James Tiberius lost after tail section breaks off Oceanic Flight 815
It was time for Rick Berman to go.
I’d been feeling quite sure of that for a while now. Voyager was a monumental disappointment. The last episode of Enterprise is widely ridiculed as a complete cop-out piss-on-the-fans debacle. The last Star Trek movie aimed high and sunk low, and from my point of view had the shittiest director ever to helm a Star Trek film.
Fingers have pointed tentatively at Berman as the culprit of driving Trek into its grave for a number of years now, and with me, it’s been the middle finger. He’s blown his responsibilities time and again, and robbed the fans of a beloved franchise by wringing the life out of it.
See ya, Rick.
Yesterday, Variety broke Paramount’s announcement that they are attempting to revive the franchise under the guidance of a totally new producing team, the same team in fact that blew Oceanic Flight 815 apart and sent it careening down into a remote beach in Hawai’i so that dude from Party of Five could run around acting heroic.
I’m not going to mince words. Lost is, for me, the American television show of the last five years, if not longer. Indeed, until Lost, I had virtually given up on network television producing something I could really become involved with. It’s not that there wasn’t other good stuff or anything; it’s just that Lost was the first show in a long, long time that served up, without compromise or exception, exactly what I want and need in an hour-long series. And it did it in spades.
Now, Paramount has tapped J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Bryan Burk, the three tropical amigos, to resuscitate the medically-dead Star Trek franchise. Can they do it? Probably — they have both the geek quotient and the writing chops, if their work on The Island is anything to go by, to pull it off.
According to the Variety article, the concept is to go back to the halcyon days of the Academy years of James Kirk and Mr. Spock, or to put it another way, National Lampoon’s Star Trek Academy Years (”Streaking! We’re going streaking!”).
This concept has a long and storied history, as witness the following:
Harve Bennett, producer/co-writer of Star Trek II through V, declined to produce Star Trek VI when his idea for going back to visit Kirk and Spock’s Academy years was shot down.
William Shatner, sometime last year (sorry, I can’t remember when or where I read this or I would provide a link), announced that he would begin writing a series of novels set during Kirk’s Academy years. With the announcement of the forthcoming film, I have no idea if Shatner will continue with his plan, or if both projects are somehow interrelated.
Rick Berman, according to the Variety article, had been developing the next film with the same Academy premise when Sherry Lansing had headed up Paramount, during its troubled, Ashley-Judd-is-in-constant-peril years. I would assume that all this material will be scrapped by Abrams and Co. in favor of beginning from scratch.
This idea has been knocked around for ages, but with all this “reloaded” and “repurposed” business, Paramount probably thought that choosing now made it trendy. Regardless of motives, I think it really is the right thing to do, with what couldn’t be a more suitable group of peoples the which to do it.
Except one thing.
Who the royal fuck on this good, grand Earth are they going to get to play young Kirk and young Spock? Forget casting Batman, forget casting Superman, forget casting the fourteenth elf from the left in the second row on the battlements in The Two Towers, of all casting choices this must be one of the trickiest, testiest, most delicate of all casting choices of all time, in the universe.
I cringe at what could so easily go wrong, my bowels are all aquiver in terror of what might be. Heath Ledger as Kirk and Orlando Bloom as Spock? Oh god, say it must not be. Benjamin McKenzie and Adam Brody from The O.C. as Kirk and Spock? [whimper]
Please, Mr. Abrams and Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Burk, if you’re out there floating disembodied in the blogosphere and chance upon this lame little blog, for the love of pete please cast unknowns, total unknowns, and avoid the pitfalls of fashion and fad and cast young people with a timeless quality, not a flavor of the month quality. So that in twenty years we won’t have to endure seeing some precocious, fluffy-haired creep wearing clothes that purport to be in the future but actually date this movie to a three-month period of fleeting fashion dictated by Entertainment Weekly, actually daring to assume the role of a popular culture character in existence for over thirty continuous years.
This could so easily be so, so good. I’d like to think that the planners of Oceanic Flight 815 have the sense and acumen to make sure that come 2008, it is so, so good.
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