Black Gate

I don’t remember if I groaned aloud when I realized that the second Star Trek “reboot” was going to be a Khan movie. It’s entirely possible. One might reasonably wonder why the production team chose to do a reboot of a reboot, if you’ll pardon the expression, when they could have taken so many directions with the story. I suspect that sheer commerce ruled the day and the notion, common in moviemaking and publishing, that whatever worked before must surely work again.

So did Star Trek Into Darkness work? Not so much for me. I’ll admit that I wasn’t disposed to be too charitable to either of the reboots in the first place. But I made a valiant attempt to be open-minded.

But, anyway. In my review of The Wrath of Khan I noted that it was something of a war of the overactors, with William Shatner going toe to toe with Ricardo Montalban. While Shatner’s character won the day in the movie, I awarded Montalban an honorary retro-Oscar for Best Overacting Performance in a Star Trek Movie.

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Fans of Eighties new wave music might remember a song by Timbuk 3 called “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” Which should have been the theme song for the J.J. Abrams “reboot” of Star Trek. I’d heard about the much maligned lens flares favored by Abrams but until I actually watched the movie I truly had no idea. It’s such an extreme exercise in cinematic brightness that I found myself fighting off a headache at a few points.

But enough of that. Let’s have a few words about reboots. I don’t care much for them. Nor do I care much for the concept, in general. Which can only come about when lawyers and accountants make decisions that should be made by “creative” types. Yes, I understand that the making of TV shows and movies is not a charitable endeavor but when a pretense of creativity isn’t present then what’s the point?

Which is the whiner’s way of saying that even though I was a fairly avid fan of the original Star Trek series I had no interest in watching the reboots. I might have never watched them if it hadn’t been for this movie rewatch project. But after tackling the first two “real” Star Trek movies I found myself getting curious about how the reboots had played out. So I skipped ahead in the chronology.

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You could say many things about William Shatner but you probably wouldn’t say he’s a subtle actor. Unless you compare his acting style to the delicate and restrained thespian stylings of Ricardo Montalban, who appears here as genetically enhanced super-overactor, Khan Noonien Singh. Two heavy hitters of the overacting community square off and naturally Kirk triumphs, but his win comes at a price.

The consensus regarding Star Trek films is that The Motion Picture was a lackluster effort and The Wrath of Khan was among the best — if not the best — of all of them. I’d agree that The Motion Picture had its fair share of issues but it also had a decent science fictional concept at its heart, and did a passable job at creating the sense of wonder that good science fiction often manages.

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My peak Star Trek watching years came in the seventies. Those of us who were too young to catch the show when it first aired in the mid-sixties could gorge ourselves on seemingly endless reruns of three seasons worth of shows. It was a far cry from Netflix and calling up any episode any time but we made do.

As the seventies wound down my interest in Star Trek waned and I wasn’t really cognizant of what came along later — four more TV series and a heap of movies. I sought to rectify this in the early years of the new century, watching as many TV episodes as possible and some of the movies, but my intake of the latter was sporadic.

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