FILM: Star Trek, bolding going

The new Star Trek movie sends shivers up your spine – the first scene has such a breathtaking velocity, it takes the wind out of you. “This is what cinema is for,” your correspondent felt, rooted to the spot. It eases back after that, and the plot is best left unsaid and unspoiled, but J.J. Abrams is to be applauded for taking real risks with a franchise that has often become trapped by its own canon. For the fans, canon is great – it gives them something to hash and rehash, a universe to live in – but it can be exclusive and limiting.

Every crew member has their chance to shine, but for News Hour the revelation was Karl Urban’s Dr McCoy. Urban does what at first seems to be an impression, and perhaps it is – but you believe him. He snarls and complains like a good ‘ol boy, paranoid but keen to do what’s right, offering some medicinal from a hip flask; him and Kirk are kindred spirits of a kind, but the movie’s narrative heart is in blending Kirk and Spock, and it’s the latter who has the emotional lead. Zachary Quinto is initially jarring in the role, but soon makes perfect sense. In some ways he is damaged by early scenes with young Spock going mental when schoolmates call his mum a ho (that actually happens). Simon Pegg’s Scotty is the comic relief, and so runs the risk of being the Jar Jar Binks of the piece – for our money, he needs to lose the green sidekick and tone down the slapstick, but otherwise fine.

Style is the area where Abrams defers to the original, with the shinier members of Starfleet resembling a colourful choir from the Sixties, emphasising a utopian break with the futuristic space suits of the initial scenes, and the griminess of Earth’s lesser citizens. The security guards are huge in the way that Deep Space Nine imagined they were in Trials And Tribble-ations, with bruiser Sixties hairdos complete with the suggestion of Bryllcreme. It’s as if the Sixties are just happening for the military – as if someone decided that bright colours go well with the Federation’s mission to foxtrot to the final frontier.

Anything would look good coming after Nemesis, but this is ruddy good fun. If only it could all be as good as the opening scene.

Knight Rides in for Christmas

An early Christmas present for fans of the popular 1980s action series Knight Rider arrived last night on American network NBC; a trailer for the long-awaited revival of the show (lets put Knight Rider 2000 down to experience, shall we – although there was that highly amusing cameo appearance from Star Trek’s Scotty which left it hovering just above sub-RoboCop corporate dystopia) aired during a break from the on-off bone-crunching ferocity of the NFL.

Fifteen seconds of teasing followed, culminating in the voice of the new Knight Industries Two Thousand (surely ‘three thousand, now?) in which the car, from beneath a blanket, says ‘Hello Mike’. So, not Michael any more? Truly the age of deference is at an end. Perhaps Will Arnett just wasn’t as well brought up as William Daniels (he even shortens his christian name, the devil). A quick trip to imdb arrested our ire somewhat; the new lead character is actually called Mike – Mike Traceur, to be precise. (That’s French for tracer, donchaknow – perhaps he has a past as an Inuit tracker in Quebec. We can picture an opening shot with a tree falling on his head, before waking up at FLAG to learn of his new job as a ‘lone crusader’ from Devon’s hologrammatic head.)

Apparently David Hasselhoff is still ‘in negotiations’ (after concluding ‘negotiations‘ with his ex-wife) for what would presumably be a cameo role as Michael Knight, perhaps as part of a training simulator or in a dream sequence. One can imagine he would want to slot into place in the Devon role, taking responsibility for the philosophical and moral direction of the series. Elsewhere in the land of eagerly awaited cameos, it was announced that an appearance for William Shatner in the new instalment of Star Trek was less impossible than before, despite the slight stumbling block of his character being dead. Ah, the miracles of sci-fi.

Finally, for a last minute Christmas present the News Hour team were seriously considering clubbing together for this rather special slice of TV history. One question was on the tip of everybody’s tongue: does it come with Super Pursuit Mode? This is unclear, although its arrival on the market has a fairly grisly backstory, coming as the result of an unsolved murder. Andrew Kissel, going through an unamicable divorce, was about to face sentencing for a multimillion dollar property fraud, and was found stabbed to death in his mansion in 2006. (His investment banker brother Robert also met an unpleasant end in 2003 – his wife gave him a poisoned milkshake before beating him to death with a statue.)

The auction, being held to pay off Kissel’s creditors, has been suspended until next month after fevered fan attention overheated the attorney in charge, but had a previous minimum bid of $20,000 (£10,000). Start saving now, as the bidding will not be cheap (maybe some of the magic will rub off on Gary Coleman).

Jobs for the abnormally formed

In the Star Trek world, a casting call has been placed for abnormal looking folk to pose as extras in the new movie. Given that alien design on Star Trek generally consist of minor tweaks to the basic human form (a side effect of the pressurised network production schedule: Vulcans have pointy ears, Bajorans have ridged noses, Bolians are blue and Andorians are blue and have little antennae, which twitch in the newer episodes but not in the old), this is an economical approach. Director JJ Abrams’ decision not to cast the resurgent William Shatner in a cameo may also be seen as a cost cutting move, despite the outrage it has reportedly caused in some circles (Shatner’s).

Perhaps Abrams should consider putting in a call to Thailand, where the country’s long-necked ‘giraffe women’ have been discarding their rings. He could create an entire diplomatic party in one fell swoop, and boost the movie’s humanitarian profile in the process.

There is a still more plentiful source for the thrifty auteur. The world of TV shockdocs with titles such as ‘Half Man, Half Tree’, ‘My Big Foot’, ‘I Gave Birth To A Mummy’, ‘The Tiniest Boy In Britain’, ‘Joined At The Head’ etc would surely be a rich and fertile source, although acting ability would be something of a crapshoot. Still, how long before reality TV brings us a twist on Big Brother featuring nothing but the deformed? The Surreal Life already humiliated Verne Troyer (Mini Me), so it can’t be that far away. Sad but true.

I am not Sulu

‘I am not Spock’, claimed Leonard Nimoy in his 1975 memoir, in a move designed to distance himself from the pointy-eared Vulcan he played on Star Trek. Two decades on, and Nimoy had changed his mind: ‘I am Spock’, he affirmed in a follow-up tome, having accepted the science officer’s place in his history.

For the stars of a series as successful as Star Trek, never being known for anything else is distinct possibility, but then you can live off it for years. One only has to witness the queues for autographs of ‘Jango Fett’s son’, R2-D2 or even Mark Hamill at a Star Wars convention to see how these get-togethers become an industry of their own. Sometimes the osmosis between actor and character is so subtle, the player themselves may not even notice. Witness the alarming similarity between George Takei’s headshot and a commanding image from Star Trek VI.

The actor

The character

Where does one man end and the other begin? Is he the dreamer or the dream?