Putting the "fan" back in fanatic
Trekkies A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1999 By Michael Redman
**1/2 (Out of ****)
"Reality is a crutch for those who can't handle science fiction" reads a t-shirt that has been in production in one design or another for decades. Although you could substitute "soap operas", "gardening", "guns", "rock and roll", "politics" or any number of other pastimes for "science fiction", sf fans are a special breed. And "Star Trek" fans are a unique mutation within that species.
Director Roger Nygard and Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar from "Next Generation") traveled the convention circuit interviewing fans and have come up with some doozies.
Probably the most famous is Barbara Adams, chosen for jury duty in the Whitewater trial. Wearing her Starfleet Commander's uniform to the courtroom, she seemed oblivious to the incongruity of the situation. "I'm an officer of the Federation 24 hours a day," she explains, "Every day I would walk past the reporters with a Vulcan-like stoicism."
Sometimes the film takes a loving look at the phenomenon. Nichelle Nichols of the original series tells of a very young Whoopie Goldberg who ran screaming through the house shouting, "Everybody come look! There's a black lady on television and she ain't a maid!"
Unfortunately, too often the film presents the fans like a freak show and I found myself cringing in a combination of fascination and embarrassment. A man speaks of having his ears surgically altered to look like Spock. A woman exhibits her hundreds of nearly identical photographs of Brent Spiner (Data) and talks about gazing at the hill near which Spiner lives.
Fourteen year old Gabriel Koerner sits at his computer creating wondrous graphics, but he is so self-satisfied about his collection that you hope, if he were in the series, he'd be the extra who beamed down to the strange planet never to return.
I may have never said this about a film before, but as the camera pours over the minutia of a Treked-out dentist office, you have to wonder why this is a movie. It'll be a hoot as a video, but in the theater I felt trapped.
(Michael Redman has written this column for a very long time and confesses to having seen every "Star Trek" episode several times...well, except some of those from "Deep Space Nine".)
[This appeared in the 6/3/99 "Bloomington Independent", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at Redman@indepen.com]
-- mailto:redman@indepen.com This week's film review: http://www.indepen.com/ Film reviews archive: http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman Y2K articles: http://www.indepen.com/
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