Star Trek and Hollywood's New Middle Standard

Prologue

Hollywood is an industry, by and large, using tools it has never bothered to master.

Every year we hear the terms "thrill ride, edge of your seat, work of startling imagination," etc. used in praise of films that turn out to be precisely the opposite; tedious, numbing and utterly lacking in imagination. And that as the absolute rule.

Plots are regurgitated, dialogue scooped from the very base of vocabulary and characters slapped together from spare parts and toothy smiles. Special effects balloon outward in expense and complexity leaving no room for either narrative value or visual clarity. Five-story-tall robots chase humans on foot and don't catch them, cartoonish demolitions of cities and plague after planet-rending plague not only make no sense, they just look a mess. Our entertainments are poorly built, wrong headed and lazy and we are told we have to just accept it because it's, " just entertainment."

But the brilliant thing about film is that it is a complete art form. Every element; costume, dialogue, set design, sound, music, special effects etc, has a specific set of capabilities, things it brings to the table and does well. Every element also has its weaknesses, areas it cannot address or does so poorly. And there to pick up the slack, in every case, is another standard element. Where set design fails, special effects arrive. Where visual narrative stalls, dialogue soldiers forward. Where dialogue plus visual cannot quite reach, music lends a hand. Every element has its place.

Sadly no element in production is so universal as administrative incompetence.

It is patently irresponsible for a multi-hundred-million-dollar film to fail at the gap between narrative and visualization, between dialogue and character, between filming and editing. All that's required at every step is simple COMPETENCE.

You are professionals.

STOP SUCKING!!!

Review

Star Trek, directed by J.J. Abrams and scripted by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman, is a lean and dangerous film. Clear eyed and capable, not a single element falters. The writing is outstanding melodrama, so much so that you might well be misty-eyed by the arrival of the opening titles.

Tell me the last time the first five-to-fifteen minutes of a film introduced a robust dramatic crisis, taking in the sweep of human existence from birth to death, wrapped you in a rip-roaring space battle using ingenious devices to facilitate moments of pristine humanity and managed to reinvigorate a decrepit esoteric franchise launching it front and center of mainstream pop-culture, all at a single kinetic and involving swoop?

I'll tell you when, NEVER.

Star Trek not only does all that in its prologue but goes on to fill the next two hours with relentless and edifying entertainment without flagging for a moment. Inside jokes, action sequences, twists and turns and not an inch of flab on the whole production. No moments when you sigh and wish they'd just get on with it. Not a single event you do not feel right to your toes.

Don't get me wrong, this is not great with a capitol "G." The special effects and design occasionally become obscuring to the action, I'm still not a fan of the relentlessly swooping camera and the acting at most does not get in the way. The film has weaknesses but is intelligent enough not to linger on them, swerving us instead back toward its breakneck pace of invention and willingness to lovingly aknowledge our familiarity with the characters.

No one will hold Star Trek up as the equal of Citizen Kane or Godfather II. It is shallow entertainment and gloriously so. But what we seem to have forgotten, as film watchers and film producers, is that entertainment does not have to insult us. In fact it does not even have the right to. Especially now that it has been done, once again, so much better. That is to say, simply, done well.

And I hope we can keep this in mind on the cusp of summer movie season and no longer allow an industry of complacent hacks to get away with their decrepit and self congratulating con.

Post Script:
I would love to live in a world wherein this film warranted a standard 3 of 5 star rating. As it stands it's a 4 ½ at least, and probably the full five (the extra half-star awarded for level of difficulty in simultaneously reviving, redefining and honoring an institution). In such a world as I imagine Star Trek would be three stars, a film like Wall-e would be four, five would only be awarded posthumously and just the preview for Transformers 2 would be punishable by death.