by Chris J. Miller (with major spoilers, redundant I know). Here is a excerpt:
Star Trek Babies
The sci-fi classic resurrected again, with a handsome young cast and a juvenile script
Star Trek **(out of five) Directed by J.J. Abrams Written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman
By J.R. Jones
Now that Star Trek is a giant entertainment franchise and fictional universe, encompassing five TV series, 11 movies, and hundreds of novels, I sometimes wish it would just go away. But I’m old enough to remember how strange the original Star Trek seemed back in 1966, when TV shows about interplanetary travel were dominated by kiddie fare like Lost in Space. My father, then in his early 30s, tuned in to Star Trek on NBC every Thursday night, and I would gawk at its weird creatures and special effects without really understanding what was going on. When I got a little older and picked up on the show in reruns, I was better able to appreciate its thoughtful writing and fantastic concepts. Star Trek, I decided, was made for grown-ups: with its mixed-gender, multiracial crew and veiled references to militarism and the cold war, it seemed to forecast not the distant future but the immediate one. (And, OK, those velour tunics with the insignia were really cool.)
Producing a space opera for adult viewers was an uphill battle in the mid-60s, and the original Star Trek left behind a showbiz story thick with irony. Gene Roddenberry, the cop-turned-TV-writer who dreamed up the show, envisioned it as hard-core science fiction, but when his bosses at Desilu pitched the show to the networks they carefully downplayed the more cerebral aspects. Star Trek was dogged by low ratings throughout its three-year run, and NBC pressured Desilu to discard the more conceptual sci-fi elements in favor of action/adventure. Roddenberry worked hard to recruit smart and imaginative sci-fi writers, but after two years he left the series and it descended into silliness. NBC moved it to late Friday night, the worst possible time slot for its core audience of young adults, and then killed it. According to Roddenberry, a demographics researcher who understood the advertising value of this audience told an uncomprehending NBC vice president, “Congratulations, you’ve just gotten rid of your most successful and important program.”
The incessant pull of juvenilia must have done a number on the writers’ and producers’ psyches, because some of the most alarming Star Trek episodes dealt with the tension between children and adults. In “Charlie X,” the second episode broadcast, the Enterprise takes custody of a teenage boy, Charlie, who’s been recovered from the surface of a planet after being stranded there alone for 14 years. The ultimate spoiled brat, Charlie turns out to have fearsome telekinetic powers: he can melt objects and make people disappear, and in one case he turns a young woman into an old hag. “And the Children Shall Lead,” broadcast in October 1968, opens with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy answering a distress call from a scientific expedition on another planet; when they arrive, they discover that all the adults are either raving mad or dead by suicide. Liberal do-gooders that they are, the Starfleet officers collect the surviving children and bring them on board the ship, not realizing the kids have the power to summon up an evil demon from the planet’s past. The universe, it seems, is filled with menacing orphans.
As scary as these little monsters may be, they’re nothing compared to the prospect of aging. One episode that never fails to freak me out is “Miri,” broadcast in October 1966. Again a landing crew from the Enterprise beams down to a strange planet to find all the adults dead, this time from a horrible plague. The children are fine, but once they hit puberty their immune system gives way to the disease; they begin to collect awful blue sores, go insane with rage, and finally die. Kirk and company, infected with the plague and cut off from the Enterprise, implore the children to help them, but the kids are naturally suspicious of grown-ups—or, as they call them, “grups.” From there it’s only a short leap to “The Deadly Years,” broadcast in December 1967. This time the Enterprise officers beam down to a planet and contract a radiation sickness that causes them to age 30 years in a day. Kirk grows so forgetful that he’s relieved of his command and must collaborate with the similarly doddering Spock, McCoy, and Scotty on a serum that will reverse the aging process.
Unfortunately no such serum existed when Paramount Pictures reunited the original cast for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). By that time, some of them were too chunky to look good in tight velour, and the old Starfleet uniforms were replaced with loose-fitting pastel togs, then roomy brown jackets that accommodated the stars’ increasing girth through six sequels. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForrest Kelley, and James Doohan didn’t age quite as handsomely as their characters did in “The Deadly Years.” By the time the old crew handed off the reins to the Next Generation cast in Star Trek: Generations (1994), Doohan was 74 and way too big to fit into that narrow tube where Scotty always used to operate on the ship. The old Star Trek may have pondered the immediate future, but the movies always reminded me what that future meant on a personal level: hair loss, weight gain, sagging flesh, and the grave. (Our 80-year mission: to boldly go where everyone has gone before.)
With the underwhelming Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), the movie franchise seemed to have petered out at last. But now Paramount has handed the old warhorse over to a fresh team of producers and sunk $150 million into a summer blockbuster, recasting the original roles with good-looking young actors who should fit into their uniforms just fine for at least another 20 years. A prequel to the TV series, Star Trek follows the characters as they make their way through Starfleet Academy and get their first assignments aboard the Enterprise. The script panders to middle-aged Trekkers by sketching the outlines of the characters’ later relationships and resurrecting the ship’s original commander, Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who appeared in the original Star Trek pilot. But the movie’s aim couldn’t be clearer: to find Star Trek a younger and wider audience for the 21st century. Directed by J.J. Abrams (creator of TV’s Lost and Alias), the new Star Trek is a relatively mindless thrill ride that would have made the old NBC execs grin from ear to ear. My 11-year-old niece can’t wait to see it.
Handing the familiar characters over to a bunch of kids does give the movie a welcome jolt, and the actors seem to have a blast cutting the heroes down to adolescent size. Chris Pine plays young hellion James T. Kirk with a fine approximation of Shatner’s preening self-regard, and Zachary Quinto makes Spock—already an officer under Captain Pike—even more of a supercilious prick than Nimoy did in his prime. The back stories are standard issue: Kirk is traumatized by the death of his father, a Starfleet officer who sacrificed his life to save his passengers, and Spock is bent out of shape because kids on his native Vulcan bullied him for having a human mother. But the screenwriters have taken advantage of the chronological rollback to amp up the young lust, as Kirk and Spock vie for the physical attentions of the smoking-hot Uhura (Zoe Saldana). At the climax, when Spock is dispatched on a dangerous mission and Uhura makes out with him on the transporter pad, entire galaxies of teen melodrama seemed to open before me.
Star Trek may guarantee Paramount a bright future, at least for the next couple installments, but it’s mostly about the past, squeezing the last few drops of magic from the TV classic. The main conflict pits the Enterprise crew against a rebel leader of the Romulans, a bellicose race that was hauled out on the old show whenever no one could come up with anything more interesting. There’s little evidence of the thought-provoking, concept-driven sci-fi that made the early Star Trek episodes so engaging; perhaps our math-and-science-challenged youngsters couldn’t be trusted to follow it. The only exception is a standard time-travel twist in which Kirk encounters a wizened Spock from the future (Nimoy, who’s been with Star Trek longer and complained about it more loudly than any other performer). When the young Spock and the old one commiserate at the very end, Star Trek begins to hint at the sort of cosmic puzzles that animated the 60s show. As Roddenberry and the best of his writers understood, that sort of wonder can make even the old feel young again.
They in fact, say that in the movie... and in TWOK.
