What's Fate Got to Do With It? (or, The Only Thing the New Star Trek Does Wrong)

(Beware; the following assumes you've seen the movie, or else have read enough about it not to have anything spoiled by what I'm about to say.)

The reviews are plentiful; you can find them everywhere, and all of them are saying the same thing: the new J.J. Abrams rebooted Star Trek as a near total success, so go see it, right now. It's by turns exciting, funny, dramatic, visually spectacular and emotionally affecting, and overall just a ton of fun. Even those who disagree on the essential thematic upshot of the film--does the film's revival of the original franchise's optimistic, high-tech, better-living-through-advanced-organized-technology vibe fit in with the Age of Obama? Or is the innocent, adventuresome excitement that animates the characters and their conflicts signal the decision to just make Star Trek into the pulp comic some always wanted it to be?--don't disagree on its awesomeness. Head to the theaters for the best Star Trek film ever...or at least, the best science-fiction/space-opera/adventure-with-spaceships-and-lasers (excuse me, phasers) film that you'll see this year. And I can't disagree--at least not with most of the above.

Not having spent a great deal of time investigating the internet, tracking down every sliver of plot detail I could come across--a geek I may be, but a Trekker, not so much--my original concerns with the film were almost entirely about the casting. The Star Trek franchise is just so immense, in so many different media, and so much of that immensity is tied up in the physical and artistic representations of the storyline's primary characters--Shatner's Kirk, Nimoy's Spock, etc.--that I was worried that the imagination of viewers like myself wouldn't be able to quite take it in. ("Viewers like myself"--what's that mean, you ask? Well, viewers like Rob Perkins, with whom I used to watch reruns of the original series and new episodes of The Next Generation back at BYU in the late 80s and early 90s; as he puts it in his review: "Today’s audience is composed of all the old people like me, and all the people even older, who loved that original 1960s series. But it also will include all the people younger than me who first encountered Star Trek in the late 80s and 90s. To them, the characters of that first show are already iconic, archetypes of all the other sci-fi heroes roaming the modern meme-space.") Will those of us who learned a particular kind of heroic, pop story-telling from those actors speaking those lines as those characters, those of us who didn't already know all about them as memes before we ever saw them perform, ever be able to enjoy our old friends being embodied by new actors? Just how would that work?

Well, I hereby put my original concerns aside. Again, as Rob says, "this movie wins." Everyone makes it work, and no one more than Chris Pine as James Tiberius Kirk. People can talk all they want about Spock, and the crucial, cool-yet-hot role he must play in these stories, but no--it wasn't just William Shatner's arrogance (well attested to by just about all his fellow actors on the original series) which forced his character again and again to the center of the episode's action; it was the fact that only a genuine, larger than life, immensely capable yet always needful persona could plausibly hold the loyalty and command the attention of the crew of the Enterprise (and, of course, of all those viewers in rerun-land, as well). And Pine pulls it off. As does Zachary Quinto as Spock, as does (truly, the greatest joy in the film for a real fan) Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy. As for the rest of the crew, who were always there but nearly always on the sidelines? Well, their performers have been much more room to develop and alter our old favorites, because they don't have nearly the weight on their shoulders. And so now Sulu is the sword-wielding Errol-Flynn-style warrior the fans always wanted him to be; Chekhov is a nerdy whiz-kid, which makes far more sense for his character anyway; Uhura is given intelligence and responsibility and sexiness (her relationship with Spock was the coolest narrative innovation of the whole basic meet-the-cast storyline, I think); and Montgomery Scott, of course, just really wants a drink. I have to agree with AICN's wonderful Alexandra DuPont: "The cast is a damned miracle."

So, that takes care of that. Does that mean there's nothing left to say; just, "it's a great summer film, go see it, and if you liked Star Trek before, you'll love it now"? Um, not quite. Because Alexandra makes another point, and it's not a particularly large concern for her, but I confess it weighs kind of heavily on me:

Almost everything else that bothers me about "Star Trek" is tied to the film's occasionally ridiculous embrace of coincidence--Kirk and his father run afoul of Nero in space battles, once at the exact moment of Kirk's birth; Kirk runs into old-Spock on an ice planet after being chased by a couple of monsters to a precise set of coordinates; Kirk and old-Spock then run into Montgomery Scott, who works a couple of miles down the road; etc.

Most of this head-scratching stuff happens during the 10-minute stretch of movie devoted to explaining the whole time-travel/reboot premise--and not coincidentally, it's only part of the movie that feels a bit sluggish. I guess you could argue that this is J.J. Abrams exploring the idea of fate in the "Trek" universe (i.e., exploring the idea that this crew was destined to be together). But that's a major philosophical break with a lot of the humanist/agnostic "Trek" material that's come before; Roddenberry's whole deal was that mankind was capable of solving its own problems without the help of God or Fate (see especially: "Who Mourns for Adonais?").

I found the larger story so charming and thrilling that this wasn't even close to a deal-breaker for me. But I'm not sure how someone who isn't a fan--who isn't on the bus already, basically--will react to the coincidence-fest.

This isn't exactly what I had in mind as my wife and I walked out into the parking lot last Friday night, but it's close enough. Probably none of the above makes sense to you if you haven't seen the film, and so what I'm about to say may sound even more confusing, but let me just press on for the sake of those geeks in the know who care about this sort of thing.

Think about it this way: what are all those hundred of other people in uniforms doing running around on the Enterprise? (Or, for that matter, looking helplessly at Nero's energy drill as he prepares to destroy the Earth, just happening to decide to do so while in geostationary orbit above Starfleet's San Francisco headquarters?) Well, on the television shows we knew: they were physicists and historians and archaeologists and weapons specialists and dozens of other occupations, because the whole thing is part of a plan, see--the plan to take the collected knowledge of the human race and use it explore and solve the mysteries of the universe, and be amazed and get beat up and learn a few things along the way. Now obviously, those old shows all had their stars, and everyone else (except for the occasional guest star) was kept in the background, waiting for the next red-shirted security guard to get killed. There were good--or, at least, defensible--narrative reasons why that was so. Still, the conceit of the show was that Kirk and Spock and McCoy and all the rest were one of those hundreds of others--luckier and braver and cooler and all the rest, sure, but still, not different. The original conceit of the show was thus anti-mythological; it was rigorously, deeply, collectively, humanist.

Now we have Star Trek, a movie that takes that original conceit, and suggests that at some point in the future the elderly Ambassador Spock, in an effort to save the planet Romulus, has blown a huge (black) hole in it. That black hole as led to the complete re-invention of the whole history of Star Trek, the storyline, as we knew of it. So far so good? I suppose--except then we are given the aforementioned 10-minute sequence in the film, in which Leonard Nimoy appears as "Spock Prime" and plays the Wise Old Man From the Future and gets Kirk and Spock to be what he (and the universe?) needs them to be in order to do what they need to do. In other words, J.J. Abrams makes Spock himself into his own--and Kirk's--deus ex machina. Now they aren't like everyone else; now we have a story in which God or Fate (or the mysterious "red matter") in a sense touches a couple of the characters on the shoulder, wrests them away from who they were and where they were going, and puts them somewhere else, as someone else. That is, as the movie has Chris Pine's Kirk say, in a bit of wise self-consciousness, "cheating." Unfortunately, all we can do with that cheating is note that it's a clever homage to the whole Kobayashi Maru plot point, which makes us think of Wrath of Khan, sigh and/or shake out head, and then get on with watching the film. Which is great, let me say that again.

I was never so hung up on Roddenberry's vision--or, more relevantly to the point I'm making here, his style of presenting his science fiction stories--that I find something wrong with the Star Trek franchise getting religion, having become fated, in a sense, with everyone else (the characters in the story and us viewers) kind of standing outside, being observers to a couple of awesome yet ordinary people who happen to have been lifted up and taken around a corner by the person who put the corner there in the first place. I mean, hell, what was Gandalf's resurrection in The Two Towers, or the Hand of God appearing at the end of The Stand, except a "cheat," a story of one type turning suddenly into the sort of story in which someone or something can upgrade the program while you're still running it? (Just to stick with Rob's computer metaphors here.) Such stories are fine; in fact, they can be wonderful. So I don't know. Melissa pressed me on exactly what was wrong with letting the story play out this way, given that the stories the sequel movies will tell are always going to be treating a few main characters as something very much like demigods anyway, and I couldn't tell her. Maybe it's that McCoy was, in a sense, "left out" of the reboot, and so now the classic Trek trio seems lopsided. I don't know.

Let's face it, these are the sort of complaints that only someone who lets their moral philosophy and geekery get mixed up could ever make. So let me just say that I enjoyed the film thoroughly, would recommend it to anyone...and, well, if part of me kind of wishes the reboot had taken place off screen, that we'd instead been given, as Tim Burke suggested, just a "complete do-over," rather than 10 minutes of Leonard Nimoy stitching together two different milieus, the seams of said stitching being plainly visible in how Kirk and Spock are played, well, that's my problem isn't? It sure doesn't need to be yours.