Fifty years ago, on September 8, 1966, Star Trek premiered on NBC. It struggled through 79 meh-rated episodes before it was cancelled. No one knew it would prove to be the most influential piece of American popular culture of the past half-century.
Before Star Trek, science fiction was the Rodney Dangerfield of the genres; in its wake, SF and its fantasy and comic-book offshoots have become the dominating cultural exports of the United States. Indeed, the obsession of Hollywood today with the “intellectual property” model—the way Hollywood refers to a product line that includes movies, television shows, video games, books, and toys, that all stem from a singular root—dates back specifically to Star Trek. By the mid-1990s, the show that had vanished from prime time in 1969 had given birth to eight movies, four subsequent television programs, two video games, innumerable toys, and dozens of novels. It was one of the original “brands.”
The surprise revival of Star Trek in the 1970s highlighted another of the phenomena that unexpectedly emerged from it: fandom. Successful reruns on New York’s Channel 11 led to the first serious Star Trek convention in 1972 in the city, run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. That “con” and the hundreds that followed it gave rise to the “Trekkie,” the kind of person for whom the fantasy world of the show was more real and more comforting than real life.
Make fun of the Trekkie all you like, and we all did, but this original fanboy became the conduit for a new kind of information flow—a more immediate connection between the makers of culture and the consumers of culture, especially subcultures. He and his friends would make up a “fan base” that would do everything it could to learn everything about the work of pop culture they loved, and would come to form the queues outside the theaters that made the openings of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind into mass events and the movies themselves into instant classics over the course of a mere weekend. These informal networks built on shared interests not only anticipated social media by four decades; they were the model for it.
Now there’s a new Star Trek movie—the thirteenth, called Beyond. It’s part of the third iteration of the Star Trek films. The first six featured the original cast. Numbers seven through ten featured the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Numbers 11-13 feature the original characters but in their younger days (and also in an alternate universe, but only fanboys understand what the hell that is, so I’ll skip it). Along with Star Wars, this series is unique in that its theoretical fanbase stretches from crucial teenage boys who still go out to the movies to people in their mid-50s like me who are choked by nostalgia for the pop detritus of our youth that still clogs our brains and makes it impossible for us to remember lines of poetry by William Blake.
Well, I’m tempted to say that it’s “Beyond awful,” because it’s a good line, and it’s even pretty much true. So there. I said it.
For no good reason, the crew of the Starship Enterprise in Beyond simply accept the word of one seemingly nice alien and fly off to help her. It’s a trap! They’re attacked by a beeswarm of ships and crash-land on a planet where they’re taken hostage. It turns out they have a doodad that will complete some villain’s machine of mass destruction—though those bee-like ships are pretty much a weapon of mass destruction, and it’s not clear why he needs another one. Then he tries to destroy a very nice city in space, just like the villain in the last one, Into Darkness, tried to destroy the very nice 23rd-century San Francisco.
Meanwhile, Captain James T. Kirk is having a personal crisis. It’s not clear why, except that it’s his birthday. A key element of this third tranche of Star Trek movies is that they labor consciously to echo earlier ones, and this bit is designed as a callback to the second film, 1982’s The Wrath of Khan. It, too, begins with Kirk having a crisis on his birthday and getting drunk with the ship’s doctor, Bones McCoy. Only in The Wrath of Khan (which is a genuinely wonderful movie, by the way, easily the best single entry in the entire Star Trek oeuvre), the scene makes sense; Kirk has hit 50, is getting old and tired, feels like his day has passed. In this movie, with Kirk around 35, there’s no organic reason for the scene and the plot point except to serve as a pointless homage to something better.
The director Justin Lin does everything he can with camera flourishes to make things look new. The Enterprise is always seen backwards, or sideways, or upside down, and things are constantly blowing up. But in the end, all these visuals come to resemble nothing so much as sped-up versions of the screen savers on old Macs (you remember—the fish tanks and the rings of Saturn, that sort of thing).
If Beyond had been the kind of thing the original show had done, it never would have gotten that fanbase, it never would have had a life after network, Star Wars would never have been made, and the past 40 years would have been different. Maybe better. Who knows?
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
