Thoughts on thoughts
Countezero said:
Either Abrams seriously wanted us to view his films in fatalistic terms that approach Greek drama or he's just fucking lazy and thought some of these contrived devices would be "cool." I tend to lean toward the latter.
This is the issue I feel is at the heart of the matter, and in fact, I agree. From there, I would introduce perspective; I wasn't expecting much of this film specifically because of that. Michael Bay ruined
Transformers; the
Dragonball movie looks like it's going to be a heap of shit; I don't even want to check in on the
Cowboy Bebop thing.
It's part of what Hollywood does. (Do you remember the Sprite "Slug" commercial?)
The film surpassed my expectations, so I'm more forgiving of its shortcomings. I think that might be one of the primary differences in how we're regarding the problem.
I've come to feel an overwhelming sense of how the movie really endorsed the whole great men among us bit that Star Wars so often gets attacked for (most famously, perhaps, by David Brin).
History itself often comes to hinge on one person. Whether this is the truth of the record or of the telling is a deeper question.
In this context, we might choose to bear in mind that Kirk is flawed; he is perhaps a great man in his depicted heroism, but he is also a deeply-flawed hero. Perhaps it is the heritage of William Shatner's acting, but as I've already recalled the number of lives Jim Kirk spends, I should also note that he's never really shown anguish. Even in vendetta for his son, Kirk displayed a curious, polymer emotionalism that was always easily contained. If he's the right man for the job, so to speak, at least part of it is his emotional dysfunction.
In history, Harriet Tubman was illiterate and brain-damaged. She was also deeply superstitious; there is a story that says when she bought a house, the question arose as to how she was going to pay for it, and she said, "I'm going to go home and ask Jesus for the money." And yet this one person had a tremendous impact on history.
Martin Luther King, Jr. cheated on his wife.
Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and even sexually exploited them.
Thomas Paine was just an asshole.
But all of them have had profound effects on the development of our society. Part of what happens, of course, is that we start to deify these people. They become mythical, larger than life. And this is problematic because it creates unrealistic expectations. People strive to exceed their humanity in ways they cannot possibly achieve. And resentment grows because these avatars of the human endeavor are no longer human.
What is the spillover effect here? Perhaps we are
assigning the context because it is our habit or conditioned instinct.
Part of the problem with the idea of great men among us is that we, too, help manufacture it. We, too, expect it.
It seems in this universe, that nobody but this combination of characters can do the things that need to be done to serve this plot (and those of the sequels that will surely come).
In 1962, Madeleine L'Engle published
A Wrinkle In Time, a book that championed individual initiative and ability over the bland, dehumanizing nightmare imagined of Communism. Thirty-five years later, the book was included on the list of titles most frequently challenged in American libraries. The objections were anti-Christianism (magical aspects of the story), lesbianism (three old women in a nod to Shakespeare), and Communism (the villain's name was "IT", pronounced as a word but read by the objectors as an abbreviation, and therefore an indictment of the American way of life).
Witchcraft? So
what? Lesbianism? Surely, they jest. Communism? Now here's the crux of the matter. Just
how do we reach that conclusion? (After all, many conservatives—and many of those religious—decry the serialized information technologies to the point that
West Virginia issued special driver's licenses for Christians. So even if we accept their transformation of the word "IT" to an abbreviation, it
still doesn't necessarily make sense.)
All that for the phrase "matter of perspective".
Roddenberry's Universe is one in which humanity has achieved something of a utopia, and we don't often see much of that society. But some have denounced it, for instance, as socialistic and so on. In that context, instead of an appeal to
übermensch, one can assert that the crew of the
U.S.S. Enterprise represents the triumph of the free human spirit over those blanching outcomes. In that context, it isn't so much
this particular crew, but rather, any crew that is (A) technically proficient, and (B) willing to jump off-script whenever they need to. In this sense, the crews of the
Enterprise under Capt. Jean-Luc Picard,
DS9 under Cmdr./Capt. Sisko, and even the
U.S.S. Voyager under Capt. Janeway all demonstrate the necessary qualities.
It is these crews that rise above the performance of the rest of the fleet. How is it that Capt. Terrell could get the
U.S.S. Reliant into such trouble? (I mean, how could he be so stupid as to take Cmdr. Chekov to the planet's surface with him, and not bring along one or two redshirts ...?) At the very least, Scotty would have recognized something was wrong when they called for return transport and had security standing by. Well, okay, maybe.
But that's just another way to look at it. Among bland, regulated humanity some people continue to rise to excellence because they simply will not be tamed by the utopiate euphoria.
A passionate argument, but as others have already noted, the whole cadets on the ship bit seemed contrived by far.
Except that this seems to be habitual with the Federation. The only other experienced officers I recall aboard the
Enterprise at that time was the ship's doctor, who died without ever being seen on screen, and Spock, who was of high enough standing in the Federation to actually
write the
Kobayashi Maru simulation. I would
imagine there was an experienced engineer down there somewhere, but in the Roddenberry Universe (ST2), the Federation sent the
Enterprise after a distress call with nothing more than a boatload of recruits aboard.
I think the hard thing to explain here is
why the primary corpus of the fleet was tied up in the Laurentian system. I'm curious about what the hell was going on that the Federation left its planets so damnably undefended. Vulcan had
nothing. Earth had, what, a bunch of pups on their first real flight?
I, for one, could not go for it, coming, as it did, on the heels of all these other fatalistic coincidences. And again, it seems something that could have been avoided. They could have all been graduates on different ships who somehow were thrust together, but that wouldn't have been as dramatic, would it?
Could have been
very dramatic. But it also would have been a movie unto itself. And it would still tread back to
this crew on
this ship. Perhaps if the Trek Universe (and the marketplace) were large enough to have stories in which each of the characters emerged from various disasters—Scotty given shit detail on a transport vessel, Uhura one of fifteen survivors from a combat loss, Sulu and Chekov together responsible for saving a lot of people by managing the crash of the
USS Whatsitsname on after a catastrophic core breach, &c.) we could have a more plausible route to assembly. Ideally,
I would do it that way, but neither the marketplace nor the studio financiers have such patience.
And I would agree, though I and VI are OK. Heck, I even like IV -- for a laugh. Still, something was missing in this one, and I don't quite know what. I will, however, say that the scenes with Leonard Nimoy showed the gulf in class or starpower or something between him and the current brood, who all look like they could be on an MTV Real World show.
I like the first one, but it's somewhat obscure. That's why
Wrath of Khan was so much more adventurous. The fourth, yeah, I liked that one too, but specifically because it's so horrible, and given what happened in the third and fifth chapters, at least they
tried. Number six did okay, as well. Not great, but serviceable.
I have no comment about the
Next Generation films.
And casting is almost always a problem in projects like this. I'm absolutely sick of the "beautiful people" mode of casting. Looking back to BSG as a comparison, at least Adama, Tigh, and Tyrol broke the mold.
This is not necessarily the case with something like James Bond, wherein I can find films of all the actors worth watching. What the difference is, I'm not sure.
Style over substance, maybe. Aesthetics over reality. I admit I'm pleased with the selection of Daniel Craig as Bond, and even Dame Judi Dench as M. They're both beyond simply competent in their roles, and neither fall into the beautiful people mode of casting. Sure, you couldn't have some toothless Jordy thug as Bond, but Daniel Craig is less pretentious an aesthetic than Pierce Brosnan or Timothy Dalton.
(
A View To A Kill has been running on cable a lot in recent months; looking back, I'm still puzzled at what makes Grace Jones seem sexy. And that was my generation's aesthetics, too.)
To the other, aside from his haircut, I can't say Karl Urban (who, at age 36, has nineteen years of acting credits to his name) necessarily fits the mold. He was appropriately ... I don't know if "ugly" is a fair word, but he certainly didn't seem much of a heartthrob.
Maybe it's just that I had such low expectations of the movie. They gave me enough on the positive side—John Cho, Simon Pegg, a decent
Enterprise bridge, and a certain dose of cornball among other things, that I'm not especially troubled by the writing conventions, and the cast doesn't especially bother me.
But this is clearly "J. J. Abrams'
Star Trek", and has nothing to do with Roddenberry's Universe, except to exploit it.
And here's a pro-con I feel I should mention:
Pro: Villain did not retain hero at site to foil plans—e.g., dropping Spock on a planet.
Con: Exceptionally complicated doomsday device; I'm not sure why the red matter required access to the planetary core, especially given what happened when Spock's ship collided with the Narada.
And so it goes.
Sorry to be so long with the reply. It's been an interesting few days.
