Back To The Future: The Racialicious Review of Star Trek

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García, also Posted At Arturo Vs. The World

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

Let’s get the questions out of the way now:

Is the command structure in the new Star Trek entirely ridiculous? Yes!

Is the “Red Matter” the epitome of flimsy sci-fi “science”? Yes!

Is a small, evil part of me disappointed that we didn’t see Tyler Perry as Admiral Madea? Kinda!

Is Classic Spock’s entire presence a series of plot-connecting contrivances? Definitely!

Does any of this make the film any less enjoyable? Absolutely not!

No, the new Star Trek (iTrek, for short) is not anything like the original series. That’s the whole damn point, one that’s acknowledged early on. This is a different timeline – doesn’t mean prior canon doesn’t count; just that the game is different from here on out.

And even then, this story and this ensemble nailed the most important aspect of any Trek movie – the relationships between the Enterprise’s core group – while at the same time redefining them. In short: Uhura hooking up with Spock? Good. Uhura hooking up with Spock over Kirk? Great!

Speaking of Kirk, he’s at the center of the biggest difference between iTrek and 8-Track Trek: Chris Pine’s version is decidedly not the Alpha Dog here. In this instance, JTK is more like a wolf in the old Kipling poem: without the pack around him, he’s effectively useless. He needs Pike to motivate him; he needs Uhura to confirm he’s not talking out of his ass; he needs Sulu to save said ass on Nero’s mining platform; and he needs both Spocks and Scotty in order to save the day. Everybody gets to shine, and the ensemble is so much the stronger for it.

Now, people are going to complain that this is “a dumb action movie,” but stop and ask: did anybody seriously expect anything involving this bunch to go smoothly? What did people want, Degrassi in space? The return of V’ger? The Phantom Menace? This story zooms along at a more ludicrous speed than Spaceball One, the heroes constantly cheat to win (the Kobayashi Maru sequence; Sulu’s embellishing his “combat training;” Classic Spock shattering about 50 different time-travel tropes) and the villain – Eric Bana’s under-developed Nero – gets punked out way too easily.

But the character work was too good to harp on any of that for too long. To wit:

The Racialicious Scorecard

Uhura: No character benefited more from both the reboot and the re-vamp of their origin. Here Zoe Saldana got to fill Nichelle Nichols’ roles and give us not just a determined, successful cadet, but one who brought a real skill-set to the table. Bring on the Uhura/Spock slashfic … er, and hopefully some insight into how those two crazy kids got together in the first place.

Sulu: Again, Kirk only survives the fight atop the first drilling platform because of young Hikaru – in a lesser movie, Sulu’s “fencing” confession would have been a set-up to make him look inept in actual combat. We got quite the opposite here. The “parking brake” bit gave us a chance to see the patented John Cho Frustrated Face. Interesting note about Cho’s casting: apparently director J.J. Abrams was concerned about having a Korean-American inheriting a role played by a Japanese-American, but was told by George Takei that the character was meant to represent “all of Asia.”

Spock: And now we come to the Big Other. The nature of Spock’s heritage gets addressed early on, and it was a little ham-handed to see Vulcans being so openly prejudicial for two reasons:

1.Would Logic not show racism to be … well, illogical?

2.We never saw him encounter racism from anybody in Starfleet – weird to think of that as “wrong,” but we’ll talk more about Starfleet in a bit.

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