It’s no secret that Hollywood loves to sell the latest ridiculously silly summer children’s’ films by pretending, in ads, that it’s an effort of grave importance, epic in both scale and significance.
This says a lot about marketing’s ability to attract formerly clear-headed adults into these types of entertainments and eventually pilot the proud infantilisation of an audience that consists of grown men and women settling for tentpole blockbusters instead of films about and for them, leading to a basterdized marketplace that caters to the every whim of adults with severe cases of arrested development- an audience that neglects the real humanism of the great films of yesterday, the contents of our former classics now becoming ‘niche’ offerings while our former B-stories originally meant for brief indulgences now dominate the marketplace.
Enter the new trailer for “Star Trek,” the eleventh offering in the space opera franchise, and one that suggests grave importance to the story of a bunch of silly humans piloting an improbable ship in an unrecognizably distant future into the deepest regions to battle obscenely strange aliens with funny skin and phony prosthetic noses. Imagine being an average salaryman in the late sixties, casually enjoying this new, campy space television series, learning that it would result in this, a straight-faced, you-must-see-this sheen of importance cloaking the silly diversion you love for its kiddie subversion of the western and skimpy projection of good-humored kids’ adventure.
Learning that you’d be seated in a movie theater and feeling your ass shake from the subwoofers pounding out booming music as Chris Pine’s James T. Kirk commits a momentous act by, erm, sitting in a chair. Society’s come a long way.
