you bring a dead tribble back to life and you don’t pay that off with a sick bay awash in tribbles? Perfect post credits joke scene guys! geez.
and the end coming down to a footrace and a fistfight? This is Star Trek! Technology people! Reverse some goddamn polarity at least. I felt like they must’ve been tired in the writing room and wanted to go home early…“um, then Spock chases him down and then they have one of those cool multilevel falling flying car fights like every sci-fi movie does nowadays? Sound good? so we’re done right?”
in space seed he only said khan. he was very concerned when mcgivers said she knew who he was. only in an officer’s meeting, after a bit of poking around, did his full name come out.
Saw the film today. I enjoyed it, I thought Benedict Cumberbatch was great. I’ve never seen an original Star Trek movie, only the first JJ Abrams film, so I didn’t have a previous film to compare it to. (Though I was familiar with the whole KHAAAAAAAAN yell.)
Maybe it was because I had not seen “Wrath of Khan”, but I didn’t find there to be any dramatic tension in the Kirk death scene, because *obviously *he’s not really going to be killed. It’s Captain Kirk, and it’s only the 2nd movie. So through that whole scene all I was thinking was “OK, so what are they going to use to revive him? Oh yeah, they had that scene with the tribble and the magic Khan blood, there you go.”
And when Scotty summoned Spock to the door to be with Kirk during his dying moments… Why didn’t he summon McCoy, too? Yeah, yeah, lethal dose of radiation, and yeah, he didn’t know about the magic Khan blood, but surely he’d realize that a doctor could at least attempt something or another. And even if he was absolutely certain that McCoy couldn’t save him, heck, Bones is Kirk’s friend, too.
A gallizon dollar budget and the best story they could come up with is to copy a 30 year old movie which was cribbed from a 45 year old TV episode?
And since they didn’t have to get creative, you would think they wouldn’t leave plot holes you could fly a star ship through. Sideways.
Let’s see just off the top of my head:
Scotty quit? NEVER!
the bad guys ship clips Alcatraz, smacks into the bay and levels half the skyscrapers in SF, yet it survived intact enough (and Kahn lived!) for the bad guy to jump off? They must build star ship out of the stuff they make the black boxes for airliners out of.
Why did they need Kahn? They had 72 other blood donors on ice (yeah I read the bit up thread, but since it wasn’t in the movie, it’s a plot hole)
One blast of the phaser was enough to put Kahn down on the bridge of the star ship, but in the final fight, he took blast after blast with no effect.
Speaking of which if you ware going to send Spock reinforcements Do you send A) A couple of big hulking security types armed to the teeth, or B)the leggy communications officer?
so one of the final scenes showed Kahn on ice. 72 capsules, 72 crewmen + Kahn, umm guys you are short one capsule.
They build them out of duranium. It’s a warship, so it’ll have armour designed to take energy weapons and anti-matter. Scyscrapers are designed for earthquakes and wind. In the event of a collision, the warship wins.
They had one of those tossed out of his tube to make way for Kirk, so it’s not like they just forgot about them.
He was faking on the bridge.
JJ probably can’t count. Hence why this film had Star Trek III tacked on the end.
after spock knocked him out, they just put him in a drug induced coma, and found his tube. once kirk was out of the borrowed tube, you pop the crewman back.
Here is one thing that really bugged me: those Starfleet officer hats/caps. I don’t recall ever seeing any officers wearing hats before. Maybe that is because most of the big meetings are inside.
At any rate, those hats were jarring. I’m sure head gear trends would’ve advanced beyond mid-20th c by that point.
As a long time Trek fan, I really enjoyed it. Even though, while I was pretty much unspoiled, I saw the plot twists coming a long way away. As soon as I saw Peter Weller leading the meeting of all the starship captains I said “Okay, that’s Peter Weller so he’s the bad guy.” I also knew that Khan’s magic blood would be bringing someone back from the dead, although I thought maybe it would be Pike.
Still I liked the way the plot was very different from ST:TWOK yet carried a lot of echoes from the other timeline. I had no trouble with Khan’s characterization, but I do think he should have been cast differently.
The only part I didn’t really care for was the Spock/Khan fight on the hovercrafts and the thread-the-needle Kirk/Khan space shot (although Scotty was amusing). I’d rather see them resolve their problems with more science and less superhuman acrobatics.
Why? Star Trek is set only a couple of hundred years into the future. The basic hat design of a crown and brim has remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years, and that particular style of peaked cap has been in use since the early 18th century.
In comparison to all other ST films, I’m just confused.
I hate the Spock Prime device. Run into script troubles? Great! Just recall Spock – how does one make a phone call to one’s future self anyway? It’s lazy writing.
My main trouble with the JJ Abrams reboots is this: There are enough references to previous ST iterations so it seems like these movies are related, but they aren’t. There’s too many instances where the plot completely destroys previously established canon. It’s annoying. In thinking about The Undiscovered Country: That was a completely different San Francisco than the one depicted in this movie.
So, where in the overall timeline are these two reboot films supposed to take place? It appears to me these films are showing us the background of everything that happened in the original TV series, the original movies, and then the subsequent TV series. Abrams just picks and chooses plot points and reworks them so they don’t make any sense in the grand scheme of things. I can’t figure out if it’s all supposed to work together or if the Abrams movies should stand alone as completely different series. It seems like there’s one foot in both camps, which make the movies a mess to try to sort out. Taken alone, these are decent space cowboy movies. Taken with all the other movies and TV series, it’s a jumbled mess of lazy writing. They’re just Lost, only in space.
Also, JJ Abrams should not be allowed to use time travel as a plot device. It’s just lazy, uncreative, and getting to be a really boring cliche.
IMO, that’s the brilliance of the re-boot. Because they changed the timeline in the opening minutes of the first movie, everything we’ve seen in both movies takes place in an alternate Star Trek universe. So many things are the same, but they don’t have to worry about breaking continuity with the original show or movies. So in terms of stardates, these movies take place before the Enterprise’s first five-year mission. But because it’s a different timeline, it’s okay that they’ve already encountered Khan or that Pike is dead and won’t be going to Talos IV.
There was no time travel in this movie. The closest thing was the conversation with Old Spock, and I agree that scene was unnecessary.
I don’t find the alternate timeline reboot brilliant. It’s confusing and destroys continuity. “Not having to worry about” continuity, in my mind, equals “too lazy to research.”
The alternative is to meticulously repeat ST:TOS canon. Even if they avoided the episodes and concentrated on some of the novels and other unfilmed stories, that’s so constricted I can’t imagine the movies being interesting.
Most efforts that play slavishly to the fanboys are failures, except to the fanboys, who never make up a profitable audience. And then complain that the piping on Kirk’s shirt was braided instead of woven k’har’gu’fuggit’n’eeway style, as everyone knows it should have been.
The TOS universe is right where it was left. This is new. This is interesting.
I think it prevents them from being confined to continuity, so they can try new things and surprise us. It allows more storytelling freedom. Laziness would be telling us a story of the Enterprise crew that we already know.
The problem is using “alternate continuity” as an excuse for things that don’t make any damn sense (e.g. cadet-to-captain-just-add-watertube-ride in the first movie, a bit of stupidity that was actually spotlighted in this movie by having this version of Kirk show us again that Starfleet shouldn’t be entrusting him with command of anything more critical that the headquarters snack bar).