Star Trek and Beyond

They rebooted Star Trek.

Um… is he all right?

They rebooted Star Trek.

Dude, we heard you already. Chill out.

No, you don’t get it. Lemme repeat myself, only in all caps and with more profanity so that my point’s clearer.

THEY. %$#%ING. REBOOTED. STAR TREK!!!

Look, I’m not a “Trekkie,” but I grew up in a house where Star Trek was watched and appreciated by what seemed like everyone except me. So I’ve seen all the old movies (at least, I think I’ve seen them. I don’t remember much from the first, third, and fifth movies, but apparently there’s not much TO remember). I know what Star Trek is all about, and Star Trek is about bad acting with bad special effects involving shaky cameras and actors throwing themselves about. Star Trek is vaguely alien-looking humanoids with plastic prosthetics on their foreheads/ears. And Star Trek is William Shatner.

The new Star Trek movie plays a lot more like Star Wars: epic space battles, truly bizarre aliens of all shapes and sizes… Heck, there’s a scene where Kirk stares contemplatively at a starship under construction that looks a lot like Luke Skywalker staring at the Tatooine suns in the first Star Wars movie.

Most of the movie features James T. Kirk in incredibly stupid situations, including an incredibly stupid scene where a big furry snow monster chases Kirk around, only to get eaten by an even BIGGER snow monster to show up, eat it, and then start chasing Kirk for no good reason. He gets into no fewer than three fist fights and loses them all. Oh, and there’s that scene where Kirk runs frantically around the U.S.S. Enterprise with swollen hands and tongue that’s… well, it’s actually pretty funny, but it feels out of place..

Despite the new, young actors coming in to play all the classic characters, the star of the movie is pretty much Leonard Nimoy, who travels back in time as the original Spock and basically resets all of history. So, yeah, the thirty years of bad television serials and passable movies? Basically never happened. The reboot is subtly executed and smoothly transitions the “old” Star Trek into the “new” one, but it involves quite a lot of pretty cheesy scenes with Old Spock.

Believe it or not, though, I actually liked the movie. Zachary Quinto really does look like a young Spock, Simon Pegg is amazing as the engineer Scotty (even though he looks nothing like the original actor), but the show is almost completely stolen by Karl Urban, who looks, sounds, and acts perfectly like Dr. McCoy. There really needs to be a bit less of Old Spock and Kirk getting beaten up and a lot more McCoy and Pegg.

Now, the Star Trek reboot raises a couple of concerns. First, if this movie proves successful, old Trekkies are going to be way out of place – even more than they used to. The trailers all exclaimed that “This isn’t your father’s Star Trek,” and it turns out they weren’t exaggerating. So when I see the Trekkies in the movie theater, who clawed their way out from underneath piles of Cheeto bags in their mothers’ basements and squeezed their portly bellies into skin-tight black jumpsuits with plastic Federation pins on them for *ahem* “added authenticity,” I almost feel sorry for them. Their universe has changed, and they don’t really belong anymore. And, honestly, it’s probably best for the franchise to evolve this way.

My second concern, though, has a bit more weight, I think. Star Trek is the latest in a long line of reboots. We got Batman Begins a few years ago, along with the Superman reboot (which is getting rebooted again). We’ve also seen classic properties like James Bond, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers get rebooted. This summer, we’re due for reboots of G.I. Joe and the Terminator series (well, the new movie FEELS like a reboot, at any rate). These are all properties that have been around for AT LEAST twenty years. So twenty years later, and we’re still watching the same stories play out, over and over again. Okay, sure, we’ve got different writers and actors, different interpretations of events, different viewpoints, but these are still the same characters.

In another twenty years, will we STILL be getting new Batman, Star Trek, and Transformers movies? And how long before Star Wars gets a reboot? Come to think of it, are there ANY properties less than twenty years old that we’ll need to start over in twenty years? Would people pay to see a reboot of the Harry Potter franchise?

I guess my concern sounds like the old complaint that “there are no original ideas left.” And, yeah, I’m a little concerned about that. I think the biggest problem, though, is with legacy. See, Star Trek, Transformers, Batman… these are stories and characters that the CURRENT adult population grew up on, so the appeal’s all in the nostalgia. Now I’ll admit I’m a little unclear as to what the current generation watches on TV, but I’m pretty sure that we won’t be seeing Pokémon and Avatar stories get revamped for adult audiences when our children grow up.

At least, I hope not, because I’m pretty sure Pokémon with PG-13 levels of computer-animated violence would be an ugly, ugly affair.