The writers of the upcoming Star Trek movie have suggested that what might benefit the franchise at this point is to make it a little bit more like Star Wars -- specifically...
"Original Star Wars. I want to feel the space, I want to feel speed and I want to feel all the things that can become a little bit lost when Star Trek becomes very stately -- which I love about it , but...."
Also, apparently the new movie's director/producer, J.J. Abrams, is more of a Star Wars fan than a Star Trek fan.
I think trying to "bring more Star Wars into Star Trek" sort of misses the point of Star Trek.
Yeah, Star Trek and its spinoffs have all tended to be more "stately" and talky -- dare I say, maybe even a little bit more intellectual? But that's what makes Star Trek, Star Trek.
Personally, I hear this supposed "need" to make Star Trek more like Star Wars, and all I can think of is the merchandising. More cool aliens, cute captain, beanie babies.
Meanwhile, I'll be keeping my eyes on this guy:
For me, the major difference between Star Trek and Star Wars is the amount of action and allegory. Star Wars tends to be more action-packed, Star Trek tends to be more allegorical.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the new trilogy was pretty heavy on the political allegory, so nothing is concrete.
And the original Trek was largely action/adventure.
Um.
Well, I can tell you one difference between Star Wars and Star Trek based on my own experience. Star Wars is fantastic entertainment, a comic book come to life; it's about superheroes. Star Trek is about human conflict, potential, and ideals; it's about humanity.
I like Star Wars enough to own several lightsabers and many Star Wars video games, but my loyalty (and money) will always go to Star Trek first.
ReplyDeleteI've always loved Star Trek because it's about the complex characters, the moral dilemmas that average people face, and the majestic starships involved. Flying around at high speeds and blowing things up was always an added bonus.
Star Trek was never really about the action so much as the way the characters reacted when they were put in peril. Phaser fire and hand-to-hand combat with a tough alien on the side of a mountain were always cool, but they were never the main attraction, at least not in my mind.
Star Wars, on the other hand, isn't so much about the characters as it is the creative aliens, the unique locations, and the awesome action sequences (though the characters still play an important role). Star Trek can get away with a long scene of normal humans talking in a boring room, but Star Wars cannot.
Whether bringing "more Star Wars into Star Trek" means bigger action sequences or stranger aliens or more creative locations, I'm not sure. But if you've seen Star Trek: Nemesis, you know that making Star Trek into something it's not (an average sci-fi action movie, in the case of Nemesis) is dangerous.
What Star Trek needs is not more Star Wars, but more Star Trek. Wrath of Khan was so excellent because, in large part, it was a battle of wits between Kirk and Khan. It was the tension, not the sense of space and speed, that made it work.
Look at The Voyage Home. Scarcely an explosion or alien to be found. Heck, they weren't even IN space for most of the movie. But it's how the characters reacted to being in a totally different century that made the movie work.
I've got plenty more examples up my sleeve, but I'll spare you them.
Star Trek didn't enjoy spinoff after spinoff, season after season, and movie after movie because they were trying to emulate Star Wars. If Star Trek is too "stately" for you, then don't watch it.
The filmmakers don't need to cater to the masses. Star Trek already has legions of fans who will see this movie no matter what it's like. I'm certainly one of them.
And, I might point out, all of these people became fans somehow, and it probably wasn't because Star Trek was like Star Wars.
Sure, they can include a bit of a sense of space and speed in the movie. But there's got to be a solid groundwork of honest-to-goodness Star Trek beneath it so that whatever touch of Star Wars gets added to it is to enhance, not drive, a movie that can already stand entirely on its own without those additions.
And, honestly, I could do without a Spock, Ewok, Jar-Jar, K'Ehleyr and Friends Playtime Tea Set.
If I wanted to watch Star Wars, I would watch Star Wars. If I wanted to watch Star Trek with Star Wars in it, I would watch the original Battlestar Galactica.
ReplyDeleteThe best of all the spin offs on TV anyway, IMHO, were DS9 and Enterprise, which tended to eschew that obnoxiously stately ethic that TNG was afflicted with. I'll never sip Earl Grey in sleek glass cup like Picard, but Sisko's insulated coffee mug with the Starfleet logo seems more in tune with my corporate, cube dwelling existence. Enterprise was able to capture that feel as well, and I hope they can channel it in the new movie.
ReplyDeleteDS9 got good when Worf came on board and they let Avery shave his head. I still remember my roommate's reaction at the time. "OMG, it's Hawke vs. the Klingons! And that's a good thing!"
ReplyDeleteI guess I need to follow the link, but my first question is what does JJ Abrams mean by "Star Wars?" The "Star Trek" universe is diverse in alien life, representing that wouldn't be too bad. Showing more of how big and beautiful outer space is wouldn't be bad. "Star Wars" has gorgeous shots of the ships and planets that could be inspirational. But if those things aren't inserted in through the "Star Trek" filter, you're probably just asking for fanboy trouble if not out-right franchise trouble. It still has to feel like "Star Trek."
But for the love Buddha, please don't use Nemesis as an influence. The ONLY thing I haven't erased from my brain is the footage of Troi and Riker's wedding reception and even it had canon issues! It was such a disappointment, I haven't really followed anything about this movie other than seeing the trailers as they release them.
Voyage Home much better influence. This movie is the crew starting out, maiden voyage, and they're supposed to grow into that team that dealt with 1980s Earth.
Like Star Wars, Deep Space Nine had a gritty realism to it. Like Star Wars, Enterprise featured flawed, average people in a flawed, average society not too far removed from our own. If eschewing TNG's "obnoxiously stately ethic" was all they wanted to do, why not say, "We need this movie to be more like Enterprise (or DS9)"?
ReplyDeleteReferencing Star Wars implies that there's more in mind than just putting a Starfleet logo on an insulated coffee mug.
I like all the flavors of Star Trek enough that a movie more along the lines of DS9 or Enterprise would be fine by me, but it concerns me when Star Wars is under consideration for doing something that other branches of Star Trek have already successfully done.
I think your analysis is spot-on. The SW franchise -- and let's just say it, G. Lucas -- has always been about squeezing as much cash as possible from the youth demo. For me, what's made the Trek collection of movies more enjoyable to watch over the years than the two SW trilogies is, they've always been centered around the maintaining and growth of comradery, about the value of maturation, about friendship. What kid wants to watch that, right?
ReplyDeleteThe problem sounds like the one with all other updated franchises; instead of merely UPDATING the franchise for a new generation, they feel a need to reinvent the wheel. Fans became fans for a reason, new fans will become fans for a reason. There is a middle ground to bring in the new fans AND keep the old ones happy.
ReplyDeleteHey, I'm fine with it--but then again, I'm a fan of Doctor Who, which has a fundamental ethos of, "What's popular right now? Let's add a dab of that into our series, just for flavor!" So 70s Doctor Who is like a cross between the Avengers and James Bond, 80s Doctor Who is like Star Wars crossed with MTV, and the new series has just a dash of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. :)
ReplyDeleteThe trick is not to add so much of the other stuff that it overwhelms your own identity. So for Trek, "bringing in more Star Wars" might mean making the battle sequences pacier (anyone want to claim that Star Trek has great space battles?), making the aliens a bit more exotic, and using little touches of set dressing and dialog to give the whole thing a greater sense of verisimilitude. You can do all that and still keep the signature Trek touches, I think.
And I for one found plenty of human conflict, ideals, and humanity in Anakin's fall to the dark side.
ReplyDeleteWhat it really boils down to is that Star Trek tends toward being ostensibly about us but really about an idealized version of us, with no avarice, war, famine, or greed. While Star Wars is ostensibly about another culture but is really about our foibles, flaws, weaknesses, hopes and dreams.
Kirk = Perfect
ReplyDeleteKirk + Vader = Not so much
I love "The Wrath of Khan" to bits, but I have to say that the space battle at the end was a bit weak. Everything moved so slowly, it was as if you watched a combat between two tanks which are both stuck in first gear. Also the aspect that Khan was stuck in thinking in two dimensions while Kirk thought a three-dimensional battle struck me as implausible. Even as someone from the late 20th century, Khan the super-genius would have known about three-dimensional combat from aerial dog-fights etc. I wonder if Roddenberry and his successors were trapped in their navy metaphor: Kirk is Hornblower, most of the federation's starships are named after naval vessels of the past, so the Star Trek space battles resemble naval battles of the 18th, 19th and 20th century.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid there was no Star Wars, just Star Trek and George Lucas was the guy who directed the brilliantly funny and warm American Grafitti. When Star Wars came out in 1977, I was 9 years old so it pushed all my buttons. I had a long love affair with it even through the late 80s-to mid-90s when it was practically off the pop cultural radar.
ReplyDeleteNowadays, I'm suffering from Star Wars fatigue. The films themselves- at least the original three- I still enjoy, but not as much as I once did. I legitimately believe the first 2 films to be aesthetically superior to any of the Trek films, even the really kick-ass ones I love.
But everything else that goes along with Wars these days has caused me to prefer Star Trek by a vast margin. And specifically, the original series with Kirk, Spock, McCoy and their pals.
While it has more than its fair share of silliness, in general it's more cerebral and intelligent. It's reminiscent of a long-dead time when science fiction was the realm of super-smart nerds who wanted to read mindblowing future tech conceptualism... even though on occasion Trek's not so smart itself. But it injected some much-needed humanity into that techy formula.
And for the past few years, you haven't had to willfully ignore a constant avalanche of Trek-related "comedy" bits every time you log onto the net to check your email. Nor do you see toy shelves just choked with Star Trek plastic junk... at least not yet.
So yeah, I'm a Trek geek. I fully prefer Trek and its more intimate fandom to Wars. But I'm not going to get pissed off at anyone who feels differently.
Like a few fans of another sci-fi/fantasy warsian franchise I could name...
More than likely, if I live another 20 years and things have completely reversed themselves, I'll be coming here and saying exactly the opposite.
Anyway, I read the interview and wasn't particularly upset by it. I just agree with some of the sentiment here that the way to make Trek succeed is to make it MORE Treklike, rather than aping Star Wars. It's like trying to make sushi more pizza-like. You end up not improving the one, but ruining the other.
Or something like that.
Trek needs to build a distinct brand apart from Wars. It should be unique, dammit, Jim!
I've always loved the old naval aspect of ship to ship action in Star Trek - ship captains outwitting each other with cunning, deft positioning and broadsides. However, I ALSO love The 'dog fights in space' approach of Star Wars.
ReplyDeleteBut, ultimately the true difference between the shows can be seen in their respective attitudes to how the action and the characters relate: In Star Trek the action is used as a device to study the motivations and emotions of the characters, whilst in Star Wars the characters are used as a device to further the action.
Ol' JJ would be doing Trek a disservice if he tried to 'Star Wars' it up. It's a different animal.
Star Trek could benefit from a bit of retooling. It seems that Star Wars became more "STNG" like in its plodding political over-tones. I am part of Star Wars 1.0 - saw the original films in the theatre when I was just a teen.
ReplyDeleteI love Trek. If JJ can make his version more like TOS and not so much like STNG (AKS - Star Trek the Next Conversation) and amp up the action and expand the universe I think that will be plus.
"Wrath of Khan" had about the best balance of character story and action of any Trek I though, and found a balance between the stateliness of Trek and the sheer fun of SW.
Star Trek was science fiction; sometimes not as sophisticated as some would make it out to be, and verging more on space opera than some would admit, but, still, one of TV's closest to successful attempts at legitimate, true science fiction brought to life.
ReplyDeleteStar Wars, on the other hand...
There are those who say it's just fantasy, or even science-fantasy, but I wouldn't even give it that; it's a fairy tale, nothing more, whose biggest appeal is in bringing SF calendar art into motion (notice I said "motion" instead of "life").
Nevertheless, I'm still not as ready to dismiss the current movie as beyond all hope as some seem to be.
I think the idea that Star Trek needs to be more like Star Wars is ridiculous on 2 levels:
ReplyDelete1) As others have pointed out, Star Trek is fundamentally different from Star Wars. Their only true similarity is that they take place in space.
2) Three out of six Star Wars movies - and [virtually?]all of the ancillary Star Wars video productions - have stunk on ice. Believe me, nobody needs even a little bit of the prequels injected into the Star Trek franchise.
The fundamental problem with the Star Trek movies has been lousy writing. More action, less action, more formality, less formality, etc. just don't matter if the script is a dog.
Star Trek needs better producing/writing and it will be fine. I think concomitant with that is a need for a break (at least 5 years, IMHO). 25(!) seasons of Star Trek have been shown on TV since Star Trek: TNG started in 1987. Since Enterprise ended in 2005, that's 25 TV seasons in only 18 years. Talk about over-compensating for the original series which people feel was cancelled too soon...
I'm a fan of both franchises, and while I don't know that Star Trek needs to become more like Star Wars, I do agree that Star Trek needs to change in some ways. It's failed to really show off its reality in the movie theater. I do like the more human story to Star Trek, but I think it needs to offer a little something more to make it worth a trip to the cinema. If they can find a way to do both, then it will give Star Trek the shot in the arm it's needed. One has to ask why Star Trek has avoided giving us a real war in the movies. I know it's not quite its message, but look how well DS9 did when it finally faced the facts that, "Oh, hey... these guys are in the military. I hear the military ends up in wars sometimes." What I think Star Trek does better than Star Wars is conspiracy. The goals of the Federation being subverted from within is something they've explored more than once and with some success.
ReplyDeleteActually the better analog for the combat in Wrath of Khan is submarine combat, which Khan should have been totally familiar with. That whole scene was straight out of something like Run Silent, Run Deep or even The Hunt for Red October.
ReplyDelete