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Star Trek sucked and you hated it.. Seriously, admit it.

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Posted 17 August 2010 - 11:49 PM

Ok, I know there hasn't been a lot of activity here lately. On most boards I would go from that fact to the conclusion that it was no big deal that noone had posted a review of the JJ Abrams STAR TREK movie. Like, big deal, right? Noone posted a review of KNIGHT AND DAY either, so ... so what? Well, this what: I take it from the lack of gushing that you all felt just as disappointed, disheartened, disgusted and downright dissed as I felt when I saw that horrible horrible "film." You probably, many of you, hated it with an intense passion. This message isn't for you. Others among you walked out saying things like "well there was lots of action in it, they had character conflicts for a change, and that was cool, and well, most of the STAR TREK movies sucked anyway, so what's the big deal?"

Well I'll tell you.

1. Big budget movie, Used Car Salesman advertising. The marketing promised that this would not be "your father's STAR TREK," whatever that meant, and preview gushers promised that this was the film that would make Star Trek, finally, "cool." Ok. This is fucking insulting, so I walked in already annoyed. I will admit that before going into anything else: I walked into that movie expecting to hate it utterly. Many times in my life, particularly with STAR TREK IV, I have done this and have been pleasantly surprised. I am not stubborn when it comes to determining whether or not I like something. I can change and have changed my mind. So you should not take from my initial resistance any sort of predetermination. However I mention it in the interest of full disclosure: I expected to hate that movie from the way the filmmakers promised it would be nothing like the Star Trek tv series and series of films on which it was based. And the promise that early reviewers made, that the most successful franchise in the history of television would now suddenly and without any precedent become "cool." Classic Star Trek had been around for decades, had spawned multiple tv series, and had been endorsed by no less a public figure than Martin Luther King, Jr. Now the director of FELICITY promised to make it "cool." Oh I get it. You don't mean lasting cultural significance; you don't mean pop culture credibility; you mean tits and explosions. I'm gonna see tits and explosions, and maybe one or two characters talking all ironical and shit. Yipee. I was going to be watching TRANSFORMERS, but with characters named Kirk and Spock and Scotty and McCoy and Uhura and Sulu and Chekov. Those iconic characters shoehorned into a cookie-cutter bullshit action plot. I learned this from the MARKETING. From the shit that was supposed to make me WANT to watch the movie. This I took as a bad sign. This was the first Star Trek movie I didn't see on its opening weekend. I was in no big hurry.

2. Time travel fixes everything. All right. Everyone knew going in that they were "rebooting" the franchise. Everyone knew that we were going to see Kirk in his Academy days, and that the series of films was going to bear only a superficial resemblance to the original tv and movie series. We had already seen this sort of thing done a few times with the James Bond franchise, and by this point we'd already had about six different Batmen. So, no big deal: you make a movie with those characters; you give them those names; you put them on an adventure. Some errors will be made, such as having Chekov on the crew, when we all know he wasn't introduced until Season Two (this error was also made in WRATH OF KHAN, when Khan remembered him even though he hadn't been in the original tv episode. I guess he met him between scenes, like in the bar or something). But this is a reboot, and it doesn't need to match the original series' continuity. So ... these screenwriters made the biggest bonehead decision they could possibly have made. They decided that they wanted to do a reboot, to use the entire cast but in a different way, and yet still have it match continuity. They decided the way to do this was TIME TRAVEL. So Spock travels from the end of his life to a time when he was in his 20s, so that he can completely change everything and create a parallel universe where everything is exactly the same but different. Now instead of small errors in continuity popping up here and there and being forgiven by all but the most diligent nerd followers of the original tv show, instead the entire show is a giant continuity error, with the filmmakers visibly waving their hands in front of our faces while repeating the mantra "time travel fixes everything." Even though everything in these characters' lives is now completely different from before, they all end up in their exact same roles, on the exact same ship, only younger. A REBOOT could have just gone ahead and done this; this story, which has the burden of claiming to credibly fit into the continuity of the original series, is completely fucking ridiculous. It's like if you went back in time to when Hitler was in high school, and by changing a few details in his early life, he'd assume control of Germany a decade earlier, and he'd appoint exactly the same cabinet. Yes, I used a Hitler analogy; this annoyed me THAT much. I'm fine with these guys throwing continuity out the window; I liked it in CASINO ROYALE, and before it, GOLDENEYE. But you can't throw continuity out the window and then come up with a ridiculous scheme for claiming that you stayed true to continuity while doing it. That's madness.

Anyway, I'm not even sure this "parallel universe" idea works within the Star Trek idea of time travel. In "City on the Edge of Forever," did Kirk and Spock and Bones travel to an Alternate Earth past, in a parallel universe? So when they let Joan Collins die, have they just made this parallel universe identical to their own? When they return through the donut of time travel, are they meeting up with their original crew, or is this the crew of a parallel universe, one where everything is the same? That seems fishy; well hell, that episode was fishy anyway. So who cares about "City on the Edge of Forever." I just use it as an example of how Star Trek time travel doesn't seem to be about creating parallel universes. I think they just stuck time travel in here so they could claim they weren't restarting Star Trek, even though obviously they were.

3. The Villain Killed Kirk's Dad as Well as Spock's Mom. Seriously. So in the future, Eric Bana has a beef with Spock for not saving his planet from being destroyed. His motives for hatred are ambiguous, but whatever. Javert was a good villain in Les Miserables, and his raison d'etre was just as stupid as this guy's. I don't care about that. What bugs me is that somehow Spock's accident sends Eric Bana back in time 25 years more than it sends Spock. So Eric Bana immediately kills Kirk's dad and noone else, and then he sits and does NOTHING for 25 years. He never resupplies his ship. He never contacts any other planet. He never even tries to go to Romulus to warn them that their sun is going to go nova in about 70 years or so. He just sits there in space with his absolutely loyal crew for 25 years. 25 fucking years! This is a mining ship; why are these guys so god damned loyal to this guy? Why did he want to kill Kirk's dad? Why did he have nothing else to do while he waited for Spock, who apparently he knew was going to come through the wormhole eventually. Why did he know that Is this something that happens in the Star Trek universe, wormholes that destroy entire planets also sometimes send spaceships back in time 25 years apart. Ah, fuck it. 25 years later, he kills Spock's mom, so Kirk and Spock bond together despite their differences and then they get him. That's the plot of this movie: a spaceship carrying some kind of indestructible mining drill goes back in time about 70 years and another spaceship goes back only 45. The one that goes back 70 is used to kill the father of the 45-year traveler's best friend, but in the past. Then the past versions of the 45-year traveler and the son of the victim of the 70-year traveler bond over killing the bad 70-year traveler. That's the plot of this movie. Fuck my life; I can't believe I watched this thing.

4. Kirk has a boner for everyone. Ha ha. A running gag in Star Trek lore is that Kirk had sex with lots of alien women. Eddie Murphy did a bit on it; I think a lot of people did bits on it. So these guys, who admit they never watched Star Trek, take this to mean that Kirk is constantly on the prowl, at the danger of discipline. I can't state this too carefully: Kirk never made a play for a crew member. The original series was far more in tune with naval discipline that any of its franchises, so I understand if this detail was forgotten. While the writers of the various spin-offs had no trouble letting senior officers bone one another, this never happened in Star Trek. This is a minor point, and if they wanted to make "horny Kirk" a running gag in a better movie, it wouldn't have bothered me. But in this one it's just another galling indication that this is a movie made by guys who openly admitted and advertised that they never watched Star Trek, they didn't like Star Trek, and that their goal was "to make Star Trek cool." To make it cool by cracking jokes about weaknesses you believe may have been in the original. Oooooookay.

5. They have an Orion girl in it and she’s horny for Kirk. See above.

6. They have a guy in a red shirt die doing something stupid, for comic relief. Also, Sulu fences. See above.

7. There's a Tribble in it. See above.

8. Kobiyashi Maru. I'd like to just say "again, see above," but this deserves a small rant. The Kobiayshi Maru test, and Kirk's refusal to fail at it, was a significant story element in THE WRATH OF KHAN. Note I say it's a STORY element and not a PLOT element. The PLOT is just the stuff that happens and the order in which it happened. In terms of that, the test has almost no significance to WRTAH OF KHAN. But in terms of STORY, which is everything, from the stuff that happens to what it means to the characters, to character development and growth, etc, in terms of STORY, the Kobiayashi Maru test is the centre of WRATH OF KHAN. This one element ties together everything that is going on between all of the characters in the movie. In STAR TREK: THE PIECE OF SHIT "REBOOT," the Kobiayashi Maru test is written in as a silly sight gag, with Kirk chewing on an apple while he's playing at it. It has no importance other than to remind people that the filmmakers may have heard of other Star Trek movies, so they thought they should reference one. Like all of the Bond sight gags squeezed nto DIE ANOTHER DAY, this make the reboot movie worse. It did not enhance it. Adding the detail that the test was now written by Spock himself made it even more ridiculous. So Spock's a teacher at an officer training academy, one which gives command grade testing to ensign candidates, and in this timeline he meets Kirk when Kirk cheated on his test? Should I believe that in the original timeline they met in exactly the same way, but then Kirk went on to assume a Midshipman role on a ship, then later Ensign, and later Lieutenant Junior Grade, then Lieutenant Senior Grade, and later Lieutenant Commander, and Commander, and then Captain, serving on several different ships and under different Captains (as referenced in episodes of the original series), in a career parallel to Spock's, before they ended up serving on a ship with the exact same name as the one the two serve on in the reboot story? All of this is just stupid. Stupid like Han Solo being raised to the rank of General? Yes. It is exactly that stupid. I've gone a bit afield from the Kobiyashi Maru rant, though, so let me get back to it. Having that test in this movie served no purpose in terms of STORY. It was no more than a gag, like sticking Boba Fett into the rerelease of STAR WARS.

9. It's just a dumb revenge movie. Honestly, everyone who says "It had good action and stuff" is ignoring that the story is about a guy who gets mad at another guy for failing to save his planet, so when he goes BACK IN TIME, all he can think to do is to kill the guy who failed to save his planet. Not destroyed it; failed to save it. And he doesn't kill him in the past; he waits for him to come back in time, even though he has no reason to know he's ever going to. What if Spock's ship went FURTHER back in time, like a thousand years, and he's already dead? Never mind; Eric Bana's agent sent him a copy of the script, so he knew if he jus sat there and did nothing, eventually old Spock would show up and then he could get his revenge by destroying Vulcan and making him watch. This is what he waited 25 years to do, to destroy Vulcan and to make Spock watch. Oh, and then to destroy Earth. ????? Gotta do that. Wouldn't be an adventure movie where a little mining ship bypasses all of Vulcan's planetary defenses to satisfy a petty revenge kick that a villain had with a guy from that planet, if he didn't then inexplicably need also to destroy Earth! Gotta have him try to destroy Earth, or who would care? Yup, that's it. So Eric Bana's goal is to destroy Vulcan while Spock watches, and then to destroy Earth, even though he thinks Spock is exiled in a cave on a dead planet and will never know he's destroyed Earth. WHEN IN YOUR PLAN ARE YOU GOING TO SAVE ROMULUS? YOU FUCKING RETARD! Yeah, whatever.

10. The "plot" is just one dumb action scene after another. I'm trying to forget that the movie started with Kirk's dad being killed by the eventual villain of the film. So for me, the film opens with an adolescent Kirk driving a muscle car through Iowa while listening to the Beastie Boys. Jesus. I can’t imagine an adolescent kid TODAY listening to The Beastie Boys, but apparently there's a Jewish rap revival in the 23rd century. In the 23rd Century. Also, is there a canyon like that in Iowa? Should I care about this? Or should I just roll ahead to the bar fight? So in this alternate timeline, Kirk is a burnout, but Chris Pike sees potential and talks him into Officer training after seeing him get into a dumb bar fight with a bunch of guys who don't have the military discipline necessary to avoid bullying strangers in bars. Yeah whatever. Then Kirk goes to school and he sneaks on the Enterprise by taking a pill that makes his hands big. Then he's shuttled sown to a planet where he's chased by a giant monster in the snow, which he outruns despite it living on that planet and probably hunting things all the time, and him just panicking and falling down a lot. Then he meets Spock in a cave on a planet roughly the size of Earth. The he beams back onto the Enterprise and Scotty is trapped in the chocolate fountain from Willy Wonka because the last scene had too much talking but it's too early to bring the villain back. Then they have to skydive onto a giant drill and fight guys who apparently live in it, because I guess this drill is immune to missiles but it's not immune to guys jumping on it. But also even though they can beam onto ships moving faster than light they cant beam onto a stationary drill that's digging into the Earth after waltzing past all of Earth's planetary defenses and probably a fleet of spaceships. Then Kirk and some people beam onto Eric Bana's ship and fistfight a bunch of fiercely loyal abd probably schizophrenic loonies who have been cooped up together for 25 years with no sense of purpose, except to do whatever their captain says, and their captain wants to kill a guy that he stranded somewhere on another planet, so let's attack Earth now, cause he said so. Then they use the magic red stuff to make a new black hole and it either destroys Eric Bana or it sends him back in time, depending on what the next movie wants.

11. The next movie will have Khan in it.

12. Uhura offers Spock a blow job. Yup; that made its way into Star Trek.

13. People get appointed to senior officer ranks just because they happen to be standing next to ship's captain when something needs to get done. Ok, the future may be different, but in the original series, Star Fleet fairly closely resembled the US Navy. So, no. A Captain could really like someone, and he could recommend a promotion, but it would still need to go up the chain of command. In this movie, Pike promotes everyone to the rank they held ten years or so later in the universe we know. Apparently noone blinks, and Kirk assumes command of the Enterprise after only a couple of years of Officer school and about a week of active duty. Meanwhile Uhura becomes Senior Communications Officer because she knows a couple of words in an obscure language. And this is on a ship that has a computer that translates languages for you.

14. Kirk nicknames McCoy "Bones" based on something he says about his recent divorce. In the original series, it's clear that "Bones" is short for "sawbones," a slang term for a surgeon. So, the writers didn’t understand this, and noone involved with the production ever questioned them, so I have to contend with the idea that in a parallel universe Kirk come up with the exact same nickname for one of his closest friends, but for a completely different reason. I know, this is a small beef, but again it's evidence of the effort put into the writing of this movie. Tits and explosions people! Tits and explosions!

15. Leonard Nimoy is in it. I know I've complained enough already about how time travel was thrown in here to pretend that this movie is a part of the original Trek continuity, but I think it was also put in here just so they could have Leonard Nimoy in it. Ok, we have a new actor playing Spock, but we got Leonard Nimoy too! Isn't that awesome? Fanboy squee! Folks who didn't even like Star Trek but watched this anyway shrug! Fucking Christ.


That's enough for now.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 21 August 2010 - 04:04 PM

"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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Posted 19 August 2010 - 02:43 PM

Well Civ, that was an exhaustive summary.

And yes, you are probably right about all.

I can see now what is MY problem with the "film". I simply never cared much about original series. Never watched as a kid and only started watching TGN around mid nineties and Kirk, Spock and some other members of the crew to me are just a reference or annoying presence (Scotty in Relics, I believe) Once you never establish the connection with the original, you just dont't care about flagrant lack of continuity, because the basic facts are just not there. Uhura - having hots for Spock - well, to me means very little if anything.
The rest - I believe it is perhaps on par with the TNG movies, where there are time travel and dumb revenge plots galore.

However, it is much easier for me to understand why I hate the TNG films - because I like the original characters and it pisses me no end that they made Troi a dumb broad, Picard a crazy bloodthirsty maniac, WOrf and Data are comic reliefs and RIker forgets how to fly a ship.

The producers of STAR TREK also could not care less about the characters or story - what mattered was the funky, futuristic look. I can imagine the endless discussion how to make ships interiors and uniforms make look to resemble originals and yet do not seem ridiculous.


good thing is, your review made me wish to see the original star trek films once again, Wrath of Khan in particular.

Thanks a lot, anyway, it made for an interesting read :)

Off TOpic- I hated the new Robin Hood film. OMG, how I hated it. And I waited for this load of crap almost two years with great anticipation. What disappointment.
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Posted 19 August 2010 - 10:28 PM

Yeah well again, I don;t really care that much about the continuity; what I care about is how they decided to break it while telling us they were not breaking it. Like, if you change 25 years of people's lives, everything will turn out exactly the same but with only very subtle differences. Even THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT was smarter than this piece of shit. I SAID IT! THE BUTTERFLY effect is better science fiction than STAR TREK. Well ... at least STAR TREK is "cool."

Oh, and JJ Abrams was also the Producer/Writer of LOST and FELICITY, the former which makes no sense and the latter of which ended with time travel fixing everything. Expect MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: IV to have time travel in it.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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Posted 22 August 2010 - 07:35 PM

I watched it because I like Simon Pegg. I thought it was one of those odd films where, even though there's lots of stuff going on all the time, nothing seems to happen with any point to it.
It might even be worse than 'AOTC', and that's low enough.
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Posted 23 August 2010 - 02:15 PM

First off
Worse than AOTC!?!?!?!?!
Wow . . .Just wow

Okay im just gonna come out and say it
i didnt mind the movie, but i'll chalk that up to the fact
that i never actually watched an episode of the original Star Trek until after i saw the movie.

I understand why Civ was really all ranty over the reboot
and though to some it is sacrilege, people like me mostly thought
"cool, now i dont have to know all the intricacies of the past to i'll understand".

I'll admit usually im not a fan of the 'lets appeal to the masses" outlook
but this time it works in JJ's favour.

Afterall this is was the first perhaps by the second
(like X2 and Spidey 2) they will have worked out all the kinks

Also Felicity had its moments, Lost made itself irrelevant in the last episodes
(now THAT was a waste of my time)and i can handle time travel in Mission Impossible 4
if they get rid of the mask making machine and voice alternator thing

Madam C
I also hated Robin Hood. Truly it was mistitled
and damn near unwatchable
MovieBob Review of Robin Hood

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Posted 25 August 2010 - 12:59 AM

Jade: Again, they could have done their "reboot" and NOT involved time travel, or the pretence that they were adhering to continuity. It's not the reboot that I disliked, but their method of getting there.

Also, ALL of the action sucked. JJ seemed to think he was making DIE HARD. He was not making DIE HARD. I honestly don't understand how anyone could like this at all without having seen any original TREK*, because the action was all silly and motivated by a dumb story. At least if you sorta liked it and also had seen other TREK stuff, I could imagine you just liked the characters and were happy to see them doing more stuff. Which was, I thought, the idea behind the reboot. Minus the stupid time travel and asinine time-travel revenge plot.

**I also don't understand how anyone could like it who had seen (and liked) the original TREK. So, double-edged sword.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 26 August 2010 - 03:03 AM

"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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Posted 25 August 2010 - 07:24 AM

Honestly, I'm actually surprised to see you go to such lengths here... this movie was a pure joke. Bad actors, bad story, bad action, bad everything. Nothing really made any sense and I'd hate to see any more movies or series or whatever coming from this reboot.


Pff, Sylar playing dress-up as Spock, how queer.

Also: Haha, called the Kobayashi Maru rehash! When even I can predict something like that, you know that you've hired some really bad writers. Let's all hope that there is a god and that he's a bad writer as well, because I've also predicted me being filthy rich by dawn.

This post has been edited by Gobbler: 25 August 2010 - 07:25 AM

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Posted 25 August 2010 - 05:51 PM

Being a person who owns all seven seasons of Star Trek TNG and five season of Star Trek DS9, I also found this movie to be despicable. I agree with nearly everything you said, Civilian #2. One of the biggest things that annoyed me was how Kirk went from a cadet (who was likely to be expelled) to a captain by the end of the movie. And not only did he become a captain, he became captain of the Federation flagship! I understand he helped save Earth and everything, but come on...there's no way that is believable.

It's also totally unrealistic how the entire original crew came together throughout the span of the movie. How can Sulu and Chekov already be officers before Kirk even became an ensign? It doesn't make any sense...
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Posted 27 August 2010 - 02:02 AM

Yikes, I'm glad I didn't see this one. I had no clue this film would touch on time travel, a concept I hate with every fibre of my being. I figured it would be a corny flick that re-introduced the old characters in a new CG environment. I was also half expecting the classic cast to come back for cameos. Time travel is such a stupid concept because it opens up multiple cans of worms, so much that you can't ignore it. I can ignore it when Stallone or Van Damme would run across a field with a glock, off-aiming and hitting targets whose growing body count far outnumbered the capacity of the ammo clip. I can accept that; these men are so well trained they can shoot without aiming or thinking and the bad guys are so inept they couldn't hit the back side of a barn at point blank. WHATEVER.

Time travel asks me to suspend my disbelief to the point of absurdity. Why didn't Bana go back to Kirk's birth to kill him as a baby (didn't Austin Powers touch on this?) What about cause and effect? What about the idea that, if it were possible, every single person would attempt to try do it, or at least every person with the means. The fabric of reality would change every 15 seconds and ultimately be torn to shit since boat loads of people would be going back in forth through time trying to fuck women, get rich, and kill people they don't like in the present. And what about going forward, the future? This is even more stupid since the future can only be played out in the present, and then you'd have multiple endings or whatever. It's so fucking dumb it hurts to make sense of it. The time travel concept is bigger than the story itself, it's bigger than Captain Kirk or Spock or the USS enterprise. The idea that this technology is open to the Star Trek Universe, for a short period of time (span of this film), and then cast to the way side trivializes how important it is, which I guess is a good thing since if the viewer was forced to take it seriously, then Star Trek would be in the corner with a can of paint.
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Posted 29 August 2010 - 05:46 AM

Well, yeah. At least in this one they made the time travel event an unrepeatable accident, but Star Trek has used time travel more than once. Generally they make it unrepeatable, so the situations you describe above aren't problematic; however in one of the movies it was something they did deliberately. I guess since that one was a comedy, and they did pay lip service to the idea that what they were doing was dangerous, I can go along with it, sorta.

My issue with the accidental time travel in this one is that it's just the writers taking what they perceive to be a story problem and fixing it in the most ham-handed way they could imagine.
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Posted 31 August 2010 - 12:01 AM

I had a sleeples last night, so I decided to watch again both Star Trek Rebot and Wrath of Khan (well, bits of it).

I have to say, it is difficult for a person who never saw one single episode of ST Original Series to totally hate STR.
Well, for starters, the flick just never takes itself seriously. It is like watching a cartoon - I realise that cartoons are unrealistic but it does not prevent me from watching and enjoying them (like the gig when a charaters runs towards a cliff or a brigde than ends and for several stepc continues to run horizontally, as if the bridge had been there, but then realizes it is not a falls vertically down - always made me wonder why, if it was possible to run horizontally in the air in the first place, not try just a little harder and make it to safety?)

Wrath of Khan and all other stuff I saw (ST:TNG and all ST TNG films) takes itself sooo seriously, I suppose it is Gene Roddenberry touch (ever saw the Andromeda series? - gosh - that is a fine piece of "moralistic" TV).

So, ok, nothing made sense in STR- but also it didn't in Lost and yet people continued to watch is, me included. Only, if you expected that story holds water together in the end, you end up disappointed. I feld mightly cheated while forcing myself to watch season 6 - I just could not believe that even is season six they continued to add more tangled plots and not very far into the series I knew they will never explain the stuff from the beginning, apparently, they just lied that they had it all planned.

Maybe with STR producers/writers were just as lazy? They perhaps assumed that some people like me never saw original Series, and knew Kirk only as a reference in other Star Trek stuff or even popular culture. If so, who would care about details? Let's make a lot of flashing lights on board of ships, lots of explosions, characters altered so they are no longer boooring, throw in a couple of references for the true buffs and voila - it will be just as successfull as Lost. A few disgruntled fans do not make a box office failutre. Ands sadly, they were right.
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Posted 31 August 2010 - 10:32 PM

I can't tell what you mean in your review MC. I am not going to go oout on any limbs here; I am not going to create any analogies about say, what would happen in a filmmaker were to make a LOTR reboot and make Aragorn a teenager with an angsty backstory. I honestly don;t take Star Trek seriously enough for absolutely relevant yet strained analogies.

My complaint with the reboot, apart from it being a bunch of nonsense that tried also very earnestly to tie itself into the oiginal series with some insane handwaving about parallel universes and black holes, and apart from it being a shitty boobs and bombs movie, was in fact that it was boring. It had no story. It just had a bunch of action scenes tied together to satisfy a cookie-cutter revenge/buddy picture. It was Lethal Weapon, but in space, and without any of the wit.

Yes, the makers were hoping that the audience for the original material had aged out, but that another generation might be ready to see what they figured was the same sort of thing, but for younger people. So I guess they figured that all of the faux-military stuff like discipline and duty - there are at least three episodes in the original series that involve a character on trial for misconduct - was boring and that what kids really wanted was a crazy guy who wanted to blow shit up. Even Khan was not so kooky: sure, he was hell-bent on destroying Kirk, but he didn't sit in space for 25 years waiting to do it. He acted immediately when he got a ship. I know WOK has some glaring errors, but they're simple errors in continuity. WOK holds true to its character story, and for that it works. The reboot has no character story, and it may as well not have any continuity, since it;s an impossible sequence of coincidences and integral breaches of naval discipline. So basically you were asked to enjoy it for the same reason you hated TRANSFORMERS: it was stupid and it had no story, but man them tits was awesome, and look at the 'splosions!
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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Posted 01 September 2010 - 04:08 AM

Perfect analogy, methinks - and oh boy, don't get me started on Transformers. Not even 'dem titties made me want to watch it in full.

Well, that being said, I never really watched the series way back too because... yeah because it was already boringly stupid back then. The toys were cool though, mainly because I didn't get them.

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Posted 03 September 2010 - 10:12 AM

Look, I am not defending the stupid flick. I am just saying that most people will enjoy it and the cognoscenti in their forties who care about the original series do not exactly make the box office success these days. And this is why JJ Abrams made the schlock. Not even as a homage. Just something to milk. And yes, analogy with Transformers is perfectly valid.

AND! Redlettermedia made Plinkett review of Start Trek - I am about to see it now! It will be mightly interesting if Mike Stoklasa made the same points as our very own Mike :)
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Posted 04 September 2010 - 03:27 PM

Yup, looks like he did. With the exception that he allowed for the limitations as though they were not self-imposed, and he appears to have liked the film. He acknowledges the numerous bits of nonsense along with story errors (not continuity errors; remember I don't care about that) and says "meh, Star Trek's done; this isn't for Star Trek fans. This is just a dumb space movie with a marketable name." And he likes it, which I find surprising.

I really like his look at the distance between the Klingon Empire and Vulcan, to point out how ridiculous it is that one phenomenon affected only those two, and his curiosity about what sort of supernova could destroy an entire galaxy. "Do these guys even know how far apart stars are?"
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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