The Movies -- So what?
By Atoz - August 26, 2009






I'm writing this just after the premiere of "Star Trek XI". I haven't yet seen the movie, and I'm not in any particular hurry to (I didn't see the tenth movie, "Nemesis", until 2007, five years after it was released!). My point with this article is that it doesn't matter because the movies don't matter.

Star Trek is first and foremost a highly successful television series. Actually FIVE successful television series (I don't count the Animated Series mainly because it's so obscure few people have seen it). And it was successful because for all those years, it was the most intelligent science fiction series around. It relied on likeable characters and good, solid drama, plus hose tasty moral dilemmas we could discuss among ourselves for hours and hours -- and it almost never dumbed down. On those rare occasions when the science was lacking (usually for dramatic reasons), you could at least see the principle the writers were trying to illustrate. Scientists and astronauts watched Star Trek (Stephen Hawking and Mae Jemison made guest appearances on Next Generation). There was even a move by some younger NASA scientists to make "To boldly go where no one has gone bef0re" the official motto of NASA! All this made Star Trek pretty much a "niche market", its fans often derided as "nerdy". Speaking for myself, I wore that term as a badge of honor.

But what about the movies? Well, the movies are a different story. The movies were made for Trekkies, of course, with the same characters we came to love -- but they also had to be made palatable for the mass market, which meant massive doses of action, spectacular space battles, and special effects. But at the same time, I'm sorry to say that the humanism of the Federation was down-played and the science was largely replaced with mysticism, to make it easier for general audiences to swallow.

Star Trek I: The Motion Picture -- Here we have essentially a remake of "The Changeling", with some mystical nonsense thrown in to make for a more "upbeat" ending. The conclusion of the story seems to be "logic isn't everything". Duh! We Trekkies already knew that, because that's what the great Kirk/Spock/McCoy triumvirate had been drumming into our heads all along! In short, the movie was a great chance to see our heroes again after a ten year lapse, but not much more than that.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan -- Okay, so the screenwriter didn't know the difference between Klingons and Romulans; that could happen to anybody, I guess! We are also treated to an example of the appalling incompetence of the USS Reliant's science officer, pronouncing a planet "incapable of supporting life" when a couple of dozen people actually live there (not to mention presumably an entire supporting ecosystem)! Plus we see the magical Genesis device, capable of turning dead planets into living ones. Very nice. The best part of the movie of course was the dramatic conflict between Kirk and Khan (which I do not wish to minimize at all), but as a Star Trek story it lacked something.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock -- Basically a continuation of the Star Trek II, with more mysticism. We get to watch a planet break apart and Christopher Lloyd chew the scenery. Wow!

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home -- Now this is more like it! A mysterious probe with unexplained powers threatens Earth. The only way to call it off it by procuring humpbacked whales, which requires time travel. This gives us a marvelous chance to see the characters we love contending with our own flawed century. But time travel merely by doing a gravity slingshot around the Sun? Whoever wrote this wasn't paying much attention in physics class!

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier -- Apparently God lives in the center of the galaxy! And only Sybok knows how to get there! Too bad he didn't pick up an astronomy textbook for a few minutes...

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country -- The mighty Klingon Empire has been reduced to (apparently) one planet, and all its oxygen is manufactured on one small moon, which explodes for no adequately explained reason. Yeah. Plus a lunatic Russian... oops, I mean Klingon general wants Kirk's head as a hood ornament on his Bird of Prey. (Yes, yes, you can also look upon it as a complex, socio-political commentary on the cold War or whatever...)

Star Trek VII: Generations -- A mystical energy vortex moves around the galaxy in a big circle, its only reason for existence being apparently to make possible a convoluted story where Picard gets to join forces with Kirk. Plus there's a madman remorselessly blowing up entire planets to get what he wants, and only James Bond... er, I mean only James Kirk can stop him!

Star Trek VIII: First Contact -- The Borg suddenly invent time travel, and they launch an attack on Earth in an attempt to re-write history so that the Humans don't teach the Vulcans how to dance the Ooby Dooby. How fiendishly diabolical!

Star Trek IX: Insurrection -- Now we're talking! This was an intense, character-driven drama, marred only by the mystical notion that you can literally alter the passage of time simply by cultivating boredom. Or something like that...

Star Trek X: Nemesis -- Another story about a madman trying to destroy the universe, saved in this case by the philosophical and highly dramatic question of whether it's possible to out-think your own clone.

Now, I don't want to leave you with the impression that I didn't enjoy these movies. I did, enormously. But -- setting aside the enormous budgets, any average episode of the series was much better written and much more interesting. It may sound hokey, but Star Trek has always been about exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and boldly going et cetera et cetera. The movies are nice to look at, but they're basically not like the series at all. That's my opinion at least.

This brings us to the question: well, what makes it Star Trek, then? Is it a starship named Enterprise? Is it just the old characters? Obviously not, because Next Generation started a new series with new characters. Voyager and Deep Space Nine didn't even have a ship named Enterprise.

So is it phasers, transporters, warp drives? Plasma conduits, phase inducers, latinum, Klingon opera, Vulcan ears, self-sealing stem bolts? Is that what makes it Star Trek? I don't think so. I could easily imagine a Star Trek series without any of those things. But what I can't imagine is a Star Trek series without the Federation. All these different alien species working together for a common good, learning to understand and respect (or at least tolerate) one another, and not shooting at each other or blowing each other up all the time.

From the very beginning, that's what it was always about. In the middle of the sixties, the Original Series showed us a vision of a future where people weren't judged on the color of their skin or the nature of their accents (A Russian in the crew? In the sixties? Just imagine it!). The later series extended that same philosophy to even wider cultural obsessions, like religious beliefs, age, and sexual orientation. Enterprise showed us the very beginnings of the Federation, and glimmerings of an idea later called the Prime Directive.

Yes, even Voyager. Voyager took place in the Delta Quadrant, far from the United Federation of Planets, but Janeway still upheld its ideals. In short, they took the Federation with them in their hearts.

The Federation is what holds it all together.