![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a better future
2013-May-19, Sunday 07:24 pmStar Trek is not Star Trek. It is now merely a space adventure franchise. Color me disappointed.
I was intending to boycott the new Star Trek movie altogether after my disappointment in the first film. I saw a documentary, though, that showed me the set of the new Enterprise engineering deck. It's not a Hollywood facade. They filmed at the National Ignition Facility where scientists are attempting to produce a viable fusion energy source. After learning that fact, I decided to see the movie at a cheap(er) matinee price. I enjoyed those scenes on the "engineering deck". I appreciated that they would swap the fictional warp core design of previous lore with an actual fusion energy source being explored today. The gesture is not enough to save the film from heavy criticism, though.
Roddenberry imagined a future in which people are better both individually and together in their culture. The episodes and the movies showed us our modern foibles. They showed us the benefits of overcoming our faults and the dangers of succumbing to them. The metaphors were obvious, and the better future was plainly evident. Humanity, as we could see there on our television screens, greatly benefited by overcoming our collective fears and biases of gender, skin color, and language. We braved the unknown, driven by the self-motivating need to learn more about the universe. In doing so, we also learned more about ourselves.
Gone are those days of Star Trek exploration and self-evaluation.
gender: The new Star Trek movies by J. J. Abrams actually backtrack on that original premise. As actress Felicia Day has noticed, strong female characters are strangely missing. Gone is the female first officer from the original Star Trek pilot. Gone is the female voice of the ship computer. Gone is the female nurse Christine Chapel, apparently already a casualty of the captain's reckless love life. Lieutenant Uhura is there mostly to justify Spock's humanity rather than to contribute her knowledge and opinions to the plot. The one opportunity she had to contribute something meaningful (while speaking Klingon) was quickly converted into a "damsel in distress" plot point instead.
race: Racially, the new movies suffer the same backtrack. In military council, the new movie offers a bunch of (mostly) white guys. The plot begins with a "disadvantaged" black man helping out the villain. The villain himself changed from the original dark-skinned superhuman from India into a pale superhuman from England. The Enterprise bridge is theoretically multicultural, but if they wanted to make the old story relevant to modern multicultural issues, then Chekhov should have been Pakistani, Sulu should have been Chinese, and Scotty should have been Brazilian. Any one of them should have been female. We know the audience can accept such changes: witness Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
orientation: Roddenberry promised us, back in 1987, that a gay character would appear in the new television series. He promised again, in 1991, that he would put a gay character onto the bridge of the USS Enterprise during the 5th season. Unfortunately, he died a few months afterwards. No studio has had the courage to fulfill his promise. Thanks to J. J. Abrams, we do see gay actor Zachary Quinto playing a major character on the bridge. But the absence of a gay character in this imagined world of tomorrow leaves a negative impression. The omission is a negative portrayal of future society since it means that homosexuality still is not the non-issue that we hope it to be eventually. The story lags behind our modern society, which is not where utopian storytelling should be.
So the new Star Trek, I've concluded, is not utopian. It's merely a sci-fi action franchise. Useful for profits; not so useful for teaching society that it can build a better future. The movie tried to use its last 60 seconds to provide a "moral to the story", but it was too little, too late. A few words at the end can't make this movie into Star Trek worthy of the Roddenberry memory. I won't be gifting my money to future films until they return to the storytelling of hope.
I was intending to boycott the new Star Trek movie altogether after my disappointment in the first film. I saw a documentary, though, that showed me the set of the new Enterprise engineering deck. It's not a Hollywood facade. They filmed at the National Ignition Facility where scientists are attempting to produce a viable fusion energy source. After learning that fact, I decided to see the movie at a cheap(er) matinee price. I enjoyed those scenes on the "engineering deck". I appreciated that they would swap the fictional warp core design of previous lore with an actual fusion energy source being explored today. The gesture is not enough to save the film from heavy criticism, though.
Roddenberry imagined a future in which people are better both individually and together in their culture. The episodes and the movies showed us our modern foibles. They showed us the benefits of overcoming our faults and the dangers of succumbing to them. The metaphors were obvious, and the better future was plainly evident. Humanity, as we could see there on our television screens, greatly benefited by overcoming our collective fears and biases of gender, skin color, and language. We braved the unknown, driven by the self-motivating need to learn more about the universe. In doing so, we also learned more about ourselves.
Gone are those days of Star Trek exploration and self-evaluation.
gender: The new Star Trek movies by J. J. Abrams actually backtrack on that original premise. As actress Felicia Day has noticed, strong female characters are strangely missing. Gone is the female first officer from the original Star Trek pilot. Gone is the female voice of the ship computer. Gone is the female nurse Christine Chapel, apparently already a casualty of the captain's reckless love life. Lieutenant Uhura is there mostly to justify Spock's humanity rather than to contribute her knowledge and opinions to the plot. The one opportunity she had to contribute something meaningful (while speaking Klingon) was quickly converted into a "damsel in distress" plot point instead.
race: Racially, the new movies suffer the same backtrack. In military council, the new movie offers a bunch of (mostly) white guys. The plot begins with a "disadvantaged" black man helping out the villain. The villain himself changed from the original dark-skinned superhuman from India into a pale superhuman from England. The Enterprise bridge is theoretically multicultural, but if they wanted to make the old story relevant to modern multicultural issues, then Chekhov should have been Pakistani, Sulu should have been Chinese, and Scotty should have been Brazilian. Any one of them should have been female. We know the audience can accept such changes: witness Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
orientation: Roddenberry promised us, back in 1987, that a gay character would appear in the new television series. He promised again, in 1991, that he would put a gay character onto the bridge of the USS Enterprise during the 5th season. Unfortunately, he died a few months afterwards. No studio has had the courage to fulfill his promise. Thanks to J. J. Abrams, we do see gay actor Zachary Quinto playing a major character on the bridge. But the absence of a gay character in this imagined world of tomorrow leaves a negative impression. The omission is a negative portrayal of future society since it means that homosexuality still is not the non-issue that we hope it to be eventually. The story lags behind our modern society, which is not where utopian storytelling should be.
So the new Star Trek, I've concluded, is not utopian. It's merely a sci-fi action franchise. Useful for profits; not so useful for teaching society that it can build a better future. The movie tried to use its last 60 seconds to provide a "moral to the story", but it was too little, too late. A few words at the end can't make this movie into Star Trek worthy of the Roddenberry memory. I won't be gifting my money to future films until they return to the storytelling of hope.