Star Trek: The Promise of You

by Sylvia Bond

Quite recently I was in the movie theater with one of my oldest friends, Amy. I’ve known her since the fourth grade, and the dirt we have on each other would fill a stadium. The movie we’d gone to see was “Quantum Solace,” which both of us were interested in and had high hopes for. Sadly, the movie was, to put it bluntly, not good. Now, I’m willing to give Bond films a LOT of leeway, seeing as I’m a Bond fan from way back; when I was six my favorite movie was “Casino Royale” with David Niven and Woody Allen and Peter Sellers. I’m not too sure there are many six year olds who could sit through three hours of THAT, but for some reason I was fascinated by the spy stuff (especially the exploding button and the spy school, though I’m sure the adult jokes went over my head), and went on to be a big Man From Uncle fan, as well.

Back to the point. Being such a big Bond fan, I was willing to adore this movie, seeing as how I adored the last Bond film, which was also named “Casino Royale,” and which stared Daniel Craig, who did an excellent job of bringing a gritty, street-savvy Bond to life. It was the perfect Bond film, the most perfect, mixing emotional content with sharp action, people dying and sexing and sweating. And Bond, with those blond eyelashes flicking above those ice blue eyes of his. Perfect. But actually, the new Bond film, which I would steer you away from, is not the point of this article. It is about a preview I saw.

Now, previews are like visual crack, a candy treat, a noonday quickie. They are the promise of the goodness to come, the joy abounding on a distant horizon. I’ve seen enough of them to be able to judge whether or not the movie will a) interest me and b) be any good. I get pretty irritated at those previews where I can TELL that they’ve clipped together the best bits and what you see in the preview is pretty much all there is that’s good about that particular movie, but overall, I enjoy previews, because they have the power to get me worked up and excited, humming with anticipatory pleasure. Like I said, crack.

My friend Amy and I have been taking in a lot of first run movies lately, and have been having a contest for a while to see who could predict how many previews would be shown before the actual movie, and I’d been winning for quite some time before she irritatedly said could we not do that anymore. It wasn’t because I had been winning, she assured me, but because it distracted her from the pleasure of the previews. I agreed. So this time, I was able to let the previews wash all over me, and was quite unprepared for the first one to pop up on the screen, rated G and containing mild thematic elements, whatever those are.

There was this kid driving a red convertible. It looked like a Corvette, and he was driving it across the desert straight towards a cliff, a la Thelma and Louise, dust curling and churning away from the tires. The car went off the cliff, and as it did, this kid jumped in slow motion, his body arced wide, arms spread as though he wanted very much to fly. Then he hit the cliff and scrambled up the edge, swearing and spitting, while the beautiful red convertible smashed into the rocks below. For a second, the camera focused on the kid’s feet and his odd footwear, and I thought for a second that they’d mixed up the film, because it seemed as if what I’d been watching was a sneaker commercial and I was pretty peeved. But then the kid stood up and there was a robot asking him his name. And the kid said, “James Tiberius Kirk.”

Oh. My. GOD. I about died; my love for character back story knows no bounds, and especially this character, who I’ve carried clutched to my bosom lo these many years. A movie about a young Kirk? Oh, yes. At LAST. Don’t get me wrong. My adoration for Shatner and Nimoy and company is hard-wired and rock solid for all the joy they’ve brought me over the years. But this is the opportunity for the entire story and for well-loved characters to be born anew, vibrant and fresh like newly-hatched chicks, but the same. Beloved. Known. Cherished.

I made a little gasp in the dark quiet, and both Amy and I clutched at each other and squealed. Now, we’re both card-carrying adults and know perfectly well how to conduct ourselves inside of a theater. But we lost it. We came apart. We’d been Trekkies since the 7^th grade and knew very well that a new Star Trek movie was coming out, but in the hubbub of paying mortgages and feeding our fish, we’d forgotten. And there it was, larger than life. Kirk as the cock-of-the-walk gunslinger; Spock being told that he would always only be half of what he was meant to be; and oh, the accent, there’s Scotty! Bones! Sulu! Uhura! Checkov! Oh my loves, my own true loves.

We were NOT quiet. We giggled and pointed, poked each other, grabbed elbows and whispered, all while trying to memorize the images flickering across the screen; all our homies were up there, vibrant, alive, tearing across the galaxy. Bringing back memories of how it used to be, when Star Trek was in its first re-run cycle, and I was madly in love with Captain Kirk. When junior high hallways were our world, the computer lab our safe haven, and me and my geeky friends hung out, like, all the time, dithering endlessly about what it would be like to be transported and how cool it would be to land on an alien class “M” planet and whether or not there would be enough air to breathe.

We watched clips of the shiny new Enterprise, saw characters running through corridors, explosions and uniforms, saw Spock bitching at Kirk, and saw Kirk leaping into the fray as though he very much wanted to fly. And then it was over, and we looked at each other and sighed, eyes glittering in the half darkness of the theater, memories humming between us. Our long and abiding love for a show that only had three seasons to prove itself already sealed and cemented was now, once more, alive.

That’s the promise of a preview, that’s what ALL previews want to deliver, a feeling like that, but seldom have I had one affect me so powerfully. I think the last time I was so moved was at the preview for “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan,” so much so that I ditched work one day, back in 1982, which, since I was well trained to go to work No Matter What, was a Big Deal. I actually lied to my boss, and went to the 12:30 showing, and found myself, oddly, in a fully-packed theater. I managed to find myself a seat right in the middle, and about 10 minutes into the movie realized what had happened, and the reason for everybody laughing very loudly at all the in jokes was explained. Every other Trekkie in town had ALSO ditched work, and I was surrounded by my fellows. My peeps. My homies. My family. The sensation of belonging, of everyone getting it in exactly the same way I got it has never left me, and I’ve never had a movie-going experience quite like that since.

Until that moment with Amy, seeing the gang up there on the screen once more. It almost doesn’t matter if the movie itself isn’t any good, for I will always have the memory of the feeling I had, that electrical, jazzy feeling running up my spine, when I realized what movie the preview was touting. Of course, having said that, I have high hopes. I want to have high hopes, I want this movie not to suck. I want the writers and the rest of the production team to not only know these characters and understand them, but to be very aware that there’s a world of fans out there (literally, a world!) who know and understand these characters better than they know themselves. Who, having been seeped in this world for over 40 years (yes, 40), come, not with unrealistic expectations but instead, very realistic ones.

We know this universe like the back of our collective hand, we understand the foibles of the Enterprise crew, their issues, their weak spots, their motivations. We know them, and in spite of knowing them like we do, we love them still. And I can tell you truly, we don’t want just special effects (although those are nice), we want STORY. We want the movie to live up to the promise of its preview, we want this universe in all its beauty, in all its ugliness. We want to sit in a darkened theater together, en mass, all of us, all over the world, having lied to our bosses and DITCHED work to join in collective pleasure in the Church of the Final Frontier.

Beauty is truth, and truth is Star Trek, and that is all you need to know. Amen.

(However, the PTB will make us all wait till May 8, 2009 for the aforementioned benediction. Don’t that they know I hate waiting?)

Sylvia Bond is a ten-year technical writing veteran with too many degrees under her belt to count. She lives in Colorado, but does not ski, preferring instead to spend her money and time at the annual Great American Beer Festival, taking road trips across the United States, and reading historical fiction from the comfort of her fluffy green arm chair. She has been involved in fandom since 1993 and been writing fanfic since approximately 1993. What she finds most amazing about fandom (besides the open heartedness of fans and the sheer amount of creativity) is how visible fandom has become. “In my day,” she says, “we had to hide behind P.O. boxes to get fanfic. But nowadays, people wear t-shirts that shout their affiliation and share their shiny toys on the internet.” It’s a wonderful world.

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