Star Trek Review
by Darren Provine (provine AT rowan DOT edu)May 8th, 2009
The situation with the "Star Trek" franchise has been shaky; the last feature wasn't a success, and the most recent TV incarnation fizzled out. So, following the "reboot" of the Batman movies, the James Bond movies, and "Battlestar Galactica" on television, the powers that be decided to give "Star Trek" the same treatment.
One reason this works is that as the technology becomes increasingly powerful, it's harder and harder to write a good story in which the characters are in danger. The best "Star Trek" movie so far was the second "Wrath of Khan", in which both the Enterprise and Khan's ship suffer battle damage early on. Both ships are crippled, which puts more stress on the people than they would otherwise have. Moving farther forward in time with the "Star Trek" we know would raise the technology levels so much that there might not be anything for the people to do at all. Going back lets the moviemakers use ships that are less powerful, and thus tell stories that are more interesting. This is easily the best "Star Trek" movie in quite some time, if not quite as good as "Wrath of Khan". But it does have some problems.
When we meet the main hero, he's a 20ish blond-haired boy-not-yet-a-man whose father died in space years earlier. He lives in a farming area, and at one point gets into a fight at the local bar, which is populated by weird aliens. He's saved from a serious pounding by an older, wiser, grey-haired man who inspires him to leave the farm and go on to greater things, and he ends up fighting an evil man with a gigantic spacecraft that can destroy a planet. No, I'm thinking of "Star Wars". You know the bad guy is evil because he has weird patterns of tattoos on his face. No, that's Darth Maul. Later, the hero gets stuck in an icy wasteland where he's attacked by a huge animal -- no, that's Luke Skywalker on Hoth. There's a complex time-travel story, where an enemy from the future goes into the past to interfere with Federation history and destroy it before it rises to power, and -- and now I'm thinking of "Star Trek: First Contact".
The motivation for the bad guy doesn't make much sense, since he's in a position to fix what he's angry about. Why not just fix it? It's not as if he's got any of the usual science-fiction worries about changing his own timeline, so there's no apparent obstacle to just changing what's got him upset, instead of destroying stuff several steps removed from what went wrong. None of the destruction he's doing is going to make his own life better, which he could easily do if he wanted to. Yes, in the moment of crisis people do illogical things. But he's had 25 years to think about it, and over a 25-year span he never calms down enough to think out his situation, and nobody on board his ship points out the obvious solution to his troubles? How did such an unthinking doofus ever get command of a huge spaceship?
On the subject of unbelievable commanding officers, partway through the movie Kirk is a cadet at Starfleet Academy, and he's facing a hearing on academic dishonesty. 72 hours later, he's been promoted to Captain and given command of a starship. Yes, he saved the day (the first of many times), but no actual fleet is run that way. No midshipman, no matter how brilliant he is or how heroic his actions, is ever going to go from "still at the Naval Academy in Annapolis" to "commanding officer of the USS Ronald Reagan" in only 72 hours. Given that a starship has something like 10,000 times the destructive power of an aircraft carrier, it seems to me that it should be that much harder to get command of one.
The academic dishonesty charge itself is a disappointment. In "Wrath of Khan", we find out about a test at Starfleet Academy called the "Kobayashi Maru", which is a simulation that cannot be won. Then we find out that Kirk is the only one who ever passed it, which he did by reprogramming it. Nothing they show us can be as interesting as what we imagine for that, so revisiting it in detail is clearly a mistake. Some side reference about Kirk having to take it, and him smirking and saying "Well, I have some ideas..." would have been enough of a nod to the other movie. And if they were determined to do it, they should have done it better than they did -- Kirk just programs in a simple bug to make it trivially easy to beat, and then spends the simulation munching an apple and acting as if he knows he's going to win. The tone of this was all wrong; it played out like a silly prank. They should have had him program in a 1% chance of victory, or something, so there'd still be a challenge. Maybe he doesn't believe in the no-win situation, but surely he does believe in the not-much-chance-of-winning situation.
Two other things go wrong with revisiting the Kobayashi Maru, both a result of a poor decision to have Spock be the one who programmed it. This makes the Star Trek world smaller; instead of being populated with lots of characters who have lots of different ideas who we have to imagine because we never see them, it turns out that it was just somebody we already knew. Even worse, in "Wrath of Khan", Spock says that he never faced the Kobayashi Maru, and asks Kirk for an opinion about his solution to the no-win situation. That exchange is much less interesting if Spock's the one who programmed the simulation in the first place.
Even with everything that's wrong with it, it's still far better and more entertaining than the last two Star Trek movies, as well as the first, the fifth, and the seventh. Yes, it's derivative, has a nonsensical time-travel plot, includes completely implausible elements, and undermines some of what was interesting about other Star Trek movies. And those are all noteworthy negatives. But it's never boring; it holds your interest from start to finish, and one reason we go to movies is to be entertained.
"Star Trek" falls in the category I call "good dumb fun". The acting is good and the characterizations are well done; you really do feel as though these are the characters we've known all along. The dialogue is free of the leaden writing that did in the "Star Wars" prequels. The funny parts are really funny and the action is exciting. The special effects, as should be expected, are flawless.
It's a fun bit of popcorn excitement. There's some disappointment in that it could have been better, but if you're looking for some light entertainment and rock-em sock-em action, this movie delivers.
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