How I Would Fix The Last Star Trek Movie

To me, no Star Trek movie is unsalvagable.

Even The Final Frontier was fixable.

That said, this is how I would alter the most recent movie.

1) Alter the Enterprise and other Starfleet vessels to more readily resemble original series vessels.

2) Replace the engineering sections of the Kelvin and Enterprise to reflect something more in line with Star Trek.

Remember, the only reason they used a brewery for the engineering room was because of lack of money.

3) Eliminate Scotty's furry little friend.

4) Eliminate Scotty materializing in the water.

5) Eliminate the Spock/Uhura stuff.

6) Eliminate Amanda being killed.

7) Replace the Narada with something that actually looks Borg and mechanicalistic rather than the hideous "organic" look it had.

8) Don't have the "drill" suspended from a cable from the Narada (which is impossible as shown in the movie). Suspend it by tractor beam or something.

9) Replace the "Jellyfish" starship with something more functional looking.

10) Eliminate young Kirk wrecking the car.

11) Eliminate the "7 minutes to Vulcan" line (or however many minutes it was).

12) Eliminate Kirk being given command of the Enterprise at the end.

13) Eliminate most of Kirks medicine reaction.

14) Eliminate the line about "only 10,000 survivors" from Vulcan.

15) Show the battle involving Starfleet and the Narada at Vulcan.

16) If possible, eliminate Vulcan being completely destroyed (devastated perhaps, but not destroyed outright).

17) Eliminate Spock ordering Kirk thrown off the ship.

18) Eliminate the Enterprise being built on the Earth's surface.

I'm sure a couple of other things could be done to improve the movie but that is all that springs to mind.

Some would say "what is left".

I say that "what is left" in the movie is the fundamentally sound story about how the troubled son of a Starfleet hero overcomes obstacles to become a hero in his own right.

Plus the establishment a network of lifelong friends among the crew.

The film was fine, it was good. No need to eliminate 90% of it to make it 'better'.

There were several niggly bits, and with every film I always something I'd like to improve, but it had no deal breakers.

I didn't particularly like Scotty's friend, or Kirk getting immediately elevated to Captain, but they're no big deal. It was a fun film, you got the bonhomie of TOS, a decent storyline and a fine introduction to Trek to a new audience.

Edited for my amusement.

http://www.wordforge.net/showthread.php?t=70795

See post #14.

Ya know, I'm a JJ Abrams fan to a certain degree - loved Alias, am enjoying the hell out of Fringe, Lost is very much up & down - but I'm not such a worshipper that I think he can do no wrong. To me, this film proved the he's not perfect in freakin spades. I pretty much hated every choice & change he made.

I strongly disagree with 6, 15, and 16. Number 15 is an especially bad idea. The way they executed that was very well done, imo.

So in other words make it yet another Trek episode where the reset button was hit at the end so that nothing that happened actually mattered.

Nope. For all its flaws, it hit on a lot of things, and one of the biggest was the fact that for the first time in ages actions in a Trek movie actually matter.

some of them I'm sympathetic too (i.e. Vulcan in seven hours instead of seven minutes or some such) but if I could make only one change, it would involve only two letters:

PIKE: "Re-enlist in Starfleet."

You solv a LOT of the incongruities regarding kirk if you just add those two letters.

The movie didn't need fixing.

It needed erasing!

If you watch the deleted scenes, he took the car to rebel against an abusive step-dad who had treated his brother (half brother? something? the Johnny kid he passes) very, very badly. Instead of REMOVING the car scene, I want them to put the family stuff INTO the movie, so that the scene makes sense.

If I were Vulcan and my planet was destroyed and my mother killed, I'd order some insubordinate little prick off my ship too. Then again, if we did follow your changes (which I mostly agree with), Spock wouldn't have to throw the little prick off his ship.

Dayton's right about the silly stuff. The reason they did it is to attract a new audience - "Hey this Star Trek stuff isn't boring!" type of deal. Hopefully the next movie will have enough of an interested audience that we won't have to see all those shenanigans. Though I am a big fan of shenanigans. Fun word. "Shenanigans." Mwaha.

Here's the thing:

Despite its flaws, the 2009 movie was fun... something Trek has not been for a very, very, very long time.

The fact that a bunch of crotchety old hardcore Trek geeks get their knickers in a twist over it, well that just proves the point.

I'd hire some proper writers.

4, 11, 13. That's all

So you're saying any new Trek production should make a point to go out of its way to alienate the existing long-time fan base?

Even the font?

Yeah.

Screw the old fan base.

In fact in the next movie I hope they put the Klingons in orbit around our solar system.

Kirk: Holy crap! Why didn't we know the klinks are in orbit around us? No wonder they look like us.

That to me was one of the best parts of the story. There must have been a dozen times where the viewer has to concede that the timeline has been changed. It happened, this ain't your grandaddy's Trek, deal with it. Over 35 years of watching it and I do not feel alienated by the evolution.

Of all the times they have hit the BRRB, this one was the best executed.

To me the worst idea was insect like things on an ice planet. I can live with just about every other change (well, the delta vega bit is gonna be this incarnation's throwaway line...).

Silly.

Everyone knows the Klingons orbit Uranus.

Spot on. But one additional point - it was also commercially successful. So we'll get more Trek. Old Trek was dead as door nail.

Personally I think there was a bit too much silliness in the movie - I really didn't like Simon Pegg as Scotty, at least try to have something in common with the previous character - but it was definitely fun, introduced a whole new generation of fans, and firmly got us out of Berman/Braga territory. Which did one excellent movie and loads of crap both on the big and little screen.

We needed a commercially successful film that showed we could have a Star Trek that people outside the die hard regulars watched again. That the idea wasn't tired and we could have it be successful again.

I was very happy with the final product and looking forward to the next installment.

"Old Trek" was not "dead as a door nail" because it was "Old Trek".

Old Trek was "dead" because the all but one of the Next Generation movies featured some of the most godawful movie writing possible.

They did not need to reimagine the franchise.

They needed something well written to begin with.

Noooooo TP orbits Uranus and wipes out Klingons.

It wasn't a perfect film. It could be made better. (Marso's fix would be a definite "plus" for example.) But even with nothing changed, it was a very good film. It gives Star Trek a future, and that's what counts.

Let's face it, the only Star Trek crew with a future is the original bunch. All the Next Generation pics showed that that PC crowd just isn't what people are looking for. The huge four-season-long story arc in DS9 makes it pretty hard to follow up on that. And I'd rather not even think about a Voyager or Enterprise film.

But everyone loves Kirk, Scott, McCoy, Spock, etc.

The problem is that the actors are getting old and dying off. There is no future there. Besides, the characters' stories have been told pretty much to the end.

This picture found a way to reset all that, with a crew on the Enterprise and a team of actors that both have a future.

Does it have plot holes you could throw a bathtub through? Sure; they all do. (Articificial gravity? Time travel? Speeds faster than light? Cross-breeding between species that are radically different? Those are just the obvious ones.) I don't care. I don't expect a movie to be a scientific documentary. If it's a fun story about fun characters, then so be it.

It's not reality, and I know it's not reality, so I don't expect it to be neat and consistent like reality. If it entertains me, inspires me, and/or stretches my mind, then it was a good movie. By that standard, it was a good movie.

I'm not about to spend all my time making a list of how it could have been more like Star Trek "used to be." They've been hinting for decades that time travel could end up changing the entire timeline irreversibly. Well, it finally happened. Good. Let's discover this new timeline now. So far, it looks pretty cool. Every one of the characters, without exception, has more depth than they did in TOS. Since Star Trek is all about characters, that is real good.

^You spent more effort typing that than I did making my list.

Strange argument, Demi. I kinda know where you're going but to argue that a reset movie matters because the actions in a movie matter is pretty circular.

If anything it just proves once again that nothing really matters in the movies because if we don't like it they'll just start over yet again.