Why Star Trek is a better movie than State of Play

The essence of what’s wrong with Hollywood is the desire to make money along with a solid contempt for the intelligence of the consumer. It’s all profiteering with no concern for providing even the semblance of a good product. State of play is a perfect example of one of those, Star Trek is not.

State of Play is about a journalist, a slovenly, chubby Russell Crowe who, as a newspaper-man stereotype in years past, would have drank and chain-smoked, but now, in a Hollywood where smoking is fashionably unpopular, just drinks. Anyway, he runs into a story, a murder that gets connected to his old college-buddy, a politician, played by Ben Affleck. Affleck is on a committee investigating Pointcorp, a ruthless and corrupt Blackwater-like contractor employed by the US government. The story throws up a few red herrings, some gratuitous action scenes to make the trailers pop, then fizzles out with a cowardly Law and Order ending. There was a point in the story when this seemed like a statement movie, like you had a script that, right or wrong, was taking on real-life entities and adopting a definite stance on something important. Silly, naive you. They started out making a point, and then decided that it could cause repercussions if they went all the way with it, so they castrated it at the end. They know the audience, passive and stupid, won’t care.

Star Trek, however had no serious point, and never pretended to have one. With a large, dedicated consumer-base, Hollywood cannot risk doing anything from this franchise badly, so they brought out their biggest geek-star, JJ Abrams to throw this one together. Abrams, savvy profiteer that he is, watched all the old movies, and then ripped off the best parts (interrogation-slugs, time-travel etc.) along with some Spielberg-like improvisations and gave them their slam-dunk. This movie is about pushing the right buttons in a worshipful fanbase, while aggressively trying to grow it. There is nothing original about this movie, but Trekkies don’t want originality, they want the tried and true gimmicks, and they got it. This movie did what it was supposed to, what the trailers promised, and what its opening sequence and all its history promised: a generic, old-fashioned seafaring story set in space with planets instead of islands.

Hollywood was always about business, not art, but business itself has two faces: the-take-a-sucker-for-all-he’s-worth face, and make-the-customer-happy face. Here we have both.