May 9, 2009 | The Star Trek Movie and Logic
Topics: Movies, Reviews, Star Trek | Tags:
Yes, I finally broke down and saw the new Star Trek movie. The movie was, with few exceptions, awesome. The exception I take issue with is the deus ex machina of “time travel,” which bugs me to no end as simply its implementation in the movie is utterly lazy.
For those of us that (maybe sadly) are familiar with Trek in all its various incarnations, time travel is easily one of the most over-used and abused plot devices ever used in the 40+ year history of the franchise. It is easily the second worst plot device in the history of science fiction, if used incorrectly—as is the case, most of the time. I’m not big on time travel itself, unless there are strictures on how it can be used.
For instance, the short-lived series Odyssey 5 (created by Manny Coto) that aired a few years ago employed time travel. However, physical time travel was noted as not being possible, but the transference of memories was possible. As such, the five survivors of the space shuttle Odyssey (who had witnessed the destruction of Earth by an enemy of a technological nature, known only as the “Synthetics”) were sent back in time five years into the past. They only had the memories, which were essentially downloaded into their bodies as they were five years before.
Another notable instance is in the show Quantum Leap, when Sam Beckett jumps randomly throughout time. However, the time travel is related to fixing what once went wrong in people’s lives, and was otherwise uncontrollable. Further, the time jumps only occurred during Beckett’s lifetime, with maybe one notable exception if memory serves (Beckett jumps into his great grandfather, who served in the Civil War).
And to go back to an Irwin Allen production of the 60s, the short-lived series Time Tunnel focused on two people lost in a swirl of “past and future ages,” but their travels were erratic as the U.S. hasn’t a clue on how to return the two travelers to their own time.
What I am getting at is this: when you travel in time and fubar something, you can go back and prevent an event from occurring, assuming the following two conditions.
- You have the means available at your disposal.
- There are no rules or strictures to time travel that prohibit it.
Sadly, the universe of Star Trek has already established that both of the above are true: timelines can be restored, whether it is some random quantum anomaly of the week, the Guardian of Forever, or simply doing a “time warp” around the sun. And “Spock Prime” knows how to do two of the three! Why bother to restore Vulcan the hard way when you can restore it with a quick hop and skip into the good ole Guardian? Eh?
If you don’t think about time travel all that much, aren’t much into the Trek canon (either on a limited or expert, die-hard Trekkie basis), and if you don’t think that deeply about the movie long after you’ve seen it, then you’re in for a treat—ignorance is truly bliss. The movie is a good popcorn flick. The movie is well cast, although I will say that Chris Pine reminds me of a younger Ben Browder, and may have watched a lot of Ben Browder’s performance on Farscape in preparation of the movie (so as to differentiate himself from WIlliam Fucking Shatner).
There are a few issues I have with the movie. One is the engineering room, which looks like a contemporary processing plant for biochemicals, nuclear reactors, or something along those lines. This is something you’d expect to see on Battlestar Galactica, not Star Trek—particularly in stark contrast to the Apple-inspired interiors of the bridge and other areas of the good ole Enterprise.
The second is the design of the ship, which doesn’t turn me on at all. There was very little wrong with the Enterprise-A version of the ship that was seen in the movies! That ship was beautiful. You could smooth a few lines out here and there, sure, and add the rotating phaser cannons but… never mind. Not worth going into, since I’m entering the anal Trekkie zone, and that’s not where I want to head. It’s done. Ain’t gonna change a thing.
Despite the above logic problem and the two issues I’ve mentioned with aesthetics, I’m very happy that J.J. Abrams and his cohorts were able to reboot the dying Trek franchise from the pathetic Rick Berman and Brannon Braga years. Overall, the film looks great, is cast very well, had a coherent plot, and it reminds me about the best parts of Star Trek—which have nothing to do with technobabble, talking heads, or political correctness. I do understand why they used the time travel shtick here with old Spock, and that was in an attempt to get most who knew of the old Star Trek shows into the movie theater seats… and that’s fine, I understand that, still I wish they threw in some indication that time travel to fix the timeline was impossible. That was not done here, and would have greatly aided the story from the logic standpoint for those who mulled over the aforementioned shtick.
TwitRSS
