Making Star Trek Great Again

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek, I would like to answer the question that I have been asked 6342 times since July 21; what did you think of the new movie? Here is my answer:

The second J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie, Into Darkness, was a disappointment. It felt like Star Trek window dressing rather than a real journey.

So my expectations for this year’s movie, on the occasion of Star Trek’s fiftieth anniversary, were low. It was good that Simon Pegg was writing, but the previews featured lots of action and little that felt like Trek. And motorcycles? I was not optimistic.

I saw the movie the day before the official opening. I was pleasantly surprised and pleased. This is by far the best of the three rebooted Star Trek films. This film gets back to what makes Trek great. It affirms the values and ideas that are at Trek’s core. It is not perfect, but it is far better than its predecessor and the first reboot, Star Trek 2009(Star Trek XI).

Warning: There are spoilers beyond this point. I am going to discuss the film as if you have seen it, read about it, or are otherwise knowledgeable about its plot, characters, themes, and issues. If you haven’t seen the film and don’t want to learn specific details, stop here and read this later.

This is an exploration film. This is a film that embraces the reality of a long-term deep space mission and the idea (and ideal) of boldly going where no one has gone before. This is a film that clearly states that, even though there are enemies, bad guys, and people who would do us harm, we must continue to be our best selves and live by our highest ideals. In this movie (unlike in the prior two), our heroes go high even when the villains go low.

This film celebrates the Vulcan concept of I.D.I.C: Infinite diversity in infinite combinations. The fact that the crew of the Enterprise, Starfleet, and the Federation represent a wide variety of ethnicities, species, and differences living in harmony is an affirmation of Gene Roddenberry’s vision. We don’t point out this diversity. It is not special. We see Sulu’s husband and daughter, but there isn’t a moment of pause to make a statement. The statement is made by the simplicity and lack of attention. It isn’t a big deal – it is our future reality.  

Jaylah, our guest character, is never a romantic or sexual figure. She is a tinkerer and fighter. The role could have been male and the story would work, but it was not done that way and I applaud the production team for this choice. Uhura and several other female characters are featured in a way that we have not seen in prior films as well. The film barely passes the Bechtel test, but it certainly acknowledges its spirit. I would have loved if the main villain had been female. That would have worked, too.

The plot is convoluted and sometimes difficult to follow, even for a seasoned Trek fan.  However, it is easy to follow the pairs of characters as they work to find each other when stranded on the planet. It is the technical details that trip us up: who is Krall? Where did he come from? How does he control his swarm of small ships? Why has he been on this planet for so long? Why is the object that Kirk was trying to give as a peace token so important to him? What is that object and what is its power? We do get answers to most of these, but they come very late and very quickly and it took me a while to sort them out. However, unlike the prior two films, the story eventually makes sense and there is no magic blood or super red matter weapon short cut plot device to make things work. The plot functions, but the gears grind at times.

Ultimately, Star Trek Beyond is a fight between those who would embrace modernity, diversity, exploration, and science and those who look nostalgically at a violent and provincial past. It is a battle against a villain who insists that the struggle against enemies, even if we have to invent them, is what makes us powerful and great. It is about what happens to people when their highest value is fear of the enemy. Those who follow such fear mongering leaders are like the mindless worker bees who swarm the Enterprise and destroy it. Krall’s transformation makes a visual statement: fear disfigures us, and hate corrupts us; they turn us from human beings into monsters. No statement could be more true to Star Trek.

Yes, the film was full of wonderful references to past Treks. There were little buried treasures for us Trekkers: the reference to Adonis’s “giant green space hand” which captures the ship in the original series, the idea that the missions are becoming “episodic,” and several wonderful acknowledgments of the most recent television series: Enterprise.

I must admit getting a little choked up at the lovely tribute to Leonard Nimoy through the photo of the original crew. The toast to “absent friends” has been made in several other Trek episodes and it was particularly poignant when the shot that followed was of the late Anton Yelchin, so horribly taken too soon.

This Trek grew from its roots. It didn’t get stuck in them. This Trek stood on its own and added to the wealth, rather than simply retreading. Like Kirk and Spock at the end of this picture, Star Trek Beyond affirms the optimistic and humanistic ideals that are the undergirding principles of Star Trek.

Now, let’s hope the new TV show can do even better!