There was no Captain's Blog in 2009 when JJ Abrams infamously made the most popular, most successful, most star-studded and action packed Star Trek to hit the silver screen since... well, Star Wars. So popular in fact that my girlfriend even loved it and when it came out on DVD, after watching it that second time she insisted on watching it again the next day, with her roommates (all girls)! And they loved it! How was this possible? How did Abrams take the eleventh film in a forty-year-old franchise of dwindling movie returns and canceled TV shows that hadn't aired in years and make such a blockbuster runaway hit? And made our girlfriends finally like it?! It all goes back to the Universal Emotion. If I had a Captain's Blog back then, I would've written that the new Star Trek reboot was awesome. I loved it. I loved it as a Trekkie and I loved it as a cinephile and I loved it as a mainstream regular person who likes popular things. Everyone loved it and JJ Abrams was hailed as a genius (this was before The Force Awakens). There wasn't much more to elaborate on except how cool that ship looked. How sharp that cast looked. How intense that musical score sounded. And all those glossy lens flares that made it so sleek and modern. But there wasn't much else to blog about that mattered. The Onion pretty much said everything I was thinking when they satirically joked, "Where was the heavy-handed message about tolerance? The stiff acting. It just didn't feel like a Star Trek film." It was meant to be ironic, but in the long run proved prescient. For all it's popularity, many fans resented the new Star Trek for exactly those reasons. They didn't understand and appreciate what JJ Abrams had done to their franchise. He had made it relatable to more than just awkward outsiders and weirdos who get lost in their own heads too often. He made it universal. The Universal Emotion. There is no one rule of storytelling because there are too many ways to tell stories, but they tend to fall into two camps. The good ones and the bad ones. And I proclaim (with all my pending accolades and unfinished accomplishments) that at least one of the key differences between the good stories and the bad stories is the presence of a Universal Emotion. At least one. (There are many.) If you imbue the characters of your stories with these universal emotions, your audience will universally relate to them. Let's look at Star Trek (2009). What was it about? Okay, so Future Spock played by the old Leonard Nimoy couldn't stop a supernova fast enough to save the Romulan Star Empire and he got sucked into the black hole which sent him back in time along with another ship of Romulan Miners who want revenge for that failure. They cause a shift in the time stream that makes all the fan favorite characters of the Original Sixties Star Trek look like different actors and all the interior lighting is now prone to lens flares. The Romulans then destroy the planet Vulcan with red matter and Kirk and Spock pew-pew their way to victory, eventually settling in to their old roles aboard the new Enterprise. With a synopsis like that, no wonder girls loved it (sarcasm). But... I'd bet a hundred bucks none of those girls would even recognize the movie I just described. I'd bet a hundred bucks those girls -- and most non-Trekkies in general who loved that movie -- if asked what they remembered about it or what they liked would say... maybe Zachary Quinto (coming off of Heroes fame) or Chris Pine (later of everything fame). Okay, I'll grant that, since both actors put in career launching performances. In fact the whole cast was incredible. John Cho as Sulu? Karl Urban? Zoe Saldana? Simon Pegg? Anton Yelchin? Every one of these actors proved to be A-list over the next several years. So are all these non-Trekkies just really savvy connoisseurs of up and coming actors? What was it that made these characters stand out so much? (Besides Zachary Quinto being really hot in those days, I mean he just was, let's be honest. You still remember Heroes season one, "Save the cheerleader, save the world!") Kirk lost his Dad. In one of the greatest cold opens of any movie ever, we see Kirk's Dad (a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth in further evidence that the casting director deserved an Oscar) give his life to save his crew, and newborn son, James Tiberius. It's an entire movie unto itself, with such absolute precision filmmaking that you experience an entire range of emotions in that first five minutes. It almost brings me to tears every time and every time I'm almost surprised to rediscover there's still whole movie on the way. "What're we gonna call him?" the elder Kirk asks as he manually pilots the abandoned ship into ramming speed. "How about after your father?" his wife says as her shuttle whisks her away to safety, holding her newborn baby in her arms. "Tiberius? No that's a terrible. Let's name him after yours." "Okay, we'll call him James." Oh... I just... Let me... I got some dust in my eye again... Just give me a second. Sure, there's a whole bunch of plot about a ship coming through an anomaly and then battle and then surrender negotiations with the Captain who must come aboard via shuttle... but this George Kirk guy just got dropped in charge of a starship with no notice and immediately has to evacuate his wife while she's giving birth, and then the autopilot breaks so he can't leave. It all happens so fast, but just slow enough to realize there was never any other choice. It was the only way to save everyone. It's touching and heart-wrenching, and maybe a little emotionally manipulative, but it's personal and tragic and in spite of the context, totally relatable. Universally relatable. Why? Because we can all imagine being dropped into a difficult situation unexpectedly and unprepared and having to make tough decisions on the fly. Even if we've never been in such a life-threatening example, we relate because it's what we fear. The scene isn't just filmed for action spectacle and drama -- although there is plenty of that -- the scene is filmed so as to make us feel what George Kirk feels, when his Captain says, "Walk with me," and lists a series of unprecedented instructions followed by, "You're the Captain now, Mister Kirk," and then shortly thereafter dies on screen, right in front of him. We feel the weight of the responsibility and the futility of the circumstances, and those are universal emotions that anyone can feel in any walk of life, regardless of the details. That's what Abrams wanted us to feel. Kirk lost his way. We next meet James Kirk as a boy, acting out when he steals his stepdad's car and goes speeding across Iowa, and almost driving off a cliff. He's acting out, obviously, but he's also short-sighted, overconfident and directionless as he does it. Three relatable qualities that define him later as an adult when he joins Starfleet and doesn't get along very well with the Academy or his commanding officers. We're told he's a genius but what does that really mean? Few of us can relate to what it's like to be an actual genius in society, must less two hundred years in the future, but the part we can all relate to is thinking we're smarter than everyone else (whether we are or not), and then getting frustrated when no one understands us. That's a universal emotion. We can relate to being listless in a bar, bored and wondering what to do with our lives (whether or not we get into fisticuffs with literal space cadets). We can relate to being frustrated with rules and institutions that get in the way of what we want to do and how we want to do it. We can relate to wanting to cheat what we think is an unfair test. And we can relate to nobody believing us, trusting us, or understanding us. That's why it's so satisfying when Kirk inevitably takes the Captain's chair and everyone obeys his commands and it all works to save the day. It's universally gratifying. Spock had to hide his emotions. As the other lead character of this buddy-cop comedy, Spock gets as complete a character arc as Kirk, if not better. His childhood is interspliced with Kirk's. His universally relatable emotion is being raised as a child of two worlds, two cultures. One is emotional and the other uptight. He's forced to suppress his feelings. We can all relate to feeling like we gotta keep stuff buried deep down, when in fact we want to explode. His entire arc is built on this and not just because it's key to the plot, later on. I'd argue that it's only so key to plot later on because Abrams specifically wants to explore it. Each of his scenes are not centered on how they hinder or advance the plot, the scenes are depicted to give the most attention and nuance to what he's feeling, and the tension between these opposite cultural forces. It doesn't hurt that Quinto portrayed these subtle layers of emotional suppression so brilliantly. Some other quick examples: Sulu is the helmsman, but he screws up during his introduction scene and leaves on the "parking break" (or inertial dampeners in treknobabble). But the way it's depicted, we can all relate to or imagine being suddenly given a shot with the professionals, wanting to prove ourselves, and then making a trivial mistake in front of everyone. Anyone who's ever gotten a promotion knows that fear on your first day. Then we relate to his success when he does in fact prove himself warping the Enterprise into the gaseous atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. Chekhov is likewise played for laughs with his thick accent that the computer can't even comprehend, but later vindicates himself when he knows the solution to a complicated telemetry problem that Spock is able to corroborate. We can all relate to trying to explain something complicated and not being understood. Scotty doesn't get as much screen time but his scenes are largely relegated to the outsider, watching the drama unfold before him, much like the audience. And much like the audience, he thinks this is all a wee bit weird but fun and exciting. "I like it here!" Uhura seems like just a love interest, and though romances make for compelling entertainment, I don't think that's enough to explain this movie's popularity among women. Her big scenes involve being hit on a by a local hick, a roommate bringing a boy over (an annoying boy no less), getting passed up for the job position you know you earned ("No, I'm assigned to the Enterprise!" Spock: "...Yes, I believe you are."), and wanting your boyfriend to open up emotionally when he needs to but still won't. Tell me women readers -- of whom I have many -- can you relate to any of these? Also being able to speak all six dialects of Romulan. Nothing more universal than that! McCoy also is subtler, and you have to watch his reactions to the larger situations around him. He represents what the audience is thinking when he says out loud how ridiculous something is, or how dangerous a situation seems, or how dumb somebody is acting, ("Are you out of your Vulcan mind?"). It's a little thing, but it works as a universal emotion, because sometimes the world around us seems just plain nutty, and we want to complain about it a little, too. Even Nero, the badguy, is basically just angry and vengeful, and we can all relate to that gut instinct of retaliation and blind rage. Nero isn't portrayed as calculating or scheming, rather Eric Bana instills within that character a storm of frustration and resentment waiting to explode.
So all you writers out there (who like me, probly want to write blockbuster Star Trek films starring all the best actors), what are your universal emotions? Whatever you're writing, whatever genre, whatever style, stop and make a list of your characters. What are their universal emotions? Are they in over their heads? Are they suspicious of a trusted friend? Do they have something to prove? Do they just want to be understood? Do they feel like society expects something of them? I'm not talking about motivation or backstory or characterization per se. I'm talking about what is the simple underlying component beneath it all which anyone could relate to, even if only in their fantasies or nightmares. Then, after you've put your finger on it, go back and look at all the scenes where they have to make any kind of choice. Where did you put the emphasis? Did you get distracted with the plot and the details? The ray guns and the starships? Or were those scenes really about the character and what they felt like making those choices? Is it what you would feel like if you had to make them? Can relate to it at a visceral level? The details don't matter. By all means, have a pretty starship in your story, but like Star Trek (2009), it isn't the pretty starship that captured the hearts of the masses, it was all those relatable characters and their universal emotions piled on top of each other, scene after scene, that made us feel like we were really trekking through the stars again.
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