Beam Me Up... Abrams' Star Trek Rocks

I didn’t have high hopes, for this latest journey of the starship Enterprise. I’m not a huge J.J. Abrams fan. I don’t watch Lost. I didn’t really get into Alias. However, Felicity paid a lot of bills for me when it was on the air. I did really enjoy Mission Impossible III, despite the fact that Tom Cruise was the lead. All that to say, I went to a Saturday morning IMAX matinee with an open mind.

The opening scene is loud and fiery, it sets the tone. I didn’t recognize Eric Bana under all the makeup which is a good thing, in a sci-fi movie. Ten minutes or so of space fire fights and then the title flashes across the screen. I was hooked. This is how I should have felt ten years ago, when Star Wars Episode I was released. In theory, I should have liked that one since George Lucas was directing and this was going to a canonical story. But no, we got pod races and Jar Jar Binks. Thus “prequel” became a dirty word in my mind.

I’m happy to say that none of that happens with Star Trek, because its not a prequel. Abrams pulls off the slight of hand required to tell an engaging story, make it simple for newbies and ride the line with the initiated. Abrams took the logical road; rather than do what Ronald D. Moore did with Battlestar Galactica and chuck the existing cannon in the trash. Abrams uses that wonderful science fiction crutch, time travel to pull off his retroactive continuity and keep the cannon of existing stories intact (sort of).

Without giving away anything you can’t figure out from the trailers or the poster, its more “reboot” in the style of Batman Begins. Its like you know the names and places, we’re just going to tweak them a bit and give them some of that 21 century CGI polish. I think with the f/x and casting, it all gels well and it works to make an enjoyable movie.

But others have been disappointed, take Marc Bain of Newsweek and his article Enterprise Ethics, Has Star Trek Lost Its Moral Relevance?

The latest film version of “Star Trek,” however, is more brawn than brain, and it largely jettisons complicated ethical conundrums in favor of action sequences and special effects. The film shows the beginnings of the Enterprise crew, tracing how Kirk, Spock and the others came together. All the character quirks are there, and the Enterprise is rendered more realistically than ever, but what’s missing are the typically progressive politics and moral dilemmas that made the original “Trek” more than a space-age adventure show and helped earn it legions of ardent fans.

Let’s see the Original Series ran from 1966-1969. It was a product of its time. Questions of racism, sexism, and war were different then, so the show was groundbreaking because it was dealing with civil rights, women’s rights, and the Cold War, etc. We’re forty years removed from that and the future is now. There is no Cold War any longer and there has been obvious progress for women and minorities culturally and politically.

I’m not sure how the new film could have crammed in the “progressive politics”, when the unprecedented characters for 1960s primetime TV (Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu) that helped drive those politics are commonplace now. Its also a tall order to compare 79 episodes to 127 minutes.

And the film doesn’t lack moral dilemmas see the Kobayashi Maru (the no win-situation) and the last 12 minutes of the USS Kelvin.  If you really have to have politics mixed with your sci-fi, then check out the aforementioned Battlestar Galactica.  The United Nations did.  This is what Craig Mokhiber, from the U.N.’s office of the high commissioner for human rights said last March, when the cast and writers of the show were invited to the U.N.

“This organization was founded on a very basic idea. Unfortunately, an idea viewed by some these days as being its own science fiction.”

“We have been accused of being a utopian organization. In fact, we see it as the only reasonable alternative to what will inevitably be, I think, a horrific dystopian society, the kind of thing that science fiction is so good at representing, the kind of world that we do see in ‘Battlestar Galactica.’”