The Trek Movies: Best to Worst, pt. 2

I was talking with a friend earlier about a different friend of mine who has hated every Legion of Superheroes incarnation since the 70s, yet he's been reading them since the 70s. Sure, you could say "He's a collector," but he's not: he buys them and then loses them. This is not rational behavior. But we are rarely rational when it comes to things we hate - or things we love, I guess. Hate or love, it could be that there's comfort in retreading the same ground. Maybe this behavior is imprinted on our psyches from pre-verbal history. 

Whatever the reason, I'm usually in the why-hatewatch camp, but I give myself an eternal exception when it comes to Trek. My Trekrage is just another facet of my overall Trek fandom. It's fun to hate the Trek I hate and to tell anyone who will listen why. I learn as much about what I love about Trek when I see it done badly - or what doesn't appeal to me, I should say, less a statement of being done badly and more Here's-how-they-got-Trek-wrong nitpicking - as I do when I see it done well. 

With that in mind, let's jump into the rest of the Bigscreen Treks.

8.

1989

A conspicuous figure from Spock's past re-appears and overwhelms the Enterprise on a mad mission to free God from behind a Great Barrier at the heart of the Milky Way, previously undisclosed and different from the other Great Barriers we've seen. When they get there, God's just some jerk. A couple of photon torpedoes and off they go. (Darmok voice) Kirk, Spock, and Bones and "Row Row Row Your Boat" at Yosemite.

If The Motion Picture is the TOS series finale that we never got, The Final Frontier is the bloated mash-up of "By Any other Name" and "This Side of Paradise" that we really never needed. With fandancing and a little (but nowhere near enough) "Way to Eden" thrown in.

Gene Roddenberry (according to Susan Sackett in her Trek memoir) didn't participate much in the making of the film. "More than anything, it was the story that distressed him. His own script ("The God Thing") had been turned down by the studio years before, and he was still smarting from that rejection. He felt that Trek V did a much poorer job of portraying an encounter with God than his own story * that it was less imaginative, limited in scope and depth. (...) He found the raw footage so depressing that he stopped attending screenings."

* Also, 100% less nude-oil-wrestling.

As Nimoy put it sympathetically in I Am Spock, Bill was riding a bad script. Not much you can do when that's the case except get a better one, which is not always possible.

9.

2016

A mutated Starfleet crew from the past returns and destroys the Enterprise. Kirk and Spock must shake off their respective ennui and stop them from taking over the Yorktown, a massive space station, and using it destroy the rest of the Federation.

I don't have much to say about this one. I don't like it much, but it's just kind of there. I have in theory no qualms with Trek going its own way, I just don't know who this movie was meant to satisfy. To bring in new fans? Some international marketing gamble? Kids? Teens? Adults on dates? Adults by themselves? This last one, maybe, I could see, but surely this is not an effective use of resources, is it? It sure wasn't what the franchise needed in 2016. 

Not that I know what it needs. It must be an annoying job, dealing with the studio and with Trek fans like me, or Trek fans like anyone. But hey: we all have annoying jobs. The only thing anyone should expect from Star Trek is an enjoyable Star Trek movie. Here we have lots of wigs, Idris Elba at his mumbliest, big CGI chases, and warmed-over plots and arcs everywhere you look. Some of it might be fun, but you can get it anywhere. (The wigs are fantastic, though. I mean this sincerely. A proper blog would give you screencaps here to demonstrate this, but alas, I disappoint you.)

10.

2013

When dark secrets from the past and present force the Enterprise to defy Starfleet Command, Kirk must sacrifice himself to save his ship and his crew. He's brought back to life with Khan's magic hybrid blood.

I remember the bad reviews this got when it came out and thinking meh, it wasn't so bad. Had I never sat down and watched it a few more times, I might still think that. But each subsequent viewing revealed its contrivances.

Here's where the Kelvin timeline went fatally off course and never got back onto it. It's not that the movie itself is specifically responsible for it; it's more what it represents. I mean, for starters, they had a big hit with the reboot, then took six years off to come out with this one. I don't care about any of the various reasons for this; it just never should have happened. Secondly, the overall plan of Abrams (such as he had one) was to flesh out the rest of the timeline in a variety of tie-in media, particularly the comics featuring the Lens Flare Trek published by IDW which would revisit each and every episode of TOS. Good idea - but hampered terribly by various factions and never properly realized. (I read most of them. See? Trekrage gluttony.)

Third, this film is a collection of bad ideas, from conception ("let's sort of remake Wrath of Khan! But pointlessly! And pretend these new actors with whom the audience has no decades-long investment can just allude to harder-won investments by the original cast and it'll have the same impact.") to execution. It looks and sounds fine - production design is rarely Trek's weak spot - but there's just nothing to hang it on. A story where Starfleet is making illegal weapons and sowing chaos and resurrecting genetically-advanced "supermen" who somehow can create weapons superior to those of people with technology centuries-superior to them is just neither Trek nor edgy. And a weird step for people trying to rekindle the energy of a well-received reboot six years in the past at the time of its release.  

As is the inversion of the whole "KHAAAN!" and death/ resurrection.

They could've had something here with Kirk and Marcus - she and Chris Pine had okay chemistry. She should have come back for STB.  

Star Trek as a franchise occasionally suffers from Bad Idea disease. It astounds me what ideas advance all the way from the writers room to test screenings without being nipped in the bud. Michael Piller's unpublished Fade In (which was available as a free pdf for awhile, not sure if that's still the case) gives a great insider's view of the behind the scenes process for Insurrection, which again is a film I kind of love but objectively recognize has problems. His book neatly demonstrates how those not-making-sense things evolved from overlapping concerns of the cast and studio. Maybe Into Darkness had something similar, but it was with this film that fans started getting yelled at by the screenwriters on Twitter and then Abrams was off to do what some felt he wanted to do in the first place: Star Wars. 

From the first reviews I read of the rebooted Trek, there were concerns it was too Star-Wars-y, too sci-fantasy not enough Trekian sci-fi. I think these complaints are valid. This only became clearer to me after Into Darkness. I began wondering if this whole thing was, after all the sizzle and on-screen zap and zoom, just an elaborate cosplay. 

11.

1991

When the Klingons take tentative steps towards an alliance with the Federation, members of the high command of both the Empire and Starfleet conspire to sabotage the process.

This is probably a lot more enjoyable film to watch for most people than either of the Kelvin timeline ones above. Not because it's any better but for the same reason the last gig a particular line-up of a band played is memorable. Doesn't matter how well they played or if the gig was any good, it's just historic for being the last time they all suited up.

 

I don't begrudge Undiscovered Country fans this; I enjoy it myself. I can't, however, hang with any "It's just nice to see the TOS characters all together one last time" sentiments. It's one thing to say it about the cast; it's another to sanction the disfiguring of the actual characters and core Trek conceits in service to a bad script.

Long story short: nothing makes sense, and the characters don't act like themselves or even competently motivated human beings. Aspects of the future that define the franchise are tossed aside with abandon. Granted this is something true of pretty much every Trek motion picture, but there's a way of doing it and a way of botching it. Necessary filters have been removed. Compare Khan's quoting of Melville in Khan to Chang's constant quoting of Shakespeare in Undiscovered Country. Same idea but something's missing.

Almost everything I just said is true of what's coming up next, but before I go, the saddest anecdote in Trek history. Roddenberry suffered an intense stroke around the time they were wrapping on TUC and was confined to a wheelchair and unable to say much beyond yes or no. He was wheeled in to a screening. While the assembled suits for whom the screening had primarily been arranged talked to themselves about how great everything looked, Roddenberry, limited in speech but having one of his more lucid days, could only whisper "No... no... no..." over and over again.

I'm sorry, but good lord the parallels. 

12.

2002

Picard and Data both struggle with the literalization of the imperfect-reflection trope in a world gone green, which drives them to suicidal tendencies. Is it suicide if you kill your own clone? Is it survival if you're haunted forever? Nem-e-sis.

Does no one comment on how green everything is? Seriously.

Same deal with the last-suited-up business:

Skaal.

And unfortunately same deal with the cast and concept being mangled in the process. Nothing makes sense here. Everything is overdone. Troi - psionically violated again? Shinzon's ship - totally overwhelming to everything in its path? The ennui - driven to Wagner levels but lacking the actual Wagner? And what the hell did they do the damn Romulans? Stop rebooting the concept/ race everytime you use them. 

Maybe if it was just a different, stand-alone sci-fi film I'd be more forgiving, but I dislike Nemesis as a Trek film. As the last TNG-cast film, I dislike it even more, and as the "corrective" for Insurrection, I flat-out hate it. Aspects of the script are fine, and the cast plays to this alternate world where this isn't a Trek movie okay enough. (Patrick Stewart in particular, who seems to be channeling the existential angst of some dark 70s western). 

It's Citizen Kane, though, compared to the worst bigscreen Trek of all:

13.

1994

The Nexus - some kind of dream nebula tripping wildly through the cosmos, ensnaring all within its path into an eternal replay of self-realization fantasies, until those ensnared just decide they kinda want to leave and then (poof) back to reality - captures Captain Kirk. Later it captures Captain Picard, and the two ride horses. Then they leave, and Captain Kirk gets shot in the back by some guy.

I still cling to the idea that this whole thing is some huge metaphor for drugs. Everything kind of resembles the before, during, and after of a drug binge. And at the end of it all, the Enerprise is destroyed, and Captain Kirk lies dead at your feet.

...

...

Time to sober up.

I go on at great length about Generations here. But I feel more comfortable just bullet-pointing all the things I hate about it. Here we go. I hate:


- The Enterprise-B set-up at the beginning. Everything about it. They're headed on a quick trip around the solar system but are the only ship in range? Its captain and crew are this incompetent? 


- Everything about Data's emotion chip. Literally everything. Don't get me started.


- Soren. Soren is a guy who will slaughter billions so he can get back to something he can easily re-enter without - okay, let's not even get into the absurd mechanics of how people enter the Nexus, especially Soren's whole Rube Goldberg set-up. As with how people exit it, it falls apart immediately under questioning. Soren gets a couple of good lines, but a) he gets way more bad lines, and b) his character is so poorly motivated that it doesn't matter. The complete nonsense of his set-up top to bottom cheapens what should be among the most powerful farewells of the whole Trekverse. It's a crime in plain sight where the murderers still walk among us. If only Shatner would press charges. 


- Kirk's death. WTF. That this actually went through all the drafts it did and took a test audience to change compounds the initial offense considerably. 


- The offscreen deaths of Picard's brother, his wife, and his nephew. (Not that it'd have been any better had they been onscreen.) This is clearly here to motivate Picard's momentary temptation inside the Nexus to live out his days with a surrogate family freed from Starfleet obligation. But you could have just had the conversation with Troi do that, or any conversation he's ever had. He breaks free of this temptation after like thirty seconds. They shot the man's family for that? 

That speaks to the script's big problem: everything is absurdly overdone. How can we make this the worst villain of all? HE KILLS BILLIONS! How will the audience ever buy Picard even for a moment being taken by the Nexus (although there's considerable precedent for this already with "The Inner Light" FFS) ? SHOOT HIS FAMILY! Spiner's complaining about not having anything to do. BIG EMOTION CHIP SCENE! Captain Kirk? SHOT IN THE BACK!

It's difficult to square the decisions made above with the work its writers would go on to do and had done up to this point. It really is like an eleven year old grabbed the keys to the franchise and took it for the proverbial joyride-and-torched-it. 

I could even go on! There's a close-up of a dropped baby doll for God's sake. It's all so much worse because these are the cinematic waters where TOS and TNG meet. TNG's "Unification" or "Relics" did a much better job mixing these streams; my disappointment is all the more profound for having the chance, and the tools, and the background to pull it off and instead, choosing all the paths they chose.

The only positive takeaway is that without the events of this movie, we never would have gotten the Shatnerverse. (Which should probably be called the Shatner-and-Reeves-verse.) As much as I enjoy those, though, it in no way compensates for or justifies all the Trek tomfoolery in Generations.

~

And there we have it, folks. See you in the comments.

The Trek Movies: Best to Worst, pt. 1

It's been a few years since my last Trek Movies rankings. It's six years later and there have been a couple of other movies so let's do the more definitive up-to-date version. 

Usually I do these sorts of things least to most favorite. But I think there's mostly agreement on which ones are best but considerable arguing to be done about which ones are the worst, and why. So let's start at the top and work our way to the bottom. 

1.

1982

A villain from the Enterprise's past returns and completely overwhelms the ship's defenses. The Captain must reconcile his present with his past and get over himself or everyone is going to die. Sacrifices are demanded; a new planet forms.

Not much argument here. Or at least there shouldn't be. Well-made movie? You bet. Well-made Trek? There can sometimes be an important distinction. Insurrection, for example, is probably not a well-made film; it is, however, great Trek. We'll get there. As for TWOK, though, the answer is: unquestionably. 

Good performances, score, fx, etc.? (Nothing like a big umbrella) Absolutely. Too many cliches or broad strokes? Well...

...

...

I mean, on one hand, there are no cliches here, only the re-enactment of ritual, the glorious embrace of every dramatic trick in the book. We love this stuff. We need this stuff. On the other, well sure, the less beholden you are to the genre or the cast, maybe a few. If you were just a standard genre fan you might be able to guess along. New wine from old decanters and all that. But that's not the sort of thing one deducts points for; in fact, let's add a thousand just for the heck of it. TWOK rules.

2.

1979

A voyager from Earth's past returns and completely overwhelms everything in its path. Starfleet sends the Enterprise to intercept. Kirk and Spock must reconcile their respective mid-life crises, or everyone dies. A sacrifice is demanded. A new lifeform emerges.

Here's a film that was everyone's least favorite Trek film until The Final Frontier came out. Its reputation has steadily grown since then, although there are still some who stubbornly hold to the original impression it made on moviegoers at the tail end of the 70s. I'd like to see the overlap between people who still hate TMP and the people who still hate disco. I bet there's something there.

Anyway, ain't a trace of disco in The Motion Picture, although the whole thing is pretty damn 70s.

Gloriously 70s, even.

Is it a well-made movie? Well - yes and no. On one hand, I'm certainly engaged by it and admire almost every aspect of its production. I agree with whomever described it as a tone poem about self-actualization. I think there's stuff to pick at here and there, but overall I love it. On the other, it seems to be somewhat baffling to non-Trek people. Which isn't necessarily an indicator of how well-made anything is. Plenty of masterpieces (Tokyo Story, Barry Lyndon, 2001) are baffling or uninteresting to plenty of different people. Ahead of its time but perfectly of its time. Not for everyone. 

Most importantly for our purposes here, its Trek fundamentals are warp factor nine. It's some of Spock's greatest stuff, it's a rom-com where Kirk-loses-ship-then-they-get-back-together, it's got Bones with a beard and "Torpedoes... a-WAY!" It's Roddenberry's last original cast hurrah, and its Trekkiness is self-evident. It should be the standard of calibration anytime the question of Trek fundamentals is posed, even. 

3.

1986

A visitor from Earth's past returns and completely overwhelms Starfleet's defenses. It wants to talk to the humpback whales, but the whales are all dead. Kirk and the gang time-travel to 1986 to convince two of them to come back to the future to save the species that hunted them to extinction. The whales agree, and a new cetacean dynasty is formed off the coast of San Francisco.

"One little mistake."

One of many favorite Spock moments.
"Tell her... I feel fine."

Den of Geek says it almost perfectly: "There's really very little to pick at in the film. You could argue it's not Trek enough, but it's still a great story, it's an enormous amount of fun, and it nicely ties up all the loose ends from the previous two films."

Hear, hear. Except that one-could-argue-its-Trekness part. No one can argue that. People could, I guess, in the physical sense of moving their lips and emitting vocal noises, but it's an absurd argument. What could possibly not be Trek-enough about The Voyage Home? I like to think about the Vulcans and other Federation telepaths that come to talk to the whales. Do the whales know what they're getting into? I suppose it was better than being harpooned. Hopefully with the immediate threat overcome, Earth can time travel back to the past a few more times and save a few more. And let's just move along before we ask any further questions about what the people of the future can and can't do and "Say if that's the case, why -" (door shuts.) 

Catch me on a different day and this might be my favorite Trek movie. Same thing goes for the next one:

4.

1984

Spock's katra is banging around McCoy's brains like a Rigellian ox in a tea shop. To save his friend, Kirk must sacrifice his ship, his son, and his career. (Temporarily, permanently, and temporarily, respectively.) An old friend is reborn.

"Maltz! JOLLLLL ICHUU'!"

Shatner's finest acting? Possibly. Not in every scene, but in at least two places. For my money it's more like ten or eleven places, but here are two that exemplify how important his character is to making this film work. 

(1) "Jim - you do this, and you'll never sit in a Captain's chair again." I don't have a screencap for it, but it's a great moment. And he never will sit in that Captain's chair again, as it turns out.

(2) "The word? Is no. I am therefore going anyway." 

As Nimoy said in I Am Spock about this moment: "That's our hero."

Everyone involved with the art direction and production design deserves special commendation. The soundstage is like a TOS set on steroids. And everything is lit with a real theatrical eye, with the Vulcan set in particular a real stand-out. It's a great character movie. Trek fundamentals times a thousand. The ending! So much more!

"You! Help us or die."

"I do not deserve to live."

"Fine, I'll kill you later."

Search for Spock was the first (and should have been the last, certain episodes of TNG notwithstanding) place this happened:

It's said in the commentary track that the reason this works is because no one thinks of the Enterprise as just a ship; it was a founding member of the cast.

Shatner writes in Movie Memoirs that the death of the Enterprise was "an exciting and unexpected plot twist in light of a seemingly unwinnable situation (that) made the film better."

Agreed. But, it points to a new problem, namely now you've got to blow up the ship all the damn time. Like rebooting your comicsverse or having someone who isn't Thor * pick up Mjolnir, the first time it happens, it's an exciting an unexpected plot twist, but it inevitably leads to it happening again and again, at shorter intervals with less and less impact. 

* In the comics, I mean. Although I guess now it'll be a problem for the MCU. 

5.

1996

A villain from Picard's past returns and brings a Borg armada with her. After almost totally overwhelming Starfleet's defenses, they time travel to Earth's past to try and stop First Contact between Vulcans and Humans. One half of the crew fights the Borg for control of the ship while the other drinks tequila with Zefram Cochrane, the alleged inventor of warp drive. The captain must reconcile himself or everyone dies.

I say alleged inventor up here because the way he is portrayed in First Contact is Sam Shepherd as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, pretty much. No one was pretending Chuck Yeager personally engineered mach-one aircraft. Plus "Metamorphosis" established a whole different character, which shouldn't matter but kind of does to me. James Cromwell gives a spirited performance, and this movie's probably more interesting with his being a drunken hillbilly who loads up the jukebox with the incidental music from Third Rock from the Sun. But if they wanted to make him this guy, why still pretend he invented warp drive and keep him a doctor? It seems unlikely this is the same guy we saw in "Metamorphosis." Although if so, it makes "Metamorphosis" even more interesting. 

Of course, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy swore never to tell what happened to Cochrane, so no one present (including Cochrane) could reference the events of "Metamorphosis." Though frankly it seems unlikely they would never tell anyone; maybe Kirk told Picard about it in the Nexus or Picard gleamed it from his mind or whatever nonsense you want. Someone could have made some crack about shimmering energy blobs and made me happy.

Enough "Metamorphosis" talk. This is a fun movie on its own merits with great performances and nice blend of monster movie with TNG-era Trek and was a big, well-deserved hit for its cast and crew.

6.

1998

When Data goes native on a covert observation op, the Enterprise is called in to extract him. They join him instead and lead the Ba'ku (caretakers of an interphasic fountain of youth) against the conspiracy between Starfleet and the Son'a (the survivors of a failed insurrection from the Ba'ku's past) to displace them.

Most people hate this one, but I've always had warm feelings towards it. Still do. I concede most of the criticisms, even if some of them are kind of over the top. I've certainly spilled my fair share of digital ink on the topic, so I'll just quote some sections from Ryan Britt's review of it over at Tor. He speaks for me (so say we all) on this matter.

"In almost every way that matters, I unabashedly love Star Trek: Insurrection. Instead of space murders, revenge, and a bevy of bad guys, this movie mostly concerns people sitting around and talking about the ethics of messing with other cultures, the attainability of near immortality, and the dangers of technology moving our lives so quickly that it destroys aspects that really matter. (...) And yet, this movie won’t work for a viewer without that person already being into this weird touchy-feely Star Trek crap. "Am I really going to watch a movie about a bunch of outer space Amish people getting screwed with by Star Trek people? Is this really what this movie is about?" Yes, poor Trek lay person, this is what this movie is about. 

"With perhaps the exception of The Motion Picture, and aspects of The Final Frontier, Insurrection is the most representative of what an episode of TV Star Trek would be like if translated to the big screen. But because of its confused attempt to also be an action movie at times, it comes across a bit messy. However, if you truly love Star Trek, some of that messiness is sort of sweet. The “action” in Insurrection feels like Star Trek got a little drunk and tried to dance to a cool song, with cringe-worthy Napoleon Dynamite results.

"But maybe that’s okay. Because love is all about liking something because of its flaws. And in most ways, Insurrection is one big mess that makes me think awwww that’s the Star Trek I know and love. Because it’s not cool. It’s not focused. And some of it doesn’t make sense."

7.

2009

When a vengeful Romulan from a sideways future-present suddenly appears and overwhelms Starfleet's defenses, Kirk and Spock must overcome their own inner conflicts to beam aboard and shoot the bad guys. Punch it!

I've grown a bit ambivalent on this one. I still really enjoy it, overall. It's fun seeing these new, youthful versions of the TOS cast in a more contemporary reformulation. And it's more like an action comedy caper than anything, right down to Kirk-gets-big-hands or the eject-from-the-ship-onto-ice-planet or so many other things. Nothing wrong with that - in fact, quite a bit right. It hoovered up box office receipts by the hundreds of millions the world over.

Great casting, memorable sets, effective score, and just enough color of the familiar TOS-verse to justify the title. In hindsight, though, this signaled the end of the kind of Trek Ryan Britt was talking about up there. A lot of the good feelings I had leaving the theater in 2009 were diffused by subsequent events. While this is a great commercial for New Kelvin-U Trek, it's really just that: a commercial for a Trek they never quite delivered.

Again, not this film's problem, just a good deal of its appeal is its "Trust us, we got this" chumminess, which seems a bit insincere in retrospect.

Even the bridge to the past - nice because it's Nimoy, obviously, I'm glad he's here - feels a bit by-the-numbers. I remember people saying the same about TNG's "Unification" back in the day, but that one seems like a sweet send-off for the character compared to his "good luck, fellas" role here.

Anyone who thinks I'm slagging it off, I've put it ahead of Insurrection, sheesh. (EDIT: Narrator voice: He actually did not. Please see comments.) That might mean nothing to you, but to me it's a clear sign I'm being as objective as possible. (He clearly was not.) Here's a rare nod to conventional wisdom.

~

So much for those big-screen Treks I'd deem the good half. Next time: the rest. Hope to see you there.