Star Trek (2009) - by Leon

It’s clear that the utopia of the federation is caught up in the grips of the dialectic, having achieved the means of its own production it is now forced to evaluate the direction of its social system. These are good times, with fruity drinks from other worlds, and the warp drive has brought previously impossible distances on our doorstep. It's high times on Earth. Or is it...   Note the words of Capt. Pike as he says to Kirk, “you have a quality that starfleet has lost”, as they sit in a bar among the rolling fields of Iowa.

 

        Part of this American Midwest paean reflects President Obama (more on that later), part of it captures the quality that Pike refers to. But what is this quality? Is it only the superior genes of George Kirk, passed down to his son James Tiberius Kirk, that Starfleet is missing? The answer lies in the makeup of the crew of the Enterprise.

        45 minutes into the film, most of the senior officers on the starship have been relieved, killed, or captured by the enemy. And the Enterprise is not alone in this. The planet Vulcan is destroyed and there are 3 references to the planets history and elders. The destruction of the planet is completed by ancient statues crumbling.

As a final blow Winona Ryder plays an elderly human, a Mortal Kombat Death Hit to the 30-somethings that are watching this movie en masse. Its clear what Pike thinks is missing from Starfleet… Youth. And its clear what this movie is saying… Old people have no place in this new time. Even Spock Sr., in order to save his skin, wisely exits the film to avoid the snaking cinematic garrote.

 

        So what is this total destruction of the existing age hierarchy supposed to represent? The clue arrives from examining the economic purpose of the film itself. JJ Abrams claimed in a recent interview that the franchise needed a revitalization; that the built up detritus of 5 series and 10 films were an insurmountable challenge to snappy writing and that the idea of having to satisfy a horde of pock-faced nerds filled him with the kind of bile only Jennifer Aniston understands. In a classic Trojan Horse move, the revitalization of the Star Trek franchise also hides a repudiation of where our society has taken us.

 

        As viewers of the last 40 years, we know what happened the first time around. Kirk and Spock record an album, an English-cum- Frenchman takes control of the Enterprise, an android starts fucking humans, and a woman gets to run a starship. Star Trek has gone wrong, and… Surprise, surprise! ... a mid-westerner without a father has come to shake up existing society and create a clean slate. Sound familiar? We are in a time where a day cannot go by without renunciations of the past from our leaders.  

        The Federation had already gotten so bad that they wanted to expel Kirk for outsmarting a test. And to Abrams, that means we have to throw out the old and start again with the new. This Loreal style makeover is just the Botox the Federation needs. A little bit of poison (Red Matter), a little prick of the needle (into Vulcan), and bam! we get another 20 years running the Federation.

       

        Let's hope our Kirk achieves the same.