The Super Bowl ad for the upcoming Star Trek movie is now online, and once again, they’re clearly pitching it to a generation weaned on the likes of Firefly (2002-2005) and Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009), to say nothing of the Star Wars prequels (1999-2005). It brings to mind what Star Trek: The Next Generation alumnus Wil Wheaton recently said of the previous trailer: “It felt like a sci-fi action movie, with Star Trek costumes.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE8xjK_tLxk
Click here if the video file above doesn’t play properly.
As it happens, one of my longstanding gripes about the Star Trek movies is that nearly all of them have been “action movies” of one sort or another. On the weekly TV series, there was a freedom to experiment, to make each episode its own genre or combination of genres — comedy, drama, romance, character study, espionage thriller, medical emergency, submarine warfare, you name it. But the movies, created in the wake of Star Wars (1977) and its many imitators, need to attract a much bigger audience than the typical TV episode, and so they have done this, or tried to, by pumping up the action. Sometimes they do it very well (1982’s Wrath of Khan, 1996’s First Contact), and sometimes they do it pretty lamely (1989’s The Final Frontier, 1998’s Insurrection), but do it, they do.
There have been two major exceptions to this, and, ironically, one of them — The Voyage Home (1986), which was more of a time-travel comedy than anything else — happens to be the top-grossing movie in the series so far, at least in North America. So these movies don’t have to be all about the action in order to attract an audience. The other major exception, however, is the first film — The Motion Picture (1979) — which was a decent hit in its day but is widely regarded today as one of the lamer films, because it is so slow and ponderous.
Still, you have to give the makers of that film credit for doing something different from the space-battle setpieces that were all the rage after Star Wars came out. And in that light, it’s kind of ironic that J.J. Abrams, director of the new movie, suggested in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times that Star Trek needs to get out from under the “shadow” of Star Wars, yet it was wrong for The Motion Picture to be so “slow-moving”, etc.
I do hope that this new film is one of the “good” action movies in the series and not one of the “lame” ones. But it needs to set the template for something more than just “action”. If this film is to have any sequels, it needs to leave the door open for something more than just another round of explosions next time.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In