Movie Focus: Star Trek

I used to watch quite a bit of Star Trek, from The Next Generation on. I like science fiction and it added a needed centerpiece to a genre rarely available. For quite a while the franchise kept churning along, slightly improving on itself. Somewhere along the way though, the stories became less interesting and with some notable exceptions even the action became less interesting. The shows certainly looked better than ever, plenty of good actors involved and many of the people involved in its success were still involved, but it still lost it. The problem, repetition. Star Trek started to repeat itself more than an alzheimer's patient, oldly going where everyone had gone before.

Even if the main story was different, how many times did we find the ship or the crew in peril with certain disaster facing them until someone comes up with an absolutely brilliant idea at the last minute. And of course it is always one of the 4-5 main cast members. Sometime I want to see an alien saying "I would have succeded if it weren't for you meddling kids". Hey guys, when something is done over and over again it no longer is very special and we become numb to it. Repetition of some storylines are bad. Repetition extending to where character interaction and action sequences are utterly predictable is worse.

In the original Star Trek series any crewman with a red shirt on might as well have had "I'm Dead Jim" written on his forehead. Their success rate was about the same as a moveon.org booth at an NRA convention. Considering the jokes about this you would think the recent minds behind the franchise would have made a significant effort to mix things up. Well you would have also thought the Democrats would have learned the efficacy of running a stiff for President too, but I digress. The point is, the great failing of the franchise was its inability (or flat out refusal) to leave some of its hallowed conventions behind, dooming it to become irrelevant.

The climax of every Bond movies is the same. Bond makes fantastic escape then gets laid.. the end. The difference is that the action in between can be a blast with some very wild stunts to keep you intrested even after so many iterations. Star Trek movies; bad guys blow the shit out of the Enterprise and fight running gun battle with command crew. TV show; bad guys trap command crew on planet, Enterprise is rendered helpless because of some previously unencountered anomaly or creature, Enterprise or crew going to bite the big one from mechanical failure. Now this sounds simplistic and it is, but so were these plot points.

Putting the main cast members in harms away often makes sense, but everrry time? The fucking ship probably has a couple hundred personnel, yet they just have to send at least a quarter of their entire command staff to an unknown situation in a pissant shuttle. Starfleet Academy teaching Custer's approach at Little Bighorn as a model approach? Good action is good action even without having a known face in it all the time. Oh and while they are at it, feel free to have some body armor and a big ass weapon to protect yourself. I know it doesn't quite fit Roddenberry's vision, but the one piece jump suit and the weapon that looks like my electric razor is weak.

Even when secure in their ship our intrepid heroes aren't safe. The enemy vessel will blast the Enterprise and... a panel on the bridge will blow up, sending a crewman into a backflip. Bad guy could hit a spot 200 feet away from the bridge and it will happen. What's up with that.. power surge? Woo doggies you got yerself some serious electrical problems, ya know I seen this on the early 80's Jags a lot. This is always accompanied by the crew bouncing off consoles (wouldn't have thought energy weapons had that kind of kinetic impact, but now I'm being picky). After someone did a faceplant on a keyboard in Kirk's era you would have figured seat belts would be standard feature on Starfleet ships. The cheapest, throwaway attempt at amping the drama was to have kids on the ship during a crisis. Fortunately it didn't happen too often. Bad idea completely, like when Vegas started angling for the entire family in the early 90's. Granted the kids may have been home when they explored the unkown, but enough shit happened in the known parts that would have made the parents yank the kids off the ship. Hell, Starfleet would have been buried in lawsuits for child endangerment as screwed up as some of their "routine" voyages were. Starfleet lawyers would have really been buried in court. What with suing subcontractors because the warp core on their ships failed to eject for the 40th time when it was ready to blow or when (apprently Windows-based) controls failed to respond when the power cable on the Lido deck blew out . But then again this was all ignored for the sake of drama and lawsuits wouldn't have been very Roddenberry-like.

Roddenberry had some great ideas, without a doubt. His ideas though became adhered to a bit too much. The future where most of humanity's nastiness had been bred out of it played well on occasion, but in the end it just seemed less real than space travel. The fanatics out there hold on to this idyllic view of our future. Is it possible? Sure, and maybe roadioactive sludge will spill on me and I'll gain 4 inches on my johnson, throw a split finger fastball in the 90's and sing like Michael Stipe. We can all dream but sometimes you have to keep an eye on reality. Too often the writers held steadfast to Roddenberry's vision hobbling the potential for more relevant story lines. It wouldn't have took a total break with his ideals, just adding a bit more complexity and roughening up the lines a bit. This oft perfection just made the shows/movies more stilted to the average viewer keeping them just far enough away that they could not quite get into the franchise.

Hopefully the franchise will lay fallow for a bit, the ghost of Roddenberry will loosen it's grip a bit, the dickweeds in the latex Klingon headpieces will get a grip and someone will make something great from the vast universe that is out there.