Star Trek – the new movie
by Philip Chien
The new “Star Trek” movie marks a restart for the 43 year old franchise. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long, but Captain James T. Kirk and his crew first aired on television on September 8, 1966.
It’s a fast action-packed movie. It’s good “Star Trek”, but not great “Star Trek”. The best “Star Trek” episodes and movies were ones that concentrated on the people and their relationships, and often with an underlying metaphor story without being preachy. (“Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”, generally considered the best movie, had an environmental backstory and concentrated on the interactions among the characters. There was no big villain in the movie and only one phaser is shot.)
The new movie is actually the third try to recast the original crew.
When a “Star Trek” movie was planned in the 1970s there were rumors that Paramount was considering casting major stars like Robert Redford and Paul Newman as Kirk and Spock. Majel Barrett Roddenberry had played Nurse Christine Chapel in the series and her character had a crush on Spock. She kidded that she’d love to play Chapel opposite Newman as Spock on the big screen. A cartoon featured Barbra Streisand trying to convince “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry to let her play Spock as a female Jewish Vulcan. Sanity prevailed and the original cast members kept their roles for 1979’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”
In the late 1980s the studio considered an origins story of how Kirk and Spock first met, with younger actors playing the parts. There were strong protests from the cast and fans and that idea was shelved. 1991’s “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” was the last movie with the entire original cast and later movies focused on the cast from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
With the 21st century the original actors are much older and some have died. The new “Star Trek” fans are the children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren of the original Trek fans, with much less connection to the original cast.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with recasting a part in a long-term franchise. “Star Trek” has done it many times - and very visibly. Savvik was played by Kirstie Alley in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and by Robin Curtis in the next two movies. Many different actors have played iconic characters like Superman, Batman, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond. An actor stands out far above the rest in some cases and is most identified with the role. In other cases different actors can be appreciated for their own merits.
For the new “Star Trek” movie Chris Pine plays Kirk, Zachary Quinto plays Spock, Karl Urban plays Leonard “Bones” McCoy, Simon Pegg plays Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, Zoë Saldana plays Nyota Uhura, John Cho plays Hikaru Sulu, and Anton Yelchin plays Pavel Chekov.
Many of the actors were fans of the original series. An exception was Saldana. Ironically her character in the Tom Hanks movie, “The Terminal” is a big “Star Trek” fan and even gets married dressed up as Uhura!
Many of the actors were concerned about playing iconic characters and some had the opportunity to talk to the original actors. Pine says. “It was incredibly overwhelming to step into Mr. Shatner’s shoes and the whole canon of ‘Trek’ film and television history. We all agreed it would be a mistake to try to recreate what he did. The challenge was to make it my own.” Pine did an excellent job portraying Kirk, but he doesn’t do a William Shatner impression any more so than Daniel Craig does a Sean Connery impression in the James Bond movies. Anton Yelchin, a Russian-born actor, does copy Chekov’s habit of replacing “V” with “W” sounds (wodka) which is more of a Polish trait than a Russian accent. (Original Chekov actor Walter Koeing’s parents were from Lithuania and talked like that. Koeing noted that he was just doing a fake accent for a television series and didn’t think that it would be something that would be so over analyzed over time.) But Yelchin does more than a fake Russian accent, he also adds his own nuances to Chekov.
Actor Michael Dorn played “Worf” on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Deep Space Nine” in the 1980s and 1990s. He recalled that from 1979 to 1982 he was on “ChiPs”, acting with Robert Pine – Chris Pine’s father.
Screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have worked together on “Mission Impossible III,” “Transformers,” and “Fringe.” Orci is a long-term die-hard “Star Trek” fan. Kurtzman recalled, “When I met Bob in high school, one of the first things I remember about him is that he had an Enterprise phone and the Bridge would actually ring!”
According to the movie’s publicity materials the writers wrote the initial script with the original Spock as a major character before Leonard Nimoy was even approached; knowing that if an agreement couldn’t be reached with him they’d have to toss it out and start over. Nimoy was interested and became an active participant. He said, “I got the sense that they really understood what the very best things were about “Star Trek.” I felt they were going to do justice to the story and elevate the movie to a level we had not been able to reach previously. The writers had done a wonderful job of capturing the characteristics of the original characters and I was very encouraged by all of that.”
Zachary Quinto, best known for playing the evil Skylar on “Heroes”, met Nimoy and the two developed a relationship. Nimoy mentored Quinto as he developed his version of the most famous Vulcan character. “Leonard and I spent a fair amount of time together,” says Quinto. “I asked him a lot of questions and he was very forthcoming with his perspective and advice. We talked about Spock’s psychology and what happened to Spock in the time span between our two characters. He’s had such a long relationship with this character, so he’s already thought about everything.”
The movie uses time travel to “preserve the integrity” of the earlier stories while permitting new ones. The original series episode “City on the Edge of Forever,” “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” and others use the concept that if you travel back in time you create a new reality which diverges from the original timeline. [Editor’s note – apparently there are multiple forms of time travel. In “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” they do go backwards in time and then forward in time back to the original timeline otherwise the story doesn’t make sense.]
Spock Prime (the older version of Spock played by Leonard Nimoy) doesn’t remember meeting an older Vulcan on his first mission aboard the Enterprise because in his timeline it never happened. Spock Prime’s trip back in time creates the new timeline where the new movie takes place. In the new timeline things can happen differently or the same as the original timeline - as long as it’s consistent.
There are mistakes which are only partially explained by a revised timeline. In the original timeline Sulu was an astrophysicist when Kirk was the Captain and later became the helmsman. It seems unlikely that Sulu would already be the helmsman under Captain Pike before Kirk’s command (while a change in the timeline does cause future changes it does so gradually and shouldn’t change unrelated events). In real life astronaut Mike Foale was originally an astrophysicist and became the flight engineer of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft (similar to a helmsman in some ways) as well as the commander and science officer for the International Space Station – but that’s because today’s astronauts must wear multiple hats.
In the new timeline Kirk’s experience on the Farragut and Republic are ignored.
Those are relatively minor nits. The more important difference is Spock’s interactions with humans. Vulcans rarely touched humans and have always been very private about their feelings. It seems doubtful that the changes caused by the time warp could result in that drastic a change.
The movie does include two myths: McCoy says if there’s a crack in the hull of their shuttle the blood will boil in 13 seconds. The human body can survive exposure to vacuum for about that length of time and the blood will not boil because it’s contained within the body. Spock repeats the incorrect version of Sherlock Holmes’s observation. He says, “When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be correct.” The actual statement is “When you’ve eliminated every other possibility whatever remains, however improbable must be correct.”
From a plot point-of-view it seems strange that Chekov is the super-genius who is more talented than the folks specifically trained for the job, and once Kirk becomes the Captain he appoints Scotty as the head of engineering, apparently not caring about what happens to the existing engineering chief.
There are places where “Star Trek”’s history has been intentionally been ignored because technology has overtaken the future. A handheld communicator that could talk to anybody in the 1960s seemed like it would take three hundred years. But well before 2009 cell phones became even smaller than the communicators from the original series. It can easily be argued that “Star Trek” “invented” the concept of the cell phone. The classic convertible the young James Kirk swipes has a Nokia cell phone (a nice piece of product placement for Nokia.)
The Enterprise is assembled on Earth in the movie. It makes far more sense to assemble it in space, for the same reasons large space structures, like the International Space Station, are assembled in space. Jimmy Doohan (the original Scotty) told an audience at a “Star Trek” convention in February 1976 how the upcoming space shuttle would bring components to space where they would be assembled into large spacecraft like the Enterprise –well before the campaign to name the prototype space shuttle “Enterprise.”
For some reason Starfleet’s major spacecraft assembly area is in Iowa, the home of James T. Kirk. Iowa’s never been a major aerospace region, although it is the home state of astronaut Peggy Whitson who was the first astronaut designated as “Science Officer” on the International Space Station.
The visual feel of the Enterprise is amazing. The new Enterprise feels right – it’s a beautiful spacecraft. It isn’t the classic ship from the original series but is similar to the version in the early movies. The bridge design is excellent (even if it’s far more high-tech than any previous series or movie) and the transporter room and sickbay looks realistic.
One major failing in the movie is the engineering section. In earlier movies and television series the engineering sets looked like they belong on a spaceship. The engineering section of the new “Enterprise” looks more like a brewery than the interior of a starship (It is – it was filmed in the Budweiser brewery in Van Nuys, California).
The Vulcan scenes were filmed at Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park, an area very familiar to “Star Trek” fans. Many exterior scenes through “Star Trek”’s history were shot on that location.
The movie features actual views of Saturn, taken by the Cassini spacecraft. Three decades earlier views of Saturn taken by the Voyager spacecraft were used in the first “Star Trek” movie.
The new movie is a different version of “Star Trek” and some purist fans will object to the changes, just as there are die-hard Sean Connery fans who refuse to watch any other version of James Bond. The original series had loud primary color uniforms to help sell color television sets; for the movie they’ve been toned down a bit but are still in the classic gold, blue and red colors.
There are many excellent subtle touches which only long term fans will appreciate. Green Orion women appear wearing just as little clothing as they wore in the original series (but at least this time undressed for a plausible reason). Two of the admirals are James Komack and Richard Barnett, admirals who were named in the various series. The subtlest in-joke is why Scotty was assigned a dead-end position on the planet Delta Vega, but I won’t spoil the surprise other than to say it involves a certain beagle.
One classic “Star Trek” myth-quote has now been legitimized. In the original series McCoy said “I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer”, “I’m a doctor, not an escalator”, or even “I’m a physician, I don’t peddle in human flesh” in various episodes, but he never said “Damnit, I’m a doctor, not a …” The new McCoy does say, “Damnit I’m a doctor, not a physicist.” The damnit myth-memory may originated from a 1975 “Saturday Night Live” sketch, “The Last Voyage of the Enterprise.” McCoy, played by Dan Aykroyd, does say, “I’m a doctor, not a tailor damnit.”
Majel Barrett plays the voice of the computer, something she’s done in every single “Star Trek” incarnation – the original series, animated cartoons, movies, and each of the sequel series. She recorded her lines before her death in December 2008. The movie is dedicated to her and creator Gene Roddenberry.
The producers intentionally named the new movie just “Star Trek”, without any subtitle or number so movie viewers who aren’t “Star Trek” fans won’t think they need to watch any of the earlier movies or TV series to appreciate it. The movie does stand on its own for a brand-new viewer who’s never seen a single “Star Trek” episode, but it is “Star Trek: XI”, even if that isn’t the official title.
All of the major actors were signed for three picture contracts. This is a fairly standard procedure for major franchise movies – that way the studio doesn’t have to pay giant raises if the first movie turns out to be a mega-hit. It doesn’t guarantee additional “Star Trek” movies, but it is a first step. Paramount has instructed the writers to start working on a script for a sequel, but the sequel will only be made if the current movie’s a big hit.
Photos courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Leonard Nimoy Zachary Qunito photo copyright 2008 by Philip Chien.
Screen capture from "Saturday Night Live" from the author's collection.
Links
Order the Star Trek Movie Novelization
from Amazon.com
Order Star Trek: Countdown Trade Paperback
from Amazon.com
Select from hundreds of Star Trek
products at Amazon.com
Order the early Saturday Night Live
book with the script for “The Last Voyage of the Enterprise” from Amazon.com
Watch The Last Voyage of the Enterprise on Hulu.com.
“Star Trek” scenes filmed at Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park.
About the author
Philip Chien has been a “Star Trek" fan since the early 1970s.
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