A Literary Trek

So here's a question; is there really any need for film scripts?

I'm not simply being facetious here. There's a well-known bit of trivia that the third Pirates of the Caribbean film began shooting without a finished script, but you'd certainly not be able to tell; Pirates of the Caribbean 2 presumably had a finished script, but it still looks like a bunch of drunk people improvising and CGI things put in afterwards to make sense of what they're doing. However, when it comes to cinema, people get far too precious about film scripts; they think of them as lovingly-crafted pieces of parchment, in which wordsmiths have honed and chiselled the dialogue to something akin to poetry. In fact, most scripts are clunking, banal, have been chopped about until most of the dialogue doesn't mean anything, and - when it comes to cinema, where a single camera move can focus the viewer's attention on the merest facial expression - having a decent script is much less important than having a decent director. You'll need a competent storyline, sure, but if the director knows what he's doing then that's a given, and even if the dialogue's rubbish a good actor will either change it or make it work. Television is a script-lead medium, and if the script's shit, then it's going to be crap no matter who directs it. Cinema isn't like that.

This is why most films don't have scripts in any meaningful sense of the world. Exhibit A is In The Loop, which - as a TV adaptation - is one of the few films out there which really is script-led, and as such was almost unrecognisably different from any other film in the cinema. Twenty minutes in a character says "I'm sick of hearing about the teeth, frankly," and you can tell how tight the rest of the dialogue has been because the first loose line jars like someone hitting your elbow with a pickaxe. In other ways, of course, In The Loop is incredibly loose; the plot gets increasingly baggy, a number of characters are introduced halfway through the film when it seems to be running out of steam, and we never actually get to find out who leaked the document anyway. It manages to survive this by dint of being well-written; in many ways it's a flashback to a 1950s style of film-making, the sort of mentality that gave us carefully, seductively artificial constructions like Breakfast at Tiffanys, and which the Coen brothers deconstructed so brilliantly in The Hudsucker Proxy. "Finally there would be a thingamajig that would bring everyone together, even if it kept them apart spatially." Brilliant.

So - the purpose of scripts (and I'm using the word "script" as a phenomenon discrete from "storyline" here) isn't to get the characters to speak like normal people, it's to get the characters to speak like nobody on earth, but to make it seem believable. In The Loop's rambling, shambolic monologues are deceptively well-honed, twisted to make the characters' banalities seem inherently absurd. It's a script which pares and embellishes its dialogue in a way that's almost alien to modern cinema. We might remember that In Bruges was described as having a great script... well, the script to In Bruges was certainly competent, but great? The one moment of genuine brilliance was Colin Farrell's half-arsed, around-the-houses, irreverently offensive simile about fat black women and dwarfs sitting on a see-saw, but the rest was just people swearing at each other. In Bruges not-really-funny-enough script was carried by two actors on fine form, and some lovely camerawork in a scenic location.

If you want another, more obvious example of this; Clint Eastwood's godawful Gran Torino has some of the most appalling dialogue of all time, with gang members who seem to have fallen out of an ethnic version of Grange Hill. The supposedly hilarious early sections are made up of Eastwood growling and muttering about "gooks" and "Hmong broads". If you're going to go for offensive, then do it with some wit; this film came out two years after Gene Hunt had said "He's got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course," and "all in all this investigations's is going at the speed of a spastic in a magnet factory", and then we're supposed to laugh at uninspired racist comments because it's, oh , 'skewering our PC preconceptions', probably. And yet nobody made the point that the script to Gran Torino is crushingly, killingly banal, because - more and more - witty, well-crafted scripting isn't something that cinema does.

How else do you explain the generally good reception for Star Trek?

Star Trek. Fucking Star Trek. A property that was relatively shit from the get-go, and then disimproved. The original series was terminally dull, a bunch of men tripping around the universe fucking anything in their path, but it was (just occasionally) sustained by half-decent storylines. The Next Generation had its moments, largely because Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner are wonderful actors and carried it on their back; Deep Space Nine was unwatchable, bombastic garbage for geekscum; and Voyager was tolerable for about half a series, when it had a hot girl in a catsuit in it. Star Trek has somehow wormed its way into our culture and become deeply ingrained there, but there's a lot of talk about returning the franchise to its former glories. However, it really never had any, and it's pro-authoritarian monocultural stance was about as enjoyable as a refreshing glass of nitric acid.

So let's be clear; the Star Trek film is boring, unsurprising, and almost terminally uninvolving. It relies heavily on fanboy-glow by showing us Kirk and Spock as kids, but their stories are so expected that only someone with no imagination could find this impressive. It's so desperate to get its fans onside that Leonard bloody Nimoy makes and appearance; it's telling that his contained, diginified persona is the most surprising thing in a film where everyone else bubbles with cardboard emotions taken straight from any action movie you care to name. Nimoy's Spock is, in his own way, genuinely unknowable. Sylar off of Heroes plays Youngster Spock as someone who suppresses a deep resentment and rage towards the establishment that rejected him... in other words, the new Spock is someone who might as well be human.

This is a film that doesn't have a "script", it has a storyboard; a series of scenes designed to move along a frankly silly plot, in which a team of kids take over Starfleet's best ship via a series of character contortions (Captain Pike actually has to promote a stowaway to the ship's first officer), and there's a three-minute scene in which Leonard Nimoy more or less explains the entire story and renders the rest of it deeply expected. If you'd allowed the actors to improv their dialogue, then they might at least have said something interesting. As it is, the existence of a 'script' is just about the worst thing about the film, the very thing that makes it as dull as it is.

Then again, it's for Trekkies, and Trekkies are morons. In any other franchise, they'd just reboot the series, which isn't a difficult concept to understand (nobody's brain melted when Batman Begins wiped out the Tim Burton movies, did they?). But no, this is Star Trek, so we need a time travel story that plods along like Mary Harney in jackboots, replete with a conversation where they clarify "the arrival of Nero has altered the future. All our destinies have now been changed." Which is a point at which any sane viewer will simply mutter, "oh for fuck's sake." And walk out. Like the sensible person they are. I didn't, but I regret it.

Obviously, Doctor Who is about sixty-four million times as good as Star Trek, even taking Catherine Tate into account. A script-led, idea-driven series is always going to be better than a dumbed-down version of The West Wing in space. Even the Doctor Who Easter Special - which even new series cheerleaders have admitted was one of the most uninspired and dull episodes of all time, and had almost nothing going on whatsoever - had that faintly interesting idea of metal-skeletoned insects swarming around a planet so fast to open up a wormhole to their next location*, which is more interesting than anything in the Star Trek movie. The only aliens in Star Trek are there as weird 'n' wacky eye-candy, and the centrepiece of the film is about a big spaceship drilling down to the core of the planet - that's the same plot as The Dalek Invasion of Earth. From 1964.

And here's how you know that the efficiently-paced, ruthlessly-storyboarded, nerd-appealing model of Star Trek is garbage. The time-travel plot doesn't make sense, because - if the spaceship-from-the-future really does change history, then the conditions for the spaceship-from-the-future to come back in time never happened, so the spaceship wouldn't have come back in time in the first place. In other words, this new universe is the subject of a classic grandfather paradox (explanation here, if you must check what it means). So, if this was Doctor Who, big winged time-travelling bacteria-things would start appearing from nowhere and eating everything in sight, causing the end of the universe. But this is Star Trek, we just end in a new more-or-less-the-same universe where there can be even more Star Trek films.

So the script of the Star Trek universe has now been unwritten. Now all we have to do is work out how to get it to stay that way, and wipe out this miserable series forever.

*Yes, I know that's taken from The Horns of Nimon. But at least that didn't air until 1980. We still win.