Star Trek: Revising the Future
A re-imagining that isn’t a reboot is tricky. Casino Royale did it by just refusing to worry about the question of exactly how the new Bond relates to the old Bonds. The Bond franchise has always done this, always avoiding getting hampered by the question. The relationship between the various Bonds has been winked at in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Die Another Day, but as a franchise, the policy has always been simple: Don’t worry about it.
Instead of fretting about continuity, the Bond films focus on getting people into the theater. Keeping Dame Judy Dench around as M is a smart choice not because it implies continuity in the re-imagining and not because it implies something about successive generations of British assassins called James Bond, but despite those things. She’s just good casting for the role, and would be right for Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace even if she hadn’t been in a Bond film before.
So why not keep her in the part — because the audience might get weird ideas that James Bond is a codename, like The Phantom? Don’t worry about it.
Star Trek’s doing something more complicated. This film transforms the Trek franchise from a long and crowded timeline into a Trek multiverse.
Some fans will speculate (i.e. worry) about what is and what isn’t a literal alteration in the on-screen universe. Which changes in the look of the Trek universe — like Starfleet monitor graphics and starship designs — belong to the revamp of the franchise and which belong to the change in the timeline? Is J.J. Abrams actually supposing that the bridge of the Enterprise looked like an Apple store before it looked like what we see on The Original Series? I doubt it. I, personally, think they’re just saying that Star Trek should present a good-looking future. To do that now, the future has to look different than it did (and could) in 1966.
I ask you, what’s more important: that Star Trek reassures you that it remembers every damn episode on every damn DVD or that Star Trek inspires us with a vision of the future in which we come together as a people to explore our galaxy and improve ourselves?
I think Trek’s optimistic vision is important, and the simple fact is that whomever’s in the audience for this new Trek movie is not going to be looking ahead at the future of Earth from 1966. If today’s audience sees the future that Trek postulated from 1966 (or 1987 or 1994 or 2001), it won’t feel like the future. The movie’s made when it’s made.
Plus, it can’t pay for itself in 2009 by selling tickets to the past. The thing has to open.
Starting with Star Trek IV: The One With The Whales, 20% of Trek movies have involved time travel. (The new movie dials that figure up to something like 27%.) Prior to this movie, though, we’ve always watched our heroes jaunt back and forth along a single timeline. In the new Star Trek picture, we’re seeing a complete POV shift from one timeline to another. Think of it as the omniscient narrator turning to look at another branch of the Star Trek multiverse, or at another draft of history. Or, just as good, think of it as us in the audience following our trusted friend, Old Spock, into a parallel universe and then staying behind if he returns to the universe of your Wrath of Khan and Next Generation DVDs. When you watch those DVDs, you’re peering across possibility at a parallel future.
Jumping to a new timeline gives the new guard wiggle room to revamp Star Trek without exactly rendering all those previous DVDs obsolete — they’re not even “classic” but alternate. They still exist, and so that whole parallel universe still exists (and is still as real as that imaginary future ever was). Unlike the reinvented universes of, say, Lost in Space or Planet of the Apes, though, the previous version and the new version still share a kind of common reality. That’s new.
More importantly, this POV shift means that, at last, Trek gets another chance to revise its visual vocabulary, as it did with The Motion Picture and Wrath of Khan, and then again with The Next Generation. Ever since The Next Generation, though, the Trek universe has only been making changes in its visual identity when those changes accompanied alterations in the fictional universe, too — things like technological leaps and uniform changes.
Consider, then, how much that franchise’s visual identity has been limited by what was affordable on television late in the 20th century. The Next Generation used lots of visual and narrative cheats to keep the action small, so that even when they built up to a big feature-film-budget action sequence in First Contact, wherein the heroic crew battles cybernetic zombies on the outside of a giant spaceship, the actual scene involved just a handful of guys on a small portion of the ship. Even if they’d made the action much bigger, and let it careen across the hull at high speed, featuring a CG horde of zombie cyborgs, it would have felt out of character. Look at Star Trek: Nemesis — an astronaut on a dune buggy could be great fun, but it didn’t feel like Trek did it?
Go back and look at the new Star Trek trailers and you’ll see the camera hardly ever sits still in those shots. Abrams like to angle his frames so they feel immediately energetic, and he likes lens flare in his effects shots, so they feel like they were photographed rather than painted. These views of San Francisco and battling starships are unlike traditional Trek shots, but they’re also good looking, futuristic, and bold. It is good for Star Trek to be these things. If a quantum POV shift and re-imagining is what it takes to revitalize the visual style of Star Trek, that’s fine with me.
Abrams also wants us to think that Starfleet ships double as the Federation’s Apple stores. So I want to see click-wheels on the armrests of the captain’s chair, dammit. I expect Spock and McCoy to beam down to alien planets with iCorders in hand.
In the new film, we get guys skydiving past a miles-long space-drill that’s cutting a planet apart, and then fist-fighting on the side of it. If the folks behind The Original Series thought they could’ve pulled that off on screen, I believe they would’ve given it a go. They didn’t let a TV budget deter them from Tholians and Gorn.
So, then. What’s supposed to be seen as a result of the change in production style and what’s supposed to be a result in the POV shift from one quantum universe to another? That is, what’s been changed by J.J. Abrams’ re-imagining and what’s been changed by time traveling space aliens? Don’t worry about it.
[All Star Trek movie images © Paramount Pictures.]
Good essay. I’d like to add that the whole lens-flare-in-the-effects-shot thing is pure Douglas Trumbull, who lent that particular signature to Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and, yes, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Homage? Or simply picking up on an excellent way to provide verisimilitude?
I think Roddenberry once said something to the tune of “One of these days, some kids are going to come along with fresh ideas and do Star Trek better than I ever have.” You know, I think he was right.
Succinctly put. Nice review of the design aspects of the movie. Wil Wheaton sent me here by the power of his twitter.
Hawesome.
I appreciate your thoughts on viewing continuity issues as parellel universes – it solves the problem while remaining distinctly plausible within the Star Trek franchise.
I know I’m going to understand this better when I’ve actually seen the movie myself. What I do know for sure at this moment: I’m getting really excited for the release!
So just do what I do, go see a movie for what it was intended to be. Reboots and re-imaginings aside, I’m a faithful trekker/trekkie and always will be, but I can’t wait to see the new film for what it’s going to be offered as. To anyone uptight about that, go jump off a planet driller.
Thanks @wilw for this awesome read.
Love this! Let it be people of the Trek. Change is needed for a future!
Thanks for coming by, y’all.
Douglas Trumbull is a major cinematographic influence on modern sci-fi, for sure, though the lens flares in 2001, Blade Runner, etc., are so cultivated that they’re almost painterly. Trumbull influence is in a mix with cinematographers like Jan De Bont (Die Hard) and Adrian Biddle (Aliens) whose work allowed artifacts of light into the shot for a sense of immediacy and realism. I don’t know if the people behind the new Star Trek are inspired by Trumbull per se, or a whole host of people whose works are being combined to mix tangibility with wonder.
We’ll see, I guess.
this is an awesome movie. saw it in Sydney the other day. you’re spot on in this article but one extra thing you get when you watch the film is how they bridge the old and the new with sound. all the bells and whistles from the old enterprise are present and the familiar sounds of tricorders & turbo lifts really is a powerful link to the original series.
Nice. Good review. Straight to the point. I’m an avid ST fan but am not freaked out by whether this film messes with official ST Canon. I just hope it is a fun time and that it revitalizes ST!
Thanks to WilW for sending me here via his twitter.
Great article. That’s exactly how I feel about the movie. I mention being “super-duper excited” whenever the trailers come on, and my dad and friends ho-hum me, saying it can’t be that good. It’s a Trek film…with modern day amazing graphics. Even at it’s worst it’s going to be awesome, because it’s Star Trek, damnit. Just enjoy it for what it is.
Completely off topic, but your About picture makes you look like Robert Downey Jr. Just letting you know.
I have seen the movie tonight and it was amazing. True to the Trek image and yet, updated. Fast-moving, lots of fun. The old time Trekkers (like me) have nothing to worry about.
Just an addition –
Spielberg puts lens flare in every single one of his films – a shot in which a character walks toward the light. He’s just in love with the look, and it’s become a signature.
I think that Abrams represents the same scaled down – that is, it’s there for a reason and pulls us into plausibility.
Also –
Great essay. I look forward to it. I remember in the Batman reboot, people were saying “didn’t the Joker kill his parents?”, which was a film invention. People are always looking for continuity, I guess.
I’m horrified when I attempt to forensically reconstruct the cries of outrage and entitlement that prompted this essay. “Some things aren’t exactly like they were?” “There’s just a bunch of stupid time travel?” “Now all the old movies are obselete??!”
But, to judge such talk by it’s effects, I did get an enjoyable-to-read work like yours out of it, so we can at least call it even. And certainly, knowing that some of the Trek Old Guard has resolved to be up in arms about “the bridge looking like an apple store” makes me slightly more likely to see the film.
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