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Get ready for Star Trek eleven
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It is emotionally jarring to realize that thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of youngsters will see their first Star Trek with new actors in the roles of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Scottie, Uhura, Chekov and Sulu…. never having seen them played by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and George Takei. – whose interpretations of those characters evolved over nearly 30 years, from the 1966-1969 television series through seven movies from 1980 to 1995.
But that will happen when the eleventh Star Trek movie premieres in May 2009.
Only Nimoy will return in the new movie – as an older version of himself coming back in time to help his younger self.
Even the actress who will take over as Uhura said she never saw the original series! (known as Star Trek-TOS to followers.)
No, I’m not going to list the new actors here because you’ve never heard of them and I feel about them now the same way I felt about Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) when it came out in 1987. Blasphemy! I just wouldn’t watch it.
But after a few years I got over it. I did watch it and gradually came to appreciate Captain Picard, Riker, Data, Counselor Troi and the others. I learned that The Next Generation came closer to creator Gene Roddenberry’s original vision for Star Trek than he was able to accomplish with the first series. With the first, he was constrained by network Neanderthals who wanted to hold him to his “Wagon Train in space” sales pitch – meaning story lines advanced by body blows rather than brain work. TNG got cerebral and fans loved it.
Hopefully, the new movie will help Roddenberry’s legacy live on because Star Trek is an important cultural icon. It gives much of the human race a positive outlook.
Most science fiction that came before Star Trek was dystopian. It presented dark and terrible futures. It showed what awaits us if we don't reform, repent, disarm, stop polluting, or don’t watch out for Big Brother. Roddenberry had a rare, happy vision of the future. In his Star Trek Federation racism and sexism have been eliminated. Poverty is non-existent, along with "cut and sew" surgery, the common cold, and the headache. People work for motives other than greed. Starship captains are magnanimous. Never mind that the Prime Directive is impossible...the Federation has only benevolent intentions. Sure, sometimes Kirk had to fight his violent ancestral past, but in the Star Trek universe, mankind is always striving to be better.
It was also a uniquely character-driven show. We loved how Kirk and Spock and McCoy interacted. Kirk and Spock sparred over brute force versus logic; McCoy and Spock over emotion versus dispassion. Despite their differences, they were friends.
If the new movie fails this legacy it will be a sad thing. But the old work will remain in movies and in books.
Yes, books. Parents, if you want to give your kids a hopeful outlook and things to ponder, help them become Trekkies by giving them books, too. There's a book about every facet of the Star Trek universe from fashion to physics. There are nit-picker's guides and quotation books, engineering diagrams and chronologies. . You can learn to speak Klingon or make an Origami Enterprise. And there are hundreds of Star Trek novels of varying quality. Some are expansions of the well-known storylines. Others are fan-written explorations. Some of the finest are written by the husband/wife team of Judith and Garfield Reeves Stevens.
The novel Federation is often cited as the best. Prior knowledge of some of the Star Trek lexicon enhances the experience of reading this novel, but it’s great for teenagers.
Younger kids might want to project themselves into Star Fleet Academy books. These go back to the character's lives as young cadets. One of the best is Shatner’s 2007 Academy: Collision Course, written in collaboration with the Stevens’. The year is 2249 and Jim Kirk is a headstrong 17-year-old barely scraping by in San Francisco, haunted by horrible memories of his childhood. In the same city is a 19-year-old alien named Spock, determined to rise above the emotional turmoil of his mixed-species heritage. Young Spock is determined to show he has what it takes to be Vulcan –even if it means exposing a conspiracy as the heart of the Vulcan embassy. In deep space, a mysterious, chilling new threat has arisen to test the Federation’s deepest held belief that war is a thing of the past and that a secure future can be forged through peaceful means alone. At Starfleet Academy the two teens will find themselves linked in their separate drives to solve the mystery.
Shatner recently said computer-generated special effects are the exciting parts of film today, but as breathtaking as they can be, they still don’t compare to the chambers of an individual’s imagination.
“It’s called the theatre of your mind,” Shatner said, “and that’s what books appeal to… the inner life that the character in fiction must have -- and that’s laid out for you in books, not movies.”
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