The ‘Marvel Effect’ Consumes Star Trek

I’m not sure whether you could list Star Trek as a manly movie or not, maybe the old movies with William Shatner were verging on the precipice.  But one thing is for sure, the trailer for Star Trek: Beyond sucks so badly.  It looks like one of those terrible new Marvel movies, where actors stand in a green screen room while the CGI technicians build a world of flying debris around them.

It’s noisy, it’s air headed.  Obviously it’s going after the Marvel crowd.  Visually, it could be an Avengers movie, thematically, it looks like it’s trying to be Guardians of the Galaxy.  It shouldn’t be either.

The first comment on YouTube gets it right: The last movie ended with the promise that they would finally be exploring the universe and literally the first thing they do is destroy the Enterprise?

Let’s see how many trampled clichés you can count in this trailer.  Generic rock track, check.  A literal blizzard of CGI garbage, check, see 0:21.  A man jumps off his CGI pod, above the CGI depths below, to enact the old ‘grab onto the ledge at the last millisecond’ chestnut.  Check.  And you know, in the midst of the chaos comes ‘from director Justin Lin’.

Ah, now it makes sense.

But it’s not just me who has a problem with this garbage trailer.  Simon Pegg, a man who is gaining my respect slowly – after all he took aim at how crap comic movies have gotten at a time when they’ll crucify you for not conforming, is also displeased.  Pegg, who stars in the film as Scotty, says he was ‘surprised’ by the trailer.

‘I found it to be the marketing people sort of saying ‘everyone come and see this movie, it is full of action and fun’, when there’s a lot more to it than that,’ he told Hey U Guys.

Anyone remember the old Star Trek stuff?  It may not have been the most thrilling shit in the world, but I mean you had William Shatner or Patrick Stewart often standing inside a real ‘bridge’, built by production.  And they’d be boldly going places with halfway interesting plots and themes, often with some cool action scenes.  And even though most of it was set in space, it sure felt practical.  This stuff isn’t like that.

It’s just noise.  Din.  For people with a stumped attention span.  I mean this movie looks like a mess, why don’t they just throw in an Iron Man cameo?