Utterly fantastic article on the state of Trek
Posted: 2003-02-22 04:47am
"STAR TREK IS DEAD"
So proclaim legions of fans who doubt the continued solvency of this thirty-six-year-old franchise. Such sentiments were even echoed by people attending Tuesday morning's Austin screening of Trek's newest theatrical installment, Nemesis.
As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I've had discussions about this very notion with friends, colleagues, and even people closely associated with the various permutations of Gene Roddenberry's long-lived juggernaut. Understandably, everybody has their own opinion on "the trouble with Trek," but all evaluations reflect one common theme: at best, the franchise is in serious trouble, perhaps catastrophic trouble. But what are these "troubles" exactly? And, how can they be undone?
Some say Star Trek should be put out to pasture, and that the series is suffering from over-exposure and burnout. This would be shameful: diminishing audiences and lackluster box office do not necessarily denote the oversaturation of a title, or disinterest in a franchise. The James Bond movies prove this out nicely: audiences may waffle over one style (or theme) of Bond movie, but when the formula is shaken-up in a subsequent film, crowds often turn out in droves. In short: that a franchise has chugged along for two or three decades – in any permutation – may be, more or less, irrelevant. At the end of the day, audiences want to be entertained. So, the question becomes: defining what entertains viewers, and figuring out how to give it to them what they want within parameters and guidelines already laid out in the franchise's history.
And this, for my money, is where Star Trek has recently failed: it has ignored quantifiably successful elements from previous feature films and television series, and failed to generate new material that is in any way compelling to either fans or laymen. On television, and in film, the franchise has repeatedly embraced modes of storytelling that are awkward and unfocused at best. It has relied upon "A" plots and "B" plots that often do not intersect (if you can't figure out a way to drive a story with just one through-line, then it's not a story that should be told at all), revelations that challenge (or utterly dismiss) previously established history or continuity, stories that regurgitate previous Star Trek adventures, and demonstrated a repeated – indeed, pitiful – unwillingness to take chances with its style, characters, or concept. In short: Star Trek is now content to be bland.
Anyone regularly tuning into Trek's most recent TV incarnations – Voyager and Enterprise – knows exactly what they are going to get, substantively and narratively. And there's rarely, if ever, any deviation. This "sameness" cuts across the board, and permeates nearly every technical element of the franchise as well: editorial sluggishness, photographic stagnancy, and musical repression run rampant. Recently, word has leaked about how such dastardly decisions have come about, and all fingers point to two individuals: franchise overlords Rick Berman and Brannon Braga.
Observant fans may have noticed an increasing stream of comments from Star Trek staff members regarding the behind-the-scenes machinations that drive Trek's creative policy. Composers have publicly commented on producer's insistence that episodic scores be "toned down" and restrained, which inherently diminishes viewer perception of the intend on-screen emotion (whether it be urgency, tension, romance, etc.) There is scuttlebutt that Jonathan Frakes – director of the feature films First Contact and Insurrection – was repeatedly ordered to restrain his visual style and camera movements during the production of those films.
Across the board, the franchise looks the same, sounds the same, and feels the same. Motionless, lackluster, uninspired, physically and emotionally colorless, texturally and conceptually tepid, and almost completely lacking in dramatic truth. And all of these shortcomings are being deliberately engineered by The Powers That Be, who insist that their vision is the proper vision, regardless of dwindling audiences and returns. People often point to the oft-overlooked Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as the boldest and most palpable embodiment of what Star Trek ought to be. Not-so-surprisingly, DS9 is also the recent Trek product least impacted by Berman and Braga, as evidenced by recent public comments from other producers on the series.
All things being equal, it seems the trouble with Star Trek lies not in the nature of Trek itself, but with the people whose vision is guiding it, and their apparent inability comprehend the most basic tenets of narrative convention or compelling artistry. Star Trek is about "boldly" going "where no one has gone before". There is nothing bold about Star Trek anymore – it has been artistically and stylistically neutered (it's a pretty sad state-of-affairs when the original television series – filmed in the 1960s – seems more stylistically refined (camera movements, shot compositions, score usage, etc.) than a considerably more high-tech and "enlightened" series made today). It has been beaten into a mushy, lifeless visage of a once daring and vital franchise.
Which brings us to Star Trek Nemesis – the first feature film to shatter the age-old adage that "even numbered Trek movies are always good". The tenth theatrical Star Trek adventure, Nemesis is an important film in many ways – mostly because its success or failure may determine a great deal about where the franchise heads from here.
In an effort to capitalize on the same success found when Paramount drafted producer Harve Bennett and director Nicholas Meyer – both Trek virgins brought in to helm Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in the early 1980s – legendary editor-turned-director Stuart Baird was brought-in to wrangle Nemesis. The theory was this: bring in some fresh blood, someone who can re-interpret Star Trek with a fresh perspective. It worked with Bennett and Meyer, maybe it will would work again with Baird...
But someone didn't think this through too carefully: Bennett and Meyer were very thorough, very thoughtful, and very contemplative about how they approached Star Trek. They did inject fresh sensibilities to the equation, but they also researched the original series very carefully when doing so. Bennett, for example, watched every original series episode before commencing work on The Wrath of Khan. In fact, as a Trek newbie, it was Bennett's idea to bring back Khan in the first place – so obviously he got something out of his crash course. Stuart Baird did no such research: reports from the set indicate he repeatedly called LeVar Burton's Geordi LaForge character "an alien" (he is extremely human), and referred to Trek's signature "phasers" as "ray guns". This is like sending someone who knows nothing about money to represent a major corporation on the floor of the stock market, and nowhere is Baird's lack of familiarity with Star Trek: The Next Generation more evident than in how its characters are approached.
There's a moment in the film's conclusion in which two characters say goodbye to each other – for all we know, this may well be the last time they see each other. There are no knowing expressions, no pauses of unspoken appreciation or understanding – nothing. These people have been friends and associates for decades, yet the departure is cursory and uninvolving, like someone we've known forever is getting on a bus to ride across town. Nemesis is riddled with missed opportunities and dramatic insincerity. One has to wonder how things would have turned-out if Baird actually had context for the material he was directing – if he'd cared enough to figure it out in the first place, or had been made to do so by the people in charge.
The franchise goes kablooey in Star Trek Nemesis
Nemesis is a big, sloppy, floundering mess. performances are generally tepid and uncertain – the main TNG characters seem aloof and unclear about what they are doing, and their interaction with each other. Dallas Puett's editing is sluggish, filled with inexplicable lag time between cuts, lending every scene a muddy and ponderous quality – an astounding deficit considering director Baird was once editor of films like Superman: The Movie, The Omen, and Lethal Weapons 1 and 2. Cinematography by legendary lensman Jeffrey Kimball is awkward and tacky, often opting for angles which place solid walls of blandness behind character's faces, when simply reversing the angle would have revealed a deeper, more textured background. Color schemes evoke Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars, rather than a big-budget feature film. Jerry Goldsmith's electronic-heavy score overpowers the on-screen action, sometime to absurd results.
Visual effects by Digital Domain – making their first foray into the Star Trek universe – are consistently top-of-the-line, but what they represent is generally uninspired. No matter how well produced DD's work may be, it's difficult to be impressed by three ships on screen at one time, when the recent The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars movies have upped the ante by putting tens-of-thousands of fighting things in front of us in a single shot. Hope shines brightly when Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard hatches a diabolical plan to lure evil Shinzon (Tom Hardy) into Federation space, where a Starfleet armada is waiting to ambush the badguy. But such a glorious notion is never delivered: Enterprise never makes it to Federation space...never reaches the armada...and we're only given a slightly-larger-than-TV shootout between a meager three or four ships. A tantalizing hint at what could have been.
Which pretty much describes the whole movie: it's a bait-and-switch. Scriptwriter John Logan (Gladiator), who has repeatedly indicated he wrote Nemesis for the fans, has mistaken trivia for heart. To reference Captain Kirk, or make an aside regarding a previous Star Trek adventure, is not the same thing as understanding the soul of a concept. A self-professed Star Trek II fan, Logan would have been better advised to follow in Bennett and Meyer's footsteps...and comb the archives for unresolved Next Generation storylines...instead of cheaply mimicking Wrath of Khan's "opposing geniuses collide & big ships shoot" motif. In Nemesis, we should have seen things we have never seen before, or followed-up on stories still waiting to be resolved. We should not have been given pale imitations of someone else's ideas.
There is a perceptual/emotional blueprint in place here, but writing, performances, and direction do not follow through on the template that's presented. In Nemesis, there are no moments as sublimely truthful as Kirk's vulnerability showing through at unexpected instances in The Wrath of Khan or The Search for Spock for example, or even his chilling comment in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier referencing a foreknowledge that he will someday "die alone". No moments as primally satisfying as the Klingon torpedo flying through Enterprise's saucer section in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country – a sequence which was, what, five or ten seconds long?
All of this isn't an effort to exalt the original series (or their movies) over The Next Generation – this is an effort to illustrate a point. It's not that hard to figure out what makes Star Trek work. Episodic ratings and box office returns pretty much bare out the illustration: for the most part, Trek is best-received, most effective, and most noteworthy, when it takes chances. Risk taking is what propelled the original series towards legendary status – would anyone have even noticed Star Trek if there hadn't been an element of controversy or edge about it – if it hadn't served as a well-intentioned surrogate for a repressed societal voice that was waiting to be heard? If it hadn't made us think about issues like abortion, racism, and censorship? Would The Next Generation episode "The Best of Both Worlds" have become one of the most popular episodes ever if the series lead hadn't been kidnapped and turned into a Borg, and for one brief moment, made a supervillain? The answer to all these questions is: no.
Genre entries like Xena, Hercules, Farscape, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and even the much-maligned Andromeda have repeatedly demonstrated that chances can be taken with a franchise, to positive and intriguing results. Berman and Braga assert they are merely following a re-definition of Star Trek, which was laid out before franchise progenitor Gene Roddenberry passed away. If this is so, one has to ask: is it honoring a dying man's legacy to remain so devoted to his vision that the legacy itself collapses under its own deadweight? Isn't it possible that Roddenberry's re-definition may not have been the proper definition? Is it doing a legacy justice to muffle its voice and stifle its vitality? Tantalizing...and compelling...questions.
Star Trek is not dead, but the ability of its shepherds to properly protect the flock may be irreparably compromised. Whether or not there are more Star Trek stories to tell is not an issue – such potential is as vast as the universe itself. Whether or not the people in charge can tell such stores is a concern. This attrition has been happening for a long time, but only now is the full extent of Paramount's remiss complacency becoming evident. Give Star Trek its balls back. Take chances. Think out of the box. Put some color into the shows – good God, who wants to look at murky gray tones every week? Add visual dynamic and kinetics. Pump-up the sound. Above all, let the characters be human, and unpredictable. Let them make mistakes, and compromise their ideals – because Trek is about humans, and humans can be inconsistent. Let our characters not always do the right thing, and let us not always agree with them. Make it...well...real.
Let Star Trek be a youthful child, filled with energy, quirkiness, driven by a sense of experimentation, exploration, and wonder. Something needs to be done here – bravely, and with extreme prejudice. I walked out of Star Trek Nemesis – whose promotional tag line is "A generation's final journey begins" – with the words of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country's Chancellor Gorkon echoing in my head: "Don't let it end this way." Not for The Next Generation, and not for the franchise in general.
Make it so...
from filmforce.ign.
So proclaim legions of fans who doubt the continued solvency of this thirty-six-year-old franchise. Such sentiments were even echoed by people attending Tuesday morning's Austin screening of Trek's newest theatrical installment, Nemesis.
As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I've had discussions about this very notion with friends, colleagues, and even people closely associated with the various permutations of Gene Roddenberry's long-lived juggernaut. Understandably, everybody has their own opinion on "the trouble with Trek," but all evaluations reflect one common theme: at best, the franchise is in serious trouble, perhaps catastrophic trouble. But what are these "troubles" exactly? And, how can they be undone?
Some say Star Trek should be put out to pasture, and that the series is suffering from over-exposure and burnout. This would be shameful: diminishing audiences and lackluster box office do not necessarily denote the oversaturation of a title, or disinterest in a franchise. The James Bond movies prove this out nicely: audiences may waffle over one style (or theme) of Bond movie, but when the formula is shaken-up in a subsequent film, crowds often turn out in droves. In short: that a franchise has chugged along for two or three decades – in any permutation – may be, more or less, irrelevant. At the end of the day, audiences want to be entertained. So, the question becomes: defining what entertains viewers, and figuring out how to give it to them what they want within parameters and guidelines already laid out in the franchise's history.
And this, for my money, is where Star Trek has recently failed: it has ignored quantifiably successful elements from previous feature films and television series, and failed to generate new material that is in any way compelling to either fans or laymen. On television, and in film, the franchise has repeatedly embraced modes of storytelling that are awkward and unfocused at best. It has relied upon "A" plots and "B" plots that often do not intersect (if you can't figure out a way to drive a story with just one through-line, then it's not a story that should be told at all), revelations that challenge (or utterly dismiss) previously established history or continuity, stories that regurgitate previous Star Trek adventures, and demonstrated a repeated – indeed, pitiful – unwillingness to take chances with its style, characters, or concept. In short: Star Trek is now content to be bland.
Anyone regularly tuning into Trek's most recent TV incarnations – Voyager and Enterprise – knows exactly what they are going to get, substantively and narratively. And there's rarely, if ever, any deviation. This "sameness" cuts across the board, and permeates nearly every technical element of the franchise as well: editorial sluggishness, photographic stagnancy, and musical repression run rampant. Recently, word has leaked about how such dastardly decisions have come about, and all fingers point to two individuals: franchise overlords Rick Berman and Brannon Braga.
Observant fans may have noticed an increasing stream of comments from Star Trek staff members regarding the behind-the-scenes machinations that drive Trek's creative policy. Composers have publicly commented on producer's insistence that episodic scores be "toned down" and restrained, which inherently diminishes viewer perception of the intend on-screen emotion (whether it be urgency, tension, romance, etc.) There is scuttlebutt that Jonathan Frakes – director of the feature films First Contact and Insurrection – was repeatedly ordered to restrain his visual style and camera movements during the production of those films.
Across the board, the franchise looks the same, sounds the same, and feels the same. Motionless, lackluster, uninspired, physically and emotionally colorless, texturally and conceptually tepid, and almost completely lacking in dramatic truth. And all of these shortcomings are being deliberately engineered by The Powers That Be, who insist that their vision is the proper vision, regardless of dwindling audiences and returns. People often point to the oft-overlooked Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as the boldest and most palpable embodiment of what Star Trek ought to be. Not-so-surprisingly, DS9 is also the recent Trek product least impacted by Berman and Braga, as evidenced by recent public comments from other producers on the series.
All things being equal, it seems the trouble with Star Trek lies not in the nature of Trek itself, but with the people whose vision is guiding it, and their apparent inability comprehend the most basic tenets of narrative convention or compelling artistry. Star Trek is about "boldly" going "where no one has gone before". There is nothing bold about Star Trek anymore – it has been artistically and stylistically neutered (it's a pretty sad state-of-affairs when the original television series – filmed in the 1960s – seems more stylistically refined (camera movements, shot compositions, score usage, etc.) than a considerably more high-tech and "enlightened" series made today). It has been beaten into a mushy, lifeless visage of a once daring and vital franchise.
Which brings us to Star Trek Nemesis – the first feature film to shatter the age-old adage that "even numbered Trek movies are always good". The tenth theatrical Star Trek adventure, Nemesis is an important film in many ways – mostly because its success or failure may determine a great deal about where the franchise heads from here.
In an effort to capitalize on the same success found when Paramount drafted producer Harve Bennett and director Nicholas Meyer – both Trek virgins brought in to helm Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in the early 1980s – legendary editor-turned-director Stuart Baird was brought-in to wrangle Nemesis. The theory was this: bring in some fresh blood, someone who can re-interpret Star Trek with a fresh perspective. It worked with Bennett and Meyer, maybe it will would work again with Baird...
But someone didn't think this through too carefully: Bennett and Meyer were very thorough, very thoughtful, and very contemplative about how they approached Star Trek. They did inject fresh sensibilities to the equation, but they also researched the original series very carefully when doing so. Bennett, for example, watched every original series episode before commencing work on The Wrath of Khan. In fact, as a Trek newbie, it was Bennett's idea to bring back Khan in the first place – so obviously he got something out of his crash course. Stuart Baird did no such research: reports from the set indicate he repeatedly called LeVar Burton's Geordi LaForge character "an alien" (he is extremely human), and referred to Trek's signature "phasers" as "ray guns". This is like sending someone who knows nothing about money to represent a major corporation on the floor of the stock market, and nowhere is Baird's lack of familiarity with Star Trek: The Next Generation more evident than in how its characters are approached.
There's a moment in the film's conclusion in which two characters say goodbye to each other – for all we know, this may well be the last time they see each other. There are no knowing expressions, no pauses of unspoken appreciation or understanding – nothing. These people have been friends and associates for decades, yet the departure is cursory and uninvolving, like someone we've known forever is getting on a bus to ride across town. Nemesis is riddled with missed opportunities and dramatic insincerity. One has to wonder how things would have turned-out if Baird actually had context for the material he was directing – if he'd cared enough to figure it out in the first place, or had been made to do so by the people in charge.
The franchise goes kablooey in Star Trek Nemesis
Nemesis is a big, sloppy, floundering mess. performances are generally tepid and uncertain – the main TNG characters seem aloof and unclear about what they are doing, and their interaction with each other. Dallas Puett's editing is sluggish, filled with inexplicable lag time between cuts, lending every scene a muddy and ponderous quality – an astounding deficit considering director Baird was once editor of films like Superman: The Movie, The Omen, and Lethal Weapons 1 and 2. Cinematography by legendary lensman Jeffrey Kimball is awkward and tacky, often opting for angles which place solid walls of blandness behind character's faces, when simply reversing the angle would have revealed a deeper, more textured background. Color schemes evoke Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars, rather than a big-budget feature film. Jerry Goldsmith's electronic-heavy score overpowers the on-screen action, sometime to absurd results.
Visual effects by Digital Domain – making their first foray into the Star Trek universe – are consistently top-of-the-line, but what they represent is generally uninspired. No matter how well produced DD's work may be, it's difficult to be impressed by three ships on screen at one time, when the recent The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars movies have upped the ante by putting tens-of-thousands of fighting things in front of us in a single shot. Hope shines brightly when Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard hatches a diabolical plan to lure evil Shinzon (Tom Hardy) into Federation space, where a Starfleet armada is waiting to ambush the badguy. But such a glorious notion is never delivered: Enterprise never makes it to Federation space...never reaches the armada...and we're only given a slightly-larger-than-TV shootout between a meager three or four ships. A tantalizing hint at what could have been.
Which pretty much describes the whole movie: it's a bait-and-switch. Scriptwriter John Logan (Gladiator), who has repeatedly indicated he wrote Nemesis for the fans, has mistaken trivia for heart. To reference Captain Kirk, or make an aside regarding a previous Star Trek adventure, is not the same thing as understanding the soul of a concept. A self-professed Star Trek II fan, Logan would have been better advised to follow in Bennett and Meyer's footsteps...and comb the archives for unresolved Next Generation storylines...instead of cheaply mimicking Wrath of Khan's "opposing geniuses collide & big ships shoot" motif. In Nemesis, we should have seen things we have never seen before, or followed-up on stories still waiting to be resolved. We should not have been given pale imitations of someone else's ideas.
There is a perceptual/emotional blueprint in place here, but writing, performances, and direction do not follow through on the template that's presented. In Nemesis, there are no moments as sublimely truthful as Kirk's vulnerability showing through at unexpected instances in The Wrath of Khan or The Search for Spock for example, or even his chilling comment in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier referencing a foreknowledge that he will someday "die alone". No moments as primally satisfying as the Klingon torpedo flying through Enterprise's saucer section in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country – a sequence which was, what, five or ten seconds long?
All of this isn't an effort to exalt the original series (or their movies) over The Next Generation – this is an effort to illustrate a point. It's not that hard to figure out what makes Star Trek work. Episodic ratings and box office returns pretty much bare out the illustration: for the most part, Trek is best-received, most effective, and most noteworthy, when it takes chances. Risk taking is what propelled the original series towards legendary status – would anyone have even noticed Star Trek if there hadn't been an element of controversy or edge about it – if it hadn't served as a well-intentioned surrogate for a repressed societal voice that was waiting to be heard? If it hadn't made us think about issues like abortion, racism, and censorship? Would The Next Generation episode "The Best of Both Worlds" have become one of the most popular episodes ever if the series lead hadn't been kidnapped and turned into a Borg, and for one brief moment, made a supervillain? The answer to all these questions is: no.
Genre entries like Xena, Hercules, Farscape, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and even the much-maligned Andromeda have repeatedly demonstrated that chances can be taken with a franchise, to positive and intriguing results. Berman and Braga assert they are merely following a re-definition of Star Trek, which was laid out before franchise progenitor Gene Roddenberry passed away. If this is so, one has to ask: is it honoring a dying man's legacy to remain so devoted to his vision that the legacy itself collapses under its own deadweight? Isn't it possible that Roddenberry's re-definition may not have been the proper definition? Is it doing a legacy justice to muffle its voice and stifle its vitality? Tantalizing...and compelling...questions.
Star Trek is not dead, but the ability of its shepherds to properly protect the flock may be irreparably compromised. Whether or not there are more Star Trek stories to tell is not an issue – such potential is as vast as the universe itself. Whether or not the people in charge can tell such stores is a concern. This attrition has been happening for a long time, but only now is the full extent of Paramount's remiss complacency becoming evident. Give Star Trek its balls back. Take chances. Think out of the box. Put some color into the shows – good God, who wants to look at murky gray tones every week? Add visual dynamic and kinetics. Pump-up the sound. Above all, let the characters be human, and unpredictable. Let them make mistakes, and compromise their ideals – because Trek is about humans, and humans can be inconsistent. Let our characters not always do the right thing, and let us not always agree with them. Make it...well...real.
Let Star Trek be a youthful child, filled with energy, quirkiness, driven by a sense of experimentation, exploration, and wonder. Something needs to be done here – bravely, and with extreme prejudice. I walked out of Star Trek Nemesis – whose promotional tag line is "A generation's final journey begins" – with the words of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country's Chancellor Gorkon echoing in my head: "Don't let it end this way." Not for The Next Generation, and not for the franchise in general.
Make it so...
from filmforce.ign.
