f13.net

Not sure why there wasn't already a thread for this. Anyway, teaser trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jFZOicwtBw (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jFZOicwtBw)

Why is Picard doing the voice over (at least for part of it)? :headscratch:

Star Trek: More Lensflare?

He isn't, that voice is Benedict Cumberbatch, they do sound quite similar though.

So Star Trek is now a superhero franchise? Seriously, that makes me want to go firebomb the studio it's so horrible and anti-star trek looking.

Star Trek: Inception Horn

I am with you being the son of a Trekkie who religiously watched ToS when she was a kid like I did with Xfiles. However, the greater message/moral of the story Trek movies would probably be lost on this current audience. New generation of Trek, new theme I suppose. I'll still see it mainly because Pine shows flashes of Shatner every so often and that always makes me smile.

Cummerbatch as Khan.

What is this, I don't even.

Star Trek movies were always kind of shit, the hour long episode format never translated well onto the big screen.

You wash your mouth out with soap, young man.

He isn't far wrong.  Pretty much all Trek movies feel like slightly longer TV episodes in terms of both writing and actual production values.  That doesn't make them shit automatically, but it does feel a bit like cheating.

Not counting the reboot, which was a full fledged AAA affair.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/05/05/enterprise-ethics.html

More of what I was talking about.

That's the current speculation, anyway.

That trailer seems to be more about Michael Bay explosions than exploring new worlds and going where no man has gone before.  :oh_i_see:

Hmmm.  That works a little better, I guess.  Wiki needs to sort itself out.

Trailer reminded me of the Aliens teaser trailer. I liked it.

That's, of course, why the TV execs intervened in the third season then cancelled the show in the first place.

So does that make the blonde in the trailer

edit: added spoiler tag

That would also make sense.

There has only been 2 decent trek movies, Khan and the last one.

But otoh there has only been one and a half decent trek series. TNG and half of DS9. So maybe its a wash.

STONE THIS BLASPHEMER!

I partially agree with you on the movies - but they were all decent, even the Save the Whales one (though that was by far the weakest), but Khan was great. However, again, I see this through a Trekkie genetic lens. I always prefer ToS to the rest of the them.

No, save the whales was one of the best it just hasn't aged well to young eyes.

Saying that V was in any way "decent" and was in any way shape or form better than IV has invalidated all your opinions anyway.  :awesome_for_real:

This.

I am excited by the trailer, if only for Cummerbatch.

Not sure what we are trying to discern as "super hero" versus the old stuff.

Yeah. V was a goddamn abomination. I think only Nemesis and that shitty TNG one on the magic healing planet with Zit-Faced Worf came close to its shittiness.

I am not a Trekkie - I'm old skool TOS all the way. I thought TNG got way too touchy-feely preachy. DS9 was good because it WASN'T that, had a more naturalistic feel. Khan was certainly the best Star Trek movie with the reboot my second favorite. I hope that this isn't Khan. I thought the trailer looked like a good action movie. That's what Trek is now.

But it gave us, 'What does God need with a star ship' !!!

(yeah... it was pretty horrible. Guess I blocked that one out and handwaved it away under the guise of retiring ToS cast still chasing the dragon)

I still reckon the people who didn't like V never actually watched The Original Series.  After all, it was simply one of the 15 episodes where The Enterprise met God.

(Yeah, it was awful, I'm just sayin' )

Also, there are people here, IN THIS VERY FORUM, who like First Contact.  Showing that there's no accounting for taste and being a cockgobbler.

Alright, the one with the magic planet which kept everyone healthy, and it seemed that the entire planet was empty except for one village of aryan supermodels . . . and these ugly people wanted to move in and get some of that magic because they had a fatal illness . . . but they weren't allowed to because they were too ugly and not blonde enough . . . what was up with that? That planet must have had loads of empty room.

I was on the side of the villains in that one.

Yes.  Insurrection was utter shite.

Call me Mr.Cockgobbler then.

Maybe I just don't take Star Trek srsly enough though; I've enjoyed most of the Star Trek films by and large, although Nemesis and Insurrection just weren't very interesting.

I do have a real soft spot for Star Trek VI, what's not to love about a Shakespeare-quoting mad Klingon General trying to start a war eh?

Not much.  Especially when he burst into Eidelweiss.

Star Trek is at it's best when it is being slightly daft I feel. Better then than when it is trying to philosophise.

It WAS the best of the TNG movies. That doesn't make it GREAT, mind you, but it sure as shit beat out the other three TNG movies. And V. And there was no Veeger.

Star Trek use to a vehicle for challenging ideas.  Now it is a vehicle for action movies. Sadly we have few of the former and plenty of the latter.

Star Trek shouldn't be movies. They just end up being bad episodes stretched to two hours by too many special effects.

Movies in general are more about the visuals than they are about the story. I thought Star Trek: The Motion Picture had a hell of a story to it. Star Trek II tied directly back to an episode which brought all the fans back to the theaters and then they just had to see what happened to Spock since he IS Star Trek. I am still amazed that the first 6 movies cost as much to make COMBINED as the reboot cost. Hell, after The Motion Picture, they were cheap as hell and brought in buckets of money. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_%28film_series%29

I liked most of the Star Trek movies, never really understood the hate.  The later few TNG ones were shitty, but other than that I got enjoyment out of watching most of them (I thought VI was really good, actually).

Also, anybody who doesn't like the one in San Francisco with the whales is litterally Hitler.

Here's a Japanese version of the trailer with about 15s extra footage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrHlQUXFzfw&feature=youtube_gdata_player)

woo

Regardless of anything else, I enjoy so much how J.J. Abrams really likes to fuck with the audience. (as in the last bit in the Japanese trailer.)

He's the most trollish director that ever trolled.

You go to Hell.  You go to Hell and you Die.

 :why_so_serious:

I came.

A summary of my opinion on the Star Trek movies, just because I felt like going through them and thinking about it.

Number               Title                                  Release date   Director   
            
1   Star Trek: The Motion Picture                    7-Dec-79     Robert Wise     Long and boring, but kinda trippy.
2   Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan                  4-Jun-82   Nicholas Meyer   Awesomesauce. Gritty and intense, though the final battle sucked.
3   Star Trek III: The Search for Spock            1-Jun-84     Leonard Nimoy     I enjoyed it. Was silly, but Star Treky. Christopher Lloyd as a Klingon, lol.
4   Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home                  26-Nov-86   Leonard Nimoy   Light hearted and entertaining.
5   Star Trek V: The Final Frontier                    9-Jun-89     William Shatner     Derp
6   Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country          6-Dec-91   Nicholas Meyer   My personal Favorite, hands down. Enjoyed it more than Kahn, though Kahn was probably a "better" movie.
            
7   Star Trek: Generations                                 18-Nov-94   David Carson   A joke. Dumb plot, horrible waste of the premise.
8   Star Trek: First Contact                                22-Nov-96     Jonathan Frakes   A decently entertaining movie. Got too silly in spots, but the best of the Next Gen.
9   Star Trek: Insurrection                                11-Dec-98                          Felt like a mediocre episode of the TV series, with 45 minutes of padding added. Crap
10   Star Trek: Nemesis                                 13-Dec-02   Stuart Baird   Bizarre. Just never clicked at all for me.
            
11   Star Trek                                                 8-May-09   J. J. Abrams   Supprisingly good, lense flare and all. My third favorite. Totally new feel, but it works.
12   Star Trek into Darkness         

You're going to need to return your beret now, Bunk.  Sorry.

Oh, a Star Trek movie about revenge. How novel.  :uhrr:
Maybe in nuTrek III the Tribbles will come back for revenge and need to be punched with lens flares.

My list of top three Trek movies would have to go:

Wrath of Khan - having seen 'Space Seed' several times on TV, having Khan return after all that time with the same actors? Hell yeah. Creatures in our bodies! This was the calling back to all those 70s trekkies.

Star Trek (reboot) - Really did not think this would work at all, and even though it is a 'YAY EXPLOSIONS - FLARE!!' movie, the actors really did a huge justice to the original cast save for Sulu who needs to be a little more swishy to pull off George's mojo. But honestly, each actor had a few moments where they actually looked, sounded, and acted like their counterparts in the original cast. Never would have thought Eomir could pull off Bones, but holy fuck he was exactly DeForrest. The story was bleh and the writing was kinda crap, but the actors becoming the originals made the movie for me.

The Motion Picture - Hot bald girl in a long satin shirt? Case closed. But really... The story is fucking cool in hooking into the Voyager probes which I really got into when I was a kid right around when this movie came out.

Save the Whales I just couldn't do at all and was at the bottom of my list. Landing a cloaked Klingon ship in Golden Gate Park? And no one bumps into a landing gear? Where the hell did Sulu get that helicopter and no one takes notice IN GOLDEN GATE PARK of a helicopter hovering there and watching shit disappear? Couldn't get past all the wtf and that is before the whole save the environment-our future depends on it theme... Too many NO NO NO parts. And really.. covering up Spock's ears they are concerned with?? In San Fran?  no thanks.

This pretty much tallies with my feelings.

Also


 :grin:

Are they ripping off Wrath of Khan fucking AGAIN?  Jesus Christ.

I'm SO CONFUSED HERE.

They didn't do Khan, so they gave Gary Mitchell a revenge story. Because herp derp Wrath of Khan. 

But that Japanese trailer makes it look like Spock dies in the radiation chamber AGAIN.

 :uhrr:

Star Trek III: Return of Zombie Spock

I imagine everything in that trailer is designed to specifically fuck with the different camps on who they think the baddie is. We don't really have any reason to assume that that IS spock.

Edit: To rephrase a bit. It could be spock, but it could also be not spock.

Yeah. I suspect that even though it's not WOK (or even Space Seed) they're not above ripping out bits from WOK and recycling them.

So you're saying we'll only know for sure once we open the chamber ?

Because that sounds quite familiar.

Schroedinger's Spock.

Here's how this came out at my house.  I, of course, don't watch TV or otherwise get exposed to media and so my wife asks me to guess who is the villain in the new Star Trek.  After "There's a new Star Trek?  Is it J.J.?" I pop out "Khan!", to which she replies, "No, Benedict Cumberbatch!"

:oh_i_see:

Now that I know he's actually playing Khan, though....

If they're actually literally redoing Wrath of Khan, wouldn't this movie have to be set some time into or after the TOS timeline, when Kirk first meets Khan?  I thought they were still prequel-ing.  It's a pretty big jump from Cadet Kirk to Captain Kirk.

My assumption is that it's some previously unseen villain who wants revenge against the hero for some goddamn reason and therefore wants to destroy the Earth, and the hero must save the Earth by punching the villain in the face.  You know, same plot as the last two Trek movies.

(edit) Actually, I forget, did the last movie have a fistfight between Kirk and the bad guy?  I just know that all the TNG movies involved Picard getting into a hand to hand fight with the bad guy at the end for no goddamn good reason.

Are you kidding ?

They totally had a fist fight on board the Romulan ship that was entirely constructed of walkways and plunges to certain death.

Because that's how you BUILD a ship.

Also, lens flare.


(Edit :  Although 'Got Your Gun' was a good line.)

1   Star Trek: The Motion Picture                      I forget, I fell asleep
2   Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan                    Space Fight (in 3d!)
3   Star Trek III: The Search for Spock                Fist Fight
4   Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home                      Run Away!
5   Star Trek V: The Final Frontier                    blocked from my memory
6   Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country                Space Fight   
                           
7   Star Trek: Generations                             Fist Fight
8   Star Trek: First Contact                           Gun Fight
9   Star Trek: Insurrection                            Fist Fight
10   Star Trek: Nemesis                                Fist Fight
                   
11   Star Trek                                         Fist Fight/Space Fight
12   Star Trek into Darkness                        

Seems Picard was the on for fist fight endings.

Piling on here. IV was a fine movie, V is among the 5 worst movies I've ever seen in a theater.

She may have got it right. I don't mind who the villain is, I'm just looking forward to seeing Benedict Cumberbatch play him.

It's funny in that V was one of the movies that most closely resembled the original series.

It's funnier someone said that ten minutes ago.

 :grin:

Wasn't kidding, I must have forgotten it because it wasn't either awesome or stupid enough to remember.  Picard punching bad guys is so inherently stupid that I remember all of those more clearly.

It was real stupid shit, but strangely compelling.

I did like the reboot.  Oddly.

The reboot is one of the best-cast films I can think of, and I think that really makes a huge difference.

The summaries online say the baddie also destroys the entirety of Starfleet' ships which is why the Enterprise must intervene against a former Starfleet member out for revenge, so.. yeah.  :awesome_for_real:

Nothing about what I've seen has screamed Khan to me other than fans fervent wishes. Just because it's Spock* in a radiation chamber doesn't mean it has to be Khan. Just that Spock has to do it to save the Enterprise for whatever reason the plot contrivance demands.  Stealing memorable moments from the old franchise to 'update' them for the new audience is nothing new for J.J.  Spock & Uhura, The Orion girl Kirk beds, Christopher Pike's injury, etc.

 * The hands look a lot like Quinto's hands, which we saw plenty of close-ups of in Heroes as he was eating brains and fixing watches.

Whoops, had my Scottish filter turned on.

My favorite choice is still Karl Urban as McCoy.

No, it totally looks like Gary Mitchell, but all the wiki and imdb say Khan.

Double bluff, methinks.

IMDB lists it as a "rumor". IMDB is community driven and wikipedia, as far as I see says "the villain".

Triple bluff. It's going to be Harry Mudd.

My triple bluff: it's actually John Frederick Paxton's clone!

WTF. Wasn't the entirety of Starfleet's ships destroyed in the first movie? I know Star Trek is a model of socialist utopianism, but replacing fleets of starships every couple of years would be crazy expensive. Also:

This will be a fucking travesty.

I'm on this train now.

Damn you all for saying it all already  :grin:

So I'll go along the "burn it all down" vector.

I also loved First Contact for the same reason I loved JJ Abram's first pass and his new trailer:

Take all the goddamned rules and canon and toss all that shit right out the window. None of it was ever good enough that it couldn't be replaced, or they wouldn't have kept reinventing it. Each series either struggled to get going or struggled to keep going. In large part it was because the core concept of superior space diplomacy is boring. Once they learned that again in TNG, they went into a kinda interesting direction. And after they realized Space Soap was boring, DS9 got good. Voyager never really took off though afaik and I don't even want to think about Enterprise.

There's nothing sacrosanct that the world can't do without.

I appreciate these reboots because there's a chance the series can have some legs. My only issue with the trailer is less about the story (which is still all guesswork) than that it released before they had enough post-production assets to show space stuff. Right now it feels like Mass Effect.

Also, you crew them with people in Starfleet academy and then you graduate whoever is left alive from the resulting massacre. Save on pay & pension costs. Win!

Orci and Kurtzman wrote the first nuTrek. Which I thought was balls, but most don't, so I agree that Into Derpness is probably going to stink, but wanted to be fair with the credits there.

I'm starting to think some people don't enjoy the original series.

Eh..., I'm under the impression that a large part of the fleet was destroyed, not all of it, leaving them some wiggle room.  The Start Trek universe seems to recover fast from fleet wiping events anyways (see the borg invasion) so I don't really mind it.  Guess we'll see how they portray the current universe in this movie.

I think they only build ships in docks as a make-work project, when they need a lot in a hurry they just use huge replicators.

--Dave

EDIT: "Yeah, Borg coming again, better run off another dozen Galaxy-class"

 :oh_i_see:

The casting on the Star Trek reboot movie was fantastic.  The writing/story was pretty meh.  Time travel is such a horrible crutch for Star Trek, they really should avoid it. 

It really was great casting.  I thought they did everyone well except for Sulu...I can't even fucking remember Sulu in that movie.

I didn't gel with their interpretation of Spock, I felt Zachary Quinto just looked either petulant or constipated. Combined with lensflare and and various situations which were just badly thought through as "comical relief" (the scene where they beamed into the ship, and one got caught in a tank? Yeah, that one sucked nuts.) etc, and I just felt the entire movie turned into one big meh-fest.

I really didn't mind in Star Trek: Lens Flare. It confined itself to the premise, and helped you believe their was some actual threat.

Didn't mind it in Star Trek : Lol The Whales, as that was clearly a star trek parody.

But First Contact can eat a dick.

Really?  I thought he was perfect for it.  I thought the script made him a little more petty than we are used to, but they also made it fairly clear that they were changing him and his relationship to Kirk quite a bit (at least, for the first movie alone).  Whether that was a good idea or not is debatable, but I thought Quinto was ideal for the role.

If you recall, Spock's whole line of thought was to follow orders and "rendezvous with the rest of Star Fleet in the Lorenchian system." So there was still some of the fleet left from whatever the hell diplomatic show of force they were doing there.

The worst thing about First Contact (beyond Zephram Cochrane being a douche and the team being cunts on the planet and the 'hard drinking arrrrg' and the fucking Vulcans visiting like fucking Greys) was the way they'd clearly looked at the Aliens movies and decided, that's what we want the Borg to do.  

It was Frakes being a wank and a hack.

Page 3, nearly 4, from the first released trailer.  You guys take your Trek very seriously.

It's just the age of the geeks assembled showing through!  If we were 10 years younger I figure there'd be less discussion.

There's another way to take it??

The casting was great. I could see the potential. Everything else was crap. Maybe if they took Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman out for a drive and stranded them in the woods, they could get some competent writers and director and do something with the cast.

I'm going to raise something that's bothered me for a while but I've never had the courage to say publicly before:

Is JJ Abrams overrated? I mean, Alias was great fun and the first season or two of Lost was genius, but nothing else has lived up to that. I'm not saying he's a bad writer or producer, he's just not what we hoped.

In other words, he's no Joss Whedon.

Maybe I should watch Fringe?

His stuff is consistently good and entertaining. Some of it, like you have said, is really great watching.

I think that's enough to put him ahead of many.


Joss Whedon? This show is now canceled.

J.J.Abrams isn't overrated by me, I think he's deeply mediocre.

He's great at giving you a glimpse of how good things could be... and then snatching it away in a shower of ridiculously over-budgeted CGI and plot holes the size of Jupiter.

Fringe is a perfect example: potentially great, big budget, interesting premise, mostly good production values and even some OK acting... but pissed away into a filthy pool of bad writing.

I had no idea there were that many Star Trek films, I gave up after the 'Lol God' movie, and whatever the first Next Gen one was. The new one looked interesting until I saw it had old Spock in it, and figured it'd be stupid time travel bullshit.

I'll just watch TOS on Hd and Bluray, and hope for better for In To Derpness.

He's fantastic for ideas and creating worlds and characters.  He sucks at telling stories.   

Yes, he's overrated but I feel the same way about Whedon.

Looper was pretty good.

Voyager soured me on time travel stories in Trek, because it seemed like the writers wanted to do some crazy dramatic shit, like blowing up Voyager, or killing off a character, but then they had to reset everything before the end of the episode, so they'd indulge themselves and then reset everything with time travel.
Doing that once or twice is ok, but Voyager pulled that crap at least once a season, if not more often. And then it was the main plot of the series finale.   :uhrr:

Star Trek always had much better success with the Evil Federation mirror universe stuff than with the time travel stuff.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/33271127/a_-_hi_doctor.gif)

Iirc there were 8 ships that went to meet the (apparently Borg-modified according to the comic book I didn't read) Nautilus Nemo ship. 7 of them were killed on sight. But that wasn't the bulk of the fleet I don't think. Spock wouldn't have thought there'd be a chance to "balance the engagement" if the Laurenthian Abyss fleet was anything less than probably double what got annihilated.

There were quite a few different pop culture references in First Contact. The only Aliens-esque scene I can think of was when the sequence where the Borg first started abducting crew. Otherwise, it was straight out of TNG episodes. Except the Queen. That was a shame. Nothing like a clear leader to dilute the essence of a "collective conscious" :P

Totally agree. Alternative dimensions > linear time travel in my opinion. You get all the fun of seeing how things could be different without the baggage of retconning history to that point. That TNG episode with Crusher getting stuck in that pocket universe was great at the end (though as usual, about 30 minutes of filler first...)

You know what else had a Queen ?

(http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lww22pQ4pI1r91lndo1_400.png)

I had to look at the URL to know who that was. The last Doctor I ever saw wore a striped suit with parsley attached to it.  :-P (Actually it was either him or the curly-haired asshole, I don't remember the order.)

I'll make an exception for him, though sure, as well as Time Bandits and Bill and Ted.

Well, yes. But the impression I got was that you thought the entirety of the Borg in First Contact was modelled on Aliens, whereas I'm saying it was just that one sequence and the use of a Queen with everything else having already been established in the series (what they looked like, how they moved in that slow plodding way, the regen chambers, the synthesis of droid and organic tech like they were doing with Data, etc).

Because, ya know, it matters. Or something :-)

The thing with slowly infesting/assimilating the Enterprise was also a lot more organic and Aliens-y and a lot less like the Borg from TNG.

I feel like if the Borg from TNG were going to assimilate an entire ship, they'd grab it in a tractor beam, drag it right into their giant fucking cube ship, and slice it up with lasers to extract the useful parts with maximum efficiency.  Remember the very first time the Enterprise met the Borg, how the first thing the Borg did was carve a core sample out of the saucer section and pull it out just to see what was in there?  That's what makes the Borg scary -- they are huge and faceless and powerful, and as far as they're concerned every other species is raw material to be processed.  They aren't quick or sly or sneaky because they don't need to be.  Having them creep and spread around like a Zerg infestation is missing the point.

That's because the main Borg cube was blown up and it was only the remnants in the escape sphere that were able to transport onto the Enterprise before it too was destroyed.

Thanks.

It was in Voyager that they started fucking around with the Borg and turning them into basically nanites.  It didn't really work and made it all techno-organic and shite.  I far preferred them when they were just a total and utter fucking rip off of Cybermen.

And it might not matter.  In any other thread.  Beyond the Star Trek one.

The concept of an "escape sphere" itself in the context of the Borg is fucking stupid.  It only makes sense if you have the concept of a Queen who is more important than the drones.  Which is itself fucking stupid.  It's like an Escher painting of missing the point of the Borg.

And yeah, I think we can blame the Voyager writers for most of it.

I don't remember much Voyager/Borg action except with the one where they started by beaming a proton torpedo onto the ship (was that the one with the guy from the 27th century that gave the doctor the improved SAG rates holo emitter)?

I feel like the Borg were screwed with too much to call First Contact "off". There was the Hugh episode which made them apparently easy to humanize. There was the Lore episode which made them both stupid and easily corruptible. There was the run-by-kids TOS-throwback episode in Voyager. Heck, as much as I enjoyed Best of Both Worlds, and consider it the turning point of TNG itself, they deviated from that by only partially assimilating Picard (which was obvious even before they stated it in First Contact). I don't recall any DS9 episode with them save the premiere. And while some of the books were fun, particulary Peter David's Vendetta, that matters as much to lore as SW EU stuff.

I agree the Queen was just wimping out and going with "bad guy" in lazier movie making than "the bad guy is technology run amock across a communist paradise". But the vibe I got was less Aliens than it was ants. And because they never were any more consistent than "techy bad guys who speak in echo" in any of the series leading up to that point, it didn't bother me.

Doctor Who is the Nightmare Before Christmas of this generation.

Was Vendetta that one that brough the Planet Eater from ToS back to kill the Borg ?  Because that one was wank.



 :oh_i_see: :uhrr: :oh_i_see:

What does that mean ?

Mediocre to good but with "cult" following that is anything but small.  It's something people watch to get cred with their respective subcultures that has little to do with any sort of quality.

Um.  OK.

Much as I enjoyed buffy and angel as well, they were also incredibly overrated.  Things we enjoy, this scifi stuff and star trek in particular, are not generally good shows. They entertain us and fill a need for fantasy but if you take a couple steps back there are wrought with plot holes and bad acting, unconvincing situations and other problems that would not be tolerated in other genres.

Doctor Who is particularly offensive because in america it's got a factor of "foreign coolness" to it that kids here use to express how much cooler they are for watching something on bbc america.

My Little Pony would be the canonical example these days.

And I will e-stab anyone in the face who says Nightmare was only mediocre.

The Borg Queen was just the Cyber Leader in a fetish suit, of course.

Go fuck yourself, dickbrain.

Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead.

Yea. But I admit to not knowing the what "wank" means in this context. Hated it or loved it?

Reason I said "ants" is because Aliens aliens move really fast whereas ants seem to sorta plod along. Maybe there's more similarity? Now I'm remembering how much I thought the opening dream sequence in First Contact reminded me of Aliens face huggers. Damn you pop culture!

I thought you meant the Woody Allen cartoon.

What is wrong with you people. Its like a bunch of hipsters invaded.

F13 was a bunch of hipsters before hipsters were hipsters.

It all stems from schild and his béret-wearing film critiques :awesome_for_real:

This thread is wank. Also equating Dr. Who with Buffy and Angel? I don't even :uhrr:

And all this in the Trek film thread, it's the escher of nerd culture :drill:

I am ASSUMING we are on the same side, for I agree and I will stab.

I'll give them to Oogie Boogie.

Nightmare was very good but it got put on a really high pedestal but I can't be the only one thinking Dr Who is overrated...really? I mean yes my opinion and all, maybe I'm that one guy but it really does nothing for me and I LIKE scifi.

Be careful of the "and i LIKE scifi". Sci-Fi has always been... pretty much my favorite genre, and I've always liked Doctor Who. There are plenty of die hard Sci fi fans that do as well.

Seriously, it CAN just come down to taste.

Except for Nightmare. You're stupid and should feel bad if you don't like it. But then, it's one of my most favorite things ever.

Slamming Nightmare and Who?

I will rip off your head and hire your favorite actor to shit down your neck.

Overrated is different from slamming, I like nightmare but come on.

Sorry. The "assimilation by biting you to turn you into a zombie stinging you with Nanites that turn you into Borg" started in First Contact. The Borg hadn't even turned up in Voyager at that stage.

And the Borg were at their best by being a unified FORCE of cybermen that chewed you up and then spat the bits of you they didn't like out. That started eroding when Picard was grabbed. Basically the Borg began losing it at the end of Part 1 of TBOBT because the writers just felt that every enemy has to have a face/leader, and could not comprehend that this was a time to break the rules.

Ironically, Doctor Who made the same mistake with the Daleks when they were became basically the puppets of Davros/the Dalek Emporer. There's no menace in a bunch of puppets.

First contact was a bad zombie movie with "alcoholic historical figures doing it for the money" to give it edge. It was terrible, and I've rarely been so let down by a movie in my life.

When did this happen ?

I can't think of a single story where Davros wasn't entirely fucked over by his own creations.

So you're saying that the longest running TV sci-fi series in the entire world is only popular because it's a fad?

Really?

I mean, I know that there's an awful lot of Trekkies butthurt ITT because J. J. Abrams made Star Trek actually popular rather than just 'popular with Trekkies' popular but there's no real need to project that elsewhere.

E: Davros and the Daleks fucked over each other equally, iirc. 4thDoc might not have outright destroyed the cyborg pepperpots back in 'Genesis' but having Davros around turned them from "United, all-conquering Empire" into "squabbling factions being fucked over by each other" right up until 7thDoc kicked the Time War into high gear by giving Davros a certain stellar manipulator and saying "Don't throw me into that Briar Patch use the Hand of Omega".

Trek movies popular with Trekkies are ones that'll actually stand the test of time, whereas Trek done for the current pop masses are just a moneygrab.  They're not movies in the sense of art, they're just diversions from current events.  The latter is what Abrams is good at.

I'll watch the movie because I'm sure it'll be good entertainment, but in the back of my head I'll still be wanting.

Also, didnt Abrams say his next Trek film would likely involve Khan in some way, with a twist?  I'm hearkening back to before his reboot came out and he was being interviewed.  If I had to guess he's merging the Mitchell and Khan tropes into one movie, which honestly sounds intriguing to me.  Both characters are similar in a lot of ways.

{citation needed}

So am I ok if I just say it was bad then?   :why_so_serious:

Uh, that kinda describes all of Trek ever. Let's not turn the IP into something more than a mere entertainment distraction that just happened to appeal to a narrower audience than Family Ties.

Movies that stand a test of time are good movies. This applies to Trek as well. Bad ones only stand up to trekkies who really want to like it just like any movie or TV that has a niche audience. Plenty of people don't like Firefly either. But me really loving it doesn't makle it "stand the test of time". It just makes me part of a niche.

Which was my earlier point: At that point there was only ever one other Borg episode. Basically that means there was never enough establishing principal that defined the Borg, which means they were making it up as they went from the very second appearance on forward.

This is why I can't get annoyed that some IP foundation was violated by First Contact. It's not like they had some deeply defined origin story.

They did for First Contact with the Vulcans and who the fuck the inventor of the warp drive was.

Both of which they took a steaming fucking dump on.

No, but neither should we be surprised that the Borg turned into impotent vilians in Voyager, when the writers used them more as typical Trek antagonists.
It's more a waste of a great setup.

Just to stir up the nerd rage, cause there isn't enough in this thread

(http://i.imgur.com/DcFB6.jpg)

Wow, what an interesting thread. I'll join those who say Dr. Who is overrated. I love the theme song and the general idea but I have trouble getting past the production values of the show and the general weirdness. I think I like my sci-fi too "serious" to be able to enjoy Dr. Who.

Hmmm, what else to say? First Contact is the only good TNG movie. Khan and Undiscovered Country are the only good TOS movies. Abrams Trek is the 2nd best Trek movie IMO. (Khan holds first place but I have to admit it is probably just nostalgia at this point.)


Is this a subtle sarcastic remark? All Trek movies are money grabs. None of them are timeless classics. The only difference is that prior Trek movies were money grabs aimed at the specific fan base. Abrams tried to widen it to modern audiences while not alienating the prior base. (Something I think he mostly succeeded at except the truly hardcore.)

Oh, and finally, I disagree about Time Travel being bad, particularly in these movies. Usually time travel is annoying because nothing changes. This movie changed a ton in response to the time travel and indeed, that was the entire reason they used it, so they could make a Trek movie but not get caught in decades of Canon continuity. For Abram's Trek I think time travel was not only used well but was necessary.

I think you're using the term Moneygrab so loosely as to make it meaningless. Every movie wants to make a profit.

I was going to argue that you were totally and utterly wrong about the Abrams Trek being the 2nd best trek movie, but I decided to rewatch it just to make sure it wasn't just lensflare hate which made me want to argue against you.

Turns out it was, mostly. I still think Zachary could do with looking less petulant in some scenes, and there were the occasional scene which should die in a fire (the beam aboard enterprise scene, where scotty gets trapped, for one, and the scene where they beam aboard the "cargobay" was somewhat akin to george lucas style bumbling about and magically getting the right outcome), but overall it wasn't as bad as I remembered it as.

But, if Abrams is still doing his whole lensflare bullshit in the next film, then I hope someone stomps on his nuts, repeatedly. If he could also step away a bit from the Jason Bourne camerashake/zoom filming style, that'd be grand too, but my hate for the lensflares could probably generate its own singularity by now.

I'm with you on Zephram Cochrane. The book "Federation" was a much better Cochrane origin story. It humanized him in a way that would have worked just as well as 90s-era pseudo-emo drunk guy. And they wouldn't have even needed to include the antagonist and all the time jumping (though Sidewarp 55 at the end was kinda fun).

Also, the movie environment totally didn't gel for me that the dystopian landscape he lived it would result in the resources necessary for a warp drive, and "about the money" when there didn't appear to be much of a working economy.

But still enjoyable movie as movies go, which is more important to me than being sacrosanct. Even the treatment of the Vulcans didn't bother me, though that whole sequence could have gone away. Forced urgency that whole thing. Lazy, like someone said earlier.

Holy shit that's awesome! First, where's the beam coming from? Second, that's not how the shields worked in 1701-A era. Thrid, don't think the Death Star could survive being that close to the ground. Fourth, the beam would be getting bigger as it got close to the Enterprise for now other reason than depth and distance.

Love it!  :grin:

Clearly the 01-a up there had traveled forward in time and gotten a shield upgrade.  The Death Star is so unconcerned at this tiny ship that's 1/5 the size of a Star Destroyer that it's just plinking a simple surface-mount ion cannon at it.   :why_so_serious:

uh... that's Saturn in the background or some other ring planet, not a beam.

Heh, didn't even see it that way till you mentioned it, but that could be what it is.

But I'm almost certain its meant to be a laser bouncing off the enterprises shields.

Last I checked, tiny ships where the only thing that can destroy the death star.   :awesome_for_real:

Who the hell is Gary Mitchell? Was he the guy that went Space Insane when he tried to leave the Galaxy? (You know, there really were a strangely large amount of god-like aliens in TOS. From Greek-god ones to those strange "We're just gonna stop your war now, k?" energy guys).

I'm pretty happy if Star Trek moves away from Space Gods and more into Superior Tech Advantages, which sorta fits how sci-fi (and culture in general) have shifted since the 70s.

As long as what face-rapes Starfleet boils down to "Yeah, you guys are basically sharp rocks versus guns here. It's gonna be bad" and not "Behold my Ascended Awesomness as I rewrite reality" I'm gonna be okay.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Gary_Mitchell

Am I the only one would love a good star trek war movie?  Just Klingons and Romulans and some bigass space battles, with fleets of ships not just 2?  Or is this just not in the spirit of trek? (or wishful thinking of an old trek muse player)

Fuck lolCircles fighting.  :why_so_serious:

Ya know, in thinking about space battles vs Trekbattles, a movie of Trek battles wouldn't break the lore. LOLcircles are kinda how they're always handled, in TNG and DS9 (and First Contact). So they'd look stupid to people who want real sci-fi space battles, but it's not like that's the target audience of Trek movies anyway.

Lol. But nah. The shape of the "planet" is wrong, and the right side of the ring is in front of the Death Star. Now, sure, a ringed planet could be more oval, and the Death Star could actually be a few million miles in diameter to make that perspective work. But I kinda doubt both :-)

Successful troll was successful. I almost took the bait myself.

In this context, what I mean by money grab is that the movies are made purely for money and without an eye to any kind of artistry. I quite enjoy 4 of the movies (the whale movie has aged poorly and is so juvenile that I find myself rating it as "watchable" at best.) but to call them timeless classics just makes me roll my eyes. They were made because Star Wars made so much money and Paramount saw dollar signs. Until Star Wars they were going to make a new Star Trek series but decided they could make more money with movies.

There was a Russian running about San Francisco looking for Nuclear Wessels.

What's not to love ???

It's a great popcorn movie. You know, like the first JJ Star Trek.  :grin:

There is certainly a balance between art, production and profit. I don't want to get all Business 101 here, but I feel that to say the Trek movies were moneygrabs implies you think other blockbuster-y IP extensions have more altruistic purposes.

IP extension is all business. The amount of money you get to spend making a movie is contingent on how much money you think you'll make from ticket sales and then after-market residuals. Same with videos games, cars, phones and just about anything else that is a good sold to a consumer or a company. They wouldn't call it "Star Trek" unless they thought the name, major protagonists, and the artists who define those characters had some cache. Sure, there's always an origin. ST: TOS, Firefly, Star Wars Ep IV. But your sequel or big screen adaptation comes entirely from the business calculus of that brand equity.

At the same time, to deliver a good experience, to build a brand that has equity, you need to deliver something people want. And that is where the art comes in.

If it's popular, that means the stars aligned between the business and the art. When it's just popular but quickly forgotten, the art failed (bad acting, bad story, bad editing). When it's just critically acclaimed but mostly a box office failiure, then the business side failed (bad planning, bad idea, bad targeting, bad marketing, bad theater support).

Buffs like to get neckbeard with their artistic value rating scales, and when it comes to certain movies, I'm right there with them. But nothing is intended to just be a moneygrab with no attempt at artistic merit.

tl;dr: just watch the movie credits to see how much art goes into a "moneygrab"   :oh_i_see:

It looks like this is the thread to just mash nerd IPs together. As such:

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b8/Star_trek_xmen_1.jpg/250px-Star_trek_xmen_1.jpg)

Starring: Patrick Stewart as himself

I think you guys got played by Abrams.

It's not Mitchell or Khan. I'm 90% sure of it.

Almost all the trailer--and even Karl Urban's "oops, it's Mitchell" thing--is a deliberate misdirect. The bit from the Japanese version especially--I'd bet a lot that what you're seeing there is Captain (or Admiral) Pike getting killed/maimed right at the start of the film with Spock being unable to save him.

The main thing we know about the film's central story is that it's designed to be "Star Trek's version of Heart of Darkness"--they've been saying that from pretty much as soon as they had a shooting script. So that makes Cumberbatch like to be based in some sense on Kurtz--a loyal "company man" who has gone too deep into a place far beyond 'civilization' and turned against civilization as a result. That generally fits a lot of the teaser imagery and voice-over.

The other thing we know is that the villain is based on a TOS character--they've been clear about that too, and it fits the "I will have my vengeance".

That doesn't fit Khan (a conqueror from the beginning) or Mitchell (gone crazy because he's been turned into a god without any preparation). But it does fit a very common type of TOS antagonist: the Star Fleet captain/admiral gone tragically bad and turned against the Prime Directive and the ideals of the Federation. There's at least five or so you could choose who fit the basic archetype. Of them, I think the best fit by far, the one who has the most interesting backstory that you could open up, play with, and change usefully without losing the basic idea of the character, is

They're doing the same basic idea as Wrath of Khan--bring back a one-shot villain, spin him up a bit into a more memorable antagonist, give him more of a backstory. The only difference here is they're going to have to explain why  has a particular dislike for Kirk and Co. but maybe that will happen in the early part of the film.

Abrams also clearly loves tweaking the fans who think TOS was about deep ideas and philosophy and so on. I loved TOS as a kid and still like it, and love about half of TNG and DS9 but let's not give Roddenberry too much credit here.

Too much credit for the thing he himself said he was trying?  For the thing a lot of hard sci fi at the time was also doing? Ok.

The only thing I got from this thread is I'd really like to insult Doctor Who because I agree 100% that Stateside people fellate it because omfg european obscure shit they can claim they have watched even the ancient versions but to be honest I've never even tried to watch it beyond a random half a episode on tv once or twice. So where would I even start if I wanted to watch it? I'd seriously appreciate a recommendation.

To me Doctor Who being the longest running scifi means its probably as crap as  the longest running anime always are but that people are really trying to say its good-good surprises me somewhat.

I grew up with it to an extent because the Tom Baker ones were on TV on PBS here in the Bay Area all the time in the 80s, when US science fiction was really hard to find and pretty shitty when it did exist. So, it isn't too hard for me to understand why people my age and older would have fond thoughts of it, there just wasn't much else available at the time (on TV) for science fiction fans. My understanding is it spent many, many years after that being shitty and only recently has been passable again and I assume that's why it seems to have come back to life as a fan thing. You never saw people talking about it in the 90s or early 2000s, at least around here.

In fairness, Rodenberry was quite clear that he made Wagon Train in Space.

Anything beyond that was luck.

Regarding doctor who, you can easily tell whether an episode will be good according to the lead actor.

Up to Tom Baker - universally accepted as 'good'.
Peter Davison - generally thought of as good.
Colin Baker - bad on TV. I gather did some good radio plays.
Slyvester McCoy - bad
Paul McCann, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant - good
Matt Smith - good performance, terrible script.

Most of the years it was believed shitty it wasn't on TV (and wasn't shitty on other media) so that may or may not count.

I'm not sure you read your own Post.  While it seems that you particularly WANT it to be a certain someone, what you wrote actually fits nicely with what is already being speculated.  Still, it'll be interesting to see either way.

 :why_so_serious:

Exactly. The best episodes were in many cases made despite Roddenberry--luck of drawing a great writer, luck of the ideas his performers had, which over time accumulated to give a sense that the show was doing more thoughtful SF (given that the other examples of televisual SF were "Lost in Space" and its ilk, not a hard bar to clear). And the fans did a lot to make the episodes more textured and layered and interesting than they often were--it's the original great example of how geek hermeneutics created a bigger, better text around a beloved source material. Roddenberry was clearly a serious creative drag on early TNG--he'd come to believe his own press too much, so among other things he kept insisting that there could be no sustained interpersonal conflict between crew members because the Federation had evolved past that sort of thing. He was also the guy who kept insisting that the Ferengi be portrayed as moronic perverts who had a thing for naked humanoid women and other dumb bits in the early TNG episodes.

Naw, see, Mitchell is a different trope--the danger of godly/superbeing levels of power, where you no longer care about the concerns of ordinary mortals. Sure, he's annoyed with Kirk personally because of the attempted abandonment, but mostly he's just overwhelmed with godly power.  is more like Captain Tracy and innumerable Admiral Dickweeds who decide the Federation is too weak (or who decide that breaking the Prime Directive to save their own skin is just fine). Which is way more like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness--gone mad because he thinks he's seen the truth about everything.

Roddenberry's statement that the show was Wagon Train in space was due to its focus on individual characters as a means to sell the message.  This has been covered in every article or special I've ever seen about the show, and I'm not a Trekkie so I don't go hunting these things down.

But I've been on the 'net long enough to not argue this shit.  You're convinced it was never conceived to be more than pulp, fine. Run with it. There was no motive behind the interracial cast, the multiple analogues to problems of the 60's and wasn't meant to inspire hope for a better future.  It was all just a blatant attempt to cash-in on the hotness of space in the run up to the moon landing.

Roddenberry was clearly an idealist in a good way, and yes, that did influence the show in a good way and gave it a sense of being more than just a Space Western. But at least some of what came to be seen as Trek's characteristic tone was luck--the luck of writers, the luck of actors, the luck of the zeitgeist. As it always is with good shows--no show comes out exactly as planned by a masterful auteur. But the key point is that there's nothing fixed about Trek, e.g., the people who say, "Oh, no, Trek can't have tons of action, that's not what it's about", are really being too closed-minded.

Wait, what ?  Why are you laying that last paragraph at my door ?


Edited :  wait, there was a post between us.  Maybe that wasn't at my door.  Arg.

Why is Starfire out of Teen Titans there too?

There's an episode called Blink which somebody quoted from earlier and that's a contender for best standalone episode of recent years. I'd get hold of that somehow.

Blink is utter awesomesauce.  It's probably in the top ten episodes of Who ever.

Also, if you just want the new improved stuff, Girl in the Fireplace is also awesome (and written by the same chap, I think).

Dalek is a really good episode despite a teeny-tiny bit of handwaving and magic.

If you want to check out 'Old' episodes, you really can't go far wrong with anything that happened to Tom Baker, particularly the Origin of the Daleks and the follow up with the Movellans.  Watch the original Silurian or Sea Devil episodes with Pertwee, I remember those fondly.

 :awesome_for_real: or  :uhrr:

On Dr. Who one thing which american audiences do a lot, or perhaps geeks in general is say "I love Dr Who-Dr Who is awesome etc, etc"  It's like saying "I love star Trek" No, you don't.  You may love the concept but loving the whole of it is near impossible because it has varied so much in quality over it's decades long run.  Who has has as many or more bad runs than star trek, can anyone ever defend enterprise or voyager?

Blink was a good episode and there were plenty more good ones but on the whole it's just become trendy, overrated and in my opinion a series with more bad than good episodes which, ironically the same could be said for star trek, even though I love me some TNG and DS9.

NO ONE who is a fan of something says I LOVE ONLY 35% OF SOMETHING. People say "I love this thing".

But there are people wearing Who T-shirts joining Matt Smith fan clubs and wearing fedoras that have only see 10% of the thing they are claiming to love.

So? They still love it. That statement borders closely to "I liked it better when it was underground".

I see it more like twilight fans who proclaim to love vampires.

Well, anyone who says they love Dr Who based solely on the last couple of seasons needs knifed.

But I'm a moderate on these matters.

But.. they do! No matter if WE might not like said vampires, they still like that shit. As for twilight fans.. the ones I know really like vampires. Hell, my fiancee is obsessed with Bela Lugosi and twilight.


Eh. I look at much more optimistically. "Hey, the crazy stuff I watched when I was growing up is now popular and packing convention centers! I'm glad people like it, because I always thought it was awesome!"

It probably also helps that the two newest doctors are roguishly handsome... OR AT LEAST THAT'S WHAT MY FIANCEE WOULD SAY HAHAHAH *coughs*.

Obviously real Dr Who fans are busy debating the relative merits of Zoe (http://www.oocities.org/eviled666/zoe1.jpg) vs Victoria (http://blog.auntjanenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/VictoriaWaterfield3.jpg) but you can't expect today's young people to appreciate the fuzzy black and white stuff.

When time is meaningless, both is an acceptable answer.

You're only a REAL Dr. Who fan if you can take an alien made out of paper machie and a shower curtain seriously.  :why_so_serious:

Except that it always was popular and packed convention centers.

Maybe just over here tho.

In the states, Dr. Who was this incredibly obscure show that got put on PBS because anything from the BBC was "culture".  :awesome_for_real:
Just now with the Who revival, and BBC America, and the interbutz,  it's much more out there.

My mother dragged me to every Star Trek convention that was within 200miles of Cleveland when I was growing up. I had no idea I should have been ashamed of it all - but who cares, I got to shake Leonard Nimoy's hand and mom got his autograph on a picture of the NCC-1701. Have to dig that up from the attic archives at some point.

Doctor Who is rated or overrated depending on who's writing it and who is playing the Doctor and who the companions are. For instance, right now, I'd rate the stories as FUCKING TERRIBLE with Moffat as the writer, but have enjoyed both Matt Smith's Doctor and the companions. The Tennant run was really fucking good right up until the last two movies/specials with only a little wankery. For Americans who watched Doctor Who in their childhood, it wasn't the hipness of watching Euro programming so much as the absolutely alien sensibilities of the English writing and cast that made it so attractive.

Let's not forget that Star Trek IV is the most commercially successful Star Trek movie UNTIL the JJ Abrams version released last year. According to Wikipedia, only Star Trek: The Motion Picture grossed more worldwide but less in America. The series was doing respectable numbers before IV but the one with whales and Russians in San Fran looking for nuclear wessels actually made Star Trek a bigger iconic series than it had ever been. It's cheesy as fuck and creatively bankrupt, but it was fun and I liked it.

And it wasn't V, which story wise was actually closer to traditional Trek (right down to Space God villain) but was a terrible, horrible abomination.

That's one of the many incarnations of Jean Grey.

Also, why the fuck is there so much arguing about Dr. Who in a Star Trek thread?  YOU'RE CROSSING THE STREAMS!

Mostly because the Dr Who thread is dead to me.  It became very boring.  For everyone else listening to me, mostly.

I enjoyed hearing your dreams for Moffat's painful and debilitating exit from the show. But then I felt the same way.

Yeah, who was that who wrote those two episodes again? What did he go on to do?




 :why_so_serious:

Thanks for taking my point and ruining it by removing the subtlety.

Croeso mawr ichi

Actually that was Rick Berman. Berman created the Ferangi as a serious threat race that ate the people that they had dealings with. Only when they were finally shown on screen he went nuts that people actually laughed at these stupid looking dwarves with big ears. And then the writers turned them into comic relief becasue they were stupid looking dwarves with big ears. So when he ripped off Babylon 5 created DS9, he set up Quark as a mafia crime boss that would provide a lot of the villiany on DS9... and then had to watch as Arwin Shimmerman and the writers rapidly turned Quark into comic relief. What a surprise.

I know when I go to Wal-Mart I want to go to the one with the cannibal checkers known to take bites out of the customers.  :awesome_for_real:

Well hey wouldnt anyone?  :why_so_serious:

And before Someone accuses me of whatever, here's a direct quote from Encounter at farpoint

Look, I'm a B5 fan, but this is just nonsense. DS9 started *before* B5, other than the pilot, which is utterly terrible and nobody would have ever been inspired to copy it. When you account for the lead time in creating a show, etc., there's just no credible argument to be made for this. The best case you can make is that they noticed that having a series story arc was working well for B5 and decided to add one of their own. That's hardly a 'ripoff'.

JMS had been pitching the idea around for several years before he finally got someone to sign the dotted line, and yes he pitched it to Rick Berman. Sorry and all. But I'm sure that Rick independently came up with the idea of a space station after hearing the Idea from JMS.

NERD FIGHT!!

"Huh. Someone made a tv series in space on a space station with a story arc, it must be a complete b5 ripoff" :oh_i_see:

Wake me up when we get to the "Voyager ripped off Red Dwarf" fight.

The early seasons of DS9 had a story arc? I thought it was about random episodes about the wormhole and watching runabouts rapidly gaining the firepower of a galaxy class. Until the shadows turned up in B5 and suddenly they heard about the Dominion which was a huge empire no-one had heard of before, and then they sat there for 2 years while the writers sat there in a panic making character driven episodes trying to figure out why these guys were not obliterating the entire alpha quadrant inside a week.

Seriously you could turn off DS9 in the first 5 minutes for the first 2 years. If there was something to do with the wormhole, preferably a ship coming through the wormhole, leave it on, otherwise it was a character driven filler episode about some unlikable character and you could turn it off.

And of course there were tons of science fiction series about space stations before DS9 and B5.  :why_so_serious:

Red Dwarf was never really lost.

Yoyager didn't have a cat or a Robot. Or guitars. Or a sarcastic computer. And Red Dwarf didn't have a changeling hidden aboard hiding as the Captains hair.

Neelix is sort of a cat in one episode, the holo-doctor is basically a sarcastic computer, and Robot covers the acting of the entire crew.  :why_so_serious:

It totally had a cat and a robot.

Or quality. ZING!

The one thing I remember from Voyager was the constant stream of episodes where there were 1-3 people left on the entire ship which had 1 hour to save the ship from <insert technobabble process of doom here>.

The one thing I remember is Jeri Ryan in a corset.

I loved B5 for a lot of things and will always hae fond memories but it always seemed for every one good aspect the show had two bad ones.

But they always had enough powah to repair the carpets and to keep their uniforms looking fresh and clean...

This.

So Cumberbatch is playing John Harrison.  This is what Paramount has given as his name. 

Another time travel plot, I guess! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison

There are a lot of people theorizing that the name is just an alias.  Which, since its JJ Abrams, I have no problem believing.

You really had to ignore the whole stupid power plot device entirely because it was so stupid.  I seem to remember a scene in an early episode where Janeway was talking about how great it was that they were conserving power by growing food instead of using the replicators, WHILE IN THE HOLODECK.  They also seemed to have no problem using their transporters all the time.

Not until series VI anyway.

The only episode I remember about Voyager was some bizarre one where things start to break down on the ship and it turns out the ship was actually somehow made of goo and oh, all the crew turned out to be goo people who only thought they were the actual crew and they all dissolved and then the real Voyager somehow flies by right where the now dissolved fake Voyager/crew was floating in space and they go "huh, I wonder what that goo is?" and they keep on flying by and that was the end of the episode.

I saw no reason to watch that show again.

Yeah, that was shit.

In fairness, though, we have seen that same storyline in quite a few sci-fi settings.  The whole 'we think we're real, but really we're not' has been done to death, particularly when they brough the Holodeck and Nanites into Sci Fi.  The amount of people who turn out to be robots or nanites or some other shit instead of the 'real' people are just legion.

However, I have to defend Voyager here :  It was utter shit from start to finish.

Oh, no wait, that's not defense, is it ?

True tho.

Fucking Nazi Lizards before Enterprise did Nazi Lizards.

IT'S THAT GUY! (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Harrison)

Was speculating about this today.

One thing that worked well about Wrath of Kahn is that at that time, a lot of trekkies knew who he was, enough so to quickly explain it to other people. They had re-aired Space Seed prior to the movie premiere, and even that was so marketed so far ahead of time that people knew to watch it and did so. It was a good marketing campaign in retrospect, but mostly possible because people still largely watched TV in real time because they had no choice.

Anyway, the problem with Cumberbach being based on any known character from TOS is that they can't rely on that universal knowledge anymore. Abrams Trek is starting from scratch, no TV series, no established lore, and very particularly tossing out a number of seemingly sacrosanct things, like destroying Vulcan and Spock's relationship with his father.

So any villain from lore can not rely on them being from lore. Instead they can only do the Die Hard approach of using the first half introducing, the third quarter in conflict and the fourth in resolution. Anything else about the villain is merely brief shout out to fans.

Which is why I think it could still be Kahn :-) There was still the superhuman era of genetic modification, it's a timely theme, and an easy thing to explain.

Edit: forgot to say why.

"Up to Tom Baker" covers three other Doctors and a lot of those early episodes are missing. Also, I believe that the First Doctor (William Hartnell)'s "The Gunslingers" is widely considered the worst DW episodes ever.

The problem with DW fandom is that you can love an actor in the role and say you love the show, but ignore everything else before and after. For instance, I liked (of what I saw) Eccleston and Tennant, but Smith leaves me absolutely cold. He irritates me on a molecular level.

But then I'm also on board with Ironwood's dislike of the Moffat approach to show writing.

That might be somewhat true, but IMO the main reason that ordinary, non-Trekkie people will claim that Wrath of Kahn was the best of the bunch was due entirely to Ricardo Montalbon being awesome, and for no other reason whatsoever.  For example, I have absolutely no idea what Space Seed is, and I expect that is true of most people who have seen WoK. 

Good point, really. Ricardo Montalban basically sat there reading entire sections of "Moby Dick" on screen for most of the movie and he STILL was awesome.

And they tried it with Picard in First Contact and it sucked.

If someone told you there was this random film and male and female leads are TJ Hooker and Kirsty Alley, how incredibly awful should it be?

That's how awesome Montalbon is.

It also didn't suck.

I doubt they'll run with Khan. In terms of time frame, they'd have to find the Botany Bay first. Yes the time streams are different, but you still have to have the first encounter. I'd guess it is someone from the academy...

As for the Klingons...Kirk has to start the hating somewhere, and this seems like the movie to do it if they want Star Trek 3 to be space explosions and it is too soon to be Romulans.

I know the new films are in a way meant to be following the old continuity, except the changes which actually resulted from events in the first film, but I rather hope they forget about that and just do their own thing.

So for example, they could take the basic idea of Khan - genetically engineered, an embarrassment to the society that created him, out for revenge - but not worry about fitting it in with the events of the original series. If the Botany Bay doesn't work, just forget about it. Just as long as the new stories they write are good ones.

Well, the thing about the first JJ Abrams Trek is that it wasn't after the first five year voyage that established a lot of arcs. It was just at the very beginning of it. Heck, given the decimation of Starfleet and the Klingons, whose to say there is a five year mission. So everything from Tribbles to Planet Eaters to the Guardian of Forever, all of it needs to be re-introduced.

Another reason I hope they spin this into a TV series. All of the early conflict that screwed up the peace loving Federation gives a new and potentially darker spin on how all those other stories can be told. It'd almost be cool if such a series was about the Dark side of Mirror Mirror, with an episode where they run into a campy version of themselves from a niave universe  :grin:

That's a really good point. TJ Hooker, the chick from Cheers and the guy from Fantasy Island. All kind of a happy accident that two of them were in one episode back 15 years prior. But then I also wonder how many parents took their kids to the first few Star Trek movies because they themselves loved it in the 60s.

And given the other point above, technically in this universe, Space Seed didn't happen yet and may not at all. So the entire Eugencis Wars from the early 21st century (would would need to be the early 22nd century now  :oh_i_see:) would need to be retold.

I should also point out for completeness that the one person in the world who hated WOK was.. Gene Roddenbery. And even he said hat Montalban was awesome.  :oh_i_see:

(http://hijinksensue.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/2012-12-11-lo-fijinks-youve-got-me-on-my-knees.jpg)

At the Ren Fest a few weeks ago, my wife gave a grinning thumbs up to some twelve year old girl wearing a "Keep Calm and Don't Blink" T-shirt.
Netflix has always had a bunch of the classic Doctor Who 'movies', but I recently saw they've added a Classic Doctor Who series -- don't know how much it captures though. 18 "collections" but it seems each one is a 4-part episode.

I think some of the older stuff is permanently lost.

Most of the 1st and 2nd Doctors is lost, yes.

New trailer, currently exclusive to Apple:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/paramount/startrekintodarkness/

YouTube copy, dunno how long it'll stay up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5gdbUC9mWU

Commence the nerdsection!

Well, the extended preview I saw before The Hobbit this weekend got my 10 year old all amped to see this around his birthday.  It got my movie itch tingling as well.

There was a longer version of that trailer playing in front of The Hobbit, opening with a scene with Kirk and Bones running through an alien forest (you see a bit of it in that trailer).  The fact that they bothered to make an alien world with cool alien-looking trees and shit was enough to convince me to go see the movie.  (Compare to the TNG movies, which generally had less thought put into their visuals than the TV series did.)

I'm noticing a distinct reduction in the amount of lensflare (at least which they let us see). Maybe he learned his lesson. :oh_i_see:

I'm still none the wiser about the point.

Bad Trailers are Bad.

Yeah, well that's why these are "teasers" and not "trailers".

I've had less teasers in my life from the Blonde wee lassie in accounts.

They bug me.  Call me when there's an actual trailer. 

(God, Nerds.  They complain when they give away the plot and complain at the teasers.  lol. )

How about the first 10 minutes in blurry handy-cam glory? (http://gizmodo.com/5969174/the-first-10-minutes-of-star-trek-have-been-leaked)

No thanks.

Nope. He hasn't learned. :oh_i_see:

Awesome second trailer. Same tone but covers a bit more, and finally includes some space stuff. Enterprise looks like it gets beat up something fierce, my guess after dropping into and coming out of the San Francisco bay.

Because me guessing on 1.5s of footage is important or something.

Whatever, looked awesome, I can nerdgasm if I wanna!

In the footage that was shown in the theaters,

Kirk fucks the prime directive more than green women.

You know as well as I that Star Trek technology only works when it's convenient for the plot.   :awesome_for_real:

Remember in Generations when they beam Picard down to the planet and then instantly forget about him and go about their business because "interference from the planet's ionosphere" suddenly makes it so they can't use their scanners?

Or in First Contact where the Vulcans can't see the Enterprise because of the moon's gravitational field?

(Disclaimer: I only remember these because Plinkett pointed them out.  In the movies they're handwaved away so quickly most people don't notice.  It's the same thing in this one, there's a quick line about how the obvious thing won't work because of some bullshit reason and now EXCITEMENT.)

Mike/Plinkett teased that Trek V was his next review, which should be good.

I hope he doesn't actually critique the film. That would be like winning a boxing match against a parapalegic.

I really hope he does actually. It'll be as long as the film but way more worth watching.

A critique of V would be good because there's a kernel of a decent movie in there somewhere with some great character moments and some nicely done camera shots...all wrapped up in a terrible mess of a film.

As opposed to, say, Nemesis which was just flat out awful in every respect.

SyFy is doing a marathon of ST movies this weekend.  Starts at 10:30est.  ST1, ST3, ST4, Generations, First Contact, Khan (Midnight, EST), ST5

Tomorrow is Khan at 11am EST, ST5, Generations, then First Contact.

It's a perfect summary of why I don't watch "SyFy" anymore.  Just a microcosm of how out of touch they are.  They never show Undiscovered Country and have a love of that terrible #5 movie and Generations. (Which I saw on the guide a few times earlier this month as well)

Maybe they don't have broadcast to 6 for some reason.

I gave up on SyFy when they stopped showing sci-fi (well before the stupid new name). Shortly after I cut the cord altogether. Only time I've missed it is around the holidays when I could tune into Hallmark channel at any time and see a Christmas show of some sort. Yea sure I can queue all that up on Netflix or Hulu+, but it doesn't feel the same.

Or at least, that's what the wife says. She's always been the TV one. I generally am doing more important things on the computer  :oh_i_see:

tl;dr: stop reading after "name)."

When my local UPN/WB/CW affiliate can show 6 and SyFy "can't" there's issues.

I've got cable because the wife works for the company so it's free.  I had base level before because DSL doesn't work in N.Ky so it's cable or no internet.  "Hey, pay us $50 a month for 120mbps!"  No thanks!

The world of broadcast licensing is really complex. On purpose. Otherwise you'd be putting all those hardworking license account managers out on the street. Think of the children!

Anywho, it's not unheard of to have licenses carved up that way. I'm not saying that's absolutely the case here of course, since I don't know and not sure I could find out. But I've heard of stranger situations.

Also, I'd pay $50/mo for 120mbps in a second. I'm paying the same for about 1/10th of that in RI because Cox has a complete lock on parts of the state and Verizon laughs at me every year when I ask when FIOS is coming to my area.

I'm jealous you get cable for free though. You need to move here, spread the love  :grin:

Saw the ten minute thing in front of the hobbit this week and it made me more excited for this than for any previous star trek thing, which is to say this is the first time I've ever been interested in a star trek thing in advance.

Gives the impression of taking star trek exactly as seriously as it needs to be and no slowing down for faulty moralising.

The thing that also struck me was that the 3d didn't feel as bad as it normally does. I think the whole MAXIMUM BRIGHTNESS AND SATURATION IN ALL SCENES philosophy helped enormously in countering the 'Glasses of Reduced Light & Colour' you are forced to wear for 3d shit.

Trailer 2 is up (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MPLogYa9Q0o)

Looks like all completely different footage, and therefore tells different aspects of the story.

That looks like so much fun.

I'm ready for this

Another trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yhz4A5BCMAA)

Benedict Cumberbatch  :awesome_for_real:

First trailer that actually makes me go "hrrm, that looks very interesting".

If only ... :oh_i_see:

I don't know who that blonde woman is but I won't cry if they show a lot more of her.


Still looks really fun overall though!

Alice Eve (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1404408/)

She's pretty!

Aye, I'm going to go against the current grain :

I don't see the point of this.  Nothing says Trek to me and I LIKED the reboot.  It all seems pretty meh.

I will say that Alice has a cracking body.

The trailer is showing explosions and wow stuff but it's keeping the plot close to the vest. I'm guessing its gonna be a lot more trekky than it looks right now.

Secret agent goes rogue, gets imbued with special powers.

It's like Mission Impossible.

Nah.

I'll wait to have my mind changed, of course.

How many of the Star Trek movies released this century would you say have been "trekky"?   :grin:

Star-Warsy?

Is there twitch?

You wanna get cut?

Wouldn't be the first time.

Spoilered due to size.

Wuh? Rogue super agent rabbits in a huge explosion with a WMD, Kirk et al go after him to get it back, first they and the ship get beat up, and then they rally and win.

Not exactly Usual Suspects  :grin:

I doubt there'll be much in the way of core "Trek" though. And really, what is core Trek anymore anyway? Throw in a few transports, a warp jump, and some shout-outs to Sulu, and you've greased the TrekCon crowd all you need. Like every other movie, even the good ones.

For the rest, more Carol Marcus. The look on her face in that scene was great.

Curious if they'll kill someone off. This one screams Wrath of Kahn/personal vendetta/personal sacrifice format. But given how he likes delivering stories, I see a twist.

I can tell when trailers are hiding big elements of plot and this one clearly is. I'll come back after the movie comes out to eat some crow but I don't see that happening.

No. Those are his next films.

I don't see the big ideas that made Star Trek and hard sci-fi great.  So Star Trek is dead.  Doesn't matter though, I will totally go see Mission Impossible: Enterprise.  It a strange world where the Batman franchise is more sci-fi than Star Trek franchise. But if they are good movies its alright.

We are not the nerds they are marketing to...

Roddenberry's Star Trek has been pretty well dead since DS9 wrapped up, if not earlier.  Voyager, Enterprise, and all the TNG movies were mostly shit.  And the "mostly" is a kind assessment.

I want to say there are a lot of nerds who would argue DS9 wasn't even Roddenberry's vision either. Which is probably why it's the best startrek.

This. The reboot was the best Star Trek I've seen since DS9. The TNG movies were mostly shit and the TNG show itself really wasn't all that great - I stopped watching it after first season. I think the trailer looks great and if Star Trek is "hard sci-fi," I'm the fucking Pope. TNG had more hand-waving narrative laziness than fan fiction and would have been cancelled after two seasons if not for the strong actors and the Star Trek name.

Regardless, Star Trek DS9 still tried to deal some big ideas in between the sexy war stuff.  Star Trek: Lens Flair while a fun action movie dealt with none.

Oh Good, this DS9 argument again.

 :oh_i_see:

What argument?

The reason most nerds cite for DS9 not being Roddenberry's Star Trek are twofold:

1) Roddenberry had no involvement with it (he was dead by the time they started seriously working on even the concept of the show)
2) It took place outside of the utopic Federation society -- there was money, and crime, and stuff like that.  Too "dark" for some.

Those points notwithstanding, I feel like the fact that it occasionally actually tackled interesting concepts (culture clashes between alien races as opposed to pew pew between alien races, moral dilemmas as opposed to obvious good guy vs obvious bad guy, stuff like that) put it on the level of earlier Star Treks, at least in terms of being good sci-fi.

That was also the big difference between the TNG series (which, much like DS9, got much better after the first couple of seasons as it got its legs under it) and the TNG movies (which were consistently crap).  The TNG series was mostly decent sci-fi; the TNG movies were all purple space bazookas and dune buggies.  They were basically action movies, but not very good ones.

The ST reboot was also an action movie, but it was at least a decent one.  I'm not hating on it, but I think anyone thinking the next installment is going to be "trekky" is either deluding themselves or is using "trekky" more in reference to superficial tropes than to themes and plot.

That's not what I said.

Quitting TNG after season one was a huge disservice to yourself. It's only after season one, maybe two that things ramped up.  I still prefer DS9 and TNG did have a few stinkers but there were absolute gems in there you're missing.

Shaka, when the walls fell...

Yeah, the first season is the worst by far, judging the series on that is kind of like judging B5 with knowledge of nothing but the pilot, which may have been the worst piece of scripted television ever produced.

Or that fucking flute.

Actually, when you think about it, most of the best episodes were strong, strong Picard ones.  Odd that.

When you look up trek in the dictionary there should be a picture of that flute.

Man, a year ago Abrams et al were saying "The plot of this movie is basically Heart of Darkness with phasers". Khan/Mitchell/Garth/totally new guy, whatever he is, he's Kurtz. He's a guy the Federation sent up the river to do very bad shit, who discovered that the Federation isn't what it says it is, and he's going to bring the bad shit home. Kirk et al will have to sail up the river to kill him and face the insanity--and probably come home to clean house.

All the old fans who are going to cry about how this pisses on Roddenberry's great utopia and sense of hope and all that shit need to take a break, look at Memory Alpha for a while, and come back to tell me how many bugshit crazy Admirals there were in TOS alone, let alone TNG/DS9. All this does is kick that up a notch in terms of universe-building: in TOS, the sheer volume of crazy admirals was kind of inexplicable and weird, given Roddenberry's fantasies that the future was essentially a utopia. In Abrams' version, there's obviously going to be some rot at the heart of 'civilization' that makes corruption at the top way more explicable. With obvious allegorical application to our current times--just as Roddenbery's ST was working with late 60s America in mind.

I would bet a ton of money that Cumberbatch's super terrorist got sent to do something really bad by Peter Weller's admiral--hence his choice of initial target. And Weller's corrupt admiral will egg Kirk on in going after Cumberbatch's villain hoping that Kirk will do his dirty business for him (Kirk being cast as Marlowe in Heart of Darkness), Kirk will get his head handed to him, will have to face that he was manipulated because he's impulsive, and grow up some. At which point he will go get Cumberbatch's bad guy in a smarter way, come home and clean house, and deliver a speech about how humans have a lot of evolving to do or something like that.

Libertarian co-worker loves Star Trek, but he hates the whole "It's a Communist pipe dream" aspect. 

Anyways, DS9 was the greatest Trek, and I look forward to this new movie  :awesome_for_real:

Yea, between this and what Khaldun said about Heart of Darkness, I can see there being more to it. Would be nice in face. As much as I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy it if it's anything like the first, I don't truly want the Star Trek: Commander Sherpard Edition the trailers imply.

And I completely agree with you on:
My first real Trek was TNG, and even looking back from season 4, there was a lot of cringe-worthy stuff until Best of Both Worlds. I can see people not sticking around for three seasons hoping it gets better of course. But when people think TNG, they're not thinking Encounter at Farpoint.

Which is why I get that DS9 was considered awesome, but only in seasons well after the 1st, which is when I gave up on it.

As to Trek being hard sci fi as someone said? No fucking way. They skirt the mere edges of some interesting concepts. But they continually tried to increase their audience by lowering the common denominator with made up words to surround really pretty pedestrian concepts. Star Trek is hard sci fi only to people who think Star Wars was too  :awesome_for_real:

Can't blame them though. Even with a trillion channels, TV is all about growing year over year reach.

Best part of Ds9:

I saw SOME of TNG after the first season. Most of the Borg episodes which were some of the best. Some of the Data/Lore stuff. I just thought most of the plots and supporting characters (especially Whoopi Goldberg's - she always annoyed me because she was essentially a plot device to keep from having to do inner monologues) were shit. Also, I thought the writers were really unwilling or unable to shake up the series with real death. Other than Yar and Picard's two-parter as Borg, I didn't see a lot of non-redshirt death or tribulations. And the Federation was a bunch of pussies. DS9 at least had some meat to it and was much more willing to show a naturalistic society as opposed to the utopia of the Enterprise that never quite sat right with me.

Also, dilithium crystals? NOT HARD SCI-FI. They are as hand-wavy as my explanation for technomancers.

Well done, that doesn't work on SO MANY LEVELS.

Yeah, that's a whole new level of hotlinking linkfailure.   Host it yourself.

Oh, and DS9 bored me. I stopped watching regularly after S1 and gave up entirely with the Dominion Herp-Derp.

I think Khaldun nailed it.

I think someone didn't get the point...  :grin:

And DS9 was shit. And I've seen all the "good" episodes in other peoples houses. The "bit battle" episode, was An entire recitation of "the charge of the light brigade" Gul Dukat philosophizing about the concept of victory and some guy talking about how he could not appreciate art because he didn't have the genetics to appreciate art (Racism much?) and lots of people bouncing around the screen for ninutes with 30 seconds of spaceships shooting. Would have been better as a one part episode

But yeah. Season 1 and 2 of TNG were pretty awful. Its only in season 3 that it got into its groove. You should see 'Yeaterday's Enterprise' at least, which, apart from Denise Crosbie, is My vote for best trek episode ever.

I don't get people that like DS9 or TNG and not the other. TOS is one thing, so is voyager but DS9 and TNG are basically bookends content wise.

No.  I really don't think they are.

DS9 was when they moved away from a kind of 'Culture' Federation and pretty much just made it Wild West America.  With all the Americanisms that you so despise.  Let's bring money back in, let's start a war, let's have lots and lots of terrorists.  Let's have Jake be a Journalist and turn into exactly the wrong kind of journalist.  One that ignores the fucking truth.  Hey, let's make fucking religion a cornerstone of the series from the first episode and JESUS FUCK weren't the religious episodes some of the worst fucking tripe ever.  No-one killed Nurse Ratchett at first glance ?  Really ?  She was just allowed to wander around ?  Ok.


DS9 was utter, utter excrement and I'm glad it's over.

But, hey, we're doing this fucking argument again.  Great.

What argument?


She really is pretty: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/hottest-stars-sci-fi-universe-gallery-1.39013


All the bits are in the right spots.

TNG was the pinnacle of Trek.  Period.  But not until Berman had more say in the series after season 2 and especially so after Roddenberry died.  He kept most of Roddenberry's ideals but modernized their presentation, especially with regard to character development.  DS9 did much of the same but shaved it down to "life on a space station" which to me made it bland until they started fucking around more in the Gamma quadrant, the dominion wars, etc.  Really, it didnt get good until Wharf showed up and started kicking ass on the Defiant and sleeping with Trills.

Also, we musn't get hard sci-fi mixed up with "high" sci-fi or "low" sci-fi.  All hard means is that it's rooted in actual science and that's really it.  I look at TOS and TNG as high sci-fi because of the philosophy involved and the general air of hope; though in some cases it could be considered hard since the relevant science seems to be catching up with theory (they did employ physicists after all).  Abrams' pop culture sci-fi would be considered low; the sci-fi parts are really there just for flavor and entertainment (not message) is the main premise... there's no lofty in his Trek.  Which to me is somewhat a shame as the IP really isnt built nor meant for that.

Voyager I'd consider hard sci. fi, which turned a lot of people off.  That series was really made for the Trek grognard to feast on technobabble.  I personally liked all of the Trek series', even Enterprise.. with TNG being my fav.  They all had trouble ramping up in quality though and Enterprise actually sucked more the longer it went.

As much as we spit hate at certain production years and episodes, compared with the drivel we get these days it really wasnt all that bad.

Bunk. Me. In.  :drill:

What's it like, always being wrong about every sci-fi series?  :grin:

One of the reasons I stopped watching "Enterprise" after the pilot was the pandering "lets have these two hot people grease each other up for no reason" scene.  The more important reason I stopped watching was that it was terrible.  I'm sure there will be a legitimate reason for her to be undressed, clothing was contaminated by space cooties I reckon.

Fake edit:  DS9's main problem was that they tried to base an entire series on an immobile space station.  So it was nothing but one horribly contrived reason after another that plotlines had to keep coming to them.  It would be like making a cop drama where no one ever left the precinct office.  Eventually they just said "fuck it" and built themselves that ship...

*primes grenade*

BABYLON 5!

*runs*

...

I liked DS9 more than a lot of the other Star Trek series I've seen, and I enjoyed Babylon 5 a lot too. Yes, both series have their terrible bits - almost any Ferengi-based episode in DS9 was terrible, and "Profit and Lace" was possibly a war crime - but so had all the other series (http://www.agonybooth.com/recaps/Star_Trek/). I liked the series conceit of a centralised space station rather than flying into new areas with very specific problems each week.

But yeah, "Profit and Lace":

(http://media.agonybooth.com/images/articles/Star_Trek/Deep_Space_Nine/Profit_and_Lace/cap075.jpg)

The only star trek I didn't really like, was the voyager series, mainly because I didn't think they really handled the whole "hurr I'm a female leader" thing well enough early on, the humor in general was just slightly off-kilter for me, and I had a bit of a problem with the whole "we're down to 1 or 2 people left on the ship, and they're going to save the day with 2 seconds to spare" spiel going on in too many of its episodes.

But shitting on DS9 for being based on a space station that doesn't move all over the place, when that's what I would call one of its strengths because it encourages having more of a red thread going through it? Get out.

I agree in general. But the two-parter Year of Hell was fantastic in general, and a standout for Voyager. Until the it-was-all-a-dream ending (which I called, but so didn't want to be right), I had it right there with Best of Both Worlds.

Year of Hell was indeed 99% fantastic.

Year of Hell was what the series should have been, and it was apparently originally planned as an actual year or season originally.


But that would've been interesting and successful, so they axed that idea  :why_so_serious:


-edit- I am a member of team redundancy team.

Reminder: BSG was, at least in part, Ron Moore going to Brannon & Brega "This is how you should have done Voyager!".

GTFO. Playing invent-a-particle does not "hard" sci-fi make. Any time they wanted to excuse something silly, they'd have someone pop off a string of gobbledygook nonsense. First season BSG, THAT was a hard-SF show. Or at least as close as we're likely to get on mainstream TV. "Hard" is not technobabble exposition and pseudoscience plot gimmicks. "Hard" is thinking about the science and constructing a world that feels real and consistent on top of it.

For me what makes Trek is the strength of the characters. TNG had a great bunch, barring poor, bland Riker - who should have been a badass of the Kirk mold, but they watered down into a Picard Jr. DS9 had an even better group, because they could expand beyond the traditional ST character options of soldier, scientist, or politician. Bashir was the least interesting, at least until they retconned him as an illegal genetic experiment. Voyager, aside from Seven of Nine and The Doctor, had the blandest cast of any ST series. They were all Rikers - watered-down, low-risk versions of theoretically strong archetypes. I can't remember a single pertinent thing about Kim or Tuvok, and Paris coasted by on being vaguely annoying.

Voyager genuinely makes me angry. They took a premise which could have genuinely jumpstarted the franchise: Starfleet crewmembers who have to work with political dissidents who risked their lives to push back on the Federation to get home across an expanse of space where they know absolutely nothing about anything, and to get home will have to inevitably compromise at least something of their principles, and maybe not even get home until they're old or dead. If it wasn't going to be rebooted BSG, it could have been something more like Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep--maybe as you got into the galactic core things got weirder and more dangerous and not just guys-with-bumps-on-their-heads-who-have-slightly-variant-human-cultures thing. It could have been a glorious show. Instead, the guys who were showrunning it turned it into easily the worst of all the Trek series. Seriously, Enterprise had a more consistent tone and sense of what it was doing. There's nothing more hateful than a badly wasted opportunity.

I had to look it up but "Year of Hell" was that huge ship erasing stuff, and Voyager turning into a barely functional piece of scrap rather then the pristine holiday camp it always was. Yeah that was a pretty good 2 episode. And The cast exhibited *shock* EMOTION in their wooden acting.

They really tried to make Riker into Kirk but the truth is, Kirk as a character IS rather dull when he's put next to stronger ones like Picard. Punching lizards and fucking green women only goes so far.

You can't have a Kirk without a Shatner. Frakes was not even close to Shatner.

The only thing I enjoyed about DS9 was Garick.  And the only good thing about Voyager was looking at Jerri Ryan.

But even Lawful Evil Garick they screwed up paring him off with Lawful Good Bashir and Lawful Neutral Odo.  Loathsome.

And turning Year of Hell into a delusion was a disappointment on an already terribad show.

All this talk of Voyager and DS9 (and their characters) makes me want to watch Babylon 5 again since my (nostalgic) memories of that show are mostly based on interesting characters the show had.  :awesome_for_real:

The ending of Year of Hell was what made me stop watching Voyager. It really is what the show should have been like all the time. And it was the best part of BSG.

Don't.

It hasn't aged well either.

Haven't seen "Year in Hell", but these parts of "Living Witness" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q-l8C89Yu0) (sorry, fan edit on YouTube) were the most interesting parts of Voyager I've seen to date. I think I'd seen three episodes of Voyager back to back where ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENED + holodeck episodes and then there was this. I would have watched this Voyager.  :grin:

Watch it the way I do: by listening to it as you do something else.  The terrible CGI and sets never come in to play that way unless there's some big action scene you want to watch.

/grenade

Babylon 5 is still better than all the Treks put together.

As a whole? No, it was not.  It had some greatness to it sure but come on, there was so much stink on that show that hung like a cloud over the good stuff that I can't believe anyone could say that.

Which has nothing to do with what I said, even if true.

Yeah, he said it hasn't aged well. And it hasn't.  It's graphics were below TNG when it came out, and even TNG looks tired and sad when you watch the ship views. (One of the reasons I prefer models over CGI. It just ages so much better.)

Then there's the fashions and the costumes.  Vorlon: Cool as fuck when I first saw Kosh.  When I see him now all I see is a mottled toilet seat with a flashlight.

Exactly.

Other than some stuttering, I think the B5 CGI holds up quite well. Costumes... well, I'm not sure costuming on any TV show holds up after a decade. Especially futuristic sci-fi of any kind. The unitards of TNG have always looked kind of stupid. B5's costumes are a bit low budget but the makeup and acting IN the makeup helps that a bit. The hairstyles and makeup on TOS are Prisoner-level of WTF sometimes - thank you 1960's and LSD. Watch any 1980's shows and be astounded how bad some of them look.

The B5 pilot did look terrible and of all of them, that's the one that really suffers from time's passage.

End season 2 B5 to about first 1/3 season 4 is pretty good TV even if the effects and all that haven't aged well. Mostly good storytelling etc.  The bad episodes nestled in that run are almost worse than anything TNG, DS9, TOS could put up as competitors in the bad episodes, mostly because JMS when he's a bad writer is so excrutiatingly bad that nothing else compares (his comics are the same). But at its absolute peak, B5 is pretty much better than anything TNG or DS9 had to offer at the same time, even if their effects hold up better.

Just fast forward anytime Londo and/or G'Kar aren't on screen, and you'll have a great experience.

What, for me, hasn't held up about B5 is I know the story and a great deal of the series was figuring out exactly what was going on and what was going to happen, particularly since it was the first series I can remember to do any sort of long term story arc.

If you'd read Lord of the Rings, the story didn't need figuring out.

 :why_so_serious:

At least Gandalf and the elves had the sense to fuck off when they weren't needed any more.

Year of Hell was the epitome of what was wrong with Voyager.

"Let's tell an interesting story. Psyke! It didn't really happen!"  :why_so_serious:

Well you obviously don't do the "lawl just a dream" ending and have them get home in the fucking rust bucket.

Babylon 5 had marginally less homoerotic subtext.  :awesome_for_real:

(http://neatnik2009.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/in-the-kingdom-of-the-blind-03.jpg)

Ahahahahahah.

Thanks.

I did say 'marginally'.  :grin:

LOTR homo erotic? naaaah (http://www.ealasaid.com/misc/vsd/)   :grin:

There is a new trailer out, it gives away too much plot in my opinion.  Wish I hadn't watched it.

Link. (http://vimeo.com/64165537#)

I'm less bothered about the plot really. A good plot is nice and all, but really it's just an excuse to string together a lot of well-crafted space badassery and laser pew pew and I'm all fine with that.

For some reason when I saw that trailer my first thought was "Die Hard in space."  Not necessarily a bad thing.

Was that a
Because if it was, I'm ok with that.  :drill:

I think so.

It has an Enterprise C vibe to it: bigger than the Enterprise A but not as big as the D which if I recall correctly was about double the length of the A. It also looks like what was described in the TNG novel Dark Mirror where Picard et al spend time in that same universe (which progressed at the same pace). It's like the Enterprise D but "angry" or something.

Yes, all these memories of old bad novels came rocketing back just because of this damned trailer and Lum saying "mirror mirror??"

Why are we spoilering stuff from trailers?

Does it give too much away? I dunno. The story is the same. Superhuman bad guy does something bad, Kirk goes after him probably unsanctioned, Enterprise gets beat up. If Holmes does turnout to be a transplant from that other universe, then in a few months we can say the trailer has spoilt it.

But that doesn't seem like a major plot twist to me. Given that JJ handled fan service in the first one with all the subtlety of a brick through a glass window, for all we know this one could open up with a text crawl that reads "Meanwhile, in the dark mirror universe..."

They've been pretty tight on the story leaks. If it was a truly important twist, they wouldn't let it leak in a trailer.

I'm in.

Looks more like an Excelsior class than a "dark universe" Constitution to me.

Ok, so like... I'm fired up now.  Might have to break out the uniform and ears for this one.

NERDS!!!!!!!!!!!

I am more than happy to have a Star Trek worth nerding out for. Been since forever.


Hmm. Spoilered for size.


Actually kinda looks like some of the ones in STO?

It looks to me like just a bigger, bulkier version of the JJ Enterprise, especially around the nacelles and struts.  Although the neck and saucer are certainly reminiscent of the Excelsior.  It's definitely a product of that universe, or maybe the mirror version of that universe?

I wish people would stop bringing up the Mirror universe, since there's pretty much zero evidence.

I think it's just a war ship, but I bet it becomes the model for the rebuilt Enterprise...

Sorry, I just hadn't even thought of it as a possibility before it was brought up in this thread, and I admit the idea somewhat appeals to me.  I agree that there's no evidence, just the personal thought that everything in black might be this universe's version of goatees.

Genuine speculation based on actual evidence and not personal fanfic ideas:  Warship developed in secret based on Narada scans.  Technology as a whole is more advanced in this universe due to the Narada incursion, and it seems silly that nobody would think to build a great honking warship from knowledge gleaned from it.  Done in secret due to Federation politically not into blatant military tech.

See ?

That makes much more sense.

There was a TOS book with a concept kinda like that. Can't remember the name, but secret Federation cabal lead by a megalomaniac develops super overpowered starship that had all sorts of fancy tech (including this neat sensor manipulator thing). Wasn't Dark Mirror nor Narada tech, but the end result was kinda the same.

The Narada idea is interesting, good thought. Only reason it bothers me is because, iirc, the back story on the Narada going from mining vessel to warship is because they bolted on some Borg tech before going back in time. I think that was from the comic or some other thing I didn't read.

Just a fun discussion. No idea whose right, and really, does it matter?

Dare you to say that at a trek convention.. :grin:

"Guys, you're all having stupid arguments over fictional shit even the goddamned creators don't remember!"

Actually, that's variant of what I need to say to my kids quite often. Of course, it's toned down (they've even established shorthand for it: "Silly argument" and "a new type of smacktalking"), and they're a safer crowd to try that on  :grin:

Shatner did it better in the 80's.

Well duh :-)

And because you mentioned it (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x930vt_william-shatner-snl-skit-get-a-life_fun)
(4:04)

Yes. I have a lot of time today. Avoiding yard work.

(http://i.minus.com/izDk0Y1jnW78I.jpg)

 :awesome_for_real:

That's the one! Heavily featured a woman version of Kirk (that isn't a misogynistic description, she was literally described that way in the book along with her two cohorts) and how her methods for dealing with the situations mirrored his. The followup to this one continued in some interesting ways, but I don't think it went anywhere after that.

Watched the skit and got a chuckle.  As it turns out, I just watched that episode about an hour ago and the question actually fit (I had to check the number and such but it is episode 25 of the first season).  

Then I saw the book cover.  For the briefest of moments the author's name was Dana Carvey.
Also, that was 1986?  Now I am depressed.
  

I actually liked that book but it has a rep as being crazy-crazy Mary Sueism which is pretty much true.

I really really hope that it doesn't turn out that the reason that the Federation sends a Kurtz up the river to their version of the Congo is that old-timeline Spock debriefed them on the future history of their universe (or even worse, that they get it out of him somehow). I'd like them to forget that old-timeline Spock is still alive period.

Random note: The first Ender's Game trailer is supposed to show before this.

It totally was. Still one of my favorite ST novels (I grant the standard is quite low, but that's one of the few I'd pull out and re-read past junior high).

Yea, def. And the followup wasn't terrible either. I wish they had done more with that character. Years later I thought Commander Shelby (from Best of Both Worlds, who later appeared in the book Vendetta, another very fun read) was modeled on her character. Though years after that I realized the show producers probably never read the books anyway :-)

Though the producers never admitted it, TNG's Klingons bore more than a passing resemblance to John M. Ford's Klingons from Final Reflection.  That's about the only one of the novels that I can still read 25 years later.  Maybe the Gerrold one about the lost generational ship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPkByAkAdZs

Yeah, it's an Audi commercial, but it is still... fascinating.  :drill:

Uh, wat?

For those of you wondering about the car at then end and why it has a Stanford logo on the door here's some info:

http://www.vwerl.com/our-work/view/45

You guys do know that the movie had a special premiere in Australia on April 23?
You can google the reports.

No spoilers here, but from what I read - most of you guys will throw gigantic nerdrage fit. Seriously.
 :grin:  :drill:  :why_so_serious:

Nah.  Not us.

Spoiler alert: JJ Abrams overuses lens flare in the movie.

Speaking of overused: Spoiler alert: In the final act, the situation on the Enterprise will become immensely dire. So dire, in fact, that the only way to save the crew and defeat the bad guy will be to eject the warp core.

(these are jokes, I haven't seen it yet)

Well, unless it's TNG.  Then it's invert polarity of tachyons using the deflector dish.

(http://oi44.tinypic.com/ngsimr.jpg)

If we reverse the polarity of the main deflector dish we can sour the baby's milk

Every time I hear Benedict Cumberbatch talk in the previews, I swear he's doing a Patrick Stewart impersonation.

TNG is the root of my "eject the warp core!" peeve. It seemed (to me) like every other episode had Geordi yelling to Picard about the damage to the warp core. Ugh.

For the record, I hate it because I think it's overused, not because of the techno babble.

I predict Into Darkness, like the previous movie, will replace the treknobabble with endless scenes of characters running down hallways to pretend that there's some kind of drama going on.

You mean dangling off of ledges?

That was like 45 minutes of the movie - people either falling off or struggling not to fall off of ledges.

I read a spoilery review of this, and if it's true, the nerd rage in this thread will be intolerable.

Abrams shits on franchise. Movie makes a ton of money because lensflares. Done.

I love Star Trek but I couldn't be bothered to rage at the first film. It's just a shitty faux Trek film for the drooling masses made by an awful director. It's more fan fiction than actual Trek film. At least they had the decency to make it essentially non-canon and completely ignorable.

I was going to say I look forward to Abrams shitting all over Star Wars but I'm not sure that shitting on what is already a giant pile of shit amounts to much.

Ditto and I'd be surprised if anyone gave a shit.

No, it's the New Canon.  Expect anything in the coming years off of this rif, not the old one which will be left to fester as it is.

The Journey Home will be about Elephants in the reboot.

True Story.

I'll be okay with whatever they do.  New Trek, for all its flaws, doesn't seem to enrage me at all for some reason, and I was a HUGE Trekkie once upon a time.  I understand what the new stuff is doing, and accept it.

There is one thing that did cause me incalculable rage, however.  Whose fucking idea was it to have the ENGINE ROOM IN A WARP-CAPABLE STARSHIP look like a chemical plant in New Jersey?  If they do away with that awful set design, or at least rein it in somewhat, all else will be forgiven.

A better question is why - in a starship where space is a premium - is there a 3' diameter coolant pipe that runs for 100+ feet without encountering any devices that need cooled when the liquid is low-enough temperature to not scald a person.

For Comic Relief.

My only real gripe with the new Trek is why in the bridge of the Enterprise so god damn bright? The whole thing looks like it was made out of acrylic pieces. The bridge to the USS Kelvin would have been better IMHO. 

For the next movie, I'm wondering how they're going to give Kirk a son. Not only is he too young in this version, he actually gets cockblocked way, way more often than Classic Kirk.

You know I watched Wrath of Khan a couple of weekends ago in preparation for this movie.

Wrath of Khan is terrible. It is an awful movie that is stupid and terrible and it's supposedly the best one of the bunch?

UGH.

I'll take the reboot over any other Trek movie.

 :ye_gods:

I know, crazy right?

You obviously need help. I have a few therapists' numbers laying around here at work I can give you.

It's the only way 3d movies can be made bearable after those god awful glasses steal 40% of the light.

I'm only half joking, its a factor in the art design of every 'made for 3d' film these days.

Either you're trolling or brain damaged.  :why_so_serious:

Or both.

As for Canon. I'm fine with what they're doing to the prime universe in STO.

I'm hearing some delightfully negative opinions from people overseas.

It's released here in Malaysia. I am seeing it this afternoon (Saturday).

/switch -off brain
/del Startrekmovieplots
/del StartrekTVplots

Even then, I'm not expecting too much even when judging it on it's own merits.

Reviews I'm seeing say it has all the faulty philosophy and science based plot holes that people seem to like about the TV show, but they do it alongside EXPLOSIONS and RUNNING so you don't notice them as much.

Which sounds good to me.

Worked for Transformers 3.

And the first Star Trek reboot.  :awesome_for_real:

Exactly. I don't even know why these movies pretend to have stories anymore. It's all about the roller coaster ride.

I liked this film, it delivered everything I wanted from a Trek movie. Would see again.

And a thousand berets go flying through the air in chagrin.

I tried this (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=19027.msg811027#msg811027) a few years back. It didn't go well.

I loved the reboot, by the way.

Are we saying that WOK's story didn't make sense, but the reboot did?

I think I need to start drinking bleach.

No star trek stories ever made sense.

But the characters have been through so many that they build up a kind of internal consistency built around bizarro-logic, which at least means actions and choices come from an identifiable palette in a specific situation.

At least until the TNG movies which are even worse than the SW prequels.

They never made any TNG movies.  If they had, they would have been utterly awful and have been erased from my brain.

So that's good.

Did it respect Cannon?

http://headdlineslondonuk.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/78217-1.jpg

Khan steals a ship, sets out for revenge against Kirk, whom he blames for the death of his wife. They go at it, tooth and nail, and SPOILER! Spock has to sacrifice himself to save the ship and crew.

How does this not make sense, as a story? It's not like the reboot, where Nero something something red matter, old spock time travel, something Vulcan something, PEW PEW! Hanging off ledges, roll credits.

No argument about the TNG movies. They were all a special kind of shit, and only watchable in a train wreck kind of way.

I brought my friend to watch the reboot. He wasn't a trekkie.
So I explained, the world of Trek is like - what if everything is utopia on earth and humanity unite to reach the stars and stuff.
Also, be prepared for moral decisions and themes as they meet new alien race for the first time and try not to interfere in their evolution.


30 mins later into the movie...

He gave me a weird stare and I just shook my head slowly as I munch on the popcorn.

On the Daily Show, Abrams basically said he didn't like Trek so he made a Trek movie for people who didn't like Trek.

Would that be a Reverse Xzibit?

Well....he said he never got Star Trek until he did the movie and went back and watched the TV and movies. And he made the movie for everyone - for those they didn't understand Trek and those that are Trekkies. So it becomes an Abrams movie with Star Trek decor and enough attention to canon to placate the rabid fans, like my mother.

I give Abrams a lot of credit for pitch-perfect recasting and for some interesting tweaks to the character's backstories and interrelationships. And some of what people are complaining about in the movies (that they're all about battles and pew-pew and not so much about overloading supercomputers with illogic, visiting planets where crazy Federation officials have reintroduced Nazism or Chicago gangsters, and getting all agitated about the Prime Directive) is a problem with the movies in general. e.g. because of the need to have a 90-120 minute narrative that is appropriately "bigger" than a TV episode, the TOS films actually told stories very differently than the episodic series. In only one of them (VI) is the Enterprise in something like its "normal" role with its "normal" crew and even then it's essentially a retirement voyage. None of them feature the Enterprise just doing its thing and being interrupted by an emergency or complication.

The TNG films *do* play like expanded episodes and they're horrible swamp-poop as a result.

So Abrams having his films filled with pew-pew and explosions and non-status-quo adventures is partially a narrative defect of all ST films. Like Doctor Who, it's really a property meant for episodic treatment.

But that said, it's also clear that Abrams doesn't really like and doesn't get Trek's basic core mythos, which is too bad. I like the creeping introduction of a slightly darker, slightly more realistic, slightly less utopian element--Roddenberry's cornball pretentiousness about a lot of his ideal future is pure early 70s and about as appealing as George Lucas' masturbatory beliefs that he was doing the Heroes' Journey or whatever.

I could imagine that after a third film, when this cast is going to either be moving up in their careers and too expensive (Saldana, Quinto, probably Pine, Pegg) or not moving up and therefore heading out to pasture in an endless series of convention appearances, could give way to a rebooted TV series featuring a completely different "next generation" cast but retaining some of the few good grace notes of the reboot.

The TNG films do not play like extended episodes. This a dumb trope and an insult to the only consistently decent sci fi series in the history of television.

The TNG movies play like inconsistent nonsense in which characters continually make decisions and take actions that make neither practical nor philosophical sense.

They shared the unfortunate trait of "Having low production values" but the TNG episodes were (for the most part) hugely superior to the films.


This doesn't mean I particularly want to see TNG episodes in movie format. But claiming the TNG movies were remotely like the TV show is silly.

Insurrection is like a really bad season 1 TNG episode. Of which there are many. Look, I loved TNG, but until you get to season 3, there are a LOT of painfully bad episodes.

Actually, I disagree. They DO play like extended episodes in that the story idea seems like it was made for a 42-minute TV episode, but has been stretched to fit a 90+ minute movie. That stretching is WHY you get impractical decisions and idiotic philosophy because they have to fill twice the time with the same amount of story. The TNG episodes probably WERE superior to the films because they had to be more economical with the storytelling.

There is a great red letter media review of insurrection which explains better than I could why Insurrection is not like a TNG episode. Mostly by pointing out that there is a TNG episode with exactly the same plot, only everyone acts like an adult and Picard in particular operates in keeping with established character traits rather than converting him into a stupider captain kirk half way through.

If you set out to make an extended TNG episode what you should get is "Best of Both Worlds". But if you use hack writers and Jonathan Frakes then you what you get is, well, the actual TNG movies.

In fact, Best of Both Worlds has been edited into a full length film.  I saw it in a local theater last month, and it's available on blu-ray/dvd now.

I'm with eldaec on this one.  The TNG movies are nothing like the TNG tv episodes.  If they were they'd be more like the actual extended episodes, which were pretty amazing: Best of Both Worlds, Time's Arrow, Chain of Command, Redemption, etc.  TNG had several great hour and a half long two parters and they were nothing like the theatrical movies.

Argh. You guys are saying, "Oh, if they were like extended episodes, they'd be extensions of the BEST episodes, amirite, and so they'd be GOOD. Because they were BAD, they can't be extended episodes!"

No. First because there are plenty of BAD episodes to extend, and second the point is not bad or good (though lord, Insurrection was bad) but that the badness of Insurrection has a bit to do with the extent to which its central conflict, scale and character development are basically "episodic" in nature--not particularly cinematic or staged as an "event film". This is the problem with ST movies in general: they need to create a 90-120 minute "event" with a sense of spectacle and narrative motion, from a source-material series that spread its spectacles out or that concentrated them into tight episodic bundles (say, Yesterday's Enterprise).  A few of the films, like WoK, rose to that challenge but mostly they didn't. The most spectacular case of not rising to it is Insurrection.

There are no extended episodes of TNG that were as bad as insurrection. The episodes ruvaldt mentions aren't 'the best' episodes, they are the episodes that are already 90 minutes long.

You won't find any episode at all of any length that is as bad as insurrection for the specific reasons I described above. There are some bad episodes, but Picard doesn't turn into a late middle age Kirk in any of them.

That said, if you just want me to agree that the specific story of insurrection was a stupid story for a film then sure. But that doesn't explain First Contact, which was just fucking stupid.

Saw a sneak preview last night in museum IMAX 3d.  Definitely worth the 3d for this one as much of it is filmed in full IMAX and "for 3d."  Interesting effects when pushed with trek sci-fi.
It's a good movie.  Better than the 1st one I thought and in reality is the true "introduction" for the reboot.

Much better filmography in this version too, taking full advantage of fairly epic vignettes and poignant expressions.

There is a caveat to all of this though; this movie is pretty much Star Wars with trek puns.   :oh_i_see:   I'm dead serious.   Imagine Star Wars mixed with Trek and you'll get this movie.  Even down to the sound effects (as evidenced in the credits).  Which makes sense since Abrams now has the SW license too - so may as well pillage their assets.

Oh, and Klingons.    We need to see more of them.

Oh, and plotholes.  There's a lot of em, but who cares in this case.

Exactly.  All of the episodes I listed were 90 minutes long and were great.  You could edit any of them to be a full length film and I would love to see them in a theater.

Saying that the TNG movies are like long TNG episodes doesn't make any sense because there are long TNG episodes and they're nothing like the TNG movies...because they're actually good.

 :ye_gods:   I don't even have the words.

In the theatre now waiting to see this...in 3D IMAX...for free. :thumbs_up:

http://www.collegehumor.com/video/4026025/deja-view-my-favorite-movie-star-trek-vs-star-wars

More importantly, the TNG movies were dumb action flicks starring a cast and adapted from a TV show that was about ethical space dillemas. Shoehorning Picard into the role of John Mclaine... well they did it in TNG, but they did it well. In the movies, they run roughshod all over the characters, especially poor Picard.
Red Letter Media's video on them show this well.

Insurrection was the really long, bad espiode of TNG. First Contact and Nemesis were dumb action flicks with the TNG characters shoehorned in. Generations was a bewildering kind of stupid, and I can only guess it was 'written' by tossing pieces of paper with words into a fishbowl and plucking them out at random.

nuTrek was dumb action, with an especially dumb story that tops even the TNG movies. It's only saving grace is the actors. But then that potential was pissed away on shallow drama, and mindless action.

I only say it feels like a star wars mashup in the superficial sense (plus a smidgen of some hero's journey + friends).  "nuTrek" still doesnt have the char. development and storytelling that Star Wars had, but let's be real.  It's an action flick, as you say.  Does a good job of that too.

Just got back from seeing this.  I loved it.  I don't care what the jaded old time Trek fans say.  The last 2 reboot movies are so much better than ANY of the previous ones, TES or TNG.

Also,

Just got back from seeing it. It is a fucking terrible movie. One of the worst I've seen in a long time. I liked the first reboot movie a good deal. Whether or not I knew anything about Star Trek, I would have hated this film. The action is totally disconnected from the flow of the narrative and half the film is taken by weird disjointed shoutouts to (or are they mockeries of) previous Trek stuff. It's like watching a bad school play version of Trek at some moments. There are some nice character bits here and there lost in the flotsam and jetsam of the plot, such as it is.

God, I love this site/community/asylum.

--Dave

Saw it a couple days ago but so much of the basic plot is wrapped up in spoilers, it's impossible to really discuss this movie in anything other than the broadest of terms until a lot more people have seen it.

The plot holes also. Fuck they are so bad.

Like:

All of those things.  As an action movie you can shut off your brain and chew your corn if you like.  As a Star Trek movie?  What the shit?  Bad pacing, another rushed movie trying to make up for years of tv episode interaction.  Oh, and lens flare.  Is that what makes it futuristic?  This movie did not need to involve you know who.  If you want to establish a new franchise you really do not need to crutch in staples of the old one. 

See it after video release, maybe. 

See, you can't be negative about nuTrek, because then you're a trekkie neckbeard poophead. It can't possibly be because the movies are shit.

As an action flick, all on it's own, no Trek baggage, it's bad. It doesn't build any tension, and relies on special effects and hanging off ledges instead of building real tension.
As a Trek flick, it doesn't inherit any of the resonance of the long lived franchise, but tries to borrow it anyway.

I swear some people just go to movies so they can nit pick about them, thinking they're the internet version of Siskel and Ebert. :facepalm:

you mean u watch movie to be entertained, ginaz?  :why_so_serious:

As a Star Trek movie it was eyerollingly bad.  Hilariously so in a couple of spots.  As a generic space adventure movie it was pretty good.  The shame of it being that the actors are all very good at their roles, that amount of effort in casting was wasted for generic space adventure.

Eyerollingly bad as part of the trek canon would also apply to star trek 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, as well as half of DS9, and all of voyager and enterprise. Arguably even TOS and movies 1, 3 and 11.

Are we saying better/worse than the rest of that mob?

It's not nitpicking when characters in movies do stuff that's very nearly random.

If I were watching a spy thriller and there's a chase scene that starts in the back streets of Paris and ends in Cairo where the characters get in cars at one point, drive for five minutes, and are in Cairo, it would ruin any sense of suspense or tension because the characters are no longer following any rules that remotely resemble the world we live in. When you do made-up worlds, you have much more leeway, but not infinite leeway. There was stuff in this movie that was actually worse than the Transformers walking out the back of the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and being in a desert a few seconds later. The "Scotty trapped in a water pipe in Engineering" sequence in the previous film is totally plausible and fun by comparison to what goes on in this flick.

It's also just not very well-paced or structured even on its own as a space adventure, partly because it's trying so desperately to hit the grace notes of a previous Trek film.

This film has sharp knees apparently.

I used to think nonsense coming out of JJ was a mysterious plan, now I know it to be lazy hand-waving. Fuck this guy. Fuck Star Trek that isn't Star Trek. Fuck Star Wars, I bet we could cobble together the major plot points of the new movie in 5 minutes. I am so tired of my favorite franchises being skinned and worn like a suit by an asshole who is all style and no substance.

Can't wait till the remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  :why_so_serious:

Reminds me of the onion video. (http://www.theonion.com/video/trekkies-bash-new-star-trek-film-as-fun-watchable,14333/)

Was thinking today about why one scene in particular in the 2nd half annoyed the fuck out of me, and how it symbolized where the movie fucked up in the 2nd half.

Yeah, that's where the "Trekkies hate fun" meme came from, I think. Smart viral marketing. They can shit out some real garbage and anyone who doesn't grin after taking a bite of this crap can be dismissed as a nerdy killjoy.

I'd put nuTrek under V, if that means anything to you. I can't decide if it's better or worse than Generations.

Well, I did not like this movie one bit. I found it impossible to enjoy because it wasn't realistic enough, I just can't buy into the whole warp travel thing. Also, transporter technology, that shit should be like an ultimate weapon instead of utility device. Bad guy got you down, just evaporate him with a transporter, problem solved, no reason to have characters running around and doing things confusing the audience.

I know right.  I must be weird or something.  I'm fairly certain most of the people nerd raging about this movie went into it wanting to hate it.

I went into fully expecting to enjoy it very much, just as I enjoyed the first reboot film. My daughter and wife went with total excitement--they'd been looking at trailers, etc. My wife doesn't like old Trek at all, was a huge fan of the first one, my daughter loves most Trek but not in a particularly nerd-intense way. Both of them came out afterwards and before I could say anything started talking about how much they hated it.

So don't assume anything. Please. I fully expected to be defending the movie against old-school fans. It took me very much by surprise how much I disliked it.

Co-worker who saw it yesterday thought it was OK and enjoyed it as an action movie but said it is definitely, "not Trek."

That was my feeling exactly.  Good action movie made better by 8-story imax, 3d, and skywalker sounds.  I'm a Trek purist and I still enjoyed it for what it was.  Was it a "good" movie per se, meh... no.  But I was entertained.  If you spend some time in schools these days you'll see who the movie was meant for really though.   :oh_i_see:   Abrams knows his new audience.

As said by others though, these actors are wasted on Abrams.  Terribly so.  They so obviously are carrying this new franchise it's pretty saddening.  I cant help but wonder what a better overall movie, in more Trek style, would be like with this cast.

After Voyager and Enterprise, I was so frustrated that Trek was in a rut. I was jazzed to hear that Abrams was starting fresh, and  I loved every trailer.

Luckily you've already been outed as a trekkie neckbeard who hates fun, so nobody needs to listen to any of your entirely valid criticisms.

I know. I'm going to my room to stroke my collection of Mego Star Trek action figures.

Look, up until the last 2 reboots, every Trek movie but 2 (Khan and Undiscovered Country, ok maybe 3 with Voyage Home) have been complete and utter hot garbage.  Truth be told, most of TOS and the first few seasons of TNG were awful as well.  Voyager went on waaay too long and had the least interesting characters of any of the series.   Enterprise felt really out of place with a weak cast.  Last few seasons of TNG and the first few of DS9 was the high water mark for the Star Trek TV franchise, with TNG starting off poorly but ending strongly while DS9 was just the opposite.  The JJ Abrams movies are head and shoulders above almost everything thats come before them Trek wise.

I think me and Ginaz are going to have to settle this another way. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SK0cUNMnMM)

The way I see it, the second movie should have boldly went somewhere to do something and the third movie should have come back to this one.

TOS is kind of painful to watch at times, but even at its most campy, it generally manages to feel like a show about exploring the unknown and wrestling with difficult intellectual problems and, you know, science fictiony stuff.  That's pretty much the thing that's missing from all the TNG movies and the reboots (at least the first one; I've not seen the second one yet).  Have any of these movies involved a moral dilemma, or finding common ground with a strange alien species, or anything like that?

I really hope someone gets to work with this cast and makes or at least tries to make a good Trek movie. I didn't hate it but I know if I dwell on it moving forward it will become easier and easier to hate it.

After Transformers though anything that doesn't just ruin completely something my younger self loved is good enough at this point.

Insurrection showed me one aspect of Starfleet I've never suspected:  you can play the HMS Pinafore with only two button presses on the main console of a starship shuttlecraft.  How can you not love a civilization that does that? 

So, I really enjoyed this. I'm not a super Trek nitpicker, but I know enough to catch most of the references. I thought the performances were solid, the script was snappy, and the pacing was good. Also, it was probably funnier than the first one.

You sir, are my new hero.

There was one thing that made me laugh that shouldn't have, but it was so funny that I forgive it.

I went and saw it. I enjoyed it even while noticing its faults. I think it's funny to watch people nitpick it while willfully ignoring similar stuff from other Trek tv shows and movies.

Early TNG was flat-out awful, and later seasons often suffered from clunkers. I was ready to buy the Blu-Ray Season 1 until I went over the list of episodes and realized they were all bad. "Oh my God" bad. So bad, I wouldn't even show them to my wife (and she's watched all of Babylon 5 with me, including Season 1).

The last season of Enterprise was wonderful. Unfortunately, the previous three seasons were so awful, virtually no one watched it.

And while The Motion Picture is slow and often dull, I still love it as the only Star Trek tale that evoked true awe in me. Between that and The Black Hole, 1979 did a lot to mold my taste in SF.

I went into the previous Abrams movie with a shrug. I actually loved the new cast save Chris Pine, who was handed a smirking frat-boy douchebag of a Kirk. I actually found Scotty more appealing more than the original. The trailers for this one evoked nothing but distaste from me. When I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, I was struck by how it seemed to have been assembled by rolling on random encounter tables - there's even a wandering lich.

I'm skipping this one.

A lot of Star Trek was crap. I'm not going to excuse it. But it was crap because it was either too nerdy or too mawkish, the product of people who - like me - didn't spend enough time talking to human beings. They were too deeply fans. When Abrams makes crappy Star Trek, it's because he is not a nerd, and he is not a fan. "Star Trek" means nothing to him. He's just making a movie with spaceships, explosions, and lens flare, taking his check, and going home.

Also, I am drunk. Do feel free to disregard all this as incoherent rambling.  :grin:

Stormwaltz,

I disagree about Abrams not being a nerd. Seriously, he even looks like a walking stereotype of a nerd. This movie is really about what happens when  a "smirking, frat-boy douchebag" has to grow up. See it if you want. I enjoyed it and it is probably my 4th favorite Trek movie behind Khan, 2009 Trek, and Undiscovered Country.

I enjoyed the movie but it required a /switch -off brain command for it to work. Accidentally engaging even first gear of the brain caused a mental wreck.

That said, it doesn't make sense.

It has some action good bits and cinematography but it truly falls apart on the basics. I'm not even talking about geeky tech points. Just basic cinema plot common sense. :why_so_serious:

So, to satisfy my curiosity, I went back and watched Wrath of Khan for the first time in years tonight. I would have to say, as entertaining as it still was at times, it was at least as full of dumb plot elements and holes as Into Darkness. I think there's a lot of rose-colored glasses action going on in this thread, starting with the very start of the movie when the captain and first officer of a ship beam down to a planet, BY THEMSELVES, to investigate a reading where they have no idea of what it is or the level of danger involved. I didn't take notes, but there were tons of other places with similar issues, maybe the most egregious being the fact that there's somehow a nebula (a really tiny nebula at that) close enough to a planet that you can drive there in a few minutes without warp speed.

To be fair, that's pretty much a standard Trek trope... and it is completely and utterly idiotic. It was idiotic in the 60's with TOS and it still is, but until the show/movie is about Ensign Dickhard and the captain is a bit character/omniscient narrator, that's pretty much going to continue.

It was actually a large asteroid. /neckbeard

I think a lot of Star trek is complete crap, I detested the prime directive whenever it came up because it always seemed to be a roadblock to doing the right thing.  The original tv series was way ahead of it's time though, it's just I never really cared for the later incarnations.

You have to admit:

Was I the only one that felt Star Wars in this Trek?  Even the damned Klingon patrol ships were essentially tie-fighters with horizontal wings.

Actually, it was admitting that the right thing on that scale is simply not ever clear cut.

That's just historical fact, alas.

What annoys me in this thread is that folks are assuming:

a) that if you didn't like this film, you must love all other Trek or not care about the plot holes in it. Not me. My feelings about a lot of Trek (films and series) are lukewarm. In many ways I liked the first reboot film better than older Trek.
b) that if you didn't like this film, you habitually nitpick everything. Not me. Most of the time my suspension of disbelief settings are pretty generous.

There's a wild difference between 'this is a movie, suspend disbelief' and the writers/director flat out saying 'you chucklefucks will swallow anything.'

I was really looking forward to this one after the first one (which I liked) but the more hype and mystery and bollocks started surrounding it, the more alarm bells went off.  And now people, who thought like me, are telling me it's dire.

Fair enough.  I'd rather skip it than end up moaning in this thread.

Meh.  I'm still going to see it.  Most of you guys hated Borderlands when I thought it was a fun game.  I'll sneak in some snacks and shut my brain off.

There are two prime directives. TOS prime directive only refers to pre-star-faring civilizations. TNG and later prime directive is pretty much America First isolationism.

I'm fine with the first, the latter is immoral. At the time B5 was an almost shocking contrast as its entire mission was essentially to meddle in galactic politics and Clark's isolationists were the enemy.

I remember seeing in in the theater and after so many years of fuzzy tv reruns, the long flyby of the Enterprise was an incredible experience. Not that it holds up, but at the time it was wow.

The story in the Motion Picture I rank just behind Khan. I loved the tie into man's early space exploration coming back to complete the circle.

Missed opportunity:

I saw this last night and liked it. My experience with ST includes only a few episodes of Voyager when I was younger, and the 09 movie a few weeks ago because my friends insisted I watch it then go see this. There were some silly bits that didn't make sense, and a lot of overly dramatic moments, but all in all it was a good action flick.

I enjoyed it as a brain dead action flick. Things happen because. Well, really because they want a particular shot or effect or something but it doesn't have to make any sense and trust me, it does not.

But...

I quite liked most of this, but it did get really stupid towards the end.

I watched the movie this afternoon in a regular theater, no 3-D and no IMAX magic.  I was underwhelmed  :|

Star Trek has ALWAYS been hand-wavy techno-magic filled top to bottom with plot holes.

Rose-colored glasses.

This movie was good.

Movie was fine. Best pulpy sci-fi since the 5th Element. Action was good, acting was good, less lens-flare was good, effects were good. Even the plot made sense.

Worth seeing.

The story in broad strokes made sense. The PLOT (the points along the story's timeline to reach the broad strokes) really made very little sense at all.

Mighty strong words those.

Yep. Pretty much is though.

I enjoyed it.

Afternoon flick in a uncrowded theater with the full massive screen.  I actually had a moment of "wow, we've come a long way these effects are pretty awesome."

My biggest gripe (action brain on, plot hole brain off) was:


I only have vague memories of the original series and movies, so maybe someone can enlighten me.

It entertained me for a couple of hours so I can't really complain. I laughed, I smiled, I sighed heavily at the extremely obvious use of Chekov's gun (no relation.)  Thoughts:

I liked it.

It's a Trek film for people not interested in or only casually interested in Trek.  They threw tropes at you without getting why they were done and that's fine and dandy for what it was.   Don't think on it too hard at all, though.

I don't think it will stand-up for multiple viewings or be one of those movies in frequent rotation on some male-oriented cable channel like LOTR has turned in to.  

As for the bitching about ST in general upthread: Most of those are tropes from the 40's and 50's sci-fi and action serials that gave-birth to the series.  Bitching about the senior officers beaming down to a planet is like bitching that Indy was totally breaking all scientific and archeological principles and practices in his movies.

I enjoyed it.  It's a summer action film.  Not choosing to think too much about some of the plot elements though.  I can see why some dislike it.  It messes with 'canon' etc. but consider it a 'lensflareverse' where cars float on air but flyers rely on old VTOL turbine engines.

Christ, now I'm thinking about the plot elements again.  To the Lobotomizer!

Non spoilery question but does a turbine engine necessarily need to work the way it does now, in the future? Was the turbine even a turbine engine or just some sort of intake? 

Turbines would need to work that way if they were turbines, yes.  I understand the mechanics are simple but pretty set such that other than fuel efficiency a turbine today is the same as a turbine from 50-60 years ago.  Much like the refrigeration cycle is all about compressing and expanding a gas, we can make it more efficient but not change the underlying physics.

The better question is why would they be needed if medical gurneys can have anti-grav devices small enough that the gurney is only 3" thick.

Could be a weight limit/power ratio equation on the anti-grav stuff in that a power source big enough to float a plane would not be feasible. 

Turbine stuff makes sense but imo it's only silly to assume that all methods of transportation would be the same in the future.

Just got back.

The prologue you saw before the hobbit was the best part.
But the film holds together till about half way through.
Fell apart somewhat for me when they tried to do the heart of darkness thing.
Oh my god the ending is terrible.
Still really no worse than the other trek films.
Can see the stylistic point about it being a bit star wars, but it had as much trek philosophical stuff as any other trek movie.

I've seen worse, I've seen better. In summary : meh.

A rousing "Meh" seems to be the national consensus, too.  Didn't even break 85 mil with a 4 day weekend.

Does the "meh" matter if you're a Trekkie, enjoy Trek but don't have a uniform or don't now who Lore is? 

The film is borderline unintelligible for anyone without a basic awareness of the plot of old trek. Non-trekkies need not apply.

The big cumberbatch reveal made me laugh out loud while the GF had no idea what was going on, same goes for the tribble based chekovs gun and the sequence with kirk doing the thing he does at the end. I don't think either laughter or incomprehension were ideal responses. Too much of the actual plot came through references. That said this was far more faithful to trek than anyone cares to admit. The prime directive, avoiding war with the other guys, and heart of darkness segments felt like solid trek stuff to me, the central relationships between kirk, spock and uhura were well delivered. The problem was that the HoD section was confusing and made little plot sense, then the final sequence after that was terrible trekkie pandering, and the filmmakers even bottled out on the logical conclusion of their pandering.

And wtf was Leonard Nimoy in this film for?

Oh and the 3d was even worse than usual.

Do not see this film in 3d. For me the choice was 3d or non-imax. Ideally you want imax 2d, but on no account go to a 3d showing.

I would only consider 3d if it's also IMAX (and a museum quality one at that).  3d on a normal-sized movie screen is never good.  For me though, it was worth it just seeing those fleeting epic Enterprise shots (especially when going to warp), but that's just me.  I'm a trekkie.  /shrug   

Screen I saw it on was 70 feet tall with 15/70 projection.

The 3d was still dire.

I think the key issue is that Abrams, who is not a noted fan of 3d, made no compromises in how the film was edited. Lots of cuts, shots had a lot going on, lots of closeups, and long sections in the dark. If you compare it to something like the hobbit the difference really stands out,  Jackson had clearly had made the compromises of much simpler scenes and nothing particularly dark (to the detriment of the film as a whole).

I just saw this. I enjoyed it.

I think the nitpick meter getting turned up to 11 is unwarranted.

I'm a bit surpised that people are nit picking this one, when the first film set the standard for stupid storytelling. Those horses not only left the barn, but they made it to Cabo and are relaxing on the beach sipping cocktails by now.

Taken completely independently of Star Trek I'd give this movie a B+ for being a decent action movie with punching, yelling, explosions, and only a couple of stupid plot holes.

Viewed with full awareness of the earlier works it was referencing, it was pretty painful.  The bit toward the end, with the hands?  Made me physically uncomfortable.

I suggest reviewing the earlier work in question in close succession; it does not hold up in comparison IMO.

Overall I thought this was just ok.  As a sci-fi movie it was fun, but the Trek fan in me wishes they would have just made up a new villain and totally forgot about Khan.

I actually have been, partly because of this thread.  

^^This.

It was an entertaining flick, with lots of action bits and if you went into the theater alert to the plentiful tidings of plot stupidity that would be evident, it's a good 2+ hours of popcorn and visuals. And all the homage honoring lines backreferencing the old school series elicited chuckles.

If you were expecting something deeper, you were bound to be disappointed.

Ohhh now I understand why everyone is so upset.  Up until the last two movies every Star Trek flick has been a deep philosophical journey into unexplored realms of imagination.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/868747/claptard.gif)

I should clarify, the thing that made this movie in particular painful (despite being a decent action flick, which is more than you can say for the TNG movies) is the hamfisted recycling and referencing of earlier movies that didn't make sense in context, but was there so people could say "hey, I get that reference!"  Every time one of those happened it took me right out of the movie because I of course recognized the reference but it was almost never done in a particularly clever way.  

I think somebody earlier commented on why the "KHAAAAAN" felt so weird and shoehorned in.  One that really stuck out for me was McCoy referencing a Gorn, which is dumb, but it just so happened that I had watched the TOS episode "Arena" (which the Gorn is from) that very morning, so it was fresh in my mind, and rather than thinking "hey, Gorn, I get that reference, that's clever," I thought "nobody from the Federation has even seen a Gorn yet, the whole point of that Arena episode was that they were making first contact with that species, how are they showing up at McCoy's maternity ward, and aren't they reptilian anyway?"

I mean, I get that I'm a big nerd and I'm not the target audience for this movie, but that's the point.  The Trek I grew up watching actually had people keeping track of the continuity and trying to create a coherent universe, because the target audience was nerds like me who dig that sort of thing.

Did you miss the part where I said every TNG movie was crap too?  :oh_i_see:

In context I feel like it actually makes more sense to me than the original one. Kirk freaks out because he's been stranded in the cave, even though he already knows he has a secret plan with Spock to beam him out. So what's he so mad about?

There's also nothing as stupid as the Genesis project involved in this one (Genesis is monumentally awful in so many ways, it dwarfs every single science nitpick I might have with Into Darkness combined), and no douchebag Son of Kirk. Honestly the more I think about it the worse Wrath of Khan looks in comparison to this one, and that's the "best" Star Trek movie.

We as an audience don't know that. So it comes across as genuine rage. We later learn that it's part of his plan, so he was playing to Kahn. I mean, if he'd said "Oh, damn. I lost. Good show!" Khan would have been one suspicious mofo.

You may not like this movie...

...it was still better than EVERY FUCKING TREK MOVIE BEFORE THE REBOOT.

Wrath of Khan does not hold up, it just doesn't.

Whales? Fucking whales?!

The entire TnG abominations?!

I LOOOOOOVED TnG/DS9 but the movies are shit, universally.

I agree on Genesis, but Douchebag, Son of Kirk will be the next movie, since Carol Marcus (son of Kirk's mom and MUCH hotter than in WOK) was here. Rite?

If your story is not about time travel, but it has time travel in it, then your story sucks.

One of many things I like about that movie is that it's not the standard "there is a bad guy, the captain of the Enterprise must punch him" plot that I think every Trek movie since has had.  Most of the really good Trek stories were not about fighting a particular antagonist.

Well, presumably not as an adult douchebag, no.

I'm sure he'll accidentally fall through a temporal wormhole as a baby and emerge as an adult or some bullshit at the start of the movie if they want him in there as an adult.

True; it is Star Trek after all.

Star Trek 4 is still the best trek film.  Fuck you all.   :awesome_for_real:

I like that one too. Maybe some local bias involved.  :grin:

You are wrong. While I will agree that the whale movie was damned silly mostly because they played it for so much comedic effect and character interaction, but Khan? Much much better movie than Into Darkness by a mile, taken within the context of the time it was done.

The TNG movies? Utter shit.

All arguing aside, I think we can all agree that Star Trek V was the worst.

I don't know, I'd prefer that to Insurrection or Nemesis. The latter is a movie so bad I can't remember shit about it other than it sucked.

The moment is a meme, as I said earlier, both because it makes emotional sense in the context of the film's narrative AND because we all love it for the sheer raw Shatnerism of it. It works on two levels: it's Shatner cheese AND it makes narrative & character sense.

In this film it is ONLY and ONLY and ONLY a bad weird dinner-theater homage to the older film. It makes no narrative sense, it makes no sense in terms of characterization, it doesn't even make much meta-fictional sense--it's not a clever ironic twist or a different line reading or anything. It's just "hey, wow, look it's Spock saying it now, we iz cool."  Meaning: if you hate the older film why the FUCK do you like that moment now? Seriously. You like a movie today that's slavishly imitating an affectionally-mocked bit of cheese from a movie you hate, because why? 

Everything that's good about Quinto's interpretation of the character (in some ways he gets it even more right than Nimoy) is undercut in that scene, everything that's interesting about this reboot cast and situation is undercut in this scene, everything that was ok about the first half of the film's storyline is undercut in this scene. If Spock is yelling about anyone, he should be yelling MARRRRRRCUS, that's the guy who really fucked up the ship and the situation. Khan is practically an innocent bystander by comparison.

What does God need with a starship ?

Always wondered.

(http://media.agonybooth.com/images/articles/Star_Trek__Generations_1994/title.jpg)

Though I personally consider nuTrek about as bad.

But it does make sense. Think about what nuSpock's character development has been throughout the past two movies, in terms of the conflict between his Vulcan and Human sides.

You are the reason why Transformers 4 is geting made, and I hate you for it.  :why_so_serious:

What?

So he's yelling about a dude he met an hour ago, that he's already blown the shit out of after getting a spoiler hint from his old self, for doing something that was actually the fault of the guy who's already dead, and that something he did is indirectly kill a guy that Spock has only known for a couple of years but has been told *should* be important to him. If you want a scene where what nuSpock's been through is played reasonably well, the scene in the smuggler ship between him and Uhura is a good scene. The entire first half of the film is heading in a good direction even with the dumb plot holes, in fact.

The whole second half, KHAAAAAAAN most especially, only works as a homage, and as a homage, it shows that the homagers don't understand why the original scene is a meme in the first place. Plus now we have people telling us that they hated the film it's homaging but they really enjoyed seeing a film they hate done again with more lens flare and even less storytelling coherence.

Transformers 1-3 were trash...kinda like star trek 1-8(? I lost track)

Look, I'm not saying into darkness is a great movie, it's a fun popcorn action flick that might shit all over star trek but at least it's well made, transformers were just terrible top to bottom.

Also Khan, watch it again, seriously. Good at the time but does not hold up in any way as a stand alone movie.  ALL the trek movies are stand alone save maybe search for spock and that's the problem, they expect you to go in knowing everyone and knowing fucking 1970's tv plots to make sense of things.  Say what you will about the new one but they do not ask that of the audience.

There is a place for things like old trek movies, extended tv specials.

Circular argument  is circular.


I really enjoy the part where you bitch about a movie series requiring knowledge of the prior movies,while the one you say is better does the same thing.

I'm not even interested in talking about whether Wrath of Khan is a good movie. For me that doesn't enter into it: it's that this one is a bad one. That's it. It's not a matter of comparison: this film is not good.

No need. I have watched the mighty fuck out of that movie over the years. What do you want me to 'remember'? (lol trek reference.)

And no, Transfomers and nuTrek are pretty much equal in qualty of storytelling. Star Trek just seems to have managed to avoid being called dumb storytelling with the aforementioned "Trekkies hate fun" meme.

Look, I appreciate that you obviously are very passionate about this, but could you turn off the sperg faucet for the time being and try to actually articulate what you want out of the movie? Understandably, its cool and edgy to hate all that is new and not old, but this is getting 2edgy4me at this point.


nuSpock's KHAAAAN-moment synopsis is as follows. I've put it into bullet points, in rough order of plot progression and relevance, because it's Friday and no-one does any work on Fridays:


 * nuSpock is having issues finding common ground between his Human and Vulcan sides. This is explained in movie 1.
 
 * at the start of movie 2, he is shown as trending towards Vulcan, in filing the report which smokes Kirk's career.
 
 * Kirk is understandably upset (given that he saved nuSpock's life) and tell him that he did it because loves him. No homo.

 * nuSpock is confuse by this, and is thrown back into Human/Vulcan dissaray. This is in large part due to the fact that he hangs around with Kirk, a person whom he obviously considers worthwhile.

 * British people happen.

 * as realisation is beginning to finally dawn on nuSpock that he cannot actually cut himself off entirely from being able to feel (prefaced by him telling Uhura that *exposition*), British people are making things worse.

 * Kirk is killed due to British people shenanigans.

 * nuSpock, realises that he has just lost one of the two people whom he can actually call a friend (Uhura being the other one, in case this isn't obvious) - a thing he has not actually experienced ever, even in Vulcan Juniour High.

 * this also happens to be the person who risked everything to save nuSpock's life earlier because they loved him (no homo).

 * nuSpock, now beginning to understand what the meaning of Fidelity in the human context is, is powerless to do anything about it (including sacrificing himself to save Kirk).

 * he finally flips his shit (succumbing to rage), and beams down to the planet to do the only thing he can do - engage in mano-a-mano fisticuffs, because despite the best plans of Team Goodguys, British people are still causing problems.


Now, as near as I can tell, all of this was spelled out in a fairly obivious fashion by the writer(s). It really is very much a join-the-dots-colour-in-the-giraffe type of exercise. And yet, it would appear, that people are still having trouble joining said dots, and colouring-in said ungulate mammal.

I apologise if I come across as snide, but there really is a point where I have to hold up my hands at the screeches of "WARGLBLARGL" and ask, what?

Never mind. You've talked yourself into it being something other than a bad homage. This makes me WARGBLGLELE and you dispassionate. It's ok. I can talk myself into other things in other movies making sense even when they don't. It's a geek skill. Knock yourself out.

lol

I'm unfortunately going to be seeing this movie again this weekend (because friends I haven't seen in too long are getting together to see it), so I'm going to be keeping a close eye out for this.  When it happened in the theater I was wincing too hard to process it.  I'm pretty sure it was Marcus's shenanigans that got Kirk killed, though.

Judging from his daughter and evilness, you can't rule out Marcus being an undercover British person.

Who said they hated ST2? Lakov I guess. That's not "people". I like WoK less than I used to, and I think Into Darkness is a better movie, but I don't hate it.

I somehow managed to make it all the way till just this year without ever seeing anything but the first 10 minutes or so of WoK on TV.  Finally netflixed it earlier this year and thought it was....... meh to ok'ish.  Didn't hate it, and was entertained, but I think the reboot trek was certainly better, and possibly some of the other movies (like 4  :awesome_for_real:).  Actually, I also rewatched the undiscovered country at the same time, and thought it was better.

It always seems I'm alone in thinking the first Trek movie was one of the best....

The first trek gets a lot of hate for being a rehashed TOS episode, a plodding storyline (because it was a TV episode stretched to 2 hours, it could have been 90-100 min and been better) the terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE uniforms (Which gave me a chuckle seeing rehashed in this movie) and 70's design aesthetic that were obviously trying to rip-off 2001.

I think there was also some hate for Kirk not being captain and being shown as out of touch/ incompetent in the beginning. You're not wrong that it's one of the better ones as time goes on and I agree with you on Undiscovered.


Yes.  His attack is what mis-aligned the somophlange (I forget what they called it) requiring the trip into the core without a radiation suit that totally wouldn't have been on board a ship with an irradiated engine.  What hit the somophlange hard enough to misalign it while also being absent from the shot isn't explained any more than why a 190# man suffering from radiation poisoning is able to kick it in to place. You'd think it would need to be a little more precsise. 

I watched it last night. It holds up quite nicely to me.

The whales was always a bit silly and self-referential. Of all the movies, it's the one that's the most like an extended tv episode.  Mostly what I noticed last time I watched it was that what special effects there were horrible, even compared to the earlier films.

Well Double Dumbass on you!

You're not alone.  From the pre-Abrams movies, it's my second favorite behind Undiscovered Country.

Honestly, if the next film starred Richard E Grant as a Shakespeare-quoting madman trying to bring down the Federation I wouldn't be upset.

 :heart:

Undiscovered Country (in my memory anyway) was good too. I'll probably rewatch that soon to see if is as full of flaws I didn't remember as Wrath of Khan.

Except that is HAS happened to him in the first movie by losing his mother and most of his entire fucking race (since he considers himself Vulcan).

Also, for most of the first two movies, Quinto's acting has been SPOT ON. He's been near perfect. The way he spoke the line just felt like he didn't even want to say it. Maybe because he realized how stupid it sounded in the context of nuTrek. I don't know. There was a way to deliver that line better and he failed at it. But moreso, it just felt out of place in the context of the story being told. As did the touching fingers through the glass part of that sequence. It lacked any emotion because 1) anyone who has seen Wrath of Khan sees that and goes "oh, homage!" or 2) the bad performance of Quinto on that line or 3) because compared to the same scene in the Wrath of Khan, these two characters (and actors) don't have decades of experience together growing a friendship or 4) because we all knew that Khan's blood would wake the Tribble and they'd be able to use Khan's blood to save Kirk.

As a result, there was no emotional impact in ANY of that scene, from Kirk's sacrifice on down because the audience knew Kirk wasn't going to stay dead. When Wrath of Khan came out, we were all like "WHAT THE FUCK THEY KILLED SPOCK OH MY GOD!!!!" And we didn't find out until the end credits that maybe Spock wouldn't stay dead.

Undiscovered country is an example of a decent 'expanded episode' style film.

Its not the greatest movie ever, suffers from the fundamental weakness of tOS acting and characters which didn't start out great and were well past their natural arc. But it doesn't disappear up its own ass like most of the films do.

And they had to do a whole movie's worth of stuff to get him back. And we had to wait years to find out.
To young me, it was similar to the cliffhangers at the end of Empire.

Stepping into TOS cast's shoes is really kind of unfair. From a child of a Trekkie, I can say, you just can't replace Shatner, Kelley, or Nimoy. They were their characters. And as good as this current cast is, it just can't capture the same feel for the role mainly because they not only have to play the role, but capture what the original actors brought to the role. They have their moments, but those are flashes rather than a steady stream (though Urban does mimic Kelley playing McCoy much better for longer stretches than the rest of the cast). I tried to go with the new guys, but those roles are pretty iconic and it just feels like that is the missing piece in the reboot and why I can't get comfortable with this movie or the last. Pine just doesn't ooze the misogynist ladies man Shat did, and while he comes close at times, Quinto just doesn't have that stoic, stiff cadence Nimoy brough to the table. 

I keep thinking about what would happen if hey remade Empire and who would play Han, Luke, and Leia? Even if you could capture Han's swashbuckler swagger, could you capture the way Harrison did it? Is it unfair to judge based on that?

Well, that's part of the reasoning why they (general they, general moviemaking) should just do new shit and stop rebooting and digging up corpses of TV shows and movie franchises. But it's all about name brands and franchises and reconizability.

Chia Pet The Movie. I'll bet money it's been discussed.

Personally I prefer the new cast. Quinto's scenes with Nimoy make me embarrassed for Nimoy.

They are all far better actors.

Even Simon Pegg.



Recasting Han Solo would be harder. Luke and Leia, not so much.

Nimoy is 82 and his age is showing. :( He doesn't seem as sharp as some other older actors.

He was pretty sharp in the Audio commercial.

I'm all in for Zachary Levi as Han Solo.

That... would be awful. I like him, but he has no edge to him at all.

Might be interesting to see him try.  That said, I can't see it working.

On reflection...

2>11>6>12>1>4>3>>>>5>>>>7=8=9=10

12 was pretty mediocre as an action film and totally lost it as a story at the point Khan's name is revealed.

But really not out of place in the canon.

Kirk was jumping on the wrong side of the thing given the mis-alignment, miraculously it snaps into place ahead of the penultimate stomp.  Of all the magical things in the movie, this was the most jarring for me because it was mundane and needlessly wrong.

Fewer ear worms than the original, so in that respect a much better movie.

Oh! Grade the movies! I'm down for that.

#1. Wrath of Khan
#2. The Motion Picture
#3. Search for Spock
#4. Voyage Home
#5. Undiscovered Country
#6. First Contact
#7. Insurrection

#8. Generations
#9 Final Frontier
#10. Nemesis
#11. Star Trek 09

Slots 8-11, man we're beyond bad and into "Do not want", so the spots become rather pointless. They're all weapons grade crap.

I really struggle with the idea that Abrams films are worse than the TNG films.

Or that first contact and insurrection are above a line where you imply that things should be allowed to exist.

The TNG films are truly an offence against the art form.

If you are putting the new trek movies behind the tng movies then just...go
Home, lock your doors and turn off all media cause you are stuck in a past which never happened and reality will never be able to pierce the bubble of your nostalgia.

I'd put the first Abrams movie ahead of all the TNG movies, but this latest one... I don't know.  Better visuals for sure, but the script is just so terrible.  I guess I'd put it ahead of Nemesis, if only because I don't want to live in a world where it's even possible to make a worse Star Trek movie than Nemesis.

For lulz, check rotten tomatoes for their list of trek movies, none of us synch up with that.

Nemesis is better than the one with the asshole immortal squatters.  I seem to have a mental block with the movies name.  Thank god.  Nemesis had Romulans and a space battle.

How different starship captains react to an alien ship attacking:

Kirk:  FIRE!  FIRE EVERYTHING!
Picard:  Conference.
Sisko:  How DARE you come HERE and IMPOSE your weapons fire on INNOCENT people!
Janeway:  Derp.
Archer:  Furrows brow.  Open hailing frequencies!  Why won't they talk!  Polarize the hull plating.  Where's my beagle?

I don't know why I typed that.

I'm almost there. I only come out once in a while to scowl at the fun everyone's having.

You misread =3

I meant that he hasn't had any friends, let alone lost any. Not that he hasn't experienced loss.

They aren't. I'd put Into Darkness just above First Contact, and then all the other TNG movies fall into the shithole down below it with the shitshow that was Star Trek V.

Saw this. Great action movie. Yeah, it has little to do with traditional/old star trek. Breaking the prime directive, and probably most of the others, in the first five minutes was JJ's way of saying: "I give no fucks about your nerdom, here is something fun instead." Beyond that, I am aware that further viewings or examination would probably bring the whole plot crashing down on itself. But it was fine the first go, so whatever.

My issues.

TJ Hooker Kirk would not have waited 5 minutes to break the prime directive.

I like picking nits as much as the next guy, but there's no gravity in space either.  Star Trek ships have artificial gravity emitters (same "action at a distance" tech as makes tractor beams and inertial dampers work) so that you can walk around in earthlike gravity while floating in space or accelerating at impossible speeds in an arbitrary direction.  No reason it'd be any different while falling toward a planet.

1) When they loose power they are in a high Earth orbit (as you can tell because the Enterprise's bottom is facing the Earth) and they will continue that orbit for a really really long time, ... unless!
2) They pull up to planet Earth and come to a complete STOP (which would actually require expending energy), so when they lose power suddenly they are falling toward at (something close to) 9.8m/s^2, which is ridiculous because gravity follows the inverse square rule and they are really far from Earth, and they will slowly fall for a couple days before hitting the Earth (yes, a guess)...  unless!
3) We're wrong about them being in high Earth orbit!  The reason the Enterprise is belly-down is because of emergency protocols.  The emergency systems are keeping some power on so folks can move about the ship, and in these situations the Enterprise reorients itself to fall belly down.  Ok, that works.  1) Enterprise was still moving straight at the Earth when main power cut, and it's belly moved to the direction of motion due to emergency protocols, which are also doing their best to keeping power to life support (lights, air flow, gravity).

Whew, I feel soooo much better about this now.

I liked the movie.  I fully expected to have to have mental blinders on because the folks making a movie need tons of people to go see it, and tons of people don't know shit about Newton or his laws and they don't want to be taught physics while seeing an action flick. 

Funny thought: more people probably have a better working knowledge of special relativity then they do of Newtonian mechanics.

I can't wait for this discussion to repeat itself when the next Star Wars film comes out.  :awesome_for_real:

Don't be ridiculous, f13 simply doesn't like to talk about star wars.

If Abrams' form holds, that film will be a deep philosophical morality play on the nature of the Force with a tightly plotted, character driven screenplay. Then I will tell the SW geeks to STFU, it's better than anything Lucas ever did, etc.  

He's a better fit for SW than ST.  Fun, frenetic action that cheerily zooms past plot holes and internal logic to provide escapism.

Plinkett shows how it is even more derivative than you think (it's 7 min not one of his 90 minute takedowns):

Star Trek: Into References (http://redlettermedia.com/mr-plinkett-star-trek-into-reference/)

RLM also did a more in-depth review.
http://blip.tv/redlettermedia/half-in-the-bag-episode-53-star-trek-into-darkness-6592545

I thought their review, and espeicially the plot analysis and comments about Khan/tribble referencing, was pretty good.

Until they go nuts in the last 10 minutes trying to pretend that old star trek (TNG aside) was anything nobler.

Did you watch TOS? Do you remember the episode where nobody punched anything, and they tried to communicate with and understand an alien being, and the resolution of the story involved the Metamorphosis (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Metamorphosis_(episode)) of human and alien?
Or the episode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menagerie_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)) that asked the question of whether it's better to live with an illusion or a harsh reality?
How about the episode that spent 90% of it's time in a courtroom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_Martial_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series))?
Have you watched the episode that dealt with the death of a single person (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Forever) in order to restore the timeline?
There's an episode that explores racism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_That_Be_Your_Last_Battlefield) and prejudice.

Jesus christ. TOS wasn't just Kirk fucking green women and punching the Gorn captain. It was sci-fi for the masses, but it was still sci-fi. I don't know about nobler, but at the very least they did stories with a little more thought than dropiing Trek references and blowing shit up.

I actually just recently saw the episode where Kirk punches the Gorn, and what people don't seem to remember about that episode was that the entire point was that Kirk DIDN'T kill the Gorn at the end because he decided it was better to try to establish peaceful relations with this new species (even though their first contact consisted of the Gorn slaughtering an entire human colony for no apparent reason).

Point being that even the episodes that we remember as being the most cheeseball were more cerebral than the current generation of movies are.

Uh, I remember that.

Honest.  I remember all of that.

That's why I don't give much of a shit about this film.  I think I've already missed it on the big screen to be honest.

Plinkett's always fun.  He does his homework.  As for the movie, to quote Donald Rumsfeld "We go to the movies with the writer we've got, not the writer we want."  I wouldn't let Lindelof write the new Denny's menu.

Lindelof gets a lot of heat, but I put as much blame on Orci and Kurtzman, who were the geniuses behind the first Transformers movie.
I honestly have shed a lot of my nerdrage against Bay and think that these dipshits are part of the reason TF/ST have such terrible stories.

Lindelof wrote Lost (sucked), Cowboys and Aliens (sucked), Promethus (sucked) and this Star Trek (sucked).  He is a parasitic vermin that has somehow attached itself to top Hollywood projects.

Those last three movies I've enjoyed the actors, the sets, the sfx, the direction but not the scripts.

He hit a cultural milestone with Lost (before everyone realized the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes) and has coasted ever since.

No doubt. Read any interviews and he comes across as a shallow moron who is simply aping his favorite writing tropes, without a serious understanding of why they work.
It is a mystery (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq3abPnEEGE) is not a story.

BTW I had a hankering for some movie Trek, and rewatched STIII and WOK over the past couple of days.

Still good. I'd put them against most modern movies, and they blast past nuTrek at warp speed. (http://my.opera.com/community/graphics/smilies/spock.gif)

Oh god, I really don't want to be that guy, but I liked Cowboys and Aliens. I also enjoyed Prometheus. I didn't go into any of those movies with any type of emotional connections or attachment though.

I re-watched Nemesis today.  I guess because I'm on a STO Romulan tear.  The Romulans, Remans and the ship battle were fun.  Everything else, yeah, still kinda blows.  They tried to give each major character at least something to do, but it was such a dumb film.  No need to go back into all that dross.

Maybe the third movie will go its own way.  It won't turn into a TV show, Quinto and Saldana are fairly big stars.  Chris Pine on the other hand...

Maybe the third movie can take up a serious sci-fi theme instead of phasOrz, like 1 and 5 did.  I mean, those movies are Trek favorites right?

No chance in hell.


TMP is #2 on my list. And there's no chance of them doing something like that again either.

Maybe now that JJ Abrams is going to be busy shitting all over Star Wars we might get a Trek movie with a dash of sci-fi in it. Depends on who writes it.

My guess for the next Trek movie is Klingons, because everybody's heard of Klingons. I fancy they'll do something like rip off Undiscovered Country, except Chang will be named Worf, because more people have heard of Worf than Chang, and he'll want revenge against the Federation and have a really big evil starship.

Stop being an idiot.