On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, Reggie Bautista wrote: > Did you read Roddenberry's novelization of ST:TMP? (Some say it was > ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster.)
Long ago. I remember the ADF connection, but not many of the plot details (aside from the ones that made it into the movie). > Overall, I liked the book much better than the movie. I thought the movie > was good, but it didn't really feel like Star Trek to me (of course, I first > saw it when I was 10 or 11, so what do I know :-). I feel the same about > the book, only moreso; it's a great book, but would have brought some pretty > drastic changes into the Star Trek continuity, and doesn't seem to match the > character of what came before or after. I feel the ST:TMP is most Trekkish, by TOS standards, of the movies. What happened IMO is that STII:TWoK *changed* the Star Trek formula. Instead of using the characters as an excuse "to boldy go," STII uses boldly having gone as an excuse to explore in greater detail the personal lives and relationships of the characters in the context of the immediate history and politics of the Federation; and this trend has continued in the movies unabated (and in the spinoffs). This change makes sense in the context of creating a more soap-opera-ish vehicle for a long series of movies -- and for providing basis for endless spinoffs - but it does radically change the feel of Star Trek. The audience welcomed the change, I think, because what we keep in our hearts are the characters, not the format constraints of the original series [*]. Thus STIII is about the relationship between Spock and his crewmates; STIV is about the relationship between Spock and his crewmates with a nice environmental message thown in the mix along with some social humor; STV, if it existed, would about the relationship between Spock and his brother despite Shatner's attempt to steal every scene and make his coworkers the objects of constant slapstick; STVI, having as it does a generic mystery/suspense plot thrown against the backdrop of Federation-Klingon politics, is actually about the camraderie of the cast for it's last go-round... Stop me when I reach a movie devoted to boldly going somewhere and experiencing something SFish; or, failing SFish, new. ...STVII is about passing the torch and establishing that no ST movie will ever have good make-up work again; STVIII is about Picard and Data confronting their cyber-demons with an inane first contact side plot that rehashes old TOS plot points; STIX is about...what they hell was it about, anyway?...giving Jonathan Frakes a chance to shoot the phasers on his own for a change, maybe; I haven't seen STX yet but it appears to throw us back into the political arena with yet another chance for Picard to confront yet another past. In other words, ST:TOS is about the things the crew find out in space and, to a lesser degree, how these things effect the crew (or convey some mind-bogglingly transparent Message). But Star Trek post-STII:TWoK is about how the crew, by virtue of being such a cool crew with such cool chemistry, affect the galaxy at large when they encounter various situations. Now, this is a fine line and even TOS crosses it occasionally, but I think that it holds true as a generalization. The increase of soap-opera-ish and story-arc-ish elements in all the later series and movies demonstrates that after STII:TWoK, Star Trek ceased to be about boldly going where none have gone before. Instead it became about the familiar themes of serial TV/movie character development in exotic locales. (It's interesting that with each new ST series we take for granted that it will take a while to hit its "stride," that point being when the series stops being a train of disconnected SFish adventures and starts being about the ongoing personal issues of the crew.) By contrast, ST:TMP is still about going out there and discovering something wholly new and amazing (Voyager 6, V'ger, Spock, Decker, Ilya, and even Kirk all present variations on this theme, plus the nature of V'ger is explored at length, and by extension human nature -- but the nature of the intracrew relationships are of secondary importance except as a foil to better illuminate V'ger). The Genesis Device doesn't even compare; it's a McGuffin eclipsed by themes of vendetta and loyalty and sacrifice. Well-presented themes, I'll grant - I really like STII:TWoK - but it's not the same as having a movie that explores the nature and meaning of the Genesis Device itself. [*] I think that the deliberately non-soap-opera-ish quality of ST:TOS is probably part of what killed it and also part of what made it so attractive to the geeks in the audience. ST:TOS doesn't present us with ongoing personal dramas: we don't see the long-term repercussions of Amok Time or of the kiss in Plato's Stepchildren. Instead it gives us a pleasant ensemble of characters with little long-term memory who get to explore a diffrerent idea every week. Character is revealed and explored, but with respect to the idea of the week, not with respect to the long-term relationships of the crew, which remain fairly static in their idiosyncracies. ST:TMP breaks from this mold just insofar as it has to reassemble the crew from their diverse lives, but then it stops and lets the big idea of the "week" take over. Starting with STII:TWoK, the crew relationships take center stage and over time the big ideas increasingly get pushed into the background. Ongoing human drama has made the franchise a success, but it ceased to be original Trek-ish in the process. Another way of looking at it might be to say that the things which make ST:TOS distinct from it's spinoffs are the things that a) killed the original series, b) made ST:TMP sub-par in many viewers eyes, and c) make ST:TMP the coolest and most Star Trekkish of the movies. YMMV of course. And I refuse to buy the DVDs until they come out with a real ST:TOS boxed set. Marvin Long Annual Star Trek Rant Maru Austin, Texas Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Poindexter & Ashcroft, LLP (Formerly the USA) http://www.breakyourchains.org/john_poindexter.htm _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
