Operation: Annihilate!

There haven't been many bad reviews of Star Trek ouside of the New Yorker, and there probably shouldn't be. However, it is significantly flawed. There's a fundamental incoherence to the whole thing that can be seen on all levels of the film, starting with the narrative structure.

It's fine to reboot the series by essentially wiping the slate clean. No one's quibbling with that, but I couldn't help but wonder what hardcore Trekkies thought about the annihilation of Vulcan. It's sort of like writing a prequel to WWII where Italy is wiped off the face of the Earth. What actually came to mind when I was watching the film was the end of Newhart. By establishing this alternate Star Trek universe, you jumpstart the next phase of the franchise, yes, but you also diminish everything before it. Realizing that the events of the original Star Trek series and movies never happened is just as unsatisfying as it was for Robert Hartley to have dreamed everything that happened to him at that inn in Vermont.

Leonard Nimoy's scenes were some of the best things about the movie, but to also assign him the matchmaking task of seeding Kirk and Spock's friendship was overkill. The plot with Nero was enough. If Kirk and Spock are friends only because future Spock intervened, that sort of puts a damper on the whole thing, dontcha think?

The action sequences were well-conceived, but as with Mission: Impossible III, poorly filmed. Abrams dearly loves to shake the frame to convey jarring action, but he relies too heavily on the gag. For the most part, the camera is too close to give a proper sense of scale or even to convey what's really going on. On TV, closeups on actors' faces are par for the course, but on film, it's claustrophobic and an ill-advised use of the real estate, which brings me to the lens flares.

Yikes. Where do you start with that? They were in every scene. And when they weren't in a shot (which was rare), there was something else obstructing our view of the characters. When great action directors like John McTiernan use lens flares, it conveys a sense of scale for the events. It appears like there's more going on than what the camera can capture. Abrams said he also wanted the flares to convey that the future was just 'so bright'. Unfortunately, what you end up with is a sense that the crew is in an unsafe working environment that could end up leaving them blinded. There are so many flares of light that you grow accustomed to the characters' faces getting regularly obscured, which is a shame because there were some terrific performances underneath all that excessive light.

Actually, the whole film feels like that. It seems like underneath all its excesses, there's a pretty decent Star Trek buried in there.

The Little Engine That Could

You can't help but dig out The Transformed Man after listening to all those old Nimoy records, and on Star Trek Eve, I think it's appropriate to dwell for a moment on poor, misunderstood William Shatner.

Gene Roddenberry may have created the Star Trek universe, but I think it's safe to say that the whole kit and caboodle would've never gotten off the ground without Shatner. If it weren't for his masterful creation of the James T. Kirk character, there's precious little chance that the collection of potboiler scripts and papier-mâché sets that made up the original series would've inspired generations of storytelling.

The Transformed Man is as roundly parodied as Shatner's Kirk. While nowhere near as brilliant as his TV work, the album is well worth a listen, and I confess to finding parts of it downright addictive. The chorus of 'Mr. Tambourine Man' is hypnotic, and Shatner's over-the-top reading of Dylan's lyric is captivating, regardless of your view of its quality. It's easy to turn off bad music, but it's next to impossible to turn off Shatner once he gets going. He's just too magnetic.

The rough concept of the album is that of an acid trip. The 'man' gets transformed by drugs, and most of the album is Shatner reading a classic verse next to a contemporary lyric. The entire track is 'Theme From Cyrano/Mr. Tambourine Man'. The first part is Cyrano's monologue about creating art without a patron, "I prefer to sing, to laugh, to dream, to travel light in my own way to see things as they are, and speak out without fear, to cock my hat at any angle that I choose." The second is Dylan's plea for an escape, "cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it." The connection is loose enough to work, much in the same way that Shatner's juxtaposition of 'To be or not to be' with 'When I was 17, it was a very good year' does. The point of the album isn't to deliver hall of fame versions of Shakespeare or to commit brilliant textual insights to vinyl. Instead, it's a kind of performance art that's well thought-out and well-intentioned.

But as with his performance as Kirk, the parody of Shatner's readings are more well-known than the actual thing. The halting speech of Jim Carrey's Kirk is rarely glimpsed in those early episodes. Kirk is mostly seen as a principled and extremely competent captain of a ship, concerned with the safety of his crew first and his mission second. He's often got a wry grin on his face, and most of all, he's gorgeous to look at, a golden god leading his rainbow-colored crew on mundane scientific missions that have a tendency to go seriously awry. That Shatner was able to make all of that work as Grade A entertainment is a minor miracle of the stage. Put a lesser actor in there, and you'd end up with a couple episodes of a show that NBC cancels in the fall of 1966. There'd be no movies, no Next Generation, no Klingon Language Institute.

In watching the original series, the comparison that comes to mind is actually Russell Crowe's Jack Aubrey. Aubrey lives in the very real world of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars, and Kirk lives in the high camp of 1960's sci-fi. But the same sense of power and authority that Crowe invests in Aubrey is present in Shatner's Kirk. They both have a wink in their eye which evaporates at the slightest sign of insubordination.

Now, I'm not saying that there's nothing to lampoon in Shatner's work. I'm just saying that the parodies have become better known than the actual work, which would be beyond most actors. Take that quintessential Shatner moment, when Khan maroons him on Regula. Shatner's howl starts in his toes, moves up his quivering body and then explodes from his mouth: "KHAAAAAAAAN!"

But it's all a put-on. He's screaming for Khan's benefit, knowing full well that he's not marooned at all. It's a performance within a performance. That scream is all most people remember though, which is sort of like remembering the cheese and forgetting about the burger.

Mr. Spock's Music From Outer Space

The Star Trek prequel has me digging into those old albums Leonard Nimoy recorded as tie-ins to the original series. Why doesn't stuff like that happen these days? It'd sort of be the equivalent of Andy Bernard releasing an album of his 'A Cappella Favorites' (which, btw, he should totally do).

Even though the first album is titled Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock's Music From Outer Space, the only persona on the album is Spock, and whether it's intentional or not, it's almost a creditable rock opera. From the back jacket:

LEONARD NIMOY...portrays Mr. Spock, the science officer and first officer on the U.S.S. "ENTERPRISE," seen traveling through the galaxies on "STAR TREK" Nimoy is an extremely versatile actor, having appeared in at least 100 TV shows, a number of major motion pictures and stage productions. He has long enjoyed music and his taste varies from Bach to Beatles. A year ago he made his singing debut in a stage production of "Irma La Douce" with Juliet Prowse - until that time his singing had been limited to the shower and to parties where he accompanied himself on folk guitar. When approached to do an album of songs and readings for Dot, Nimoy welcomed the opportunity of presenting Mr. Spock's debut in the world of music.

That doesn't quite prepare you for what ensues, which is mainly a couple of show tunes and spoken word pieces among loads of tacky instrumentals. After a rock version of the Star Trek theme, Spock delivers a monologue about being alien. A line like "so much like you, and yet...so unalike" is only the windup for this doozy:

Am I the you before,
the you you were
when your world was new?
Or am I the you
that you will be tomorrow

He goes on about his home planet and having "no heart or feelings", climaxing with the sentiment that "Some may envy me, but I pay a price to be from human feelings free." Not only does he get his Yoda on a decade before Empire with that line, but Spock also establishes his isolation, which is the main ingredient in any decent rock opera. Whether you're deaf, dumb, and blind, or half-Vulcan, you've gotta be plenty alienated to hold down an entire album's worth of material! A little self-pity helps too, which is probably why on the next track Spock sings "Where Is Love?" from Oliver!.

Spock is half-human, after all. Giving voice to his emotional side through song, and his logical side through spoken word makes complete sense. Plus, the lyrical connection is actually spot-on. The song reinforces the sense of distance from his home planet when he sings, "Must I travel far and wide? 'Til I am beside the someone who I can mean something to...Where is love?"

After two more musical interludes, Side A closes with another spoken word piece, "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Earth". Spock asks us to think about aliens on other planets looking at Earth the way that we look at the stars and mocks the notion of stars falling on Alabama as 'most illogical'.

Side B kicks off somewhat inexplicably with the Mission: Impossible theme: Is humanity being less self-absorbed the impossibility? Is it impossible to think that Spock could ever be at home among Earthlings? The next track, Kurt Weill's "Lost In the Stars", brilliantly reinforces the confusion with its sublime lyrics about God forgetting about the Earth. Again, through song, Spock gets at a deeper truth which is reflected in the song's ambiguity. Whether God has truly forgotten about us or not, we all are essentially "lost out here in the stars". With God out of the picture, that leaves our fates up to us, and that's the dilemma Spock contemplates with his last two tracks.

He addresses the rest of the album squarely at Earthlings in the grand old sci-fi tradition of films like The Day The Earth Stood Still, which are basically just riffs on Scrooge being shown his own grave. Instead of a ghost, we get an alien, and there's no doubt that this is only a future that 'May' be, rather than 'Will' be. Our own annihilation hinges on the choices we make, as made explicit in the song "You Are Not Alone", which is about how humans will react to meeting aliens:

What will you do when you meet them?
Will you greet them or turn them away?
Will you show them how to run a world?
Will you teach them War?
Will you teach them Hate?

You've got to hear the swell on the word 'Hate' to believe it.

And if that song weren't obvious enough, the album concludes with a cautionary tale, "A Visit to a Sad Planet", in the form of an entry from Spock's journal as first mate. The Sad Planet is (what else?) Earth, and it's been ruined because humanity "were never satisfied...they wanted more...they wanted everything."

These spin-off albums are actually a lot like the original series, in that they are so easy to dismiss as campy, B-grade products. However, there's enough of a genuine conceptual backbone to the projects to make them interesting, and if listening to these old chestnuts again doesn't get you pumped for J.J. Abrams' take on 60's high kitsch, I don't know what will!

Well, except for maybe the trailer...