STAR
TREK: HOW TO REVIVE A SCI-FI FRANCHISE IN THE 21 ST CENTURY
Star
Trek.
Those two four letter words mean so much to a massive group of people. Star Trek: The Original Series was a
three season, low budget, show created by visionary Gene Rodenberry and
starring William Shatner as the charismatic, and slick, Captain Kirk, a sort of
“space cowboy” captain, Leonard Nimoy as the selfless, cold, composed, and
calculating first officer Mr. Spock, and DeForest Kelly as the Captain’s close
friend and chief doctor not a magician of the U.S.S. Enterprise. The series
chronicled three years of the Starship Enterprise’s five year mission, the many
adventures of the Enterprise crew making all of the characters and cast eternal
cultural icons. Star Trek spawned a
massive fan base, and a legacy that would continue for decades producing Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise. The Quality of
Star Trek series had been rapidly declining since the death of Gene Rodenberry,
and many believed “Trek” to be dead forever. Until the franchise was revived in
2009 by a most unlikely messiah of science fiction- the mesciah- the man who redefined the science fiction genre with
original TV series such as LOST and Fringe, J.J. Abrams. Abrams 2009 revival, entitled, rather simply,
Star Trek, broke hallowed ground and
went where no director had gone before among the Star Trek fandom with its
flashy effects and fast paced Star Wars-esque storytelling. J.J. and his sci-fi
team quite literally took a defibrillator to the franchise and approximately one-thousand
lens flares later produced the most successful franchise revival in the history
of pop-culture.
Let’s start by looking at what makes Abrams Trek so
different from the other Trek films. J.J. Abrams is very publically a bigger
Star Wars fan than Star Trek fan, so it’s only natural that his Trek would
reflect it, right? WRONG… mostly. The similarities between Star Wars and the
2009 revival are very much a conscious decision on the part of the Abrams team,
Abrams recognized the difference in Star Trek’s TV series and the successful
space adventure films of recent years and concluded that a modern sci-fi
audience would be more accustomed to the fast paced zooming and zipping of a
star wars style space battle. In other words, 2001: A Space Odyssey, wouldn’t cut it with today’s viewers, Abrams
knew that he was going to need a more thrilling style, and if that meant
throwing out all physics of space, then so be it. Specifically in the action
shots, Abrams fought to have silent space throughout the entire film,
unfortunately silence on screen doesn’t play well, audiences don’t feel as if
they are truly watching a finished product, and Abrams didn’t want old women
asking they’re trekky teenage sons if the speakers were broken, so he made the
space silent by comparison, there are still sound effects in the space scenes,
but you don’ hear them because they come after loud explosions. Another pace
decision Abrams mad was the radical idea to have constant lens flares
throughout the entire film, it gives the feeling that there is always something
happening just out of frame, and keeps the film alive even in dramatic close-ups
or during expositional monologues, and it allowed the cerebral dialogue of
classic Trek to play surprisingly well against the attention-deficit pace of
today’s culture.
Abrams Trek was groundbreaking for many reasons, but
alternate timelines have happened in Trek before, the most courageous thing the
film does, is to sit a new man, Chris Pine, down in the captain’s chair. Pine was
mostly unknown before Star Trek. He plays onscreen as a Harrison Ford as Han
Solo type, with the storyline of a Luke Skywalker (see? more Star Wars) Abrams
early cannon divergence (the death of George Kirk, James’s father, on the day
of his birth) allows Pine to play a Kirk that didn’t grow up in the shadow of
his father’s greatness, always wanting to be a starship captain, instead this
Kirk has total disregard for authority and has to be talked into joining
Starfleet by Capt. Pike, and only when Pike is captured and Spock is
emotionally compromised is Pine finally advanced to Captain of the Enterprise.
That arc is ever so important to the future of the franchise. Directly before becoming
captain Kirk meets Leonard Nimoy as an older Spock from the prime timeline, the
one with Shatner, on an ice planet (not unlike George Lucas’s Hoth),where Spock
Prime assures Kirk that he must become captain of the enterprise. Nimoy’s
appearance in the film alone is a blessing. Kirk is eluded by the captain’s
chair throughout the entire film to this point and it is only after Leonard
Nimoy appears and essentially says “I’m cool with Abrams and lens flares and
Chris Pines ridiculously noticeable roots, so all you Trekkies have to be too.”
It is something that no one else, not even Shatner could have provided and it
is the single reason that not a single fan of the original series has
questioned J.J. Abrams or his decisions regarding Trek.
The entire cast does an
amazing job, Quinto makes Spock his own with the classic Vulcan speech and yet
strong emotional undertones. Pine masterfully delivers a bad boy attitude while
keeping a strong and assertive tone of a true Starfleet Captain. Zoe Saldana as
Uhura makes the lieutenant the strong female she always has been as well as
giving her a fierce streak of backhanded remarks and animosity towards the
captain. Karl Urban absolutely kills it as Doctor McCoy his eyebrow is unlike
any other, and he is certainly the most physically resembling of all the cast
to their originals. Simon Pegg as Scotty keeps you laughing the entire time,
and just makes me happy when he’s on screen. John Cho as Hikaru Sulu fills
George Takei’s shoes nicely and proves that he can play more than just comedy.
A well-executed revival
of the most successful American Sci-fi franchise by J.J. Abrams makes fans happy,
it makes me happy, and I believe it would have made Gene Rodenberry happy too.
I look forward to seeing more from Abrams franchise revival, maybe after he
goes off and gets all the Star Wars out of his system in 2015.
“The future is bright, so bright, in fact, that it can’t
even be contained in the frame.”
- J.J.
Abrams regarding lens flares
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