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I wouldn’t call myself a Trekker (and I would probably get it wrong and call myself a Trekkie, or whatever other now unfavoured divisional word has been coopted by the media and is thus no longer appropriate for usage amongst the true fans – I still wait for the day that furries decide that they need a new name to seperate themselves from the stereotype that has been created around them. On that day a giant anthropomorphic shark will have been jumped…) but after a worryingly extended rant about the hidden excellence of The Search for Spock, the comedy genius of Voyage Home and the “exception that proves the rule” rubbishness of the even numbered Undiscovered Country the other day, while walking back from the sandwich shop, I realised that I may have more love for Star Trek hidden inside me than I thought.
Deep Space 9 is obviously some of the finest science fiction produced for television in a long while, despite it being as far from ‘boldly going’ as a program about a space station with limited manoeuvrability can be, but I found myself sitting through an episode of Voyager this evening (it must have been late in the series’s life, as Janeway may have still had a voice like an alien but she backed it up with the less silly hairstyle that I heard Kate Mulgrew fought for from her first makeup session) and while waiting for some code to compile I caught myself watching the new trailer for JJ “I did Lost and Alias surely that must count for something, even if they did all go a bit shit? Jennifer Garner’s lovely though” Abrams’s new Star Trek movie.
I’ve seen the first teaser trailer a bunch of times and it is just that – a teaser. There’s some people welding and some portentous speaking by Lord Leonard of Nimoy, but apart from that and a glimpse of the new Enterprise there’s little there. Apart from the concept of teasing. Which is what the trailer is all about. You can tell by the name. I like short sentences. Anyways, despite the film still being 5 months away (after being pushed back to May 2009 during production) they’ve kicked out the first trailer with sequences from the probably now complete film. You’ve probably seen it already, but I care little – here is my uninformed and bullet pointed dissection of it:
- Kirk is a cock.
- No REALLY a cock.
- Spock is conflicted.
- I mean REALLY conflicted.
- He and Kirk can pose for posters quite well.
- Spock gets ANGRY! Vulcan with emotions! WOOP WOOP!
- The ships will be in fights and shake around.
- Simon Pegg is in it and shows that he can do a scots accent.
- There are boobs in it.
- Kirk is the reason why boobs are displayed.
- LEONARD NIMOY IS IN IT!
There you go.
Just to make this a bit more painful, here’s that again in a bit more detail.
The trailer opens in classic fashion with a “Oooh, what film is this?” scene with a touch of Thelma and Louise and a subtle hint of futuristic police bike chasing a nice bit of classic car across the desert. However, Kirk drives the car over the cliff, diving out at the last moment and only just stopping himself from going over. I care little if in the full story he has an abusive alcoholic uncle and a mummy who doesn’t love him, but this to me says one thing – “I am James Tiberius Kirk and I am an annoying cock”. Just to make sure we realise this he continues to ride around on a motorbike, looking moody and generally displaying that he is, as mooted previously, a cock.
In classic premise establishing fashion we move on to character number two – (Mr) Spock. Now, if you’ve watched Star Trek (if you are reading this then the likelihood of that statement being false is about as likely as the inclusion of ’sitting on your arse whinging about Star Trek’ as an exhibition sport at the 2012 Olympics AND my being selected as one of the ‘athletes’ to be exhibited) then you know that Spock is conflicted – half human, half vulcan, who knows which way things might go? However, in the trailer they’ve got to get this information to you as quicky as possible, so they go for the voiceover saying “This is Spock. Look, he’s really conflicted. Like really. You got that? Conflicted? Yes. There’ll be explosions soon, hang in there. Conflicted”. So, Spock’s conflicted, that’s good.
It then moves on again – we now need to both bring the bored people back into the room and establish that Kirk and Spock are the two main characters, and that at some time they will appear on screen together. So, some explosions and fighting and a quick cut to them on the bridge of a ship, posing as if they are on the poster of the film. Which they probably were. It’s also a hark back to the classic Trek poses of Kirk and Spock on the bridge, so I’ll at least give them points for invoking the enduring images of Trek cultural memory.
Now we’re done with establishing the main characters we can move on to the important bits – special effects, explosions, fighting, boobs and Simon Pegg. Not necessarily in that order. So, what do we have in quick succession? Spock getting angry and hitting something, people running, things exploding, the bridge shaking (with the actors having learned from the last four generations of Star Trek how to be in an shipquake in a vaguely realistic looking way), a girl in a bra with Simon Pegg’s scots accent in the background, Simon Pegg (who, despite sounding so unlike Mr Scott it scares me, is awesome and the reason why I am permitting this film to exist) looking sweaty (or damp, there is not enough context to establish the source of the moisture), some more explosions, Kirk “getting it on” (although the lady in question does not look sufficiently alien to give The Shatner the tribute I feel he deserves), some more explosions and, as the obligatory finale, St Leonard of the Trek, bringing his special brand of aged voice gravitas and waving his paycheck in the face of the aforementioned unfeatured Shat.
So, my predictions:
- I’ll like it, but it’ll be almost universally hated by ‘real’ Star Trek fans.
- The ‘real’ Trek fans will say that the people who like it aren’t ‘real’ Star Trek fans.
- I’ll like Simon Pegg in it, but not be able to work out any resemblance between him and Jimmy Doohan.
- JJ Abrams will buy another boat.
- Sci-Fi-London won’t get the premier…(but we can hope)
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Posted: January 16th, 2009 under blog.