Star Trek
Let me just bust this out right at the top, because I’ve been dying to use this joke ever since the opening fifteen minutes of the movie.
I look forward to the Academy giving a Best Supporting Actor nod to ‘Photoshop Lens Flare from Star Trek.’
I know, if I’d worked it into the text it would have been a better joke, but it was distracting me.
Sindey Lumet, in his classic book Making Movies says a movie shouldn’t be more than 2 hours long, unless you have something important to say. Shindler’s List can be three hours long, but Fried Green Tomatoes? Hopefully some of you reading this are young enough to be puzzled by the idea of a movie called Fried Green Tomatoes, but I assure you it was real. I think it was like the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants for the post-menopausal Baby Boomer, but I’m not sure. I cherish my ignorance of the subject.
We’ve seen a lot of summer fare that’s just absurdly long and for no good reason. Transformers, a movie with no redeeming qualities other than Fighting Giant Robots, and no aspiration to any other redeeming qualities was nevertheless 2 hours and 23 minutes long OF WHICH only about 30 mins was actual fighting robots. What the shit?
But at the end of the day, I think Roger Ebert’s wisdom trumps Lumet’s. “A good movie cannot be too long, a bad movie cannot be too short.” The goal here is a sense of timelessnes. I remember seeing The Right Stuff when I was 12, a three hour movie, and I was astonished to learn upon exiting the theater that the movie was more than 90 minutes long. I was a geek for the Space Race and that had a lot to do with it. A lot of people think that movie was tortuously overlong and I see their point. But if you love what you’re seeing, then you don’t notice how long the film is. And if you don’t love what you’re seeing, you sit around for two hours saying “Where the fuck are the fucking giant goddamned fighting robots and who the shit is that goddamned minor bullshit character I don’t give a shit about #12?” I promised a friend of mine I’d keep the profanity down.
All that is leading up to my point that not only does this movie respect its audience enough to come in a disciplined 2 hours and 6 minutes, those two hours flash past you in a whirlwind unlike any movie I can remember. The pacing is just relentless. There’s no down time. None. From the opening salvo we are whisked along with the crew and their first adventure.
This whole movie feels like Act One. It’s as if they took the action-packed opening of a James Bond movie and made a whole film out of it. Is it funny? Yes, it’s hysterical. And a little whimsical. That’s what grounds it in humanity, the laughter is not from gags or jokes, but from human nature. We don’t laugh because they just made a clever reference to Old Trek, we laugh because of damned good writing and acting. Is it dramatic? Yes. Even the Hunt For Red October Moment you can see coming a mile away works because it’s handled so well. Do we believe in the characters and the setting? Yes. Is there a real sense of fraternity here? Yes.
The chemistry between all the actors works great and isn’t that a huge relief? There’s no one that feels out of place. Oddly, I didn’t feel like Pine and Quinto had natural chemistry, I just felt like they were damned good actors who knew how to fucking act like two characters with real chemistry. Its a fine point, but I was an actor for a while in college and I get a little geeky about this stuff.
The story itself is…it’s not bad, but the thing is: it’s not important. I know how weird that sounds.
When I heard that they cast Daniel Craig as James Bond two movies ago, I was thrilled. Much like when I first saw Boromir hold up the One Ring in the first Lord of the Rings teaser, I was convinced at that moment they’d gotten it right. Before I ever saw the movie I was just blown away by how hard a job the guys in charge of Bond had been given. This was a cultural legacy juggernaut with so much baggage. How to reinvent it and make it relevant to a modern audience while keeping to the tradition. You need a surgeon’s skill to know which bits of the franchise to cut out and which to keep. How to boil down the essence and start again. And they pulled it off brilliantly. Whatever you think of the actual movies, holy shit what a good job they’ve done as trustees of an icon.
I didn’t have that feeling here until I was actually watching the movie and I thought “My god, this is the hardest job in Hollywood right now.” There is no other franchise that bestrides our culture the way Trek does. And Abrams, Lindelhof & Company hit it out of the park. The critical insight I think they had was; they threw out the story.
By which I mean, they stayed a million miles away from trying to tell a Star Trek Story, and all the baggage that comes with it, they just told a story that served no purpose except to get all the characters together to do something awesome and save the world, and clear the slate from 40 years of continuity.
“Save the world.” You know I’ve been pretty sick of that for about…18 years now. It’s been a long time since I saw any movie put the whole world or universe or whatever in jeopardy and believed it. I often say, don’t do that. I don’t know The Whole World, just create characters I believe in and care about and then put them in jeapordy. But they did it here and I did not even notice until just right now when I wrote that paragraph above.
And they did it by…well, they did something so daring and ballsy than if I’d read about it beforehand I’d not have believed it. No spoilers.
The most common criticism we’ve seen leveled at this film is that it’s just an action adventure movie, not a science fiction movie and I don’t really dispute that. Yeah, it’s got Time Travel in it, but Miami Vice had a season with James Brown as an actual fucking alien, yo. No one thinks Miami Vice was science fiction.
But so what? It’s rocketships and rayguns, which means, alright, it’s not a science fiction story, it’s an action-adventure in an SF setting. Not all the best of Trek was the sociology, some of it was just damned good storytelling. On any fan’s Top Five Old Trek list, Balance of Power has to figure highly and that’s just Run Silent, Run Deep in space. As I’ve said before, there’s no real tradition of Science Fiction stories in film, the way there is in print. The critical element that set Trek apart was optimism.
You remember watching the Next Generation and seeing Starfleet Academy for the first time, right? And remember how you thought it was Douchebag Academy and you wanted to punch all those characters? Well here you get a real sense of tradition and optimism and of a future where you really can do something amazing. This movie does what no previous movie has done since…probably Trek II and that is; show us a place we’d really want to live in. In the 1960′s, Trek did something no other SF series had done. It created a future people believed in, and wanted to live in. This is that. It’s optimistic, and forward-looking while being grounded in reality and packed with action and WHAT MORE CAN YOU ASK FOR? You want some kind of sociological insight? Science fiction ideas instead of setting? Man this is just Movie #1, they’re going to make more!
If you’re one of those people who, like me, saw Zachary Quinto as Spock and wondered when he was going to eat Kirk’s tasty brains and gain his powers, let me assure you that from now on when you watch Heroes you’re going to see Spock. He was born to play this part. As soon as I saw him doing it, my reaction was “Of course! Who else could do this?” And I thought it was brilliant casting before, I wasn’t prepared for the finished product. Nimoy talks about watching Quinto perform the role and just kicking himself at all the great little touches this young actor was giving the role that Nimoy never thought of. You see that on screen. In many ways, its a more complex and more nuanced character and performance.
Chris Pine, man I would not want his job. I can’t think of any character in any thing ever where one actor created something so titanic as Shatner did with Kirk and yeah, I think Shatner was an incredible actor. I think the 60s had a whole generation of great TV actors and Paramount has a long tradition of finding really incredible talent. But while Quinto and Urban are in many ways channeling earlier performances (in Quinto’s case, because I think this kind of performance is natural for him, in Urban’s case because he’s a way better actor than I gave him credit for) Pine is creating something from whole cloth. I never saw Shatner in there, or any attempt to be like him. But while…and here I may be about to make my most important point in this whole thing…while I never for a minute thought “Yep, that’s the character I know,” as I did with Spock and McCoy, I completely accepted that this was Kirk and I wanted to see what he, the character not the actor, would do next. Pine’s performance convinced me there could be a Kirk who was not the Kirk but yet interesting and engaging on his own merits and wow what a job. That’s a tough job description. “We want you to be your own actor, and do what you want, but we also need a performance out of you that is respectful to what has gone before without in any way channeling that earlier take on the character, and inspire and engage an audience.” Chris Pine, A+.
The real revelation for me though was Karl Urban who you all remember as Eomer from Lord of the Rings, and the Russian Assassin in the opening of Bourne #2 and some random bullshit guy from that random bullshit Vin Deisel Warhammer movie. Here, he’s lovable and funny and relevant and acts as the glue that brings everyone together.
Urban is so great as McCoy, he’s so much fun in every scene he’s in…if he wasn’t in this movie you’d think “Man, this movie and crew are so tight adding one more character would ruin everything” but not only does Urban elevate everything, he steals every scene he’s in. Even the scenes where he’s the most important dude IN the scene. He’s steals scenes from himself! In a strange way, he’s like Hugo Weaving in the Matrix sequels. You know he’s coming, and you’re looking forward to it, but even expecting it he surprises you. In fact, he was so good it pulled me out of the movie a little and made me wish out loud that he got more work from this. He’s just awesome.
Nero, the Bad Guy is nicely done. He’s another element that, on paper, I would not have believed would work. But Eric Bana is that good an actor. He’s no Khan, but then you’re never going to get that again. Just be glad you got it once and go watch the second movie again. Nothing wrong with that.
They give Nero some backstory and it’s maybe a little…ah…convenient, and a little too much work went, I feel, into rationalizing his evilness. I prefer bad guys in movies like this to just be evil. Which is why Heath Ledger’s Joker is, I feel, the ultimate movie villain, never to be topped. But Bana projects such vitriolic hate and bitterness and anger that we’re forced to believe him. A particularly nice touch, I thought, was making his futuristic doomsday ship just a junker from his time. After being initially impressed with its size and scope, I was a little confused at how Yoyodyne the interior was. “Man that ship looks like a shithole,” I thought.
“This is just a mining ship, where I’m from,” Nero says.
“Ah, that explains it,” I thought. Neat.
I didn’t even mind the Bullshit Device, which normally I do.
“We have a device,” Nero says at one point.
“What does it do?” Asks a concerned Romulan.
“It creates Plot Points.”
“That’s bullshit,” says the concerned Romulan.
“Yes. I know. That’s why it’s called the Bullshit Device.”
Actual dialog.
I forgive the normally execrable Bullshit Device because it works. And by “works” I don’t mean “creates black holes” or “destroys planets” which is what the people in the movie think it does, I mean “the audience understands what it does, it moves the story forward, and it’s clear.” It’s not too complex, they don’t spend too long explaining it because they’re afraid the audience doesn’t get itchrisnolan. And even though, if I were to explain it to you right here it would seem tortured and overlong, in execution it’s not. There is one scene that’s a little heavy handed where Actual Leonard Nimoy shows up, as you know if you’ve heard anything about this movie, and tries to Mind Meld with Young Kirk.
“What’s a Mind Meld?” Kirk asks.
“It’s a quick way of getting through a lot of tedious exposition,” Leonard Nimoy responds.
“Oh that’s convenient. Do I need to stick around?”
“No, it’s just me and the audience and I’m in voiceover. Why don’t you head to the gym for about 3 pages. I’ll text you when it’s over.”
“Awesome.”
Actual dialog.
And while I was obviously deeply aware of the writers and director laying pipe, as they call it, I didn’t mind it because it was kinda neat. I usually like that scene anyway, where the Scientists show up and explain how the Alien Thingy Works, but I typically require that scene to be one of discovery rather than revelation. “We have figured this out” works better, I think, on audiences than “here’s what happened” because usually “here’s what happened” feels like the actor just turning to the audience and saying “Ok, I read the script and here’s what it says.”
Maybe I’ve betrayed a little bit of something that didn’t work for me and that was, oddly, Leonard Nimoy. This may sound strange, but of everyone in the movie, he was the one who least felt like he was the character he was portraying. He looked and felt to me like…Leonard Nimoy being happy and proud that new talented actors were continuing the tradition he and others created. There was, as there was supposed to be, a paternal attitude coming off him, but I didn’t feel one character having this paternal attitude toward the younger version of him and the people he knew, I felt like the actor was expressing his own joy at seeing the franchise he helped create reinvigorated by such talented people.
But that’s a minor quibble and otherwise his presence was well-handled. Though I didn’t believe it when I read it, Abrams and Lindelhof & Co. do something pretty amazing. They pull off a time travel story that not only works, not only frees up the entire franchise to be its own Trek, inspired by but in no way beholden to the original series, they then use that opportunity to do something. They don’t merely set it up so they can do whatever they want later, they set it up so they can do something incredibly bold and daring in this movie. I won’t spoil it. But I was astonished when I realized they had done something earth shattering hem hem and were not going to use the time travel thing to go back and fix it.
But that’s it Mr. Abrams. You get one time travel story, that’s my rule. Unless you’re Doctor Who, which never uses time travel to do anything except get us to the next story, you only get one Time Travel story per franchise, otherwise I will find you and punch you right in the junk.
So that’s it. Nothing more to say. I’m going to go now and try and find a theater somewhere in SoCal that’s showing this movie at 3am.
Oh, by the way, those of you who noticed the shuttle named the Gilliam? Its a reference to the film’s Script Editor, not the Python. Or, at the very least, not only the Python.
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May 8th, 2009 at 4:59 am
Agreed about Nimoy. Heck, agreed about everything. Geez, Eric Bana just seethes with rage. Where was that Bana in Ang Lee’s Hulk?
May 8th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Also, one of my nice-little high-points that I don’t think a lot of people caught about this movie – Chekov, or to be specific, Chekov’s scientific knowledge. In the later Trek movies, Chekov often ends up being the backup science officer (or, say, the Science Officer on the Reliant) aside from just being the guy who shoots the guns.
This movie has him actually doing more science stuff on the bridge (and spouting more scientific dialog on the bridge) than Spock does, which I thought was a nice touch.
May 8th, 2009 at 9:15 am
He didn’t have a crappy lighting director in Hulk, I guess.
May 8th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
I see you have been reading some of my critiques about the direction of the new movie.
My despair is, having created this action-adventure story, we’ll now have an entire franchise of action-adventure. At least in the original Star Trek series every once in a while we got treated to some actual science fiction. Yeah, many of the episodes were just re-dresses of contemporary stories (Run Silent, Run Deep, as you mentioned) or social commentary that didn’t rely on science. But Star Trek penetrated our culture in a way that no other show that had ANY science fiction at all had ever done. Even having a little actual science fiction was a nice change.
So, now we get to totally scrub that out of the franchise.
I wish someone would do a Culture novel as an HBO miniseries, or maybe Blood Music as an Outer Limits episode, or SOMETHING. But apparently our audiences are primed to find science fiction intrinsically boring. Probably it IS and I’m just a freak like that.
Oh well. It’s not the first time that I’ve been disappointed by being the minority.
May 9th, 2009 at 8:03 am
There is not enough trauma in this movie. I loved it when I watched it, loved it when I talked about it for 40 minutes on the walk back to my hotel, and dreamed about it all night. But when I was in the shower at 0-dark-30 this morning, it hit me that 6 billion people died remotely, and EVERY SINGLE PERSON the main characters interacted with on a daily basis died in plain site. And the VULCAN is the only character with an emotional reaction?
There needed to be a moment of solemnity, a place where someone "adult" (Chris Pike, of course) could frame that pain, and forge it into something other than random acts of senseless future violence. The lack of that scene I think fundamentally weakens the integrity of the whole story. It made the characters less than really fully human.
On a second minor note along the same theme, Kirk’s defense at his Academic Board hearing was incredibly weak. Worst case you could recycle the dialog from II. Best case, you could allow that scene to reveal to the audience what Pike has seen in Kirk all along – the reason he makes him 1st officer in the middle of a horrific crisis. The part of Kirk that is INCAPABLE of accepting the no-win scenario, which is the part of Kirk that makes him AWESOME.
On the other hand, I’m absolutely planning on seeing it again today, and I haven’t done a back-to-back theater experience since SW1, so that’s saying something extra special about this film.
RyanD
May 9th, 2009 at 9:31 am
oop, confused Bana and Bale again….
May 9th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
I loved it and actually ended up seeing it twice this weekend. (I almost walked up to the ticket counter and bought another one Thursday night. :>)It’ll be interesting to see what Paramount does with this. They’ve been given a gift on a silver platter and I’m hoping they work on another show set in this timeline. I blogged today about how I’d love to see a show with Wil Wheaton playing Wesley’s grandfather as the captain of the USS Insert Name Here.
May 10th, 2009 at 2:09 am
I agree, in principle, that the brief scene we see with Kirk "on trial" and Spock prosecuting would be a good place to add some more Kirkness, but in execution I don’t think it would work. The scene we got exists to further the tension between Spock and Kirk and it does that job quickly and then gets out of the way. It’s a very lean movie at 2:06 and I consider that a virtue. If the movie were about the Kobayashi Maru test, then that scene would have been the climax and then we’d have got the scene Ryan describes.
Upon a second viewing, I’m more impressed with Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine.
Quinto is so perfect, I honestly think they could not have made this movie without him, as absurd as that sounds. I feel like they had to wait for a Zachary Quinto to show up.
And while Chris Pine is in no way doing a Shatner impression, he has that same hunger for the whole universe. Like he’s going to eat it, and with joy. He seems to *derive* Kirk’s swagger and humor, rather than channel it. But critically, unlike Shatner, Pine isn’t playing the Lead. He’s playing the anchor. He’s the steady rock that everything revolves around. Everyone else is defining themselves off him.
That’s probably wise. Many people have mistakenly perceived Trek, the Original Series, as being an ensemble pieces when in fact its the Kirk Show. But while you can do that with Shatner, I don’t think you can count on lightning striking twice and so this really IS an ensemble piece. And that requires the steady rock at the center, not the flamboyant, charismatic leading man.
Like John McClane, Kirk in this movie gets his ass kicked in every single sequence we see him in *and he wins all the way through*.
One of the great hallmarks of good acting is when the audience knows what someone’s thinking, and when we see Kirk confronted by Spock in front of the Academy, not with the No Win Scenario (which is not what that scene’s about) but with Fear, we *see* that Kirk disagrees. He has *never* experienced fear. He never has, and he does not in this film. But he doesn’t say it and thank god. If he did, it would bring the whole thing down. It would mean handing us something we’re supposed to figure out.
Also, there’s a tribble in the movie.
May 10th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Matt, interesting take.
I could understand how Kirk Prime would live life without fear. He was the product of a long line of Starfleet officers (at least, according to the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Starfleet was made for him – a meritocritous organization that knows how to follow leaders and take orders, but challenge assumptions and restrain arrogance. Kirk Prime was perfectly suited to be Fearless.
Kirk New, however, should have a different outlook. His father died in a very scary event – a random throw of the dice put Nero & his ship in that place at that time to encounter the Kelvin. Clearly he had a tough upbringing living in a home with a father-replacement who didn’t like him (witness his Ferris Bhueler moment with the ‘vette), and then something drives him to go to Starfleet bars and get the shit regularly kicked out of him (otherwise how would he know he was good in a fight?)
I think you can scare a kid into having real fears and Kirk New should know fear. But something genetic makes Kirk New incapable of accepting the no-win scenario. Logically you can get kicked in the nuts enough by life to develop a healthy appreciation for danger but it takes something deep down in the core to be so fucking optimistic and willing to forge on well past the point when others have abandoned hope to find victory in the fate of "certain defeat".
Spock New gets to be different from Spock Prime. His mom died in front of him and his dad admits living his life baed on emotions, freeing Spock New to share the love a good woman. Why not give Kirk New something changed too – a core of fear that he has to overcome, but he DOES overcome because, well, Kirk is AWESOME!
I always felt that McClain in the first Die Hard was a very well-rounded human character. He certainly feels fear – fear for Holly, at minimum, but several times you can almost hear (and sometimes you hear outright) his inner war to keep doing amazingly hard things despite the risk. What makes McClain in DH1 AWESOME is that he masters his fear and does what needs to be done anyway. That’s the kind of Kirk I wish there had been room for in Star Trek.
[Compare and contrast this with the new Bond, who truly is fearless]
RyanD
May 11th, 2009 at 2:42 am
I think you’re hewing back toward Star Trek as The Kirk Show, and I don’t think this is that. To get that, you’d have to sacrifice so much of the dynamism of the cast we have. I’m not sure audiences would respond the way they have.
I, also, disagreed with and disapproved of the decision to make Young Kirk a rebel. I always imagined Young Kirk as being ideal Officer material from the get go. Disiplined, motivated and naturally inspiring as a leader.
But the closer we got to the release of the film, the more I thought that I, as a writer, couldn’t have made something like that work. We need Kirk in this story to be Me Against The World and the journey of how he ends up in the Captian’s Chair.
I read a book about Delta Force and having met a couple of Special Forces dudes, they’re never what you expect. They’re usually small, unassuming, wirey guys with no swagger or bravado but also no humility. The book opens with one of the first recruits talking about how they found him and it’s all "I was doing something awesome and then this awesome dude came up to me and said ‘hey me and some awesome guys are going to do some awesome shit, you want to come along?’ And I said ‘Awesome.’"
There’s no journey there. These guys were hunting and living off nuts and bark in the woods of Louisiana at the age of 11 for fun. They were born awesome, and ok fine, but blech from a storytelling standpoint.
I think maybe the writers did a little too good a job here. Kirk goes from being a "Me Against The World" character to a natural leader right in front of us, but because he doesn’t compromise his hunger and eagerness to consume everything around him, we almost don’t notice it. He just transferrs his attitude to the people around him. He goes from internalizing his worldview to externalizing it.
When he’s in the Future Ship with Spock and gives Spock this great look and says "It’s going to work." There’s really not an ounce of doubt in him. He believes in Spock the same way he believes in himself and that’s his journey.