How I Would Fix The Last Star Trek Movie

Since when did "profitability" have anything to do with quality?

All the profitability proves is that with no Star Trek on the air at all for years and a summer blockbuster marketing campaign that you can pull in a lot of viewers.

And I'm looking right at Avatar as another example of that.

Bullshit. The movie had a long period of staying power at the box office. It wasn't a Wolverine where it had one big weekend and then faded into oblivion. No movie lasts for multiple weeks unless the majority of the viewing public believes that it is good. There will always be a minority of people that don't like what the majority of the viewing public likes. Doesn't change the fact that the movie was a success according to both critics and box office.

You've still provided no evidence of quality.

Popularity and profitably are not evidence of that.

IIRC, Blade Runner nearly bankrupted it's studio yet is today considered a science fiction classic.

As this conversation proves, quality is purely in the eye of the beholder. But when the majority of critics and the public agree that a movie is good, then that pretty much answers that question. Since you like to ignore critics and the general public, what is your barometer for proof of quality?

Star Trek movies or movies in general?

Standards of quality in either for me would need an entirely new thread.

Nude scene

I can see thousands of nude women (I assume that was the thrust of this) with just a click of the mouse.

I can't see a good Star Trek movie that way.

The problem is that "quality" is an extremely subjective thing. You act as if it was objective, and only your conception of it is correct. That is why people don't like the way you come across.

If that many people liked it, then to that many people, it had quality. It's that simple. The fact that it wasn't the quality you like doesn't give you the right to judge them the way you do.

Ever since this movie came out, you have been extremely judgmental about anyone who liked it, because you automatically assume that your evaluation is totally objective. That isn't the case. You didn't like it? Fine. You have a total right to that opinion. What you don't have a right to, is to say that others are wrong in liking it. Some of the things you dislike so wildly about it are matters of opinion, and others are issues that many people prefer to overlook. Those who like the movie have just as much of a right to their opinion as you have to yours, and their opinions are just as valid as yours, because none of the opinions are measures of objective facts. Therefore, none of the opinions are "right" or "wrong."

Oh, and in regards to the film franchise relaunch being a dead end, that's because you've gotten The Way It's Always Been Done (TWIABD) beaten into your head since at least 1978 (possibly earlier).

In TWIABD, nothing changes. No one gets promoted, and you have the same crew for years--decades even. Your first officer valiantly refuses promotion because "his heart belongs to the Enterprise." You have to come up with plot contrivances to end career growth and get people back on NCC-1701.

As was mentioned recently, because of the way movies are structured, the focus for two hours every couple years necessarily is on 1 or 2 main characters and the rest of the cast gets cursory development and are there to advance the plot.

There used to be a pretty vocal contingent that lobbied for Sulu to get his own TV series as Captain of the Excelsior. You do 2-4 Trek movies and then you bring on a CGI version of that TAS alien that replaced Chekov. Then you either spin Sulu off to an Excelsior TV series or you spin Chekov off to the Reliant. That way you've only got one "name" star--and not an incredibly expensive name at that--and the rest you can cast nobodies. If you want you can have cameos from the other movie cast from time to time.

To reiterate, the whole "dead end" thing is a red herring anyway, because when new Trek came to TV after the film franchise revived the brand, it had nothing to do with the film cast. But if you really, really wanted to do a related TV show it would be pretty easy to do it effectively.

Which reminds me: The films that were tied in directly to a contemporary TV series were the least successful, crappiest 'Trek films in franchise history. Why would you want to follow that path anyway. The new movie has given the franchise new life. Why get instantly back to killing it? Why not let it develop and grow for a bit before running it into the ground again?

Wow. I bet your kids don't fuck with you!

Nicely said.

Spock and Kirk had both studied Captain Pike's journals, which included an incident in which Pike, as a first officer, rebelled against his captain over the handling of a crisis...an event remarkably similar to events in the film "Crimson Tide", which Kirk had presumeably seen, being somewhat of a student of things nautical.

Spock was aware of Kirk's record, having prepared to confront Kirk at the Kobayashi Maru inquiry. He would therefore logically conclude that if Kirk were confined to the brig, he would only escape and lead a mutiny which could potentially disrupt ship's operations at a critical time.

It is natural, then, that Spock would maroon Kirk in an effort to prevent yet another "Crimson Tide" scenario.

Or, as in Abrams Trek, contrivances to jump start careers and make characters older so they can all end up on the NCC-1701 even if some of them aren't even done with the academy.

Exactly like the argument that a reboot was needed, really.

Exactly. I see Captain X likes to continue to bring up Avatar. I didn't like Avatar.I thought it was typical hollywood leftwing crap. But that doesn't mean that no one else had a right to enjoy it and that my opinion is somehow superior to the millions who did enjoy it. It wasn't my cup of tea. So what? The entire rest of my family does enjoy Avatar and I don't think any less of them for it and I'm certainly not going to say that they have to show me "proof" that is a quality movie. You can't prove an opinion.

You can show that your opinion has a reasonable basis.

I gave a whole list of reasons that I did not like ST:FC and they seemed to be accepted as reasonable objections.

When in fact, it is all ultimately opinion.

I hold my family to higher standards.

Ah, shit. It's getting deep in here now.

No one says they have to, but that doesn't equate to someone not expressing the reasons why they don't like a movie. Oh, and I keep bringing up Avatar because it's another example of a movie with a shallow, simplistic plot and one-dimensional characters that was still financially and critically successful. It also tends to generate the same kind of butthurt when people discuss how much it sucks. The fun part is that usually rather than actually discussing the movie and why they think it's good, they tend to bash the critics.

Seriously though, why all the long-winded posts about opinion? Everyone already knows that discussion about a movie is opinion. But when discussing plot points and the like which are actually in the movie, one's opinion as to whether these are good or bad doesn't mean anyone is proving anything beyond what they see in a movie.

And that doesn't change the fact that what I saw was clearly a bad movie.