Chris Pine's comments that modern movies can't be cerebral... what about Interstellar? The Martian?

I think the problem is that too many people here buy into the stereotype of STAR TREK, rather than what is it: an action space opera that uses an allegorical story structure. In fact, I think those who want a more a cerebral approach are TNG fans. Otherwise, people would recall that TOS is anything BUT cerebral. I am sure that everyone here recalls such luminary episodes like "I, Mudd", "The Trouble with Tribbles" and that masterpiece "Spock's Brain". And I say this because of how people responded to TMP, compared to how people responded to the rest of the TOS movie era. And yes, TVH was not about "space battles", but it was hardly "cerebral". But, honestly, I think that the actual problem is that we, as a fanbase, have too many different opinions as to what would be the "perfect" STAR TREK film. Meanwhile, you don't have as many differences of opinion among the STAR WARS fanbase, other than the Prequel-vs-Original Trilogies, and, in fact, even the haters of the Prequels is still supportive of the franchise as a whole. Hopefully, with the new TV series coming out next January (YAY!), everyone will be happy. And, at the very least, the more cerebral themes can be examined more closely, whereas a two-hour summer film will have a hard time doing so.

 

It's a TV show - you can't trivialize it any more than you can pat the desert dry with a hand towel.

 

I don't think anyone has a problem with that Nerys. It's just when people start getting cynical/mocking/personal about it. See the post after yours for an example. I personally disagree that TOS or TNG have been overhyped (while still acknowledging times when they were weak, i.e. TOS season 3), and I would be happy to explain my reasoning politely to anyone interested.

If Trek was overhyped, then all other cultural phenomena like Star Wars and Tolkien should take a radical reappraisal too. Although personally I don't think they should, because I also think they are just as valuable as people portray them to be. Both are popularizers of ethical systems, and literary ideas for example. Star Trek was a popularizer of complex concepts, including elements of western philosophy, ethics and classical literature. There were a couple of nice articles from TOR.com, on Nicholas Meyer:

How Nicholas Meyer’s Literary Love Saved Star Trek

If one believes the Trekker superstition that every odd-numbered Star Trek film is bad and every even-numbered one is good, the big news is that the superstition can be explained like this: Nicholas Meyer is involved in some capacity on every single even-numbered original cast Star Trek film. Meyer wrote or re-wrote aspects of the screenplays for The Wrath of Khan, The Voyage Home, and The Undiscovered Country and directed both The Wrath and Country. He’s is a highly literate multi-talented guy that recognized the things that made Star Trek great, and made them better. And he did it with literature.

In order to convince the audience that Zachary Quinto is indeed and in fact Spock in the 2009 Star Trek film, the writers made sure he said lots of Spock things like “logical” and “fascinating.” But perhaps the most telling quip Quinto’s Spock utters is “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Even if you’re not a rabid Sherlock Holmes fan (like me) many could still probably indentify this aphorism as originating with the famous detective and not with the Vulcan scientist. Not to mention, Spock spoke this exact same line in Star Trek VI.

Back in the fall of last year, I got a chance to speak to Nicholas Meyer on the subject of Holmes for an article I was writing for Clarkesworld Magazine. Meyer told me he thought the link between Spock and Holmes was fairly “obvious” and because part of the story of Star Trek VI is a mystery, detective references were highly appropriate. As a Holmes buff, I told Meyer my favorite thing about Spock quoting Holmes is the way he prefaces it by implying Sherlock is literally his ancestor, indicating they inhabit the same fictional universe. And if Holmes had children, it could have been only with one woman, the blackmailer Irene Adler from “A Scandal in Bohemia.”


“So, can I assume then that Irene Adler is Spock’s great great great great grandmother on his human side?” I asked him. To which Meyer answered; “Correct.” What’s revealing about Nick Meyer geeking out with me about Holmes is how much he respects classic methods of storytelling. If you listen to his audio commentary on the DVD for the directors cut of The Wrath of Khan, Meyer bemoans the problems of film, insofar as he worries that the images and the sound “do it all for you” and little is left to the imagination. Meyer says on that same commentary that he always looks for places to “withhold information” from the audience. Why would he do this? To bring the story back to a classical way in which the best literature works; by firing the imagination.

If you caught our excerpt from Meyer’s memoir on Tuesday, you already know he figured out the relationship between Kirk and the novels of C. S.Forrester. But with both The Wrath and Country, he went hog-wild with references to all sorts of great literature. Khan is obsessed with Moby Dick, General Chang with Shakespeare. In fact, we get a double literary reference in Star Trek VI when General Chang says “So, the games afoot, eh?” This phrase is often attributed to Sherlock Holmes who actually borrowed it from Shakespeare’s King Henry V.


But what does all of this quoting from Dickens, Doyle and Shakespeare do for us? Well for one thing, it grounds a far-out science fiction adventure in themes that pretty much anyone can understand. Am I saying Nicholas Meyer dumbed down Star Trek by putting in all this classical literature? I suppose it depends on how you like your science fiction. Meyer (like many of us) seems to enjoy the parallels contemporary stories have to the best stories and themes of the past. He also doesn’t dance around these references; he tackles them head-on and peppers them into his projects. It’s also not like Meyer invented having the crew of the Enterprise be well read or cultured in the classics; Shakespeare references have existed in Trek since the classic episode “The Conscience of the King.”

Because science fiction is the genre of big ideas, a kinship with really soul-searching lit like Dickens or Shakespeare is bound to happen. What Meyer did is give us our medicine of culture without us even noticing. Even without his influence, this kind of literary crossover probably could have happened in other realms of science fiction and in Star Trek specifically. In fact, it kind of did. Picard is quotes Shakespeare all the time. (Even using it in one instance to threaten Ferengis into giving up Lwaxana Troi…) J. Michael Straczynski has Tolkien references strewn throughout Babylon 5 like nobody’s business. Ronald D. Moore talks about Hemingway on Battlestar Galacitica commentary. Obviously one has to know a thing or two about literature and renowned writing in order to be a good writer.

In relation to his work on Star Trek, Meyer is the most remembered for doing it well. Meyer wrote some of the best-remembered lines in Star Trek VI, but some of the even more memorable lines were written by Shakespeare. I may have never picked up Moby Dick if it weren’t for The Wrath of Khan and I might not have been near as into Hamlet as I am now as an adult, if it weren’t for The Undiscovered Country.

People talk a lot about how Star Trek inspired astronauts and scientists throughout the years, but for me, I think it inspired interest in classic literature just as much. Literature is a huge part of my life thanks to Star Trek and that, I think is largely due to Nicholas Meyer. Because Nicholas Meyer didn’t just save Star Trek by helping a mainstream audience understand it, he reeducated it too.​

From when he was named as a writer on the new show:

Star Trek’s Best Writer/Director EVER Has Joined the Crew of CBS’ New Star Trek TV Show

Star Trek fans of every shade just received the best news: writer/director Nicholas Meyer is joining CBS’ new Star Trek television show, which is set to debut in 2017 with Bryan Fuller producing.

Not sure who Nicholas Meyer is? He’s the guy who saved Star Trek from obscurity and made it smarter than you ever realized. Here’s why this is possibly the best geek-related news of the past 20 years.

Showrunner Bryan Fuller sums up Meyer’s credentials perfectly in his announcement to Entertainment Weekly:

Nicholas Meyer chased Kirk and Khan ‘round the Mutara Nebula and ‘round Genesis’ flames, he saved the whales with the Enterprise and its crew, and waged war and peace between Klingons and the Federation.

Meyer wrote and directed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. He also co-wrote Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. In short: all the classic Star Trek films that everybody likes were the direct result of Nicholas Meyer’s involvement. He’s also written three Sherlock Holmes pastiches: The West End Horror, The Canary Trainer, and, most famously The Seven Per-Cent Solution. That last one features Sherlock Holmes hanging out with Sigmund Freud, a plot point which was referenced in the latest episode of Sherlock, “The Abominable Bride.”

Just recently, in a phone conversation with Meyer, the writer/director told me he saw himself as a “popularizer” of literature and other culture, which is 100% what he did with The Wrath of Khan, resulting in a great movie that instilled momentum in popular culture that led the cast of the original Star Trek through four more films. By blending genres, and established big thematic messages, Meyer took what was already great about Star Trek and popularized it for the mainstream. And he didn’t do that by dumbing it down, but rather by making Star Trek more complex, artistic, and realistic. Nicholas Meyer made Khan a huge fan of Melville’s Moby Dick, while Kirk and Spock caught up on Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. In The Undiscovered Country, Meyer gave Spock lines from Sherlock Holmes’ stories and out-right insinuated that Spock was related by blood to the great detective through his human mother. Kirk, Spock and Bones were great characters before Nicholas Meyer, but after he wrote them in The Wrath of Khan, they became even more human than we could have possibly imagined.

The Wrath of Khan was Star Trek’s biggest comeback, and it paved the way for how the rest of the franchise saw itself. We would be living in a dimmer geek world without Nicholas Meyer, and now that he’s back writing Star Trek, our whole future just got a hell of a lot brighter.​

I also don't think this kind of thing was new to the motion pictures, I think TOS had plenty of stuff like this already. I don't discount good episodes, just because some were also goofy screwball ones. In an anthology show, you get both comedic episodes, and ones that are a bit more cerebral. Again, since so many people in the first 8 pages took cerebral to erroneously mean "no guns", I will restate for the record that we all love the pew pew, to pre-empt more of that.

 

Yeah, I think just deconstructing things endlessly isn't positive. People have different responses to things, depending on the subjective value they place upon a concept. Someone might find "Where No Man Has Gone Before" to be a trite episode, and someone might find it really valuable because they are more interested in the concepts it explores (nature of a human / object-essence). Just wish people wouldn't project their own jadedness with the material, onto the series value. I.E. someone saying "Wrath of Khan" didn't tackle complicated themes on page 2. It does - by any measure of literature.

I don't think anyone has a problem with that Nerys. Its just as SL said, there is a tendency by some to just offer cynical and mocking replies.

 

Did it tackle complicated themes? Yep. Did it do it well? I think that's debatable. Turning Kirk into a moron who wasn't smart enough to raise his shields in the face of danger was, basically, character assassination. Then there's the fact that the movie is full of massive, massive plot holes.

For me, The Wrath of Khan is saved by the scene chewing done by Shatner and Montalban, and the great space battles. This movie wouldn't be remembered for its literary nods.

 

Over- quoting from books that are required reading in high school does not make a movie deep. To be fair, TWOK is less indulgent and more substantial than TUC in this regard.

Most of what TWOK tackled it also fumbled in the end zone. But what the hell, the space battles were fun.

 

The Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum in Washington DC sees fit to honor the show and the newly conserved U.S.S. Enterprise as an "artifact" in its new display location in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall.

They don't trivialize the importance and inspiration of Star Trek to contemporary minds because some of the best minds in our history do not find it trivial.

 

Mainly the SmithsonIan has discovered over the decades that the Enterprise drives traffic to NASM like no other single exhibit.

It wasn't accidental that the model was located for so long in the gift shop. Ka-ching!

 

Please elaborate on what themes you refer to. I don't mean to test you. It's just I can almost guarantee that different people see different things. You will list some, and I will list some others that I noticed. They wont match up probably, unless you are some kind of expert in English literature, in which case I will prepare to be embarrassed (have mercy on me).

I would personally be wary of making broad value judgements about any fiction; if I've learned anything over the years debating the merits of TV/films, etc, its that what we notice/appreciate in drama/literature is down to what themes we personally place importance on. For example a Christian might really love a literary work that explored divine justice, and an atheist might find them trite, finding humanist themes such as dialectical progress interesting instead, which the Christian might find trite - the two may not even notice the presence of each others favorite ideas. No theme is too prosaic as a result. In other words, what we appreciate when we engage with stuff is subjective - that is why some critics can pan something, and others exalt it as a revelation. It's also why critical opinion is largely useless as an objective judgement.