Star Trek

[No spoilers here.]

I went to see the latest Star Trek movie last night. Now Star Trek is something I really grew up with. It captured my imagination. So while I wasn't about to dress up in morally-tinged 1960s pastels for this occasion, I was excited when I heard rave reviews for this new movie. Unlike most, however, I was a bit disappointed by the movie. It's everything I've come to expect from J.J. Abrams: the elements of exciting action but no actual substance. It really reflects what's wrong with much of the science fiction movie genre: a total lack of ideas. Oh, sure, there are incredible visuals of people diving into Vulcan's fiery forge from space, lots of phaser fire, hot people making out, and mysterious looking red substances, but what you get in the end is simply what the game of tag would look like if the players were TOS characters. Need I point out that the movie's plot makes no sense? In fact, it's much like Abrams' Alias, where a hot secret agent pranced about, equally lithely, from underground lair to designer cocktail. It didn't matter that the series literally made no sense, because it wasn't about sense. They both even have the damn red balls, which are, I suppose, the most Vulcan, logical, way to illustrate a MacGuffin. Now, I rant about how they've turned my imaginative series into the latest Transformers movie, but admittedly, a lot of the Star Trek franchise was totally unwatchable garbage. Have you seen the odd numbered movies? They don't make any sense either and they're horrible. So they haven't ruined anything, really. I just feel a sense of emptiness where a sense of wonder should be. You know, I watched the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" recently. In it, they take what might be considered largely dry material (engineers flipping switches, designing spacecraft, and dropping a feather and a weight on the airless moon) and made it fascinating and wondrous, at least for me. America's first astronaut in space, Alan Shepard, is plummeting to Earth after his orbit, much like the TOS characters in the Star Trek movie, but it is riveting. He, too, is cocooned in a (retroactively) ultramodern shield, but he's experiencing incredible G-forces, and there is the terse suspense of the unknown, rather than the casual acceptance of a yet another spectacular CGI. Later, the astronauts are orbiting the moon, demonstrating that spacecraft can successfully dock and undock a quarter of a million miles away, and they're looking out their window at the moon. They marvel at the lunar landscape, which, to me, rather than being a barren, lifeless surface, is a richly textured thing of fine sands, blazing ejecta, and dark regolith. That mere rocks would be fascinating and wondrous is well beyond the scope of Star Trek, and I suspect, most audience members these days. Certainly, if I were directing Star Trek, it would be a huge flop. But it's still sad to me...