I remember watching that new Star Trek
movie on TV, about a year ago. The 2009 J.J. Abrams film. I certainly wasn’t sold
on the next ones. Here’s why.
First off, there is the matter of the “red
matter”. That is not a WMD, it’s a WWD – a Weapon of World Destruction.
Scratch that. It’s a WSSD – a Weapon of Solar System Destruction! It’s
insane! Beats the Death Star. Beats Galactus. Beats everything I ever saw or
read in SF/F – except maybe for the awakening of Azathoth and the Great Old
Ones, with the stars being “right” and all. But really, that “red matter” is
CRAZY. If such a weapon existed, it would require an intergalactic Imperium’s
Security Council just to safeguard it and prevent it from falling into the
wrong hands. And you would never – ever – put it aboard one tiny shuttlecraft
named Jellyfish with a lone aging Vulcan ambassador in it. ARE YOU MAD?
Such a superpowerful weaponized substance should be escorted by an entire
armada of Battlestars and heavy warships! This is ridiculous. It’s like putting
the entirety of Earth’s nuclear warheads on a damn yacht with Madeleine
Albright at the tiller, and send that craft somewhere on the high seas without
further monitoring!
How come the Federation didn’t notice
the disappearance of the most dreadful weapon in the galaxy? Twenty-five
years later that rift in space ought to be the most heavily guarded point in
the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. One huge space station plus a hundred major
warships patrolling AT ALL TIMES.
This scenario by Orci & Kurtzman makes no sense at all.
And then there is the thing with those
twenty-five years. Seriously, a ship full of Romulan convicts waited patiently
in a remote corner of space for twenty-five years without being noticed,
without ever interacting with the rest of the universe, without any mutiny, and
without the crew going nuts and killing each other? Not one of these convicts
ever said, “Fuck you, Nero! I’ll go to Romulus, and have sex with all the
Romulan bitches I can find for the next twenty-five years – and then if Romulus
is annihilated in 2387, so be it. But I’m not gonna wither away aboard this
damn ugly depressing mining ship. Not for twenty-five years, no way!”
And where did they get their food and water
during all those years? From a replicator, all of it? For a quarter of a
century? Really?
This tremendously long wait is predicated upon
ONE single assumption: Nero somewhat knows that Spock’s shuttle carries
the all-powerful red matter, and he knows that the shuttle is being
sucked into the very same time-rift – but time-rifts are unpredictable
anomalies, and if Spock’s shuttle is sucked into the rift eighteen minutes
after the Narada, on the other end of the rift (in the past) those eighteen
minutes could very well become twenty-five years! Nero knows that. He’s
not only a convict and a miner – he’s also an expert on time-rifts somehow...
So, after the first six months of stealthily
waiting, a few Romulans said, “Well, forget it, boss – that shuttle’s not
coming! Can’t you see? It has probably escaped the rift’s gravitational pull or
something... Let’s move on!”
But Nero quelled this rebellion and said, “We’ll
wait a little longer. Like, twenty more years or so.”
It’s a farce. A joke. It is NOT AT ALL
believable.
J.J. Abrams has terrible timeline problems,
and always tries to blur this blatant flaw by adding “magic” and some “parallel
reality”, like we had in Lost and in Fringe.
Hardcore Trekkies scrambled to fix that huge
incoherence by claiming that the entire crew of the Narada was jailed on
Rura Penthe during those twenty-five years; but that’s weak, honestly. Doesn’t
solve anything, come to think of it. Reeks of desperation.
So pardon me if I didn’t see the second Star
Trek with Cumberbatch, and probably won’t see this new one either. I know
Abrams will make a good movie at some point in the future. Let’s lay low and
wait for a while – like, twenty-five more years.
