Mark E. Cotterill explores the strange new world of the Remake, the Sequel, the Prequel and the Star Trek Reboot

When the latest Star Trek remake came out in May this year I made the fairly radical decision that I would not go and see it. Even though I'm a huge fan of all things Trek (well, all things except Voyager and Enterprise) as soon as I heard they weren't just making the next film in the Star Trek franchise but actually remaking the original iconic sixties Star Trek series, I knew I wasn't going to like it - I didn't want to like it, but I didn't know why.

If you look at a list of the top grossing films of the last couple of years you will find a remake of Batman, a remake of Transformers, a remake of James Bond, an Indiana Jones movie, a trilogy of Spiderman remakes, a Watchmen movie and an X-Men prequel, amongst a multitude of other remakes, sequels, trilogies and series.

In fact the ideas these films are based on are very old indeed; X-Men as a comic goes back to the 1960s, Transformers was a 1980s toy advert thinly veiled as a cartoon, James Bond was a series of books which were turned into films in the sixties, Indiana Jones was a trilogy of action movies from the eighties which was itself based on old thirties and forties serials and Batman has been around since 1939.

Since Hollywood is in the business of making money, by creating 'entertainment' which might cost in excess of $100 to $200 million to produce, doesn't it make sense to base this entertainment on something with proven success? Doesn't it also make sense to make large scale, one-size-fits-all mass produced/mass consumed units rather than take a chance on dozens of smaller movies from unknown writers and directors which only a small minority of the audience might like? If this is true then I'm afraid we're going to be seeing even more movies based on an ever diminishing list of well known franchises.

Success breeds success. Everyone knows the most basic rules of producing a hit movie; if one kind of film does well, it gets copied and if a movie makes a lot of money it gets a sequel. It's an idea which goes back to those early b-movies and horror films which may have ended with the death of the monster, but when the film became successful it's revealed that the monster survived after all. The studios knew that they were guaranteed to make as much money as they had first time around so long as everyone came back to see the follow-up, but most often these sequels weren't as good as the original. One exception to the rule, and possibly the one which finally broke the trend, is the 1991 film Terminator 2, probably the most successful sequel ever made.

On the face of it The Terminator (1984) is a basic monster chase b-movie flick, but with an interesting twist; For the first half-hour or so of the picture the action plays out as a standard female-in-peril thriller. Only about 30 minutes in do we realise the Arnold Schwarzenegger character is actually a robot of some kind. The idea is so basic that, like the Terminator itself, it could run and run and by the time the sequel rolled around seven years later with the advanced special effects of the day and an extra Terminator added to the mix in the formula still worked.

Director James Cameron managed to both extend the story set up in the first film and convincingly develop the main character of Sarah Connor who went from being a frightened moped-riding waitress to an AK-47 toting survivalist who spends much of her life in mental institutions thanks to her foreseeing the approach of the global nuclear Armageddon. What's also interesting about Terminator 2 is that Cameron deliberately ends the movie with all the 'temporal' loose ends tied up. The chip which led to the creation of Skynet is destroyed and so is the Terminator from which it came, meaning the particular future that led to the creation of the Terminator can't happen either. Cameron was saying as clearly as he could to the audience that there was to be no third instalment, but thanks to a little 21st century retconning we did, and a fourth and a TV series.

So, certainly if a successful film gets a sequel then a really successful sequel must become a trilogy, and if we're talking about trilogies then we're talking about Star Wars. It's the origin point of what we mean by the 'Trilogy' in science-fiction where the modern action movie is born. The way George Lucas strategically places an action sequence at 10 minute intervals throughout the movie, where before a film may have had a climactic 'ending' or chase sequence somewhere in the middle. It was the first film to become so popular that a major studio agreed to not just a sequel but a whole trilogy.

Even though the story of Luke, Darth Vader and the rise and fall of the Empire spans the three films of the original trilogy the first Star Wars movie, later subtitled A New Hope, holds true to a more traditional three-act structure; there's a threat to the Rebellion (the 'Problem'), the Evil Empire who is trying to stop them (the 'Conflict') and a final act in which the Rebellion successfully defeats the Empire once and for all (the 'Solution'). If you look carefully you will see that everything in the story points towards this resolution at the end. The Death Star represents the Empire and is everything, once it's destroyed it will mark the beginning of the end for the Empire. Had the other movies not been made Star Wars on its own would still have made sense. The whole story-line about Darth Vader's past, his relationship to Luke and Leia and his involvement with the Emperor is absent and all Darth Vader as a character really does is go around scaring people and killing Ben Kenobi, which George Lucas later admitted was put into the script simply because he didn't have any more lines for Alec Guinness. The whole history between Vader and Kenobi which would later form the basis for the prequel trilogy is just a back-story and no more. Just like those 50's horror movies though, at the end of Star Wars the monster isn't quite dead.

George Lucas got the inspiration for Star Wars from many different sources, mainly from the clunky Saturday matinee serials he saw in his youth. If you look at the "what happened in the last episode" title crawl of Buck Rogers you will immediately see the connection, but he was also inspired by Japanese cinema and more generally fairy-tales. I'm sure every Star Wars fan knows of the links with Kurasawa's Hidden Fortress in which the whole story is told through the eyes of two lowly servants, but Lucas also recognised that anyone who didn't speak Japanese could still tell what was happening because certain stories, ideas and character archetypes are universal. The Young Hero, the Wizard, the Princess and the Rogue aren't just ancient but they are global and you can find them again and again in the literature of Europe, Asia, India, China and the Far-East. "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away" sounds a lot like "once upon a time" and perhaps it's also significant that, unlike the majority of science-fiction, Star Wars isn't about the future and nor is it about 'us'.

The problem with fairy-tales though is that they have endings. Once 'The End' has appeared on the screen, it's kind of hard to carry on with the story, but in Star Wars those words never appear. Each time a Star Wars movie ends it's the beginning of the next one. Even Return of the Jedi had a follow-up, though not in cinematic form but a whole series of books. The Jedi Academy series and Tales from the New Republic carry on the story, or continue the legend, but if you're really sure that this is 'The End' then what else is there left but to go back to the beginning? Time for a Prequel.

The Prequel can confer 'real' status on a character; real people have histories so why shouldn't fictional ones? Like when every teenager suddenly becomes interested in what their parents were like as teenagers. We love these 'hidden histories' and maybe it's the reason why programmes such as "Who Do You Think You Are" and "Time Team" have become so popular in recent years. Prequels are also an excellent way of using a well established franchise but with a whole new area of unexplored territory to exploit.

According to Wikipedia; a prequel is a work that portrays events and/or aspects of a previously completed narrative, but is set prior to the existing narrative.

A prequel must be part of the same series as the film it precedes, but if, like the new Star Trek or Batman Begins, it starts the story (and the series) anew, it is not a prequel - but rather a 'Reboot'. With a reboot much, or even all, previous continuity in the series can be discarded. A reboot doesn't have to be consistent with the existing canon (all the previously established continuity) of the series and so this can be conveniently discarded and replaced with new canon, just as it was with the the TV series Enterprise.

Television has actually been doing reboots for a while with shows such as Smallville, Battlestar Galactica and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In each case the producers decided to simply ignore everything that had happened, whether it was the comic book, the previous series or the movies and concentrate on the essence or the core elements of the concept, while still benefiting from the familiarity the audience had with the series. This is pretty much essential with TV because unlike films the drama is spread over a much longer period, particularly with American shows which typically run over 26 episodes per season for several years. One of the big problems with a prequel or a series based on something that's already well established is that you, as the audience, often know too much about what's going to happen and who it's going to happen to, which makes it sort of difficult for the writers to spring the kind of surprises which weekly episodic television demands.

Certainly there has never been a TV series or franchise larger than Star Trek, spanning four separate series and ten movies across five decades; hundreds of episodes and thousands of hours, but the problem also persists for other long running series such as Star Wars and Doctor Who. When writers create a story there's one thing it has to be above all else; entertaining. This means that something new and original has to happen in every story and the longer a series runs the more difficult it becomes to come up with new ideas. Soon, writers are forced into creating ever more outlandish scenarios to hook the viewer in and the more something 'cannot happen' the more its happening becomes inevitable. How many times in a TV series does the lead character appear to have died, or the ship is seen in the trailer being destroyed, only to reappear at the end?

To achieve this trick writers often employ the 'reset button technique'. It is often introduced as a plot-twist which effectively undoes all the events of the episode. This could be achieved by using dream sequences, time travel, hallucinations or dozens of other variations. Perhaps the most extreme example being Bobby Ewings return from the dead after an absence of a complete season in the eighties TV soap Dallas. His wife wakes up and sees him in the shower and realises that the whole previous season had been a dream, but when something similar happened in the Spiderman comics in 2007 furious fans started a wave of protest and letter writing directed at the comic's Editor Joe Quesada.

The 'One More Day' story-line was an attempt to restructure the three main Spiderman series and reconcile the events of the various alternate timelines, but the result was a major changing of canon as Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane was erased totally from the history of the character, and with it the last twenty years of the comic's story. Loyal readers of the comic lit up the forums and even appeared on Youtube tearing up editions of issue number 545 and 'thanking' Quesada for wasting the last twenty years of their lives. The 'fix' was actually a particular kind of reset-button technique known as retconning;

Retroactive Continuity (retconning) is the deliberate changing of previously established facts in a work of serial fiction.

Retcons can allow the alteration of the back-story of a series by adding a new piece of information which sheds a whole new light on things. Star Trek has done its fair share of retconning over the years but probably the best examples are to be found in Star Wars. Most notably the changes made in the 1997 re-release of the films where some scenes were actually changed such as the controversial 'Han Solo shooting first', but even more changes were made when the films were released onto DVD for the first time in 2004. Following the release of Episodes I, II and III George Lucas altered the voice of Boba Fett using the actor who had played his Father Jango in Episode II and he added actor Hayden Christensen to the final scene of Return of the Jedi, replacing Sebastian Shaw who had played the older version of Anakin Skywalker, but the most bizarre retcon perhaps of all time occurs in Episode II.

In the original movie, A New Hope, a group of stormtroopers enter the control room where C3-PO and R2-D2 are hiding and one of the extras at the back of the group bangs his head on the door. Amazingly the 'mistake' was never noticed at the time and made it into the final cut of the film. It became a famous 'movie gaff' until 2002 when Lucas placed a small in-joke into the scene where Jango Fett boards his ship on Kamino. It's hard to make out, but he also bangs his head on the raised door as he enters the ship, the implication being that since Jango is the clone father of the Stormtroopers they have all inherited this inability to see where they are walking. Suddenly a continuity error becomes a whole back-story of its own!

If you want to see some of the worst retconning of all time though I don't think you could do any better than look at the new Doctor Who. Leaving aside the ingenious technique of having one actor replace another by means of a regeneration or twelve, the almost constant permanent extinction and reappearance of the Daleks and their leader Davros is perhaps the best example of using a retcon to simply repeat a good storyline. It seems that where the Doctor is concerned, whenever we're told that something is 'impossible' we can be sure that at some point it will occur; the more impossible it is, the more likely it's eventually going to happen. The ongoing cycle of making the rules and then breaking them might be fun for a while but eventually the dramatic credibility of the series is tested to breaking point.

So apart from making vast sums of money, what's really behind all this looking back and raiding the science-fiction of the past? I believe it really got started around the time we entered the third millennium, coincidentally when the Star Wars Prequels began. Once the magic date of 2000 arrived we stopped imagining the future and started living in it, but with all our attention focused on something called 'the Millennium-Bug', which threatened to bring modern western society to its knees, everyone was too busy to notice. The reality which science-fiction had been exploring for a century or so failed to materialise and in the year 2000AD the British comic which bore that date as its title suddenly became 'past tense'.

At a New Years party at the end of 2000 I remember playing 2001: A Space Odyssey on the TV in the background, but all it seemed to do was generate a feeling of disappointment and disillusionment in the room, or it may have been the punch. In the real 2001 we weren't taking shuttle-bus trips to low-Earth orbit, we weren't eating chicken sandwiches on the Moon and we weren't even watching BBC 12. Of course the year 2001 would become famous, or infamous, for a very different reason on the 11th of September and anyone who had any doubts about what kind of a future the 21st century was going to be, had them dispelled; We were entering a time of war, of fear and of great uncertainty. It's in stark contrast to the sixties when the original Star Trek series hit our screens.

During the 'space-age' of that decade, science was seen as reassuring, as being 'truth' and a provable fact about the universe we inhabit. Scientists were heroes who were delivering tangible results in areas such as medicine, transportation and communication. The early days of computing promised to transform our future world into something like what we saw on the bridge of the Enterprise. Interest in science and science-fiction grew, spurred on by the writers of the Golden Age who had enjoyed great popularity in the forties and fifties. Stories were based on the latest scientific advances in areas such as genetics, robotics and computing and many of the great writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke where themselves scientists. Their stories were rooted in science, but asked the 'what-ifs' and looked at the doomsday scenarios. Several of these great writers, such as Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison went on to write for Star Trek and followed in this tradition with episodes like "What Are Little Girls Made Of" which explored the possibility of transferring a human consciousness into a machine and "Space Seed" which speculated on the existence of a mass eugenics programme by the 1990s resulting in the creation of a race of super-men.

There was also an optimism about the future, that science would save us. The actor who received the most fan mail on the show wasn't the show's star William Shatner but Leonard Nimoy who portrayed the cold and scientifically logical Mr. Spock. Politically too the sixties was a time of hope, as well as upheaval and revolution, in the form of the civil rights movement in America and the feminist movement.

Many people now feels that science has failed to deliver and they just don't trust it any more. "Bad-Science" inspired movements like the moon-landing doubters, anti-environmentalists and creationists have gained more support than they ever had before and the take-up of science based courses at universities and colleges is now at an all time low. We are living in the 'information age' and yet our technology constantly lets us down. Our computer systems crash, our video conferencing calls break up and drop out and our space shuttles unexpectedly explode. We have even reached the point where someone will admit their ignorance about science and be proud of it, then they'll brand those who do show an interest in it as nerds and geeks.

Now it seems we really are 'driving forwards while looking in the rear view mirror'. What we are doing is trying to recapture that view of our own future through the eyes of the science-fiction of the past. Certainly if you read science-fiction rather than watch it at the cinema or on television there's much more originality and new ideas, which would seem to confirm the idea that Hollywood is financially motivated rather than making these kinds of films because of a lack of material. There's also the possibility that, as the great philosopher Paul Weller once wrote, "the public wants what the public gets" and Hollywood isn't really following a cultural trend at all but creating one. It certainly seems that over the last decade this kind of nostalgia boom hasn't just been confined to films.

Listen to the popular music of the last ten years and you'll hear something which wouldn't sound out of place in the fifties or sixties, in some cases it is even recorded using original equipment from that time. Perhaps the worst thing you can say about the music of today is that it doesn't even offend your parents who after-all were probably into punk, heavy metal and hard rock in their formative years. Likewise motor manufacturers have been resurrecting old brands such as the Volkswagen Beetle, the Mini and the Fiat 500, all cultural icons of their time. When we look back at this first decade of the new millennium will we really be able to see a definitive style any different from the nineties, or will it just look like an agglomeration of styles from the past?

I think each generation has to rebel against its parents, not simply by overturning and throwing out the old ideas just for the sake of it, but by having an unwillingness to accept everything on face value, to re-examine and doubt everything that's accepted as 'just the way it is', otherwise the culture risks stagnation and nothing will change. Judging by today's popular culture then it's clear that this generation has completely failed to do this. Rather than rebelling against our parents we've become them! Think about it for a moment; when they were young did your parents drive a Beetle or a Mini or a Fiat 500? Did they watch Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica or Doctor Who? Did they read Watchman, X-Men and Spiderman comics?

I think it's for this reason that the success of the new Star Trek troubles me so much. Already there are rumours of a sequel, and no doubt a trilogy, even a series and so another 'old TV show' makes millions of dollars for a Hollywood studio and the vicious circle goes on, but that's not the worst of it. I think about what happens to the original whenever a 'cheap copy' is made. Something is lost. Those old episodes of Star Trek were not as slick or impressive as the new movie, but they were somehow more genuine. Placed next to the new incarnation in direct comparison they can't possibly look as good and the same goes for all of the other titles I've talked about in this article.

So we are robbing the past, using it up. Soon, there might be nothing left to remember, and then where will Hollywood go for its ideas?