Brooding young firebrand and Beastie Boys fan, James T Kirk.
I
am not a Trekkie. My mother watched repeats of the original Star Trek when I was little and back
then, if there weren’t any lightsabers, it was not worth my time. Now the show is a giant franchise and a
universe filled with stories and aliens and Shatner’s toupees. But when I heard JJ Abrams would take the
helm of one of these movies back in 2009, I was intrigued. Alias,
Lost and now outer space. I’m in.
A
lot of die-hards did not like this movie and I don’t care. It worked for me. But I’m not here to compare Kirks and Spocks
and Vulcan love. I want to talk about
one of the most ingenious cheats in time travel fiction ever.
So,
if you are familiar with this project, Abrams was not a Trekkie either. He used this as a basis to reboot the stale
movie franchise into a new series of summer blockbusters. I was excited about the movie, but I
understood that this franchise, out of all the franchises, had the most
entrenched group of hardcore nerdlings who would never be happy with anything
Abrams put onscreen.
A quick tangent: I believe that this modern diehard fandom phenomenon
is both ridiculous and sweet. It is
ridiculous because established characters always go through a change through
the years. Societal impact, opinions
change, writers take different angles, actors age out of roles, someone
eventually creates a cool Batmobile. Star
Trek is a little different because the foundation was a TV show, instead of
a comic book. Comic book fans have an
understanding that different hands and minds shepherd storylines as the years
pass and different studios take turns transforming them into billions at the
box office. But TV is not as fluid, especially a show from the 1960’s that was on
less than three seasons.
But
I do believe intense fandom for fictional worlds is sweet in one specific
way. Star
Trek, and for a while, Star Wars,
were left up to the fans to fill in the gaps.
There were companion universe books, etc., but most of us were left with
our imaginations to find out what happened to Luke after Darth Vader was
dead. Or in this case, what happened to
Spock after he died and came back again.
There was enough time to fantasize and use our imaginations to create
our own fan fiction. That’s why there are always complainers out there when
something beloved hits the screen. The
movie can’t possibly improve on the stories we created for ourselves.
Now
on to JJ Abrams McCheaterhead.
I
poke fun out of awe. I thought it was a
brilliant choice in the new incarnation to include a time travel element. Quickly: a slighted Romulan chases an aged
Spock through a wormhole, traveling back through time to both alter the lives
of Kirk and Spock. The actions of this new
time travel variable eventually alter the course of the Starfleet universe as
everyone ever knew it.
The
James Kirk of yesterday is not only younger, at the beginning of his career and
played by a different actor, but his motivations and personality have forever
been altered. Spock’s home planet is
destroyed. Now we have a conflicted and
bitter Spock. Most of these reboot experiments involve some rejiggering of the source
material. That is understood. But using time travel as a means to
accomplish that goal is purely unique and diabolically clever.
Hey! Need to reboot a franchise but are sure to
piss off the die-hard fans? Start from
scratch and build your own universe! If
they disagree with character motivations and storyline changes: Hey man, that was the other timeline. Whatever Kirk and Spock did in the previous
incarnations is essentially moot. That
was a different reality.
Surely
this pissed people off. I loved it. Those are fun movies. (I probably wouldn’t have brought back Khan,
though...) Time travel served as a
set-up for an entire franchise, even though the stories aren’t about time
travel. I thought it was a slick move.
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