I obviously can’t answer for FordTaurusSHO94, but I can give you my take on it.
Firstly, I was never a big Trek fan. I guess I’ve seen most of the old series episodes, plus all the movies and all the *TNG *eps and that’s it. I like it and am familiar with it but I don’t speak Klingon or anything, it was just a series me and my dad and sometimes my mom liked to watch. Secondly, I loved the movie. It and Iron Man were the most fun I had in a movie theater in ages.
When the movie came out in blu-ray I rented it and watched it again with my parents, mostly so I’d see what they’d think. My father’s reaction was precisely the same as mine: “very fun movie, but that guy is not Kirk and that other guy is not Spock and I’d rather they didn’t call this Star Trek”. The characters are just wrong. Trek had some pretty distinctive and recognizable characters and their representation on the movie just hit all the wrong notes. Kirk is an iconic figure, as is Spock. There’s only so much deviation that can happen before people are bothered.
Trek is all about the captain of the ship and a very few guys from the bridge crew (disclaimer: I did not watch DS9 or Voyager or Enterprise). This core group consistently presents us with some values and principles, of self-restraint, self-control, self-reliance, tolerance, integrity, etc… It makes for comfortable viewing and gives a consistent and recognizable “feel” to Star Trek shows and movies. This captain was unlike any other Trek captain in action, word and gesture and the people that surrounded him were equally off. If I thought of it as “generic sci-fi action flick” all was ok, but as Trek it fails.
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P.S. I agree with the OP’s suggestion of Babylon 5. I would have been happy if they stopped it at the end of the fourth season, but after the fifth one was over to still go on was completely too much. I’ll add X-Men, of which I grew tired sometime in the early nineties (I did read Grant Morrison’s run and it was great, but I didn’t like anything that came after) and also Spider-man. To me the jumping off point was Civil War, but it should have been that whole clone fiasco.
Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt series. I enjoyed them but the last few became tedious to get through. He should have not introduced Dirk Pitt’s son Dirk Pitt jr into the stories. I always to have to wonder who Cusslers is talking about.
I’m not a fanboy, but I do own all the movies, TNG, DS9, ENT and Voyager on DVD (although I can’t for the life of me imagine why I bought voyager… I’ll never watch it again). I’ve watched all the episodes (TNG, DS9 and ENT more than once, probably – at least the ones I liked).
And while I can’t answer for anyone else, I did like the new Star Trek, but it didn’t feel like Trek.
I can live with the updated scenery.
I loved the updated CGI.
I felt at home with the updated cinematography.
I could live with the ‘more action, less diplomacy’ of the new movie (obviously, they couldn’t set up a movie series with diplomacy – that’d’ve flopped).
But Kirk wasn’t Kirk, and Spock wasn’t Spock. Think back to your favorite series… lets say, House.
Now, imagine instead of having Hugh Laurie play House, after watching the characters change and evolve along with their actors, they recast House and put AnnaSophia Robb as Cameron, Zac Efron as Chase, and I can’t think of anyone to play Foreman, House, Cuddy or Wilson – but you get the idea.
So there was this pretty decent show. It was about an escaped super soldier living in a post-apocalyptic(ish) authoritarian America. The incredibly hot heroine battled fiendish gangsters, corrupt politicians, and the evil government operatives who created her with the help of a wheelchair bound underground journalist. It was called Wheels and the Legman.
Ok, it was Dark Angel, and it wasn’t the most brilliant art ever created but it was a good show. Memorable moments include Logan killing a dude with piano wire and a villain so evil that he gave sick veterans in his care sugar pills and sold their medication on the black market.
Which brings us to season 2. Which sucked. The government agency pursuing the hero is replaced with this evil genetic engineering cult. Which is also somehow ancient. The gritty plots were replaced with a monster of the week premise, which included dog boy, and fish girl, and bat kids. Season 1’s message of attempting to deny nihilism in a crap sack world is replaced with a hammy metaphor about racism and inclusiveness. This great because no science fiction or fantasy work had ever tried to do this even a little in the past 45 years.
So basically, I’d had enough Dark Angel by the end of season 1. I’d rather season 2 had never been made. I feel that if it had ended after one season, the show could have had cult classic potential. Instead you can’t mention the show without noting how abysmal the second half of it was.
The new movie is a straight forward action movie. Star Trek has never been about that. Aggression and violence is always used as the very last option. The characters in the movie don’t represent the characters that I grew up with. When I was younger, TNG was on TV. Although I was never a fan of TOS, I enjoyed some of the movies and I liked seeing cameos on TNG, so I was familiar with the characters. The crews on the previous Enterprises quoted Shakespeare and listened to classical music. I can’t see anyone in this movie doing that because it would be “uncool.” The only ones who I could see a connection between the new and old was Bones and maybe Mr. Scott. Some of the product placement bothered me too.
The science in this movie also bugged me. A black hole isn’t supposed to work like a vacuum cleaner. Vulcan takes more than a couple of minutes to get to. How long had they been at warp speed from Vulcan when Kirk was removed from the ship, yet he happened to land on a planet close enough to it that Spock Prime managed to witness its destruction? One drop of Red Matter can destroy a planet, but a beachball sized amount was just placed in the Sol System right beside Saturn and there’s no concern about Earth? It just goes on and on.
If they wanted a more action based movie with a new cast, that would have been fine, but it should have been based after the events of Nemesis and not tried to change characters that were established over 40 years ago.
Jet Li. I would watch (and recommend) a documentary of him folding laundry, he could do no wrong, and I owned every movie he’d done and enthusiastically loaned them at every opportunity.
Then Romeo Must Die came out and I pushed tons of friends into going. He’s awesome! He’s the future!..after the movie…Um, sorry guys, wanna go rewatch Fist of Legend?
It must have been a fluke, surely. Cradle 2 Grave. Arrgh!
I still like Jet, but my fanboyism has evaporated.
Xanth. The first 3 or 4 were really enjoyable. I gave up at 6 or 7, and Anthony’s still writing them (and readers are buying them) after 33 novels (with apparently 2 more in the publication pipeline).
My wife (who is a huge Pirates of the Caribbean fangirl) is now in denial that movies 2 and 3 ever existed. She deeply wishes that they’d never been made, rather than acknowledge the mess that they were, and how badly they changed the Captain Jack Sparrow character.
Yep. It got pretty bad when they started recycling ideas like when Bart got a racehorse or Moe tried reinventing his bar. Enough already.
Maybe now that Conan is out of a job, he can try penning a few episodes.
*Sliders *started out pretty fun, in my opinion. Not great sci-fi (or SyFy) by any stretch of the imagination, but it was still pretty cool.
Then, by season 4, all but one of the original Sliders had been replaced. One was replaced by his own brother, another was kidnapped offscreen and turned into a baby machine, another was… Oh, screw it. It should’ve ended long before any of that happened.
The Bond films were that way until the reboot. vdgg81 said:
Babylon 5 suffered because of the fears of cancellation. Everything that happened in season 5 should have been mixed with season 4. The problem was the show was under threat of cancellation, and JMS rushed to find a way to wrap things up, including the finale movie, and then got announced he was extended for the fifth season. Now he had to flesh out the developments of the year 5 to lead up to the finale. It screwed with the pacing and made things a bit disjointed. Plus, Claudia Christian leaving made another hole in the flow.
I would love to see Babylon 5 as JMS originally envisioned - no Sinclair leaving, no replacing telepaths, no Ivanova disappearing, the pacing running through without the intrusion of the cancellation. Sadly, we get the Babylon 5 that was made, not the Babylon 5 that wasn’t. Todderbob said:
This is a curious question. How much of a character is the character as written vs how much does the actor bring to the role? Can a TV or movie character be replaced with a new actor and be the same? We see this with movie versions of old TV shows and old movies.
The newest one coming up - The A Team, complete with a black man with Mr T’s haircut to play B.A. Baracus. Is that right? We’ll see.
I wasn’t offended by the idea of recreating the characters with new actors. I enjoyed the pacing and fun of the new movie. I was less thrilled with the way characters were tweaked, with holes in the plot, with the science, and with the obsession with overdoing the “fan” stuff. I liked McCoy, Scotty might have been a tad overdone, was fine with Sulu and Ohura (though they certainly felt a bit different), didn’t know what to make of Chekov (primarily because he shouldn’t have been there). Kirk eating the apple in the Kobayashi Maru? Completely unnecessary and wrong. It was done as a fan link to TWoK, but in that movie it was well-wedded to the scene and made sense in context. Inserting it in this movie was a fanwank that detracted from the scene and the movie. Crap like that annoyed me.
It’s still a fun sci-fi movie to watch, but since it butts heads with all of the Trek I’ve grown up with, it bothers me that this is the future of Trek. I think they have everyone signed up for three movies. I hope they return to the prime universe in the third movie.