Director Roger Nygard might well be the Francois Truffaut of Star Trek fans.
I would heartily agree with those nerds who think Trekkies still stands as a documentary you could watch again and again, the movie still holds its repeat value all these years later. Nygard himself has been doing things here and there, working in episodic television for a story or two, shooting the slightly inferior Trekkies 2, but it hasn’t made the same impact as his exposé on the lives of a few geeks who are really really into Trek.
However, his latest documentary looks like it is pushing beyond the humorous and is getting back to the style which made Trekkies so much fun. That film worked because instead of pointing a finger and laughing at all these silly people, like a five minute puff piece would do in your local news market if a comic book convention rolled into town, he let the subjects breathe. He let the subjects talk for a little bit as Nygard interspersed footage of these people’s natural lives into what was being discussed. This trailer opens up with that formula, he flat out address the camera with his hypothesis, as he barrels right into the interview footage of a lot of people. A lot of them.
The snippets he gets from people about the nature of life and why we’re all here on earth is an interesting one, certainly the documentary that came out last year by Peter Rodger, Oh My God, dealt with this in a more serious way, but it’s Nygard’s penchant for the humorous that makes this trailer wholly his own. As proof, there is a moment at the mid-point of this trailer where, after asking his question to a subject about the nature of why we’re all here, Nygard says “Don’t bullshit me…” in a way you realize that this isn’t going to be heady. It’s going to be interesting, hopefully insightful.
The departing comment by the director of Empire Strikes Back, Irvin Kershner, encapsulates the loose attitude of this film as he compares the emotional pain a lot of us all feel in life to the complete laissez-faire happiness that only idiots possess. It’s poignant and it made me laugh a little. Hopefully this movie is as peppy as its trailer.
