TREKKIN' IT: THE FINAL FRONTIER

Fair warning: review contains spoilers.

At its best Star Trek has been a standard bearer for intelligent, mainstream science fiction. But the longer it allowed its actors creative control, the more it risked being the victim of runaway egos. The series had done fine letting Leonard Nimoy direct a couple installments, but the franchise was about to suffer it's first bona fide dud with the William Shatner helmed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

 In interviews, producer Harve Bennett, who remains enthusiastic about the finished product, calls the film “Bill's turn,” referring to a contract clause that allowed Shatner a shot at directing solely because Nimoy had had one. That he would try directing a feature isn't surprising, he'd long been looking for ways to distinguish himself beyond acting. In addition to his infamous singing carrier, he had directed a few small plays and a smattering of T.J. Hooker episodes. The same year Final Frontier was released, Shatner published TekWar, the first in a series of cyberpunk novels he co-wrote with an uncredited Ron Goulart. Shatner viewed himself a storyteller and for his feature debut, he set his sights sky high for what he hoped would be the ultimate Star Trek film, one that would simultaneously take the franchise into darker, more action oriented territory whist pumping up the broad comedy and, most staggeringly, answer the question of 'is there a God' with a very preachy 'no.'

That's quite a checklist for a first time film director, but the film cannot be called a failure of ambition because that would imply that Shanter, Bennet and screenwriter David Loughery (Lakeview Terrace, Nurse 3D) had a clear, unified idea of what they were doing. Instead the film is the definition of egotism, going off in a hundred different, conflicting directions, thinking each one will be equally fantastic and perfect, and the resulting film is a complete mess.

The film is not without its moments. The film's prologue – one of the few moments where the film rises above its generally workmanlike visual look, a problem perhaps exacerbated by the films short shooting schedule – lands us on Nimbus III and introduces us to Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill), a renegade Vulcan who's brainwashing the local farmers into serving as his own personal army.

From here it gets really convoluted, really quickly. Through some awful dialogue delivered by David Warner (who seems to be in physical pain delivering it), we learn that Nimbus III is a diplomatic outpost in the Neutral Zone separating the Klingon and Romulan Empires from the Federation. The place is even refereed to as “the planet of Galactic peace.” Why then, we might ask, is the conference room where the ambassadors meet in a storage closet behind a seedy dive bar in the kind of town waiting for Clint Eastwood to ride through? It doesn't really matter. The film may go through a lot of trouble explaining Nimbus III, but it's all about to be thrown away. All that matters is that there are important people in the capital city that Sybok will use as hostages so he can steal a starship.

All this exposition is intercut with some shockingly disparate scenes where Kirk, Spock and McCoy go camping in Yosemite National Park. This 'action' climaxes with a campfire scene where the gang teaches Spock to sing “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat.” As a kid I remember kind of liking this, It's patently ridiculous, and the chemistry of the actors almost sells it, but as an adult it feels like little more than a way to fill time while scoring easy fan service.  The fact is that real fans already know that these people love each other, and if the film wanted to remind us of their bond for later in the film, there are a hundred simpler ways to do so that don't stop the action cold. It's never a good sign when the first half hour of a film feels like the first half.

Eventually, the crew is ordered to rescue Sybok's hostages and after arriving on Nimbus III we get a direct to video style action scene where Kirk and Spock ride on blue horses and charge a team of commandos into Paradise City (where the grass is not green and the girls are cats). Eventually Sybok wins and uses Kirk to takeover the understaffed and chronically malfunctioning Enterprise A. At this point we learn two unbelievably ridiculous things, 1) Sybock is really Spock's half brother and 2) The reason Sybok wants to steal the Enterprise is so he can travel to the center of the Galaxy and meet God.

The film uses the family revelation to shake up the Kirk/Spock/McCoy relationship. It's an admirable idea, but giving Spock an evil half-brother we've never heard of is such an out of nowhere Scooby Doo twist that it's a non-starter, as is the implication that the overly pragmatic Spock might betray Kirk and their multi-decade spanning friendship for an outcast half brother with whom he has an anecdotal relationship at best. Still, the film doggedly peruses the idea that the crew's loyalty is up for grabs as Sybok uses his Vulcan abilities to “remove their pain.” What that means exactly is very inconsistent. At the beginning of the film it seems like he's brainwashing people into joining him. But as the film goes on it tones down the Charles Manson vibe and it suddenly seems like his glassy eyed followers have free will, especially when it comes to characters we like.

This culminates in the film's only good scene, where Sybok attempts to take away McCoy's inner pain. He's forced to relive his father's death, for which he was responsible, while Kirk and Sybok argue as to the best way to deal with our daemons. Sybok insists that we must purge ourselves of the past in order to move forward, hence his whole “give me your pain” shtick. Where as Kirk believes that our past, especially our misfortunes define who we are and should be preserved at all costs. This is the kind of intellectual argument that Star Trek is best at, and the film would have done better to have more of this, but alas the film decides it really wants to meet God instead.

The Enterprise approaches the center of the Galaxy, passing through lots of lightning bolts, energy clouds and other special effects nonsense before arriving at a mysterious planet the crew dub Eden. Sybok and the core Trek trio set down on Eden and search while Jerry Goldsmith's score does an admirable job instilling a sense of wonder. For a moment it feels we just might have something, but then “God” shows up. We should not expect very much from a film that promises a cameo from the almighty, we have such high expectations that it's hard to impress us.

Sticking with the "big, white beard" look doesn't help.

To be fair, the being that appears isn't very well defined, it could be God, the Devil, some kind of alien, or some kind of combination of the three. I take it though that he is meant to be God in some fashion because that's what the finished film has set up, and it never really suggests otherwise. At any rate, he is revealed to be a fraud. After a shockingly short encounter, Kirk outsmarts “God” who seems to be nothing but a snake oil salesman who, like Sybok only wants to steal a starship, prompting Shatner's famous line: “What does God need with a starship?”

That's a good line, but it's the beginning of a thought not the end of one. At this point in the film it's fairly safe to assume that Shatner is an Atheist, which is fine and dandy if that's what works for you, but his film casually brushes off the idea of a God without any thought, insight, nuance or debate. The film had the wonderful opportunity to explore how faith can be corrupted and trap people or even suggest that this being only wants a starship so he too can search for his creator, which would be really interesting. But instead of doing any of those things, the film decides to half-ass the whole Atheism thing and paint Shatner's alter ego as "God's" outright superior: according to this film, God and his followers are either glassy-eyed hicks or hucksters who are easily outwitted by the glorious Captain Kirk, envy of all! That is, of course, before "God" is killed by a photon torpedo delivered by Spock (Trek's go to embodiment of all that is logical and scientific).

Final Frontier had a chance to be something interesting, but mistakes the kernels of ideas for fully formed ones. It wants to have big ideas but would rather go camping. All and all, it would have been best if Shatner had stuck to acting. Time has ensured that film isn't necessarily the lowest point in the series, but it's pretty damn close.

Grade: D

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Trekkin' It directory:
The Motion Picture
Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan
The Search for Spock
The Voyage Home
The Final Frontier
The Undiscovered Country

Generations
Best of Both Worlds / First Contact
Insurrection
Nemesis

Star Trek '09
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis) 

TREKKIN' IT: THE VOYAGE HOME

Leonard Nimoy is a big softy. After the financial success of Search For Spock, he was given greater creative control to direct Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and what kind of film does he make? Not a space combat film like Wrath of Khan or a sterile, alienating thinker like The Motion Picture, but a movie about friendship, teamwork and saving the whales. On paper, it's this film, not Final Frontier, that ought to be considered the big misstep, the one no one talks about. But instead Voyage Home is one of the best, and certainly most delightful films in the series.

Picking up where the last film left off, we find Kirk (William Shatner) and the rest of the crew in exile on Vulcan, deciding to return to Earth and face the consequences for all the rules they broke so they could save Spock (Nimoy). As they approach Earth, things get impossibly goofy: in a reworking of the V'Ger set-up from TMP, the planet is being devastated by a mysterious, alien probe. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) decodes the probes signal as a Humpback Whale song. Evidently, the probe had expected to make first contact with some kind of Whale based civilization and instead only finds the Humans who, in this world, had long ago hunted them into extinction. Consequently, the only way to save Earth is to go back in time and find some whales to talk to the probe. Yes, that is the actual set up and it's a real testament to just how good these actors are that they sell the gargantuan leaps necessary to move the plot along.

After a trippy time travel sequence, the crew sets down in 1986 San Fransisco and splits up into teams. Kirk and Spock case out a local aquarium while the rest of the crew concentrate on modifying and repairing the ship. It's at this point where the film gets to what it's best at: fish out of water comedy. We get a lot of fun scenes of the Enterprise crew trying to adjust to their 20th Century surroundings.The highlight might be Scotty and McCoy trying to figure out how to use a Mac Plus and handing out future technology willy nilly.

The film is unusually democratic in handing everyone screen time. For years Walter Keonig's Checkov has had very little to do but sit around and be the likable Russian (it's telling for a franchise where people are defined by their jobs that Checkov's skill set remains undefined), but here he finally gets his own subplot, scoring some of the films better laughs when his obliviousness to Cold War hostilities lands him in trouble when he has to sneak around a U.S. nuclear vessel.

We also have a small subplot about just how culturally displaced Spock is. He's unable to relate to his crew mates, the 20th Century is even harder. There's an endlessly amusing gag about him being absolutely terrible at swearing, even worse than Kirk, who charmingly thinks "Double dumb ass on you" is a real phrase people say in 1986. Spock's inability to act Human is interesting as he is indeed half Human. Because he was raised in Vulcan culture, he was never that warm to begin with, but he used to be able to fake it just a little. The film makes a point of telling us that the ritual that brought him back from the dead also reset his brain and erased all the years he'd spent trying to reconcile his two sides.

While this is a very small subplot in the film, and a character point rarely touched upon, Spock's regression is the flip of the direction the film's were taking. Like Spock himself, Trek has always had to navigate between brains and heart. At one point Trek was primarily about allegory and big ideas, but that began to noticeably shift during Nimoy's tenure as director, and it's most apparent here. The big ideas in Search for Spock where jumbled and confused, here they're stripped away almost completely so the film can romp around with the crew. No one's going to argue "save the whales" as a goal, and the crew is alarmingly unconcerned with altering timelines. This is the first Trek film that's more about the star-power of the actors than anything else. The human focus is a welcome 180 from where the series started, but in going for the opposite extreme it also sets precedent or the series most indulgent, least enjoyable entries as we'll see with Final Frontier and the mostly ego driven Next Generation films.

Voyage Home is goofy, strains all credibility, but it's funny and it works like gangbusters. While easily the broadest, and most accessible of the series, it's also the boldest departure. Until now, the series had followed the traditional "bigger, darker" sequel model, but after all the heaviness of the last few films, it's nice that the Trek series took a break and made an impossibly fluffy, vacation style movie like this.

Grade: B+

If you enjoyed this review, you can follow Screen Vistas on Facebook by clicking here

Trekkin' It directory:
The Motion Picture
Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan
The Search for Spock
The Voyage Home
The Final Frontier
The Undiscovered Country

Generations
Best of Both Worlds / First Contact
Insurrection
Nemesis

Star Trek '09
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis) 

TREKKIN' IT: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK

The problem with franchise film making is that it seems to require a certain amount of status-quo. No matter how dramatic it would be, you can't kill Iron Man because the studio has a five picture deal. But when freed from these restraints really interesting things can happen. As it entered production, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan looked like it might be the last Trek film. Certainly, the last with Leonard Nimoy who had grown tired of his role in a franchise that frankly hadn't been serving him well. But then two things happened. Firstly, he started to enjoy making Wrath which gave him a fantastic death scene that was the whole thematic crux of the film, and secondly Wrath of Khan ended up making more money then expected. A third film was now in the cards, but Spock was dead. The franchise could have moved forward and dealt with the consequences of this major dramatic event in a thoughtful manner, but it would also mean risk losing part of what made the franchise profitable. The laws of status-quo demand Spock’s return.

As a result, we got Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Talk about putting a spoiler in the title. No money will be awarded to anyone who guesses whether or not they find him. Any film that starts from this premise is bound to disappoint. It's not a cynical film by any means, but it exists as a rote rebuke of everything the previous film was about.  Spock's self sacrifice was meant to teach Kirk that he couldn’t cheat death...except now he can, kinda sorta.

Just Kidding: The Movie starts by rewinding back to the end of Wrath, and reminding us that just before Spock died, he mind melded with Dr. McCoy (Deforest Kelley). After the Enterprise returns to Earth, Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) is informed by Spock's father (the wonderful Mark Leonard) that the mind meld transferred Spock's soul into McCoy's body. If Kirk can just bring McCoy and Spock's body to Vulcan, then Spock could be revived with an ancient ritual. The Vulcan's have always had some psychic powers, but it's a bit silly when they go from being studious logicians to bringing people back from the dead with magic.

Having McCoy, all Kirk needs is Spock's body which is on the Genesis Planet created at the end of the last film. It's far too simple a goal for this film so we get a couple perfunctory roadblocks such as Starfleet brass decommissioning the Enterprise and a group of Klingon's extremist's, lead by Christopher Lloyd for some reason, who are trying to get their hands on the Genesis Device which no longer exists.

None of this works as well as it should. Having Leonard Nimoy direct the film may have been a good way to keep him around but it serves the film poorly. He would go on to direct a much better Star Trek film in the future, but his direction here aims for somber but misses the mark and becomes flat and ordinary. Ultimately he’s serving too many masters. Nimoy wants to give Spock’s death the proper weight but is also caught up in the idea of bringing him back and too distracted by exploring the further implications of the Genesis Device. Though some of the blame should fall on screenwriter/producer Harve Bennett, Nimoy’s inability to connect all these ideas coherently only exacerbates the thinness of the film.

The Genesis angle does provide the film with its best stuff. We get Savvak (recast with Robin Curtis for money reasons) and Kirk's son David (Merrit Butrick) exploring the Genesis planet. We learn that David took some unethical shortcuts in creating the device that are now causing the planet to rapidly destabilize. They also find Spock, his body reanimated by the planet's radiation or something. Not only has his body been reanimated, he's also been rejuvenated into a rapidly aging young boy who's consciousness is tied to the planet. It doesn't make a lick of sense, but at least it’s engaging.

This idea of Spock’s body being torn up by the planet mirrors the idea of McCoy's mind being overloaded by the added burden of Spock's consciousness, but neither idea really develops. The McCoy angle is particularly neglected and inconstant, basically boiling down to Kelley slipping into a spotty impression of Nimoy. It scores some laughs to be sure, but as a device, it essentially robs the film of both Spock and McCoy, making the film feeling somewhat under populated.

But we still have Kirk and the rest of the crew who do an admirable job filling in for some fluffy heist sequences where the crew plot to steal the Enterprise back. These sequences play heavily on the star power of the actors and is the first time in the franchise where all the supporting characters have something to do (except Checkov, poor guy). With these scenes we also get some of the aging theme that's been present in the previous films. We learn that the reason that reason the Enterprise has been decommissioned is to make room for a younger crew on a new, experimental ship, The Excelsior. None of this ever rises above escapist fantasy about how these borderline senior citizens are willing to sacrifice their carriers to save their friend and go on one, last adventure. It’s heartwarming but it's also tremendously easy.

The film tries to darken itself up towards the end when those pesky, shoehorned Klingons show up for one of those forgettable, climactic fist fights avoided by films with better sense. (Spoilers) As Kirk kicks the Klingon captain off a cliff he shouts out, in classic Shatner-esque fashion: "I have had enough of you," a sentiment which unfortunately sums up the entire scene. In the lead up, David sacrifices himself so the franchise can avoid dealing with Kirk having a son, and in the film's most effective moment, Kirk destroys the Enterprise. Perhaps it's personal bias, but seeing serious harm done to any incarnation of the Enterprise always seems to work dramatically, it's the only "character" in this franchise that can be killed and replaced without dedicating an entire film to it. (End Spoilers)

Search for Spock is a mixed bag of a film, but it is enjoyable. It exists primarily to retcon large parts of what is arguably the franchises best film. It’s also wafer thin, and full of easy, downright lazy choices, but it still holds together, largely due to the charisma of the cast. As cynical as it looks on paper, it does have some genuine heart to it. It’s a lesser Trek, but it’s the best of the lesser Trek’s.

Grade: C+

Trekkin' It directory:
The Motion Picture
Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan
The Search for Spock
The Voyage Home
The Final Frontier
The Undiscovered Country

Generations
First Contact
Insurrection
Nemesis

Star Trek '09
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis) 

TREKKIN' IT: SPACE SEED AND THE WRATH OF KHAN

Star Trek: The Motion Picture ended up being something of a disappointment. Financially it did fine, but failed to fill Paramount’s coffers with Star Wars levels of cash and while ambitious at times, the film was messy, slow, and tried too hard to emulate 2001 while striving too little to play to the shows biggest strengths. Still, Paramount decided to go forward with a sequel, albeit with a much smaller budget and massive amounts of retooling.

That retooling included the demotion of series creator Gene Rodenberry from producer to the nebulous and ceremonial post of “creative consultant.” In his place Paramount installed Harve Bennet to produce and co-write what turned out to be one of the best franchise films ever made: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. We'll get to the film in a minute but first, let's talk about the Original Series episode that inspired it: “Space Seed.” (Spoiler alert for both "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan follow)

 

As an episode of Trek, "Seed" is quite good. Not quite in the top tier of Trek, but fairly close. In addition to filling in some much needed back story of the Trek universe, it also supplies one of the franchises standout villains: Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Mantalbán).

The episode opens with The Enterprise stumbling across a 20th century Earth ship, The Botany Bay, drifting through space. Against all odds, a scan reveals faint life signs, prompting Captain Kirk (William Shatner) to send over a landing party which discovers that most of the ships original passengers still alive in suspended animation. Scotty(James Doohan) blunders with the old technology and almost destroys Khan's suspension tube. Kirk acts quickly and has Khan taken back to the Enterprise.

Kirk and Spock are suspicious, but nobody knows who he is yet, which allows the revived man a certain amount of subterfuge in order to familiarize himself with the much more advanced Enterprise. Look, sometimes people do things in TV shows purely for plot convenience. It's understandable when you've got to get through the story really quickly, but there are points where “Space Seed” asks Kirk to be an irresponsible moron. I'll leave it to a bigger Trekkie than I to inform me of proper protocol, but it seems a bit ridiculous to let mysterious strangers read up on the blueprints and security capabilities of an advanced military vessel deep in unexplored territory. On a related note, Dr. McCoy (Deforest Kelley) likes to leave dangerous surgical equipment sitting around and is quite the badass with a scalpel pressed to his neck. 

Soon it's revealed that Khan is no ordinary man, but a genetically engineered superman who built a dictatorship during WWIII. Khan, and the existence of a Third World War is a big deal for the Trek universe. One of the things that sets Trek apart from other visions of the future is its optimism. To Gene Rodenbery and his writers, the future is a statement that we would, eventually, solve poverty, sickness, intolerance and war, but as we learn in “Space Seed,” the emphasis is decidedly on the “eventually” part. More than ever, the show is underling just how flawed people can be, especially when hubris and ambition are involved. 

The crew's reaction is rather interesting. When Khan's identity is discovered, Kirk is amused and Scotty owns up to a “sneaking admiration” of the man. When Spock objects to this nostogification of the past, Kirk is quick to compare him to Napoleon and point out that Khan's dictatorship wasn't responsible for any “major” massacres. But it sits a bit uneasy with Spock and with us. The whole idea of Khan being the product of eugenics is meant to invoke 20th century dictators. Everything about his origins and fascist mindset should fly in the face of the inclusionist Enterprise crew. Part of the problem is that the Enterprise is 200 years removed from Khan and the events of WWIII. By namechecking Napoleon but invoking Hitler and the Cold War (WWIII featured full blown nuclear combat), the episode touches on History's troubling tendency to, given enough time, glorify men who seek power for its own sake. 

Still, Kirk's admiration is understandable on some level. Despite all his intensity, Khan is extremely magnetic, a fact not lost on Lt. McGivers (Madlyn Rhue), a 20th century expert/fetishist. She more than anyone else looks at all the ugliness of the past and glamorizes the ambition of conquerors. She's immediately taken with Khan and the two begin a rather abusive romance. Eventually he manipulates her into helping him revive his followers and take over the Enterprise. Leading to a big fight between Khan, Kirk and Shatner's stunt double.

Eventually the good guys win, but there's a bizarre hitch. Kirk decides to give Khan, his followers and McGivers some supplies and then maroon them on Ceti Alpha V, a nearby planet. How anyone allows this is beyond me. Surely taking over a Federation starship is a serious crime, and I know it's been 200 years, but there can't be a statute of limitations on attempted global domination? In a way it's typical of Kirk's seat of the pants style of command, but it's also a mindbogglingly stupid plot contrivance. Still, I shouldn't be too hard on this ending, if Kirk had been more responsible then we wouldn't have gotten Wrath of Khan. 

Even more than its contemporary, The Empire Stirkes Back, Wrath of Khan is about its ending. (Just a reminder, this is a spoiler review) It wasn't a creative choice to kill off Spock but a way to lure Leonard Nimoy back to a role he was getting tired of. But to the credit of director/co-writter Nicolas Meyer (Time After Time), you'd never know it to look at it.  He embraces the imposition and builds the film around it.

In this context, Khan is no longer a nightmare from the past but of the future. He is death incarnate. Meyer's film works as a rebuke of just how light and fluffy death is treated in shows like Star Trek. He and his writers seem determined emphasize the mortality of all these characters, especially Kirk's.

The film opens on a particularly unhappy birthday for James T. Kirk. Not only is the admiral no longer commanding the Enterprise, but he's found himself assigned to training his replacement crew. The pleasures of which seem limited to sassily chewing out Lt. Savak (Kristy Alley) a Vulcan cadet in line for his old job. As Captain, Kirk used to explore strange new worlds and cheat death on a weekly basis, now he's feeling his age. As Admiral, he's retreated from the world that suited him best, not wanting to push his luck and now his life savors of anti-climax.

In contrast is Khan. While Kirk was getting softer, Khan was getting sharper and deadlier, growing mad with grief over the death of his wife (presumably McGivers). Bent on revenge he manages to escape Ceti Alpha V by stealing the U.S.S. Reliant, a federation ship doing survey work for the Genesis Project.

Genesis is a device that rapidly terraforms lifeless planets. Think of it as the film's ace in the hole, planting the idea that that from death can come hope and new life. The hitch being that Genesis is ultimately too dangerous because the same process that allows it to create life would also destroy any living thing it came in contact with. All this leads to Kirk, Spock and Dr. McCoy debating the ethics of creating such a device, particularly considering that Starfleet acts just as much as a military organization as it does a scientific one. In the wrong hands, Genesis is a 23rd century atom bomb. It's not ultimately important to the film, but it's a point not lost on the team developing it, particularly Kirk's old flame Dr. Carol Marcus and the their son David (Bibi Besch and Merrit Butrick).

This is the kind of stuff Trek excels at. Tricky intellectual ideas gussied with a shiny sci-fi action coating. Not that the coating is neglected here, in fact the set pieces are uniformly fantastic. After a slow burning first half Khan uses Genesis and Carol to lure Kirk into an trap. The Reliant mounts a sneak attack on the Enterprise, crippling her. So right away in our first action scene we have the heroes at a major disadvantage. By embracing the mortality angle, the film has upped the stakes and, ideally, that's what action movies are really about. The action genre isn't really about explosions, but the possibility that people we care about might get hurt and die in those explosions. Without those stakes you've got nothing. Obviously it's hard for audiences to get to worried watching a weekly series or the Nth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean because we know that there's a status quo to be maintained. But with a major death being imposed on the film already, the stakes immediately jump much higher. The conventional wisdom is that these types of movies are only as good as their villains. But I'll add that a good villain is nothing without a vulnerable hero.

It's interesting that Kirk and Khan never meet face to face. Perhaps when Meyer saw "Space Seed," he realized how boring the climactic fistfight was and decided to skip it.  Instead they just interact via the bridge viewscreen. These scenes have a palpable tension to them not just because the film has invested in the characters but because they are legitimately about one intelligent tactician trying to outsmart another. In that initial encounter, there's a wonderful sequence where Kirk and Spock try and find a way to use Khan's unfamiliarity of 23rd century tech, while he counts down the seconds until he kills everyone. The film invites us into the heads of its protagonists more than we usually get in these types of movies.

The ending is particularly spectacular. In a final attempt to even the odds Kirk lures Khan into a nebula that disables the sensors of both ships. Eventually leading to Khan detonating the Genesis device as a last Melvilleian gambit to kill his enemy. The Enterprise escapes, but only because Spock sacrifices himself. The death of Spock is a fantastic emotional climax, but if there is an issue it's that after his funeral, the film starts to hedge its bets. Indeed as filming went on Leonard Nimoy had a reversal and now wanted to continue doing Star Trek. We don't see Spock come back to life right away (that would be silly), but the last few shots might reveal too much where the next film is heading.  It's not too bad, the ending comes back to the idea of the Genesis device creating life out of death and it's nice that the film ends on a hopeful note, it's just irritating to see the film building in escape clauses.

Grades:
"Space Seed": B+
Wrath of Khan: A-

Trekkin' It directory:
The Motion Picture
Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan
The Search for Spock
The Voyage Home
The Final Frontier
The Undiscovered Country

Generations
First Contact
Insurrection
Nemesis

Star Trek '09
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis)  

Note: I saw the Director's Cut of the film. The only worthwhile addition is a small set up where a plucky, young engineer is revealed to be Scotty's nephew. Apart from that one snippet the content in the DC is unnecessary at best, interrupting the natural films rhythms. The superior Theatrical Cut, as well as "Space Seed" are both streaming on Netflix Instant. If you enjoyed this review, you can subscribe to Screen Vistas via Facebook 

TREKKIN' IT: THE MOTION PICTURE

The existence of Star Trek as a film series is something of an anomaly. These days it's fairly common for cancelled television series to get revised for either new episodes or a feature. Firefly became a movie after just 10 aired episodes and we've also seen new episodes of Futurama, Battlestar Galactica, Bevies & Buthead, Hawaii 5-0, Family Guy, Doctor Who, and Arrested Development not to mention the Veronica Mars revival in our near future. But back in the 60's and 70's the idea was mostly unheard of. So why was Star Trek chosen for a feature film rebirth 10 years after the fact? Basically, the answer is money.

Star Trek didn't have the most audacious start. The show was cancelled in 1969 due to low ratings. It did, however, do substantially better in syndication (partly due to a shift in how ratings were measured). Paramount tried to make good on the show's popularity (read: increased value), but the franchise suffered through a cheaply made animated incarnation in the mid 70s while a second live action show, called Star Trek: Phase II, languished in Development Hell. But then came Star Wars, and for a brief moment anything even remotely sci-fi was box-office gold in the eyes of studio bosses, leading to Phase II's pilot script "In Thy Image" being swiftly converted into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. 

Gene Roddenberry's initial conception of Star Trek as a show was "too cerebral" for NBC who demanded he action up his ideas a bit. Honestly, it was a good idea. Roddenberry was a good sci-fi writer, but he was no Rod Serling and left too much to his own devices he could get hokey. There was no way that Star Trek woundn't end up being campy (William Shatner's acting didn't help), but being forced to be more mainstream helped the show go down easier. But it's clear watching this first film incarnation that Roddenberry and director Robert Wise (The Day The Earth Stood Still) were determined that Trek be taken seriously. Unfortunately, the result combines all the least accessible elements of the show. It'd be tempting to write it off as "one for the fans," except Trekkies mostly ignore it as well.

The plot involves a massive, possibly evil, space cloud that's headed straight for Earth. You know it's Star Trek when something as goofy and innocuous as a cloud can be anthropomorphized into a galactic threat. It helps that the cloud is a pretty decent special effect, executed by legendary FX wizard Douglas Trumbull (2001, Blade Runner), and that there is something far more interesting at the center of the cloud.

What's at the center of the cloud you ask? Not so fast! Before we can find out the answer to that we first need to reunite the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise and have a lot of gratuitous character conflict. The reunion takes its time so that everyone can have their "moment," but those moments tend to be distracting and unnecessary. Did having McCoy (Deforest Kelley) dress like a hippie really move the story along, establish theme, or do anything? Did anyone believe that McCoy, the squarest man on the Enterprise, would ever let his beard grow that long? If that's not bad enough, Wise also focuses on new characters like Decker, the Enterprise's new captain, his former girlfriend Ilia, and their hackneyed, Airplane!-style romance.

Kirk (Shatner) fares much better, though his plotline still feels forced: he's now an admiral and, upset that he's not in command of his beloved ship anymore, uses the cloud crisis as an excuse to get it back. Decker, perhaps out of spite, stays on to make Kirk feel old by reminding him he doesn't know the new tech in the refitted Enterprise. It's nice that the film is realistic about the cast's age (a theme that will continue throughout the films), but the role of Decker should have been given to Spock (Leonard Nimoy), a normally central part of the Trek chemistry who in this film, doesn't even step foot on the Enterprise until the halfway point. It's is a shame because Spock's arc, as tossed off and convoluted as it is, is the only one that has anything to do with the cloud.

Okay, so Kirk and Co. finally get to the cloud and the film properly starts. It's clear that Wise wanted to make an smart, adult sci-fi film. Just look at the references: there are long, hypnotic 2001-esque shots of the Enterprise traversing the interior of the cloud and the alien ship hidden inside. We learn that (spoiler alert)  the giant spaceship at the center of the cloud was built by a mechanical race that views people as infestations, which is very Philip K. Dick, as is a fantastic sequence of Spock exploring the ship's memory banks. Later, one crew member is confronted by an artificial reconstruction of a lost love one a la Solaris. To top it all off we later learn that the ship is piloted by (seriously, spoilers) Voyager 6 (or V'GER), an old NASA satellite that has been supped up by the machine planet and, having presumably absorbed all knowledge in the universe, returned to meet its creator. The problem being that having been modified by a digital intelligence, V'GER can't accept that its creator might be biological and threatens to destroy all life on Earth if Kirk doesn't produce something its programing can accept.

This is all really, really cool stuff, Wise and the screenwriters were clearly up on all the hippest sci-fi of the day, but they completely fail to recreate the effect. Part of the issue is that in those long, exploration passages, Wise mistakes spectacle for content. The scenes inside the cloud are pretty and atmospheric as hell, but have nothing to do with the themes of the film and give us nothing to go on. 2001 was about the evolution of man being shepherded by people from "out there," and as mysterious and obtuse as that film is, Kubrick was pretty up front about that theme so that the audience has something to ponder while looking at all the weird stuff. But Star Trek: The Motion Picture doesn't do that. There are no hints, little conceptual cohesion and, until the last act, little sense of the intellectual exploration that is a cornerstone the Trek brand. By the time we get to all the cool stuff, we've frittered away the runtime on atmosphere and watching Kirk frump around having a sassy mid-life crisis (everything with Kirk is sassy). So all the interesting implications of the twists have about five minutes each to be explored before being solved in a quick, simplistic way, that conveniently disposes of some of those new characters we don't care about. 

As a Trek film, it's too all over the place, short changing the Kirk/Spock/McCoy relationship that's always been the heart of the Original Series in favor of new characters who don't really matter. As a piece of hard sci-fi, it's too thin and too long. Trekkies would eventually get good Trek films, but this isn't one of them. It's got great ideas, if only it used them.

Grade: C+

Trekkin' It directory:
The Motion Picture
Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan
The Search for Spock
The Voyage Home
The Final Frontier
The Undiscovered Country

Generations
First Contact
Insurrection
Nemesis

Star Trek '09
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis)