By Roger Nygard, 1997.
Documentary, hosted by Denise Crosby and featuring an array of Star Trek stars and fans.
Rating: 9/10, 8/10.
I love Star Trek. Let’s just get that out in the open. Love it, always have, and I am not ashamed. I’m rather disappointed with the Star Trek people recently, what with first Voyager, then Insurrection, then Enterprise, and then Nemesis, which I haven’t even bothered seeing yet. But in its glory days (which I would argue lasted right up to the end of Deep Space Nine), it really had something great going. So when I rented Trekkies, I was super excited. And I was not disappointed.
The movie focuses mostly on a few specific trekkies individually. There’s the fifteen year old boy who has been working on turning a van into a replica of an original series shuttlecraft so he can drive it when he turns sixteen. There’s the dentist who has decked out his office entirely in Star Trek décor, including having his nurses dress in Starfleet uniforms. There’s the woman who is frighteningly obsessed with Brent Spiner (who played Data) and calls herself a "Spinerfem." All proudly show off their collections of Trek memorabilia. As they do, Trekkies reveals its genius as a documentary: the trekkies themselves are fascinated by their collections (the Spinerfem has a creepily well-organized photo album of nearly identical photos of Brent Spiner speaking at conventions; one man shows schematics of a Romulan cloaking device he’s made, which he "thinks" he can "modify for a Federation starship"), but Nygard and his camera are much more interested in their faces and their body language as they obsess. And, yes, it is interesting. Fascinating, even.
A key element in the goodness of this documentary is that, while it shows the sometimes frightening excess of the fans (like in the bit where the dentist and his wife talk about how sometimes they roleplay, with him playing Tasha Yar and her playing Data, and how it helps their relationship, as Denise Crosby—who played Yar—backs away in terror), it never seems that Nygard feels superior to them. The trekkies are weird, hilarious, scary, and sometimes pathetic, yes, but this is affectionate more than it is mocking. The movie opens with the proud statement that "trekkie" is the only fan-name that has an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. We get the feeling that Nygard is just like the obsessive fans he’s showing us, only with perhaps more of an ability to step back and see how strange it all is.
One more note: I often recommend this movie to friends who are not fond of Star Trek themselves, and they shy away, thinking that they have to like or at least know something about the shows to like the documentary. This is not true. I’ve watched it a couple times, with a wide variety of people, ranging from fans to casual watchers to people who’ve never seen any kind of Star Trek to people who hate it, and they’ve all enjoyed it. So regardless, watch away.