Review: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Now that Western popular cinema has entered the post-Marvel, post-LOTR age—where serialization is not just accepted, but expected, in our blockbusters—it's interesting to look back on an era when such things were still pretty new. The original Star Wars trilogy began the modern version of the trend, and, alongside the Indy trilogy, the Star Trek film franchise reinforced the trend, proving it to be a viable strategy and not a series-specific aberration.

No film in any of those three franchises is quite as "serial" as Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a.k.a. "the whale one." Each Star Wars installment began with a crawl, reminding us of Where We Last Left Our Heroes; the Indy movies had almost as little connection with one another as the Bond movies; and even Star Trek III took the time to show us a clip from the pivotal ending of Star Trek II, and worked in lots of in-narrative review of that film's events.

Contrast this with the comparatively abrupt opening of Star Trek IV. The opening council scene with John Shuck's Klingon ambassador provides some indirect summary of the previous two movies, then Kirk's first captain's log says "We're in the third month of our Vulcan exile," never fully explaining why they're exiled, let alone why the planet Vulcan would be harboring them. Ironic that the most financially successful Trek film (up until 2009) opens in a fashion so impenetrable, almost hostile, to the uninitiated viewer. It's not as though they could have assumed that every audience member saw The Search for Spock. (Indeed, it seems they even tacked on a weird prologue for the foreign markets under the assumption that too few people overseas had seen III.)

Review: Star Trek: Into Darkness

Readers: if you happen to possess an affection for American cinema as an art form…what are you doing even reading this review in the first place?

You know it's gonna be dire. You remember the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek vehidebacle (term © Fraught Experiments LLC), and you learned to expect more of the same from the sequel's ubiquitous promotional material. You know it's just another schlockbuster (term © somebody else, probably), one which at best—at BEST—possesses a tiny glimmer of ambition and heart.

Let me just nip that optimism in the bud right now. If Hollywood is doomed, as some say, it will be because of movies like J.J. Trek In2 Darkness. The warmest words I have for it is that it seems like J.J. & Co. wanted to appear to evolve their franchise.

I say this because, Into Darkness is arguably about something—intentionally or not. This is notable when we remember that the Trek franchise pre-J.J. had always tried to be about something. Specifically, Into Darkness is about the morality of targeted killings.

Review: Star Trek (2009)

I wasn't really a nerd in school. I had to gain acceptance into their social stratum—I had to work up to nerddom (indeed, I never even played a tabletop RPG until college). This is largely because I moved from city to city and state to state so often that, statistically speaking, at any given point in my academic history I was probably the New Kid.

Table 1.1: School Social Strata ca. Reagan-Bush-Clinton Era

Stratum Name (Descending Order)	Access to Sex, Liquor, or Non-Homemade Drugs	Trek Franchise Investment
JOCKS	Complete	None
JOCK AFFILIATES	Moderate to Extreme	None
JOCK WOULD-BES (& Vo-Tech Hicks, Where Applicable)	Low to High	None
ARTY COOL TYPES	Moderate to High	None to Low
NERDS	None to Low	Low to Extreme
NEW KIDS & UGLIER FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENTS	None	None to Extreme
UNTOUCHABLES	That's Pretty Funny	Let's Just Say, Probably Writes Letters to Counselor Troi

(Don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this.) You will notice that the second and third columns above represent two major forms of escapism, for members of all strata, from the meat-grinder hellscape of their shared environment. You'll also notice that each of them is roughly inversely proportional to the other. That Star Trek was almost completely rejected by all but the lower strata is, I'm certain, a large part of Paramount's decision to not just reboot, not just reimagine, but thoroughly reinterpret the franchise with 2009's embarrassing film.

Days of Future Past

I just watched the Deep Space Nine two-parter "Past Tense" again recently. Though it's not DS9 at its very best, and it's preachy even for Star Trek, it's always affecting—and it seems like every time I watch it, it becomes more plausible.

I'm not referring, of course, to the "chroniton envelope isolating the Defiant from the changes to the timeline" business, or even the idea of "changes to the timeline" making sense. If time travel is possible, nobody but the time travelers would ever perceive "changes to the timeline," because the act of traveling into the past would spawn divergent timelines that cannot be re-merged, but instead only be made to seem identical…but that's a discussion for another time. (Maybe when I finally get around to watching Primer, that can be part of my review.)

No, the plausible part is all the 2024 Sanctuary District stuff. The last time I watched "Past Tense" was probably four or five years ago, and what felt plausible then is no less so now:

"It's not that they don't give a damn, Doctor. It's that they've given up. The social problems facing them seem too enormous to deal with." - Sisko

"We had to cancel our trip to the Alps this year because of the student protests in France." - the female party guest

"Jobs. You guys want jobs? When are you going to figure it out? There are no jobs! Not for us, anyway." - B.C.

Review: Star Trek: Generations

Generations may be the toughest Star Trek film to review. Maybe that's why I picked it first. (Don't worry, I'm sure a ranty J. J. Trek review is just waiting to come out of me.)

It's tough because there's a lot to like here, yet there's so much to question and doubt. As you'd expect, Trekkies seem to disagree strongly about this one. (I may be the biggest Trek fan I know, but I'm no full-on Trekkie. I have, however, witnessed Trekkie debates in online contexts.) Some like it while admitting its shortcomings; others consider it at least as bad as V—or TFF, as Trekkies probably refer to it, to prevent confusion with V.

On that spectrum, I'd have to count myself near the middle. I find watching Generations to be an exercise in frustration and tedium punctuated by moments of Trekly goodness.

I'll start with the good:

We Had to Destroy Star Trek in Order to Save It

When I left the theater at the end of the first installment of the Abramsprise franchise, I had already decided the following:

That was a technically proficient action movie with almost no real characterization or heart, barely any actual sci-fi except for being "in space," and no meaning at all. Every other Star Trek film, and the vast majority of the episodes, had some kind of meaning.

The conceit allowing Abrams to rewrite continuity is a clever one, reminiscent of a better-than-average fanfic—but the profit imperative will mean that subsequent films will use that conceit as carte blanche to go in thematic and stylistic directions Roddenberry would have gone postal over.

The Trek franchise will from now on resemble the Transformers movies more than anything else.

Judging from the Twitter response to the new teaser for Star Trek Into Emptiness, I'd say my conclusions were right on. Not that it stopped the first one from being a colossal hit, or the second one from being made.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying awesome action and ships crashing into stuff have no place in Star Trek; some of the best DS9 episodes are full of that kind of asskickery. I will admit to being impressed, visually and tonally, by the new teaser. And with mere seconds of screen time so far, Khanberbatch is already far more interesting than (*chortle*) Nero.

But I can't conceive any conditions that would motivate me to pay theater prices to see this. I might not even be able to bring myself to Netflix-Instant it, depending on what reviewers I trust have to say.

I guess I'm a dinosaur, but not every genre property needs to be completely drained of its original raison d'etre. We could leave some stuff alone, couldn't we? An Abrams sci-fi franchise based on, oh, I don't know, original settings and characters could have been just fine, couldn't it? What's next, Disney turning Star Wars into a tender rom-com involving a precocious puppy?