Starship Porn
Starship Porn
Aug 06
One of the many small reasons I loved the new Star Trek movie was that it upheld a grand Trek tradition: Starship porn.
Pretty much every Trek movie (and definitely all the good ones) have featured lusty FX shots of the Enterprise. Whether the ship is standing still in drydock or cruising the Mutara Nebula, it always looks so damn…HOT. The camera lovingly caresses its nacelles, lingers longingly over its saucer, and frequently takes her from behind as she jumps into warp speed.
The best starship porn is accompanied by memorable music. Pretty much all the big guns of film score composition have had their spaceship porn moment. From Giacchino to Goldsmith, here’s a few of my favorites.
Star Trek II: “Enterprise Clears Moorings,” James Horner
What made Michael Giacchino’s score for the new Trek work so well for me is that he took a page straight out of the Horner playbook and built his cues around basically one or two musical riffs that effortlessly encapsulated the tone of Trek itself. So it wasn’t like you had a Spock theme, and a Nero theme, and a Tyler Perry theme; there was just one big fat TREK theme, and it served throughout in various forms.
Horner took a similar approach to most of the Khan score, and he makes the swashbuckle of his maritime-esque theme melody really sing here for a cue that accompanies the crew prepping the Enterprise to go check out the action at Carol Marcus’ space outpost.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture: “The Enterprise,” Jerry Goldsmith
Like most of this movie, Jerry Goldsmith’s Enterprise theme is big, slow, and at times stirring. If the rest of these moments are starship porn, then this is one of those half-hour “adult series” they used to show on Skinemax, where you’d wait twenty minutes for a five-minute sex scene that didn’t even feature enough nudity. Or so I recall from my teenage years, when Skinemax was my only outlet on many a lonely Friday night.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: “Home Again, End Credits,” Leonard Rosenman
Because the Enterprise is AWOL for most of the film, Rosenman doesn’t really get much of a chance to score starship porn; there wasn’t time or inclination really for loving shots of a model of a Klingon bird of prey. But he makes the most of the twenty or so seconds he’s got to work with. You can almost feel Kirk’s erection as the old bird comes into view.
Star Trek (2009): “Enterprising Young Men,” Michael Giacchino
(video’s not so great visually, but it’s Giacchino conducting the piece live a few weeks ago in Italy, and it kicks pretty serious ass)
McCoy and Kirk approach the Enterprise for the first time in this new continuity. I love love LOVE the pounding riff that precedes the sweeping use of his main theme; it reminds me of the theme from The Magnificent Seven. I never really imagined anyone would come along to cook up a Trek theme that deserves to stand alongside the work of Alexander Courage, Jerry Goldsmith, and James Horner, but Giacchino absolutely does just that.
So I focused on Trek here, but help me out. What other sci-fi films feature great moments of starship porn? I was struggling to think of an example from Star Wars, but nothing seemed to fit.
Star Wars BEGINS with starship pr0n. Also, the beginning of AOTC, where you have that mirror-sheened Nubian cruiser landing on Coruscant.
There’s a pretty substantial fleet junkie subset of Star Wars fandom. I flirt with being one of them, but my favorite thing about the mythos – the thing it has over Trek in my heart – is starfighters and dogfights. Any time an X-Wing does anything is kind of like that for me – the design of the movie starfighters (not the visually striking but headscratching Christian Gossett designs from the early in-canon Dark Horse comics) from the N1 to the Aleph to the X-Wing makes me anticipate watching the things in action.
Cool post. I wish Twitter were up so I could find my tweet from the moment during the first time I saw Trek that I saw Enterprise for the first time.
Yeah, Star Wars is littered with Starship porn. The opening scene of the Star Destroyer over Tatoinne pretty much created the concept.
I absolutely love the final shot of Empire, where they pan out from Luke and Leia watching the Falcon fly away to a shot of the whole Rebel fleet, it’s just beautiful. Pair that with the scene of the fighters flying through the fleet as the head to battle the Second Death Star in ROTJ, and I’m getting chills right here.
Also, 2001. Both the shot of the bone flying in the air, turning into the commercial space cruiser. That whole sequence, is porn. Along with the many, loving shots of Discovery floating towards Jupiter.
I’m not sure–they show lots of ships in Star Wars and they shoot them well, but it’s not like they linger on them obsessively the way they do in Trek.
It seems to me built into the differences between Wars ships and Trek ships–in SW, ships are for fighting and flying, like a WWII air battle. In Trek, they’re more like giant ocean vessels.
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