Celebrating Star Trek’s 50th Anniversary
Time to boldly go into Star Trek’s triumphs and failures to see how it has become the go-to cultural icon that dares to go where no one has gone before.
In the last month of Star Trek’s 50th Anniversary celebration, I wanted to give Trekkers (Trekkies? I can never keep straight how we’re supposed to refer to ourselves) one final say before the new year and to make sure that we continue the conversations of the final frontier into the 51st anniversary.
One of my earliest memories is watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my parents; specifically, the Geordi love episode “Aquiel” where the titular character removes the VISOR of the Enterprise-D’s Chief Engineer. Since then, I have been immersed in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future — watching all the episodes, reading a good chunk of the novels, playing the video games (where my Armada fans at?), and most lovingly, obsessing over the movies.
Most people can agree that the age-old Star Trek v. Star Wars conflict is not much of a war itself, because Trek rules the small screen while Wars the multiplexes. And watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for the first time concurrently with the new season of Star Wars Rebels pretty much proves that point. Both series are noteworthy, but DS9 was clearly a special moment in television history. Heck, just look at all the love it got during the 50th Anniversary celebrations. But when you pit the best installments of each film franchise against each other, it’s pretty obvious that The Empire Strikes Back is far stronger than even The Wrath of Khan.
That being said, the Star Trek films have been and always shall be my friends. Each one brings something unique to the Trek pantheon, and, for better or for worse, charts new directions for the franchise. Perhaps the most important legacy of the franchise, even above the iconic characters, is the strict adherence to creator Gene Roddenberry’s idyllic vision of the future. It’s something I have always appreciated — seeing a future that was not apocalyptic and devastated by war, but rather one filled with hope, togetherness, and a common goal of bettering ourselves. Free of the plagues of prejudice, Star Trek offers an uncharacteristically optimistic future for humanity.
Ironically, and though the producers and filmmakers ardently deny this, we got our first Star Trek film because of Star Wars. The latter’s unprecedented success in 1977 made studios scramble for a science fiction project worthy of a blockbuster budget and plum release date, which led to the demand for a Star Trek film franchise. Since leaving the air in the late ’60s, the fanbase and phenomenon only grew, leaving people desperate for more. The original series ran in syndication to high ratings nearly every day with fan conventions growing each year. An animated series alleviated some of the tension, and the success of that program proved to Paramount that it was worth revisiting the project on a bigger scale.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as it was eventually called (though I’m much more fond of some of its earlier titles, like Planet of the Titans and The God Thing), was a slow, thoughtful sci-fi “adventure” that was missing most of the fun elements that made the original show click. It is certainly more cinematic than many of the later installments of Star Trek cinema, and indeed seeing it recently on the big screen I can really appreciate what they were trying to accomplish. And that score by Jerry Goldsmith… gawd, what would we do without it? But despite a pretty decent box office showing, fans and critics did not respond well to this new vision of Star Trek. Star Wars created an audience demand for a rollicking good time, so it was apparent that the Star Trek franchise would need to take a new direction to stay relevant.
Enter Harve Bennett: the “showrunner” of the Star Trek films who revitalized the franchise by making it a blockbuster sensation. He brought Nicolas Meyer aboard to direct Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and had the faith to let Leonard Nimoy take the reigns of The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home. That trilogy of movies is what Star Trek should be on the big screen: submarine-style epics and big space battles, yet still having plenty of big moments of character development and humor to give the story weight.
What new praise can be heaped on Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan? Its stature as the best Trek may never be challenged. The Wrath of Khan’s success evolved out of tense direction, brilliant casting (Kirstie Alley feels like she’s been part of the crew since the pilot of the series), and one of the most iconic megalomaniac villains in cinema history. Ricardo Montalbán as Khan is one of cinema’s finest baddies, and the fact that he never even shares a scene with William Shatner’s Captain Kirk is even more startling when you remember the electricity the two share. The initial space fight sequence can never be imitated enough, and no captain on the shows or movies since has said “Fire!” as coolly as Khan.
And while it’s really quite incredible that the filmmakers had the cajones to kill the beloved Spock, they managed to upturn our expectations even more with The Voyage Home, where Leonard Nimoy’s Spock comes flying back to the forefront after taking a sabbatical in The Search for Spock (he was dead after all). Without his miraculous resurrection (which did catch some fan ire as a cheap escape), we wouldn’t get his alien impressions of 1980’s Earth or his inability to grasp the “colorful metaphors” of the time period. Nimoy also shined as director; while it seemed obvious at the time to give control to someone who knew the cast’s strengths inside and out, the studio was hesitant to give the project to him.
Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country ended up being the last hurrah of Captain Kirk and his crew, who faced a governmental conspiracy and the framing of Kirk for the assassination of the Klingon Chancellor. Nicholas Meyer presented another energetic and deliciously evil villain, Christopher Plummer’s General Chang, which made Undiscovered Country the send-off that Star Trek fans needed. It also came at a time when Star Trek was starting its zenith path to another decade of success in the 1990’s, with The Next Generation standing as a national sensation and ratings smash.
But my favorite Star Trek film is actually a TNG one (gasp!) — Star Trek: First Contact. This is the one where our heroes, led by Patrick Stewart’s awesome Captain Picard, take on the Borg and their nefarious mission to eliminate The Federation from existence. The film is a tale of revenge and destiny that emanates everything synonymous with classic Star Trek: action-packed, funny, emotional, and character-driven. We care about Captain Picard, Data, and guest stars Cochran and Lily more in this movie than in any other TNG flick — whether it’s due to the writing, the stellar villains, or the attention to key comic timing, it all just comes together and works like a charm.
But let’s not pretend that the Star Trek film franchise was all sunshine and rainbows. For example, on a rather unfortunate turn of events, an icky franchise blackmail in the form of a legal clause in Shatner’s contract stated that whatever Nimoy did, Shatner had to do as well. And because Nimoy directed two Star Trek films, Shatner had to as well. Thank God we were only treated to one. No, I mean literally. In The Final Frontier, the crew of the Enterprise looks for God. Sigh. Other than the opening at Yosemite, nothing about this film works. It makes no sense, the characters go nowhere, and the villain makes me nauseous. Thanks, Shatner.
And the TNG films sank more than swam. The original premise of Kirk’s Enterprise vs. Picard’s Enterprise-D never came to fruition for Star Trek Generations; instead, it gave viewers another unwanted existential story. And by the time Insurrection and Nemesis rolled around, Star Trek had moved past its apex and into a sharp decline. The prequel series Enterprise was imploding with poor ratings and lack of fan loyalty, and people were sick of the franchise. The characters weren’t clicking with audiences, and of course THAT theme tune didn’t help matters much. Add in how Insurrection put people to sleep and Nemesis was a critical punching bag (despite giving us a pretty cool climactic space battle and a pre-famous Tom Hardy), and we were witnessing a franchise collapsing from the heights of national fame to a ridiculed and outlived cultural movement.
Today, most fans are familiar with the Star Trek brand on the name of J.J. Abrams and his swashbuckling new take on the franchise. Abrams rebooted the Star Trek movies in a really innovative fashion: he created an alternate reality, thereby still allowing all memories to be intact and not retconned like many franchises have done. The fact that Captain Picard, Colonel Kira Nerys, and Seven of Nine are still having adventures recognizes the success of the past while fans new and old can enjoy the recently dubbed Kelvin Timeline. I loved the 2009 Star Trek quite a bit, in the way that it provided us with plenty of nostalgia but still injected a sense of “mainstream” fun back into the fold. While Into Darkness may have been bogged down in trying to recapture the magic of Wrath of Khan, Star Trek Beyond gives me hope of a return to the carefree days of rollicking adventures, instant character chemistry, and humorous dialogue sprinkled throughout clever writing.
In the wake of a notorious 2016, Gene Roddenberry’s forward-thinking ideals seem more important than ever. Let us set our sights on going where no one has gone before: working to create the best versions of ourselves possible, and exploring the final frontier… as one species, united, and together.
Historical facts in this piece were gathered from The Fifty Year Mission, the 2016 two-book Star Trek historical compendium by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman.
Check out the Movie Musing podcast for more analysis. Edited by Mark Febrizio, Demetrios Festa, and Quentin Hoffman
