To Boldly Go Where No Series Reboot Has Gone Before

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I can sum up the movie Star Trek in three words:

Fuck yeah! Woohoo!

(Woohoo counts as one word in this case, and even then that’s probably too many as woohoo is less a word and more a sound people make during moments of supreme elation, like when they win the lottery, or watch Star Trek.)

Star Trek features a lot of tried and true science fiction movie hallmarks, as though the writers had gone through some sort of cookbook for making awesome movies and selected all the appropriate ingredients, and then doubled them all. Multiple people are incinerated. Multiple phasers fall off of precarious ledges. Multiple people fall off of precarious ledges. A Vulcan bully gets his ass kicked. Young Kirk drives a classic car off a cliff for no apparent reason. Best of all, the film carries on the gleeful bloodlust of the original series, featuring a joyous and happy ending in spite of the fact that (spoiler alert), seven-eighths of Kirk’s graduating Starfleet class have all died, in addition to some six billion Vulcans.

I hadn’t really been eagerly anticipating the Star Trek movie, which made this whole experience a lot more surprising – ordinarily, when I’m excited about an upcoming movie, the months leading up to its release consist of me scouring the Internet regularly in search of new information while religiously watching the trailer over and over again (for reference, please reference my activities in the 12 months before Watchmen came out). However, not being an avid Trekkie, my skirt failed to be blown up by the teasers, the trailers, the extended trailers, the posters, or the Burger King promotional bobbleheads.*

*Watchmen had no promotional bobbleheads, much to my dismay – I would buy a car right now if I knew that I could have bobblehead Rorschach in the back window in order to take a dump on the emotional complexity of the graphic novel everywhere I went.

So for me to be able to walk into the theater, have my world completely rocked for two hours, and then walk back out again without having to go through the rather arduous anticipation cycle was somewhat akin to the experience of walking downstairs on a sunny Tuesday in July to find a Christmas tree and a living room full of presents, all of them for me, none of them socks.

Star Trek’s irrepressible sense of awesome more than makes up for the four seasons of torture I endured at the hands of Scott Bakula and Star Trek: Enterprise, the heavily derided prequel series that gleefully joyrided through history, forever fucking up the Star Trek series canon and frustrating the living daylights out of the Wikipedia fiends attempting to establish a concrete year of first contact with the Borg. I’ve lain awake many nights trying to figure out how a show like Enterprise, where an entire plotline consisted of the diplomatic ramifications of Captain Archer’s dog whizzing on an alien tree, could run for four seasons when a vastly superior show like Firefly, which features a guy getting kicked into a jet turbine, could get cancelled after one.

But of course, that’s what Star Trek had lost track of before this movie – senseless violence. For the first two seasons of Enterprise, nobody died; good guys or bad guys. This implied that space was less the final frontier, full of uncharted mystery and danger, but more like an indoor playground at Chuck-E-Cheeze, where you might get bruised on the slide or find a dead raccoon in the ball pit but, in the end, would learn a lesson and go home relatively unscathed. By the time we’d reached the season finale of Enterprise, I halfway expected the final scene to show the entire crew merrily ghost riding the ship through the Xindi expanse, or some shit of equal stupidity.

At this point, you might be wondering why, if I’m not a Trekkie, I kept watching such a horrible show for so long. To be honest, I was bored, my parents were watching it, and I didn’t know any better – as a result, my first experience with Star Trek coincided with the series’ darkest hour. It’s like if the first Indiana Jones movie you watched was Indiana Jones and the Attack of the Crystal Skull, or the only James Bond movies you ever saw were For Your Eyes Only, The Man With The Golden Gun, Moonraker, and Octopussy.* I’d gotten started on a Star Trek that suggested the series was about present-day social issues chunkily transposed onto a spaceship; the movie harkens back to the original series, which was all about killing Redshirts, macking on alien chicks, and being an unstoppable asshole genius all through the galaxy.

*Wow, Roger Moore is in all of those movies. I wonder if there’s a connection of some sort…

Star Trek isn’t a perfect movie – I don’t expect to see it winning Academy Awards or generating the same sort of fanboyism that The Dark Knight did last summer – but it is fun. The thing is, though, it isn’t stupid fun; I did enjoy Transformers, but a lot of that was because I was watching an epic blockbuster that cost more than the combined income of my entire family based on toys marketed to kids in the 1980s. Star Trek is a really expensive movie based on something more valuable – a group of racially diverse spacefarers who have attained a godlike popularity in our culture. Sure, none of them can turn into a truck (yet!), but their history is somewhat more illustrious.

Truman Capps would also like to mention that the movie had a great script - there just wasn't anywhere good to mention that in the main text of the blog, so he's sacrificing the potential joke here to let you all know.