Absolutely No Machete Juggling

For whatever reason, Star Trek was just not something I got into as a kid. Sure, I was a geek, and lots of geek friends loved Star Trek, but it never appealed to me. I liked Star Wars, but I was generally into a different kind of sci-fi (anything dealing with robots, time travel, and superheroes). Space just wasn’t typically my thing.

I had managed to avoid Star Trek almost my entire life. Some friends wanted to see Star Trek Insurrection when it came out in the theater, so I went with them, but I didn’t really know what was going on or who anyone was, and I found the movie to be pretty damn boring, so I wrote Star Trek off.

When the new movie came out, some coworkers organized a trip to see it and I joined. I thought it was pretty good, but I won’t really be discussing it much. After seeing it, however, I felt like I was missing something due to having never seen the other movies, so I decided to go back and watch the first ten movies. A Trek-a-thon.

In this post, I’d like to discuss my thoughts on Star Trek, speaking as an outsider that never watched the television show, and had avoided nearly all things Trek my entire life.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

While I was watching this, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to continue my Trek-a-thon. The movie was slow, at times even boring. It seemed like it was trying to be the next “2001: A Space Oddyssey.” Sorry guys, Kubrick was a genius, and Robert Wise wasn’t no Kubrick.

As the 2-hour, 16-minute movie (I could only find the Director’s Cut) crawled to an end, I found myself mostly annoyed that the filmmakers had decided not to bother explaining who anyone was. I knew Kirk and Spock from pop culture, but nobody else was explained in any way. Clearly this was a movie made for people who had watched the show, which alienated me a bit.

I swear there were like 20 full minutes devoted to majestic, lingering shots of the Enterprise while people stared at it in awe. I guess fans of the show were supposed to be drooling over Star Trek on the big screen or something, but I found it to be pretty ridiculous. The scene where Kirk takes Scotty’s little shuttle to the ship was total overkill.

Overall, the movie wasn’t too bad. A little pretentious, but it was entertaining for what it was (2001 but with middle-aged dudes). Score: 3/5.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

I’m glad I didn’t give up on Trek-a-thon after the first movie. This one had a completely different style to it, a fundamentally different tone, and was a much better film. I felt the special effects had aged pretty well, without a lot of head-slapping moments. It was nice to finally see what the “KHAAAAN” meme is all about.

The movie had a good villain and a good story. It did a far better job of explaining who everyone was without unnatural expository dialogue. I found myself actually engaged in the story. Spock’s death didn’t impact me very much since I knew the subtitle of the sequel, but it was nice that they were willing to do it.

Kirstie Alley was incredibly distracting for me, but the movie was quite good. I found myself actually WANTING to see the next movie after it was over. Score: 5/5.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

Here’s what I imagine happened:

Studio Executive: The last movie made a lot of money, let’s make another.
Star Trek Writers: Well, we kind of killed Spock, and it wouldn’t be very good without him, so…
Studio Executive: You’re not hearing me. Write another Star Trek Movie. NOW.
Star Trek Writers: But we killed Spock!
Studio Executive: So bring him back to life!
Star Trek Writers: But– wait, what?

The entire movie felt like a rationalization for bringing back a character they killed. A giant UNDO operation on the entire franchise.

Killing Kirk’s son felt very similar. “Well, we can’t have our main character caring for his kid the whole series, guess we better kill him.” I loved the scene where Kirk pretty much told Spock’s father that he didn’t regret saving Spock even though it meant his son dying. Nice, Kirk. Still, a decent job was done making it an interesting movie.

Christopher Lloyd was insanely distracting. I’m sorry but that guy simply does NOT fall into this role. I never saw a Klingon, I always saw Doc Brown wearing makeup.

The movie was a little weird, though nowhere approaching The Motion Picture weird. Vulcans have souls and split their minds, I don’t know, it was all very hand-wavey. Clearly an attempt to undo the side-effects of Star Trek II, but a decent movie altogether. Score: 4/5.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

This movie was just insanely stupid. Just completely idiotic from beginning to end. Traveling back to the 1980’s to save some whales because whalesongs will prevent the Earth from being destroyed?

The whole movie is just a quirky fish-out-of-water comedy, but with Star Trek characters. It was like Star Trek meets Police Academy.

Generally speaking, when movie franchises have gone on far too long and the writers don’t know what to do with the main characters, they get sent to space. Leprechaun 4: In Space, Jason X, Moonraker, Hellraiser: Bloodline, and so on. Since the Star Trek characters are always in space, this movie is basically the exact opposite. Watch as the Enterprise crew fails to understand how to use a computer! It’s funny because they’re so advanced! Seriously, idiotic.

This movie is awkward and embarrassing from start to finish. I especially like how they take the woman back to the future with them. Any other movie would at least MENTION how they’re screwing with the past, but this movie just doesn’t care at all.

The movie is preachy beyond belief. “Care more about the environment you assholes!” Thanks, I get it. Can we get back to the, um, science fiction now? If I wanted to have my television tell me how important it is to care for the Earth, I’d do something like watch Captain Planet. More specifically, I’d bash my own brains out with a hammer.

I know a lot of Trek fans refer to II, III, and IV as a trilogy unto itself, but that’s like saying the Robocop movies or Spiderman movies are a trilogy. A third one should only make a “trilogy” if it doesn’t completely suck.

I mean, whales? Score: 1/5.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Another really weird one. Not as weird as the first movie, but pretty out-there. Spock’s got a half-brother suddenly, which suffers from “very sudden character background that had never been mentioned in a previous movie” syndrome. Oh, and he’s looking for God. Uh, alright.

The movie starts with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy singing row-row-row-your boat around a campfire, then transitions immediately to me rolling my eyes and checking the running time for the movie. Apparently Scotty and Uhura are an item now, as if I have any reason to care about two characters whose roles are basically to explain to the main characters what plot device is preventing them from solving the movie’s primary dilemma (I can’t translate this, the warp drive is broken, blah blah blah).

The movie is, generally, pretty forgettable. It feels like nothing really happens for a while. Some pretty cheesy gags (Scotty hitting his head, Spock with his hover boots) pepper an otherwise bland narrative. Things get more interesting when they find “God”.

I actually kind of liked that scene. Kirk asking “what would God want with a Starship?” was a pretty fun scene, though still a tad on the preachy side. Honestly, I can barely remember anything else that happened, and I think the series was starting to feel stale by this point due to a total lack of any sort of character growth. Score: 3/5.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Just when I thought the level of preachiness from Star Trek IV could never be matched, a movie comes along to prove me wrong. They may as well have just had Kirk turn to the camera and say “racism is bad” over and over for an hour and a half.

When the crew invites the Klingons onto the ship, they even have one of the characters say “guess who’s coming to dinner” (the title of a movie from 1967 about racism) and someone else says “they all look alike.” Here’s a little test for film-makers: If your metaphor is more heavy-handed than in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, it’s way too heavy handed. To make matters worse, it turns out that about half of the very same Klingons that were criticizing Kirk for being so racist as to think that all Klingons were warmongering evildoers turned out to, in fact, be warmongering evildoers.

Christopher Plummer and Kim Cattrall both looked distractingly silly in heavy makeup, as did the bad guy from Robocop, I could barely stand it. I laughed through every one of his scenes, I have no idea what happened during any of them other than me wiping tears from my eyes. The Christian Slater cameo also gave me some chuckles.

The scene where the crew tries to decipher the Klingon language was dumb. Uhura is this master of language, but never bothered learning the language of one of the Federation’s biggest enemies? Whatever.

Despite these flaws, the movie was pretty entertaining. It avoided the staleness that I was feeling in V without taking the series in a fundamentally different direction as in IV. It was essentially a murder mystery in space – a Sherlock Holmes whodunnit with the crew of the Enterprise – and it worked. I found out later that the director has actually written a number of Sherlock Holmes novels, which is interesting. Score: 4/5.

Star Trek: Generations

Kirk has retired (again) and boards the Enterprise (again) only to find that there is an emergency that requires him assume control of the ship (again). Maybe it’s time to stop making movies about this guy and move onto some new characters. Oh, good, that’s exactly what’s happening. Wait, is that Whoopi Goldberg?

This was the first movie to introduce me to the Next Generation crew and, just like with Star Trek The Motion Picture, the movie seems to have no interest in helping anyone who isn’t a fan of the show understand who anyone is. Picard is introduced to me as the captain of a boat in some kind of interactive hologram. Has it occurred to anyone that this is my first impression of the guy if I don’t watch the show? He comes off like a douche.

The guy wearing a Visor installs a chip into the robot guy’s brain which proceeds to make him incredibly annoying for the duration of the film. Do fans like Data? He seemed like the C3PO of the movie, just annoying and superfluous.

Malcolm McDowell always plays a good villain, but he isn’t given much to work with here. Basically he’s trying to destroy planets that will move some ribbon of happiness to a planet that he can be on and be absorbed into the ribbon of happiness. Sure, I’ll go with it.

Picard tries to stop him, completely fails, and gets absorbed into the “Nexus” where he is treated to a fantasy about the life he could have had. I had a really odd moment during this scene because one of Picard’s kids said “I love you daddy” and I thought “Huh, that girl sounded just like the girl that plays Cindy in the Brady Bunch Movie.” I checked IMDB, and it was the same girl (the movies came out one year apart). Why did my brain know this? What a waste.

Anyway, Picard finds Kirk (who wound up in the Nexus too) and tells him he needs to leave the place of infinite happiness to help him stop Malcolm McDowell. Kirk basically tells him to fuck off, the universe “owes” him. Like I said, I’ve never watched the television shows, but the movies painted a pretty clear portrait of Kirk: he’s a guy who is so bound by duty to the Federation that he can’t seem to let himself retire. But in this movie, he tells Picard to get bent. What?

Picard basically guilt-trips Kirk into leaving a place of unimaginable happiness so that he can help Picard beat Malcom McDowell because Picard got himself stuck in a rock while trying to fight the guy. Kirk agrees, then dies for it. So, yeah, Picard is an asshole. Score: 2/5.

Star Trek: First Contact

This movie makes continual references to some episode of the show where Picard gets kidnapped by the “Borg” which are some kind of collective hivemind. Folks, again, 5 minutes of explanation would help here. We don’t all watch your damned TV show.

This movie did, however, give me the most background so far of what the future is like (communist) and how it got that way (vulcans talk to a drunk). I appreciated finally getting a little background on this.

When the crew was first going back in time, I was worried it was going to be “The Voyage Home” for The Next Generation’s cast, but since they traveled to “the future” from my perspective, I didn’t mind it too much. Again, the crew doesn’t seem to give a crap about possibly altering the past. Weird.

Data is annoying again, but the Borg are pretty effective villains. It’s basically a slow-walking-zombie movie in space. Can’t go wrong with slow-walking-zombies. At some point Picard tricks the Borg into entering a holographic fantasy and then kills them with holographic bullets. Does the word “hologram” mean something else in the future?

Definitely one of the better movies in the franchise, but I am still finding virtually every character annoying at this point (especially Data). Score: 4/5.

Star Trek: Insurrection

Even without having ever seen the show, I felt like this whole movie seemed like an overly long episode of the television show, a sentiment echoed by many fans apparently.

This time the villain is F. Murray Abraham, who is now working with the Federation to steal resources from some planet of hippies. I had a hard time caring about the hippies, but the notion that the Federation was doing evil seems like the sort of thing I’d have expect to raise ire among Star Trek fans. I dug it, I’m a sucker for anti-authoritarian plots.

The movie starts out with Data pissing off the Federation, and Picard and crew try to apprehend him so that he doesn’t have to be destroyed. Because of the previous two movies, I find Data to be extremely annoying, so I couldn’t possibly care less about rescuing him. Kill him.

Apparently Riker and Troi have a thing going. Not sure why I’m supposed to care, but it’s directed as if it’s some kind of shocking reveal. Riker is about as bland as possible (especially when compared to Spock) so I couldn’t care less. He looks dumb when they shave his beard, though.

The planet of hippies makes everyone feel younger, which is played up for laughs through most of the movie. I guess everyone is acting out of character, but since I’ve only seen them in two other movies I haven’t had the time to get to know the characters, it doesn’t play well.

The special effects are dismal and the story is un-engaging. Overall, pretty pointless and forgettable. Score: 2/5.

Star Trek: Nemesis

Another one with large portions of plot centering around Data. Awesome. This character must be a fan favorite. I don’t get it, he sucks. Riker has his beard back, too. Good.

When I first noticed the film was about “Romulans” (who had not been present in any previous movie except to the extent that people drank their Ale), I wondered if this movie was going to create a nice bridge to the 2009 Star Trek movie. In that movie, Spock tries to save some Romulans and winds up going back in time. I was kind of hoping that this movie would have Spock doing just that, creating a nice little loop in the Star Trek series. Disappointingly, that didn’t happen.

This one seems to mostly be about a clone of Picard that looks and acts nothing like him. It seemed like a soap opera or something. An evil twin? Really? I did like when Shinzon told Picard that, had Picard lived his life he’d be doing exactly the same things. It was also pretty funny that LeVar Burton has fully embraced the contact lens thing instead of the visor. Clearly Burton was sick of wearing the damn thing and demanded the writers figure out a way for him to avoid it.

Maybe I was just tired of this cast by this movie, but by this movie I still found them significantly less engaging than the non-TNG cast. It seems like the original movies were about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The rest of the cast just existed to support them. The TNG movies seem to almost be ensemble films, with equal weight given to all of the characters. Nobody is the lead in them, not even really Picard. The problem is that, with only four movies for them, it means that none of the characters really get fleshed out well enough for me to care. Though the originals skewed too heavily in favor of the main three cast members, the later movies go too far in the opposite direction.

Anyway, this one wasn’t necessarily bad, and it held my interest, but it just seemed significantly cheesier than the others. I still found the cast unengaging, so it was hard to care. The movie gets an extra point for killing Data, but loses it back for acting like I should give a damn. Score: 2/5

The Odd-Numbered Rule

One thing I had always heard about with Star Trek was the rule of the odd numbers, which states that odd-numbered Star Trek movies are bad and even-numbered Star Trek movies are good. Since I had seen Insurrection (number 7) and hated it, I figured this was probably true.

However, now that I’ve seen them all, I’m finally in a position to verify the accuracy of this rule.

Trek Fans are nuts. It’s not a “rule” if it applies to fewer than half the movies.

Kirk vs. Picard

Another aspect of Trek culture I am aware of is the ongoing debate of Kirk vs. Picard: who’s the better captain?

I’m not sure if the movies give me a good opportunity to answer that question. Picard was only in one good movie, while Kirk was in three good ones (and 2 okay ones). That being said, Picard seems to be portrayed as smarter than Kirk and less cocky, but kind of inept. Picard fucks up pretty consistently, one time he fails so hard that the only person who can pick up after him is Kirk.

Picard also seems preoccupied with the past and the holodeck. He kind of comes off as not really wanting to be captain of a ship, whereas Kirk is obsessed with being captain of a ship. Stop farting around in the holodeck, aren’t you supposed to be exploring space? And why the hell do you have an English accent, aren’t you French?

In the movies at least, Picard seems like kind of a whiny loser, but Kirk seems like an arrogant asshole. As such, I’d expect to like Picard more, but based on the movies I’m going to have to give this one to Kirk. I think Patrick Stewart is a far better actor than William Shatner, but Kirk seems like a better captain. Not sure I’d want to be on Kirk’s crew though, that guy destroyed an Enterprise pretty much every time he got put in charge of one.

New vs Old

I think I’m finally in a position to evaluate the 2009 movie. I enjoyed the movie for what it was (a brainless action flick) but having now seen the original movies, I’m sort of confused as to why longtime Trek fans like it.

The new movie was an action movie, lots of big-budget effects and danger. Clear enemies, clear objectives, and a simple narrative. The original movies were mostly dramas in space, occasionally peppered with short, deliberate action sequences.

The second movie was a thoughtful film about growing old and death. Kirk’s reluctance to retire, his obsession with reliving his youth, and eventually Spock’s death are all about death. The movie makes a number of well-thought-out observations on this topic. The same goes for the third movie, which is more about birth and life. The fourth movie is, though preachy, about the environment. Five is about religion and faith, and six is about racism and bigotry. Seven explores the nature of joy, asking intelligent questions about the nature of happiness – can one be happy without moments of unhappiness for contrast? Eight is about conformity, nine is about youth and beauty, and ten is about fate and free will (at least a little).

The point is, all of these movies have something to say, and they accomplish saying it (with varying degrees of success) in a science fiction setting. These are dramas, not action movies. Star Wars is pulp action movie, but Star Trek is not. Characters in Star Trek face ethical and philosophical dilemmas.

The new Star Trek, however, is nothing like the old movies in this regard. It seems to have nothing to say at all, and regularly ignores characters and ethics in favor of loud, computer-generated battles.

Personally, since I have absolutely no stake in the original Star Trek movies, this shift doesn’t bother me at all, but I’m a bit shocked that Trek fans generally seem to enjoy the movie. It seems like it’s clearly telling fans “people won’t pay to see the stuff you like, so we’re hijacking your characters and putting them in Star Wars.” It would be like taking Darth Vader out of the beloved Star Wars series and making him a cute little kid with the same name just to rake in some dough. Wait, that’s exactly what happened, and everyone hated it. Star Wars fans were calling for George Lucas’s head on a stick after Episode 1, but Trek fans generally seem pleased with the new movie. I don’t get it.

Final Thoughts

My sister realized I had never seen Star Wars and forced me to watch it when I was about 14, long after most people my age had seen and loved the movies. I enjoyed them a great deal, and became a Star Wars fan.

Did my Trek-a-thon have a similar effect? Hardly. A few of the movies were decent, but most of them were somewhere between tolerable and terrible. The original series on TV looks too corny to tolerate, and any interest I had for The Next Generation has been destroyed by three crappy movies. I know I’m a geek and I enjoy geeky things, but I don’t think I can get into Star Trek.

I appreciate what it’s trying to be (the thinking man’s Star Wars), but the series just seems too inconsistent for me. When it’s bad, it’s REALLY bad, but even when it’s good it tends to be obnoxiously preachy. It waffles between being base and patronizing, it’s hard to know what you’re going to get.

So this didn’t make a Trekkie out of me, but at least I now understand when people make jokes that reference Star Trek.