For Nerd Eyes Only

Gene Roddenberry may have created Star Trek, but in a way he was the show's greatest predator, and his ideas for Star Trek II (Kirk and Company travel back in time to the Kennedy assassination) may have been poison in celluloid form and symptomatic of a larger problem of Roddenberry's - namely, that in three short seasons he revisited some of the same recursive formulas - this time mimeographing the chemical composition of City on the Edge of Forever. When Harve Bennett was hired by Paramount to create a sequel out of the ashes of The Motion Picture, he conspired with Jack B. Sowards to write a script that was tailored together by director Nicholas Meyer into its present permutation. Roddenberry never agreed with Bennett's vision of the future - in a way, he birthed something and had it stripped from him as other people coaxed it along and nurtured it - but shedding old skin amounts to an unemotional process. An executive must have the fortitude to stop the guy in charge creatively from driving himself and others over the edge of a cliff, even if it is on a gilded road, and the simultaneous foresight to make the calculated risk of choosing a visionary to carry the franchise forward.

Star Trek Nemesis tried to sweep away some of the old talent in order to emulate the approach taken with The Wrath of Khan, but this time the stakes were a dying franchise. Berman was still on board, but John Logan ruddered the screenplay efforts, and Stuart Baird, a long time editor with Warner Bros., was assigned to direct the picture. But unlike Bennett, who treated Star Trek with the reverence it deserved and telegraphed it with his exhaustive consultation of the original series before work began, Baird had absolutely no pulse on The Next Generation. I am sometimes loathe to blame writers. This is a director's field, and in the hands of a bad director, the writer might not like the treatment given to their scripts anymore than we do.

But Nemesis sidestepped much of the character work that made Khan so good, supplanting Star Trek as a lame action vehicle for illogic and bad science. Thematically, it was a blank piece of paper with only the barest hint of an outline. Beyond Kirk's age, beyond the danger of receding into his house of antiques, the James Kirk of Star Trek II was the perfect compliment to his younger self: he was a man who always had an answer and who bent reality with unwavering intolerance for loss when domineered by an ostensibly impossible situation. When he is faced with a choice between losing his ship or losing his best friend, he finds that there are no rules he can break to emancipate himself of that situation.

It's culpable of Nemesis that the episode The Best of Both Worlds did a far better job in capturing what should have been one of the movie's main themes. If you remember back, Riker was too comfortable on the Enterprise and refused to assume the captain's chair of any other ship while savvier officers passed him by. Like any good story, he was eventually forced to come into conflict with his frailties and make the tough choices that few other hot shots could make. Why does Riker want the captaincy now? Who are these people and how did they get here? Following the Dominion War, Worf only seems like he's aboard because it's in Dorn's contract. Data's sacrifice is a noble gesture of humanity, but there is no bearing in what he has done since First Contact. When B4 is needed most to provide a contrast to Data, he is cast aside by the plot, and he is too much of an idiot to absorb anything that Data tells him: Data would have made an excellent teacher. Nemesis should have been a referendum to explore the changing lives of the crew in the fifteen years that they had been together. Instead, it amounted to a wasted opportunity. The best part of the movie comes in the dying moments. As Riker tries to recall his first meeting with Data, the camera zooms in on Picard, evoking a similar shot in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Picard is given a moment of introspection, but it does not last, and Riker's memory fails him. That's kind of how I felt about this film...everything forgotten.

One of the hardest things to do is to turn inward with introspection and question your liabilities because you might find that you are no longer needed - or worse, not good enough to rise to the occasion - and just like Roddenberry before him, I feel that his protegee Rick Berman did not recognize this. Elevating Braga to producer was a mistake - Braga was a competent boilerplate writer when he had the established crew of The Next Generation to work with, but he was limited. Roger Ebert in reviewing Nemesis said that, in some uncertain terms, Star Trek was tired, bloated, collapsing in on itself with its own mystique, lost in an infinite regression, and yet like a political campaign Berman forged ahead with four more years, twisting the knife through the heart of a dying franchise. Ten years earlier, Harve Bennett originally had eyes on doing a recast for the upcoming Star Trek VI that featured the crew in their academy days (presented in flashbacks so that it could feature Shatner and Company). Back then I think the idea was somewhat misguided because Bennett and Meyer were masters of their fate, and the risk of an academy treatment in the wrong context might have been averse to Star Trek's increasing popularity with the proverbial transference of the torch to the TNG crew imminent. In 2008 the time is not only right - it's the only way to revive Star Trek.

What strikes me most about JJ Abrams - and I suspect this is why he got the job - is that he has a panache for character work, a verve for humor, and a wild sense of sci-fi and mystery. Meyer brought a very practical and naval masterstroke to Star Trek, and though Roddenberry couldn't always see it, that evolution was as much in retrospect a celebration of Star Trek as it was an attempt to preserve it and move it forward. Abrams will return to the values of the original series. That it is a time travel plot is incidental. With his academy script, Bennett saw that it was necessary to contrast the old cast with the new cast in order to make the juxtaposition palpable. This time Nimoy represents in its totality the old arc, and it will form the basis of the film.

I don't think that roles should be proprietary. Fans may hold characters up to be icons - what they want to see is the old character, but they know that it would be treasonous to duplicate the performances. The benefit in bringing in a new actor is that he'll have a different take on the part. There was nothing in Shatner's acting ability that couldn't be surpassed (this isn't like recasting Brando's Corleone), and there are ways a new actor could play Kirk that weren't necessarily in Shatner's range, so I say that change is good. If Pine is trying to play the same Kirk, then it won't live up. But if it's an alteration of the character based on what the script calls for (and he has license to do this since it's a younger Kirk), then the alteration is warranted. It might be Kirk, but it's a different kind of Kirk, just like how Craig is a different kind of Bond with his own set of strengths and weaknesses.

Paramount is investing a lot into this project - $150 million, which is just about as much as any Star Trek film has grossed worldwide (although Star Trek is a breeding ground for merchandise, so there is a lot of revenue that is not factored in). Paramount has never even invested more than $50 million into a Star Trek film, but the price of creating a blockbuster has become expensive, and the awareness of the Star Trek brand is far reaching, so it's a matter of selling the film to the right people. This film is a new beginning, one that require neither a history book nor a tech manual. The danger in sci-fi is that it can be completely unrelatable. Showing the Enterprise built plate by plate by men with blow torches humanizes it a bit. Star Trek has always treated technology as something cold and technical, which is great for fans who love the mythology, but it's not so great for everybody else. I trust in the ability of Abrams to make something palatable for fans and newcomers. Nimoy seems to think that Abrams is on the right track too, and when it comes to Star Trek, I have always trusted his opinion. He has proved that he is not an apologist, which is what Star Trek needs: an honest look at itself.