This post discusses plot points from Star Trek Into Darkness in some detail.

Starships and Klingons and tribbles, oh my! I’d expected that Star Trek Into Darkness, J.J. Abrams’ follow-up to his 2009 alternate-timeline reboot of the venerable franchise, with returning writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, could have been any one of a number of things: a confident coming-of-age for Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), a return to the tradition of space exploration that defined the original show and movies, with some unintended consequences thrown in to accomodate the tastes of modern action audiences, and even continuation of the sci-fi screwball romance between Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana). What I didn’t anticipate is that as a blockbuster, Star Trek Into Darkness would be impressively generic, but that in a summer when drone strikes and extrajudicial killings appear to have been on many screenwriters and directors minds’, it would do one of the clearest (if not deep) jobs of outlining the debates over the American drone program for a mass audience.

When we meet up with the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise again, they’re on a planet inhabited by a primitive species that’s about to be destroyed by a volcano. Spock, in a potential violation of the mission directive to explore the world, uses cold fusion to stop the explosion, but not without endangering his own life in a way that prompts Kirk to come to his rescue by means that blow the Prime Directive not to speed up that species’ technological development quite literally out of the water, or without hurting Uhura, now firmly established as Spock’s girlfriend. Their actions, and Kirk’s filing of a fudged report of them while Spock tells the truth, get Kirk demoted to First Officer under Christopher Pike, who returns to command of the Enterprise, and Spock reassigned to the U.S.S. Bradbury. But their split it short-lived after a man identified as Starfleet officer John Harrison induces a fellow member of Starfleet to bomb what appears to be an archive, an attack that turns out to be a trap to lure Starfleet’s top commanders to a single for a strategy session. When Harrison attacks that session from the air, killing Pike and other high-ranking Starfleet commanders, Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) gives Kirk back his ship and permission to go after Harrison, who turns out to be rather more than he seems.

The details of what how they do so are remarkably noisy and remarkably forgettable. But the nature of Marcus’s commission to Kirk and company provokes the movie’s strongest throughline and most clearly-developed ideas. The question in Star Trek Into Darkness is whether or not Kirk should follow strategic detail of Marcus’s orders to, using new and advanced torpedoes, “park on the edge of Klingon space, you fire, you take him out, and you haul ass,” or comply with Starfleet rules and make sure that Harrison receives a fair trial back on earth. That Star Trek Into Darkness presents that choice at all, outlining the debate in very similar terms to the arguments about the use of drone strikes to carry out extrajudicial killings of accused terrorists outside of the United States, differentiates it from the other pop culture explorations the subject, which has become a strikingly common feature of movies and television this year, including Iron Man 3 and Fox procedural Bones.
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On Thursday night’s Parks and Recreation, Patton Oswalt played a Star Wars-loving Pawneean who mounted an epic filibuster under a little-known provision of the rules governing the City Council. It’s a great meta cameo for a guy who’s a nerd icon. But watching the whole thing, which Parks and Rec wisely released online several days in advance of the episode’s air date, I got to thinking that Oswalt’s pitch for a new Star Wars movie, which would mash up Thanos, and Tony Stark, and the X-Men, not to mention Robot Chewbacca actually says a lot about the state of nerd franchises as geek culture has taken over the world and become big business:

Oswalt’s grand mashup speaks to the mass enthusiasm that has made comic book movies and science fiction franchises such generally dependable moneymakers for studios despite the significant upfront costs required to make and to market them. But it’s also a reminder that there is enormous corporate consolidation of geek properties, particularly in Disney, which owns Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, and in the form of J.J. Abrams, who now controls both the Star Trek franchise and the core narrative of the forthcoming Star Wars sequels. These companies—and Abrams and Joss Whedon, is acting as an overall creative consultant of the Marvel movie universe—are absolutely capable. But this consolidation does represent a narrowing of perspectives.

And in Oswalt’s monologue, the things that fit together about all of these universes is their gee-whiz elements, their Infinity Gauntlets and jets and X-Wings and Iron Man suits. They’re all worlds in which amazing things can occur, of course. But this kind of enthusiasm strikes me as besides the point, and makes me a little sad. X-Men is an engine for exploring ideas about collective identity, about genetics as a source of identity, about the Holocaust, about the regulation of extraordinary abilities. The toys are extras, not the point. Ditto for Star Trek, where things like warp drives and beaming are a way of getting the characters rapidly into a lot of different situations that are about opening up everything from interracial relationships to the question of whether artificial intelligences have rights. If those ideas get lost in the rise of geek culture as a massively consumed corporate product, we’re losing a lot of what made those franchises so deeply engaging, and objects of such deep identification and debate in the first place.

Corporate consolidation, in other words, is the Infinity Gauntlet. It’s granted beloved geek figures like Abrams and Whedon enormous amounts of control over Time, Space, Mind, Soul, Reality, and Power. But we’re at a critical point where we’ll see if the concentration of all of that creative and financial power actually lets science fiction and fantasy conquer pop culture in all of its multifarious inventiveness, or if it just means that a narrow, relatively homogenized set of stories and set of characters takes over the world, bringing a narrow set of ideas with it.

Per Kotaku:

At CinemaCon today, Disney revealed plans to release new Star Wars films each summer beginning in 2015. The plan isn’t to go Episode VII, VIII, IX in three years but, rather, to run spinoff films in-between the major “episode releases” every two or three years. This is consistent with earlier reports of plans for spinoff movies, plus reports that the next trilogy will pick up after 1983′s Return of the Jedi. Disney’s announcement meshes the two together rather definitively.

In a way, I’m even more interested in what the spinoffs might look like than about the new trilogy. It’s a setup that creates more space for creative storytelling within the Star Wars universe, while still keeping the core space opera going under the—if nothing else—predictable leadership of J.J. Abrams. I don’t know that Disney will ever be comfortable getting this experimental, but there’s so much room for playing with visual styles, kinds of stories, and pairings of directors and subject material. Why tie Ben Affleck, for example, to the core trilogy movies when he could take his experience with Boston cop movies and apply it to a movie about the Corellian Security Force? Why not reunite Jessica Chastain and Kathryn Bigelow for an austere lady-Jedi movie—or even cast Chastain as Mara Jade? How about hiring Guillermo del Toro to do all of the monster design for the franchise going forward and letting him play with some stories about non-human main characters? Disney’s going to make an absolute fortune out of these movies. I’d like to see fans communicate to them as clearly and as loudly as possible, and as early in the process as we can, that we’d be excited to see the Star Wars franchise innovate if it’s going to flood the zone, rather than stay stagnant.

The news that J.J. Abrams will be directing Star Wars Episode VII may have me down at the mouth for what it says about the larger, risk-averse state of franchise science fiction and fantasy. But when it comes to Star Wars, because I am an irrepressible optimist, there’s always a new hope. And this time, it’s in the form of rumors that Disney may be considering a female lead for the project, though some of that sourcing includes the speculation that Matthew Vaughn pitched Chloe Grace Moretz as a lead, a prospect that would have killed me and sent me to feminist nerd heaven.

Because I’d love to see this come to pass; because I still think it would be smart for Disney to not entirely blow up the Expanded Universe continuity so it can juice the value of a ton of extant intellectual property; and because early rumors are that Michael Arndt, who is writing the script, is setting the movie in the Jedi Praxaeum, the school established on Yavin 4 after the end of the Galactic Civil War, it’s worth a reminder of how many fascinating female characters pass through that setting in the Expanded Universe. Any of these women would make for terrific subject material for Episode VII, and pay us back for the deeply terrible writing for Padmé Amidala in the prequels.

1. Jaina Solo: The most obvious way, and one of the coolest, to pass the torch from the generation of actors who defined Star Wars to their characters’ children. Jaina Solo is Han Solo and Leia Organa’s daughter, and in the Expanded Universe, she grows up to be an incredibly talented fighter pilot, Jedi Knight, and half of a hot will-they-or-won’t-they romance with the descendant of an Imperial officer. There’s a ton to be done there, and a natural bridge for small roles for Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, as well as Mark Hamill as Jaina’s famous uncle.

2. Tenel Ka Djo: Princess Leia is one of the most badass subversions of the princess genre of all time, from her toughness under torture, her prickly romance with Han Solo, and her role as a stateswoman in her own right. But she’s hardly the only descendant of a royal family to find a larger purpose in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Tenel Ka Djo is the heir to a hugely powerful matrilineal kingdom, Hapes, who walks away from her destiny to train as a Jedi Knight. Disney’s made some steps in the right direction with Brave, but this would be downright revolutionary.

3. Mara Jade: Maybe the contender with the strongest fanboy constituency, there are challenges with making Mara the main character of a new trilogy, namely that she ends up as Luke Skywalker’s wife, and telling her origin story now would require finding a way to substantially age down Mark Hamill if they’re going to have a canonical epic romance. But Star Wars is, to a certain extent, really the story of Darth Vader. With him out of the picture, Mara’s trajectory from the Dark Side—she worked for the Emperor, before Luke found her and turned her to the light—would provide a complementary journey that would hit familiar emotional beats and make similar use of the Force.

4. Daeshara’cor: In the original Star Wars trilogy, members of the alien species Twi’lek mostly got to be sexy—and sacrificed—dancing girls or villainous advisers. Daeshara’cor is a former slave who hooks up with the Republic and with Luke Skywalker out of her hatred of the institution. She could be an interesting way to tease out the impact of the Empire and the stakes of the Rebellion that doesn’t involve goofy trade federations or adorable podracing moppets.

5. Tionne Solusar: Need to give a new generation of Star Wars fans a thorough grounding in the mythology of the Force and Jedi history? Who better to feature than the Jedi historian. Send Tionne around the galaxy on a testing and recruiting mission, and you could recreate some of the getting-the-band-together magic of X-Men: First Class.

Because we really need our pop culture franchise to be dominated by an increasingly limited number of visions, Deadline and other outlets are reporting that J.J. Abrams will direct Star Wars Episode VII:

Star Trek director J.J. Abrams will be helming the next Star Wars movie. “It’s done deal with J.J.,” a source with knowledge of the situation told Deadline today. Argo director Ben Affleck was also up for the gig, the source says. Michael Arndt is writing the script for the first installment of the relaunch of George Lucas’ franchise by Disney.

There are two issues here: how well-suited Abrams is for Star Wars in particular, and the consolidation of big franchises under a very limited number of perspectives (especially since the perspectives are those of white dudes).

On the question of Abrams as a fit for Star Wars, I’m deeply ambivalent. I think the franchise has been at its weakest when it’s delving too deeply into the details of its mythology. In the initial trilogy George Lucas and his collaborators had the wisdom to retain the emotional power of the Force as a cinematic device by leaving it relatively mysterious. Once the movies started delving into midichlorians and the manifestations thereof, the Force started to seem clunky and silly, no longer something those of us at home could dream of accessing. Abrams and his collaborators have a weakness for focusing on mysteries and exploring them to death, be they Smoke Monsters, strings of numbers, or aliens rampaging around New York City. I do think there’s an extent to which Abrams will be protected from this tendency by Arndt’s script, and the larger plans of Disney, which will presumably will be thinking about projects like television shows and Zack Snyder’s rumored stand-alone Star Wars movie. But I do think that Abrams’ interests in mysteries are actually a relatively a poor match for the greatest strength of the Star Wars movies: using a mysterious concept to open up a larger world, rather than focusing obsessively on the mystery itself.

But really, the profound disappointment I felt on hearing this news is less about my specific feelings about Abrams as a director. It’s more that franchises like The Avengers, Star Trek, Justice League, and Star Wars are opportunities for writers and directors to exert enormous cultural influence, and to accrue the kind of capital and credibility that can become enormous springboards for their more personal projects. The Avengers, for example, gave Joss Whedon an opportunity to bring his unique spin on female characters to Black Widow, who’d been poorly served in Iron Man 2. And its success won him a long-running and one assumes extraordinarily lucrative position overseeing the franchise: his ideas about superheroism will play a major role in American moviegoing for as much as a decade to come, and the money he makes from it gives him the opportunity to pursue more passion projects like his adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. That is an extraordinarily precious thing, and it makes me terribly sad to see that power concentrated in one person, rather than spread out to a number of people with different interests and perspectives on the kinds of questions raised by our biggest franchises.
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I’ve written in the past that perhaps the greatest sign of Hollywood’s racism is the deeply boring white actors it gives chance after chance when compared to the wildly talented black actors it refuses to aggressively promote and develop. But the industry is determined to keep giving these fellows chances. So not to get all Regina George about it, but here are five boring white dudes I wish Hollywood would stop trying to make happen. Because to some degree or another, it’s never going to happen. I’m not saying these men don’t deserve to find work, or that they’re bad people (with one exception). But if Hollywood has limited capital and advertising dollars to spend, it could be spending it more interesting places.

1. David Lyons: There is no penance too great to be done for The Cape, NBC’s epically awful attempt at a superhero story. There’s nothing wrong with trying to make a show that looks and feels like old-timey comics, but it doesn’t work when a stump is standing in for your lead actor. But Lyons is getting another shot, in the J.J. Abrams show that people are still insisting is about “a world where all forms of energy have mysteriously cdased to exist.” I guess from one ludicrous premise to the next?

2. Alex Pettyfer: Need a generic-looking dude for your adaptation of a book that came out of James Frey’s Young Adult fiction factory? For your silly remake of Beauty and the Beast? Pettyfer is your dude, as long as you don’t mind him acting like a diva on-set (or the rumors that he stalks his ex-girlfriends). Bland handsomeness is a dime a dozen. If only Hollywood was willing to jettison the bland jerks, and recognize that they can get bland personalities to match, and at least get to neutral.

3. Jason O’Mara: To be fair, Terra Nova had problems other than its totally generic leading man, including expensive special effects paired with a total lack of careful thought about what to do with its promising concept. But O’Mara didn’t exactly bring anything special or original to the party. But never fear: of course he’s getting another shot, this time, in a new show from CBS about former Las Vegas Mayor Ralph Lamb.

4. Sam Worthington: Perhaps the most egregious example on this list, Worthington’s the face of two franchises—Avatar and the Titans movies, despite an utter lack of a personality or much in the way of a range of facial expressions. Neither franchise is particularly dependent on Worthington’s performance, but man I’d like a more interesting actor to get at least a bit of the credit for carrying them.

5. Zac Efron: Yeah, I know, there’s the teen and tween factor. But strip Efron of his trademark swoop of hair and the opportunity to sing overblown songs on the Disney channel, and it’s not particularly clear what his appeal is or his talents are. Sure, there’s a viable romantic comedy market out there, but people like Channing Tatum, who have actual personalities, might have an up on Efron there. We ladies? Not stupid.

I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that we’re seeing a crop of global-warming related pop culture projects. And now, J.J. Abrams and the Weather Channel are getting in the game as well. Abrams just sold a drama to NBC, which seems to be betting big on science fiction, about “a group of characters struggling to survive and reunite with loved ones in a world where all forms of energy have mysteriously ceased to exist.” (Energy, of course, is not the same thing as fossil fuels: if all forms of energy cease to exist, so will life.)And the Weather Channel is getting into the unscripted space with Turbine Cowboys, a show about the workers who maintain wind power turbines in dangerous conditions.

Both of these are intriguing concepts. The Abrams show is the kind of after-the-disaster thinking that I’m always interested in, though I’ll be more compelled by the concept if the characters have some sort of alternative energy source they’re trading or manufacturing. People may get far along on an irreversible decline before trying to find solutions, but unless Abrams is pushing the reset button on society, if energy sources just vanish suddenly, I bet someone, somewhere is keeping the lights on, or at least trying really hard. Americans do love their appliances. And testing the depth of our attachment to them, and to our sense of instantaneous interconnectivity could be a really interesting project. A show that’s as much about what energy lets us do as that as the specific sources that power our desires could personalize the energy crisis beyond gas prices.

Turbine Cowboys is, of course, set in a more familiar future. But I think it’s a smart move to personalize—and glamorize—people who work in the new energy economy. I think the left does a good job of selling outcomes, but given that a lot of the work we’re talking about is hard organizing work that requires a generational timeline, we need to glamorize process, too. I’m not saying that the work of turning over to new sources of energy requires as much epic courage as sitting through being assaulted at a lunch counter. But if we’re going to valorize auto workers, we could valorize the folks at old U.S. Steel plants who are building wind turbines. And if we’re going to make heroes out of Dutch Harbor fishermen, surely we can make heroes out of the folks who are trying to make sure our energy sources are sustainable.

Over at the League of Ordinary Gentleman, guest-poster Ryan B. thinks I’m being too hard on J.J. Abrams:

In defense of Abrams, he clearly wants to use Star Trek, a show that really is about what the future would be like if liberalism won and became the dominant ideology of humanity, to both portray the reality of same-sex love and advance the cause of gay relationships in a larger cultural sense. And he is struggling, in a way I think Rosenberg doesn’t give him credit for, to figure out how to make that work in a movie that has to be simultaneously a blockbuster, a work of art (for some definition of “art” – don’t interrogate this too much, please), and apparently now also a liberal clarion call. That’s hard!

The thing is, I don’t know that it is clear that Abrams is particularly engaged with Star Trek‘s progressive legacy on this or any other issue. Rather than being about exploration or governance, the plot of his 2009 movie is about security, and the security threat doesn’t actually say much about the nature of the universe. Nero isn’t the Borg, who want to impose a totalitarian vision of perfection on the universe: he’s just angry and destructive. Nero believes that the Romulans were sold out by the Federation, but Nero’s wrong — the destruction of his planet is an accident, rather than, as might have been more interesting, the result of Federation ineptness, callousness, or strategic coldness. I’m sort of entertained by the idea of Nero as an intergalactic Don Blankenship using the tools of mining for evil, but that’s a stretch beyond even the kind I’m comfortable with. The closest thing the movie has to politics is the idea that the Federation and the Academy are more welcoming of folks of mixed heritage than the Vulcan High Council is, but that’s pretty weak tea if we’re trying to imagine an awesome progressive society of the future.

And more to the point, as Zack pointed out in comments on my original post, you can include a gay character in a franchise without having the story be a story about that character’s gayness. If Abrams decided to give Sulu a sex life, he could do as little as include a funny throw-away reference to the boyfriend Sulu’s got back in port in the same vein as Sulu’s confession that by combat training he meant fencing lessons. It would shade in our vision of the future in a usefully progressive way. It wouldn’t actively disrupt continuity. And the inclusion of gay people in the background of a story who aren’t actively angsting over their sexuality isn’t tokenism. It is real, and it’s true, not just in the future, but today.