Star Trek: the final nerd frontier. These are the-okay enough of that, you can see where this is going.
Yes, Star Trek. That quintessential nerd franchise. When most people imagine a stereotypical nerd, I’m betting a short, stout, bespectacled figure dressed in a puke green uniform standing in line with others much like him waiting for an autograph from the guy who stood third from the right in that one shot from that one episode he wasn’t even alive to see in its original run. I am not one of these people. Yes, when I was younger I enjoyed “The Next Generation” a great deal, and it probably had something to do with Generations being released when I was ten. But I’m not a Trekkie by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve only ever seen one episode of the original series. Which is why I’m not talking about the series, I’ll be talking about the movies. Specifically the movies based on the original series. That is, the first through the sixth and the eleventh, which was released in May this year. This will be an outsider’s perspective. I don’t pretend to know everything about them. After all, I’ve never seen the series upon which they were based. Nor have I read the books about the lore or studied the blueprints of the ships. I’ve seen the movies. Things were revealed to me I didn’t previously know and I’d like to discuss it. So let’s boldly go where many many many have gone before shall we?
The first film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, came about in 1979, a full ten years after the series had been canceled, when Paramount executives saw how much money Star Wars made and said, “What do we have like that?” The answer was Star Trek. It had spaceships, aliens, a dashing hero (read that without snickering, I dare you), everything Star Wars had. So by and by the movie came into fruition. With veteran science fiction director Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still) at the helm no less. What came to the screen was not very comparable to Star Wars. The film is incredibly slow, it takes its time doing everything. Most notably in revealing the new Enterprise, something that’s done every three films or so. In a five-minute-plus sequence we fly around the ship. It’s pretty impressive for a late-70s model, but by today’s editing standards, takes far too long. J.J. Abrams paid homage to this sequence in the new film, and he did it in two shots that last no more than fifteen seconds and then we’re in the ship. But the original was thirty years ago, when fast cutting gave everyone headaches.
The story is pretty much the same as every Trek film: unknown thing is hurting or getting in the way of other ships or Earth and Kirk and the gang need to find out what it is and stop it. The whole team is reunited on this new mission full of slow sciencey 70s adventure, and then, upon mission completion, Kirk gives orders to head “thataway” to begin the next one. Whether it was intentional or not, Star Trek: The Motion Picture really only rebooted the franchise and gave reason for the other movies and series to happen. For that, I thank it, but to this outside observer, it’s the least entertaining and least Trek-like of all the movies.
Upon the first film's smashing success (it made $240 million adjusted for inflation, which puts it at the #2 spot for adjusted grosses in the franchise behind the new one), a sequel was born. Star Trek could actually almost be credited with creating the modern trend of every successful movie having not only one, but many sequels (the first six movies were released within twelve years of each other). But when it comes to sequels, few surpass their predecessor in as many ways as Star Trek 2 did. I’ve let it build up, but here’s the real, full title, Star Trek II: The Wrath of KHAN. Khan is the be-all, end-all Star Trek film. It has drama, comedy, action, crazy characters giving monologues - nay - soliloquies, it’s constantly referenced by everything from "Seinfeld" to Kill Bill, it’s everything it needed to be and more. This is in thanks, not completely, but almost, to director Nicholas Meyer. He came onto the project a navy buff wanting to direct a submarine movie. So he did, but in space. It was Meyer who came up with the navy-based uniforms and insignias. He thought of space in three dimensions, which allowed for a tense “chase” in a nebula, as if Khan’s ship (the Reliant) and the Enterprise were submarines in murky water. It was on this film that introduced a ship with the warp engines on the underside, so as not to confuse the Reliant with the Enterprise. Entire series owe Khan a massive debt, for without it, they would not exist.
Khan also begins the trend of Star Trek movies not taking themselves seriously. Stay with me on this one, it may be a bit confusing. Everyone involved with the films has fun with them yes, but they take them very seriously. The movies themselves, do not. For example, in this film you have a Vulcan Kirstie Alley. Maybe in 1982 that wasn’t funny, but now, it’s hysterical. Added to that is Khan being the character that he is. Quentin Tarantino opened his revenge epic Kill Bill with Khan’s quote “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” What he left out was the rest of Ricardo Montalban’s line: “...and it is very cold in space.” That line is amazing and ridiculous yet completely serious in its execution and motivation. The same is with, in my opinion, the best line in the movie: Khan’s final mini-speech (which I have just learned is from “Mody Dick”, which makes it all the better): “To the last, I will grapple with thee... from Hell's heart, I stab at thee! For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee!” Again, completely serious in its delivery yet wholly comical because it’s Khan who is delivering it. The final example, is the oft-copied, but never correctly, Shatner scream “KHAAAAN!” Like a lot of quotes from older movies, the references tend to embellish. In the movie it’s a zoom-in, short scream. When referenced, for example, in "Seinfeld", it’s a spinning overhead zoom-out seven-seconds-long shriek. It’s emphasized to add comic value, but it hardly needed any.
Another thing Khan advanced was the technology used in the creation of the movie. Star Trek, since a film was made every two years for more than a decade, is a franchise where you can see noticeable improvements in the effects with each installment. Usually the reaction is, “well looks like another Star Wars came out” and that is generally why the effects have advanced. In Khan, though, is an impressive fly around a planet being terraformed by the Genesis devise, which makes livable planets out of ones that can’t support life. It’s a computer simulation seen when Kirk is describing it and ILM did it all computer-generated, the first sequence of its kind. (I find this arguable since Tron, which used extensive CG for the time, came out a month later and was being made at the same time.)
To be continued...
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