For some reason, the youtube.com video in my earlier post has stopped working. Here's another that works, today at least.
HomoDommi and I spent all day in the garden today (and yesterday, as it happens) and our conversations run,
"Should I put the dahlias, here, do you think? Or back over there? Do you agree with Salon's assessment that Obama represents the Spock of the 2000s?".
"Here, hold this post while I cement it in. Although it seems like Bush best represents the Kirk of old (cowboy politics), what was different about this movie that the new Kirk seems so liberal and hopeful, rather than cocksure and over-confident? Can we be turning into Republicans? "
"The young man who played Pavel Chekhov so charmingly also plays Kyle Reese in the new Terminator movie. Now that makes me more interested in Terminator: Salvation."
My first love was Captain Kirk. I mean, Dad was way up there, but frankly, when I was four years old, I wasn't quite sure that the guy on the television wasn't Dad, or that the guy weeding the garden on Sunday hadn't spent the week before hanging out with alien princesses and shooting monsters. I've always walked a thin line between fiction and reality.
When the show was in nightly syndication in the 1970s, the family would play, "Name that Episode". The winner could name the Star Trek episode -- by title, not by "you know, the one where the invisible aliens are just super speeded up so they sound like buzzing flies" -- in the fewest seconds of the pre-credit sequence. I was usually the winner. I wore a miniature U.S.S. Enterprise pendant on a little silver chain around my neck in my senior year of high school, and I took it to college with me as a talisman. The scorn I held for the 1970s Battlestar Galactica, a mere shadow of a show in comparison, could not be contained in words.
Even so, my interest in the Star Trek universe waned over time. Captain Kirk became synonymous with the cowboy arrogance and unthinking conceit of the American establishment. I was embarrassed ever to have loved him, unsophisticated and hayseed as he was. Han Solo (and then Indiana Jones) shouldered Kirk to one side, and was in turn displaced by others. The heroes of more recent mainstream science fiction have been too dark and sophisticated to love -- Kyle Reese (or should it be the Terminator himself), the shocking cynism of Neo in The Matrix, the brilliant coward Baltar in Battlestar Galactica.
I watched a year or two of the Next Generation; virtually none of any of the later franchise series. I stopped seeing the movies after the wretched fifth one. Most recently, I have been enthralled by Battlestar Galactica, the dark, frakking anti-matter to the bright, optimistic Star Trek universe. When I heard they were making this prequel, I was amused, impressed by the announcements of casting choices, but not overly interested.
And then the reviews came out, and even HomoDommi expressed an interest in seeing it on the big screen, and I started getting excited. So a group of us saw it yesterday.
What can I say? This movie gets it right. Gets it all exactly right. The casting is perfect -- all the main characters are there (embodied now in actors a decade younger than the original cast was, originally) retaining the mannerisms and essential personalities of the original, while allowing for new shadings. Through very clever use of time travel paradoxes, the movie establishes that we are now in an alternative reality to the one our old Kirk and all the rest lived -- so the Star Trek universe has been reset: the prequel doesn't have to lead to the stories we watched in the the tv series. Talk about brilliantly starting a new franchise!
But mostly, it is the attitude of the original show that has been returned, honored, and updated. Each character gets his (or her) duly appropriate introduction. The loving shots of the Enterprise in space don't go on too long. The dorky skin tight uniforms now look more like a light Tevlar-like chain mail sweater over a comfortable cat suit. Plotting shows some thin spots here and there, but there's lots of it. Coincidences abound, but only when they are for the good, and there's always some backup plan that falls into action at the exact last perfect moment, saving the day. A very Star Trek experience.
One review I've read felt that the new film "desecrates" Roddenberry's original stricture that there should be complete peace on earth, no whisper of disunity. Yawn, I say. Yeah, the new Kirk would ignore the Prime Directive, given a chance, but that's not the point. The point is that we made it. It is, like, the 24th century, dude, and the Earth is still around! (Even so, the cities are pretty ugly, and Iowa looks rather like southern Utah.) There is true multi-cultural diversity, aliens and humans working, and loving, together. Those who want to be challenged and admired, go to college. Physics is revered, linguistics is sexy. This is the way the world should be. Thinking that everyone will be happy all the time in that good world, and that ambition can exist without discontent, is naive.
So, I won't recommend you go see the movie, because you can't enjoy it as I did, returned to the arms of my first love, good ol' James T. But I intend to see it again (in the cheap theatres, with pizza and beer).
Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film as "Fun, Watchable"
