NB This review boldly goes
into plot spoilerific territory (as surely as it splits
infinitives)
If I haven't written much about the
Star Trek movies so far (only a brief response to the first one here) it's partly because I felt responses were hard-coded. It just came
down to have much of a classic Trek fan you were. Hardcore fans of
the original series hated the reboot with a vengeance, whereas I...
well I was never that much of a fan, so was more
amenable to change. Which suggests at different perspectives, rather
than different analysis. Which would make any debate purposeless.
It's true, for example, that the the
original series was powered by the Kirk/Spock/Bones triangle. But
that seemed effective because of the chemistry between the three
actors, the way some bands can only work with a classic line-up,
making it something of a fool's errand to try and reproduce. Better
to vary from it. Admittedly, they strayed too far, and made films too
much about Kirk and his supporting cast. But it's better to go in the
right direction and overshoot than the wrong.
This time the script conspires to
divide the crew into twos, but is only interested in the effect of
this on Spock and Bones. And it's actually handled reasonably well,
Spock suddenly finding a joke funny and Bones worrying he's become
delirious, Spock attempting to say he'd always assumed their
relationship to be based on an underlying respect and Bones firmly
insisting it doesn't need saying. It's reminiscent enough to work,
without being trapped inside imitative.
And when Kirk's two-hander with Chekov
yields nothing similar that's probably just as telling. Kirk's job is
to move the plot along, and anyone with him is an audience or
sounding board. There's some feints to give him one of those
'atonement-with-the-father journeys' out of Scriptwriter's Basic, but
that tends to lurk around the film trying to find some sort of
purchase. And, surprise, his 'arc' is his considering giving up being
a starship Captain only deciding to stay one after all – meaning he
comes out of the film just the way he was on the way in. Phew, that
was close!
We're clearly intended to connect to
him by him being coded as connected to our era. So much so you half
wonder if there's a director's cut scene where he wakes up in the
future, Buck Rogers style. Perhaps what's significant is how
this is played. He's a rock'n'roll Starship captain, riding a
motorbike round an ancient planet to distract the enemy, and later
seizing victory by blasting the Beastie Boys at them.
If these moments are annoying, rather
than goofily charming as they seem intended, it's most likely because
they're so absolutely unearned. At the close he tells another
character, now enlisted with Starfleet, she doesn't have to obey all
the rules. Because, you know, he said so. There
may well have been eras before ours which had lower levels of
personal freedom. But the gap between perception and reality, the
idea of how free we are compared to the way our lives really
function, that must be unprecedented. Short of some truly
dystopian turn in history, nobody is going to look back on us and say
that was the time you didn't have to obey all the rules. And
consequently our heroes have become coping strategies, ways by which
we can lie to ourselves.
And the flashy, frenetic direction of
the film (by Justin Li, who's previously directed things like
'Fast and Furious' sequels) makes the perfect
accompaniment for Kirk. As it leaps, giddyingly and unrelentingly
from one set-piece to the next, its almost a trailer extended to film
length. At times the flash-cutting is so unfollowable you end up just
guessing what must have just happened, and you're normally right.
That said, the set-piece scene where
the swarm attack the Enterprise, effectively slipping under the radar
of its mighty weapons to literally dismember it, is genuinely
effective. It's almost like the opposite to the classic opening of
'Star Wars', where a great big spaceship is shown
to be chased by an even bigger one – this is death by an army of
minnows. The scene's even given a neat fillip later, when it's
revealed that their peer-to-peer inter-ship communications jammed the
Enterprises' in themselves rather than through a deliberate plot,
like they attacked us with their very unlikeness.
It's one of those classic moments where
you can watch a Hollywood movie and root for the bad guys without
having to rewrite much in your head. In fact it's virtually Negri and Hardt's theory of multitude versus empire, laid out on
the screen. (Not, it must be said, a theory that's particularly
convincing. In fact it's quite possibly no more than rock'n'roll
autonomism the same way Kirk's a rock'n'roll Captain. But for all
that it's fun to see it on the screen.)
And of course at the very same time the
film seems cheerily innocent even of the concept that the 'bad guys'
might portray positive features. In the standard clash-of-values
conversation with the villain Kraal, he snarlingly mocks their
“unity” as a “weakness”. Yet not only are his crew as unified
in purpose as Kirk's, they are defeated precisely by having this
unity disrupted.
Even if we weren't already expecting a
plot twist over Kraal, Uhura is given a line to tip us off that one's
incoming. And the way it's delivered is effectively handled, suddenly
fixing on a clue which has been hiding in plain slight just as we've
been looking elsewhere.
Yet it's this twist which truly
scuppers the film. It turns out... I said there'd be plot spoilers,
didn't I?... it turns out Kraal was himself a Starfleet captain, who
wound up marooned on a distant planet, became convinced he was dumped
there and consequently got a little embittered. And okay, aliens in
science fiction are never going to be truly alien. That would make
them beyond imagining, and then no-one would be able to imagine them.
They're always going to be our shadow selves in some form, us at our
worst so our best can get in a fistfight with them.
But there's a question of degree.
Making them our literal shadow selves and no more turns them from
disturbing shapes into mere reflections. It's taking those shadows
and wringing the darkness from them, it robs them of any element of
alienness. Historically as the Earth became delineated to the inch by
spoilsport cartographers, the edge of the map was pushed further out
and finally space became the place for the weird and inexplicable.
This is more less what lies behind the rise of science fiction as a
popular medium. It's where the strange can still be strange, where
the unknown rears up at us. If you don't honour this then the science
fiction becomes just a setting, a desktop background interchangeable
with any other.
And this fault line is blown wide open
by the ending. In'Into Darkness' we returned to
Earth for a final battle with a terrorist bad guy intent on blowing
up stuff. And here... okay, it's the futuristic city of a space
station, but that's pretty much the same thing. And it's worse than
repetition, it's even worse than the nagging sense we never
really went anywhere, it runs counter to the most
basic premise of 'Star Trek' – the bit spelt out
up front about boldly going. Significantly that fabled opening
monologue is now relegated to the end of the film, like the franchise
is permanently being thrown off course and trying to get back on
track. This film should really be called 'Star Trek Back
Again'.
Because Star Trek is inherently about
frontiers not home bases. Roddenberry's well-known original pitch
for the show was “Wagon Train to the Stars”. Starfleet can be
referenced, but needs to be kept in the background of a story. Kirk
should land on an alien planet like a Marshall bringing law to Dodge
City, explorer and policemen simultaneously. In short, this film is
not without it's moments. But it's reached the point where they made
Star Trek so unlike itself, that even a non-fan like me thought of
throwing in the towel.
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