1. No socio-political agenda driven "message." I don't mind a little real-world relevance but do NOT use this film to beat me over the head with something.
I understand your aversion to "preachiness" but to what extent do you draw a line between contemporary relevance and "agenda driven 'message'"?
You hit the nail on the head with the word “preachiness.” I have no desire to go spend ten bucks to sit in a theater for two and a half hours and be lectured allegorically about how I’m destroying the planet or how capitalism is evil or whatever else the Hollywood cause-of-the-month happens to be. I don’t want to feel like the person who wrote or directed or produced the movie is up there on the screen wagging their finger at me and trying to “raise my consciousness” or something.
The difference between “contemporary relevance” and “an agenda driven message” is subtle and, I’m sure, largely dependant on whether or not you agree with the message. I don’t agree with most of what comes out of Hollywood message-wise these days but I am capable of watching—and enjoying—movies about controversial issues when they don’t try to pretend that there is only one side to the argument.
To cite a Trek-relevant example, DS9 was generally very good at contemporary relevance without being preachy about it, thought-provoking rather than condescending. The questions it raised were usually messy and multi-faceted and frequently not resolved according to the established and over-simplified Roddenberry ideals, if they were resolved at all. TNG, on the other hand, tended to be very preachy and heavy-handed with its moralizing about all sorts of things, IMHO. I still enjoyed it and even count a few episodes among my all-time Trek favorites, but they were notably NOT the ones with an obvious agenda attached.
The Trek movies, on the other hand, have mostly avoided the “message” thing. Sure, if you look hard enough, you can find all sorts of relevance and commentary and deeper meaning in many of them, but for the most part you have to
look for it and find what you will; you aren’t being clubbed over the head with it like a baby seal. The TOS movies walked this line pretty successfully, I believe, and it wasn’t until the third TNG film,
Insurrection, that they really started to go overboard. I might credit
Nemesis with the same problem if I had ever been able to make enough sense out of it to draw any such conclusions.
It remains to be seen what line, if any, the new Star Trek film will attempt to walk. My gut feeling is that they will avoid any overt, heavy-handed messages beyond the personal, character level, but I guess we’ll see.
