Star Trek XI: FIRE EVERYTHING!!

Master film-makers like Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jane Campion, Robert Bresson and Alfred Hitchock understand something essential about film as an art form; you trust your audience. You recognize their dignity and intelligence with dramatic revelation, and not ending with tidy conclusions. You let them walk away with something to consider. Master filmmakers avoiding spelling out every detail with the assumption that you're an inattentive child needing to be sold something.

I just returned from seeing the much anticipated (by me) Star Trek movie. I felt very excited after seeing the first trailer which was the long, slow pan of the Enterprise being constructed backed with a conservative use of the old theme song mixed with a voiceover of JFK about space exploration. I once read and article about the editors who make hollywood trailers and one of them said "If the film has a blockbuster opening weekend and then dies, we really know we've done our job." Boy, did I get suckered in. Do I ever have a bad taste in my mouth.

And it's my fault because I was fair-warned by the later trailers. and by interviews with J. J. Abrams repeating the phrase; "This is not your father's Star Trek, we've got to sell it to a new generation." My understanding of the old Star Trek was that it took on relevant philosophic and moral issues. This new Star Trek is all about selling itself. Pardon, not selling, ramming it down your gullet, and explaining everything, because, you know, the stupid little kids have no capacity for attention or reflective contemplation. I can do without that kind of contempt.

I once theorized that the reason I always felt uncomfortable watching video, as opposed to watching film, was because of the frame rate. Video has this buzzy, hyper-real presence about it. Film, normally shot and projected at 24 fps, requires the brain to fill in the information via persistence of vision. Video, with a frame rate of 30 fps, has to make up for it's poorer quality of resolution by throwing more frames at you.

Star Trek didn't seem to care if I watched it. It wanted to throw images at me and challenge me to keep up, like an automatic tennis ball launcher gone haywire in a situation comedy. The story, which was OK, but not really substantive or even very exciting, could have been more powerfully told in a longer form. Maybe two, or three films.

All winter and spring I heard Abrams talking about how important the chemistry of the characters were, but I didn't get that it cared about the characters at all. They barely had time for one breath, let alone time to sit and think, or speak little more than quippy, hackneyed catch-phrases like "Do it! do it! do it!. I felt like the film was a giant puppy in a tiny room ceaselessly begging for my attention.

Another tired device that I thought was pervasive was the bad-ass, navy seal, one-upmanship aspect. This is a major virus, too often passing for drama and excitement, that I'm still waiting for hollywood to find a cure for. Do we really need to hear some frat-boy screaming "go! go! go! go! go!" or "lock and load!" or "Let's do this!" in every trailer? God, please let it die, or at least keep it out of Star Trek. The audio for every punch and body hit was artificially sweetened to make a thud in your chest cavity. I think they had a guy in the sound department hitting the lowest subsonic key on the synthesizer and another guy cracking a two by four for every instance of impact.

The production design went right along with the direction, the furious editing, and the over-percussive soundtrack (even the glitzy, chrome phasers turned percussive, like they were shooting hyper-bullets.) The bridge was barely visible for all the white light glaring into my eye, and was so glossy I was amazed that the actors weren't slipping and falling. At moments, it was like watching Lord of the Dance in a Vegas hair salon. (OK, I lifted the Vegas hair salon from another reviewer, but it's so apt!)

Did I like any of it? A little. The special effect were great. The shot of the Enterprise rising out of a mist at the end was way cool, made the little hairs on the back of my neck rise up ( I love when that happens.) I also love the far-away shots of the ships in relation to one another, with shifting focus and shaky camera, this optical technique gave those shots some raw weight. I thought Chekov was great.

A phrase just kept rolling over in my mind toward the end of the film and during the drive home. I had heard an interview with an author who had written a book on the nature of beauty. He said; "Glamour is beauty without soul." This film, in my perception, was a very pretty, fast, percussive, glamorous film, that didn't even get near what I've experienced as Star Trek. I know Star Trek. Star Trek had soul.