Star Trek:Renegades Pilot Being Crowdfunded

We're past the trailer and talking about the actual movie, which got posted somewhere.

It had the usual Star Trek flaws, such as all the ships being accompanied by other ships with big banks of lights for external illumination of the ship as it flies between stars. They never really show us those ships or their crews of lighting technicians, best boys, grips, and gaffers, even though we know those ships have to be there or the outside of the starships would be lit only by dim starlight, so they would look like a Boeing at night over Kansas. Trek star ships even stay illuminated when they're swinging around the night side of a planet. It is an enduring mystery.

I'm downloading this but wikipedia says it is a pilot for season 1. Are these people actually going to make a "series"? I mean really...

I can't see it working well as a series. It didn't even work well as a pilot.

The basic flaw I see is that by having a small group (a half dozen or so), doing secret missions is that you've already eliminated probably 90 percent of typical Star Trek story lines. They're not really going to be doing any exploring. They're not going to be investigating space anomalies or planetary weather patterns. They're basically just going to be doing secret agent missions without Federation support. You might be able to get a season out of it. I suppose it might have been an attempt to make a Firefly concept (small crew with a ship avoiding the law) set in the Trek Universe.

Another issues I had with the pilot was "Who is the protagonist/s?" I still don't know. Everybody who survived the episode? You could have killed any of them off and it wouldn't have mattered. I didn't latch on to any particular character, except perhaps for Captain Alvarez (Corin Nemec) who is definitely not supposed to be the protagonist.

I've watched 18 minutes so far and have had it.

Step up and watch the rest! Embrace the suck!

How are we going to have a good thread about the show if we don't all buckle down and watch the whole thing? Sure, it's an hour or so of your life that you'll never get back. You may even have nightmares about it. But think of the ranting you'll be able to do.

I've watched the whole thing. I want my 90 minutes back, and an additional 90 minutes so that I can cope with what I saw.

Embrace the suck.

It was good enough to get escape the cutting room, but not bad enough to spawn its own cult following like Sharknado. Some parts were actually pretty good. Most were not.

I think part of the failure was cinematography. How you frame a scene, and how you sequence the images into a narrative, is the difference between Spielberg and a SyFy original movie. Much of Renegades comes off like it was a class project by film students at an Iowa community college. The reasons are probably pretty deep, but I can only speculate on them. The focus was probably on getting people on board for the project, instead of the project itself. The critiques could get pretty deep, and actually pretty constructive, because they'd go to the core of what's wrong with most fan films. Maybe a few ruthless assholes are important to putting out a top quality product. Maybe some other element was missing. It would be fascinating to see how Clint Eastwood would make a Star Trek pilot. I'm sure it would have little resemblance to Renegades. It would be quiet and contemplative yet with death hanging over everything. It wouldn't try to fill each scene with constant dialog, action, and dramatic music.

As an afterthought, given the infinite space that is space, and the astronomical distances you can observe, I think Clint Eastwood might show us the way to a better Trek. A starship doesn't have to blunder into a situation. It can sit back an observe from a very far distance, as it's captain quietly mulls things over in his head and decides on a plan of action. Put Clint's drifter archetype from the 60's and 70's in the captain's chair and you have an idea with legs.

Okay, fine. Watched it.

Liked:
Ship designs, Capt. Alavarez as non-protaganist-but-not-buffon character, the concept of the dude with the Borg augments (however much it's a rip-off of Cyborg) some of the cast (the Betazoid chick, the Andorian, Gary Graham) even though there were nt really any good performances

Meh - the sort of technical nit-picking like gturner's musing about why the ships have external lighting. There's really no point in discussing stuff that's done out of necessity of the medium (like there's not supposed to be sound in space for example) - who gives a fuck? The Cardassian rip-off of Garak might have been an okay character if you could overlook he was not Garek. Russ did his usual fine job of playing a character I have zero enthusiasm for.

Bad - pretty much everything else. Even actors who give perfectly competent-to-good performances elsewhere come off as local-theater amateurs in almost every scene. The only time I found anyone even reasonably okay was Robert Pichardo and that was a scene that had pretty much nothing to do with the plot. Worst of all, the characters were poorly drawn and the backstories were weak or non-existent and a lot of the "plot" was just "WTF?" Laying aside the "real" characters (Chekov, Tuvok, and Zimmerman):
Lexxa Singh - Excellent choice as a concept for the lead, either horribly mis-cast or catastrophically written, possibly both. The daughter of Khan ought to be a Xena type with a great tactical mind and high intellegence, not a waif who talks big.Her character was more often along for the ride than carrying the action. And who'sthe woman who may-or-may not be alive that Tuvok is being a dick about? We know Khan's wife is dead so...?
Dr. Lucian - not sharply defined or well played. Ought to have had some distinguishing trait
Ragnar - intended to be lovable rogue I guess, had too little to do and no idea why he's with this bunch
Icheb - Cyborg rip-off at least had an in-universe history which helps, but was he this wooden on Voyager?
Shree - lots of blue tits mostly, and other than being for hire we don't know much but she wasn't as stilted in performance as most others
T'Leah - who did her make-up? and why is killing an "old habit" if she's supposed to be Vulcan?
Captain Alvarez - one of only two acting performances I'd go so far as to call "good" - it will be a miracle if theoretical future eps don't turn him into a buffoon
Ronara - the other fairly good performance, but I don't know why she's here as a character. Usually "rag tag" crews are a set of people who each bring a unique and valuable asset to the whole - too many of these folks I don't know why they are involved
Fixer - supposed to be charming, comes off as caricature...almost like a Michael J Fox character rip-off


To me, the thing worse than just being generically bad is using up a lot of okay-to-good parts and still managing to make something bad out of it.
Garis - Vic actually did okay in several scenes but as i said - you can never forget he's a Garek stand in. Also, he's dead so ...eh.

I'd agree to the bolded bit. In the right vehicle there was some potential there.

Saying Corin Nemec could be better than Bakula and Mulgrew is very shallow praise indeed.

I finally watched the whole thing. To me there is way too much of a "throw everything we can afford against the wall and see what sticks" sense about the production.

The space battles were pretty well done though that isn't enough to build a series around. And there are some glaring oddities and holes in the production. For example, the starfleet ships bridge looks like it was thrown together at a convention.

What are they wearing? Why does one character have glasses? Why is Chekov in this? Why is the bridge of that one strarship yellow and made of cardboard?

I gave up with Icheb screaming get out of my head to he hot chick while acting like a baby. What a shitty actor.

Why? why? why?

Those are important questions to ask.

IIRC, Renegades was being made as a proposal for a series presumably to CBS.

Well, I eagerly wait to see whether they pick it up.

Aw hell.

I haven't watched this yet, but S31 is basically the CIA and was portrayed as evil in Roddenberry-Trek.

I think most people not locked into Gene's ultra-libertopian view of the future realizes you would need an organization like S31. Humans are never going to be the robots he portrayed in TNG, and even if they were the rest of the species aren't.

There is a fairly large contingent of fans that would love an S31 series by someone like Ron Moore or maybe Abrams. Basically show us the bad shit they have to do to give the polished and perfect appearance of Roddenberry's world.

My only fear is they would make them all goody-goody and it would just end up being Trek with black uniforms.

Well, I think this pilot blew much of what you'd need for a serious take on S31 because they're an eclectic group of misfits. Those generally work better as a comedy like "The A Team."

IIRC, during the Kennedy Admin. (which itself was in love with covert operations) an administration official was challenged about the use of covert activities to which he responded "What do you want us to do? Send in the Marines?".

The obviously inference being some relatively low key shadow ops are preferable to outright warfare.

This would obviously apply in the Star Trek universe as well.

It was created after Gene died....

I think he was referencing the fact that Section 31 was portrayed as evil in Deep Space Nine in the sense that DS9 though moving past Roddenberry's "idealistic" 24th century Federation, there were still vocal advocates of that idealism within the series. Notably Bashir.

Which is ironic given that it turns out Bashir was the product of illegal genetic engineering outlawed due to the carnage of the Eugenics Wars.

Not ironic at all, when you consider the objection Bashir had about that.

I'd counter the idea that the CIA is Section 31 anyway. The CIA still have a legal framework. S31 did not. It existed purely for the viewer to debate the extent to which lawlessness is acceptable for the greater good.