Well-said. I can't recall the last time I really enjoyed a Hollywood summer flick the way I enjoyed this. But that's not enough for some people, I guess, though I haven't seen a lot of negativity about this movie, have you?AndyDursin wrote:
As I said before, for the TNG fans, or people who weren't so much into the old show, I can understand how they'd find it "silly". But this is more what STAR TREK is to me, than any of the franchise's later entries or shows.
IMO, Abrams "got it," and I also agree most of the people who don't care for it are hard-core Trekkies who wouldn't have accepted anything he would've done. Frankly, I think it's their loss. It may not be perfect, but this movie is exceptional for the type of entertainment that it is.
One thing I find truly silly is the Next Generation, a tedious and pretentious show, being seen as the successor to a show that was very accomplished at what it was trying to do--entertain.
I think the very last time I leafed through an issue of Cinefantastique was when they had an article calling NG "The best-written show on television." I laughed and put the mag back on the newsstand and that was it for that magazine. It expressed the mindset of a group of people I knew through someone else. Oddly enough, these same people were into "graphic novels" while I was reading these "novels" and "literature" and yet I was unsophisticated, I guess, because I wasn't reading the latest issue of Batman Gets Depressed or whatever.
You've touched on the fundamental issue for me. Something that wears a serious suit of clothes isn't serious, and that was NG for me--it said "Look how adult we are, we talk about serious issues!" And yet it addressed those issues in the most simplistic, self-congratualtory and tepid ways. When the show was good was when it was closest to the spirit of the original show. Of the episodes I saw, there were some that made me think the creative team had its act together--and in each case, the show was different, because it was not trying to be Serious Science Fiction, but a fun and exciting story, well-told. It doesn't have to be about endless action, it has to be about characters we enjoy going on adventures--sitting around in the captain's room blabbing about how we all have to get along isn't my idea of fun, and guess what? The makers of Star Trek aren't going to teach me anything I don't already know, and they're not going to make the world better, at least not by lecturing their audience (and merely reflecting back their own beliefs at them--that's what most "dangerous" television does, anyway, it's only "dangerous" and "challenging" to those the established audience looks down on, never to that audience).
The unpretentious fun of the original meant that when these characters got "serious" in certain episodes it broadened their experiences, made them better characters--it didn't just stop the adventures dead to blab for twenty minutes, or to engage in meetings and politics, like the episodes of the newer shows which made me bail, or try for deeeep characterizations which fail when you're talking about robot people. (Roddenberry and company were so fascinated with the Data guy becoming human--I couldn't give a damn about that, and it was not handled in the efficient, interesting way Spock's problems in the original show were, but in these endless soap opera theatrics about "What does it mean to be human????" Well, it doesn't mean you're a machine, and why are we even discussing this, unless you're trying to use it as a metaphor for how we treat some folks as 'non-people"--again, something the viewers of course don't do, so the whole Data thing is more self-congratulation, ahhhh, wouldn't the world be great if Those Other People (white guys...unlike the white guy trekkies) treated everyone the way *I* would treat Data? Wow, challenging stuff for the "best-written show on TV.)
And the fans lapped this stuff up, to the point where Paramount kept shoveling these shows on the air and into theaters, thinking there would be an audience. Sorry, but you don't assign Stuart Baird or a TV actor to direct your movie if you respect the property, you do so to crank out a replay of something that worked once decades ago and don't want anything too "original" happening.
Abrams is unashamed to make a FUN space adventure. I found the NG characters--ALL of them--such terrible bores. Could you imagine any of them in this current movie, doing those things? There is more humanity in the first meeting between McCoy and Kirk than in all of the NG movies, with their stiff characters spouting cardboard dialogue.
These are space movies about the fun of running around with ray guns while embodying basic moral values--love of planet/country, individual initiative, things the NG folks found appalling in their boring, inoffensive, One World worldview. That the aging fans have gobbled up three decades of deadly dull pretentious junk because Star Trek has a "philosophy" and is "about something" and don't you dare mess with "canon" Paramount! probably means Paramount didn't do this back in 1979, when they probably should have. Since then, what have we got that was entertaining--maybe a total of six hours or so of the original cast in three movies? The fans were so infatuated with the idea of the original cast--most of them poor actors--shuffling through their roles so we could pretend we could go home again that they couldn't see or wouldn't admit that the movies got away from the original show's formula, and the subsequent shows showed Roddenberry was really full of this "I'm creating a philosophy of the future!" silliness.
What's really silly is pretending a space show is really serious drama. That drained what was genuine and special about the original show and replaced it with pretentiousness and stiffness because no one wanted to admit these people were too old, and couldn't really act very well in the first place--UNLESS they were TV actors playing melodrama--and that we liked this show originally not because it preached Los Angeles New Age politics, but because there were hot alien chicks for Kirk to bed down when he wasn't blasting space monsters and outwitting devious villains with funky ears or goofy outfits.
There's nothing silly about admitting a show is "just" a fun adventure that entertained millions, without pretending to be more than "just" that.
I MUST have liked it--look at how much verbiage I've wasted on Star Trek, fer pete's sake!
