Star Trek Week: Threading the Needle, Or Marketing Star Trek: Into Darkness

I suspect that many old-time Trekkers like me are a wee bit concerned about what they have been reading and seeing for months regarding the new Star Trek film: Into Darkness.  In short, the marketing efforts have been incredibly...generic, and therefore underwhelming.

Many other blogs have covered the details at great length, so I’ll just review them quickly and get to my point. 

The first Star Trek: Into Darkness poster we saw reveals the film’s villain, John Harrison, standing over the monumental wreckage of London. That wreckage forms the iconic Starfleet emblem. 

This image very closely mirrors the details of the poster for The Dark Knight Rises (2012), which features another wrecked metropolis, Gotham City. Only this time, the wreckage forms the iconic Batman crest.

Recently, a second uninspiring Star Trek: Into Darkness poster appeared.  It reveals the U.S.S. Enterprise in ruins, smoke emerging from it, as the great ship plummets from orbit.  This image very closely mirrors the Iron Man 3 (2013) poster, which showcases Tony Stark (as Iron Man) falling from the sky -- similar direction, similar smoke, similar color scheme.

Even the title Into Darkness has many long-time Star Trek fans concerned. 

The title sounds uncomfortably like many other popular blockbusters of the last four years or so.  The Dark Knight (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) and the upcoming Thor: The Dark World (2014).  “Dark” is pretty clearly the descriptor of choice in Hollywood these days, but it is tremendously disappointing to see Star Trek tread along so generically in the path of so many previous movie hits.

And then there’s what little -- pre-release -- fans have been told about the story beats.   One such beat suggests the film involves “vengeance” as motivation, the key motivating factor as well in previous franchise entries The Wrath of Khan (1982), Insurrection (1998), Nemesis (2002) and Star Trek (2009). 

Specifically, the revenge-desiring mad-man, the aforementioned “John Harrison,” fans know from clips, is captured mid-way through the film and held in a kind of transparent glass cell for a time, where he is interrogated by the heroes before presumably masterminding some fiendishly clever escape, and once more wreaking interstellar terror. 

As you can see from the images posted below, this plot development very closely mirrors a crucial plot detail in The Avengers (2012) and Skyfall (2012), whether intentionally or not. 

Then there’s the shuttlecraft chase seen in the previews.  We see in a trailer as this small vessel is pursued by many (Klingon?) ships, and Kirk argues that it will fit through a tight opening in some kind of high-tech complex. Spock argues that it won’t.  The ship flips on its side and survive, and Kirk and Spock continue to bicker. 

The character interaction here is funny enough -- and pure Star Trek -- but the small ship turning on its side to escape pursuers (who somehow can’t also turn their ships on the side…) is pure genre cliché.  We’ve already seen it this summer in Tom Cruise’s Oblivion (2013), not to mention countless times in the Star Wars saga.  

The overall worry here is that trailers are generally supposed to project the movie’s best qualities.  

Yet many of the moments we’ve seen so far have been derivative and generic.  They don’t inspire confidence that this new Star Trek is anything other than an assembly of blockbuster elements extruded through an industrial process (to misquote the comedian, Harry Shearer).

For all these reasons, many long-time fans, including myself, are feeling some uneasiness about Star Trek: Into Darkness at this juncture.  The concern is that a beloved franchise which once prided itself on originality is mutating into another generic superhero/action series.  Popularity is being sought at the expense of the characteristics that made so many love Star Trek in the first place.

For an example of creative bravery in Star Trek’s past, I would point to two films, in particular. 

The first is Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which -- love it or hate it -- came out just two years after Star Wars (1977) and could have proven an enormous, unquestioned hit by featuring tons of space battles and freaky aliens.  Instead, Gene Roddenberry and Robert Wise created a lugubrious, grave story of man’s contact with a mysterious life-form.   The film was still a gigantic financial success.  You can despise the film, but you can’t argue it copied anything of substance from the immensely popular Star Wars.

The second such act of bravery is surely The Voyage Home (1986), a fish-out-of-water comedy rather than the typical sci-fi soap opera.  The film was true to Star Trek, and yet it proves absolutely delightful as a human tale.  It didn’t need WMD, terrorists, or huge space battles to find favor with blockbuster audiences.

Given such franchise courage in the past, it is worrisome indeed to see Star Trek: Into Darkness attempt to succeed on the basis of not what makes Star Trek so special and individual an entertainment, but rather upon the surface values it shares with Thor, James Bond, Iron Man, Batman, and the like.

Before anyone accuses me of being negative or hostile, there is another side to all this.  I fully recognize that Paramount isn’t marketing Star Trek: Into Darkness to me.  Frankly, I’m going to see the movie no matter what.  I even saw Star Trek V (1989) something like six times in the theater, after all.

Rather, the marketing department’s job is to convince non-Star Trek fans that this movie is an exciting, action-packed spectacle that they must see, one very much like Skyfall, Iron Man 3 or The Dark Knight Rises.  

With its underwhelming and derivative poster images, at least, the marketing department seems to be reminding folks that Star Trek: Into Darkness is the very thing you loved before.  You loved it as The Dark Knight and Skyfall, and you’re loving it RIGHT NOW as Iron Man 3.  Why not go to the theater on May 17, 2013, and love it one more time?

From that perspective, the marketing tactic makes absolute sense.  Sure, this strategy gives me a pit in my stomach and sows uncertainty, but it makes sense that Paramount wants to protect its 190 million dollar investment and market Star Trek to the widest possible audience. 

What counts, ultimately, is the movie itself. 

If Paramount must market Star Trek as the fourth or fifth coming of James Bond/Batman/Iron Man/Transformers to put butts in theaters, it’s a devil’s bargain I can live with as a Star Trek fan. 

Where I will not rubber stamp the movie, however, is if indeed -- as the John Harrison imprisonment scene superficially suggests at this point -- the movie proves as derivative in narrative and content of the aforementioned blockbusters as the Into Darkness posters are in terms of design.

If that happens, then Star Trek has indeed been sacrificed to the altar of big money, and the sooner it returns to television (on HBO or AMC, preferably), the better off the franchise will be. 

Obviously, I have not seen the movie at this point, so I can’t make any conclusions about how good it is, how original it is, or how generic it is.

But I want to end this essay on a positive note.  I want to note again that I liked and enjoyed Star Trek 2009 tremendously, and felt that the new cast was wonderful.  The cast exceeded all my expectations and really brought the beloved characters to life in a wonderful way.  I loved the pacey, jaunty feel of the movie, and felt it honored the original Star Trek experience. So of course I would love to see the same talented cast bantering and bickering its way through another exciting adventure.  If Into Darkness can make the characters click, and avoid too closely copying other recent blockbusters (and The Wrath of Khan), it could very well be a great movie experience.

That’s what I’m hoping for.  I’ll post my review next Tuesday morning, and I’ll report on whether the generic marketing reflects the movie…and Into Darkness is therefore the hackiest of cinematic hack jobs. 

But as a Trekker who wants to like the movie, I’m hoping instead to report that the Star Trek magic again shines through, only on a bigger budget -- and on a bigger playground -- than ever before in its history.