May

9

Star Trek is back

May 9, 2009 | 6 Comments | Joshua Gans

Star Trek is back. The new JJ Abrams version literally reboots the entire franchise and opens it up for much much more. The movie itself is more about characters than plot which is just fine because, for decades, no director has been able to make the characters work properly. This time they are all good, especially McCoy, who is both most faithful to the original and the most capable of bringing in nostalga.

All of the talk around this movie is how they threw away the constraints of being consistent with the rest of Star Trek but having seen it I have to say this: (i) Star Trek fans will enjoy it more than non-fans; and (ii) that is precisely because it is perhaps the most faithful movie ever to the rest of Star Trek and you have to know about that to see it all come together. If the person next to you isn’t laughing at some points that it because they are not a Star Trek fan.

And to top it off, for readers of this blog, there is a ‘shout out’ to economics that only an economist will surely see. So if you see the movie, listen very carefully to the child Spock’s lessons and you’ll see what I mean.


Comments

6 Responses to “Star Trek is back”

  1. Chris Lloyd on May 9th, 2009 12:35 pm

    I don’t know that you eocnomists can take much comfort from the Star Trek universe. There’s no money in the 24th century. 

    The challenge, as Jean-Luc always reminds us, is to better ourselves. Easy to say for a guy who made it to captain.

    There is limited food and holodeck privileges on Enterprise. Any speculation Josh as to why there is not a thriving black market in these? Oh wait. They are all too busy bettering themselves.

  2. Steven Hamilton on May 9th, 2009 12:38 pm

    I saw this on Thursday night with a close friend (who is a mad Trekkie) and my gf (whose knowledge of Star Trek can be summed up neatly by the fact that, on the way to the movie, she said “who is Spock, I’ve never heard of him/her?”). I’m in the middle of these two extremes – I’ve never really been into Star Trek (I’ve always been more of a Star Wars fan), but was, nevertheless, fairly excited to see the movie.

    The fact that, despite the massive disparity of Trekkie-ness between us, we all thoroughly enjoyed the movie is a testament to how fantastic it really is. I didn’t get any of the jokes (I’m not a Trekkie), but still found it pretty humorous overall.

    The triumph, as you say, was the characters.  Spock and Kirk were truly astonishing. My favourite part was the public good reference that nearly made me jump out of my chair.  My two pals had no idea of the significance. But it was a nice touch. Another of my favourite things was the design – just about everything was beaufitul and the retro theme was tastefully executed.

    My Trekkie friend is pretty miffed at the messing around with time and he kept muttering something about the “grandfather paradox”, whatever that means. Personally, with no Star Trek knowledge, I thought they handled the time really well.  But my assumption (and I could be wrong here) is that the movies basically renders everything that has ever been done in the Star Trek universe non-existent. Which I think is fine as this really is a reboot of the franchise and it affords the production team a great deal of flexibility to cherry pick all of the best bits. But I doubt this point will please the die-hard Trekkies.

  3. chris joye on May 9th, 2009 12:43 pm

    Vulcan child talking to non-human learning machine:

    “Must be non-rival and non-excludable. But can market liquidity be both these things, I ask?”

    Vulcan child thinking:

    “I am channeling my Vulcan-human hybrid cousin, Joshua Samuel Gans, who with his ill-tempered Klingon co-author has been carrying on about the role of liquidity as a public good.”

    Josh, I think at least the first part of the first quote is right from the movie–but I may have got it wrong…Wife was nattering.

  4. Scottie on May 10th, 2009 12:33 am

    “… literally reboots the entire franchise …”

    the franchise is a computer?

  5. Star Trek at catallaxyfiles on May 10th, 2009 9:08 am

    [...] 23 century when the story starts. I don’t know if the reboot changes that part of the story. Joshua Gans likes the [...]

  6. Ed on May 11th, 2009 12:39 pm

    “There [are] limited food and holodeck privileges on [the] Enterprise.” Really? As far as I can tell there are not limited food privileges, although I suppose holodeck access would be limited since there are only so many hours in the day and only so many holodecks.

    As for material goods, when it’s possible to make almost anything you want using a replicator, I suppose it really would be possible that it’s not strictly necessary to work simply to get more material goods. Thus people might actually work simply to better themselves, or because they like the challenge. Look at open source software, even with present day scarcity some people like to program and tinker and do things that are considered “work” simply for fun or to get recognition, but not for the purpose of material gain.