The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

There is a scene in Star Trek, the movie re-boot and monster box-office smash this summer, where three crew members of the U.S.S. Enterprise are descending from their spacecraft in preparation for a landing to destroy a sort of massive land drill that is attempting to destroy the planet Vulcan. At three thousand feet, two of the crew announce they are deploying their chutes; the third yells out a "Yee-haw!" and doesn't bother to follow suit, prefering to feel the rush a little longer before doing so. The two other crew members plead for him to pull his chute but he refuses. At 1000 feet, he finally does, but he is too close to the landing platform and crashes into it, sliding off to the other side, taking him into his ultimate demise in the drill's exhaust. And Kirk and Sulu are now on their own to blow-up the drill and return to their ship.

If this was a different movie, such as perhaps Transformers, that cowboy parachuter probably would have waited until he was 20 feet from the platform, then while pulling his chute, performed a triple sow-cow and lutz before blowing up the planet drill singlehandedly. But Star Trek, while still having you need to suspend your disbelief to enjoy it, tries to make it feel a little more real, a little more gritty, and results in giving you a film with a lot more character than the average science fiction/action film.

The whole premise of a re-boot seems preposterous and insulting to audiences who loyally followed the original stories. It usually means that there is no creativity left in the think tank thus they have to go back to rehashing old characters and plots. But here's another way Star Trek delivers the goods: It has used the time travelling device in past stories, but it never has shown the consequences of messing around with the so-called "timeline". But here, it asks that question, and the movie is sort of the hypothesis. And by casting Leonard Nimoy and having the Spock character be a major plot point of the movie, it doesn't ignore the legacy of the past series while at the same time allowing for a younger version of the original cast to carry on with the Star Trek universe in a plausible, non-eyeball rolling manner.  And I think the audience buys into it.