(Click here to see my Star Trek box office chart)

After more than two weeks in wide theatrical release, Paramount Picture’s Star Trek (2009) has shattered both internal and external records and accumulated over $152 million at the box office. It boasts the highest grossing opening weekend in franchise history at $79.2 million, easily breaking the former record established by First Contact (1996) of $49.9 million (when adjusted for inflation).

The digitally remastered version for IMAX screens also broke a formidable record, raking in a domestic total of $8.5 million during its opening weekend, surpassing the previous benchmark record of $6.3 million set by The Dark Knight (2008) last summer, and continuing its record-breaking pace through its second weekend.

To call this franchise reboot by J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman a "success" is to understate their remarkable achievement, especially when you consider the pressures they were under not only by studio executives but also the worldwide fan base who feel intimately connected to the original cast members of Kirk, Spock, and McKoy. I think the box office results and overwhelming positive reviews widely attest to the fact that they have positively answered their critics and satisfied (most of) the fan base.

I am going to discuss my thoughts on this movie in further detail, including what I think is its greatest merit, but be advised that it will contain spoiler information. Keep that in mind before reading on.

This particular fan is certainly well satisfied. Although I do reserve some criticism of the movie (e.g., the use of ‘lens flare’ was excessive and distracting, I disliked the music score, the alien beasts on Delta Vega were unnecessary, etc.), the movie overall was fantastic. I think the casting was well done, especially with respect to the key characters. And the actors are to be commended for capturing the iconic personalities without mimicking the original actors who portrayed them (e.g., Chris Pine was Kirk without being Shatner). I was also really pleased that the on-screen development of, and chemistry between, the integral relationships of Kirk, Spock, and McKoy were at once both authentic and convincing. And as much as I loved Kirk and Spock in this movie, I must confess that Karl Urban’s portrayal of crotchety and eccentric Leonard McKoy totally stole the show.

But despite the various things that this movie got right, there is a more significant merit at work here that I think helped make this movie a success, at more of a subconscious level that many people might be uncomfortable confronting consciously.

It has been a long time since a Star Trek motion picture employed the instrument of allegorical narrative to highlight and address issues of contemporary significance. Like most Trek fans, I did enjoy and appreciate the crew of The Next Generation and their motion picture adventures, but I have to wonder if perhaps part of the failure experienced by the Star Trek franchise—from the weird hand off in Generations (1994) to the box office flop of Nemesis (2002)—was related to the fact that the stories were essentially internal. Despite the socio-political events going on in the world at the time, the Next Generation movies confronted issues that were significant to the Star Trek universe but not our world.

To get a better sense of what I’m talking about, take for example the last movie featuring the entire original crew, The Undiscovered Country (1991). It addressed head-on issues of contemporary significance at the time. The destruction of the Klingon moon Praxis could be viewed as a metaphor of Chernobyl, which the Klingons tried to deal with internally, like the Soviet Union had. But the incident eventually forced them to become less secretive due to their need for outside help, like the Soviet Union who had practically bankrupted itself on military spending, like the Klingon empire. Consider how the collapse of the Soviet empire was mirrored in the collapse of the Klingon empire, leading to the political and pragmatic similarities between Gorkon’s peace initiatives in that world and Gorbachev’s glasnost in this world.

The movie did not mirror real historical events completely, of course, but it used them rather as a catalyst to explore important issues and themes of contemporary relevance. And that is something that Abrams and the writing team of Orci and Kurtzman finally injected back into the franchise with Star Trek (2009), as far as I understood the narrative. (It is perhaps somewhat ironic that once again it is the original crew at the helm.)

What tipped me off was the villain in this movie, a Romulan war criminal known as Nero. I appreciated the fact that Nero was originally a noble character (a back-story alluded to in the movie but fleshed out in the Countdown comic books); it helped make his character believable. What had set Nero on the course of becoming a war criminal was the catastrophic destruction of his homeworld, Romulus, which he blamed on the calculated impotence of the Federation to act, embodied in the Vulcan ambassador known as Spock. When Nero channelled his grief into bloodlust, he lost his noble character under the powerful influence of vengeance. He would avenge the death toll of his people on the planet Vulcan first, then on to Earth and other planets of the Federation, until he could finally rid the galaxy of the pestilence that caused such grief.

But what really drove the metaphor home for me was a particular scene aboard the Narada (the spaceship Nero commanded). He had captured Captain Christopher Pike and was interrogating him for the subspace frequencies for the Federation’s border protection grid. When he was not getting the information he wanted, he resorted to more extreme methods for extracting it. At this point something in my mind clicked, and the entire story shifted dramatically. (This is at least partly the reason I saw the movie three times.)

Suddenly I began looking at Nero as a metaphorical representation of the Bush administration; I saw the destruction of Romulus as the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings and the 9/11 terrorist attacks; I could see a real-world correlation to Nero’s grief-turned-vengeance toward those he felt responsible; I began to consider the relationship between first-Vulcan-then-Earth and first-Afghanistan-then-Iraq, how Vulcan was easy but Earth would be complicated in the same way that Afghanistan was easy but Iraq was complicated, that getting at Earth required interrogation for information the way getting at Iraq did; I noticed that in the Countdown books the Klingon homeworld was next, similarly to how Pakistan is next; I saw parallels in both spheres with respect to ridding the world of those thought responsible; I saw a powerful allegory in Nero being a formerly noble character whose vengeance caused him to lose his way and wander into war criminal territory, in a way representing America’s fall from grace; one could even argue that refining decalithium into ‘red matter’ typifies refining crude oil into petroleum; and, of course, it was impossible to miss Nero’s increasingly aggressive interrogation techniques as mirroring those advanced under the Bush administration (with the subtle image of water on the floor, sloshed at Nero’s feet as he paced around the platform to which Captain Pike was bound).

And true to the heart of Star Trek lore, the humanistic optimism of Gene Roddenberry rises up to offer an answer to this narrative of vengeance on two different levels. First, the black hole that eventually consumes Nero and his crew aboard the Narada might graphically represent a cautionary tale, that vengeance is a fire that can end up consuming the avenger. And second, the hopeful triumph of unity through diversity, that the heart and soul of a healthy and thriving world is found in the harmonious union of diverse ethnicities and cultures working together toward a common good through the collaborative value of our unique multi-national and multi-ethnic diversities. Roddenberry intended Star Trek to be a platform for confronting real-life issues under the guise of entertainment. As Michael Spindler noted, "Society as a whole may be unaware of the direction [we] are taking in the world—that is, until an artist holds a mirror to face of humanity, offering up a chance for self examination and reflection."

Is my understanding of the story actually what Orci and Kurtzman intended to present the audience? I don’t know; of all the interviews I have read, they never address the issue. The correlations I described are significant, and can be multiplied further, so I am really inclined to think so—although given its sheer audacity I doubt they would ever admit it. But what I think is perhaps more important, as with all art, is the fact that this is what I took from the story, that this is the relevance and import I inferred from it on my own, that this is what it said to me and how it has informed and influenced my own thinking, that I discovered the Roddenberry heart of Star Trek resurging in a provocative cautionary tale in what could have been just another flashy movie.

Kudos to Abrams, Lindelof, Orci, and Kurtzman. Thank you for breathing new life into the sociologically relevant Star Trek envisioned by Gene Roddenberry.

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