There’s a new Trek movie coming out, as you probably know. I’m looking forward to it, and there are a few good reasons why I think this overmilked franchise may get a new lease on life, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But first…
A long time ago, I used to read a sci-fi column in Starlog magazine called Rumblings by David Gerrold, a writer who penned, among other things, several Star Trek episodes. That column, from back in the late 1970s and way before blogs, read very much like a contemporary blog, each month a little slice-of-life journal entry from David, an Angry Young Man in the mold of Harlan Ellison, frequently decrying something he’d encountered through the process of being The Writer David Gerrold. It was funny. It was angry. It was dark. I was a teen at the time, and I loved it.
And then one day, in the early 1980s, he changed the name of his column to Soaring, and changed the nature of his column from curmudgeonly to something a little less so. In making the transition, he noted the difference in his personal outlook, and I believe the sentiment ran something along the lines of “life’s too short to be so upset by everything all the time.” But I’m paraphrasing of course. The point is, that moment of change for David stuck with me, and I think about it pretty frequently.
I’m thinking about it a lot these days as I hear about the new Star Trek reboot, not only because David Gerrold was a writer on the old series, but also because of the attitude of J. J. Abrams (”Lost”) who is running the show.
J. J. is by all accounts a pretty positive person, and the joyful way he is plunging into the Trek universe is typical. He is, oddly, a self-admittedly non-Trek person. He points out that he’s always liked the more visceral sci-fi fare, and cites Star Wars as a passion over Star Trek, noting nevertheless that his smarter friends tended to prefer Trek. I know what he means.
But the thing is – Gene Roddenberry’s vision for Trek was very optimistic. Developed in the mid-to late 1960s, in a time of great social upheaval in this country, Trek dared to show a universe where people of all races, countries, and credos could come together in a single-minded attempt to get Captain Kirk some lady friends. Oops, I mean, explore new life and new civilizations… to boldly go where no man had gone before. So it seems a very logical choice for the very positive, very un-cynical J. J. Abrams to take on.
Entertainment Weekly recently ran an article on the upcoming Trek movie and Abrams’ philosophy toward making it, and it’s a refreshing difference. Sci-fi in general has gotten so cynical, so dark. Even with the lessons of David Gerrold’s shift from Rumblings to Soarings in mind, it’s so easy to get jaded, cynical, dark. As an example, I love the new Battlestar Galactica, in part because of its dark, gritty reality. But as that show has continued to darken over the past couple of seasons, I could detect a buzzing in the back of my head, something like a young, optimistic sci-fi fan in my mind getting crushed under the weight of all that serious, depressingly pessimistic reality-based fantasy. It’s refreshing to remember Roddenberry’s original optimistic take, and encouraging to hear J. J. talk about his attempt to “make optimism cool again”. It’s a nice reminder.
Some nice quotes from J. J. Abrams that give me hope for the film:
- “I think a movie that shows people of various races working together and surviving hundreds of years from now is not a bad message to put out right now.”
- “We weren’t making a movie for fans of Star Trek. We were making a movie for fans of movies.”
Let’s hope so.
