Blogical Conclusion

ENTERPRISE REPRISE

The new ‘Star Trek’ is a typically anonymous modern-day sci-fi extravaganza, with only a token resemblance to the TV series – but it’s fun nonetheless.

JUN 21, 2009 – A LONG TIME AGO, IN A metaphorical galaxy far, far away, we gathered around our black-and-white television sets, every Sunday morning, for what was unquestionably the prime programming swatch of the week. This was when Sherlock Holmes, in the form of Jeremy Brett, would unearth scandals in Bohemia and grapple with speckled bands. This was when the great BBC Shakespeare adaptations would unfold, in unexpurgated one-hour installments spread out over weeks (or months, in the case of the young prince who just couldn’t make up his mind). All this seriousness would be leavened by a half-hour of classic cartoons, with tenacious tomcats untiringly on the tail of deviously slippery mice. And somewhere in between, we’d get beamed up to the final frontier, where no man – certainly no Indian television viewer – had gone before.

But even discounting the newness of the experience, Star Trek was a bona fide phenomenon. Even as the series took flight to all those exotic places filled with all those exotic people – never mind that the aliens looked disconcertingly similar to humans, save for a pointed ear here, a gnarly forehead there – it was grounded by a genuine desire to explore, not just space but also the ethical and social and moral realms of science fiction. The conceit of a race of highly evolved (and highly diverse) humans on a spaceship in the distant future allowed the series to pontificate – sometimes ponderously, but also entertainingly, sometimes even irreverently – on the desires and the dilemmas of humanity in the present day. As children, we may have delighted in the transporter beams and the phaser guns set to stun, but a distinctly grownup sensibility permeated through the proceedings.

The films, on the other hand, rarely managed to live up to the television episodes. You’d think that with the inflated budgets and the increased dimensions of the screen, the adventures of James T. Kirk and company would play out better than ever, but the features only proved that Star Trek was, at heart, a medium-budget television series. With a few exceptions – The Wrath of Khan, First Contact – the films seemed so weightless as to be made of interstellar vapour, the gently ruminative tone of the series (which was in tune with the great sci-fi films of the era, like Silent Running or The Man Who Fell to Earth) inevitably having given way to the rambunctious swashbuckling that, thanks to the unprecedented impact of Star Wars, became forever inextricable from sci-fi cinema.

On the big screen, therefore, there’d be a great deal of action-adventure plotting over the nefarious cloaking device of the Bird of Prey, the grasshopper-green Klingon warship, or the crew’s efforts to barrel through the Great Barrier in order to meet the Maker, but the philosophies came off as undercooked – token oblations to the original series – and worse, the Kirk-Spock centric narratives left the rest of the cast about as resonant as Vulcan emotion. “Bones” McCoy was reduced to comic relief, a reliable dispenser of crabby wisecracks, just as Uhura was downsized to a glorified receptionist, forever clutching at her headset and relaying information to her shipmates. Scotty was simply some sort of plumber-engineer, tinkering around the bowels of the Enterprise with tools as heavy as his accent, and Sulu, little more than an Oriental chauffeur, steering his milk-white master’s vehicle through uncharted terrains of the Milky Way.

On screen, these characters were lost in space – they truly belonged on television, where, over a stretch of episodes, they appeared to be an integral part of an A-list team, rather than instantly replaceable handymen. What the small screen lacked in terms of big effects, it compensated for with bigger character development and better plotlines – and subsequently, when the films began to yield diminishing returns at the box office, it was almost a relief. With further big-screen installments looking increasingly less likely, it appeared that Star Trek would finally be consigned, through reruns and renewed series, to its first and finest home: television. But Hollywood, of course, would sooner self-destruct than abandon attempts to resuscitate a franchise that can live long and prosper, and so we have a new a big-screen version, rather ambitiously titled… Star Trek.

The implication seems to be that it’s back to the basics, though nothing could be further from the truth. This handsome production is, every gleaming inch of it, a product of its pixelated era, a typically-today interbreeding of sci-fi spectacular and action-comedy. (I was especially tickled by the sly smile that spreads across Kirk as he accidentally cups Uhura’s breasts during a bar brawl. Somewhere, William Shatner is fisting the air that his successor, finally, is being allowed to boldly go where he never went before.) But unlike Casino Royale, which reignited and reinterpreted the Bond franchise by turning the guns-girls-gadgets formula on its head, Star Trek is content to coast along the least-resistance path of generic entertainment, whether or not the audience is the kind that wipes a silent tear when the older Spock assures the younger Kirk, “I have been and always shall be your friend.”

Whether it’s Scotty showing up in an unexpected fashion in a most unexpected location, or the planet Vulcan imploding into nothingness, or Kirk and Spock shockingly coming to blows on the Enterprise, the film has been shaped in that modern-day, hyper-edited, less-talk-more-action, please-all-audiences manner that replaces orneriness with ordinariness. Scotty could be just another comic-relief character, Vulcan just another eye-catching special effect, and Kirk and Spock could be any two headstrong individuals battling for control of a ship (it’s just that one of them happens to have funny eyebrows). This doesn’t make the reboot any less pleasing as popcorn fare. It’s just that you don’t have to be a fan to enjoy this Star Trek, which is possibly why it’s such an unqualified worldwide success. Besides, for those of a certain age who yearn for a certain vintage, I suppose there’s always television.

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