Star Trek Beyond, Ghostbusters 2016, and the Trouble With Reboots These Days

I didn’t understand the way my boyfriend liked the new Star Trek movies until we saw the new Ghostbusters.

As I’ve posted about before, Star Trek, especially the original-series movies, was a formative part of my childhood. I know it not wisely but too well. Contrariwise, as a kid, I didn’t encounter Ghostbusters all that much. I remember watching the cartoon but not too much about it. I know I saw the movies, but probably when I was at least a tween, if not older.

Boyfriend had the opposite experience: as a little kid, he had Ghostbusters toys and Ghostbusters games, and he knows and loves the original movies way better than I do. But Star Trek wasn’t really on his radar.

Ostensibly, the new Star Trek movies and Ghostbusters (2016) are aimed at both of us: nostalgic returning fans and newbies to the property. They do rookies the service of “erasing” all the complicated canon — and its real-world social history — through reboots but still wink at old hands through cameos, knowing one-liners, and visual references.

But does that make them a better cinematic experience for everyone? Or does playing to the mean disappoint everyone’s expectations?

I liked Star Trek Beyond and Ghostbusters, but I liked them in different ways. I didn’t have much stake in the latter. I didn’t have enough knowledge to compare it to the franchise’s previous incarnations or feel disappointed that I was paying to see a copy of another movie. Contrariwise, I knew exactly what Star Trek Beyond took from its predecessors and what it brought to the franchise.

But despite enjoying them, something about these movies — and the other Star Trek reboots, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and the MCU and… — felt different. Watching both helped me put my finger on what.

I’m getting sick of movies that don’t want me to forget they’re movies.

First, a caveat: it might be that the biggest difference is me. I was a kid when I fell in love with Star Trek and Narnia and the movies that still move me. I’m an adult now. I have more experience and understanding to draw on in analysis. I like to think I’m self-reflective enough to compensate, but perhaps that changes which movies I enjoy more than I thought.

Anyway. Let me explain what I mean by way of almost-analogy. Star Trek Beyond proudly offered the Barco Escape experience, so of course Boyfriend and I went to the one of the only theatres in the GTA kitted out to offer it.

Imagine that the movie theatre is a box. The main screen is on the wall directly opposite the spectators. In Barco Escape, the two sides are screens as well. Panoramas explode into your peripheral vision, giving you a sense of being in the environment.* Well, hypothetically.

See, Star Trek Beyond did have some cool panorama shots, but because only the spectacular set-pieces were in Barco Escape, the two screens on the sides constantly turned on and off. On for epic special effects, off for every other type of shot. If a scene switched between the vastness of a space battle to a close shot of Spock on the bridge to Kirk’s reaction to the enemy ship, you’d get on-off-off-on, sometimes within just a few seconds.

It was like having someone sitting beside you yelling, REMEMBER THIS IS A MOVIE!

And you know what? That feels like exactly the attitude of every remake or reboot or long-awaited sequel I’ve seen recently, even the ones from franchises I’m not into.

They may not scream REMEMBER THIS IS A MOVIE! with their on-again, off-again special effects, but their scripts, plots, and cinematography do it all the same.

The original Star Trek movies and series were earnest. They may not have been philosophically rigorous, bless them, but they asked serious questions like, “What if Captain Kirk had to end the Klingon Cold War but is bigoted against Klingons because of his military experience?” Not questions like, “What is the coolest thing the audience has always wanted to see Captain Kirk do? How can we show the audience that we grok their fandom?”

The filmmakers focus on including a meta layer: jokes and plot elements whose complete impact is inaccessible unless you have some extra-fictional knowledge of the movie universe.

We might care about meeting Spock from the alternate future, but the real emotion of the moment comes from seeing the late Leonard Nimoy (Z”L) don the ears once again. Rey and Finn running into Han and Chewie only matters to us if we already know and care about the latter pair.

And it’s not like these moments aren’t obvious. I don’t know most of the cast of the original Ghostbusters to see them — I can recognize Bill Murray, and I thought I could recognize Dan Ackroyd (who has apparently changed physically quite a bit). But it was pretty darn clear when the movie wanted me to know who an actor or actress was and what they’d done outside the world of the story, in real life, to really appreciate the scene.

It’s an atmosphere I expect more from zany comedy movies like the Zucker brothers’ Airplane or franchises where the conceit has the characters interacting with real celebrities, like the Muppets. It’s funny when Neil Patrick Harris complains about not being the one the Muppets tap to host their comeback telethon, because he exists in the world of their story, the world of show biz.

Likewise, as part of their style of humour, oddball comedies like Airplane constantly shatter the illusion of the world of the story as a coherent universe. They stretch concepts to absurdity by juxtaposing the movie cliché (war trauma shatters grunts’ minds) with off-the-wall details (that poor private thinks he’s Ethel Merman — and actually is). To get the joke, you have to be constantly aware that this is a movie and thinking of extra-movie things: other movies, real-life celebrities, pop-culture history.

Which is hilarious in an off-the-wall comedy.

But when I’m otherwise supposed to take this movie dramatically, suspend my disbelief and care about the characters as though they’re real people, it’s distracting for the joke to be “haha, that’s Sigourney Weaver, who is playing a character in the reboot of a franchise in which she played a different character!” It’s fine as an Easter egg, but it can’t be the point of the scene without hamstringing the audience’s ability to take the story universe seriously.

Why should I care about James T. Kirk if he isn’t real? I can subsume myself in the spectacle, in the funny banter, in the mechanics of the plot, but I can’t feel for these characters the same way I felt for the original Spock and McCoy and Uhura if the movie doesn’t hold up its part of our contract to treat them as real people who exist somewhere, out there, in the United Federation of Planets.

And the story needs to have its own ideas of those real people, not just anxiously scan my face to see what I think of them and reflect my impressions back at me.(“This is what you think Kirk should be, right? Right? Huh?”)

If storytellers are going to use a representational medium like Hollywood-style film, where the conventions say that we’re seeing a captured reality point for point — as though a camera has been placed on the bridge of the Enterprise herself and is transmitting the universe of the story to us — then let us wallow in those conventions. Stop reminding us that the camera isn’t our eyes and we’re watching actors playing characters, not the characters themselves.

Alternatively, take it all the way — pull a Dogtown and use deliberate reminders of fiction to enhance the experience. The way the best, exciting presentational theatre does.** Harness our imaginations to co-build the world and its meaning rather than imposing that meaning but forcing us to constantly drop and re-mount our suspension of disbelief.

Fandom brings the meta. That’s what fans do. And we do it because we love to.

We don’t need moviemakers to do it for us.

* Unfortunately, since most theatres can’t accommodate the technology, the movie couldn’t use what has the potential to be the most immersive deployment of Barco Escape: to place the audience physically between characters having a discussion, so you have to look back and forth the way you’d follow a real-life conversation.

** Though, of course, theatre isn’t immune from this issue. When I saw the Stratford Festival production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe this summer, I was annoyed at the one or two panto-like asides referring to contemporary pop-culture: they’d captured my suspension of disbelief in Narnia, and it was jarring to have it forced back to present-day real-life for the sake of a couple jokes aimed over the heads of the target audience.