Worth: $10.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Sonequa Martin, Michelle Yeoh, Doug Jones.
On the edge of Federation space, the USS Shenzhou investigates a damaged satellite. Further study reveals a hidden artificial object buried in a nearby asteroid field. First Officer Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin) puts on a spacesuit to investigate. On the object’s surface she is confronted by a Klingon – a species unseen by Starfleet in 100 years – and accidentally kills him. Soon the Shenzhou is facing down a massive Klingon warship. Captain Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) wants to negotiate. Burnham wants to attack. The future of the Federation and the Klingon Empire hang on their decision.
Being tasked with making an all-new Star Trek television series in 2017 must be something akin to a poisoned chalice. It has been more than 12 years since the franchise was last on the small screen. During that time television has advanced considerably in style, tone, prestige, and delivery. A new series must negotiate a new context; one where Star Trek’s patented brand of utopian exploration, technobabble and straight-faced nobility may no longer find a mass audience. Stick close to the format of The Next Generation, Voyager or Enterprise and one may struggle to find a new audience. Strike out and embrace the more complex, nuanced characterisation and serialisation of contemporary television and one risks abandoning the dedicated audience already there.
“The Vulcan Hello”, written by Bryan Fuller and Akiva Goldsman based on a story by Fuller and Alex Kurtzman, visibly struggles to negotiate these waters. As a continuation of the Star Trek tradition and as a new TV drama it succeeds and fails in equal measure. There is potential in Discovery, but at this stage it is unclear in what direction that potential will go.
One glaringly poor choice is to set the new series 10 years prior to the events of the 1966 series. Prequels always run the risk of feeling dramatically weak, since in broad strokes the future of the series’ fictional universe is already known. It also has weird design repercussions, something that also affected Enterprise, since a starship 10 years older than the Enterprise should look 10 years older and not 50 years more recent. The episode also takes unnecessary design liberties with the Klingons; sure, they’ve been redesigned before, but that was after just a handful of television appearances and they effectively haven’t changed aesthetically in more than three decades.
I can sense some of you rolling your eyes, but the bottom line is that these things do matter. Discovery could easily have been a completely original take on the Star Trek concept, picking and choosing story elements to make an entirely fresh presentation. It arguably should have taken this route. The production team and CBS (who are bankrolling the production for their US-only CBS All Access platform) made the deliberate choice to set their new series in the continuity of the previous TV shows, and then made the subsequent deliberate choice to make everything look completely unlike those shows. Obviously I do not expect a new TV series to be beholden to its decades-old predecessors, but the production has boxed itself in entirely of its own volition. It is also genuinely odd that, in a genre effectively purpose-built to look into the future, the last time Star Trek set a TV series or film in the franchise’s own future was the series finale of Voyager in May 2001.
The series suffers from a surfeit of style. The space sequences have been animated to look as if they were shot with hand-held cameras. Half of the interior camera angles are tilted for additional drama. Scenes onboard the Shenzhou look as if the camera lenses were soaked in milk. Hopefully future episodes will dial back the visual excess and focus on better dialogue.
When the tensions are high and the drama powers at full throttle, “The Vulcan Hello” does get suspenseful. When the tensions are low and the setting is being unveiled, it is difficult to watch with a straight face. Early scenes are packed with characters spouting nonsensical scientific banter and explaining their back story in the most bluntly obvious of ways. Old school science fiction fans talk of the “As you know, Bob…” phenomenon; Discovery has it in spades. They talk less like characters in Star Trek and more like a bad photocopy of someone trying to parody them.
After a very weak first 10 minutes, Sonequa Martin does make for a sympathetic and engaging protagonist. Likewise, Michelle Yeoh takes a little while to settle in before becoming a strong and likeable captain. It is very much appreciated to see two women of colour share dramatic scenes; it should not feel like a rare experience. Doug Jones is visually distinctive as the Shenzhou’s science officer Saru, but struggles with a character written too broadly and for comic effect.
In the end it all seems a bit of a mess. The series’ development was a famously troubled one, with original showrunner Bryan Fuller jumping ship over creative disagreements and the slack picked up by a group of contributors including Akiva Goldsman and Alex Kurtzman. This is the first of a 15-episode season with plenty of scope to improve and settle into its own identity. It may get better. As a lifelong Star Trek enthusiast, I desperately want it to get better. For now, rather sadly, “The Vulcan Hello” has an awful lot of problems.
