The New Star Trek Movie: Human/Vulcan Exceptionalism
Secondhand Smokette and I caught the Star Trek prequel today, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as a fun adventure, but more precisely, as a loving homage to the original series (which I used to watch in the dorm in college, can you believe it?). What was fun is that the young actors playing Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Ohura, Chekov, and Sulu, wisely do not do imitations of Shatner, Nimoy, et. al. , and yet take moments in which they eerily capture the essence of the characters as depicted by the original stars. If you are a fan of going "where no man has gone before," you will enjoy this picture very much.
This review by the SF Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, with whose attitudes I generally disagree, is spot on.
Labels: Star Trek
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 3:55 PM
23 Comments
23 Comments:
I'm still leery of going to see it, though, because I heard that they made Kirk...
...well, we know he was a womanizer, but we never *saw* the space-aged Don Juan in action, and I heard there was a pretty stand-out scene of it. I felt like the writers/producers/directors were going too far trying to "update" the original series.
One (alien) woman in bed in bra and panties, no actual passion or coitus because it is interrupted. About what the original Kirk did.
Whew! Okay, that's no worse than watching him put on his boots after a commercial break. ^.^
Original Star Trek airing at the college dorm... Yes, that DOES date things.
If blogs were a contest, I'd give you bonus points for talking about Star Trek. It's great to hear more good reviews of it!
You're very lucky to have your wife. I'm probably going to have to go see the film alone during the day while my husband is at work or while he's away at sea!
(Spellings are Uhura and Chekov, though. :-) Okay, I'm a geek! I can't hide it anymore! I have NCC-1701-A plans I inherited from my dad on my bookshelf! Shame.)
I watched the original series as a child and it meant so much to me, I want to watch it alone, and I'm nervous as to whether they are going to ruin my lovely fantasy for all times (I know they want to....)
But hearing what you have to say about it perhaps it's not as scary as I thought.
nissa_amos_katoj: Thanks for beaming down. I think it is a real tribute to the original series. Some story lines change, but it is done as part of the plot. And there is a nice surprise. It isn't dome camp, which is also a put down as well as a tribute. They were serious in the fun they had and give the audience.
Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy saved my mother's high school physics grade.
I love telling this story at TrekFest here in Houston, because the initial reaction is always, "Star Trek technobabble helped in real-life physics?" and a sideways look that says people think I'm putting them on.
Actually, what happened was, my mother was taking a physics class with a teacher who was so fresh out of the university the shiny hadn't rubbed off of her yet. The teacher got two groups of kids - the ones who were really good at physics, and the ones who weren't. Mom was in the latter category.
It turns out my mom's teacher was a BIG Star Trek fan and had a little bit of a crush on DeForest Kelly (who played Bones McCoy). Paramount was going to cancel Star Trek after its first season because they didn't see it making any money. In retalliation, bunches of fans got together and wrote in a protest to Paramount.
My mom's teacher told her entire class that for every protest letter they wrote in, they'd get bonus points attached to their grade. Since half the class was failing, they took her at her word. And, because she was honest, for every single letter they wrote in, they got bonuses.
My mother, who'd been failing miserably, got a decent passing grade, because she'd learned to type and made up dozens of form letters, then signed them and gave them to her teacher for mailing.
Mom knows the episodes so well, she can fairly accurately quote them, especially any of Uhura's lines. She can also tell you exactly which instruments used on the show were salt shakers, spoons that were bent, the inside of a gutted TV, etc.
And we used to own the entire collection of Star Trek novels. In one, UHURA'S SONG, the half-Vulcan Spock points out to a native creature that his language considers suicide to be so highly illogical that they don't even have a word for it in their language.
Books like Star Trek novels, which are written by different authors but follow the same series, are created around "bibles," or notes that explain things that are canon to the series. There are "bibles" for all kinds of series - the Transformers continumn, Star Wars, any of the Forgotten Realms novels, etc.
Well, take that notion - Vulcans didn't believe in suicide. Ironically, in an episode of "Star Trek: Voyager," the Vulcan Tuvok tells Captain Janeway that Vulcans practice a form of ritual suicide when they become old and weakened, since it's "illogical" to continue on after your usefulness.
How is that for you? We went from Roddenberry's "bible" for the first series saying that suicide is *illogical* to Vulcans saying it's *perfectly* logical.
"And we used to own the entire collection of Star Trek novels. In one, UHURA'S SONG, the half-Vulcan Spock points out to a native creature that his language considers suicide to be so highly illogical that they don't even have a word for it in their language."
That his CULTURE considers suicide, etc... sorry. I typed faster than I thought.
My college philosophy prof used Star Treck to talk about Utilitarianism in my first philosophy course. I think Spock was in it...one of the characters was going to sacrifice himself for the creq because the good of many outweighed the good for the one...of course, that doesn't really dealve into the negative social implications of utilitarianism, but we did talk about that.
That was "Wrath of Kahn," a great movie, in which Spock sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise, which would have been destroyed (along with Spock) had he not done it. Of his action, he says to a grieving Kirk, "For the many, one."
But also in the same movie (or perhaps a different one), Spock or an other chracater says, "For the one, many," when the entire ship is put at risk to save one person.
In any event, an act of heroism akin to the foxhole buddy who jumps on a live hand grenade that his friends might live, is not utilitarianism.
So, your prof was all wet.
I'm not convinced your prof even watched the film before trying to use that analogy!
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."
That's from "Wrath of Kahn." It comes up again two movies later, in "The Voyage Home." Spock's human mother is asking him, "Spock, does the good of the many outweigh the good of the one?"
Spock says he'd have to regard that as an absolute truth, something to that effect, and Amanda (his mom) replies, "Well, then you're here because of a mistake, made by your flawed - feeling - friends. They believed that the good of the one - you - was more important to them."
Back in "The Search For Spock," the Enterprise bridge crew hijacked the first Enterprise and ran off to rescue Spock, then blew up the ship and took over a Klingon vessle, so they were all being court-martialed at the end of the fourth movie.
What it boiled down to was, these people loved him enough that they willingly risked their careers for the chance to save his life, because as a person with absolute value (as all people are), he had the right to live. So Spock sacrificed his life, and his friends sacrificed their careers, because humans and Vulcans are exceptional creatures.
.....for the record, I can quote whole lines from "The Trouble with Tribbles."
((puts on her "I'm A Fan-Girl" button and wears it proudly))
.....for the record, I can quote whole lines from "The Trouble with Tribbles."But can you quote whole lines from "Trials and Tribble-ations"? ;-)
I'm glad people enjoyed this. I never watched Star Trek, never wanted to, never understood why anyone would want to. "To boldly go" splits an infinitive, which as far as I am concerned is the worst sin second only to animal experimentation, and and that was enough for me. Helped to destroy use of the language, and the kind of standards we need to have the right kind of society, too. Not splitting an infinitive is much more important than people -- here or in space -- seem to realize.
In fact from what I've picked up from hearing it discussed, the appeal of Star Trek has to do with the personalities and very "human" personalities and traits of its characters. Only one of them ever sounded interesting to me was Spock, who apparently then had to be ruined by being occasionally "human." Right, it's ok to split an infinitive; we're "human," after all, loveable because we are imperfect, born in sin, all that malarkey. Me, I'll stick with unsplit infinitives, real clothes rather than those space costumes on Star Trek, and nice pre-Christian, pre-forgive-them-they're-only-human, classical values. Post-Star-Trek and its tolerated split infinitive, what've we got? The culture of death. But no matter how often I say that "human exceptionalism" involves circular reasoning, I know I might as well be talking in outer space.
Keep talking, Ianthe. We're listening even if we don't agree.
The movie was terrif. Star Trek has been pulled every which way, from the different series, to the movies and the novels and the fanzines, and still somehow it has integrity.
We saw it Friday with our 22-yr-old daughter when we had gone to attend her graduation and move her back home. I'm going to cut-and-paste this from my blog (which you are all welcome to look at, but anyway)
Funny Star Trek movie story: F changed into the vintage Star Trek t-shirt her dad had bought as a teenager when the original series was airing. We didn't see anybody in Spock ears or anything for that particular showing - I think the trekkies must have picked out a different one to go to. Anyway, she sat between her dad and me. There were about 20 minutes of tedious and repetitive commercials and previews before the movie (and after the scheduled start time) and after a while R and I started complaining audibly. I asked F if we were embarrassing her.
"I'm at a Star Trek movie with my parents," she said. "I can't be embarrassed."
I laughed about that through the entire movie - which was very good, by the way. We'll probably see it again, and take L this time.
Deborah -
Actually, I was never a big fan of Deep Space 9. I had the entire Star Trek: TNG series on VHS-
(which I had to sell when my VCR fried itself and I found out I couldn't buy another one that wasn't attached to a DVD player - VCR/DVD combos don't work very well, I've noticed; the one in our living room won't play a tape no matter what we do)
- and the same with the Star Trek: TOS, but DS9 started getting a little off-kilter in some areas, and after the whole Q-wants-to-suicide thing on Voyager, I sort of lost interest. I tred getting into Star Trek: Enterprise, but I kept getting disappointed when epiosde after episode opened and Scott Bacula didn't utter a single "Oh Boy" or its equivalent.
Ooh I completely gave up when it came to Star Trek: Enterprise. They just started out on the wrong foot with a bad theme song. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was a nice song and all, but really? Electric guitars?
I'm just a kid, so Star Trek: Voyager was like my gateway drug into the world of Star Trek. Not a great series, mind you, but it came out when I was in junior high and at that age it was pretty cool (well, to me, definitely not to my peers). So through that I ended up really getting into DS9 and didn't mind it too much (and through all that ended up really enjoying TNG and TOS, of course, and made my dad a very very happy man). But Enterprise was just lame; I couldn't get into it at all.
Yeah, Enterprise wasn't what it should have been. They had to go back and retro-con everything, and it didn't jive with me. I also didn't like their portrayal of the early Vulcans. It didn't jive with what I knew of them from TOS and TNG.
And every time they introduced the Captian I kept waiting for them to say "Dr. Sam Beckett" and wondered where Al had gone off to.
Two nights ago the horror channel "Chiller" showed "Stephen King's The Langoliers," and the dude who played Al from Quantum Leap was in it, playing a know-it-all mystery author. Every time he tried to explain what he thought of their situation I kept waiting for him to say, "My second... no, seventh wife." It also starred Balki from "Perfec Strangers" as the bad guy. Even without the accent, when he called the kid "Little Blind Miss," I kept waiting for him to say, "Cousin," and do the dance of joy.
Sorry, but sometimes you get a great actor who can do a lot of great parts, but the problem is, if you put them outside their strenghts (the Quantum Leap dudes in quasi-serious roles in a horror movie and in Enterprise; Balki as a murderer? Both groups are comedy by nature), then the acting comes off so stilted, and that's even worse than electric guitars in the opening theme of a Star Trek series.
I suppose some shows were just destined to be drinking games. Or see-how-many-marshmallows-you-can-fit-in-your-mouth games. Whatever.
Man, Quantum Leap, I haven't heard THAT in a long time.
Star trek is THE BOMB! it got me on the edge of my seat the whole time!
cant really agree with trekkies who hated it because this JJ Abrams adaptation really brought in a whole slew of new fans!
I mean just check this out www.youtube.com/watch?v=50qSWTkYgEg
everyone is becoming a trekkie coz of this movie!
So you can't stand split infinitives? Just what do you find so irredeemably evil about the fact that the speakers of certain languages, including English, employ a grammatical structure consisting of "to" followed by a modifier followed by a verb? If you want to stamp that out of the language, you;ll have to travel further back in time than any FEDERATION vessel has ever done; because split infinitives in English go back at least 1000 years.
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