Where no brand has gone before

The newest installment of the Star Trek franchise won’t hit theater screens until Christmas 2008, but some tidbits are trickling out of the secretive set. Winona Ryder is playing Spock’s mom and Shaun of the Dead star Simon Pegg is playing Scotty.

New, young faces are a good start at refreshing a classic 40-year old sci-fi series. But this film is being “reimagined” be director J.J. Abrams. Think Tim Burton’s Batman, which transformed the campy “shark repellent”-wielding Adam West incarnation and took inspiration from the darker beginnings of the caped crusader.

In the original five year mission, Star Trek offered sixties viewers a Utopian future in stark contrast to the racial difficulties, social tension, and looming nuclear oblivion of the real world. Star Trek showed us a world where not just men and women, blacks and whites, and Americans and Russians worked in harmony together, but humanity overcame war and strife to form a Federation of Planets with other species.

It also inspired our techo-fetishes: communicators inspired a Motorola engineer to design the cell phone, Uhura sported a “Bluetooth” headset, computers talked to us, and the impulse engine is in use today on NASA space probes. Transporters and warp drive were more than a plot device—they gave us hope of a grand future peacefully exploring the final frontier.

And it was all new and fresh and inspiring. In later years, Star Trek became more and more formulaic. Visual artist Gabriel Köerner is working on the new movie, and offered insightful criticism of the last Star Trek TV series, Enterprise. “They did my dream show,” says Köerner, “and closed the book on doing a good take on that concept. It was essentially a surrogate Original Series.”

“It’s a prequel to The Next Generation. It shared TNG and Voyager’s look, feel, scoring, pacing, dialog, storytelling that centered around a white male Captain, a logical Vulcan to be his judgment, and a southern man of bold feelings to be his conscience. Nothing about it was daring or different. An awful vocal soft rock theme, taking ‘Star Trek’ out of the title, guys in button-down shirts and ties, little more rough language, and whipping up ‘prequel’ words for all the same luxurious technology does not make a ‘Proto-Trek’. Its producers blamed its premise for being ‘too different to accept’ for its demise. It was that it wasn’t different.”

The new movie is expected to bring Star Trek to the mainstream and bring back the excitement. Köerner goes on to discuss his inspiration for the upgraded movie version of the NCC-1701:



“I took inspiration from old Chryslers, women, Starship Troopers, women, art deco, and Jonathan Ive and mid century modern design. I wanted a flying Jayne Mansfield, Captain James Tiberius Muthafuckin’ Kirk’s Flying Sex Machine. His hot rod. The only lady he keeps around longer than a beamdown to the planet of the week.”

As a lifelong Trek fan, I hope the movie is as hot as the ship design—and pumps new life into the Star Trek brand.

Labels: culture, sci-fi

posted by Mark @ 3:56 AM