Yes, a lame girly title. Now read:
The internet is full of comments like these:
"Kirk wears black in the new film!!! JJ Abrams doesn’t understand Star Trek! This film will rape Rodenberry’s legacy!”
"Rick Berman’s team never understood Star Trek, they just inherited it from Rodenberry and ran it into the ground!!!”
"Enterprise misses the point of Trek!"
Lots and lots of fans like to tell other fans (and big movie studios) that they don’t “get” Star Trek or don’t “understand” it, but those people never seem to actually quantify what it is that others aren’t getting.
To me, Star Trek is about a bunch of people, all from different races, backgrounds, religions etc. working together and treating each other as equals. They go on space adventures, meeting weird aliens and fighting evil forces (that, more often than not, turn out to be ‘misunderstood’ and our crew makes peace with them at the end).
Admittedly, Voyager (or rather, Janeway) took this too far and adopted a preachy, holier-than-thou stance toward the rest of the galaxy. And Deep Space Nine’s “humans don’t use money, we work to better ourselves” thing sounded suspiciously like communism.
It gives us moral dilemmas, too (admittedly, Walt Disney-strength ones): Was Captain Archer right to torture that alien guy, and steal from those others, knowing that a peaceful future, and six billion lives were at stake? Do the ends justify the means? What about when Kirk had to let that woman die in the past?
But most of all, it’s silly, light-hearted, escapism. A fun TV show (or film or book etc).
That’s it. Hopefully some idiot hillbilly neo-nazis will channel-hop to it and realize the error of their ways or something.
But, taking a look around the internet, it would seem that the majority are more concerned about whether the Animated Series should be considered ‘canon’, or if Trek XI is ‘wrong’ because the USS Kelvin has only one warp engine and Gene-o said they have to have two. I somehow doubt the number of warp engines was top of his list of “important things to convey in my TV show”. Fans seem more interested in hurling abuse at each other because their interpretations of Trek differ slightly (again, over things like spaceship code numbers and the technicalities of pretend future technologies), thus spectacularly missing the whole “people with different ideals getting along” point.
So tell me: What does Star Trek mean to you? And what don't the big film studios "get"?
The internet is full of comments like these:
"Kirk wears black in the new film!!! JJ Abrams doesn’t understand Star Trek! This film will rape Rodenberry’s legacy!”
"Rick Berman’s team never understood Star Trek, they just inherited it from Rodenberry and ran it into the ground!!!”
"Enterprise misses the point of Trek!"
Lots and lots of fans like to tell other fans (and big movie studios) that they don’t “get” Star Trek or don’t “understand” it, but those people never seem to actually quantify what it is that others aren’t getting.
To me, Star Trek is about a bunch of people, all from different races, backgrounds, religions etc. working together and treating each other as equals. They go on space adventures, meeting weird aliens and fighting evil forces (that, more often than not, turn out to be ‘misunderstood’ and our crew makes peace with them at the end).
Admittedly, Voyager (or rather, Janeway) took this too far and adopted a preachy, holier-than-thou stance toward the rest of the galaxy. And Deep Space Nine’s “humans don’t use money, we work to better ourselves” thing sounded suspiciously like communism.
It gives us moral dilemmas, too (admittedly, Walt Disney-strength ones): Was Captain Archer right to torture that alien guy, and steal from those others, knowing that a peaceful future, and six billion lives were at stake? Do the ends justify the means? What about when Kirk had to let that woman die in the past?
But most of all, it’s silly, light-hearted, escapism. A fun TV show (or film or book etc).
That’s it. Hopefully some idiot hillbilly neo-nazis will channel-hop to it and realize the error of their ways or something.
But, taking a look around the internet, it would seem that the majority are more concerned about whether the Animated Series should be considered ‘canon’, or if Trek XI is ‘wrong’ because the USS Kelvin has only one warp engine and Gene-o said they have to have two. I somehow doubt the number of warp engines was top of his list of “important things to convey in my TV show”. Fans seem more interested in hurling abuse at each other because their interpretations of Trek differ slightly (again, over things like spaceship code numbers and the technicalities of pretend future technologies), thus spectacularly missing the whole “people with different ideals getting along” point.
So tell me: What does Star Trek mean to you? And what don't the big film studios "get"?
