There’s something very… monumental in the works. Something primal. I can feel it. A shift.
Earlier this year many people my age and older, some a little younger, finally took the last burden and insult from the once legendary Star Wars, as Clone Wars stumbled out like a long lost friend at your high school reunion who’s gone off the deep end. The one who used you be your best mate, and who, after losing touch, seemed to make an endless stream of brain-dead and baseline-crazy life decisions and now is off in the corner half-dressed and drunk out of his mind, listing off reasons to people of how he’s not really stalking his ex-girlfriend, even though no-one brought it up. You see your old friend and you realize he’s too messed up. He’s too far gone, you think. You walk away from Star Wars. I was one of the last holdouts — Revenge of the Sith is my second-favorite Star Wars movie if I close my eyes and ears during the scenes where Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen talk without shouting.
You can call it Star Wars mourning, if you like. Like a breakup, even a good breakup — a breakup you were prepared for — you need some time to heal. And then, when you’re ready, you can behold the god-damn-awesome-with-fireworks Star Trek trailer that hit the tubes today.
As a die-hard Star Wars fan, never, never in my life have I been excited for a Star Trek movie. Sure, I could enjoy me some STNG, but anything after that — or movies that don’t have KHAAAAAAAAN in them — weren’t worth it when you had Luke and The Force to cheer for. But that’s just it, we don’t have Luke anymore. We don’t have the same Force. We have snippy-padawan-sidekick girl, as well as the word “padawan.” And instead of boring, slow moving ships and non-action, we have god-damn sexy Kirk and Sylar Spock, the hot girl from Curse of the Black Pearl who wasn’t in the sequels, and about ten gallons of screen-busting awesome. It’s almost as if smoldering Eomer “Bones” McCoy walked into the living room where we were going through old photos of Han and Lando on Cloud City, with overflowing buckets of awesome saying “Excuse me, could someone please tell me where to put all of this awesome? I have all of this awesome overflowing here and nowhere to put it down.” Suddenly, the unthinkable has happened. Star Wars is now solidly, completely terrible, and Trek has stepped in to show Wars how it’s done. And people are going to follow. In droves. To me, it’s the strangest thing, how one story got it so wrong when it came back for a second go, and how, on what seems to be it’s third trip around the block, somebody seems to finally be getting the other one right. This is a time in geekdom that people are going to look back on. This is The Big Geek Switch.
A last note. A few months ago I saw my friend Donovan about to toss out or donate a Star Wars Monopoly game. When pressed, he offered it to me instead. When I took it home and opened it, I was amazed. The game was made before the prequel movies ever existed, and seeing it was like seeing an old friend, long gone.
Another last note: Scott Kurtz perfectly nailed a point to this argument in PVP that, yes, I was thinking as I wrote this.
–nv–
