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STARRY EYED TREK
by Daren Foster

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STARRY EYED TREK
by Daren Foster

***Critics go weak kneed over the new Star Trek movie.***

The bastards have won. The siege has succeeded. The ramparts have been scaled. The blockade maintained and supplies and reinforcements choked off. The moat has been drained with pretty flowers planted in its dry bed. The bastards have won.

Amongst the rubble and ruins lie the emaciated, disease riddled corpses of discernment, critical thought and cultured sensibility, bludgeoned brutally and repeatedly by the marketing driven, risk averse, audience tested sorcery of the forces of darkness. Money lust stands victorious. Empty spectacle is king.

Case in point: Star Trek: Another Movie. Just over two weeks into its initial run and the worldwide box office receipts are well over 200 mil. This is not much of a surprise, I guess, although the surge of interest seven years after the franchise seemingly floundered to an ignominious end with Nemesis barely covering its cost is somewhat perplexing. But even more baffling is the outpouring of critical praise heaped on the 11th movie installment. Blasting onto the screen at warp speed and remaining there for two hours, the new and improved Star Trek will transport fans to sci-fi nirvana, screeches Variety. In the pop high it delivers, this is the greatest prequel ever made, claims Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. A burst of pure filmmaking exhilaration that manages to pay homage to the classic 1960s TV series and still boldly go where no man, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy included, has gone before, purrs Peter Travers of Rolling Stone.

I’m sorry, what?! Were we all watching the same movie or did critics get a peek at another, slightly… uh, better version? The first thing out of my mouth as the credits rolled was, well, it didn’t suck. Hardly a ringing endorsement but coming from me, high praise for a summer blockbuster. Setting the expectation bar embarrassingly low for these outings, I find myself pleased after paying 13 bucks to see a movie that didn’t suck.

Yes, through a relentless flow of mind-numbingly inane, empty-headed but eye pleasing pictures, the barbarous hordes at the helm of power in Hollywood have succeeded in so mangling our critical faculties and level of expectation that apparently we will glom onto anything that doesn’t leave us brain dead and drooling.

Thus, Oscar nomination talk for last year’s The Dark Knight. Or the loving embrace of anything and everything that Clint Eastwood films in his winter years. How about Vicky Christina Barcelona? At least it wasn’t Match Point!

And now, the giddy reception for Star Trek.

But shouldn’t we really expect more from a movie than simply not sucking? Star Trek entertained me for the most part. Moments caught my fancy like the opening battle between the time jumping Romulans and the USS Kelvin or young Kirk’s wild ride in the red Corvette convertible. There were flashes of zazz yet I was never fully engaged with Star Trek. Oftentimes I caught my mind wandering to other things far, far away or to the bucket of popcorn in my lap. Do people actually take up the offer of free refills with these? Don’t you hate it when a kernel breaks off and lodges itself between your gums and teeth? They really should come up with a portable Waterpik for times like this. Maybe they have. I should go by a Shoppers Drug Mart after the movie, see if such a thing already exists. When was the last time I visited the dentist?

I even took a pee break near the end of the movie. This may not be all that surprising for some filmgoers but it’s something I rarely do and only grudgingly, under the most dire of circumstances. Yet, there I was so utterly uninterested in one more discussion about reason versus emotion -- Star Trek’s central motif and one stab at depth that was already a tired concept 40+ years ago -- that I decided to take a few moments before the final showdown. (Let me guess. Spock is going to realize that life cannot be fully lived on logic alone confirming Hollywood’s enduring anti-intellectual bias.)

As I returned to the theatre, I was wondering why the energy and money had been spent to revive the franchise once again before quickly realizing what a stupid question to ponder. Marketing, pure and simple. Is there an easier job in the world than working in a Hollywood marketing department? With deep and quite possibly bottomless pockets stuffed with cash to cover every visible surface on subway platforms and to fill each commercial break on TV with your product, how hard is it to put bums in seats especially when you rely almost exclusively on already existing and well known properties? How often have we heard it said about a film that doesn’t fit neatly into very rigid, Robert McKee approved slots that it’s a hard sell and difficult to market? Isn’t that what should earn a marketer the big bucks, their ability to successfully market something that isn’t easily marketable? Imagine if, some 80 or 90 years ago, weak-kneed tobacco company marketing departments had balked at trying to convince people to form a habit that would end up prematurely killing half of those who regularly took up smoking. The planet would be overrun with people now.

Andrew O’Hehir, a movie columnist for Salon.com, wrote an article recently entitled Why the original Star Trek still matters. Normally I’m down with O’Hehir but as someone who grew up with the original Star Trek, I was struck with the thought that aside from the hopelessly awkward and socially inept, the original Star Trek never mattered. Along with the likes of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, Star Trek was nothing more than time occupying cheese. Sure, later in syndication it was a fun diversion when you were high and trying to avoid writing that long overdue essay on the gyre symbolism in Yeats’ poetry. To claim any other elevated significance for the series is trafficking in patently false historic revisionism. Star Trek was, is and always will be pure, unadulterated cornball cheese.

Which is fine as far as it goes. Summer blockbusters are built on a solid foundation of cheese. Expecting anything more from them would be futile and tilting at immoveable windmills. Good, well executed cheese is nothing to sneeze at and given the dearth of it at the movies, it should be embraced when it appears. Not sucking falls somewhat short of that laudable goal however, and the critical back flips the latest Star Trek reincarnation has received suggests just how desperate we’ve become in search of such cinematic rarities. All the accolades also suggest that the bastards have won. If there was any doubt about that.