Star Trek into Recurrence

by Christopher Barr

I’m not a huge fan of Star Trek, like the director of Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek into Darkness (2013) J.J. Abrams, I’m more of a Star Wars fan.  I’m not sure why that is but at that time in my life, like Alien vs. Aliens, I was more of an action junkie, intravenously connected to explosions and machismo.  So I usually leaned toward the latter and assumed the former was artsy whateverness. Now, since growth and mild maturity I’ve come to love Alien over Aliens and appreciate Star Trek on more of an adult intellectual level.

The Wrath of Khan was a film of my youth.  I was in my early teens when I first saw it in a smoky, smoke-permitted theatre.  I’ve seen it over the years on TV as well but it, like many of my childhood and early teenage year movie experiences, faded into a backdrop of cultural change and a technological viral explosion.  The Internet and the life-like cartooning of computer generated imaging and 3D, (thanks Cameron for the movie ticket hikes)  post-film experience movies weather the screens with busy colorful explosions, choppy plots and lens flares (keep the good flare fight up Sir J.J. of Abrams).  But the less hectic past can often force its way through all the distractions of texting, facebooking and tweeting and remind us of whom we once were, during a time when one still viewed fresh ideas and imagined new possibilities.    

Three months prior to the theatre release of Star Trek into Darkness, I went on a Star Trek film festival with myself (that sounds geekly perverse, like I was sitting on my lonely stained hand-me-down sofa in a dank basement with my Buck Rogers hand cream and Battlestar Galactica, Cylon issued tissue paper)  Set phasers to stun people.  So I watched the Wrath of Khan, which I haven’t seen at this point for years, and I can safely say, with what knowledge I do possess on film studies, that it’s a masterpiece of science fiction cinema.  Equal to what The Empire Strikes Back is to the Star Wars universe.

Star Trek into Darkness is a neo-tribute to those old Star Trek movies at best.  With no realistic future in site, we, as a culture, are robbing the past of all its richness and raping its then-meaningful contexts.  We are then retrofitting this creatively bankrupt idea into a-sometimes-exciting, but ultimately meaningless afterbirth, then glossing it and dressing it in millions of dollars of advertising and force feeding it as new and fresh, to a socially and mentally blind audience.  It’s odd to me that forward thinking has become the new past thinking.  I’m a big fan, psychoanalytically speaking, of drawing from the past to examine the present for the betterment of the future, but on a creative and film making level this is blatantly weak. 

This movie, so says its predecessor, has altered time and space and has put the crew of the U.S.S Enterprise (alone with everyone else in existence) on a new historical path, a whole shiny new timeline.  Abrams’ first Star Trek movie made it justifiably acceptable to travel to the past and change the future for new adventures for the crew.  Except, Into Darkness, wasn’t a new adventure but rather an old one redressed for the ‘modern audience’, an audience that is put into the position of Spock Prime, Leonard Nimoy.  The only person in this very twisted universe that knows the old timeline as he lives now in the new Abrams timeline.  Spock Prime tells New Spock in Star Trek into Darkness, that he was sworn not to reveal details of his time line but then tells New Spock that the Enterprise have faced Khan in his time line and he’s crazy and not to be trusted.  This gives New Spock expositional information that in turn is used to defeat Khan from the new time line (wait, my head won’t stop spinning).

If you don’t learn from the past, the past will repeat itself.  This film and many like it in recent years, have become like the ancient symbol depicting a serpent or snake-like dragon eating its own tail, Ouroboros, film cyclically eating itself.  Frederich Nietzsche’s Eternal Return states that one must change within oneself to escape the trappings of the banality of existence.  Like Bill Murray in the film Groundhog Day, that change must first be learnt, analyzed, understood then applied.  That change must come within.

The movie has spectacular special effects and has some pretty talented young actors, great for an excuse to scoff down warm popcorn at the local over-priced multiplex.  As Spock would say, ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’.  Maybe the ‘many’ would like a future filled with hope and promise during a decline in civilization, maybe films like this will remind us of a past when there was a visible future over the horizon.  Hopefully Mr. Roddenberry isn’t turning over in his existential ashes on the Pegasus rocket floating in space.