Steve Ogden's Moon Town

I was fortunate enough to catch the new Star Trek movie over the weekend. I have to tell you, I wholeheartedly enjoyed it. Just a great ride all the way through, and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes good movies. Maybe this overmilked franchise may get a new lease on life, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

But first…A long time ago, I used to read a sci-fi column in Starlog magazine called Rumblings by David Gerrold, a writer who penned, among other things, several Star Trek episodes. That column, from back in the late 1970s and way before blogs, read very much like a contemporary blog, each month a little slice-of-life journal entry from David, an Angry Young Man in the mold of Harlan Ellison, frequently decrying something he’d encountered through the process of being The Writer David Gerrold. It was funny. It was angry. It was dark. I was a teen at the time, and I loved it.

And then one day, in the early 1980s, he changed the name of his column from Rumblings to Soaring, and changed the nature of his column from curmudgeonly to something a little less so. In making the transition, he noted the difference in his personal outlook, and I believe the sentiment ran something along the lines of “life’s too short to be so upset by everything all the time.” But I’m paraphrasing of course. The point is, that moment of change for David stuck with me, and I think about it pretty frequently.

I’m thinking about it a lot these days as I think about the new Star Trek reboot, not only because David Gerrold was a writer on the old series, but also because of the attitude of J. J. Abrams (“Lost”) who is running the new film.

J. J. is by all accounts a pretty positive person, and the joyful way he is plunging into the Trek universe is typical. He is, oddly, a self-admittedly non-Trek person. He points out that he’s always liked the more visceral sci-fi fare, and cites Star Wars as a passion over Star Trek, noting nevertheless that his smarter friends tended to prefer Trek. I know what he means.

But the thing is – Gene Roddenberry’s vision for Trek was very optimistic. Developed in the mid-to late 1960s, in a time of great social upheaval in this country, Trek dared to show a universe where people of all races, countries, and credos could come together in a single-minded attempt to get Captain Kirk some lady friends. Oops, I mean, explore new life and new civilizations… to boldly go where no man had gone before. So it seems a very logical choice for the very positive, very un-cynical J. J. Abrams to take on.

Entertainment Weekly ran an article on the Trek movie shortly before its release, and it also dealt with Abrams’ philosophy toward making it, and it’s a refreshing difference. Sci-fi in general has gotten so cynical, so dark. Even with the lessons of David Gerrold’s shift from Rumblings to Soarings in mind, it’s so easy to get jaded, cynical, dark. As an example, I love the new Battlestar Galactica, in part because of its dark, gritty reality. But as that show has continued to darken over the past couple of seasons, I could detect a buzzing in the back of my head, something like a young, optimistic sci-fi fan in my mind getting crushed under the weight of all that serious, depressingly pessimistic reality-based fantasy. It’s refreshing to remember Roddenberry’s original optimistic take, and encouraging to hear J. J. talk about his attempt to “make optimism cool again”. It’s a nice reminder.

Some nice quotes from J. J. Abrams that give me hope for the film:

• “I think a movie that shows people of various races working together and surviving hundreds of years from now is not a bad message to put out right now.”
• “We weren’t making a movie for fans of Star Trek. We were making a movie for fans of movies.”

In one of the Trek movies, Captain Kirk used a phrase in reference to the notorious no-win Kobayashi Maru training scenario that is part of the Star Trek universe. That phrase – “I don’t believe in a no-win scenario” – has stuck with me, and I wager it stuck with Abrams as well, because the Kobayashi Maru and that phrase figure prominently in the new Trek movie. It would be fun if that sort of positive outlook began to permeate our culture again.