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.
