The single point of genesis of my two favorite Star Trek movies

And the word "genesis" is chosen intentionally, as you will see.

But first some background on why I just read a book about one of the most beloved epsiodes of television of all time, why there's an incredible controversy about it, and why it fits appropriately as a post in my movie blog.

You may recall I told you last year that I wanted to read more about films. Sure, reading is a time I cherish for specifically not doing movie-related things. But reading about films is also part of deepening your love for/knowledge of the movies. So last year I vowed, at least in the short run, to read a book about movies or filmmaking as every second book I read, starting with Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation, which I read in November and December and wrote about several times on the blog.

So after reading Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles in January, I turned my attentions in February to a project I'd been putting off.

Last year, an old friend sent me the book you see above, as well as a graphic novel depiction of the same controversial Harlan Ellison episode of the original Star Trek series, "The City on the Edge of Forever." He also sent me a Red Sox t-shirt that is in my regular rotation, since he's a lot more Star Trek than Red Sox. 

All three items were appreciated, but the two Star Trek ones seemed like they could cause me a headache. 

See, a few months ago I started to read the book you see above, and it starts with Ellison basically in the middle of a diatribe whose beginning I had not heard. Ellison, you see, was not only a legendary science fiction writer, but he was also legendary for his belligerance and argumentatitve nature. This did not just make him a boor; it appears that his friends cherished him, and he had many professional relationships that were cordial. But he didn't suffer fools and he rarely kept quiet about something that bothered him, or at least, not "forever." (He was sitting on his "City on the Edge of Forever" gripes for something like 30 years before spewing them all here.) Anyway, the tone of the rage-filled rant, which eviscerates people like Gene Roddenberry and which had not (initially) provided me the sort of background context I'm trying to provide you here, caused me to set down the book and save it for another day. 

The basic background here is that Ellison submitted a script for the 28th episode of the first season of Star Trek that, according to Gene Roddenberry, could not be filmed. Having read the teleplay, I'm inclined to agree. There's so much plot in this one episode that it was better suited to being a feature film, not a single 48-minute episode of television. 

Did Roddenberry et al make gutless decisions in rewriting the teleplay so it would fit into their standard allotment of screen minutes and their standard budget? I'm sure they did. And I'm sure everyone who took a pass at the script -- which seems to have been about 13 people -- was a less talented writer than Ellison. But then they took more credit for it than Ellison thought they should, especially as they sprinkled their discourse about it with disparaging comments about him. 

Well, the episode was a success in two very specific ways, or three, if you consider its legacy. In the moment, the episode won an award both for the televised version, and the teleplay that Ellison submitted for consideration -- even though those two things were quite different. Its legacy? "The City on the Edge of Forever" edges out "The Trouble with Tribbles" to be considered the favorite episode of the original series, any time a vote is taken about this sort of thing.

The plot? I'll give you that as well. Kirk and Spock must go back in time to the U.S. of 1930, following a troubled Enterprise crewman who is escaping the rest of the crew and whose presence in 1930 is going to alter the course of the future beyond all recognition. While there, Kirk falls in love with a woman who, in space-time terms, is a focal point of this point in history, and who must die in order for the future to proceed as it has. Ironically, it's the troubled crewman who is trying to save this woman, while Kirk must let her die.

Heady stuff. Much headier in Ellison's script than the pallid facsimile we get in the TV show, though of course, this also became the favorite episode of the entire series, so they had to be doing something right. They couldn't have known, at the time, how much better the episode would have been with more of Ellison's original ideas intact, but then again, that would have been twice the length. (When the graphic novel version of it was made, it was made into five separate comic books, which tells you a little something about its length.) 

I'm writing this post for two reasons: 1) I need to get something up on my blog after leaving you with a rant about racism at the movies three days ago, and 2) I want my friend to read this as my reaction to reading the book and the graphic novel, and then finishing it off with my first-ever viewing of "The City on the Edge of Tomorrow," which I did last night after buying it on AppleTV. So I may at this point shift to not clarifying everything I'm talking about as I address my comments more to him, though we'll see how that goes. The journalist in me demands to provide context at every juncture. 

So yes, it's quite clear that Ellison wrote a very thoughtful treatment in which the bad seed on the episode is a drug-dealing Enterprise crewman (not a poisoned Dr. McCoy, as he turned out to be on TV) and there's a lot more of interest in the scenes of Earth of 1930, which take place in an unspecified American city. His vision of the planet with the time portal, which gives the episode its title, is undeniably more grand, but that's where the budgetary restrictions of a show with a weekly production schedule come more into play. In any case, the graphic novel is a glorious realization of Ellison's every hope for the episode, and on this occasion he is inclined to offer plenty of praise, as he says he was "over the moon" for how they conceived of his words in the artwork. 

And it's true that very little of that survives on the show. In fact, there are points where it feels like they could have used some of Ellison's original turns of phrase or other dialogue, because the stories are similar enough, but they deviated from those words more out of spite than actual necessity. So that gives credence to some of Ellison's charges that Roddenberry and others were acting in bad faith, though I suppose it also gives credence to the idea that Roddenberry and others bore a greater responsibility for what was actually on screen -- and this is the notion that perturbs Ellison the most. 

I do think it's funny that there is such a controversy over this episode, because often controversies, especially those resulting from tampering with the creative process, are the result of something that failed spectacularly. "The City on the Edge of Forever" was a spectacular success, by any measure. So I think that's what initially struck me as obtuse about Ellison's complaints. Can't everyone just be happy that a really good Star Trek episode resulted from this? They all get dragged down by the "success has many fathers" nature of the controversy. Just be glad it was a success, I think.

But watching the episode, especially after already reading four treatments of Ellison's material across the two books, it does seem very puny by comparison to what Ellison wrote. Surely it needed to be streamlined, but within that, you can see the lack of courage in the decisions. Ellison wanted Kirk to approach doing the wrong thing, or actually not be able to do the right in the moment and need to be saved by Spock. In the completed version, Kirk does do the right thing, and we don't even really see any emotional aftermath of it. 

The thing that I find really interesting about this whole thing, though, is that fans had to already love the episode to even get to this point of there being a controversy and there existing an unexpurgated version of this story. My friend introduced this to me as the episode that made him love Star Trek, which is funny, because I am coming at it from the angle that the episode is pretty weak compared to what Ellison wrote. Then again, this is just part of my theory that you like the first version of something you encounter the best, a theory that usually applies to songs. For example, if you hear the remixed version of a song first and fall in love with it, you will not like the original, even though without the original the remix would not exist.

I wonder if I would have felt differently about it if I'd watched the episode first, and maybe my friend assumed I was already familiar with it. Maybe then I would have been attached to the decisions on the show and found Ellison's choices perverse. Then again, I suspect most people who love Ellison's take had already seen (and loved) the televised version, yet still had a place in their heart for his original version. Me, I'm a Star Trek fan, have been since The Wrath of Khan. But interestingly, I've only seen a couple of the original episodes all the way through. I just didn't watch the show at the time -- obviously, I wasn't alive yet -- and never went back to it over the years, even though I love these characters and the movies they're in, and even though reruns were surely available on television stations I had access to as a kid. 

Although I have a clear preference for Ellison's version, I do want to acknowledge something that I thought the episode got right that Ellison got wrong. And here we get into the stereotypical Trekkie complaints, the kind William Shatner lampooned when he was on Saturday Night Live, that get way too into the weeds. But they're weeds that I think Ellison would respect.

In Ellison's version of the story, the time disruption caused by the drug-dealing crewman Beckwith, when he goes back in time, results in significant changes to this version of the universe. But not so significant there is not still a ship sitting at the exact coordinates of where the Enterprise was when the crew beamed down to the planet, and is, in fact, actually the Enterprise itself -- just manned by a pirate crew. It would be reasonable to argue that if Beckwith had caused a permanent rift in time, not only would the Enterprise not be in that exact space at that exact time, it might not exist at all. (Ellison would probably have an explanation for this, maybe that the renegade crew/pirates constitute a visual representation of an altered universe, containing the ring of truth if not actual plausible scientific truth.)

In the TV show, the Enterprise is, in fact, gone. The crew that are with Kirk and Spock -- which includes Uhura, who utters the cringe-worthy line of dialogue "Captain, I'm scared" -- are stranded on the planet, rather than stranded on the Enterprise with a crew of renegades. At least the Trekkies who thrive on pushing their glasses up the bridges of their noses can appreciate this more believable outcome. (Of course, if we were going full Back to the Future, then probably they would all just vanish from existence -- but then you wouldn't have an episode.)

Because he didn't tell me, I'm not sure exactly why my friend was convinced of his love for Star Trek by "The City on the Edge of Forever," but I can tell you why it would have convinced me, even if I have to retrofit an explanation that might not have made sense if I'd first encountered the episode years ago. And here now we finally get to the two movies I referenced in the subject of this post.

"The City on the Edge of Forever" features primary components of both Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, far and away the best of the original six Star Trek movies. And those two components nourish two different parts of the brain of the devoted Star Trek fan. 

Let's start with the fun one.

There's a decent argument to suggest that without "City on the Edge of Forever," Star Trek IV would not exist, or not in its current form. Talk about time-related causalities. 

The Voyage Home involves a return by the Enterprise crew (though not the Enterprise itself) to present-day San Francisco of 1986, the year the film was released, in order to acquire a humpback whale to prevent future Earth from being desiccated by an alien craft trying to make contact with the (now extinct) whales. As notably the only movie in the series where "comedy" is an appropriate genre, the film relies heavily on the rapport between Kirk and Spock as they try to blend in with the San Franciscans, much of it very funny. The rest of the crew are there, on different missions and also blending in, but Kirk and Spock -- and a present-day love interest for Kirk -- are sequestered on their own mission. 

That this features the essential fundamental dynamics from "City" is no accident, though it should be noted, the Voyage Home version of Kirk and Spock do not appear to remember their previous trip to 20th century America. I think we're meant to take this as similar to the James Bond movies, where we don't really believe that this James Bond has had all the experiences of the previous James Bonds -- though the fact that Kirk and Spock are played by the same actors does make this problematic.

For me, this movie came along at the perfect time, as I was still high off of wrestling with the time travel conundrums presented to us in Back to the Future the year before. And while there are not quite so many "if you change this, then this" moments in The Voyage Home -- no one is fading in and out of existence, for example -- it still delves deep into the problems of being in an earlier time period, including the fact that things you need to get back home haven't been invented yet. That's also a plot point in "City," I should mention, as well as Back to the Future. Although Ellison says The Voyage Home was one of about four Trek movies he was approached to write, he didn't write it -- though his fingerprints are all over it. This is certainly the more "Roddenberry accessible" version of a thing Ellison might have written, especially since it gives Kirk a happy ending with the girl.

And this is just the "fun" part of Star Trek. Sling-shotting around the sun in order to travel back in time. Building a tank on a Klingon vessel (remember, the Enterprise blew up in the last movie) in order to transport a whale. Scotty trying to talk into a mouse to address the computer. It's great stuff and I get a grin on my face just thinking about it.

But "City" also has the much more serious theme at the heart of The Wrath of Khan, not to mention its band of renegades, Khan's crew, who were first envisioned by Ellison in his version of the "City" teleplay.

I don't suppose I need to give a spoiler alert for The Wrath of Khan, seeing as how it turns 44 years old this year, and seeing as how I didn't avoid spoiling that Kirk gets the girl at the end of The Voyage Home. But here is your Star Trek II SPOILER ALERT anyway.

So you know that after a ripping yarn about a mano-a-mano space battle between Kirk and Khan, during which Kirk is also grappling with his own mortality and the surprise of being in close contact with his estranged son, we get the gut punch of the death of Spock. It's not a permanent death, of course -- you already know, because I've told you, that he was in Star Trek IV. We have the Genesis planet to thank for that, and now you see why I included that word in the subject of this post. A weapon of either ultimate creation or ultimate destruction gets fired at a nearby barren planet, which quickly becomes verdant and teeming with life -- and which is where Spock is ultimately "reborn," a saga that continues throughout Star Trek III, which is of course subtitled The Search for Spock. (And one of the reasons The Search for Spock conforms to the Trek rule of thumb that the odd-numbered movies are not so good, is that the regrowth of Spock into an adult is never not weird and is always wobbly in its execution.)

But at the time Khan came out, we couldn't know for sure that this was not the end of Spock. Maybe Leonard Nimoy wanted out of his contract or something.

Anyway, Spock must expose himself to untold amounts of radiation to help save the Enterprise crew, which he does, knowing it will be the end of him. His death scene, one of the more emotional out there, contains this famous line: "The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many ... or the one."

Which is pretty much the thesis of the sacrifice of Edith Keeler in "City."

Kirk has the chance to save her, but he knows that it will mean either the loss of the Enterprise entirely (on TV) or the loss of the crew to a band of renegades (in the teleplay), which amount to the same thing, for all intents and purposes. And though in the show we don't know if this version of the universe is worse -- we just know the Enterprise is no longer there -- in the teleplay we know that renegades run amok in the galaxy, avoiding punishment and spreading evil.

And so yes, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the one. Outweighed the needs of Edith Keeler, but also outweighed the needs of James Kirk.

So yes I'm glad to have spent this time with "The City on the Edge of Forever," even if Harlan Ellison created a very difficult entry point at first with his spewing of bile at the already dead Gene Roddenberry. (And to be fair, he did castigate himself every time he did this because you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead.)

I am convinced that his version of the story is better, but both versions contribute wonderful things to our culture, and both versions helped make my friend a Star Trek fan. So I'm glad both versions exist.

And as a last comment, seeing the teleplay and then seeing the TV show give me a great glimpse into the creative process, which is what makes this another invaluable part of my project of reading about film. Any script undergoes great changes before it ends up on screen, whether it's a TV script or a movie script -- and this exercise gave me a greater appreciation of just how complicated that process can be. 

A Star Trek mission with Star Wars robots

Hollywood has always operated on the core principle of finding a successful formula and trying to repeat it, and rarely has that seemed more evident than in The Black Hole.

In fact, I'm sure the reason my parents took me to see it back in 1979 -- making it one of the first five to ten movies I'd ever seen -- was because it had that kind of Star Wars, Star Trek feel to it.

Boy does it ever.

I watched the movie for the first time since then on Friday night, having still retained some images from it all these years later, but having no real idea what to expect. I knew it was fairly cheesy and nowhere in the same category as either of the sci-fi enterprises whose coattails it was trying to ride, but I also remembered that there were some things that had disturbed the six-year-old me. I wanted to see how objectively disturbing they actually were.

Answer: somewhat objectively disturbing.

But first, about the comparisons to the two Stars.

The most obvious influence is probably Star Wars, a huge hit from only two years earlier, and mostly in terms of the design of the robots. Yeah, there are laser battles, but as they look so much worse than those in Star Wars, it hardly feels worth dwelling on them. No, it's really the robots in particular -- and one robot in even more particular -- that feel like trying to recreate the Star Wars formula.

I'm thinking specifically of this robot, called Vincent:

There's more than a little R2-D2 in this little guy.

You wouldn't call him an R2-D2 clone, of course. They've taken pains to differentiate him. Vincent speaks English and he can fly, which is something R2-D2 did later but definitely could not do at the time. But R2-D2 was certainly an inspiration. Then again, George Lucas stole the basic design of R2-D2 from Silent Running, so it's not like there's every anything new under the sun.

Then there's this guy on the left:

He's called S.T.A.R. (oh yeah, Vincent is really called V.I.N.C.E.N.T.) and he's kind of a cross between a stormtrooper and those guys who control the Death Star's giant laser. If he reminds you a little of Darth Vader, it's probably not a coincidence.

But the real Darth Vader character in this movie is probably this guy:

He doesn't actually remind me of anyone in the Star Wars universe directly, though funnily enough, his character design is a bit mirrored in the emperor's royal guards from Return of the Jedi, which wouldn't come along for another four years. If anything he probably resembles the Silon Raiders from Battlestar Galactica (one year earlier), the Daleks from Dr. Who (more than 15 years earlier) or even that robot from Lost in Space (from around the same time as Dr. Who). If I'm going down this road I might as well also compare him to Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). And again we get into that everything-influences-everything-else territory. Sinister robots are frequently sinister in similar ways. (And all the robots I've listed here are not sinister, but I digress.)

The funny thing about Maximilian is that he shares a name with the actor who plays his master, Maximilian Schell. That's a chicken-or-the-egg scenario right there, if ever there was one.

I had at least V.I.N.C.E.N.T. and probably also Maximilian as toys when I was a kid. In retrospect, it seems unlikely that The Black Hole would have been popular enough for a toy line, but again, that's following in the Star Wars mold of merchandising. The way these toys moved was pretty cool, as I recall. Vincent (it's easier to just type his name that way) had a head that popped in an out of his body, turtle style, and I believe also had legs that could extend or not. I don't think Maximilian came equipped with whirring propeller blades, but I could be wrong.

So that's the Star Wars part. The Star Trek part comes entirely in terms of the plot.

Stop me if this sounds like an episode of Star Trek, or a Star Trek movie, or a half-dozen of each you've seen before: A seemingly deserted ship floats on the edge of some sort of space singularity, and to approach it may endanger our intrepid crew. But there could be survivors on board, and they have to figure out the mystery of what happened on that ship. When they do board the ship, they indeed find that it is occupied, most likely with a one-time alley who is no longer quite what he seems. And other ... sinister stuff. Before long, our intrepid crew is involved in an adventure with possibly cataclysmic repercussions.

Yeah, that's a Star Trek mission if ever there was one. In fact, even the most recent Star Trek movie from just this year has basically this same setup.

Of course, Star Trek *movies* were not a particular source of inspiration for The Black Hole. Only one of them existed at the time, and it had come out only months earlier. But the TV show had of course been in existence for some time, and it surely helped inspire this story.

But wait, we're not done.

The most unlikely influence on this film is 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's not unlikely because that movie is not good -- it's incredible, of course -- but because it's not commercial. Or not what we thought of as commercial in the post-Star Wars era.

The thing those two movies have in common are their endings. The entry into the black hole (spoiler!) is very similar to the Star Gate sequence that ends 2001, in that both are trying to visualize some interstellar phenomenon that is fundamentally unknowable ... and do that by producing visuals that almost certainly would not accompany such an event. 2001 of course has the whole surreal part about the old man in the bed, and The Black Hole's equivalent thereof is a cathedral-like crystal tunnel and a garish vision of hell in which Maximilian gets fused with his master while hooded figures look on. Both films end on what looks like the rise of a new planet, or could be interpreted that way anyway.

Okay, so on to what might or might not have disturbed me.

I was definitely disturbed at the time by the death of the character I now know was played by Anthony Perkins. Maximilian drills into him with his propeller blades (bloodlessly) and he falls down into a chasm in the ship and dies. I'm quite sure I found that too intense at the time. What I don't specifically remember, but probably horrified me, was the unmasking of one of the drones that are being passed off as robots, but are actually hypnotized/lobotomized humans. That was some pretty scary shit.

Overall, though, this is a pretty silly movie that has a lot more talk than action, and the action there is -- especially the laser shootouts -- is pretty cornball. Also, Neil deGrasse Tyson was right to criticize it as "the least scientifically accurate film of all time." There are parts where human beings are just floating in space without space suits and not dying. Yeah, it makes no sense.

Glad to have watched it again, though. There are few films I can say I haven't seen since the 1970s; now there is one fewer.

Ranking the Star Treks

It only took 11 days, but on Thursday, we finally watched our first BluRay on our new (and first) BluRay player.

The delay had a lot to do with getting the right HDMI setup. See, we have only one HDMI port on our TV, a consequence of having purchased it about three years ago. It still feels like our "new" TV, so this was one of our first pieces of evidence that it's not quite cutting edge. Our cable box had been hogging the one HDMI port, so we initially set up the BluRay player using ... um, regular cables. (Sorry, I'm not a component geek -- I don't have all my terminology down.) But we knew we weren't taking full advantage of the HDMI picture quality, so the day before we went into the hospital to give birth to my son, I bought an HDMI two-port hub, that would allow us to have both the cable and the BluRay player take advantage of the TV's one input at the same time. I didn't get to actually try it until a week later, at which point it proved to be a total dud -- thanks a lot, Radio Shack.

So we decided on a temporary solution of going old-school, and simply changing which cable was plugged into the back depending on whether we were watching cable or BluRay. This can't be our permanent solution -- it's just too much of a hassle. But we put it in place at least long enough to pop our BluRay cherry. And instead of watching either of the two BluRays we'd bought -- Where the Wild Things Are or Bram Stoker's Dracula -- we went with a rental from Blockbuster: J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, which we'd both seen. Simply put, it looked beautiful.

There had been exactly ten of the "original" Star Trek movies -- six with Captain Kirk et al, and four with Captain Picard et al. Abrams' film goes back to Kirk et al, but of course recasts those roles with younger actors. (As well as including Leonard Nimoy as part of the plot's time-travel element.)

And though I usually like to choose round numbers to rank things, yesterday I got to thinking that it would be a fun blog post to rank the Star Trek films, since I've seen all 11 of them. If I want to add some kind of flimsy justification to ranking the top 11 of something, I can tie in the 11 films with the 11 days it took us to watch our first BluRay. Hey, I said it was flimsy.

One note before I begin: Many of these rankings are based on only a single viewing, which in some cases took place over a quarter century ago. But let's just say I'm not committed enough to fairness to re-watch ten other Star Trek films, just so I can be absolutely certain of the accuracy of my personal rankings.

Without further ado (SPOILERS TO FOLLOW):

1) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, Nicholas Meyer). As I discussed in my post about good sequels earlier this summer, Star Trek II is almost certainly the most important Star Trek movie ever made, as it allowed all future Star Trek movies to exist. When Star Trek: The Motion Picture failed to register, a lot was riding on this movie to succeed, else they probably would have stopped making theatrical incarnations of the adventures of Kirk, Spock, Bones and the gang. And succeed it did -- even though the original actually made more money, this was considered to be the far superior effort by critics and fans. The Wrath of Khan gave us one of the great mano-a-mano cinematic battles of all time between Kirk and Khan, even though they never meet in the flesh in the movie. It's like a great chess match between two brilliant generals, and it includes some of the most quotable Star Trek dialogue of all time. (Not to mention Kirk's all time great melodramatic moment, seen here.) Not only are there some excellent space battles and military strategizing, but the film also contains some melancholy philosophizing on aging, which is nearly poetic. (Ironic in retrospect, considering that the Enterprise crew were just getting started in their cinematic adventures, not wrapping them up.) Ricardo Montalban surely gives one of the great villainous performances of all time as Khan. If this is not everyone's favorite Star Trek movie, it should be.

2) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, Leonard Nimoy). However, I'd have a hard time begrudging anyone this as a choice for best Trek movie of all time. If you want to talk about truly going where no [Trek film] had gone before, how about making a Star Trek movie that could accurately be characterized as a modern-day romantic comedy? The film is suffused with a sprightly quality that was absolutely infectious -- I remember the audience I saw it with in hysterics over the writing, especially Spock's attempts to fit into life in 1980s San Francisco. It was a masterstroke, after two previous extremely dour entries, to give us a Trek movie in which not a single tragic thing occurs, and the primary conflict is whether humpback whales can be returned to the 23rd century, to communicate with an alien probe that is inadvertently sucking Earth dry in its attempt to contact them. This is a tight, exciting script, and it features a darling relationship between Kirk and a 20th century marine biologist (played by Gillian Hicks). That's where the romantic comedy element comes in. William Shatner and Nimoy lead the way as the cast gives us a bunch of loosey-goosey performances, and a helluva fun time at the movies. To add to the movie's quirk factor, they're riding around in a captured Klingon vessel. If there were ever a Trek movie for non-Trekkies, it was this one.

3) Star Trek (2009, J.J. Abrams). Or this one. I needn't go about praising this movie too much, because plenty of other people have already done that. But if there were ever a person who could bring Star Trek to the masses, Abrams was apparently the guy. Sure, you have to adjust for inflation, but Star Trek's $257 million at the U.S. box office was nearly $150 more than the next highest grossing film in the series, the aforementioned Star Trek IV ($109 million). The film is excellently cast from top to bottom, with Chris Pine effortlessly taking Kirk's confidence by the lapels, and Zachary Quinto seemingly born to play a Vulcan. This film may have spoken to audiences in a big way, but that doesn't mean it plays it safe. In fact, Abrams risked royally pissing off a nation of Trekkies (they actually prefer the term Trekkers) by messing with the Star Trek timeline, including destroying the planet Vulcan. But the kooky time travel logic actually makes a certain sense, and for the most part, I think Trekkers bought it. As well they should -- the new timeline will allow new, never-before-considered adventures for characters whose fates had already been known in previous Trek films.

4) Star Trek: First Contact (1996, Jonathan Frakes). And here's where I start to get a bit fuzzy. According to my records, I have seen this film only once, and it had to be in the theater, which means I haven't seen it in 14 years. But I remember thinking that this excellently continued the reliable "the even Star Trek movies are better than the odd ones" principle, this being, for all intents and purposes, Star Trek VIII. Again time travel enters into one of the best Trek movies, as the Enterprise returns to the moment on Earth when contact was first established with extra-terrestrial life, paving the way for the future of human space travel. But it also contains Picard's tangling with the ominous Borg, a great Trek villain that had not yet appeared in a movie. Both elements are carried off excellently. Also, Frakes continues the series' tradition of actors taking the helm for at least one film -- he also plays first officer William Riker.

5) Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991, Nicholas Meyer). And speaking of the even-numbered movies, this is the other great example, in addition to II, IV and VIII. This and First Contact could easily flip-flop in the rankings, as I remember them about equally well, and they are probably about equally good. I clearly owe them both another viewing, as the primary thing I remember about this movie is that Kirk gets stranded in some kind of ice prison, and that David Bowie's wife, Iman, makes an appearance. The rest is just nebulously positive vibes.

6) Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984, Leonard Nimoy). Hands down the most difficult-to-watch Star Trek movie. It surely helped solidify the "odd movies are bad" principle, but I think this movie is difficult more than it's bad. Even if it weren't about the rapid re-growth of a reborn Spock on the Genesis planet, and all the trauma that entails, the movie also features Kirk's son David (Merritt Butrick) getting killed by a Klingon, and the crew setting the invaded Enterprise to self-destruct. The movie is literally dark, shot in shades of red, and there's nary a happy or humorous moment in it. But in my book it gains points by really "going for it."

7) Star Trek Generations (1994, David Carson). I've actually re-watched this film in the last five years, and if not for that second viewing, it might have been ranked lower. However, this is a pretty good film. It's an effective torch-passing ceremony from the old Enterprise crew to the new, and contains perhaps the single-most momentous occurrence in the entire Trek narrative: the death of James T. Kirk. It's a pretty satisfying death -- he pretty much saves the universe in the process. Oh, and Brent Spiner is really funny as Data, who has an emotion chip implanted with hilarious results.

8) Star Trek: Nemesis (2002, Stuart Baird). This film earns extra points for its own sense of finality, as it was pretty much known that this was going to be the final Star Trek film (Star Trek X, if you are keeping count) -- at least that's what we thought before J.J. Abrams came along. In fact, it's the only even-numbered Star Trek movie that is not widely acknowledged to be significantly superior to its odd-numbered counterparts. I don't remember a whole lot about what happens in this movie, but it does feature a major character death as well: Data, who has always been the Next Generation's answer to Spock. Then again, they do create a new Data at the end, he just doesn't have the original Data's personality -- or should we say, memory banks?

9) Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979, Robert Wise). Despite listing several Trek films earlier that I said were most urgently in need of revisiting, this may actually be the most deserving candidate for a second viewing because it's been over 30 years since I've seen it. That's right, I only saw it in the theater, and all I really remember about it is my profound sense of disappointment when I walked out. It must have been really boring to leave a six-year-old like me, who should have just liked seeing laser blasts and space ships, so totally unsatisfied. In fact, I remember actually feeling a palpable sense of uncertainty about Star Trek II when my dad and I went to see it in the theater, because of how much I'd disliked this film. But this is the one that demands a revisit merely for academic purposes -- it couldn't have been as bad as I remembered, could it? The other thing I remember is that there was a bald woman in it.

10) Star Trek: Insurrection (1998, Jonathan Frakes). This movie may actually be better than Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but the reason it's ranked where it is is that it has the least grandiose plot of any Star Trek movie, despite that inflammatory title. In fact, I remember writing in my review that it was more like a regular episode of The Next Generation than a movie. The plot had something to do with saving people on a doomed planet, and I remember that Picard and his love interest spend a decent amount of time trapped in some kind of cave. As an interesting side note, this may be the only review I've ever written where I no longer have access to any copy of the review. For some reason, my review was replaced on the website with another writer's work, and I can no longer find the Microsoft Word original. Also, I thought I'd share a funny little story, this being Star Trek IX. Back when The Search for Spock came out, my friends and I had a joke that each of the next however many movies in the series would be the search for one of the other crew members. The one that always was funniest to me was Star Trek IX: The Search for Uhura. Because let's face it -- even though Abrams is trying to make her a more important character this time around, Uhura was a total afterthought in the original six Star Trek films.

11) Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989, William Shatner). You'd like to think that the only film in the series directed by William Shatner would be better than this, but it ain't. As a sign of my affection for the series in general, I still do not consider Star Trek V to be out and out bad -- but it's not good. Shatner wisely tried to continue the levity and camaraderie of Star Trek IV by having Kirk, Spock and Bones go on a camping trip and climb a mountain. It's a good effort but it doesn't quite work. Of course, the real lasting impression of this film is that the Enterprise crew goes to the edge of the universe (or some such) in a quest to find God. Who knew that God was a renegade Vulcan named Sybok, Spock's half-brother? Not how I pictured him.

Agree? Disagree? Actually seen all 11? I'd love to hear from you.

10 days of insomnia + acid reflux + swine flu ...

+ my sister visiting for a week + a huge project at work + the NBA playoffs + baseball season = exactly two movies seen and two blog postings during the month of May.

I'm upping the number of one of those right now. The other will change tonight when I go straight from work to see Star Trek in IMAX -- which is probably the last thing I should be doing considering that I haven't had a decent night's sleep since the calendar turned. But I gotta squeeze it in now, because on Thursday morning, my wife's sister arrives for almost a week. It's a sisterrific month of May in our household, to be sure, as mine just left this morning. We might have actually gone to Star Trek while she was here, but I wasn't able to gauge how interested she was, which turned out to be more interested than I thought.

Busy times, busy times.

A couple clarifications.

I don't actually have swine flu -- at least, not that I'm aware of -- but for awhile last week I was pretty paranoid about the poor timing of my sore throat, which eventually turned into the more traditional common cold symptoms that I have now. Still haven't actually developed a fever, so I'm not planning any medical action. Of course, that's probably the same thing all the people who dropped dead of swine flu thought, before they dropped dead of swine flu. I have found enough time in the last week to read that the swine flu pandemic no longer seems as serious as once thought, so I've stopped worrying about whether I need to make an appointment with my doctor -- which would be complicated anyway by the fact that we switched providers at work on May 1st, and I don't even have my new card yet. (If it's not one thing, it's something else, right?)

The insomnia. It sucks. Though I do have it to thank for actually getting to watch my second movie of the month, Swing Vote, which I watched during one gym session and two bouts of sleeplessness. I'd make a joke about insomnia and Swing Vote, except darn it, I actually kind of liked it. Maybe I'll say I liked it only because of the delirium.

The acid reflux. Almost nightly for the last five to six days. I'm sure it has something to do with the insomnia, though the insomnia started before I noticed having acid problems. I ate a really healthy dinner last night at a vegan restaurant, and I still had heartburn. D'oh.

The project at work. Almost everyone at my company is getting a new cell phone in the next three weeks, almost 200 of whom are porting in from another network. There are more moving parts to this project than I could have ever imagined. Yikes.

The NBA playoffs. Go Celtics!

The baseball season. Go Red Sox! Go my fantasy team!

I hope to have more actual movie-related thoughts by the weekend.

Trailer bowl

I was going to write a longer piece, but I ran out of time, so thought I'd at least check in with something shorter.

It's no great revelation that for a lot of people who watch the Super Bowl, the commercials are the best part. (These days, that's debatable). For film fans, though, you have to increase that by one layer of specificity. While your average fan just wants to see how Danica Patrick will make a new innuendo about her breasts for GoDaddy.com, or the latest shenanigans of the Budweiser clydesdales, film fans are eager for their first look at a bunch of new films.

Of course, the value of this used to be higher. Nowadays, the hardcore geek can find any trailer he/she wants online. But I like to take a little bit more of a laid back approach to trailer watching. If someone sends me a link saying I "gotta watch this," then I will. But otherwise, I won't go seeking them out.

And so it is that I still look forward with some giddiness to what the Super Bowl has in store for me. I still remember the burst of excitement I felt over such films as The Hulk, Transformers and Wanted. Ah, what great films they all turned out to be. (Please note my sarcasm).

And one thing I noticed -- no matter how my attention was diverted elsewhere, toward socializing or drinking or eating scrumptious appetizers, and sometimes even toward football, I somehow maintained a sixth sense for tuning in when a new trailer started. (I reviewed, just to be sure, by fast-forwarding the copy on my DVR tonight. If you don't watch the commercials you missed the day afterward, you'll never watch them).

So instead of doing the rundown of which commercials were good and which sucked -- and this year, it would weigh heavily on the latter category -- I thought I'd give a quick recap of the film trailers, and my impressions based on one (or in some cases, two) viewings.

Duplicity. With Clive Owen and Julia Roberts yukking it up like there's no tomorrow, this looks like Mr. and Mrs. Smith meets Oceans 12. In other words, I'm not interested. In case you're interested, IMDB says this will be the third film called Duplicity since 2004. (March 20th)

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. I have a number of concerns here: 1) If it's the first movie in the series, do you really need a secondary title? 2) It's releasing in August -- not a good sign. 3) Aren't these guys supposed to be military? How come there's no sign of a battlefield? Looks more like X-Men to me. 4) It's directed by the guy who directed The Mummy. 5) The ad played before kickoff, which means it can't be good. Other than all that, I'm excited. Hey, I played with G.I. Joes when I was a kid. (August 7th)

Angels & Demons. I admit to referring to this as Gods and Monsters when the ad came on. Hey, I'd had a couple beers. The only thing I will say is that when I saw The Da Vinci Code, I thought it was an exact replica of the book. Well, I haven't actually read the book this time, so maybe there'll be some surprises. But I will probably not go. Oh, and I loved how the ad referred to the first movie generically -- "He uncovered one of the greatest cover-ups in history," or something to that effect -- and then, lacking the confidence that you'd know what they were talking about, threw in a whispered voice saying the word "Da Vinci." Thanks, I needed that. (May 15th)

The Year One. Jack Black and Michael Cera get stoned -- but not in the way you're thinking. I liked the idea when I first heard of this, but the ad did nothing to build on that. The sets look cheap, but not in a good way, and the humor seems like it'll be pretty warmed over. Though it is nice to see Michael Cera taking a break from playing Michael Cera. (June 19th)

Fast & Furious. Okay, we have to figure out something here ... is it a series reboot if it's the same cast? Or is it just the fourth in the series? "New model, original parts." My head is spinning. This is the first time I have ever seen a series try to create a different title just by removing a couple of definite articles. I guess that ampersand is new, too. Does this mean that Vin Diesel has finally admitted he needs to make some safe choices? Blah. (April 3rd)

Land of the Lost. I was a huge fan of Will Ferrell's in Step Brothers, so this looks like a step backward to me. However, Danny McBride is in this movie, so that bodes well. But why didn't they put him in the ad? (Remember, I'm going on a single screening here). Ultimately, this reminds me a lot of a number of other movies. Where's Brendan Fraser when you need him? I think the main reason this movie exists is so that Ferrell could say "Matt Lauer can suck it!" (June 5th)

Star Trek. Every other trailer for Star Trek has been awesome. This one was no different, even in short form. I've honored it by giving it the accompanying art for this post. (May 8th)

Up. I was overjoyed by the appearance of this one when I first saw the trailer, but on second viewing, I was a little more hesitant. Will I grow to love the old man and the boy scout just like I've loved all the other Pixar characters? Probably. Will definitely see this one in 3D. (May 29th)

Monsters vs. Aliens. Speaking of 3D glasses ... I did not have them to watch this. But I still liked the trailer. I'm wondering if it's possible I could prefer a Dreamworks picture to a Pixar picture for the first time ever. Probably not. (March 27th)

Race to Witch Mountain. Huh? This movie is confusing as hell. Didn't Hellboy already impress us by standing in front of a car, and Hancock already not quite impress us by standing in front of a train? I guess we've never seen a kid do it. Eh. Dwayne Johnson or not, I will pass. (March 13th)

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Okay, I know most of us have seen Transformers ... but do any of us remember who "the fallen" were? This assumes some kind of deep investment in the angst and mythology of the Transformers world. Which none of us had. Hey, I liked Transformers better than almost anyone I know, and Michael Bay can still blow stuff up, but I am not excited for this. (June 26th)

Most regret not seeing an ad for: Terminator: Salvation (May 22nd)

Not a bumper crop overall. In fact, weakest field in years. So it goes.

Okay, so it wasn't that short. But I wrote it fast.