Star Drek

Slashdot is carrying a story about the new JJ Abrams-directed Star Trek movie casting Matt Damon as a young Captian James T. Kirk.

Now, I’m not a huge Trekkie. I do like Star Trek—as a card-carrying geek it’s part of the bylaws—but I don’t obsess on it the way some folks do. Still, I like the original series (campy old SF TV gets the thumbs up) and The Next Generation was often very good and occasionally awesome. Deep Space Nine was intriguing but I sort of drifted away from it during the initial run and I haven’t made time to go back and watch it on DVD yet. Voyager and Enterprise somehow inspired no interest from me and I haven’t see a movie since Generations, probably because it wasn’t very good and didn’t bode well for the direction they were taking the series. Honestly if you think about it most of what Rick Berman has done to the series has made me like it a lot less than I might have otherwise. Roddenberry knew what he was doing. Berman’s a hack. And that ain’t opinion, baby.

Anyway the point is that JJ Abrams directing a Star Trek movie is intriguing although I fear that Abrams is becoming the new go-to pseudo geek that people tap because of his success with Lost to do stuff that is really wild but popular. The thing is I don’t know that he’s really that guy because what he has done is come up with two very interesting shows with some memorable characters. He’s a start-up guy: He has the good high-concept ideas that get other people’s creative juices flowing. That’s a good thing, entertainment needs people like that.

But what he hasn’t shown any indication of is that he can take existing properties or ideas (including his own) and come up with some way to move them forward past the initial idea point. Alias, anyone? Mission Impossibe 3 (which I haven’t seen but was a huge disappointment in the box office)? I’m not sure that handing the reins to him and saying, “Save our franchise, Mr. Abrams!” is really the correct path to take here.

Especially since they’re talking about doing the flashback thing.

Here’s something funny about SF: It really needs to go forward, as in, toward the future. It sounds strange since most SF is futuristic anyway, but there is more than just this one example of SF universes that have a hard time moving past their own initially fabricated realities. Pushing foward and making up new things to happen to a cast of characters is something that should be obvious in SF but frustratingly often isn’t. Star Wars prequels anyone? The problem lies in the fact that once you start flashing back and doing prequel-type stories you run into the problem of the anticlimax: Since we started with these characters (or this universe or whatever) at some point in the future, some of the dramatic license is sucked out of the stories from the relative past because to a certain extent, we know how it ends.

I once had an English/writing teacher tell me that flashbacks are only useful as tools which shed new light on events happening in the current setting. If they exist solely to flesh out a story that can otherwise be alluded to, better the allusion than the full on exposition in flashback form. What happens with all these Episode Ones and Temple of Dooms and Animatrixes is that things we don’t need to be told in gritty detail are fully fleshed out to the point where we physically can’t form a sense of suspense because we know how it ends. How can you fear for Indiana Jones’ life if you know he lived to experience the events in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Did anyone really need to know for sure that Anakin Skywalker lost most of his limbs and was put into the Darth Vader suit because of lava burning off his limbs? We could have lived our whole lives and never needed to know that particular tidbit, but it was supposed to be the ultimate climax of six hours worth of films.

In the end I don’t care if they cast Matt Damon or Tommy Lee Jones as a young James Kirk: I don’t want them to have to cast a young James Kirk at all. Move on, people. Let’s get on with the story: There are plenty to tell that don’t involve re-visiting characters that have practically been cast as 24/7 reality show stars as much screen time as they’ve had. Isn’t it maybe time for a new group of characters? Why can’t we have the next Next Generation?

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