Pete Hindle

This is a piece written for Kino Bambino, a local zine run by film fans in Newcastle. You’ll be able to pick up a copy from the Star and Shadow, amongst other places, from 14/05/2009 onwards.

Have you noticed a trend with summer blockbusters? I have. They like to take a well-known nerdy book, film, or TV show, and make a new, shiny version of it. Currently, we can see this happening to the Star Trek universe, which has been operating since the sixties as a sort of Rosetta Stone of sci-fi TV.

The earliest forms of Star Trek were glorious technicolor slices of cheese; later versions of the show have a sort of po-faced seriousness that scared off sane people from watching anything like it. In a sort of no-man’s land there were an increasingly cheap series of films that never got any better than Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, despite going all the way up to Star Trek X. I’ve seen all of them, and I can hardly remember what happens in Star Trek X (‘Data dies’ is all I can remember from that 90 minutes of my life.)

And this summer, we get what they are calling a ‘reboot’ of the franchise. Why? Well, Star Trek is just too big a money-spinner for Hollywood to ignore. The last TV version of Star Trek was so dull that nobody watched it, so a big-screen re-imagining lets the suits play merry hell with the existing universe of Trek – which is no bad thing.

Star Trek’s universe was reliant upon the idea of evil aliens being bastards to us poor benighted citizens of the universe. This is dumb, and ignores practically 90% of plot-lines. Where are the evil humans trying to take things over? As a race, we practically live for taking things over, and we’ve thrown up some of the most evil bastards ever. When you combine the two (Jeffery Archer, I’m looking at you here) you get great plotlines, which make for great movies.

The new Star Trek is about making the original series sexy again, the same way that Planet of the Apes got made over, the same way that GI Joe is getting a tummy-tuck and boob job later this summer, and the same way that Star Wars got botoxed to within an inch of it’s life in 2004. But the sad part is, it doesn’t make any difference.

Star Trek doesn’t need any new fans; people dress up like Klingons at the weekend anyway, so it’s a fair bet that they’ll spend a fortune on anything with the prefix ‘Star Trek’. The reason that the franchise got rebooted is so that your mum knows what’s on at the cinema, and that’s because the economics of modern Hollywood means crushing as many people into the stalls as possible. And everybody has a slight fondness for Trek, somewhere, even if it’s just Spock and his neck pinching.

But it’s not your mum that’s going to watch the film four times and then go home and Facebook his mates about how great it was; it’s your average nerd who’ll be proletising this new Star Trek. Anything with an inbuilt fan-base that loves it already is going to get picked up by Hollywood over the next half-decade, and then flogged to within an inch of it’s life as the moguls seek to earn some money.

So stand by for a flood of films that have your less sociable friends grabbing their coats and heading out: later this year, Maurice Sendak’s ten-sentence children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” will make a splash. We’ll also see more Harry Potter and Transformers, and a sequel to horny-but-celibate vampire movie Twilight. As long as you’re not looking for something original, there’s plenty of geeking out that can be done at the cinema.