Then perhaps you’d be better off avoiding threads populated by those of us movie-watchers who do like to analyze movies to death and pick apart every scene or dialogue.
Nobody’s making you play with us, you know; we were just hanging out in our Star Trek movie thread having a nice chat about plot holes when you burst in and started gratuitously slinging the angry disdain. You could have just avoided this discussion altogether.
Just got back from seeing it. Add me to one of those who think it was an awful mess.
It feels like the movie was written by taking scenes from better movies and stitching them together with no particular care towards making any of it make sense or present a coherent story. Nearly every dramatic moment in the movie feels like it was lifted from another move - mostly but not all from other Star Trek movies. I can’t think of a single memorable moment that was actually original to this movie. And there was no part of the plot that wasn’t stupid.
But, it was fun and shiny, and the actors turned in decent performances.
I can’t believe I’m defending the mvoie’s logic, but..
… how on earth would Khan know this? Khan has no idea who James Kirk is. Remember, in this timeline there is no “Space Seed.” Kirk is a complete stranger to him, as are everyone else in the crew. He has no idea Kirk disobeyed anyone’s orders until the Vengeance shows up and shit gets real, and he doesn’t know the background of that conflict at all. Khan, in fact, appears to be operating under the assumption that the federation is inherently immoral and unethical; that’s his entire beef with it. They’ve been using him and holding his people hostage. Why would he give Kirk any credit at all for being anything other than a pawn?
Dropping in with a few thoughts:
The movie’s opening night at our base theater here in Japan was last night, place was mostly full (single-screen theater, the really popular movies might play one showing a night for a week, usually they show two different movies each night).
It was in 3D… but I’m kind of cross-eyed (yes, and they give me a gun and let me drive government vehicles and everything), so I can’t really comment on the 3Dosity of it.
I predicted two things about the movie, and was right about one of them: The villain was going to be Khan or a similar enhanced human a la Doctor Bashir. I also predicted (with some dread) that they would use time travel (again), but thankfully they resisted that urge.
Transwarp Beaming and Spock Prime… yeah, those cats were out of the bag, so it would be silly to just ignore it and hope the fans forgot about them. Spock Prime didn’t really give Spock any hard facts, just warned him that Khan was very very dangerous. As for why he didn’t tell Spock to pound sand… I figure he’s still pretty sore at Khan for that time he ambushed his ship, killed his students, and caused his (temporary) death. Even Vulcans can carry a grudge.
That said, I was hoping Spock was calling for the cavalry. If they can’t reach Starfleet, maybe the New Vulcan Defense Fleet could send some help. Alas, no.
The reveal on John Harrison’s real identity was perfect. I was hoping that he’d hold off on being a straight antagonist for the duration of the film from that point. Just a sort of Enemy Mine temporary (and not entirely trusting) alliance with Kirk. I thought it’d make for a keen new dynamic if they’d made it last longer. Let him get the drop on Kirk and make his getaway at the end.
I’d have switched out Carol Marcus with Lt. McGivers for this film. Let Kirk and Khan compete with each other trying to keep her attention.
McCoy performing surgery on a torpedo… I lol’d at that scenario, with his more logical reaction to it than in STVI, plus his constant flirtation with Marcus just to honk off Kirk. While on the topic of Carol Marcus, Jealous!Spock was comedy gold.
This new darker version of the franchise is interesting, with the various ripples from the Narada’s appearance in the 2230’s. Starfleet is more militaristic (though not yet a full-on military), pushing their tech and weapons development a lot harder than in the original timeline (with a little help, it turns out).
The Klingons evidently went and popped Praxis a bit earlier, probably trying to play the same catch-up game that the Federation is (they had something like 40 ships get wiped out off-screen in the previous movie). The Romulans are the only major power we haven’t seen react to the implications of the Narada, but I can’t imagine they’re just quietly sitting idle. I’m predicting they’ll make an appearance by the next film. The fact that the Federation and the Klingon Empire both have taken solid boots to the nuts and the haven’t (that we’ve seen yet) should have some impact on the balance too.
Carol Marcus went from doing terraforming research (with great potential for misuse as weapons) to being an outright weapons researcher. Nice touch.
I think they’re going to have to address the Super Serum Kirk thing in the next film, it’d be a bad habit to start forgetting such things once introduced, especially since they have managed to keep them in mind so far. Also, I’m pretty sure McCoy just created the all-consuming adorable space locusts that the Tribbles were in the original series. Maybe that will be the Casus Belli between the Klingons and the Federation…
I didn’t catch the Vengeance’s name early on, so for a good while after it’s introduction, I just assumed it was the USS Excelsior, right down to Scotty’s sabotage. It was also a cold splash of reality to see what happens when an up-gunned exploration ship, a spacefaring Coast Guard Cutter, if anything, found itself in a battle with a dedicated battleship. Enterprise never had a single chance to fire her guns, and she couldn’t even run away.
Sulu in the Captain’s chair was awesome. “If you test me, you will fail.”
I do agree that the new movies need to forge some new ground and set up some new plotlines, rather than playing with the original ones. Then again, I’ve seen anime series play the reboot game for years now (at my last count, at least three different versions of Tenchi Muyo, not counting spinoffs centering on other characters, for instance. Two alternate versions of Full Metal Alchemist, two or three of Ghost in the Shell, and three or four alternate versions of Starship Troopers, and that didn’t even start as a film franchise until the late 90’s…)
Also, did anyone notice that they employed Mr. Chekov as a Chekhov’s Gun? That couldn’t have been an accident. In any case, his working in Engineering isnt’ quite “right”, but at least his skills in that area were established in the previous film. Chekov is a capable engineer. He’s just no Scotty.
I liked Cumberbatch as the villain, though I kept expecting to see Martin Freeman turn up. Maybe he can play Joachim if Khan turns up in a sequel. Bonus points if he rants about Khan never listening to his advice.
I watched it today. I didn’t think it was bad, and it was easy enough to watch, but it sort of slid right off me. Good films linger in your head after you leave the theater, but this one was completely over for me the moment the lights went up. Indeed, there were chunks of the film where I felt like I was watching a film *about[/] Star Trek, rather than watching a Star Trek film.
The actors, to me, felt more like they were playing characters rather than playing people. Spock was better for this than some of the other characters, but with Kirk especially, I never felt like I was watching James Kirk the person. I felt like I was watching the actor play James Kirk the Star Trek character. It felt very pastiche-y. The female characters were also terrible-- useless and with no personality.
I don’t mind the action, but they completely abused the “tense countdown.” The countdown (“We have to diffuse this bomb in 10 seconds or it’s gonna blow! 9…8…7…”) can be a great way to emphasize tensions. But it can also be a cheap way to try to inject tension into a plot element that you haven’t bothered to build actual tension into. And when a movie does it over and over and over again, it quickly loses its impact. The whole movie felt like a mishmash of tiny, consquence-free mini-crisises, which are built up and resolved with barely a blip on the viewer’s emotional radar.
I absolutely will continue to tear movies apart. For me, the post-game commentary is one of the primary pleasures of filmgoing. If I need mindless entertainment to get through the hours, I’ll go read Cracked or something. When I watch a movie, I am going to sink my teeth into it. And given that modern blockbusters cost millions of dollars and involve hundreds of people, very few things you see on screen accidents. What you see on screen reflects thousands of decisions, and it’s fun for me to analyze those decisions- what worked, what didn’t, what would I do differently, etc.
Just saw it last night. Loved it!
I’ve seen all the original episodes and the Wrath of Khan, and I still loved it. My kids have seen most of the original episodes, but not WoK, and they loved it, too.
If there was some measurement of (Favorability of New character)/(Original character), Chekov wins in my book. That is, I like the new one much, much better than the original. Of the crew, Spock is probably the lowest on that list, although I still like the new Spock.
There were some great lines, I had no idea it was going to be Khan (I still thought Gary Mitchell), and I didn’t figure out how they were going to restore Kirk until I saw the tribble again. I really liked the line about enemy of my enemy, and Spock’s retort.
Do they actually show Nurse Chapel in this one or the first one? I remember her as well as Kirk does, I guess. Two cat ladies? Meow. Sign me up.
The fight scene at the end was fantastic. My main complaint for all the reboots is that Kirk keeps losing fights. I guess his father really taught him how to fight in the original timeline.
I walked out of the theater grinning from ear to ear. What a great movie!
Saw it on Saturday. Enjoyed it, but not as much as the first reboot. I think some of the criticism is fair. The Spock emotional reaction to Jim’s “death,” for example, can only elicit the response they wanted from the audience if the writers depend on a few decades of cultural back knowledge. It certainly isn’t organic to the reboot universe and the short period of time, with the strained relationship, that Kirk and Spock had together. It was “poignant” only because we all “know” that Kirk and Spock have a fraternal love by virtue of prior movies and TV episodes having established that in the zeitgeist long ago. So, yeah, it was a bit lazy.
I’d like to see another filmmaker for the next one, someone who has a bit of a nerdish passion about the Star Trek universe. I’m not one who takes that to an extreme–if someone uses the wrong epaulets on the Klingon dress uniform, who cares? (Does the Klingon dress uniform even have epaulets? Do they have a dress uniform?) But I’d like someone who understands Spock, for example, an understanding in our little geekdom that recognizes that it’s important to sacrifice nonstop action and easy plot advances if you have to do so for consistency. It’s important not “just because.” It’s important because it makes moments like Jim’s death real and truly poignant, a satisfying emotional payoff and not a cheat. The plot just has to take better care with the back story and the most basic logical building blocks of the Star Trek universe, not for the fanboys, but because ultimately it’s better storytelling.
That said, I did enjoy it. Good fun, and the plot “misses” weren’t fatal, more like missed opportunities IME.
It looks like you, and everyone else who makes similar complaints, needs to take a look at Moff’s Law.
Holy hell, that was a schizophrenic movie. The actors universally did great work and the action sequences were fun as all get out, but that script… good lord. Someone on Twitter made the comment that it feels like the kind of story lampooned in John Scalzi’s “Redshirts” (in the sense of events being driven by a poorly-written Narrative, rather than in the sense of lots of ensigns dying - although that happens too), and I think that was dead on.
BTW when Kirk told Chekov to “put on a red shirt” I laughed out loud but I am not sure it was supposed to be a joke. Was it?
Enjoyed it but that sort of bit captured what was a bit disconcerting about it:
There were lots of shout out bits that were funny to me because I read them as making good natured fun of source material - Spock’s Khan shout, Kirk behind the glass hands up to Spock’s, the red shirt comment, so on. But I am not sure they were meant to be funny and while I laughed it distracted from being able to buy into the fantasy as reality of the moment since they were not taking themsleves seriously … and the movie was asking to be taken in that way as well, not primarily as self-satire.
So fun, better than expected, but I am hoping they get on to having their own adventures in a five year mission that only obliquely involve things that have now happened because the Enterprise was elsewhere than where it was in TOS.
Oh, yeah. That and the Kahn yell got big laughs.
I liked the movie and thought it was a lot of fun. Enjoyed Cumberbatch’s performance (though I do agree that it’s problematic), and I may end up seeing it again.
Is it weird that I enjoy Chris Pine’s “I’ve just been choked out and now breathing hurts” acting?
I’m pretty sure the Kahn yell was not supposed to be a moment of levity.
Really? I thought it was meant to be funny. How could it not be?
We watched the movie, and one of the things that really impressed us was the excellent use of 3D. We both ducked several times in the movie as things seemed to whizz right off the screen. I thought the 3D was better than Avatar’s, my wife thought it was about as good as Avatar’s.
We both enjoyed the movie, even with its flaws. We groaned at Spock’s “KHAAAAAAN!” My thought in the death scene was “No one wants a sobby Spock!” It was clearly an action movie more than anything else, and “anything else” includes being a Star Trek movie.
But I thought that even as an action movie it was flawed. It was badly paced. It lacked build up between stunts, er, scenes. When you move from stunt to stunt to stunt the audience kidnda gets shell shocked and the stunts lose their effectiveness. Which IMHO happened with this movie. For example, when Kirk was repairing the Warp giant dental instruments, I was thinking “Most exciting mechanical repair scene EVAH!” It’s not because the scene wasn’t well done, it was just getting kinda hard to care at that point.
As for canon, I don’t see why Abrams needs to adhere to canon, but what he DOES have to pay attention to is why people liked the show in the first place. I liked it because, cheesy as it sometimes was (Spock’s Brain, anyone?) it actually was science fiction. It built a consistent future world that you could understand, in which people behaved as you might expect them to, and which operated according to rules that made sense, for whatever value the writers could manage for the word “sense.” (Again, not always much, “Spock’s Brain.”)
I get no sense that Abrams gets this, or cares about it. He just wanted to make an action movie with a lot of lens flare, and he took bits of past movies and stitched them together in a way that generated a lot of action scenes, and to hell with anything else. The ways in which he departed from canon were stupid and did not reflect any understanding of what makes the Star Trek series appealing to fans. THAT’S where he fucked up.
I saw it this past Friday and enjoyed it. I can see some of the plot holes and wince, but mostly I approached it as a summer popcorn movie and just went with it. Perhaps that was easier for me because I actually hadn’t seen the 2009 film nor “Wrath of Khan” nor “Space Seed.” Even though I watched quite a few of the movies and many of the TOS episodes in reruns, I’d managed to miss anything Khan so Cumberbatch didn’t seem out of place to me.
Now I have gone back and watched WoK and SS. Corny! LOL. Khan and his crew looked like some kind of 80’s hair band in WoK. Now I need to rent the 2009 reboot.
I’m just a sucker for the Kirk/Spock friendship, so even when it’s corny or doesn’t make a lot of sense (like Spock being so upset about Kirk dying when they barely know each other), I eat it up.
Really? Spock believes that Kirk is DEAD. That’s not a time to put in a moment of levity. (unless you are a terrible director)
I enjoyed it in a summertime popcorn action movie way. I definitely felt like I got my money’s worth.
Having said that, I felt like it wasn’t so much a “movie” as it was a set of shout-outs. Let’s see, prime directive, tribbles, Christine Chapel, red shirt (to be fair, that one did make me laugh.)
And while I like a little fanservice as much as the next guy, Carol Marcus and her undies struck me as totally gratuitous.
And Spock’s Khan yell got a bigger laugh than Chekov’s red shirt line in the theater where I saw it. That was most definitely a bad sign.
I don’t think that Spock was supposed to be so close to Kirk, so much as he was already on the edge and traumatized by losing his homeworld (and mom!) that he basically couldn’t stand one more loss. Even if it was his pet sehlat. Or Kirk. That was all lampshaded in his explanation to Uhura on Kronos.
I loved the movie, except for the 3D lens-flares, which were distracting. And pretty much the only time I noticed the 3D.
I was annoyed at Uhura turning into a needy girl, and thought that Chekov’s role could have easily been expanded by taking over Carol Marcus’ role.
The only annoying plot hole that brought me out of the moment was the mischaracterization of old Spock. All his talk of “destiny” was highly illogical, and I don’t buy that he’d vow to never reveal all the preventable bad stuff he knows from his history because “destiny”. Let Kirk’s brother get killed on the Deneb colony by whatever those flying sucker-blobs were? Let some other guy’s brain get scooped out to save the world of the postapocalyptic bikini women? Let Earth get eventually steamrolled by Vger, or by the giant cigar looking for whales? This is not the Spock we know.