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Easy A
Mean Girls by way of Nathaniel Hawthorne
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reviews containing all of these words: Roddenberry
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
(1991)
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| Action/Adventure
Rated: PG
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| With Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country - dedicated to series creator Gene Roddenberry, who died the year of its release – the sci-fi franchise manages to find a new way to be oppressively boring. This entry is structured as a police procedural, as Kirk (William Shatner) and “Bones” (DeForest Kelley) are framed for the assassination of a Klingon ambassador. While they’re sent to a “penal asteroid,” Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and the rest of the Enterprise crew dig around the starship trying to find clues pointing to the actual culprits. This mostly combines the interminable interstellar politics of the later Star Wars films with the slowest game of Clue you’ve ever played. The only moments of interest come on that asteroid, where Kirk makes out with a shape-shifting fellow prisoner who initially looks like supermodel Iman (and is indeed played by her) and later transforms into a copy of Kirk himself. It’s the perfect metaphor for the series’ narcissistic, blowhard hero. From director Nicholas Meyer, who also made the second film, and with appearances by Kim Cattrall as a “sexy” Vulcan and Christopher Plummer as an apparently Asian Klingon obsessed with Shakespeare. |
| Star Trek: Generations
(1994)
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| Action/Adventure
Rated: PG
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| A graceless, clumsy passing of the baton from the original cast to that of the second television series in the franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. Though Star Trek: Generations opens with William Shatner’s Kirk, he’s quickly an afterthought, making way for Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and a wacked-out evil scientist (Malcolm McDowell). Not that things change all that much. Excruciating attempts at humor are still prevalent – mostly surrounding Brent Spiner’s Data, an android who serves as the Spock stand-in – while the endless, meaningless technobabble has increased. (One suspense sequence hinges on the following question: “Would a defective plasma coil be susceptible to some sort of ionic pulse?”) I had hoped Generations would rescue Star Trek from its pervasive dullness, but somehow things have gotten even more boring. That could be because Stewart, a real actor who exudes a professional craftsmanship, can’t “elevate” the embarrassing elements into camp. You feel sorry for him, while Shatner – who literally reappears on horseback for the nonsensical climax – always seemed more than happy to wallow in the series’ cheesiness. The earlier films were bad, yet fitfully, ironically amusing. Could it be that I’m going to miss Kirk? |
| Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
(1986)
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| Action/Adventure
Rated: PG
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Star Trek finally finds a personality, which would be a step forward except that the filmmakers – including Leonard Nimoy, returning as both Spock and director – decided that this personality would be a humorous one.
The fourth installment in the Gene Roddenberry franchise finds Kirk (William Shatner) and crew back in time – to 1986 San Francisco to be exact – where they must bring a pair of humpback whales back to the future to save Earth (don’t ask, or you’ll really laugh).
And so we get a lot of forced, fish-out-of-water “humor,” complete with clown music and even a brief mime gag. “Don’t bury yourself in the part,” DeForest Kelley’s “Bones” tells James Doohan’s “Scotty” at one point, but they all do, shamefully mugging as if they were doing Star Trek: The Comedy at some regional dinner theater.
This includes Shatner, whose Kirk has finally reached his full lounge lizard potential (it’s as if the comedy has freed him from his remaining inhibitions). He winks his way through the end of the world, even pausing at one moment for a dinner date with a feisty marine biologist (Catherine Hicks) in order to woo her out of the two captive whales at her oceanarium.
When he’s finally back in his captain’s chair at the end, the hamminess has set in for good. “(We’re) out of control and blind as a bat,” he declares with Shakespearean grandeur.
Perhaps the good bad era of Star Trek has begun?
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Star Trek: The Motion Picture
(1979)
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| Action/Adventure
Rated: PG
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| In this first theatrical venture for the television series created by Gene Roddenberry, going boldly where no man has gone before mainly means floating … and floating … and floating through space, until you reach a state of Zen bliss or crushing boredom. If the endless interstellar vistas of 2001: A Space Odyssey tested your patience, Star Trek: The Motion Picture will make you cry like a little star child. Those looking to defend the Star Trek oeuvre shouldn’t start here. Journeyman director Robert Wise (Sound of Music, The Day the Earth Stood Still) relies heavily on the outer-space imagery, either because he’s worried the series itself wasn’t very cinematic (which it wasn’t) or because he knows that the script has little else to offer. The plot sends James T. Kirk (William Shatner) back to the starship Enterprise to take over for Captain Willard Decker (Stephen Collins), and the power struggle between the two offers the movie its only dramatic interest. (That’s partly because Shatner’s Kirk is a pompous, stubborn egotist whose rash decisions make him a blowhard, if not a buffoon.) These two jockey for control of the Enterprise as it enters an ominous energy field headed toward Earth. At the center, they encounter an artificial intelligence that questions the necessity of human existence. It’s a facile intellectual argument too neatly handled, though not until we’ve endured many, many long shots of various vehicles drifting across the screen. The only one of these segments that amuses doesn’t do so for the right reasons. When Spock (Leonard Nimoy) hops on a space scooter to conduct his own scouting mission of the energy field, he zips around as if he’s on some souped-up, 22nd-century Harley. Add a psychedelic wormhole sequence, and I guess you could recommend Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a science-fiction nerd’s Easy Rider. |
| Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
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| Action/Adventure
Rated: PG
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| The best-received installment in the science-fiction franchise created by Gene Roddenberry is a much more conventionally structured action movie than its debut. Yet if this is the supposed high point for the Star Trek movie series, it’s still a low point for sci-fi. Despite phaser shoot-outs and starship battles, these pictures remain inert affairs, obsessed with meaningless technical jargon and philosophical pretensions. Here the intellectualism involves broad allusions to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which is quoted by the title villain (Ricardo Montalban) as he maniacally pursues vengeance against former rival James T. Kirk (William Shatner, introduced in back-lit glory but otherwise looking awfully sweaty). Montalban is remembered as a classic villain, but that’s only because his outrageous overacting doubly stands out among the catatonic performances that mostly surround him. Wrath of Khan also persists in the memory because Kirstie Alley, about 10 years before her “Cheers” run, shows up as a pointy-eared Vulcan and Walter Koenig, as Chekov, has an alien bug crawl in his ear. Still, I’d rather endure that than have to listen to Spock (Leonard Nimoy) prattle on again about his commitment to pure logic. Wrath of Khan climaxes with Spock’s death, but considering his name is in the title of the next installment it would be illogical to expect my respite to last. |
| Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
(1984)
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| Action/Adventure
Rated: PG
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| Leonard Nimoy – Spock himself – took over as director this time around, delivering a somber, mournful installment of the Gene Roddenberry franchise. And when the defining trait of your series is dullness, this isn’t exactly the best strategy. Since Nimoy is busy behind the camera, Spock himself remains off-screen for much of the film, as Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and a skeleton crew of familiar faces commandeer the starship Enterprise against orders and return to the planet Genesis to search for their presumably deceased, pointy-eared friend. Christopher Lloyd shows up as a Klingon baddie, but this guy has half the screen presence (and smarts) of Doc Brown. There is also an unfortunate attempt to recreate the famous alien bar scene from Star Wars, where we get a morose “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley) instead of Greedo. It was tough to stay awake during the picture’s finale, a long resurrection sequence involving Spock on his home planet of Vulcan, but I perked up when the final title issued the following threat: “And the adventure continues…” |
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
(1989)
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| Action/Adventure
Rated: PG
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Did it really take William Shatner in the director’s chair to finally give us a decent Star Trek movie?
I’d rather credit others for the modest successes of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, yet another installment in the franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. In fact, Final Frontier would be another wash were it not for Laurence Luckinbill as the series’ first interesting villain (and yes, I’m counting the bewilderingly beloved Khan).
Luckinbill plays Sybok, a Vulcan renegade who has abandoned that alien race’s allegiance to logic in favor of a therapeutic form of mysticism. Like Bill Clinton, he gathers converts by looking deep into their eyes and telling them he feels their pain.
“Each of us hides a secret pain,” he tells DeForest Kelley’s “Bones” at one point, prompting a vision of a shameful moment in Bones’ past that brings to mind the wrenching introspection of 1972’s Solaris, the Andrei Tarkovsky space epic that was remade by no less than Steven Soderbergh.
After assembling a band of acolytes, Sybok hijacks the Enterprise from Kirk (Shatner) and pilots it toward the Great Barrier, a cosmic void where Sybok believes he will find God. Luckinbill makes Sybok such a persuasive, empathetic character – he has the deranged sincerity of a cult leader – that Kirk and company begin to believe he might just be right. For much of the film, you’re not sure whether he’s enlightened or crazy.
With this framework in mind, a Solaris reference isn’t such a stretch. If the first film blatantly hoped to mimic the philosophical grandeur of 2001: A Space Odyssey - and failed because its ambitions were so obvious – this piece of pop cinema comes closer to such a goal by allowing the “cosmic thoughts” - to borrow a phrase from the picture itself - to emanate naturally from the story line and characters.
Still, I’m grading on a sliding scale here - Final Frontier is “good” only in relation to the previous Star Trek pictures. I’ll admit Shatner stages a moody, Mad Maxesque opening in which Sybok “counsels” a recruit on a barren, smoking desert planet, but he’s also the one who oversaw Kirk’s catfight with a three-breasted feline stripper.
As for the unfortunate moon dance performed by Commander Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), I would say Nichols is too old for this (the series had reached a point where such thoughts applied to most of the crew), except that no one should be asked to awkwardly gyrate under the light of multiple moons, no matter what their age.
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| Star Trek: First Contact
(1996)
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| Action/Adventure
Rated: PG-13
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Star Trek finally gets imaginative, exciting and – dare I say it? – kinky.
Star Trek: First Contact is ambitious and provocative right from its opening shot, a close-up of the eye of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) that pulls back to reveal a vast spacecraft. As you hurtle through the ship, you catch glimpses of pasty cyborgs with glowing red eyes – they’re like Terminator robots that have been bitten by zombies.
This would be the Borg, a relative newcomer to the Gene Roddenberry franchise (they first appeared in an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”) and one of its few arresting villains. A seemingly mindless “collective,” the Borg traverse the galaxy with the simple, ruthless goal of assimilating all other life forms by turning them into similar, cybernetic beings.
In First Contact, a Borg Queen (Alice Krige) and her minions travel back to 21st-century Earth to sabotage mankind’s initial extraterrestrial encounter (Krige’s icky wooing of Brent Spiner as Data, the Enterprise’s android, is where the sex comes in). Picard and crew follow them and fight a two-front battle: one on Earth and one on the Enterprise, which eventually begins to resemble the besieged farm house in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead.
First Contact is heavy on action, including a decent space battle between the Enterprise and the Borg’s giant floating cube, one of the few Star Trek vessels to exhibit any sort of visual invention.
The emphasis on action allows the thematic elements – normally so heavily handled in Star Trek movies – to float along on a nice, subtle undercurrent. When Picard recalls his previous assimilation at one point and says, in horror, “I was linked to the hive mind!” it makes you wonder: Nearly 15 years after this movie, with the arrival of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, have we become the Borg?
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| Star Trek: Insurrection
(1998)
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| Action/Adventure
Rated: PG
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| After the brief excitement of Star Trek: First Contact, it’s back to boring basics for the Gene Roddenberry franchise. Picard (Patrick Stewart) and crew uncover an elaborate, confusing conspiracy that involves plastic-surgery obsessed aliens (including an unrecognizable F. Murray Abraham) who have joined forces with the Federation to spy on an idyllic planet of annoying hippies. Director Jonathan Frakes, who also plays Commander William Riker, proves his adeptness at the helm of First Contact must have been a fluke, so dull and lifeless is this installment. He does provide himself with an icky candlelit bath between Riker and Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), which comes out of nowhere if you’re unfamiliar with the television series. Picard also gets a “romance” with one of those hippies (Donna Murphy), but true to Star Trek form, this mainly involves endless walks while philosophically debating things such as the passage of time. During Star Trek: Insurrection, time moves very slowly indeed. |
| Star Trek: Nemesis
(2002)
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| Action/Adventure
Rated: PG-13
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| Action director Stuart Baird was called upon to helm this tenth installment in the Gene Roddenberry franchise, and indeed there are more space battles and phaser fights than in any of the previous Star Trek pictures. At this point, looking to juice the series with action scenes is the equivalent of applying a defibrillator to a cadaver. For most of its run, the Star Trek films have been lifeless - mired in dull technobabble, sophomoric philosophical pretensions and awkward humor. The sense of wonder that defines superior science-fiction is all but absent. Nemesis is no different. Picard (Patrick Stewart) encounters an evil clone of himself, allowing existential identity issues to further bog down the proceedings. By the time the movie whimpers to its end, with various good-byes and even a key death, I felt no more attached to this universe than I did after watching 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture. After 13 years and 10 movies, the most I can muster is a shrug. |
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