Getting Trek right from the beginning

Sara and I finally got the chance to go see the new Star Trek last night, thanks to a couple in the church who took our kids for the evening (and a wonderful time was had by all, too; we have some great folks in this congregation), and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.  In reinventing Trek, J. J. Abrams and his writers managed to make it what it should have been; they did an amazing job of keeping the characters true to themselves while justifying the reinvention of the series through the story they told.  In a way, the plot exists to explain and validate the creation of a whole new version of the same crew, and it succeeds fully in that.  Of course, that’s an ulterior purpose; The Phantom Menace succeeded in its ulterior purpose, too, but failed dismally as an actual movie.  Star Trek, by contrast, is a smashing success.

I’ve read some complaints about the plot being full of holes and overly dependent on coincidence, but I don’t agree; by and large, I’d say that the necessary coincidences arise logically out of the agency of the plot.  The one ringing exception to that is the coincidence of Montgomery Scott’s introduction into the movie, which is implausible to the point of indefensibility; I’m not sure it quite rises (or sinks, if you prefer) to the level of deus ex machina, but it’s pretty close.  For the rest, though—sure, there are coincidences, but they’re reasonable consequences of past events, and as McAndrew would say, “The laws of probability not only permit coincidences, they insist on them.”

I saw someone complain that what the old Spock tells Kirk doesn’t square with what he tells young Spock, but it doesn’t seem to me there’s cause for criticism there; he explains that himself in admitting that he misled Kirk in order to assure that Kirk did not only what he wanted, but in the way that he wanted it, as a way of trying to repair the breach between the two.  As for Eli’s comment that “the villain’s method of attack is very creative, but basically requires that planetary defense systems are non-existent”—point taken, but that’s Trek.  As a fan of the military SF of folks like David Weber and John Ringo, the idea of an interstellar power without extensive planetary defenses sounds ludicrous to me, too, but Trek never has had them.

In other ways, though, Abrams and company have made Starfleet, and the crew of the Enterprise, a lot more believable.  Everybody has a job that actually means something, and everybody gets to contribute.  Sulu isn’t just turning the wheel, and Uhura doesn’t just answer the phone; in fact, the changes in the character of Nyota Uhura are the biggest improvement in the whole movie.  Not only is she introduced as a genuinely impressive human being—a tough, intelligent, independent woman who needs that intelligence and independence to do her job—but her specialty, communications, is finally shown to be a real specialty of real and critical importance, one that needs a good xenolinguist (scholar in alien languages—which she is) if it’s to be done well.  They’ve set up the crew as a true ensemble in a way that the original never was.

Roger Ebert, in his review, complained that “the Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action,” and I’ll grant that there’s some justice to his charge; as a practical matter, he provides the defense himself when he notes that “the movie deals with narrative housekeeping,” setting up the new cast for sequels, but that doesn’t change the fact that this movie has things happen which implicitly raise huge issues that are never addressed on-screen.  A bit more introspection along Roddenberry’s lines, I think, would be a good thing, and I do hope we’ll see some thoughtfulness as the sequels come along.

On the other hand, the movie is a cracking good adventure yarn, which has always been the core of Trek, and it does this a lot better in some ways than Roddenberry did, too.  For one thing, while the scripts Roddenberry oversaw “might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy,” they never put anything really at risk; there were never any long-term negative consequences for any of the permanent cast.  (The one exception to that I can think of might be “The City on the Edge of Forever.”)  The same cannot be said of the new Trek, which inflicts staggering losses on its version of the Federation. I admire Abrams’ guts, because I don’t think I would have had the nerve to have the Federation suffer that badly.

I’m no movie reviewer, but I enjoyed Abrams’ Star Trek immensely; I won’t call it great art, but for what it is, it’s excellent—I think it’s clearly the best version of Trek yet—and I look forward to seeing what the folks behind it have for us next.