While Star Trek is certainly not about time travel and destiny in the way that Lost is, it does have to deal with it somewhat, most specifically daddy issue-wise with the revelation that Kirk, in Future Spock's time, knew and drew inspiration from his father.  As well, we get a nice moment at the end when Future Spock meets his younger self and tweaks his "customary greeting."  It also provides us the context for one of my favorite moments in the film, when Future Spock meets a young Montgomery Scott.  The wonderment expressed in that moment by Leonard Nimoy was as heart-warming as it was hilarious.  It's one small way in which the nostalgia factor has wormed its way directly into the film.

But, of course, it isn't the only way.  The whole notion of re-booting Star Trek is based on nostalgia for the old days of the series, for exactly the nostalgia that Future Spock expressed in that scene.  It's not nostalgia for The Next Generation, there was a TNG movie that came out just ten years ago.  But it's been a while since we've seen Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest of the crew that originally drew people to the whole thing.  Plus, it fits in perfectly with what Hollywood is doing right now.  Since the birth of the massively popular comic book adaptations, Hollywood has mined the past for surefire hits.  Obviously this means re-boots like Star Trek, Batman Begins and, to a certain extent, Superman Returns (since it picks up after the second film of the previous franchise and its plot includes Superman coming back, both within his world and ours).  Recently, we've had movies based on the things that the about-to-be-thirty generation loved in their childhoods, Transformers and GI Joe having actually gotten made while a He-Man movie has languished in development hell for five years and we're probably only a few years away from movies based on Voltron and the Thundercats.  When I went to see Star Trek, these were the trailers I saw: Terminator: Salvation, Year One, Land of the Lost, Transformers 2, Night at the Museum 2, and GI Joe.  It's not just that stock trope about no one having any imagination anymore; tons of interesting, original films are made and released each year.  It's just that none of them catch on all that big.  And it's not just that sequels sell, this has been the case forever.  It's that we can no longer really and on a large scale as a culture relate to something new.

Land of the Lost is based on a tv show that, along with Starsky and Hutch and The Dukes of Hazzard, represents all the fun cheesy kitsch of seventies television.  (I wonder if someone is hard at work penning a big screen adaption of Grizzly Adams.)  Year One seems like original entertainment, but it draws from every possible source it can, including the Bible prominently, Jack Black and Michael Cera eat from the Tree of Knowledge and then encounter Cain and Abel before winding up in a Roman era that looks something like that section of History of the World, Part 1.  Night at the Museum 2 as well doesn't seem like it should be that big in the nostalgia department, until you make major characters of Amelia Earhart and Abraham Lincoln (who must have hired a stellar PR team in the last year) and give a major moment in the trailer to Darth Vader.  Then there's Terminator: Salvation, an attempt to finally deliver on the brutal future promised nearly thirty years ago (how fitting) and GI Joe, our toys finally come to life.  And, of course, the epitome of it all is Transformers 2, a sequel to movie based on a cartoon based on a toy line. 

It seems this is all we can relate to, these things that stand in for what we remember having liked as kids.  I don't think this is because we truly still love that stuff, I think this is the extended side effect of all that irony.  As David Foster Wallace makes clear in "E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction" published as part of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, irony can only tear down.  Wallace was immensely dismayed that so much brain power had been expended just to point out something's flaws.  More recently, this is what "snark" represents for David Denby, that intensely destructive and blasé stance that so many take these days.  Thus, when we sit down to watch something, maybe all we can see are its flaws.  Just look at the Slumdog Millionaire backlash; it's really humurous that some would find it unworthy of an Academy Award when its heart is nothing more or less than an old fashioned romantic drama, the studio era transported to the third world.  We've become so adept at tearing things down, at pointing out and reveling in internal conflicts and a clunky line or two, that we've lost the ability, perhaps, to enjoy something for the first time, on a grand cultural scale.  Instead, we look backwards to a time when we were kids and thus less world-weary and certainly less concerned with the internal coherence of a movie or television cartoon.  These things remind us of our own artisitic innocence, when no one even cared that GI Joe wasn't really a television show so much as it was a thirty minute commercial for the toys.  And it's much easier to be nostalgic than to actually like something someone else might not have heard of and definitely dislikes anyway.  We don't have to stop tearing everything down in order to enjoy it either, since it was us who built it up.  We did the heavy lifting a long time ago.

*concurrently posted today at stevesword.com