Clearly I’m in the minority here, but I liked the first ST reboot. The second one with Benedict Khanberbatch was nonsense and the third was a noisy mess (much as I enjoyed the use of the Beastie Boys), so I can’t say I’m disappointed at the lack of another one (and also we’d be missing poor Anton), but I’d rather rewatch the first reboot than any of the odd number Shatner ST films (or most of the TNG ones, for that matter).
I concur 100%.
I can’t stand the new Star Trek re-boot, but I hate sounding like an old man screaming “get off my lawn!!”
I get that Kirk was a bit of a renegade, but having a college freshman taking over the flagship of Star Fleet and saving the day, etc. was a bit over the top for me. And on and on . . .
I also concur with the Roddenberry comment. He’s a perfect example of a tool who hit a home run once. But what a home run it was.
Mostly agreed. The first reboot movie was a surprisingly good full-throttle sci-fi action movie set in a Star Trek universe. If they’d used it as a jumping off point to make slightly more classically Trek-ish stories, I would have almost no complaints.
The followups were a big turn for the worse.
Agreed. I should have had GQ on the list. It’s definitely about TOS.
Abrams: You’ll never guess who Cumberbatch is going to be in the next Star Trek movie!
Fans: Is he Khan?
Abrams: No, he’s going to be an all new character but you’ll be surprised and delighted to see who he will be.
Fans: Is he Khan?
Abrams: No, he’s going to be a mysterious new character with an interesting backstory and complex loyalties.
Fans see Star Trek Into Darkness.
Fans: Hey, he’s Khan!
Abrams: Ha ha, I fooled you!
And to add what Dale Sams said upthread, they could have made Kirk more of a charming rogue who rises quickly through the ranks by innovative, outside the box solutions to conflicts or have him show some true colors by becoming a hero along the way but instead they made him a smirking a-hole who cheats and messes up everything in his path. Eating an apple at his military hearing was such a weak, shorthanded effort to make him look like a confident rascal, instead it made him look like a smug jerk. Everything is a shortcut, nothing is earned in the new movies. I liked Pine as Kirk though and I think they did a great job with casting but the movies just weren’t very good.
I wouldn’t call him a “tool” at all. After Star Trek, he produced three brilliant pilots that should have been picked up for series but weren’t: Genesis II, Questor, and Specter. The second, from what I’ve heard, was turned down because it was “too much like The Six Million Dollar Man.” I don’t know why the other two were rejected (if anyone has any information on them, feel free to chime in), but I have seen them and they were very good indeed.
Plus, he created and produced The Lieutenant (which admittedly was not a great success but was still a good show) and wrote many free-lance scripts prior to that. One of them, for Have Gun, Will Travel, was award-winning.
Nothing about the “total restart of the franchise…sorta” is necessary except that it exists purely for fan service by making pointless references to the original cast films. There is no real story or consistency even within the “different dimension”, and the writers gleefully embraced lazy tropes (unbelievable coincidences, ad hoc inventions like the interstellar-range transporter) to cope with having painted themselves into a corner due to poor plotting. Abrams tries to cover for the lack of story or decent characterization with zany hijinks, madcap action, and blinding the audience with his favorite technique of inserting lens flares. These are films made for the Fast & Furious crowd (with all the lack of concern about plot or consistency that entails) and it was hardly suprising that Justin Lin was hired to direct the third film.
The only “stroke of brilliance” I’ve seen from Abrams is that he knows that viewers like a mystery, so he came up with his notion of a “mystery box”. Unfortunately, he failed to grasp that the point of a mystery is eventually revealing the secrets behind it, and instead just copes by adding more mystery boxes or producing answers that are wholly inconsistent or illogical, e.g. inserting Khan (played by Benedict Cumberbach as the whitest-beyond-white person to ever bear that surname), and then having his “superblood” revive Kirk from death two minutes after the “See, we took the poignant scene from Wrath of Khan where Spock sacrifices himself in a way that the film carefully built up over its whole length and switched it so Kirk sacrifices himself for no reason…aren’t we just so clever?” The whole underlying theme of The Wrath of Khan was regret and sacrifice, even when making the best decisions, hence why it is important that the antagonist is a character from Kirk’s past.
Abrams and his ‘creative’ team didn’t understand any of that, and just used Khan because it was a memorable villain, even though everything that was really memorable about him came from Ricardo Montalbán’s scenery-chewing performance that matched Shatner’s hammy acting beat for beat. Abrams isn’t just a bad writer/director/producer; he is a creatively lazy one who consistently relies on referencing back to the better work done by predecessors to make his work seem as if it has some thematic depth. Really, he is what Michael Bay would be if Bay believed he were actually creating great art instead of disposable schlock.
Double thumbs up. After I walked out of Abrams’ first Star Trek film, I said, “I liked that movie better when it was called Galaxy Quest and Tim Allen was a better actor in that role than Chris Pine.” Star Trek was never much in terms of science fiction—what “science” was referenced was pure technobabble, and the implications of innovations like the transporter or time travel are never really explored to anhy significant degree—and its appeal was largely predicated on the strength of its characters and their interactions. The writers of Galaxy Quest understood this implicitly, as well as the tropes of the genre of episodic space opera, and turned them on their head for both comedy and pathos. Abrams’ Star Trek movies use the characters purely to drive the plot or for comic relief, and there is zero consistency or believable character development. They are dumb movies that use lens flares and explosions to detract from the fact that they have essentially no real plot or thematic depth.
Stranger
I did note that Abrams is a big fan of the whole “jumping off a high place” thing. Man, is he a fan of that.
I was referring to Roddenberry there, not Abrams. Otherwise, spot on.
No, and no.
The BEST episode of Star Trek was Forbidden Planet, and the second best was Captain Horatio Hornblower.
Then Wrath of Khan!
Yes, exactly. I can’t fathom how he keeps getting away with just putting references to the original content into a blender, and then dialing up the oomph-factor. I mean, the guy is basically the standard model: he just remakes the originals with stuff packing a bigger punch that nobody really can see any need for.
I seriously, honestly can’t understand how the 2009 reboot has a 94% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Something about all the lens flare must be messing with critics’ minds.
I tried watching one of the new movies and felt nauseas after about 20 minutes. Had to turn it right off.
Because of what I’ve heard, I will never watch the Abrams movies. And I know I’m not missing anything.
But I have the collectible Burger King glasses. 
Which reminded me of one more thing which pissed me off. We didn’t see the real Kirk win the Kobayashi Maru scenario, but I definitely got the impression that he made it look real which forced the instructors to try to figure out how to do it. I also didn’t get the impression you could retake the test. The Pine Kirk was smirking during the whole thing and practically shouting out his cheating. Abrams, as usually, missed the point.
Strike one in the movie reboot was when they had the shipyards on Earth, rather than in orbit. WTF?
Strike two was when I saw, in the trailer for the second one, the Enterprise under water! Double WTF??
I pretty much gave up on the reboots after that.
He not only missed the point, he flew past it at transwarp speeds. The entire point of the Kobayashi Maru exercise is that it is a test of character, e.g. how do you handle a hopeless situation. By reprogramming the test, as described in Wrath of Khan, Kirk avoided having to face the “no-win scenario”, and in typical fashion outwits Khan by guile (pretending the Enterprise to be in much worse condition than it actually was on an open channel monitored by Khan), only to then have to face the death of Spock, which for him (and the fans who revered that relationship) was the ultimate no-win scenario, which also parlays into the general theme of the film of loss and mortality, as symbolized by the reading glasses gifted to Kirk early in the film, which were broken during the battle. It is deft screenwriting that manages to deal with the readily apparent aging of the cast, undercuts the myth of Kirk as an invulnerable hero and paragon of virtue, and gives weight to the death of a major character in a way that few films can manage.
Abrams treated the test as a “fill in the gaps” fan service moment, relying on knowledge of the original Wrath of Khan for any impact, and Kirk as a smirking, apple-chewing asshat has no real character to play; he’s just a guy who is promoted from cadet to captain in less time than it takes to eat a hot meal. It is the weakest kind of writing and plotting that just skips from scene to scene making the characters do and say whatever just to drive action sequences and the thin excuse for a plot.
Stranger
“Undiscovered Country” is a terrible movie. People remember it fondly because it was better than the dismal Final Frontier, but it’s a 3/10 at best. It’s cheap, uneven, has jokes at all the wrong times, just brutal.
I am, a Star Trek fan, but to be honest, I think there have been a total of two good Star Trek movies; Wrath of Khan and Voyage Home. That’s it. Everyone likes Undiscovered Country and First Contact, and I think they both suck, which is a shame because they at least have some good moments.
I’d rank the first Abrams Star Trek about there, too; it legitimately has some great moments, and in a nice change of pace it doesn’t look cheap as hell, like a lot of ST movies. But there’s too much silliness, and the subsequent films generally made no sense at all.
+(Graham’s Number)
Excellent points from all, especially Stranger On A Train. I’d emphasis that Abrams just seems to Not-Understand-The-Source-Material. He sees Kirk has done clever things and has a certain place in Star Fleet lore, but he doesn’t understand why. He sees Jedi Knights have a certain panache and use light saber fights as a last resource (also with a certain style), but doesn’t understand why.
Thus the end result of any of his inherited franchise productions is an exhibition of not knowing how. It’s only with a thin veneer of competence and a touch of respect for the source material that separates him from Michael Bay. OK, maybe that last bit was too harsh.
I saw Star Trek Into the Darkness. It wasn’t the worst film I’ve seen, but the original episode “Space Seed” was much better.
guestchaz is correct; you can no longer use the original actors, but Voyager is also correct. There are plenty of holes and follow-ups that can be done. Get new actors and do them
Examples: Someone has discovered The City on the Edge of Forever and is messing with time. Could it be Harcourt Fenton Mudd?
The federation now has the much improved engine from “By Any Other Name.” The Enterprise can now reach sectors of the galaxy previously unattainable with all sorts of opportunities for new scripts.
Bring back Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln from “Assignment Earth,” one of my favorite episodes.
The crew of the Enterprise has to deal with people from their future who want to mess with time.
^ The Wrath of Mudd?