Deploy the Red Matter!

This past May, I was studying the night before my statistical geography exam. I was in the library around 8:30PM when I got a phone call from Martha. Sounding super excited, she invited me to come see the opening night of the new Star Trek movie at the Grand View. Naturally, being studious and diligent in my work, I declined her invitation. Naturally, Martha pressed me to come, despite my decline. Naturally, since I love Star Trek and Martha, I recanted and went to see Star Trek. Martha brought Dad and three of her friends, and even made me a little com-badge out of cardboard and tin foil.
This was the first of five times I saw Star Trek in theaters. Each time was interesting in different ways. The first time though, my mind was just blown. When I got home from the movie and went to sleep, I honestly couldn't. I stayed awake until 4AM processing what I had just seen. Unfortunately, this meant that I slept until fifteen minutes into my exam, and had to rush to class where the professor gave me a pitying laugh and said "you'll do fine." I am reminded of this incident now because I am, by pure chance, listening to the soundtrack of that movie on youtube for the first time since having seen it.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to spoil the plot of the movie in this entry. If you haven't seen the movie yet, I suggest you stop reading. It is well-worth seeing without knowing what will happen in the end, so if you have any interest at all in seeing it, stop reading. STOP READING! Hopefully, you've gotten the message by now, and I advise you to read on at your own risk.
While now I have seen the movie five times and have sufficiently deconstructed the plot and themes, when I first saw it I was simply amazed. J.J. Abrams, the movie's producer (director? I don't know - I'm too lazy to look at IMDB) who also came up with Lost and Alias, took the novel approach of revamping the series with the time-honored Trek theme of time-travel. To appeal to a wider audience, he brought in a fresh cast of good-looking and appealing actors to play the parts of the now-aged (and in the case of DeForest Kelly and James Doohan, deceased - may they rest in peace) original cast. I can understand the need to appeal to more than just Trekkies - the whole franchise has been on shakey ground forever, basically, because it appeals to a specific sort of person. This is not to say unmarried white men over 30 who are more likely to read Wired than Sports Illustrated. Rather, I think the average Trekkie is someone who reasonably expects that we - as humans - will outlast the doom-and-gloom of our modern era to enter a time when we can not only travel to the stars but flourish there, despite our species' hangups. I think it speaks volumes that there are so few of those wonderfully optimistic people in the world. Anyways, let me get to my first point, which is related to this topic. That is, that good movies don't necessarily translate into good sales, and good sales do not make for good movies necessarily. Let me compare movies to literature in this sense. Not many people read Shakespeare - and yes, I know anyone with a background in English literature will accost me for this, but I think it's true. Sure, we're all familiar with Shakespeare, but how many of us have actually read Romeo and Julius or Hamlet, much less Twelfth Night, Titus Andronicus or Henry V? Among the general public, not that many. Now consider how many have read a book by Dan Brown, or the Harry Potter series? Both are examples of well-crafted books, but books that are not exactly high literature. I would lay odds on that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wilde, Tolstoy, and Orwell would all have gladly taken Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling to task for making so much money on what is essentially literary pulp. Similarly, anyone who has ever been to an arthouse film (and while I admit I've only been to a few, I have found them to be generally boring) will recognize the differences between that genre and the typical Hollywood blockbuster. Capitalism doesn't leave a whole lot of room for the arts, after all, since what is good might not be popular, and what is popular might not be good, but what matters is what people will pay for, and that's what we get in bulk. I'm not saying there is a better system of promoting the arts, but that's just what I've noticed. So when J.J. Abrams decided to recast everyone in Star Trek (with the notable and well-played return of Leonard Nimoy as an older version of Spock, I think he was thinking of everyone who reads Sports Illustrated rather than anyone who reads Wired.
A good movie needs good actors, true, and I will admit that the cast of Star Trek was above par on the whole. Certainly, no one pissed me off (except possibly Chekov, who luckily only had a dozen or so lines and was put in largely so that they could say 'Hey, Chekov's here too!'). However, this is not what I want from a movie. That the actors will not piss me off should be a rule, and the exception should be that I should watch an actor (or actress, excuse me for being gendered) and say wow, that was a good performance. This didn't happen with Star Trek. This however, I chalk up to plot more than anything. Were the greatest actors and actresses of all time to have performed, there would only be so much that could be done to save the movie. This is a common problem in Hollywood, where big-name actors and actresses devote their name to a movie that really honestly truly sucks. Whose fault is it? Well, the screenwriter for one, the director two, and the actor three for not having enough sense to say 'send this to a B-lister'. Now, let me begin to analyze just what was wrong with Star Trek's plot.
First, time-travel. Time-travel is A-okay, so long as everything winds up fine in the end. Part way through Star Trek though, we witness the planet Vulcan being destroyed (the method in which it is destroyed I won't even begin to analyze - needless to say I suspect J.J. Abrams of badly copying George Lucas via the Death Star, but with less imagination and even less plausibility. The mechanical inaccuracies I shall leave to physicists). At the end of the movie, Vulcan stays destroyed. True, in an alternate universe, Vulcan still exists, but there, Romulus has been destroyed. Great! J.J. Abrams has just fucked up the entire stellar-political sphere of both the regular Star Trek universe and his own alternate one. Did he not realize that, without Vulcan, Star Fleet would surely collapse? It'd be like, if during the 19th century Europe had sunk into the ocean, and Western civilization had been represented only by the United States, Canada, Australia and the African and Asian colonies of Europe. We would be in a whole different boat. And of course, since Star Trek takes place before the events of any other canonical source (except Star Trek Enterprise), we are left without all of that to come in the future as well. How will Spock be reborn on Vulcan at the end of Star Trek III, or Lt. Valeris conspire against the Federation and Klingons in Star Trek VI? Without the Vulcans, the Federation is like a chair with only three legs - the Humans, the Andorians and the Tellerites, and since I bet none of you have ever heard of the last two, it goes to show that without the Vulcans, the Federation is pretty much up shit creek without a paddle. J.J. Abrams, you've killed the genre.
Of course, we can look to the regular universe, where Vulcan still exists, but here, Romulus doesn't exist (and by extension, Remus, since Romulus and Remus are twin planets and as their stellar system was destroyed in a cosmic event, both would have perished). Without the Romulan Star Empire (which, thanks to the events of Star Trek X, was just beginning to enter into detente with the Federation), the entire balance of stellar-political power shifts in the galaxy. Boo! It is disturbing. I am sure J.J. Abrams, though, can invent some novel, new universe where the Vulcan doesn't need to exist (or maybe he'll just say 'yes, Vulcan was destroyed, but enough Vulcans survived that it doesn't really matter), but that requires reinventing the wheel. It would've been easier just to pit James Kirk against an irascible and maniacal foe without the need to bring genocide into the equation. Which, by the way, was not particularly skillfully done. Nero, the baddy in Star Trek decides to destroy Vulcan because Spock didn't do enough to save Romulus in the original universe. However, is Nero the Emperor of the Romulan Star Empire, or the Praetor? Or even a powerful senator, an admiral or a commander of the Tal Shiar? No, he's the captain of a mining ship. And because Romulus gets blown to bits, he goes a bit gaga, falls through a black hole, and goes on a 25-year quest for vengeance against the entire Vulcan people. I can't even think of a good parallel for this situation. It just isn't plausible. It's like James Kirk fighting John Q. Postal Worker. Worse, John Q. Assistant to the Secretary of the Cousin of the Sister of the Postal Worker's Next Door Neighbor. Maybe J.J. Abrams was trying to tug at our heartstrings by having us 'relate' to Nero, but c'mon! No one can relate to genocide on that scale, and even if one could, the shock of it would be maddening. It'd be like if the Earth were destroyed, and the only people to survive were the four guys up in the International Space Station. They would envy the dead.
So, I've already confronted J.J. Abrams for his cast and his major plot hole. However, overall, the dialog must be addressed next. Good dialog can carry even the shittiest of plots. Look at Monty Python. Not to say they had shitty plots, but the plot was barely there. That's because it barely needed to be there. They were funny because the dialog was good (and because John Cleese is a master of funny walks). J.J. Abrams made the classic mistake of trying to integrate humor, action and emotion into a movie. Like Israel being a democratic, unified, Jewish state, you can only have two of the three. You can have emotion and action - Children of Men, for instance. You can have emotion and humor - Four Weddings and a Funeral. You can have action and humor - Hot Fuzz. You can't have all three, and when you put them all together, the movie collapses under the weight of it all. This is what happened in Star Trek. Arguably, Peter Jackson tried the same thing with the Lord of the Rings movies, but he had the advantage of having three movies over which to disperse these three elements, and he also used humor sparingly, and never in direct combination with action or emotion. J.J. Abrams didn't take this advice to heart. For instance, right after the destruction of Vulcan - which would probably have put everyone on the Enterprise into a state of shock ranging from upsetting to debilitating - Abrams has Spock making witty retorts to Kirk, and Kirk playing around like that the loveable class clown in high school. Not believable, and quite frankly sophomoric. Spock would probably have gone insane, killed Kirk in a single blow, forcing McCoy to euthanize him out of sympathy, and then Sulu would be running the ship, who himself would be traumatized at the events that had just transpired. That doesn't make for good theater, which again relates to the fact that J.J. Abrams shouldn't have blown up Vulcan. If you can't scale up the drama with the scaling up of the plot, DON'T DO IT IN THE FIRST PLACE!
It's late, and I have to sleep, so I'll just casually mention my disapproval in the way older Spock was introduced, my disapproval of a romance between Uhura and Spock, and my disapproval that Scotty, Chekov and Sulu were even in this movie (they were treated like supernumeraries when they should've been principals). To end, I too could dump several million dollars into a blender and get you a movie like Star Trek, but I could also have taken a bit of thought, a bit more appreciation for the past and future, and maybe wound up with something else. I certainly expected J.J. Abrams, a man whose choice of work centers around such creations, to have done so. Maybe next time. Until then, live long, prosper, and keep on hanging and banging.