06.14.09

LOVED Star Trek

Posted in Reviews, Society, Writing at 4:44 pm by JC

I always thought that Star Trek was fun, but kinda sterile as a series (hence my ultimate preference for Star Wars in the ST vs SW battle of the geeks), but J.J. Abrams take on it… MAN. It’s like Star Trek with a Star Wars sense of character drama.  Awesome!

It got me thinking about science fiction in general. I’m looking at the Starship Federation and noticing that most of them are human. And, granted, this could just be budgetary constraints (alien actors being so much more expensive to hire ), but in sci-fi, humans are almost always weaker, slower, less agile, and not as educated/intelligent as other species. And yet we are always in charge.  I’m looking at this situation, and wondering… how do we get there if we’re weak and stupid compared to everybody else? And what does this say about what we value most in humanity, if we choose heroes who don’t succeed by strength or speed or intelligence? After I talked around the issue for awhile, Scott finally hit on the word.

Determination

Our heroes, in more than just sci-fi, get hit, shot, flung, mashed, diseased, and stabbed… and then they get back up. They still believe they will win when the chances of success are 725 to 1. They take off after the enemy, head on, full bore even when logic says regroup and reinforce before proceeding,  and, of course the audience knows what the character only guessed – that if the party had taken the time to regroup, it would’ve been too late.

Foolhardy? Well, yeah. But I find it interesting that as a species (or maybe this is an American thing?) we champion this trait that everybody can have. I mean, no matter how we train, most people are not physically capable of Olympic sprinting; no matter how we study, most people are not capable of Einstein genius. But when you give up is a choice. Granted, nobody can actually take the beating that a hero gets in a movie and still, well, LIVE, but the principles of “Never give up; never tell me the odds; charge in like a big damn hero even when it’s stupid” those are choices. Indiana Jones, Capt. Kirk, John McClane, Mal Reynolds… bleeding and bruised, these people crawl their way back to the badguy, and somehow through sheer willpower, beat ‘em anyway. And we LOVE them for it.

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