The nacells on the Enterprise. Come on- full of fail. It looks like the nacelles are going to fall off or drag the ground. They make the ship look out of balance and clunky. I ain't crazy about the secondary hull, either. The love of my life is still the original- best design ever.
Yeah, I saw the movie last night and loved it, but I'm still not liking the ship very much. The "cowls" around the front of the nacelles look too clunky and the ventral undercut on the secondary hull is too extreme. I don't like the Gabe Koerner "reimagined" Enterprise very much, but I like it a lot better than the one in the new movie.
I liked the saucer section and deflector dish on the new one better than Koerner's, but I would have liked it if they used those nacelles instead.
I agree with my dual. The ship is ugly. Has nothing to do with canon and a lot to do with plain aesthetics. The interior ain't that great, either.
Ugly ship, both inside and out. Here's something else: the biggest issue of all, Kirk's miracle ascendancy from cadet to captain, would have been SOOOO easy to write properly and make believable. Want to know how? Okay, here's how: When we see Kirk in the bar for the first time, he isn't a no-name, genius level repeat offender from the midwest. He's FORMER LT James Kirk, an ex-starfleet officer whose meteoric rise through the ranks was arrested suddenly when he was busted for insubordination during the hearing after his reprogramming of the Kobayashi Maru scenario. This AU Kirk has deep issues surrounding the death of his father, and he snapped in the hearing when someone brought his father's death into play. In TWOK, Saavik was a lieutenant when she took the KM test. The implication was that command school was a graduate course that an officer returned to, not part of the undergraduate 4-year curriculum at the academy. So Kirk left starfleet in a huff and then a year or two later gets his ass whomped in a bar. Pike encounters him, they have their little chat, and Kirk agrees to think about returning to starfleet. Kirk goes to meet Pike when then the crisis hits, and he agrees to be reactivated for the emergency. (Hey, they were assigning cadets for the same reason!) Pick up the story from there. My review of this movie will be in the omnibus thread. It'll be very short.
^^^ That was actually the way I had assumed they would write it all along (once plot details began to leak out) and I can only attribute it to a brain cramp on the part of the writers. I'll bet if you could ask K&O about what you just said they would react with:
What I've noticed, having done many fan rewrites of many franchise stories, is that these plot holes and implausibilities are extremely easy to avoid with a little thought. It's just lazy ass writing that causes them.
Trouble is that they seem to not care to do so. And hey, most people seem to not mind anyways. You and I do, but seems we are in the minority.
My question is this: What was wrong with the original design? That original enterprise was iconic. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
Its the truth though. You and I love the old design because we grew up with it. Not so much for the 1990's and after-born crowd.
They might have fixed some plot holes except that they were filming during the writers strike and weren't allowed to do any rewrites.
How would new Star Trek fans that the Abrams crowd claims they are trying to draw into the theatres even know what the original series Enterprise looked like.
It's not so much laziness or unconcern, IMO, it's simply the nature of creativity - everyone doesn't have the same "ideas" or insights. It's not uncommon at all for something to be pointed out after the fact that the author wishes desperately he'd thought of. I would say that in major motion pictures it should be more rare than elsewhere because there are so many creative minds that address the project, but really, the main thing here is the one of the writers (can't remember which, kurtzman I think) who was professed to be a serious Trek fan (as opposed to others being more casual) - if anyone was going to notice what Marso refers to, it would be/should have been him. So I go back to saying - pretty much just a brain cramp. I refuse to believe that a screenwriter who values his career can't be arsed to put the best work out there he can. it's not like working on an assembly line. He's going to be highly identified with his work, for good or ill.
No offense but yeah it did. You are looking at it from a Trek aficionado perspective, not a general moviegoer's one.
Unless you live in a mud hut in Africa or the slums of Delhi, you know very well what the Enterprise looks like.
My wife never reads Wrodforge, so when we go see it and they first show the Enterprise, I plan on leaning over and saying, "Look, dahlin'. Wrong font."
No shit. I did not like Gabe's design at all, but compared to what made it to the screen, Id take that any day. I cant argue that. The ship, made for low res TV needed to be updated for the big screen. But not this way. There are a shit load of examples of folks over at the TrekBBS art forum who have done just that. They took the original design, tweaked it, and made it into something very contemporary that would have worked with both old and new fans. Matt Jefferies (who designed the original ship) and Andrew Probert (who designed the Movie and TNG ships) and Rich Sternbach (who worked along side Mr. Probert) were industrial designers. When they designed something, it had a purpose, even if it was (most of the time) imaginary. Contrast a ship from the movies or the TV with something from Star Wars. Lucas and company just stuck crap on ships to make them look cool with out realizing that you didnt have to do so. Well that Star Wars mentality is screaming in this movie in that some hacks who didn't know anything about design were turned loose.
Which is the reason for so much of what went wrong in the franchise to begin with - lazy writing and general apathy from the producers and the studio suits. Those people are stupid though, and I can't respect their opinion when they accept lazy writing like that. So in order to "update" it, they went back to vintage 1950s car design? I'm not buying it. I also don't buy into the mentality that either everything needed to be completely redesigned or it had to look exactly the same as it did in the '60s. Exactly, there have been at least two good updates of the old ship I've seen, and I even have some ideas myself how to update the old girl for modern audiences and the big screen. They really should've had talent like that on the design team instead of the people they ended up going with. No offense to them, but people like John Eaves can draw some pretty cool things, but everything they do tends to look the same, and frankly there isn't much functional about their designs. Just look at the E-E, for example, there's a lot on the outside of that ship which doesn't make sense as far as how the interior would have to be arranged to fit it.
I didn't mind the exterior of the ship (could hardly make it out, to be honest), but I thought that the bridge and engineering needed "work". The bridge was too much like the cosmetics counter for my taste, and engineering didn't make any damned sense.
Not only did engineering not make sense, the dimensions looked out of whack for being inside the ship itself.
