The American Spectator : Star Trek

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Star Trek

By James Bowman on 6.1.09 @ 6:02AM

The plotlessness thickens.

At least he thought it was worth a mention. When Christopher Orr reviewed J. J. Abrams's new Star Trek movie in the New Republic online, he must have thought it incumbent on him to acknowledge in passing that, as he put it, "the script (by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) may be the most preposterous since Lex Luthor decided to take over the world by way of kryptonic real estate: This is a film with, literally, a black hole where its plot should be." Not that there's anything wrong with that, apparently, since he mostly liked the film. Oh, and don't worry about literally disappearing into that black hole either, by the way. He's only alluding to the film's way cool representation of a black hole -- which, as it painstakingly explains, causes a mixup in space-time that sets what plot there is in motion.

Most critics these days appear to be of the opinion of Kevin Maher in the Times of London, who explained to that paper's readers the economics of Hollywood franchises like "Star Trek" by sniffily insisting that "plot is highly overrated." But it seems to me that plot isn't rated at all -- otherwise the critics who raved about the new Star Trek would not have thought of the plot as even more of a dispensable item than did Christopher Orr. What he and most contemporary critics seem to like best about a movie is not that it offers a ripping yarn but what they would call its intertextuality. "Abrams keeps things moving at a lively clip," Mr. Orr writes approvingly, "tossing in elements borrowed from The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan, and even Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." Ah, yes, that's the stuff. Who in the black holes of today's movie palaces needs plot or plausibility when you've got the opportunity to pass the time ticking off the allusions to other movies that the film-makers have been thoughtful and clever enough to insert for your benefit?

That plus the spectacular computer-generated imagery ought to be enough for anyone, I guess. Anyway, it will have to be, as the film has virtually nothing else to offer, unless you count talented impersonations by young actors of the now-old actors who originated their roles back in the 1960s and the occasional bit of snappy dialogue or in-joke. When Spock (Zachary Quinto) sees his home planet annihilated, for example, he meditatively observes: "I am now a member of an endangered species." Or when, on his departure for a dangerous mission, he tells the comely Uhura (Zoë Saldana), "I will be back," and she replies coquettishly, "You had better be; I will be monitoring your frequency." I'd like to think that it's also an in-joke when George, the first Captain Kirk (Chris Hemsworth), asks some Romulan aggressors: "What gives you the right to attack a federal ship?" or when the terrifyingly vengeful Romulan leader (Eric Bana) later pops up on the communications screen of the Enterprise and says to Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood): "Hi, Christopher, I'm Nero." But I'm not sure it is.

I don't know. Perhaps I am too hard on Star Trek's plotlessness. As with so many other movies I have seen lately, I occasionally found myself thinking that I ought to give the thing the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the plot does make sense to those with a thorough grounding in Einsteinian relativity and the physics of time travel, such as they are. To me it is all just a lot of mumbo-jumbo, dragged in by the ears to allow the movie to cut out those always-awkward corners of sequence and causation and provide an excuse instantly to make happen anything it needs to happen that has a promising visual element -- say, the pursuit of the young Captain James Kirk (Chris Pine), son of George, across the frozen wastes of an ice planet by a giant, crab-like monster until he meets the older self of Spock (played by Leonard Nimoy, of all people), the man who marooned him there, from whom he learns his Destiny. How's that for intertextuality?

Old Spock is there to rescue him (with a torch!) because he comes from an alternative reality. Or something. And the narrative freedom conferred by this fantastical physics also helps, of course, to make the random events of this movie dovetail with the by-now well-established Star Trek mythology as developed out of the 1960s TV show through the ten previous movies and I don't know what further incarnations of the same characters. This is the one bit of storytelling that Trekkies are supposed to care about, so a liberal provision of alternate universes must obviously come in handy. Thus we are given to understand that the opening sequence in which Kirk's father is vaporized in a kamikaze attack on the Romulan mothership just as he, Kirk junior, is being born in an escape pod only happened in one version of reality and that, somewhere out there, there is -- waiting to be found in a subsequent episode, perhaps -- another reality in which the elder Kirk proudly survives to watch his son graduate from the Starfleet Academy.

I have not so far seen anyone object that it is not only the plot but the emotional mainspring of the action which is affected by this multiplicity of worlds, available seemingly at will to the characters as well as to the film-makers. Thus Captain Nero -- "a particularly troubled Romulan," as Old Spock sagely observes to young Kirk -- is supposed throughout to be mad for revenge against Young Spock because Old Spock didn't do enough to save the Romulan home planet from destruction some years before -- though he did all he could -- even though we are also given to understand that, in another reality, the planet was not destroyed at all. Nero is apparently at liberty to pick and choose between these two versions of events, and the fact that he chooses the one which requires -- albeit only in his own twisted mind -- taking his revenge on Spock by destroying the Vulcan home planet thus seems merely arbitrary -- as, of course, does that destruction itself. No wonder those Vulcans are supposed to have no emotions!

It's another manifestation of the way in which, in the era of the cartoon movie, both film-makers and audience both suppose that nothing needs to accounted for as if it were an event in the real world. Fantasy means never having to worry about motivation or consequence. Yet motivation and consequence are so much a part of what audiences throughout history have worried about, and in particular have gone to the movies to have presented to them in carefully worked-out fashion, that you've got to wonder what has changed in our culture to make these things matters of such unimportance as they are today. Partly it must be simply because we have grown so accustomed to fantasy that we have forgotten there can be any other kind of movie. But also, it's a mere matter of the kind of self-indulgence that fantasy was invented to appeal to.

Only consider. The young Kirk is a hell-raising bad boy who first appears as a young teenager (played by Jimmy Bennett) in a vintage car stolen from his step-father, which he proceeds to drive off a cliff. Neither then nor subsequently does he appear to have any good habits of diligence or application nor does he ever crack a book. Yet he becomes in record time at the Starfleet Academy Spock's intellectual equal and, without effort but with his natural insubordination and impertinence intact, is transformed in a twinkling into a Starfleet captain and a hero to young and old alike. You've got to suspect that not worrying too much about how their hero got to this position of honor and eminence is obviously a necessity to the kind of people who are being invited to identify themselves with him.

In the same way, Kirk is identified for us as a hero by his refusal to "believe," as he puts it, in "no-win scenarios" -- and, lo, in this movie's scenarios he always wins! Spock, a careful calculator of the "logic" of things, may reckon that there is only 4.3 per cent chance of success when the two of them go on their own to take over and destroy the Romulan mother ship, but his doubts are airily dismissed by the ever-confident James T. Kirk. "Trust me!" he says. And we, too, have no choice but to trust him in his comic-book perfection. Here, as in its provision of alternate realities, the fantasy must banish failure, suffering (or more than the momentary kind) and hardship as its first order of business. But only those who don't think plot, that essential tether to the real world, is over-rated are likely to care.

About the Author

James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (35) | Leave a comment

Paul D| 6.1.09 @ 8:26AM

Your review describes the problems with the movie completely.

Two of the strengths of the original series were the tight coherent plots and the painstaking efforts made to remain somewhat consistent with known science and the laws of physics.

This movie throws those strengths in the trash. I can still suspend belief to a point, but ultimately the movie asked to much of me when it wanted me to believe a 23 year old cadet, no matter how heroic and talented, would be put in command of the "Fleet's premier starship."

Thanks for putting it so clearly.

cdc| 6.1.09 @ 8:40AM

all that aside the movie was quite entertaining

Tim| 6.1.09 @ 8:46AM

I was eager to see the movie because I thought (based upon reviews elsewhere) that it recaptured that sense of wonder that the original did. Perhaps they were not up to the task, perhaps, we, and the world are a lot older and jaded. In either event, there were good moments here and there but it lacked a coherent thread. It felt like watching fifteen or twenty big budget webisodes.
It also continued the disgraceful trend of portraying the future as a place reserved for hot twenty somethings. It could have been a reboot of Friends.

Tim| 6.1.09 @ 8:47AM

And why the Heck does the antimatter engine room look like the Sam Adams Brewery?

Kinley Ardal| 6.1.09 @ 8:52AM

The engine room looks like a brewery because Starfleet is populated by college kids who need the alcohol in deep space, what with short skirts and green women, add the booze and you've got college campus in space!

The movie was vastly disappointing to me, turning Kirk into an irreverent punk rather than a hard-working defy-the-odds hero. I'm apalled at Abrams' vision of Trek, although I thought the ship looked pretty nice.

Anastasia Mather| 6.1.09 @ 9:09AM

Well, contrary to all the sniffers and toffs here, I thought it was a rip roaring good time. Was some of it silly and impossible? Yes, but who cares? I'm not even sure I saw the same movie as you did.

What I saw was the development of characters who eventually would be best friends forever, and how they started to get that way.

Geez, lighten up, people! You should have remarked about how little bad language and other bad things there were in there. I didn't have to cringe in a corner every other second.

Tony in Central PA| 6.1.09 @ 9:28AM

I took my nephew to see this a couple of weeks ago. The plot was incoherent because of the various alternate universe invocations. I guess this can be considered an allowable Mulligan for salami science fiction. Like many mass audience movies nowadays, its a headache - inducing, video game thrill ride. The acting was generally decent and the special effects were, of course, very special. The biggest black hole in the film was the absence of any pretense of reality not so much about physics, but human nature.
It can be argued that our entertainment as well as our culture has become increasingly irrational in the past few decades. Its too bad this film didn't have a real Vulcan for a producer.

Dustoff| 6.1.09 @ 9:35AM

Ahhhhhh, what the heck. It was just a fun movie to watch.

Vector| 6.1.09 @ 10:03AM

*spoiler alert*

Yeah, Spock can go back in time, at will, in a broken down Klingon ship to save two whales, but can't do it with a ship far more sophisticated to save his own world?!

Kirk getting promoted from a Naval academy cadet to the Captain of the Nimitz Air Craft Carrier that he wasn't even assigned to?

The Captain of the Nimitz making a cadet "1st Officer" in the time of war, what happened to the other 100 officers on board that ship and to the chain of command?

Yes, lots of action but the plot was so silly it made the movie ridiculous in the extreme. I mean couldn't they come up with something more believable. Like cadets going on an adventure like a Han Solo without trying to get him in the Captain seat as soon as possible. So what if they had to make 2-3 movies to make him the Captain, it would have been more fun and more believable.

Kevin Killion| 6.1.09 @ 10:06AM

Excellent dissection of this entertaining but very incoherent movie. The plot of "Star Trek", such as it is, is precisely the kind of mess that we all feared would come from the director who also extruded the similarly incoherent "Lost". As this review said, "It's another manifestation of the way in which, in the era of the cartoon movie, both film-makers and audience both suppose that nothing needs to accounted for as if it were an event in the real world. Fantasy means never having to worry about motivation or consequence. "

erp| 6.1.09 @ 10:32AM

It's fantasy, not a documentary on space/time travel.

theblackcommenter| 6.1.09 @ 10:49AM

Indeed it was a decent film for entertainments sake, but the plot was truly incomprehensible and nonsensical. The strength of the original series (TOS) was it's coherence with both human nature and with laws of nature, neither of which this film gives any acknowledgment of.

Desmond| 6.1.09 @ 11:59AM

The film certainly has its positive and negative attributes, but if you haven't seen it yet, I wouldn't form my opinion from this review, which is a dog's breakfast of misremembered quotations, incomprehensible criticisms (he's surprised to see Leonard Nimoy as Spock? Who does he think should play Spock? Mary Tyler Moore?), and a thorough unfamiliarity with one of science fiction's hoariest tropes (time travel, which was old when Mark Twain used it).

Ed| 6.1.09 @ 12:46PM

I also have some doubts about plot of the movie. In some of the later Star Trek TV series, there was a Federation "Time Police" from the 28th and a Half Century that was supposed to keep things like Vulcan's destruction from happening. Where are they?

There is not a Navy in the world that would promote a Midshipman to Captain after a few days of combat. Ensign perhaps, but not Captain. Star Trek always has been a liberal's fantasy about how to run a military.

Also, over a time span of four decades, none of the writers have ever had a clue about stealth technology, IR optics, and electronic warfare.

If you want to see how military Sci-Fi should be done, try David Weber or David Drake.

Siegfried X| 6.1.09 @ 12:55PM

It is the curse of the "odd". Every odd-numbered star trek movie stunk.

I agree about the youth problem. Maybe the next movie will be the prequel to the prequel where the 6 year old Kirk, Spock, and crew are put in command of the Enterprise and fly their first mission.

Tim| 6.1.09 @ 2:13PM

Star Trek: Babies
Follow the original adventures of the crew at Enterprise pre-school....

frankg| 6.1.09 @ 2:24PM

Of course!
Star Trek muppet babies!
Run with that, Siegfried.
Ready a script for my lunch with the big guys tomorrow.

HarryBeard| 6.1.09 @ 2:36PM

All of this misses the point of this movie:
By throwing all of the original characters into an alternative universe and restarting the whole franchise, they have a free hand to take anywhere they want. They no longer have to spend countless hours trying to reconcile every little plot twist to the "canon". They can make the butterfly effect do whatever they please and maybe even make a few decent sequels (one can only hope).

Siegfried X| 6.1.09 @ 3:27PM

I am not talking about canon. In no universe does it make sense to give command of the largest ship in the fleet to someone who just graduated from the academy. Regardless of the cadet's raw talent, he has no experience. There are thousands of more qualified officers. The cadet will be better off in the long term by having time to practice commanding squads and smaller ships, and by stints in various specialties like engineering.

Dan Frick| 6.1.09 @ 6:26PM

How come it never occured to the Romulans to rumble over to Romula and tell they that the planet will be cooked in 200 years. Unless thet sent to message to Spock on Monday instead of Thursday.

Siegfried X| 6.1.09 @ 7:52PM

That's the problem with time travel, too many paradoxes.

Ultimately though as this commentary says, the plot is just too sloppy. It's amazing that they spend tens of millions of dollars on a movie, yet the script has more holes than a screen door. I've seen it happen so many times.

I guess this is supposed to be a lite summer movie to see, then forget, not think about.

Bohred| 6.1.09 @ 8:54PM

If nothing else, the plot device of time travel was internally consistent.
Here it is; Big black hole in Original Star Trek timeline is going to eat the planet Romulus. The Vulcans come up with a black hole eating red pill, and build a super fast ship to send their elderly (129??) scientest Mr. Spock to put the pill down the hole's gullet first. He fails, Nero has a hissy, and the resulting chase puts them both into the black hole's space/time vortex and they travel to the past. When they show up in the past they change the timeline. So it is not a Alternate Universe, it's a new Timeline. The old timeline is gone forever, actually never existed. Paradox, circular, tautological, but classic time travel stuff. Doesn't explain Capt. Pike making Kirk first officer though.

Scott Taylor| 6.1.09 @ 9:47PM

I'm on the side of the ones who enjoyed this flick, though it certainly had it's problems. But as an Iowan, I'd love to know how that enormous cliff got here. It certainly doesn't exist today. That's almost as bad as that episode of Happy Days when Fonzie survives a plane crash in the mountains of... Wisconsin?

Bill Vallely| 6.1.09 @ 11:06PM

Did John consider the possibility that, no kidding, the story made perfect sense, and he's just too lazy to keep up?

Solo| 6.2.09 @ 8:57AM

Oh! My! Gawd!

Reading some of these comments is like the ultimate nightmare scenario of stumbling into a Trekkie Convention and being unable to find the exit!

"Time Paradox"? "IR optics"? Discussions about inappropriate Field promotions????

IT'S A FREAKIN MOVIE!

Come on, guys! Have any of you ever been on a real date?
Have you ever even kissed a girl?
*Looks down while brushing foot on carpet*

It's not real! It's just a movie!

~Apologies to the writing staff of SNL~

Oh..and no offense. I'm just kiddin' around!

LOL!

Tim| 6.2.09 @ 10:14AM

Baby Kirk: Goo! Pa poopy na!

Baby Khan: Gaa! eh poopy poopy waa!

Baby Kirk: KHAAAAAAN!

Vietnam Vet in Communist MA| 6.2.09 @ 1:40PM

I finally saw the movie, while unfortunately sleeping through part of it. However, my subconscious picked up something subtle -- the theme at the end of the movie went "....... where no one dares to go". Wasn't the original theme ".... where no man dares to go..."? Anyone else hear this or was I still asleep?

Siegfried X| 6.2.09 @ 2:02PM

Yes, the star trek family changed "no man dares" to "no one dares" many years and movies ago. I don't know exactly when.

Siegfried X| 6.2.09 @ 2:07PM

This movie is just one example of the lack of quality which is typical in 2009 America. Buy something at a store and it likely will be dead on arrival, break within a month after purchase, or be so poorly designed that all units of that type never really work. Buy some sort of service or document and it is liable to be mostly computer generated, with not enough human effort.

Felix| 6.2.09 @ 5:30PM

The greatest false god worshiped in Hollywood these days is Deus ex Machina.

Tom Woolard| 6.11.09 @ 10:40PM

Great movie. Probably the best ever Star Trek movie, the others were too mired down with baggage from the show. I believe it's easily the highest grossing as well. As for the old farts that can't get into it, nobody cares.

Herb Wheelock| 6.11.09 @ 10:46PM

Nobody ever said "no man dares". The line was "to boldly go where no man has gone before". The concept of "man" as mankind was lost on some of the pricklier types out there in the '80s, so it was changed to "where no ONE has gone before" by that bald guy on the Love Boat version of Star Trek (Next Gen.).

mazzuchelli| 7.1.09 @ 5:36PM

I got a huge kick out of the yawning chasm in the middle of a flat Iowa. Driving the vintage 'Vette into said chasm wasn't near as amusing. There was also a backdrop of a towering mountain range in Iowa that we found mystifying and of some concern. Folks, forget all those Tuscan-esque, Grant Wood landscapes. Reject Hollywood's overwrought embellishments.The geography here is flat and forbidding. The roads are ill-paved. The land is trampled. When you cross the border into Iowa, don't look left, and don't look right. Just stay on I-80, and keep on driving. In the meantime, I'm taking the dog to Playland Park this afternoon to walk across the Bob Kerry pedestrian bridge over the Mighty Mo. Regrettable name but beautiful structure.