Like a lot of folks, I’ll likely see Star Trek: The New Hotness this weekend. I skipped the last 2 ST movies (I never even rented them) due to a lack of interest that bordered on disdain; I don’t know if it was the fact that the Next Generation characters had been played out or if it was just the lifeless and automatic nature of the storylines I gleaned from the ads and reviews, but I barely noticed these movies existed. When a kid I’d been really excited by Star Trek: The Motion Picture and its first three or four sequels, and I recall getting a bit jazzed when they combined the NG cast with the TOS cast for Generations, but after that it gets cloudy. The problem I think is simple enough: If you’re not willing to take any real chances with a universe, if you’re not willing to kill off characters and shift political realities – if you’re not willing to mess with the basic infrastructure of a universe – it gets dull. No matter how inventive the story is, we all know every movie ends with everything status-quo, and that gets dull.
Star Trek II through IV managed to escape this, I think, via Spock’s death and eventual resurrection. Having Spock die was unsettling, having him come back as a decidedly changed man was unsettling, and unsettling is good for stories.
Anyway, we’ll see what JJ has done with this storied franchise. I’m interested in how he handles the tech stuff, because some parts of Start Trek have not aged well. Sure, beaming up is still cool, ships hurtling through space remain beyond our reach, and phasers still have that tang of futurism on them, but other things are hit-and-miss: The Communicator, for instance. Sure, the thing can put you in touch with your ship light years away, instantly, apparently without network outages, but the Communicator would fail if introduced to the market today. A single-purpose speech device that does nothing else? The iPhone would eat it alive. Maybe if combined with the Tricorder – and one wonders why no one ever thought to suggest this back in 1966 – there’d be a chance, since apparently the tricorder can be rejiggered in a variety of ways to do almost anything.
One thing I’m still waiting for, of course, is the replicator. Although the day I can just keep ordering Scotch from the microwave without having to get up from my chair is probably the last day you see me. Some folks might get lost in the Holodeck, but I will be lost to an endless supply of consumables, limited only by imagination. Monkey-flavored beer? Why not. The fact that it always seemed like we’re supposed to be blown away by the warp drive and the beam-me-down stuff while taking the replicator in stride is weird anyway. The replicator would solve world hunger and any other shortage problem, immediately. Gold would be worth about a penny a pound and the world economy would collapse, but we’d all be fat on Twinkies and Root Beer. Assuming you can afford a replicator, which would probably cost somewhere around forty or fifty trillions dollars apiece.
But I digress.
Updating a story like Star Trek so that it seems like science fiction again to a modern audience is tricky. On the one hand you don’t want to step on all the things that people love about it; on the other you’d got to clear away some of that 1960s and 1980s gunk that’s cluttering everything up. I’m glad to hear the rumor that they’re keeping the miniskirts, although that maybe doesn’t fall under the category of technology. I will also miss Shatner’s legendary. Speech. . .patterns, and hope the new guy doesn’t try to imitate them too much, if at all, but again, maybe that doesn’t have anything to do with SF. Unless a Romulan Brain Worm infestation is revealed as the source of Kirk’s speech impediment. Which would rawk.