I'm Going to a Critic Screening of Star Trek Monday Night

No. It is a new timeline that runs in parallel to canon.

I have no problem with that, IFF it doesn't suck. If it does suck, I'll be calling JJ Abrams personally and demanding a refund for the drugs I wasted on his film.

I find this whole attitude of anyone who doesn't like it and DARES raise the spectre of the original films/series is just a nerd so don't take them seriously to be very irritating.

It kind of reminds me of what happened when [-]Retard[/-] Revenge of the Sith came out. Anyone who dissed that movie when it was first released was shouted down and called various names, as time went by, however, more and more people started saying that the film sucked. (It did.)

The problem with both Trek and SW is that its now a goddamned religion for some people, with various factions who insist that their view of what's the best part of the saga is the only one possible. There are also those folks (in both camps, again) who'll [-]fap to[/-] watch anything with the ST or SW label attached to it. Case in point, Enterpoop, which even its dedicated watchers admitted was pretty crappy a good chunk of the time. These fappers went on to try and raise money to save the series when the cancellation was announced! (They needed $30 million, but got only about $3 million [the show had about 3 or 4 million viewers, IIRC], and for fuck's sake, $30 million is about what was spent to win the freakin' Ansari X-Prize! Why would you want more of a crappy [or at least tended to crappy] TV series when for the same amount of money you could have you're own freakin' space ship!?!)

Trek clearly needed some reworking if the franchise was going to continue in anything other than book form and fan films. B&B were idiots, and should have had it taken from them long before it was. There were several possible ways the franchise could have been redone. One is to simply do a "kick it forward a few years" like was done with TNG, another was to shift it to some place else in the Trekverse (ala DS9 and VOY), the third, and the one they went with, was to go retrograde. Each one of these has their merits and problems, the key to making it work, however, are those involved with the project.

The choice of actors, overall, doesn't seem that bad (certainly better than some of the names said to be in the running at various points). As a director, I think Abrams is fine. He's better than, say, Ron Howard. His stories, I'm not really thrilled with, the same with the screenwriters. I've found the plots, characters, and dialogs they've written to be pretty bad. Not the worst I've ever seen, but bad enough to make me extremely hesitant to want to see the film. Ever. None of the things I've read in this thread so far (and the other one, including all the spoilers) inspire me to want to spend my money and time on the thing. Not because I think it isn't Trek, but because it just sounds like its not a good film. (Which as every Trekkie should know, are two entirely different things.)

I'd like for it to be a good film, I'd like for it to reinvigorate the franchise, but I'm not seeing anything in these discussions which makes me think that its going to be good. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe like BSG what sounds like a bad idea is really something decent after all. But if someone's going to convince me of that, its going to take a stripped down discussion of the film on its merits, not hyping how cool this or that shot looks or glossing over any of the flaws in the film.

Someone once said, and it makes sense to me, that the best Trek stories could be stripped of their science fictional components and they'd still work (only fair, since many of them were ripped off from some place else ). I haven't heard anything, so far, that sounds like you could turn this movie into a Western and have it work. Until I hear something like that, I'm going to be dubious about it.

Except that's not really how Trek time mechanics work.

Sisko and Bashir in the Bell riots.
Data's head in a cave.
The whole DS9 cast dealing with saving Kirk from a bomb.
First Contact.

None of these people seemed concerned with saving a alternate reality caused by a shift in the timeline, they were interested in saving their own reality.

The timeline has been altered, TNG (the series that really launched the franchise) has been wiped away. DS9 is gone. There will never be a movie made to correct this problem, perhaps when Trek is at a low point again someone will write a novel to fix it all and the fanbase will adopt it into canon.

BTW, doesn't this movie demand old Spock die in it? His future is gone and I doubt that the producers locked him in for any sequels. It seems unlikely that they would leave him floating around in the 23rd century. Isn't Old Spock's fate sealed? Again.

Old Spock indeed ends up living on in the 23rd Century.

So you are basing your complaint on what those fictional characters THOUGHT was the way temporal mechanics worked, right?

In point of fact, we don't KNOW that all of those events didn't cause parallel time streams.

A new TS doesn't have to be very much different from the original at all.

In fact, Sisko "becoming" Bell is pretty much exactly that.

there's no on-screen evidence that Bell was Sisko before the trip occurred, after the trip occurred Sisko was Bell, but was the future that we saw thereafter the same time stream which they left? For all we (or Sisko) know, everything we saw on DS9 after that point was a different TS.

The best argument to the contrary is the Edith Keeler conundrum. But one might explain that away as the influence of the GoF shielding them from having been dropped from existence in the new timestream.

That's no to say every fine point can be explained. Time travel stories are, by definition, highly difficult if not impossible to reconcile to logic. But the point remains, you are arguing against a different application of temporal mechanics than we normally see in Trek.

That may be the single flimsiest reason to dislike this story I've seen yet.

You might as well just have said "wrong font"

And that's why most of them are lame.

No, not in any sense.

I'm referring to the corny humor and the other cliches Star Trek has become infamous for (like technobabble) which are all still there.

The guy who wrote NEm was supposed to be a fanboy, too. And all you have to do to see what I'm talking about is head to TrekBBS's STXI board

Then why are all the STXI 'tards going on and on about how much continuity sucks? There are two problems with this, and the first is the assumption that continuity is in any reasonable way restrictive. If you consider not contradicting something you've previously established (like using Space Mutany as an example, a character dying) restrictive, then you probably shouldn't be making something that's trying to be serious in any way -whether it's Star Trek or a more "mainstream" show.

And this is the second part of it, namely that pointing at past examples of such mistakes is in no way an excuse for furthering that problem. The mentality that it's ok to abandon the last 40 years of the franchise because of TPTB forgetting or just being stupid in some cases will never make any sense to me.

Which is to say pointless name-dropping is stupid, especially taken in light of basically everything else being changed anyway. Am I supposed to think it's cute they pulled a planet name from one of the first TOS episodes and applied it to a random moon or something? If I am it's pretty easy to see the target audience JJ was aiming at.

From people who have given reviews and answered questions about the movie after viewing it. Specifically I'm speaking about a planet name from the Where No Man Has Gone Before being used for a moon near Vulcan in the movie.

Wrong. I'm using information readily available to everyone to base my own opinion on. If you don't like it, tough shit.

And do you honestly think me watching the movie is going to magically make me change my mind when I already know what happens in the movie? Or is this just a troll? I'm leaning toward the latter since having a positive opinion about the movie without having seen it seems to be perfectly alright.

Yeah, I'm sure the dumbing down and inability to keep consistency did nothing to hurt the show.

That's what I've been doing.

Such as?

I don't believe I said that, I believe I said they bashed the original show for being corny and then did a lot of those corny things in their movie.

Ah, I see, I can only care about story, or minutiae instead of considering all of it when forming an opinion.

Yeah, it is, because in doing so they become just as nerdy as they are accusing the other side of being.

No, this has nothing to do with that. I was just stating a fact.

Although the fact that they wiped out TNG/DS9 does tick me off.

But does he go back to the 20th Century and lay the smackdown on a punk with a boombox on a San Francisco bus?

Enquiring minds want to know.



Personally I think they should remake TWOK. That'll get the fanboys all riled up.

We can use Jean-Claude Van Damme as Khan. He's about the right age to pull it off.



Imagine "He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round Perdition's flames before I give him up!" but with a Belgian accent.

To a certain degree.

A good AU story will keep the best stuff - in this case character.
It will also create a universe with rules and regulations that are sacrosanct.
Someone wants to change the rules - create a new AU - with the good characters but new rules.
And make sure the universe makes sense.

I liked DS9 once they got the whole war running. The episodes "The Ship" and "In the Pale Moonlight" are two of my all time favorite trek episodes.

Voyager....alas...what could have been....had they kept to the original idea....of course they strayed right into Kumbaya territory by the end of the pilot you knew it was pretty much over for what it could have been.

Enterprise could have been great but again the people running it were retards. We could have had the Romulan War or even better the war with the Klingons.

Ah, but it is exactly how Trek time mechanics works - if you chop off before TNG began and include the ST animated series.

Recall Yesteryear. Spock was suddenly in a parallel universe because someone had been viewing Vulcan history. Recall he went back to fix the problem so he could exist.

Recall in doing so, he got back into existence, but he lost his pet.

And that seems to be what Abrams is doing.

Going back to TOS and giving it a new branch so that there can be a new franchise.

I'm torn OTOH between wanting to support good sci-fi (along with my inner geek that, like you, considers the original ST pretty much the only true ST, so I'm predisposed to like it), but OTOH refusing to sponsor a Hollywood bereft of new ideas or originality, at best capable of regurgitating old characters with worn archtypes into a forgetable two hours (Dukes of Hazard, Lost in Space, Beverly Hillbillies, Adams Family), or, at worst, a sexier, explosion-laden remake, of the sort parodied in Stargate's 200th episode ("I'm pregnant").

I'll take it from your review it's not the latter and that the time travel device wasn't worn thin to transparency. Quick question - would you consider the story you saw more driven by character or plot?

-sniff-

About page 4 this thread starts smelling like big blue. Which is also the color of lavatory fluid, known amongst pilots as 'smurf juice.'

Well, the only way to have an "honest re-boot" is via mucking up the timeline. Look at it this way- you now have two Treks to play with- the one we all know and love and are comfortable with and a new one, where none of us know what is going to happen, but that is going to be very different with

We get to play in a new sandbox, with a lot of "what-ifs" to consider now. In a way, this is better than just re-telling how Kirk, Spock and McCoy met each other or how Kirk came to be captain of the Enterprise, because we'd all know how it would end then. A simple prequel wouldn't be nearly as good as a full "reboot caused by time travel".

I've watched Trek since the early 1970s when it was in syndication and am as much of a purist as the next guy, even moreso since I'm a stickler for continuity. To me, TOS is Trek and everything else is a weak counterfeit (even DS9). But from what I've seen (I think I've watched every clip at least a dozen times) and from all the reviews I've read, I like where this is going and where it could possibly end up. Abrams hit a home run (or, as Storm said, he truly beat the 'no-win scenario") and I am interested to see where nuTrek goes from here.

It is now. Deal with it.

You know, I'm always reluctant to bash Berman. Yes, Braga was a cunt and 95% of the stuff he got his hands on with Ron Moore was crap. But Berman gave us some great TNG stuff, DS9, First Contact and so on. Four spin off series and four movies is no small achievment and whilst not as good as TOS, and somewhat tired towards the end, he kept an audience for the majority of those years. Yes, his Trek could have been better, especially the last two series, we all know that. But, it could have been much worse and I think people forget that. If Trek had died during the first few years of TNG there's no way this movie would have been made. Too much time would have passed and the franchise wasn't nearly as big back then. I feel lucky that as a Star Trek fan I've had so much over the years when fans of over franchises often wait a decade of more for something new and we have the sheer luxury of being able to pick and choose what Trek to like and what to not.

Yes, it is time for the next generation of filmakers (pun intended) and Berman's day is long over. But I think credit should be given where credit is due.

Which gives me another excuse to trot out my theory that Berman is a passable producer if someone else has picked out his talent for him. But if given the choice he surrounds himself with less yes men and people less competent than him out of some misplaced assumption that people will need him more if he surrounds himself with incompetents.

My evidence of this is that, in the early years of TNG, where Roddenberry had put together the team, Berman did a fine job. But as people left, he picked poor replacements for them and the franchise became crappier and crappier.

Of course this is just a theory, and I could argue it the other way as well.

No, not a troll at all. I'm quite sincere. If you were to somehow see the movie tomorrow and then you came here and listed off a dozen story related items that pissed you off, I'd tip my hat and say "agree to disagree" (assuming in fact I did disagree)

I've seen far too many examples of films coming out which the "buzz" was one thing and the movie turned out to be something altogether different.

Just got back from seeing it: epic win.

Urban nails it from the start; Pine and Quinto take a while.
When Pine swaggers into the bridge for final scene he's got Shatner's Kirk down to a tee.

Loved the little touches too; Kirk eating the apple is surely a nod to The Wrath of Khan.

Meanwhile, Patrick Stewart features in a pointless franchise spin off elsewhere this summer.

Exactly. it doesnt replace the original, it's just a variation of the original.
More like a parallel universe like version, IE a mirror universe where Spock dont have a beard and the Federation isnt an evil empire.
If the stories good, why not. There's a wealth of stories you can do considering that senario.
My only minor nit pick until I see this is cadet Kirk saving the Enterprise makes me think of an ensign who used to save another Enterprise.
Well that and the fugly bridge.

Well, I'm not spending money to see this, so the chances are the only way I'd see this is as a DVD rip. In any case I'll agree to respect anyone's views if they like this movie, no matter how wrong they are.

Cloverfield, Lost in Space...

Trek has a tendency to burn out those who get too deeply invested in it. It happened to Roddenberry as early as TOS S3, and by STTMP and TNG he was just rattling around inside his own head, although the chronic substance abuse may have been as much of a factor as Trek.

He at least had the advantage of being surrounded by truly gifted people like Coon and Justman and Fontana, none of whom were shy about telling him when he was going off the rails.

Berman, on the other hand, produced two potentially gifted "sons" and decided to disown the one with the discipline and the dedication and groom the one with the pipeline to the drugs and hookers. The burnout was commensurately faster.

Between the two, you had Harve Bennett, who was wise enough to get out before he burned out, though not before his complicity in ShatnerTrek.

It happens with all aspects of the franchise. I've seen several skilled editors at Pocket flare out and hit atmosphere, and possibly the best of the lot got "excessed" just before Christmas last year.

We won't even discuss the love-hate relationship most of the actors have with the franchise...

36 hours till I see it in IMAX glory!

This thread is a good example of why I've kept myself away from Trek geek commentary about the new film, and have paid attention to the mainstream critics. I'll trust the opinion of someone who can deliver an opinion of the movie on it's own merits unburdened by having dedicated the past 30 years of their life to it as though it's a religion. All the pointless arguing as though we're discussing Catholic orthodoxy. Trek fans are as rigid and dogmatic as Bulldog at a Southern Baptist convention.

All I want is an entertaining movie and 2 all-too-brief hours of fun, and 95% of the reviews say that's exactly what this flick delivers. Saturday, 11:30 a.m., I'll be there.

I'm not a Southern Baptist, you retard.

You jumped on that pretty fast, didn't ya?

Warning for flaming.

Warned for trolling.

Personally I don't put much stock in "mainstream" critics that usually have to have little disclaimers in their reviews because they think people will take them for nerds if they review something sci-fi. Sort of like all those reviews for nuBSG that would start out along the lines of "I totally don't normally watch sci-fi..." or have something along the lines of "but this show isn't really like a sci-fi" in there somewhere.