain new aspect of her character and relation to the command crew... you know what I'm talking about).
- The gimmick for releasing itself from continuity quicksand. It's such a cheap trick, time travel and alternate realities, but apart from the hammy speech explaining it to the audience the existence of the fork-in-the-path way of getting them off the hook of sticking to prequeling an inconsistent show whose every detail millions of fans have committed to memory really worked for me in every way. It not only relieved the pressure of "wait, but that couldn't have been how it happened," it also proved for some interesting scenarios and intellectual exercises ("how did things go in the non-Neroed version, I wonder?"), which I was surprised to find myself enjoying rather than rolling my eyes at. So props to that, because I think for a lot of people that was the biggest problem, and one of a dozen ways that Enterprise kind of dropped the ball.
- It never tripped over itself trying to please anybody. For all its flashy obnoxious cinematography and all its over-the-top action scenes, it never felt pandering, either to fans or anti-fans. It felt like it was being itself, like the movie was what it wanted to be, and I have to credit it for that. That's actually a bigger thing than it sounds, making a movie like Star Trek that comes off (mostly) like just a movie, seriously? That's tough work. There's a lot of history to sift through. I guess Nolan's Batman movies manage the same, but those are pretty good company to be in.
I understand the Star Trek science has never been intended as plausible. I understand this is not science fiction but an Ark movie using a starship. I understand that the character types are as familiar as your favorite slippers. But the franchise has become much of a muchness. The new movie essentially intends to reboot the franchise with younger characters and carry on as before. The movie deals with narrative housekeeping. Perhaps the next one will engage these characters in a more challenging and devious story, one more about testing their personalities than re-establishing them. In the meantime, you want space opera, you got it.
The sequel is already in the works, and I hope that now that the ground rules are established, maybe we can sneak back in some of that fun stuff like Big Ideas, Character Development, and Story. Where Ebert sees the film's focus on "narrative housekeeping" as a detriment, I'm actually grateful it bothered, but it does make me eager to see a film where that Whole New Origins business is out of the way -- I only hope that its less like the sequel to the Bond reboot (Quantum kind of falls flat compared to Casino Royale, don't you think?) and more like the Batman reboot (Begins is pretty sloppy on rewatching; Dark Knight is tight for a five-act two-villain story).
Still, I do recommend this. I am definitely going to pay to see it again. Take from that what you will.
Okay, so despite being tired and lazy (and my laundry sitting in the basement this whole time) I managed to ramble a good deal here. And I cheated with the list business, saving me from trying to organize my thoughts. Long, disorganized, and poorly thought out. Man, Star Trek deserves a better blog post than it's getting here, that's for sure.
Maybe after I watch it again I'll come back and bore you all again.