Lotd2242

The original series was perfectly fine. It needed no fixing. They already did the only possible thing available to make it better which was to update the space shots with CG and clean up the effects. Things did not really start to fall apart until the end of Voyager, and it's just because they had the same five guys writing the stories and they were clearly burned out. Enterprise was a failure of execution more than anything. It could've been a really cool thing to see the founding of the Federation and mankind's initial forays into deep space, but instead we got a Temporal Cold War and emotional Vulcans that take their clothes off all the time. Look I was not opposed to trying something to breath life into the franchise. I just prefer not to do it at the expense of existing characters, and I don't see how this movie does that. People who are entertained by this movie will be bored to tears by the average Star Trek episode or movie, so I doubt many of them are going to get into the old stuff. They can't really spinoff a new series from the movie since most of those actors are not going to stop doing movies for it, nor are the writers most likely. They'll probably be lucky to milk another two movies out of it. So assuming you consider this movie Star Trek (as a case can be made that it isn't beyond the name), it's more like a stay of execution than a new life. The only movie that really did a good job of drawing in the non-fans and making them fans was First Contact. It had a wide appeal when it came out, and it was fairly consistent within the Star Trek universe so that people could quickly hop over to TNG or DS9 and go from there.

I liked the beginning with George Kirk. Right up until the Corvette sequence I was actually starting to get engaged (pun intended) and thinking that I was going to be totally wrrong about this movie much to my chagrin. So many Star Trek fans had been saying "this thing is awesome go see it" that I was sitting there watching this sequence thinking "holy crap maybe they were right." I thought for that brief moment it was going to pull a Transformers on me, wherein I go in thinking it will suck and find myself surprisingly loving it. Then it just swerved right off the cliff with Kirk's car. I also liked the portrayal of Pike. I think that was pretty well on the money considering how little we know about Pike (except for the whole "Hey suspended cadet Kirk you're the First Officer now" bit.) The thing that sealed it for me was his shifting into telling Nero name/rank/serial number during the interrogation. He also has the only good line in the whole film and he sold it perfectly. But that's not enough to cover for all of the the problems with the rest of the movie, nor my distaste for Hollywood's insistence on messing with things that were perfectly fine the way they were in an attempt to make them "appeal to a wider audience." At the end of the day I have no idea why anyone, much less Star Trek fans, thought this movie was so awesome. It was a decent action flick but nothing special and a terrible adaptation of Star Trek. I also find it amazing how easily placated the general and usually extremely nitpicky Trek populace is by this alternate timeline nonsense. I'm not particularly obsessed with the canon either, especially given how little there is about that time period in the show. I just want the characters to act within the established personalities, and that includes the Enterprise which for all their talk of making it updated to reflect our new level of technology looked less futuristic and more dysfunctional than even her 60s counterpart. Moreover, they could've easily taken an end-around any reboot reservations and accomplished what they wanted without having to add the stigma of wrecking what had come before by either doing a prequel within in the confines of the established lore and telling the story of Kirk & Co's first mission or skipping ahead of the TNG era 100 years and creating their own group. Hell the Enterprise had a bunch of sister ships in TOS they could've used as their own too without changing one iota of the timeline. Or there's a whole period between TOS and TNG that is completely unexplored. So many ways to accomplish the same goal without stomping all over the established characters.

That episode did not involve time travel though. That was one where Worf travelled through a rift in space to a parallel quantum realities. They proposed that everything that can happen does happen in an infinite number of parallel dimensions. So that would nullify the whole time travel plot device as creating a parallel dimension. What happens instead is either Nero's time travel has destroyed one of the quantum realities or has just knocked our cameras as it were into another quantum reality that happened anyway. EDIT: Found the score to be disappointing, especially when they revealed the new Enterprise. This is one thing the original Motion Picture did totally right.

They did. They just had old and familiar names.

Are you saying you went to go see it because it looked like generic SciFi action and it wasn't? But yes, the plot had all kinds of holes. Too many to even consider. I think the alternate reality thing is probably the biggest cop-out ever. It's lazy writing by people who are unwilling to actually take five minutes to figure out how to fit themselves into an existing universe but want the brand name. There is really very little canon to worry about relating to how Kirk & Spock & Co. all came together or what they were up to at the Academy. They seem to propose that the original timeline exists in parallel, but since Star Trek's time travel always resulted in causality loops wherein everything that is supposed to happen happens anyway and the future does not change, this movie implies that either the original timeline has been obliterated, or the other half of the loop has not yet been completed. I guess Picard will come back from the future and stop Nero from killing Kirk's dad or something. Even it is a parallel universe, for all practical purposes, that timeline is gone. If your old timeline is so "old and bloated" that you feel the need to irrevocably alter it to tell your new stories, why would you go back to it? So it's gone either way. It's no different than say the Mirror universe where Spock has a goatee. Sure it exists, but it isn't the one we're following. The easiest way they could've respected the timeline while doing whatever they wanted would've been to kick the ball down the road from Picard a hundred years and create a whole new crew.

Spock with a goatee?

Ahh the Bleck troll. One day I will learn not to feed it, but it's so cute and adorable sometimes I just can't help myself.

Describing something as Michael Bay-esque is just shorthand for "this movie is a bunch of over-the-top action sequences strung together by a contrived and flimsy plotline." Sometimes it's a lot of fun, but it's rarely anything special. As for the Dark Knight, that was saved from mediocrity by Ledger's Joker. He single-handedly made that movie worth the price of admission.

It was a decent movie. I've just seen it already about 150 times before, often done better.

That is exactly what I thought in the scene where New Kirk meets New McCoy, amazingly enough.

I was wrong about this movie. It was not Star Trek 90210. It was Star Trek: The Michael Bay Edition, and the part of me that really enjoys that kind of mindless action flick was satisfied. Problem is if it did not have the Star Trek label on it, nobody would care much about yet another retelling of Generic SciFi Action Movie #2, complete with product placement and revenge-bent villain, because this was pretty much forgettable and unremarkable in every way. As far as the Star Trek label is concerned, "this isn't your father's Star Trek" is a total understatement. This isn't Star Trek at all. Change the names and round off some ears, and you'd have no idea this movie had anything to do with Star Trek with the lone exception of Urban's McCoy, who manages to channel his inner Bones quite a few times, even though several parts felt utterly forced to the point of being like a parody (particularly the inevitable "I'm a doctor not a..." that felt completely out of place.) Also, New Chekov is possibly the most annoying SciFi character since Jar Jar Binks. The military structure in this movie is atrocious too, which is sad considering how anal Rodenberry was about it in the original series. These people are getting promoted left and right just because they happen to be there, especially New Kirk. I'd probably be more displeased, but spoilers prepared me for most of the exceptionally retarded stuff.

The thing I remember most from that game was "My patience is wearing thin. I'm banishing you into a time warp from which you will never return."

Why do you have to choose between the two? Spock was awesome AND logic.

I am sure it will be a fine, entertaining movie. It just won't be Star Trek as anyone knows it. Also, thanks to the various screenings that have occurred, the plot is fully available for anyone who wants to know, along with several full clips, so picking it apart is not entirely a blind affair. EDIT: You're right. My mistake.

Until this movie came out, I never heard of anyone complaining about Star Trek's cannon. Hell, the hardcore fans I'm sure enjoyed picking it apart. Plus, if you go forward in time, who cares? Then you have a whole new historical period to craft as you wish like TNG did without having to stomp all over what came before. Also New Kirk is going to be like New Coke, a pathetic attempt at adjusting the formula to increase marketshare that results in an inferior product.

Nothing to spoil. It's an alternate timeline. That really pisses me off too. The argument they make (aside from piggybacking on the name recognition) for going back to Kirk & Co. is that they are the best Trek and they want to recapture that magic. If you have changed those characters so much that you need an alternate timeline just to get away with it, then you're not recapturing anything. The magic was not just a bunch of names and places, but a unique blend of actors, directors, and writers that happened to come together and make something special. If you really want to create a whole new character group using the Kirk/McCoy/Spock template, go right ahead. Just give them their own names and histories. If you want to update Star Trek to look like it could be from our future, then just skip ahead another 100 years from TNG/DS9/VOY and have a ball. Going forward keeps you from having to deal with all of the cannonical issues in the twisted ass backwards history of the Star Trek universe too.

"The Perfect Mate" had a TOS episode to match it. It was on this weekend, ironically, where Kirk has to escort some angry bitch to another planet to marry a guy and settle their war. By the end of the episode she falls in love with Kirk as he tries to de-bitchify her, and uses her magical tears to make him fall in love with her. If one of her attendants hadn't rigged the ship to explode, he probably would've nailed her but he ends up having to deal with that instead. In the end, he just sends her off to her arranged marriage anyway. As for torture, Kirk got whipped in the Nazi episode and didn't bat an eye. "Spock, would you please hurry? The guard did a very professional job on my back." It makes sense though. He and Spock and McCoy were constantly being imprisoned and tortured one way or another, so you'd gotta figure he'd be used to it. I think Kirk would never have caved to seeing the lights. Knowing him, instead of smashing the controller, he would've rigged it to shock David Warner's character to death. Then he would've broken out and escaped back to the Enterprise. Agreed about Archer. There is also New Kirk from Star Trek 90210 to deal with. From what I've seen New Kirk is a typical rebel without a cause angsty asshole teenager who would've broken under the strain and cried for his momma about five mintues in.

Well for one, Star Trek always played that game of "Prime Directive is holier than thou" and then ten minutes later Kirk is banging the alien princess he's supposed to ferry to her arranged marriage. More importantly though, he Prime Directive stated that they weren't allowed to involve themselves in the development of other cultures, and it applied primarily to sub-warp species. The idea was to keep stuff like the Hitler planet and the Mob planet from TOS or "Picard is God" from TNG from happening. They also weren't allowed to essentially upset the balance between fighting cultures either by providing weapons tech or what have you. The Hirogen thing is a bad example because she wasn't interfering with their culture. She was looking for a solution to the Hirogen constantly hunting everyone, including her ship. Plus, Holodeck tech was not weapons tech. The Federation was almost always fine with giving out medical supplies and other technology that didn't involve weapons. It eventually came back to bite her in the ass when the Holograms developed sentience though.

I don't think anyone ever succeeded in time travel without breaking the Temporal Prime Directive.

She never threw it out of the window for absolutely nothing. Most of the time the Prime Directive didn't apply since they were always running into warp-capable civilizations. Even so, she didn't break it half as many times as Kirk or Picard.

This is why I didn't like DS9. Star Trek was always many things, but not dark. The whole point was that it was a brighter future than our own. I didn't find any of the secondary characters to really drive the story either. Most of them just irritated me, especially Weyoun and Kai Winn. Martok was cool though. Also, agreed on Garak but Gul Dukat was nothing special, especially after his genetic alteration to Bajoran or whatever and the whole anti-prophet bit.

She did not know them better than Picard.

Must we fight even about Star Trek? Just kidding. Actually I really enjoyed Voyager for the most part. I like it way better than DS9. I thought Seven's character was actually much better played than she was ever given credit for. It was very much a hybrid of what made Data and Spock so interesting. Plus you've got The Doctor and Janeway's stubborn refusal to break with everything that Starfleet represented. Some of the best episodes were those where they forced Janeway to choose between the idealism of Starfleet and just making their trip that much more bearable. For A though, it's just that they overused it so much. Every time you turn around it's another "instant way home" episode. The first couple times it's interesting to see the characters get their hopes up only to have to deal with the inevitable letdown, but after a while it's just like "why are you still falling for this stuff?" And of course the way they ultimately did get home was kind of lame. For B, they did start to recycle lots of plots that had been done before. Enterprise had that failing too. The Borg kids I didn't particularly care for myself, except that episode with Q's kid and Icheb. Although that episode was just a rehash of Deja Q where Q is forced to become human and Data teaches him about humanity. Plus, they progressively made the Borg less and less fearsome as Janeway was getting away from them every ten minutes. It made perfect sense that she would run into them constantly, and obviously they can't get assimilated or the show is over, but it was starting to get ridiculous.

Blah, I guess there's no way to turn this discussion into hating on the new movie. Sisko was a terrible leader anyway. What never made any sense to me about DS9 is why the Federation Flagship, i.e. the Enterprise, is never there. In Insurrection they explain it away as it doing all the diplomatic duties, but it was one of the most advanced and powerful ships in the fleet with arguably the best and most proficient crew in the feet, and it's not out there wrecking Dominion ships. Granted, it's a televsion convention they can't be crossing over the TNG crew all the time, but why would you leave your most powerful ships on the sidelines while you're getting your ass kicked? They always threw all those useless Excelsior and Miranda class ships at the Dominion as if they had any hope of doing any kind of damage. Voyager at least got back to the whole exploring the universe shtick. The problem with Voyager was that A: you knew they would eventually get home and until the series finale, any instant-get-home option would inevitably fail and B: by the last three seasons they were just recycling old episodes. Of the two, Janeway was definitely more about Federation principles than Sisko. Her very adherence to them is the reason they were stuck in the Delta Quadrant in the first place. EDIT: Also to the point about SciFi usually making humans the jerks, that's one of things that made TOS and TNG endearing. In that future, humanity grew up and became the goody-goody force in the universe. In an effort to making everything "darker" in DS9/Enterprise, they often tossed that concept aside.

Actually I meant about how they were doing that with the Star Trek movie but yeah Judge is awesome. His best line ever was the bit where Daniel tries to prove how deep he is, and Teal'C responds, "My depth is immaterial to this discussion."