There were movies

The New York Times previews Star Trek.

As I've expressed in my tribbles about the upcoming film, I'm a bit distressed by the liberties with Trek history and lore apparently taken by J. J. Abrams, as seen in the previews of the film. A bit of explanation in the article:

Perhaps more audaciously, this “Star Trek” also has a time-travel story line that essentially gives those on its creative team license to amend internal “Trek” history as they need to, and they aren’t timid about exercising it. (For example the villains of the movie are Romulans, even though the Enterprise’s first encounter with this alien race occurs in a well-known original “Trek” episode.)

And then:

“You had to love genre at your core in every possible way,” he said. “And yet you had to separate it from what ‘Trek’ had been, to make it feel fresh.”

The premise that Star Trek in its most recent small-screen incarnations - Voyager, followed by the awful Enterprise, and Nemesis on the large screen, had left Trek "in dire straits" is fair enough. But I'm not sure the assessment that Trek accordingly required a reimagining and amendment follows. 

The failure of Trek over the last decade has been a failure of imagination, a failure to adhere to the creativity that made Star Trek fascinating, and a failure to maintain consistency with its past. Trek lost not only the new audience, but its fans as well.  Enterprise abandoned any consistency with Trek lore. Angry, deceptive, manipulative Vulcans are humanity's true enemy? The Borg have a queen, who effectively destroys the collective because she has the hots for an android, even if that android is Commander Data? Zefram Cohran is a drunk? And what the heck was Nemesis about anyway? Some clone of Picard who neither looked or behaved anything like the man, apparently, and a dunce Data. And we wonder why the franchise was in disrepair? It's certainly not because it maintained its Trek character.

Abrams thinks that people aren't as interested in "space" as they once were.  That misses the point of Star Trek entirely.  Star Trek was never about space, it was about humanity and struggles and drama and pain and hope and triumph.  The greatest episodes of the original series and Next Generation both took place on firm ground - The City on the Edge of Forever, The Inner Light. Even The Wrath of Khan isn't really about space - it is really just a battle at sea, a marooning on an uncharted island, and finally a submarine battle (or whale versus boat); it's Moby Dick (and it's no secret, either - Khan spends the movie quoting Ahab).

Abrams directed Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible III. In the previews, it appears that he's trying to turn Kirk into another Tom Cruise character. That's not a compliment.

I hope Star Trek is a great movie. I really do.

But I'd be a fool to hold my breath.