I haven't had high hopes -- or much of any hope, really -- for J.J. Abrams's "reboot" of the Star Trek franchise. It doesn't have much to do with Abrams's skill as a filmmaker, really. For me, it breaks down like so:
- Star Trek, as a franchise, is creatively exhausted. It is played out. It needs to die off. But of course this will never happen, and so I have to turn to Reason #2.
- The biggest reason for this exhaustion is Paramount/Viacom, who after Gene Roddenberry's death accelerated the franchise's descent into, well, franchising. They may pick someone like Abrams to keep things moving, but in the end he's bound to deliver them the kind of movie they want to see.
Devin Faraci of CHUD put it this way, in his look at some sneak-preview footage of the movie:
... something tells me that these characters [the Trek crew] are going to be about endless 'snappy' banter that's never funny and barely counts as dialogue. This is what screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman bring to all the material they write - terrible, tortured dialogue. They're blockbuster blueprinters, not real writers, and having them on this film is probably the greatest strike against it. ... They're exactly the sort of writers who are killing Hollywood, the writers whose ideas feel as formatted and predictable and friendly as their Final Draft scripts.
And that's the problem: "formatted" and "predictable" and "friendly" is exactly what ViaMount wants from Trek. They don't want anything edgy or daring or (gulp) new, because that doesn't put butts in theaters. Actually, never mind butts in theaters; if we go back to the algebra of the exhibitors being the real customers, what ViaMount cares about most is being able to sell the thing in as many territories as possible.
I grew up with old-school Trek, and I have an emotional connection to it that does not transpose easily. I'm fond of it because it is a product of another era, a time when people seemed genuinely afraid of looking forward because they felt like they would see only disaster. That was a time when you could put ad copy like "VALIANT KIRK! GLORIOUS SPOCK!" on the back of one of the James Blish novelization tie-ins and get away with it. It didn't seem silly or self-referential or parodic or wink-wink-nudge-nudge; there was no all-pervading mockery of such things that they had to fight through. People cared about the show because it was something entirely new, in both attitude and form.
That's why this whole thing just smacks of being wrong. It's a puppet play. It's not even a remake or a reboot; it's just another milking of a cow that was out to pasture a long time ago. And the fact that X million dollars is being pumped into it means that much less else out there that's going to be genuinely original.
Personally, I could not care less about Star Trek, but I'm excited for this movie, thanks to Abrams. I think Faraci is overestimating the importance of a script in a big Hollywood movie like this. Orci and Kurztman wrote Transformers and Mission Impossible 3, and I loved one of those movies!
It's too bad Abrams gets ignored as the skilled action director he is. But yeah, he needs to get away from franchises.
Was it "MI:3" you were fond of? I haven't actually seen it yet (and I'm willing to check it out for the sake of perspective if nothing else), but "Transformers" was so obnoxious, overblown and wretched that I couldn't even bring myself to write about it. I do like the look that they've brought to the new movie, though -- the glimpses in the trailer of, for instance, Vulcan, are striking.
Mission Impossible 3 is one of the most clever action movies ever made. It never gets overblown with special fx or unbelievable John McClane stunts. Abrams knows how to build tension, Hitchcock style. I would check it out!