I love Star Trek. When I heard that William Shatner had directed a documentary featuring of the Captains from all five of the Star Trek televised series, I put it on hold at our local library. Funnily enough, its arrival to my hold shelf coinicided with William Shatner's recent birthday!

Shatner is, of course, the first and quintessential Star Trek Captain. He played James T. Kirk on the original series, which aired for three seasons in the mid 1960s. In this 96 minute documentary, which he wrote and directed, he interviews Sir Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard from Star Trek: Next Generation; Avery Brooks, Captain Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Kate Mulgrew, Captain Janeway from Star Trek, Voyager; and Scott Bakula, Captain Archer from Star Trek: Enterprise. To add a little fun, he also does a brief interview with Chris Pine, the young actor who plays the role of Captain Kirk in the 2009 rebooted film version of Star Trek directed by J.J. Abrams.

Not knowing anything about this documentary before I watched it, except for the fact that it involved all the captains, I imagined a couple of things which turned out not to be true. I thought it likely that all the captains would be in one place, interviewed together or perhaps doing a round-table conversation, and I assumed that most of what got talked about would be Star Trek. Wrong on both assumptions.

Now that I've mentioned what the film isn't, I'll say what it is: Shatner's quirky one-on-one conversations with the other five. He travels to meet them in various locations, usually on their "home turf." The film moves around, providing clips of one conversation, hopping to another. Intercut with conversational snippets is footage of Shatner at a Star Trek convention, talking with the crowd, glad-handing fans at a back-stage meet n' greet, saying funny tongue-in-cheek stuff that shows how much he enjoys and still thrives on the capital (pun intended) from the Star Trek run that helped shape the trajectory of his career.

He does, of course, talk to each person at least a little bit about their role -- how they got the part, what they felt about it. Some of them, like Patrick Stewart (the best part of the entire thing) are articulate and thoughtful about their participation in the series. Others seemed more reticent -- though it was sometimes hard to tell if it was because they were not as comfortable with Shatner's casual interviewing style, or just wanted to talk about something else.

Bakula, meeting Shatner in L.A.,  turned the conversation to his years on Quantum Leap a good bit, and almost talked more about how much he loved the original Star Trek (as a college student) than he did his own participation in Enterprise. He confessed that his main interest in doing the show was because it was the prequel. He also made a comment that didn't seem very fair to his talented cast when he said he didn't think their show had done nearly as a good a job at capturing camaraderie as the original -- though one got the sense that he was trying to pay Shatner a compliment more than anything.

Kate Mulgrew, sitting with Shatner on an empty New York stage, seemed a little defensive and edgy, especially when Shatner pushed her on what it meant to be the only female Star Trek captain. It was hard to tell whether or not they actually enjoyed one another's company, and their meandering conversation about gender roles gets a little odd. Mulgrew clearly found it challenging to play the role of Captain Janeway while attempting to be a single parent.

Even odder than the Mulgrew interview, however, is the interview with Avery Brooks in his New Jersey home. Brooks is a jazz musician and poetic philosopher, and he keeps everything off-balance. Shatner, to be fair, plays along gamely and even seems to enjoy the weirdness, but half the time you can barely follow what they're talking about, especially when Brooks gets into riffs on the effects of an acting career on family/marriage and ruminations on life after death (the two heavy topics that Shatner insists on bringing up with each captain).

The only interview that seems to fully attain creative clarity and comfortable camaraderie is the one that Shatner does with Patrick Stewart in the actor's lovely English home and gardens. Clearly Shatner thinks of Stewart as something of a mentor, and Stewart's "gravitas" -- and his willingness to wholeheartedly embrace his role as pop culture icon despite his long history of classical acting -- has helped affirm for Shatner that he doesn't have anything to be embarrassed about when it comes to having created the role of Kirk. Shatner's long-standing insecurities about his own abilities and whether or not he's created anything of lasting artistic worth seem authentic and a tad bit sad. Coupled with his concerns about aging and death, the film provides a rather intimate portrait of the interviewer -- and while that's interesting, it doesn't tend to yield much insight into the people he's interviewing. They mostly feel like mirrors.

The bits with Chris Pine are fun, but feel like window-dressing. The best moment is when they arm-wrestle. And no, I'm not kidding!

The Captains felt like a big missed opportunity. This is a very small "club" to which only a half-dozen people belong, and yet there were few creative/artistic questions across the board addressed to all of them. I would have enjoyed seeing them all together; I would have found it fascinating if they'd all been given a scenario/captain's dilemma to solve!  I also would have enjoyed more actual clips from the shows. They used a few, but not nearly enough. They also used occasional "talking heads": one co-star of each captain from each series, although oddly enough, not a single co-star of Shatner's from the original series.

If your initial expectations are like mine, you might find yourself disappointed in The Captains, though in and of itself, it's an interesting creative exercise.

~befus, 2012

Recommended: Yes