Star Trek
Directed by JJ Abrams
Written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman
With Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy and Eric Bana
I've never emerged blinking into the sunlight from an afternoon screening in a porn cinema. My hunch is that it's probably a fairly similar demographic to the audience who were at Saturday's 4pm screening of the new Star Trek film.
There weren't any women and at least two men that I saw could be cast as Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons with no change of clothing required. This unrepresentative sample is the very definition of a niche market but it turns out that the film has been very well received and is certain to make lorry loads of money.
In a way it deserves to. An early sequence with the young James T. Kirk hell-raising to "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys would gladden the saddest heart.
The plot, as best I could make out, involved Kirk altering history after meeting the older Spock to relieve young Spock of command of the Enterprise to kill the Romulan psychopath who had already destroyed Vulcan and was about to obliterate Earth with a machine that makes black holes. Or something.
This was old school Star Trek with no irony, lots of mumbo-jumbo science, a brief scene with a sexy green alien woman and Uhura in their underwear and a happy ending. It was entertaining, escapist hokum. Or was it?
Young Kirk had gone badly off the rails to become the only "genius level repeat offender in Iowa". After a bar fight he was persuaded to join Star Fleet, which is described as a "peacekeeping and humanitarian" by his future commander.
It's a multi-ethnic, multi-species military organisation that somehow always downplays its murderous role and you couldn't help thinking that this is how the US, British, Canadians, etc. in Afghanistan and Iraq wish the world to see them. If only people could ignore the wedding party massacres and concentrate on the vaccination programs.
God forbid that we start getting all uber-Trot but in a fairly subtle way Star Trek is quite an ideological film. Handsome, decent, liberal-minded people staff star ships rammed with photon torpedoes to protect us from uglier, non-liberal, twisted members of species from alien galaxies who wish us harm. You see the analogy.
This return to the core values of the Star Trek brand coincides nicely with the early days of the Obama presidency. Of course he's in charge of a massive killing machine but it's only there to protect nice people from nasty Romulans. Kirk and Star Fleet don't have a cynical bone in them and Obama has the momentary luxury of playing the same type of straight-up polished hero.
Cometh the president, cometh the film.
[First published at: www.liammacuaid.wordpress.com]