In Search Of The Human Adventure

There's conventional wisdom in the world of Star Trek, perhaps more so than any other fandom that I am involved in, with the possible exceptioon of James Bond, and even with Bond, you do get the odd rallying cry to the true greatness of Moonraker or Licence To Kill.

Trek, on the other hand, is so rigidly organised that every movie has a set verdict already imposed on it. So here goes:

Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Worthy but dull
Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan - Brilliant
Star Trek 3: The Search For Spock - Unworthy
Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home - The pinnacle of mainstream Trek
Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier - Bobbins, and probably all the fault of Shatner
Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country - A worthy final voyage for the original crew
Star Trek: Generations - Two Captains in search of a plot
Star Trek: First Contact - Brilliant
Star Trek: Insurrection - An overlong episode of the TV show
Star Trek: Nemesis - Shite.

Now, by and large I do actually agree with most of the judgements, with two notable exceptions (and I have been known to watch TFF and enjoy it immensely on occasion, but that doesn't render it any less bobbins). They are The Search For Spock and Insurrection. Both of these films, it has been argued, are like overlong episodes of the TV show, with no real cinematic value. Which is kinda true. It's also true that they both follow on from tub-thumpingly balls to the wall action movie entries into the Trek canon and isn't variety the spice of life? If either TWoK or FC had been followed up by a film which had tried to do the same thing but bigger and better, they would have been doomed to failure. Look at the movie franchises which have tried that: Pirates Of The Caribbean, Batman, Terminator - it's a case of diminishing returns because you can only go so far before it just gets ridiculous.

So, TSfS and I turn the heat down a little. It's a good thing. It lets the characters breath. As good as FC was, the only character who got a look in was Picard, with his Moby Dick homaging subplot. Everyone else in that film was simply acting out their plot function. I brings the cast of The Next Generation back for the first time since - arguably, the holodeck sequence at the start of Generations. Because no one would have watched the series for the epic space battles and action. As a weekly syndicated series, TNG was amazingly light on action. It was about character. We fell in love with Star Trek (and The Next Generation in particular) because of the characters, not because we turned in each week to see shit getting blown up. That's not what the TV show was about. It's not what the movies are about either. Both The Wrath of Khan and First Contact are anomalies in the ten-film sequence, much in the way that Tomorrow Never Dies is an anomaly in the Bond canon in that it doesn't feel like a Bond film. It feels like a common or garden action movie that just happens to have James Bond as it's hero. The Trek universe of The Wrath of Khan is subtley different to anything that has gone before in Trek and anything that will come after it. Even TSfS and TVH which follow on from Khan take place in a different universe. Not massively different, but enough to ensure that Khan's militaristic Napoleonic era sea battle transposed to space has a unique place. While First Contact isn't as drastic a departure - by this time the Trek universe was much more defined and rigid as it was when Nick Meyer and Harve Bennett were carving out new territory - it still carries with it a different mood - again, it's a much more militaristic Starfleet we see here (and it's ironic that First Contact, made before the start of the Dominion War over on Deep Space 9 is a much more militaristic film than Insurrection, which takes place during the war), emphasised by the new uniforms and the design of the new Enterprise-E. It also rewrites Trek lore to introduce the Borg Queen (and back in 1991, Peter David, that bastion of quality tie-in fiction had to have a disclaimer in his Borg novel Vendetta as it featured a female Borg and - according to Paramount at the time, such things did not exist). In much the same way that Aliens symbolically castrated the threat of the xenomorphs by having so many of them (and having them suddenly so easy to kill, a far cry from the one indestructable alien in Ridley Scott's entry) having a spokesman (or in this case, spokeswoman) for the Borg - giving an enemy whose facelessness was on of its most appealing factors - removed much of the threat and was an all too easy concession to the apparent need for the film to have an identifiable foe who could go up against Picard. And give Data a blow job in the most literal sense.

The Search For Spock is essentially Part 2 of the Genesis trilogy (although Part 3 - The Voyage Home is less concerned with what happened in the previous two films and more bothered about having a good time and delivering its eco-message). Unlike the films starring Patrick Stewart and co, the original series films more or less follow an arc, an arc which is most apparent between films 2 and 4, continuing on from each other as they do. As such, TSfS has a lot of mopping up to do, although why they felt they had to bring back Spock is beyond me. It is, at it's core, an unnecessary action. I know Spock is the most loved of the Trek characters (although McCoy will always be my favourite - while Kirk is the fist and Spokc the brain, McCoy is the heart of the original crew) but having him brought back, and by such an obvious plot McGuffin cheapens the character and robs us of what could have been an interesting new crew dynamic. Picture this: following the events of Khan, the Enterprise crew stay together, the ship being repaired. Taking Spock's place as Kirk's first officer is Saavik, it's obviously command that she's been groomed for when she takes the Kobayashi Maru test and her inexperience would have created a lot of interesting conflict and taking over at the science station is David Marcus, Kirk's son, who was all but wasted in TSfS, aside from the one short scene where he's talking with Kirk over the intercom and he says 'I knew you'd come'. Now, it's fairly clear from the closeness of Saavik and David in TSfS that they have some sort of relationship bubbling over so you have the chance to do what no Trek series did till DS9 did - you can tell stories about long-term relationships and father-son stories. Obviously, this wouldn't work in the conext of the movies because there wouldn't be enough room to develop those relationships to a sufficient degree, and anyway, I'm not here to regret what might have been. I'm here to defend the third film.

And it is worth defending. There's a lot of good in there, a lot of humour despite the rather grim plot, a beautiful restatement of what Trek is all about when Kirk destroys the Enterprise. Now, you have to remember how Kirk felt about the Enterprise. It wasn't just a ship to him. It was his home, his life, hell, it was almost like his lover. How many women did he fall in love with, only to leave them behind because he was more in love with the Enterprise? Exactly. Losing the Enterprise, and losing it in the way he did (especially so soon after losing his son) is - to me - a greater loss than that of Spock at the end of the previous movie. As Kirk himself says at the end of the movie, when Spock has been returned to him, "The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many." He's not talking about Spock's needs there. He's talking about his own. Having never faced death until losing Spock, he's come to realise that the Enterprise means a lot to him, but it means less than Spock does, than David does, because you can't deny that Kirk's actions are primarily motivated by revenge. He blows the Enterprise up to kill the Klingon bastards that killed his son. It's telling that he doesn't even realise what he's done until he sees the hulk of the Enterprise burning up in the atmosphere of the Genesis planet and it's up to Bones to tell him, or to mollify him, saying that he's done the only thing he could do. In essence, The Search For Spock is all about one man's greed and what it costs other people. And that man is Jim Kirk. Picard goes on a similar emotional journey in First Contact. Having been tortured and dehumanised by the Borg, he is prepared to go to any lengths - even sending his entire crew on a suicidal mission - to defeat them. The main difference between the two captains is that Kirk's greed is motivated by a desire to get his friend back - David's death and the destruction of the Enterprise are simp,y two unfortunate consequences of that desire - while Picard, like Ahab, is driven purely by a desire for revenge, and revenge, in the universe of TNG is not something that is tolerated.

Insurrection is, in my opinion, probably the second best of the TNG movies. Nemesis obviously brings up the rear, it's poorly thought out plot, flat direction and basic lack of understanding of the characters/concepts that make Star Trek what it is cripple it and the good in it - and there is some; Riker and Troi's wedding, Dina Meyer as the Romulan Commander, the battle between Shinzon's vessel and the Enterprise - is not enough to tip the balance. Generations likewise suffers. The first twenty minutes or so - the portion with Kirk essentially - is wonderful, but the easy rapport between Kirk, Scotty and Chekov casts into sharp relief the cold formality that exists between the crew of the Enterprise D. Only Will Riker comes across as a geniune human being while Patrick Stewart is crippled by a plot which kills off his brother and nephew and then asks him to be a gung-ho hero, which is impossible, even for an actor of Stewart's calibre. Plus the bizarre decision to introduce elements like Data's emotion chip - which, for an audience who hadn't slavishly followed The Next Generation on television would have seemed out of place at best and mawkish at worst - it's clear that Ron Moore and Brannon Braga (G's writers) didn't have much of an idea about the differences between film and TV. Ironically, had it not been so bound up in the mythology of the TV show, All Good Things..., the series finale, has more scope and potential for action than Generations. And they waste Kirk, in more ways than one. And they got it wrong twice. First Kirk dies by getting shot in the back, then in the reshoots, they killed him by having him on a bridge that collapsed. Kirk should have died sacrificing his life, choosing to die, rather than in some stupid accident. It's no wonder Shatner had second thoughts and resurrected Kirk in the novels.

In many ways, the naysayers of Insurrection are right. It's a story which - Generations aping finale excepted - could have been done as a two parter on the TV show. But does it really matter? There's more essential Trekkiness in Insurrection than in all the other TNG films put together. There's more humour... there's more heart. And that is what Trek was all about, in the final analysis. It's just that the fans expected something a little more bombastic after First Contact - a film in which the entire galaxy was at stake - than Insurrection which is a more personal story on every level.

It reminds me of a comment I read somewhere concerning the deaths of the Tom Baker and Peter Davison Doctors. Tom Baker was better, they said, because he died saving the universe while Davison died saving just one person. In my humble opinion, they got it the wrong way round. Davison was a far better hero than Baker because he was willing to sacrifice himself just to save one friend (and it's telling that Eccleston does much the same thing in the rebooted Doctor Who). Insurrection is much the same. It's not hard to try to save the universe. Saving one person? That's much harder. As Kirk himself says at the conclusion of The Search For Spock after Sarek asks him if the sacrifice was worth it, given the cost of his ship and his son: "If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul."