Tiberius is the worst
Okay, so I saw the new Star Trek yesterday. I dug it. It was much more of a “space opera” (read: Star Wars) than an exercise in science fiction (or it’s “imagination-based” brethren, SyFy). Growing up, I would watch episodes of Next Generation with my dad. We were never fanatics of the show, but we’d watch it whenever we happened to catch it. I enjoyed it plenty, and I’ve always been a fan of heady science fiction stuff dealing with the fine line between man and machine and the point at which mankind’s technology outstrips our own intelligence. I’ve read my fair share of Phillip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov books. But something about the Star Trek show always bothered me: it was lame.
The crew is essentially a group of peace ambassadors on a mission to make friendly first contact with new alien life forms. This sounds exciting, but in practice the show often seemed about as exciting as a town-hall meeting debating the construction of some municipal park or something. There’s a reason nobody would watch a TV show about foreign policy set in the present. It’s boring. Simply substituting the names of countries for those of fictional worlds actively lowers the stakes and personal investment in the proceedings. Not that this stuff can’t be exciting, it certainly can, but I always felt like Star Wars was about depicting incredible space-battles and watching the turning tides of war between entire planets, while Star Trek was people talking about amazing things without ever showing them in any interesting way.
Obviously it’s somewhat unfair to expect a TV show (especially one from the 60s, or late 80s, or whatever) to be able to compete on a week-by-week basis with the whiz-bang visuals a blockbuster movie is able to pull out, but that just furthers my point that a weekly television show isn’t (or at least wasn’t, I haven’t watched Battlestar Galactica, which is universally acclaimed, although I still maintain that title is awful) the best medium for these kind of entertainments. Books can dwell on space-politics and it can be fascinating (Dune springs to mind) but to me it seems that when I put up eight bucks for a movie about space battles there should be some, well… space battles. Some ships should blow up. It should be exciting. It should look good. There should be fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, monsters, chases, escapes, true love and miracles. Some enemies should become friends. Some friends should become enemies. On top of that, anything dealing with time travel or alternate universes is a bonus. And let me tell you, this movie delivered on all those fronts. So while this may not be “your father’s Star Trek,” it’s one that he could certainly get behind (I know mine did) and maybe your kids one day as well.
P.S. Was it just me or did that ice planet monster thing seem like it might have been a distant cousin to Clover?
Pretty good review, never thought of the old ST in the way you expressed it. (Never watched it much either.)