Wouldn't It Be Cool in the Star Trek Movie in 2015...

I've never claimed TOS was perfect.

Nor have I ever claimed that V was anything but crap.

It was indeed and awful movie.

Sorry, but I'm not seeing the problem in Chup's post.

Thank you for proving my point....IN SPADES!




As for my statement "we all agree was good", the "WE" I was referring to was the vast majority of film goers and critics who enjoyed the movie. That did not include you and the handful of naysayers who feel compelled to poop on everyone else's fond memories of the film.

Yes! Muad Dib knows how to play the Game of Thrones!
You win or you die.

We've been through this before. To say that another poster "peddles bullshit" is to call that person a "bullshit peddler."

Feel free to disagree with others and argue your case, but keep it civil, please.

I dunno, when I think a bullshit peddler, I think of...like, a guy with a van with a logo, and a place with a window with a logo, and mugs, and bumper stickers, and overalls with the logo embroidered, along with a name patch, y'know, the whole deal.

Oh, yeah, and bulls.
Lots of bulls.

Anyone can peddle a little bullshit out of the trunk of their car to get rid of some surplus.

Don't make 'em a full blown bullshit peddler.

Any more than swapping old tapes makes me a video clerk

Star Trek being a good movie is entirely based on one's opinion.

Star Trek being a popular and financially successful movie is a fact.

Dunno about all that. I was guardedly optimistic. Understand, at this point NEM hadn't been released. VOY had gone out with a whimper, but I hadn't really realized how much it blew. It just got to a point--likely around the time the ship first landed on a planet--when I'd just stopped watching or really caring about it.

And for whatever Beavis and Butthead's faults, they've been very good at telling people what they want to hear. So while they'd taken an interesting premise in VOY and quickly bungled it and I had some definite reservations that they'd do the same with ENT, they were saying the right things. And I had high hopes that we'd see a rough-and-tumble "The Right Stuff" Trek, full of cowboy diplomacy--and maybe how said cowboy diplomacy really fucked things up, leading directly to the Prime Directive.

Of course they pretty much fucked everything up by the pilot and instead we got VOY with blue instead of black jumpsuits, a male captain and chief engineer, a female surly Vulcan and a black token ensign navigator.

Waaay behind in this thread, but this post raised another interesting point for me.

Not only was the story they went with an attempt at reconciling the existing storyline with the franchise history, there was another reason for it: They had to get the cast together in an interesting manner.

Ordinarily (as has been discussed before) you're not going to have your ensigns, LTs, CDRs, CAPTs, et al as classmates. Kirk would've went to the Academy YEARS before Chekov did. So you can't tell an Academy story with the whole cast. MAYBE in a reboot you can make the Big Three (and possibly Scotty) classmates and then, around mid film you do a "Ten Years Later" title. IMO, this is lame, cliched, weak storytelling. And still, how do you introduce the rest of the cast? Have Uhura and maybe Sulu come on as ensigns, do a "One Year Later" cut and introduce Chekov? While they're at it, they might as well lovingly fly around the ship for five minutes while they wait for the paint to dry on the bridge.

No, if you do a disaster movie, you jumpstart the action. And create some dramatic tension, and you get to go "OK, you're the Captain, you're a LT, you're..." And you get to introduce all the characters at once.

As a perk, this means you don't "have" to have characters retire/get promoted out of the job and bring in a new Captain, etc. (I say "have" because I'm not entirely sure it is a bad idea to do it that way--just make the Enterprise the common factor and refresh your cast as required. Alternately tell the stories of the cast as they move through their career and on to new ships and new duties.)

But I'm rambling now. Bottom line is IMO there are some real storytelling benefits to getting the crew together the way they did and, while I when they said it was going to be a time travel movie, I can see why they took the opportunity to tie the new franchise back in with the old. If you're going to do this sort of story anyway, might as well make the Big Bad from the future.

Hey, Harve Bennett's "Starfleet Acadamy", movie was going to have Nimoy and Shat flashback to the story from after ST 5 or 6, and it was going to veer WAY away from the TOS timeline as established in throwaway dialog and such.

Be grateful for the damned Nero timeline, so many Trekkies heads would have exploded after the Bennett movie, the mess would JUST be finally hosed away right now.

I understand the points about taking some liberties with common sense to "get the cast together".

but it wasn't necessary.

With some commonsense writing you can justify the getting all the main characters on the same ship at one time without some idiotic garbage like Scotty materializing inside a water tank.

No.

You could crowbar it together for onscreen, but you'd still need a book's worth of background notes to hammer out every little gap to appease the frothing canonheads.

And it would have to be published to do so.
You'd need a fucking manual for a movie.
Imagine when the mainstream caught wind of that shit, as if Trekkies aren't sneezed at enough.

I find that entire prospect from start to finish nauseating at my very core.

No, that's exactly the kind of shit that had to die.

Oh please.

EVERY FREAKING Star Trek movie to date (including the Abramsverse) has had such huge plot holes in it that it as almost been a mantra among Trek fans

"They explain that in the novelization".

That is one of the things I hate to hear most. My reply is always

"Unless they're handing out free copies at the threater, I don't give a damn about the novelization".

Even Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan had plot holes that had to be explained away in the same way (though far fewer than some later movies).

And none of it would be necessary without tighter writing and more attention to detail.

Yes, and all these movies with plot holes should have had better writing, yes?

http://www.totalfilm.com/features/40-baffling-movie-plot-holes/raiders-of-the-lost-ark-1

I'm not going to diverge into other movies.

This thread is about Star Trek and that is what interests me in this discussion.

Movies MUST stand on their own.

If a movie has a plot hole, I DON'T CARE if it's explained somewhere else. I do not sign up to read a novel or a comic book when I go to a movie; the movie must supply everything pertinent to my enjoyment of the film.

If it does not, it is not a successful film IMHO.

On the other hand...

In the case of Star Trek, some fans apparently need EVERYTHING explained, even details that matter not one iota to the plot. Fine. Go buy the "prequel comic" and resolve to your heart's content. There weren't any questions from Star Trek (2009) that I needed to resolve by reading Countdown. The story is complete in and of itself.

Well, almost. There's still the obvious glaring hole of what the Narada was doing for the 20 years Kirk was growing up---and, please, don't speak to me about deleted scenes; they don't count 'cause they're not in the film. The film fails to explain and is less for it, though I still enjoyed the picture overall.

Yes, and that's over now, so let's move on.

Y'know what I'd do?
Insert a scene in Star Trek 2 that canonizes "Cheech N' Chong's next movie".

Then, space coke would be canon.
That'd solve everything.

Where was Nero for 20 years?
Doing space coke.

Where was Chekov on "space seed"?
Doing space coke.

How did the world react to the vanishing of Gillian Taylor in TVH?
Chekov left behind a baggie of space coke, after that, her friends didn't care so much.

See?
Perfect.

All it'd take was a split second of Cheech N' Chong from the last scene in "...next movie", flying by a window.

How did they end up in the future?
Space coke.

I don't understand why they didn't have the bad guy ship reenter the rift, and pop back out 20 years later. Hell they didn't need for the ship to come full out of the rift for the killing-kirks-dad scene, or have Senor Kirk push the ship back into the rift, they'd be the most logical thing to do.

In fact, have what Chong calls "space coke", turn out to be Plutonian Nyborg, then that splices in "Heavy Metal", and you can use the Loc-Nar to explain everything else.

Except that BSG accomplished that without any kind of time travel plot - they just introduced Richard Hatch as a different character and played him opposite the new cast member for the character he played. Rumor has it they offered the same kind of deal to Dirk Benedict until he turned out to be a sexist asshole. There also wouldn't have been any need to introduce all the characters the way they did either, which in the end detracted from the some of the focus the movie might have had otherwise.

Uh, no, comparing a bad movie to another bad movie that didn't even get made doesn't make a valid defense for that bad movie that was made. Abrams Trek was still just a dumbed down dumb action movie that really wasn't good at all except maybe as a dumbed down dumb action movie where the bar is already set extremely low. You know, like Starship Troopers.

It does when we're talking continuity, and that that's the movie, thus continuity, you were almost going to get.

And that JJTrek is virtually the same concept redressed.

"Almost" is still meaningless in this case, and it in no way defends Abrams Trek from criticism. Abrams Trek happened and it was a bad movie. Neither Berman's version of STXI or Bennett's version of STVI happened.

Which doesn't change the fact that it's nothing more than a dumbed down dumb action movie that has some really serious flaws as a movie. About all you're illustrating is that Paramount changed its mind about the whole Starfleet Academy idea over the course of 20 years and that Abrams Trek really isn't all that original.

Didn't say it did.
That's an absolute you pulled out of nowhere.

Didn't say it did.

Love it when they argue against imaginary adversaries.

I would add this.

In regards to plot holes, I think a good rule of thumb is

"the bigger the events of the movie (in the Trek universe), then the more important the plot holes are".

For example

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is an awful movie with huge staggering plot holes throughout.

But.

The events of the movie don't really matter much in the bigger scheme of things.

It is basically a run of the mill "Enterprise crew" adventure.

So the staggering plot holes don't matter as much. After all, who cares.

But the Abramstrek sought to make radical changes in the entire Star Trek franchise.

Thus its plot holes are much more grevious.

Its like the difference in your barber making a mistake vs. your neurosurgeon making a mistake.

Probably the biggest plot hole is the convenience of the coming together of Kirk, original Spock and Scotty. The counter argument from the filmakers, and also Nimoy & Pegg, is that this represents the disrupted universe trying to heal itself.

What do you make of it.

No, I pulled it out of the fact that you brought it up as a way to defend Abrams Trek using one of the old "if you think this was bad..." arguments.

And I like it when they try to use a straw man and then quickly backpedal when they're called on it.

When you think about it, it's preposterous that the TV crews are always together in the various mirror universe episodes, despite radically different cirumstances. Is it fate bringing Mirror Bashir and Mirror O'Brien together? Or is it perhaps the regular DS9 timeline bringing them together to mimic the mirror guys? Is it "the current of time" as Spock said brought him, Kirk and McCoy together again in "City on the Edge of Forever"?

Or... you just suspend your disbelief and enjoy. Unless you're incapable.

Execution matters. And to be honest the only MU episodes I remotely enjoyed were the first couple of DS9 MU episodes and the ENT one, for that reason.