Lotd2242

It's too bad they couldn't have left it where it was in DS9 with Worf's "we don't discuss it" quip.

It's difficult to tell really. It's not just the loss of the ships and the resources the entire Vulcan system normally provides, but also the resulting chaos. Vulcan was always a keystone of the Federation, so if you abruptly yank that out, you're going to throw the Federation leadership into disarray. Moreover, if Earth is in fact being affected by the black hole, they need to focus a substantial portion of their resources to finding a way to deal with it. As far as Nero, he makes clear he's separate from the Romulans, but they neglected to give any indication as to what he spent 25 years doing. He could've spent the entire time secretly working to assist the Romulan Empire's development for all we know. He may have spent it sitting in one spot waiting to see Spock show up. I can't speak for anyone else, but I wasn't planning to see it at all. After three days of listening to people tell me how it was totally not what the trailers and plot details implied and was actually a great adaptation and a fantastic movie, I figured I might as well take a chance on it.

It's kind of beyond weakness though. They really should cease to exist after this movie, especially if Nero took the time in his 25 year wait to go drop off some of his advanced weaponry on Romulus. One would also expect the quick destruction of the Enterprise as she is overwhelmed trying to stave off the invasion pretty much by herself.

This is something that troubled me about the end of the movie. The Federation has lost a key member planet and member race, all of their home-based ships save one, an entire generation of cadets, and Earth now has a massive singularity sitting outside its doorstep. The rest of the fleet is engaged in some other war with somebody (Klingons?) This should, by all rights, leave the Federation in chaos and wide open to assault from every major power in the viscinity. One would expect the Romulans to quickly capitalize on the situation and conquer it outright.

Because Pon Farr is a Vulcan mating urge that if not satisfied essentially results in insanity. It's made pretty clear that by the time the fight was on, Spock did not know what he was doing at all. As soon as he's "killed" Kirk, the Pon Farr subsides and Spock returns to his controlled self. The only true emotional outburst Spock shows is his surprise and joy at seeing Kirk alive, but even that lasts all of a half-second. Whether or not that can be attributed to the Pon Farr cooldown is not stated. Still, it's a far cry from what Spock does in the movie. If he had just slugged Kirk, it would've made sense in the context of that character, but he flew into a homicidal rage and nearly choked him to death on the bridge of the ship.

I'm not sure how a sudden yet entirely telegraphed homicidal outburst is more interesting than watching a character who has spent his whole life learning to suppress his emotion struggle to maintain his control in the face of an overwhelming series of emotional events. Plus, you weaken Kirk this way. Kirk has no reason to intentionally crack Spock other than Future Spock's say so, particularly in lieu of the fact that Spock is totally in the right to head for the fleet. They could have at least given Kirk an alternative plan that was risky, but possible, as opposed to a suicide charge on Nero's ship. That reminds me of something else that bothered me. Why would Spock stand there and listen to Kirk mouthing off at all? He doesn't need Kirk to get the information since Scotty was right there and far more responsive to questions. You'd think he'd either throw Kirk off the ship again or have him hauled off to the brig as soon as he refused to answer his question. That would be the logical thing to do, and until Kirk's "yo momma!" Spock is still apparently able to think logically. I edited the quote just to save some space. It's out of the blue because Pike has no justification for giving a cadet the First Officer position. Leader of the away team, fine I'll buy that. He could've done that without promoting Kirk a single rank though. I'm not even sure he's within his rights to promote Kirk at all since Kirk is not in Pike's chain of command given he's still a cadet, a suspended one at that, and doesn't belong on the ship. Kirk's essentially a civilian. Two words: Pon Farr.

You could tell they had no idea how to get him in command the moment Pike promotes him to First Officer out of the blue. Still, the whole thing would've worked a lot better if Spock actually was emotionally compromised by the events of the film. Until the violent rage moment, Spock is acting perfectly rationally and taking the proper course of action. Instead, they should have had Spock choose to just chase after Nero under some flimsy pretense to cover a building desire for revenge. At which point Kirk can object to the suicidal mission, get thrown off the ship in an escalation of Spock's wrath, and as such later when Kirk provokes Spock it would make more sense that he'd lose it. It also would make Kirk's interference meaningful since he would be doing it for some tangible reason, rather than his Destiny to be in command requiring it.

Did they have a plan to destroy it? I honestly don't remember. I thought the entirety of their plan was to beam over where Spock was going to go looking for the red matter and Kirk was going to go get Pike.

It also happened to be a result of an incurable Vulcan disease. I can understand that rationale, but the problem is that Kirk does not really do any of that. His act of bringing them together is basically to sit in the chair and tell them they're going to suicidally attack Nero. It's not as though Spock did not have that idea, more that Spock acted correctly realizing that his ship was no match for Nero's. Classic Kirk makes much more sense as captain because he is a master tactician with a knack for coming up with clever, last-minute strategies to save the day that nobody else thought of. He was also no slouch in engineering, piloting, medicine, combat, or diplomacy and could jump into any role pretty effectively. What could've really distinguished New Kirk as a leader worthy of the captain's chair would've been to recognize that they could hide at Saturn and beam something onto Nero's ship to give them the advantage and convince Spock and the rest of the crew to do it, rather than throwing a tantrum on the bridge. Even you do give Kirk the credit, I don't see how it gets him promoted to captain of the flagship of the Federation though. Maybe off of academic suspension or possibly captain/first officer of a little ship on which to cut his teeth.

Not true. They would've died before Spock had the opportunity to make the decision had not Nero recognized the name of the ship, which would've been less likely if they appeared with the rest of the fleet since he would be too busy shooting everything to look closely. Plus he wouldn't care about the name of the ship without the possibility of Spock being on board. Then, if it weren't for Future Spock, Kirk would've died on the ice planet, or at least would've been stuck there slowly freezing to death while Spock proceeded to the Laurentian system anyway. So it's really all Spock. Come to think of it, I don't think Kirk does one right thing the whole movie, and takes lots of actions that should ultimately prevent him from getting any kind of promotion. He spends pretty much the entire movie making bad decisions and nearly getting himself and others killed for no reason.

No, they would've died in the trap set by the Romulans if Sulu had taken the e-brake off before trying to go to warp. They're still debating Kirk's warning even as they come out of warp into the debris field. They probably still would've died if Nero hadn't caught a glimpse of the name of the ship and remembered Spock might be on it and stopped shooting at them.

That was all Spock. One of the things I wondered is why Kirk gets the credit? Future Spock gave him the ideas, New Scotty did the beaming, New Chekov came up with the hide in the rings bit, and New Spock flew Future Spock's ship to do all the drill breaking and Nero ship-killing.

I think if Billy Joel were to see this thread, he would respond by singing Why Should I Worry? from Disney's Oliver & Company. Speaking of him being a dick, I once saw him give some performance for a college or whatever on Bravo and the man needed sheet music to play Piano Man...

I'm wondering if the second movie will beat Cryptic's Star Trek MMO to release. The MMO sounds interesting in concept, but I don't know how well it will work in practice. They've decided to take the "fast-forward 100 years" style approach with the player as a ship's captain. Apparently there will be real-time space combat as well as away missions to planets and such, with customizable ships and crews and races. They've also had events in the timeline mess up relations with the Klingons so that the Federation and the Klingons are at war.

That could be a possibility. The irony is that the most panned Star Trek series is the only one that remains unscathed by the timeline change.

It has been a discussion between "all of us" on the film. You don't see me randomly picking new people posting in favor of the movie and saying "you're totally wrong; this movie blows ass." Some people have made various assertions and addressed me directly with them, including you. Since I disagreed, I responded with my difference of opinion when they raised points that were worth discussing. I posted my negative review in one post, people disputed my view directly to me, and I gave them the respect of a response where appropriate. I'm not stopping you from discussing the hotness of the green chick despite being perplexed that they managed to find the one Orion slave girl in the galaxy who was not a slave in the movie. Or from moving the discussion in any other direction. So stop complaining that I'm the one beating a dead horse because everybody in the thread has their own reason for why I'm wrong and chooses to address me specifically with it rather than simply state that/what they liked about the movie or move on to something else.

Except that I disagree that it is a Star Trek movie beyond the name. It's not just that the other movies are better, which for the most part they are, it's also that this movie essentially dumps everything that was good about the Star Trek franchise simply because the people who made it did not want to conform to that universe. If you don't want to be bound by that franchise's universe, then don't use it. That would be the case if the movie remained anywhere near the original, but this does not. We've all heard remixes that stray so far from their source that you can barely tell they're connected, some of which that start to sound like something else. And like I said, if you think "classic" Trek is so broken that you have to fundamentally alter all the characters and the universe in which they live in order to make it work, why bother? Saying there's too much canon to worry about is a pathetic excuse to write their own movie and use the brand name to get people to see it, when it would otherwise be ignored. Hell, if you're going to change everything, at least do it for something more than some cookie cutter rebel without a cause stumbles into his Destiny by besting some incompetent revenge-bent villain who happens to have some superweapon plot. If you're going to turn Kirk into an obnoxious prick, at least do something original and have him refuse Pike's offer outright. Go somewhere with the idea that not having a father figure could affect someone so much that whereas before they were concerned with duty and honor that in this universe, they'd just as soon see the world burn. Make it a battle for Kirk's soul as much as anything. Better yet, do the reverse. Stick to the optimism and idealism that Star Trek always embodied and make Kirk grow up to be exactly the man we knew despite a broken home and a broken universe. Make Nero so bent that he spends 25 years scattering the TOS crew to the wind because he wants them to live pathetic unfulfilled lives wishing for something better, but because of Future Spock and the people that they are, he just can't seem to succeed until it comes to a head where he decides "fuck it all" and decides to just destroy as much of what they loved as he can. Of course if they really had balls, they would have done a true prequel and conformed to the universe as we knew it, but I know that's asking way too much of Hollywood. Yes, my opinion differs, and I'm perfectly within my rights to argue for it, just as you are for yours.

It does change its quality. From a general filmmaking standpoint, it's mediocre. Then the title says, "This is also Star Trek." Well, if it gets everything wrong about Star Trek, it's obviously going to lose points for that. It would be like if I hired you to remix the main theme of Chrono Trigger and you gave me Legend of Zelda. The remix may not suck from a musical standpoint, but it isn't what I paid for. I don't know about you, but most people are going to be annoyed they didn't get what they paid for even if what they get is not horridly bad. Or perhaps a better way to put it would be if a teacher assigned you to write an essay on Lord of the Rings and you wrote one on A Christmas Carol. Are you still going to going to get an "A" because your spelling and grammar are passable even though you got the topic wrong? Even still, "mildly entertaining" is not "fucking awesome! go see it!" as seems to be the general sentiment.

That's fine. Perhaps you understand my vehement debate against the awesomeness of this movie considering your reaction to even the potential implication that I thought Transformers sucked. And just to be clear, I don't hate the Star Trek movie. I just consider it a pretty forgettable generic action SciFi flick with the Star Trek label stamped on it, which is more or less what I expected to see when I went in. If it didn't have that label, I would've mildly enjoyed it, laughed about the laughable plot, scoffed at the bad science, and promptly forgotten about it until it showed up on some cable network in a year or two.

Most of them hate on it for bad dialogue, plot holes, not having enough talking from the giant truck robots, and the giant truck robots not being the same giant trucks they were in the 80s cartoon. That last one is probably the oddest one considering they constantly added new/changed the giant truck robots to sell more toys throughout every Transformers property, why would the movie not change some of the giant truck robots so they could sell new toys?

So you basically told me to shut up because you thought I was hating on Transformers? Also, something I find highly amusing is that so many people I've heard talk about how they loved this movie (Star Trek) absolutely hated Transformers, which is ironic considering they're the same style containing the same problems, most of which are exacerbated in Star Trek. I guess people just had such ridiculously low expectations and were so desperate to see something with the Star Trek label after so many years that getting a decent movie with decent acting was enough. I suppose if that and the people who loved it for being generic action movie translates into a new TV series that is more like old-school Star Trek, it'll be worth it. I'm not sure where they intend to go with this universe either way though. The Federation should, by all rights, be thrown into utter chaos as a result of the destruction of such an important planet and the near extinction of a founding race. An entire fleet of new ships full of a generation of new cadets are wiped out. They've got two black holes affecting space travel in the heart of the Federation, one of which is quite possibly large enough and close enough to affect Earth itself. This would be the perfect opportunity for every major power in the galaxy to just swoop on in and conquer them. At the very least, Kirk & Co. will have to spend their time doing patrol duty instead of exploring.

Sinewav responded to something I said and I disagreed with the assertions made. Sorry if that bothers everyone because I apparently happen to be the only person in the world who did not like this movie for any number of reasons both directly relating to Star Trek and not. I liked Transformers. That was the perfect kind of movie for Michael Bay' style. It's giant toy robots fighting. There isn't much there in the first place. I said before there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that Star Trek has never been that kind of thing, and even Transformers had fewer plot holes.

I do not take exception with the quality of the acting. The new actors did fine with what they were given, but their characters do not really behave like their originals, save maybe McCoy. They are instead the same generic templates we see all over the place, the rebel without a cause, the conflicted mama's boy, the token hot chick love interest, the loud-mouthed comic relief... That is more a problem with direction and writing. I don't think new life has been breathed into Star Trek by this movie so much as its corpse has been reanimated, given some makeup, and sent out to eat brains. I think one of the main reasons Enterprise (and the end of Voyager) were such abysmal failures is that they were trying to shift into being an action series. Yeah that's fun stuff, but after a couple episodes it gets old. If you actually think about it, most of the time Kirk & Co. did not fight their way out of trouble. Most of the time they had to think their way out. Break the super-robot with a logic puzzle. Convince their alien captors to turn on their superiors. Goad the godlike being into using up all his power. Bluff the alien commander. Make up the new drug/technology on the spot. Classic Kirk would be more likely to use his new "beam from a trillion miles away at warp" ability to put some new Romulan-only knock-out gas McCoy devised using Spock's blood onto Nero's bridge than risk himself, Spock, and the Enterprise. Through it all, they would have to deal with all kinds of existential issues as McCoy, Spock, and Kirk each take a portion of the human psyche to play out the different positions for us. This movie does not slow down long enough to even give the characters time to consider their options, nevermind start to delve into the existential issues. Also, contrary to popular recollection, the one woman that Kirk never nailed was the green chick. He screwed everything else in the galaxy except the women on his ship and the green Orion slave girl, who if memory serves actually went home with Scotty. EDIT: Scratch that. Pretty sure the dancing chick was not one of the green ones, and Kirk did make out with one of the Orions to play along with her seduction and escape in a different episode.

Star Trek II had lots of them. "How we deal with life is just as important as how we deal with death, don't you think?" to name one. There's also a discussion of the proper use of science, whether or not we should develop a technology that has both the potential for extreme good and extreme evil. III: Existence/importance of souls and how far you'd go to save a friend's soul. Arguably the weakest in terms of moral/philosophical issues. IV: Conservation and the "green" debate. V: If you could wipe away all your bad memories would you? Is God "out there"? What really makes a family? VI: Racism & Prejudice. Cold War allegory. Generations: Duty vs. personal happiness. Is living in a fake paradise better than the real world? First Contact: Moby Dick. Insurrection: Good of the many vs. Good of the few. Allegory to the forced movement of Indians etc. Nemesis: Nature vs. Nurture. Star Trek was always at its core a discussion of existential issues or an allegory to some issue of the day wrapped with some science and a hopeful view of the future. That's why geeks liked it. I don't. I stated why earlier. I liked the beginning of Voyager. I disliked the end for many of the same reasons you stated. There's not much else to be said. The Budweiser Brewery (that's where it was shot) for engineering is one, yeah. The refit design and the later TNG ships have the futuristic warp core look. The original had a clean two-tier engine room with a window to the core. On the bridge, it's hard to tell if the buttons are still there or if they're touch screens, but we know Sulu's console has a throttle. Even the 60's ship had evolved past the throttle. Apparently both he and Chekov also need desk lamps despite how ridiculously bright that place is. The new ship's comm officer has to stand for some reason, and her console has all kinds of things sticking out of it that appear to serve no function. Microphones I guess? Do we still need microphones in the 23rd century? The one thing I did think was well done was increasing the size of the main view screen, which I think they turned into a window with a HUD. That can really go either way. One the one hand it means the bridge is far less protected than it probably should be, but on the other if the power goes out you can still see what is in front of you.

This goes back to what I was saying about this not bearing a resemblence to Star Trek. Most of the Star Trek movies have very little action in them especially by comparison. I think First Contact probably takes the award for it. Wrath of Khan, which is held as the gold standard of Star Trek, has all of two major action sequences and they don't last long. They are also pretty slow considering. What Khan does have that this movie doesn't is the hallmark of Star Trek, deep moral and philosophical questions. Even IV, despite being a total comedy, deals with what we would now call the "green" debate. It also has very little action of any kind.