Amen! I never thought the original Uhura worked as a sex symbol, and TOS always stumbled when it tried to use her as one. This Uhura, however - ye gods!
They did something I objected to in Star Trek: Enterprise when Manny Coto (sp) wrote it; Fan Fic. Including unnecessary references and quotes to impress the reader. “Golly, he knows about Star Trek like I do! He must be good!”
The more I think about it, the more this thing fellates with greater alacrity.
In fact, it’s even worse - the crew could have gone home, shown the Romulan government sensor records of the disaster that destroyed their planet, and sparked a crash program to save the world.
I liked this movie quite a bit - it was fun, and pretty. But my god, it was dumber than a sack of bricks.
Indeed, you are correct. Thank you for so politely pointing out my error. Can we be friends on My Space or something? 
I suppose I could change my question to “What beam could be strong enough to get to the core of a planet?” but I recall from TOS that Enterprise could destroy a planet.
Oh, wait, TOS didn’t happen.
I just looked her up on IMDB (Zoe Saldana), and apparently she played the witch in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Man, she cleans up NICE. I think she’d have to be a hell of a distraction for the guys on the bridge of the Enterprise, especially if she’s going to wear those short little skirts and boots.
I disagree. These are not insignificant technical details, they are mistakes about extremely simple natural phenomena that have been made central to the plot. I don’t have a problem with sci-fi shows inventing technology that probably wouldn’t work, or having everyone speak english instead of using subtitles all the time. But when your entire plot revolves around a supernova doing something that supernovas do not do, when you could just as easily substitute a deliberately constructed doomsday device for the supernova, or decide it’s only going to destroy one or two politically vital systems instead of the entire galaxy, it’s just lazy.
He reminds me of the fangirls who think that “It’s fan FICTION” is an excuse to write absolute crap. This is not a good thing.
Supernova thing should have been a gamma ray burst of stars near Romulus and an accident on Romulus upon return from successfully absorbing it the black hole destroys Romulus.
Red matter? How about Red Paint? And why create so much of it and then not use most of it? Maybe in a small enough point it does time travel, but once it eats half a planet the tidal forces kill everything first before they get sent randomly in time, only a small black hole will send stuff through time coherently.
They could have explained that a small black hole dropped at the surface of a planet
Drill creates interference? Please. How about electronics jamming?
Putting Kirk off on a planet is a stroke of genius. Spock is already convinced that Kirk is a lot smarter than he is and will definitely get out of a brig.
Why did Pike make Kirk first officer? Because all of the crew were rookies and Pike really liked the cheating at the Kobiashi Maru test and just plain disagreed with everyone else about busting him.
Uhura and Spock was just logical. Any woman that beautiful would get me to abandon logic on a daily basis.
The long range transport to a warping ship was just bullshit. They could have just commandeered a runabout that was kept at the station and Scotty could have had another motivation for not using it.
I’ll chalk up Nero dumping Spock on the same ice rock Spock dumped Kirk on as an unavoidable byproduct of the timelines quantumly converging.
While this was an enjoyable movie from a pretty pictures and acting perspective (and hot Uhura), the writing was really lazy and non-sensical. Nothing I could not have fixed and made better in three days of writing.
A fun movie. I liked it, and give it four out of five stars in my own personal ranking scale, but I understand and agree with most of what Half Wit and Skald are saying. The movie’s pretty ridiculous when you look at it with any kind of critical eye, and the implausibility of Kirk being the captain of the flagship of an interstellar fleet three years after he was convinced to enlist is just absolutely unbelievable.
Also, what the fuck was with The Beastie Boys in the 23rd Century? I literally exclaimed “What the hell?!” when *Sabotage *started playing.
The antique car was tuned into a 23rd century Moldy Oldies station? 
It was a fun popcorn movie with very pretty scenery (most of it walking about in Starfleet uniforms), some nice callbacks to the source material, and it treated the TOS characters with more respect than about half of the previous movies. Not anywhere near my Top Ten, but not sorry I spent money to see it. I’ll get the DVD and happily go see a sequel.
Zoe was Anamaria, the awesome pirate lady (“You stole my boat!”), not Tia Dalma the witch- that was Naomie Harris, who also cleans up nice.
Speaking of the skirts, were they shorter in the film than in the original series? It seemed so, but I haven’t watched my TOS since I was a kid so I’m not sure.
Fanwaking Engage!
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[li]The whole supernova thing: nobody ever cares to explain why it would threaten the whole galaxy, it’s one of many nonsensical things that are just taken for granted.[/li][/quote]
The star is heavy with dilithium, the neutrino pulse would propagate at warp 7.
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[li]Cancelling it out with a black hole? Even Doctor Who only played that one for laughs…[/li][/quote]
I’m pretty sure a black hole would work.
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[li]Plus, as I can’t stop myself from pointing out, it’s really just Romulans wanting to one up the Klingons and their exploding moon.[/li][/quote]
No fanwanking necessary.
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[li]Red matter, schmed matter, but why were the black holes so YMMV in their effects? You get either total annihilation, or time travel, whatever the plot needs.[/li][/quote]
If you accept Star Trek physics which is utterly wrong in pretty much every way, you have no business having a problem with red matter.
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[li]The planetary drill creates some interference field, again for what seems totally plot related reasons. Eh, I actually don’t even care about that one.[/li][/quote]
It wasn’t a war vessel, so no reason to have jammers or transporter disrupters. However, communications and transporters are routinely disrupted in the Star Trek universe.
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[li]The scene from the trailer with young Kirk racing the oldtimer is symptomatic for the movie – it’s never explained why it happens, if he’s running from something or whatever, it just happens because it looks badass and shows that Kirk’s a hotshot.[/li][/quote]
He hates his stepfather. What is difficult to understand?
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[li]Nobody’s actions are ever motivated in any way. Why should Spock throw Kirk out on some remote planet? Just to be a dick? Is he going to grow a goatee next, because this film’s events actually lead to the creation of the mirror universe?[/li][/quote]
He wasn’t supposed to be on that ship anyway and had already tried to escape. Delta Vega was in the same system as Vulcan (Spock could see Vulcan’s destruction from the surface), and there was a federation outpost on the planet.
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[li]For that matter, why did Pike make Kirk first officer? Yeah, he’s ‘read his files’, but nevertheless, somebody’s gonna feel a bit cheated out of his promotion… Furthermore, Kirk hadn’t even formally concluded his training yet, was actually suspended, and basically illegally on board.[/li][/quote]
Because he believed in him, because his father saved them.
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[li]And why’d he then send the guy he’d just made first officer on some ridiculously ill-conceived suicide mission (that ended up having zero effect, too)?[/li][/quote]
He didn’t know it would have zero effect at the time. And that was actually an awesome plan.
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[li]How, then, was he able to assume command just like that after getting Spock to freak out? He’d just been thrown over board for mutiny, then entered the ship, illegally, for the second time, to pick a fight with the captain! And like one other person even knew he’d been made first officer by offhand comment of the captain.[/li][/quote]
I assume they had all been informed.
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[li]No relationships were actually established. Kirk and Spock just get together because the elder Spock says so, the Uhura/Spock thingy is ‘established’ when she sticks her tongue down his throat (throwaway line about favouritism notwithstanding).[/li][/quote]
I don’t know what you’re actually complaining about here. Kirk/McCoy/Spock’s relationships seemed to be established pretty well to me.
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[li]Generally, promotions seem to be earned when a superior officer dies. [/li][/quote]
When? Pike survived.
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[li]What sense does it make to man your ultra-new flagship entirely with rookies who have barely completed basic training?[/li][/quote]
The whole fleet was away and the Enterprise left before it’s commissioning ceremony. If you have a problem with that, I suspect you hate every other Star Trek movie that has the Enterprise (or random stolen Klingon bird of prey) be the “only ship in the quadrant” available to save the day.
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[li]The transwarp transporter, again ‘invented’ because the writers couldn’t think of any way to get Kirk off the planet he had no reason for being in the first place, pretty much makes all starship travel obsolete, seeing how it can cross interstellar distances instantaneously.[/li][/quote]
Older Spock did it. Presumably ships of the future run with transporter screens or low power shields to prevent that. In the movie timeline there would be no need. As for rendering starship travel obsolete, perhaps it uses ungodly amounts of energy, has limited range, and becomes orders of magnitude less efficient as the mass goes up.
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[li]So, Kirk lands on some remote planet, where he’s coincidentally rescued by Spock, coincidentally similarly jettisoned there by Nero (for similarly good reasons), where they coincidentally stumble, in some backwater outpost, over none other than Scotty? I’m surprised Spock didn’t drop dead from a burst blood vessel trying to calculate the odds of that. raises eyebrow[/li][/quote]
The planet is in Vulcan’s system. It was clearly visible from Vulcan… in fact it might be a moon. As for Scotty being there. Must be fate. Or Q. 
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[li]You can’t escape the gravitational pull of a black hole going at max warp speed, but creating a big ass explosion behind you will do the trick? I don’t know if they were trying to subvert fan’s expectations, but couldn’t they have Scotty come up with something at least marginally more believable/clever?[/li][/quote]
Technobabble. The physics is all made up anyway. Assume that the uncontrolled gamma rays from the anti-matter explosion did something neat with the subspace dowhatsis… they make shit up like that all the time.
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[li]Almost forgot: Vulcan bullies?[/li][/quote]
That’s canon from TOS.
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However, there were good bits, too:
[li]The fanservice. Having Kirk attempt to bone a green skinned alien girl? Killing the redshirt (though merely by his own stupidity, not as a means to show the severity of the danger)? Our plan has 4.3% chance of succeeding? All ace, and there’s more I’m forgetting.[/li][li]The designs, both of creatures and ships. Except for the Romulan one, which just was a horribly confused mess of scary spiky things and other stuff. [/li][li]The acting, for the most part; nothing spectacular, but generally solid. The guy who played McCoy I thought really nailed the characters mannerisms. I was a bit surprised that I didn’t like Simon Pegg as Scotty, but the whole character just seemed a parody of himself, and not a very good one. But maybe that was due to the synchronisation. [/li][li]There also were some genuinely funny moments, and some that really showed heart, particularly where Spock breaks through emotionally. [/li]li Spock definitely was the most well done character, for the first time actually acknowledging his split heritage, even building upon it. Plus, I never thought ‘live long and prosper’ could sound so much like ‘fuck you’ as when he rejected the offer of the Vulcan science council. [/li][/quote]
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[li]Space fights looked awesome, and particularly the space jump was thrilling (ridiculous as it was in and of itself; I’ll just assume they had some magical gizmo negating re-entry heat).[/list][/li][/quote]
They weren’t moving relative to the ground. The drill was in a stationary orbit. You can drop from space in that case and not be subjected to re-entry heat. Our ships today feel re-entry heat because they are bleeding off 17,000 mph of speed. If you just dropped from a platform (like a shuttle not moving in relationship to the surface of the earth) you would fall without a fireball.
I have fanwanked you into oblivion. Is there no one else?* Is there no one else?*
See, I noticed that too, but it kind of amused me:
“Wait, hang on, he’s *Captain *Kirk now? Captain?! Of an actual star ship? Of the Enterprise, are you kidding me?! He was a cadet five minutes ago! On suspension! Now he’s Captain?!! Ok, who’s he sleeping with?”
Speaking of which, I never got the Shatner Kirk as the Ultimate Girl Bait he was supposed to be, but that Kirk?
Purrrr.
This is incorrect. If two points are rotating around a third at the same angular velocity (like a point on the surface and a satellite in geo-synchronous orbit), the difference between their velocities will be equal to the difference in the two points’ heights (in metres) multiplied by their angular velocity (in radians per second). This is because even though they take the same amount of time to complete one revolution, the path taken by the point in orbit is longer than the path taken by the point on the surface.
Last night *The Terminal *with Tom Hanks was on TV – that’s the one about the guy stuck at the airport directed by Spielberg. A really mediocre film. But interestingly enough it features a lovely Ms Saldana as an immigration officer obsessed with Star Trek. 
That’s true. But it isn’t enough to cause a plasma fireball when re-entering the atmosphere is it? I mean guys have skydived from balloons at the edge of the atmosphere, right?
Along with some of the other plot holes already mentioned, here are the ones that took me out of the movie:
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Why would Spock be piloting the “red matter” ship? Spock is one of the most well known and respected beings in the galaxy. Someone of his stature and his age would not be the pilot on a mission like this. It would be the equivalent of Colin Powell going on a commando raid in Iraq.
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What exactly is Nero mad at Spock for? Spock didn’t CAUSE the supernova. He was just a little late at getting there to contain it. If your wife is in a car wreck and dies because the ambulance got there a minute late, how would going back in time and doing something really bad to the ambulance driver help? If you could go back in time, wouldn’t you do something to keep her from being in the crash in the first place?
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Why destroy Earth? Nero seems to think that destroying other Federation planets will prevent the destruction of Romulus. How would that work, exactly?
I think Nero thought Spock was the reason for the supernova, or else it wouldn’t make sense to wait around and kill him. Because if Nero knew it was the supernova then he’d have plenty of time to evacuate the planet.
I was full of plot holes the size of a galaxy but it was kinda fun so I got over it. The MOST fun with the film over time will be the LOTR style pissing and moaning by TOS fundies who don’t cotton the retcons of their fictional universe. The spectacle of them peeing and pooping themselves in impotent fury is more entertaining than anything else.
Does anyone know if the sequel has the same writers?
You meet the nicest folks on the 'Dope.