Full disclosure: Until a few days ago I was not a Star Trek fan. I've seen maybe 30 episodes and 2 movies before this one in my entire life and didn't hate them but also didn't love them. I LOVED this movie though, and am rapidly doing everything I can to immerse myself.
I realize I don't exactly have nerd chops on this subject. I certainly can't claim to grasp the specific pain that those fans who disliked or even hated this film must feel. It must really, truly suck to know that, despite assurances that the old timeline is still going on somewhere, for the forseeable future their beloved franchise will be dominated by an incarnation they despise that has carte blanche to ignore whatever it likes from the canon they love. Not just on mainstream films (and possibly shows [/fingerscrossed]) but in fandom as well, where the vast majority who loved the movie will be supplemented by lots of new fans like me.
But if you're a lifelong, diehard fan (as my dad is), and extremely pissed off about this film (which my dad isn't), I'd like to offer up a lesson from another branch of geekdom that may offer a slight glimmer of hope:
As a young DC comics diehard, I was one of what felt like a vanishingly small minority (especially because this was pre-internet and i was a 13 year old kid in a small town) who felt lost and abandoned following the Crisis on Infinite Earths. For those who don't know, CoIE was a massive comics event (in a time when those didn't happen every other week) in which basically the entire DC Universe as it had been known for decades and decades was wiped out and rebooted anew (with some exceptions, which seemed minor at the time but became important later). There was a Superman, but he was certainly not my Superman. Moreover, the stories they said they wanted to tell with this new universe seemed less interesting to me, cheap and modern and shallow and a betrayal of a lot of what I used to love about DC.
Whats more, since comics at the time (unlike Star Trek) pretty much only existed in one medium (Superman movies aside), that meant the new continuity truly and utterly erased the old continuity. I had my old comics, but it seemed certain that apart from maybe the occasional one-shot I would not be getting any serious comic attention devoted to the characters I'd loved so dearly. They were dead and gone forever, confined to past issues, the way you look at home movies of a loved one who has moved on.
Now, in time I grew to accept and love many of these new characters. But there were many cases where I didn't, and many others where I still preferred the originals regardless of how much I liked the rebooted characters.
For years I kept up sporadically with comics, gritting my teeth through a bizarrely limited and infuriatingly indecisive superman, a one-dimensional psycho of a batman, and a green lantern who was not the green lantern i'd loved because the green lantern i'd loved went insane and committed murder on a Hitleresque scale.
But then a very interesting thing began to happen. Cracks started to appear in this new contuinity, and people began to remember what they liked about the old one.
At first in just manifested in the occaional ressurection of a forgotten classic character or a run on a book that rejected the "grim and gritty" status quo for brighter and more heroic and more unselfconsciously wondrous themes.
Then a character or two slipped through, explictly from that long-lost continuity. Not much, but a reminder that it was still alive.
Then crossovers occured, out of continuity one-shots and series that made explicit efforts to return to the past.
And then, finally, it all collapsed. All the old characters came rushing back, and there was another crisis (and another, and probably more and more for as long as DC can milk it, but I digress), and some lived and some died, and stuff changed, and changed again. And some of it was new, and some of it was old.
Now, a lot of this was crap. But some of it wasn't. Some of it was absolutely great, and exactly what fans like me, who'd felt so abandoned before, had been looking for. They even brought the old green lantern back and showed how awesome he was to begin with.
My point is, the past never really died. How could it? This stuff is made by nerds. When do nerds really ever let anything die?
Sooner or later, some diehard star trek fan is gonna get his hands on this franchise either in movie or show form. And maybe he likes the new version okay, but he also remembers that old version. That other timeline. And he'll think "Okay, maybe it was a little worn out back then...but its been a while, and I wonder what they've been up to. I kinda miss those guys...hey what if Kirk finds himself thrown into a distant alternate future, one where his father never died..." or he'll think, "well these whiz-bang adventure tales are fun, but i'd really like to create an in-depth political and philosophical show.."
And you'll fall in love like you did the first time.
I realize I don't exactly have nerd chops on this subject. I certainly can't claim to grasp the specific pain that those fans who disliked or even hated this film must feel. It must really, truly suck to know that, despite assurances that the old timeline is still going on somewhere, for the forseeable future their beloved franchise will be dominated by an incarnation they despise that has carte blanche to ignore whatever it likes from the canon they love. Not just on mainstream films (and possibly shows [/fingerscrossed]) but in fandom as well, where the vast majority who loved the movie will be supplemented by lots of new fans like me.
But if you're a lifelong, diehard fan (as my dad is), and extremely pissed off about this film (which my dad isn't), I'd like to offer up a lesson from another branch of geekdom that may offer a slight glimmer of hope:
As a young DC comics diehard, I was one of what felt like a vanishingly small minority (especially because this was pre-internet and i was a 13 year old kid in a small town) who felt lost and abandoned following the Crisis on Infinite Earths. For those who don't know, CoIE was a massive comics event (in a time when those didn't happen every other week) in which basically the entire DC Universe as it had been known for decades and decades was wiped out and rebooted anew (with some exceptions, which seemed minor at the time but became important later). There was a Superman, but he was certainly not my Superman. Moreover, the stories they said they wanted to tell with this new universe seemed less interesting to me, cheap and modern and shallow and a betrayal of a lot of what I used to love about DC.
Whats more, since comics at the time (unlike Star Trek) pretty much only existed in one medium (Superman movies aside), that meant the new continuity truly and utterly erased the old continuity. I had my old comics, but it seemed certain that apart from maybe the occasional one-shot I would not be getting any serious comic attention devoted to the characters I'd loved so dearly. They were dead and gone forever, confined to past issues, the way you look at home movies of a loved one who has moved on.
Now, in time I grew to accept and love many of these new characters. But there were many cases where I didn't, and many others where I still preferred the originals regardless of how much I liked the rebooted characters.
For years I kept up sporadically with comics, gritting my teeth through a bizarrely limited and infuriatingly indecisive superman, a one-dimensional psycho of a batman, and a green lantern who was not the green lantern i'd loved because the green lantern i'd loved went insane and committed murder on a Hitleresque scale.
But then a very interesting thing began to happen. Cracks started to appear in this new contuinity, and people began to remember what they liked about the old one.
At first in just manifested in the occaional ressurection of a forgotten classic character or a run on a book that rejected the "grim and gritty" status quo for brighter and more heroic and more unselfconsciously wondrous themes.
Then a character or two slipped through, explictly from that long-lost continuity. Not much, but a reminder that it was still alive.
Then crossovers occured, out of continuity one-shots and series that made explicit efforts to return to the past.
And then, finally, it all collapsed. All the old characters came rushing back, and there was another crisis (and another, and probably more and more for as long as DC can milk it, but I digress), and some lived and some died, and stuff changed, and changed again. And some of it was new, and some of it was old.
Now, a lot of this was crap. But some of it wasn't. Some of it was absolutely great, and exactly what fans like me, who'd felt so abandoned before, had been looking for. They even brought the old green lantern back and showed how awesome he was to begin with.
My point is, the past never really died. How could it? This stuff is made by nerds. When do nerds really ever let anything die?
Sooner or later, some diehard star trek fan is gonna get his hands on this franchise either in movie or show form. And maybe he likes the new version okay, but he also remembers that old version. That other timeline. And he'll think "Okay, maybe it was a little worn out back then...but its been a while, and I wonder what they've been up to. I kinda miss those guys...hey what if Kirk finds himself thrown into a distant alternate future, one where his father never died..." or he'll think, "well these whiz-bang adventure tales are fun, but i'd really like to create an in-depth political and philosophical show.."
And you'll fall in love like you did the first time.
Resistance is futile.
