Why? Because it's Spring Break and I'm at work with nothing better to do. Also because you can't confuse a fantastic show with a racist series of movies (Really? There's only two black dudes in the whole galaxy and one of them dies? Unless you count Jar Jar Binks, but he's not really black; he's just a super-racist caricature of black people) and get away with it.
I previously wrote a review of why Star Trek is and always will be better than Star Wars, but that was on my old blog and that's gone now. I'm probably going to cover very similar points, and frankly, I doubt you'll care. That's fine. Gonna do it anyway, so let's get started.
I started with racism, so let's delve into that a bit, because it's a perfect example of the difference between the two series. Star Trek was aired in the 60s, back when it was totally acceptable to hate black people. Nevertheless, it prominently featured a black woman in a high-level position. That alone would be impressive, but here's the best part: the character is not "the black comm officer." She's just the comm officer. There's no reference made to her skin color. Ever. Because in the twenty-third century, no one gives a shit. Uhura is smart, pretty, and competent. That she is also Swahili has literally almost no impact on her character in the series. That's a view of race we still haven't achieved, and this show was portraying it in the 1960s.
Compare that with Star Wars. In an era where racism is actually not ok, George Lucas decided that he needed what is essentially a blackface actor without the blackface, and stereotypes of Asians and Jews in his movies. I'm still struggling to understand why people paid to see Episodes II and III after that and why there was not a bigger uproar over this. This isn't just Hollywood whitewashing; this is active racism in one of the biggest film franchises of all time.
I use this example because it's a good illustration of what these stories represent and how they're written. Star Trek is a show about social issues, life, and the human condition. Star Wars is largely a standard hero story. Granted, there's nothing wrong with that at all, but there's also not much groundbreaking going on where the plot is concerned.
It's not just the message that makes Star Trek better, though. For one thing, the aliens in Star Trek are way more realistic.
You read that correctly. Before you bring up the scene with the Gorn, let me do it for you. If you've watched that episode, you know that the Gorn aren't just generic lizard creatures: they are people. They have a race and a culture and a set of technology different from that of the United Federation of Planets. Kirk recognizes this and refuses to kill his Gorn adversary, because he respects sentient life in any form. This is a far more complex view of alien races (and assuming they actually exist somewhere, probably a more accurate one) than you find in any Star Wars movie. Given info solely from the movies, describe any race in Star Wars other than humans. The lack of detail about literally any of them may astound you when you actually think about it.
The Vulcans in Star Trek may be only actors with putty on their ears, but the show delves quite deeply into their biology, culture, architecture, philosophy, and more. Their arid desert world and devotion to pure logic make the Vulcans seem way more alien to us than say, the Jawas or Gungans, because we know more about them and the differences between them and Terrans are based on culture, not appearance. So while the special effects in Star Wars are better, the aliens aren't nearly as complex, and are therefore actually less alien. Sure, Wookies are covered in hair, but from the movies we glean nothing about their culture, so we can't see what makes them all that alien, other than their simple physical appearance. Given this shallow level of distinction, it's actually not hard at all to see how racism seeped into George Lucas's pet project. (If you're still not convinced, consider that Vulcan customs are loosely based on ancient Judaic ones, and that an actual Jew had a hand in creating that. Now think of Watto. Enough said.)
Realism is a constant issue in Star Wars, though, especially when it comes to the portrayal of personal relationships. The actors in the old one (especially Rick Dekkard, who played a phenomenal Han Solo after a brief stint retiring replicants in the Temple of Doom) made it work, but the writing just isn't always there. Hell, some of the best lines of the original trilogy were ad-libbed by Indiana Jones, because that guy is just a fantastic actor in addition to being a damn good archeologist.
All joking aside, when you examine Star Wars and the underlying writing, you realize just how much people like Harrison Ford and Carrie Fischer saved the damn movies. Keep in mind that Lucas had far less control over the original trilogy. The newer trilogy is essentially his baby. He had total control over it the whole time. Look how that ended up. The acting is flat, the characters' emotions are often exaggerated to the point of being cartoonish, and the dialogue just sucks. There's really no other way to put it.
I'll give an example. Let's examine how love is portrayed in Star Trek and how it's portrayed in Star Wars. In an early episode of Star Trek, Kirk is betrayed by a woman he's fallen in love with. In fact, he's forced to actually kill her. Naturally, this tears him up pretty considerably, and the complex emotions are portrayed very very well. At the end of the episode, one of the bridge members asks him if he's alright. Instead of responding the question, Kirk brusquely orders the ship ahead at warp. That's how someone might actually react to having to kill a loved one, because it's awful and you probably wouldn't want to talk about it, but you'd still be visibly upset.
Compare this to the love story between Anakin and Padme. It's forced and a little creepy. Anakin is a volatile man with the emotions of a disturbed teenager. He hasn't seen Padme in ten years when he starts hitting on her (extremely badly). Yet somehow Padme falls in love with him based on nothing but a connection they had when he was ten years old and she was 18, even though her entire interaction with him as an adult consists of him being borderline abusive and massively creepy. At one point, he tells her he killed an entire village, including women and children. (Now if that doesn't get a girl hot, I don't know what does.) Yet somehow, Padme falls for this guy even though he's immature, disturbed, and actually a murderer. There's really no indication given, because Padme doesn't talk a whole lot, and when she does, she drones.
Given that Natalie Portman is actually a pretty funny and dynamic person when she interviews on talk shows and such and that she's done at least decent acting in other films, you kind of have to chalk up her terrible performance in Star Wars to bad directing and really bad writing. The love story isn't really all that romantic because Lucas essentially has the writing skills of a thirteen-year old boy.
Even if you took out all the bad writing, racism, and shallow portrayal of alien races, however, you're still left with one huge fundamental difference: Star Trek is based on an attainable and positive future. Star Wars is based on a dark and simplified past. Star Trek is what you want the future to be. Most of Earth's demographic problems are solved, the quality of life is awesome, the government hesitates to ever go to war and when it does it's usually pretty merciful unless directly attacked, and technology is ridiculously helpful, if somewhat quirky and occasionally problematic. The Federation has a past and a real character. It's a generally good organization with decent, skilled people, but still prone to the bickering and political infighting any such organization would have. Compare this to the Star Wars universe, set in a past a long way from us, where a rebel alliance whose origins and organization we don't know about are fighting an Empire that's, you know, bad, because they blow up planets and stuff. Star Trek is about the future of humanity, and it's a big, bright, positive, attainable future. Star Wars is about some stuff that happened "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." Frankly, why should we give a shit?
This is the main reason I strongly, strongly, prefer Star Trek. The future portrayed is a plausible one and you feel like you have stake in what happens. The characters are just so much more engaging and real, people with whom one can emotionally connect. That's why the 2009 iteration of Star Trek, which features TOS characters played by great actors, remains one of only two movies that can make me tear up. When I watch Star Wars, on the other hand, I'm usually wont to pick up a video game or book while I'm watching it, because it simply doesn't engage me the way Star Trek does.
I'll give Star Wars credit where credit is due. It was groundbreaking in the special effects department, and it got people into science fiction in a way Star Trek couldn't. The problem is that that's because Star Wars is essentially pop sci-fi. People who don't fully understand the potential power of the genre and never pick up a real work of science fiction still love Star Wars. And that's fine. But if we judge the series on an objective level, especially including the new trilogy, it's mediocre at best. That's why when Barack Obama confuses them, it hurts my inner geek. (And when I use the term, I mean it. There's a difference between real geekiness and just watching Doctor Who occasionally and calling yourself a nerd. That'll be the subject for another post, I'm sure.)
So no, Barack Obama. The Vulcans and the Jedi are not the same thing. Because while they're both fictional, one is the creation of a man who knew how to write and had more imagination in his pinky toe than most people have in their whole body and one is the daydream of a a man who writes like a thirteen-year old and happens to have a lot of cash. The only thing you have in common with geeks is that both have a tendency to use expensive remote-controlled shit. The difference is that one group doesn't use it to kill people. So please just go back to talking without saying anything, because frankly, that was much much better.
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