WTH does that mean?
I wager twenty quatloos on the newcomer!
Um, getting back to the original topic:
I just saw it for the first time (yeah, yeah, well, I was busy TEACHING, damnit! :mad:). Here are my thoughts:
It was very poor.
I am afraid that movie-makers have decided that all you need to do to make a movie watchable any more is throw around a bunch of really awesome looking special effects generated by computers and this will keep everyone riveted. Plots don’t need to be well developed, characters don’t need to be anything but one-dimensional, and script-writing can be back of the napkin stuff because who the hell CARES, if every five minutes something blows up, or implodes, or falls from great heights??
Explain to me why it was necessary to totally reboot the concept? And if you were going to do that, why did it become necessary to do it in a really, really dumb way?
Between this movie and the really pretty poor series that was Enterprise, I’ve decided to simply give up watching these (if there are any more) in the theater. Waste of money.
As I understand it, the Canon Fundamentalists say that if it was not onscreen, it cannot really be said to be canon. Yet that was the authorized novelization of the story.
Oh, yeah, and: Finally saw it.
In the words of neo-Scotty, I liked it, it was exciting. It’s not Art, it’s not about the meaning of life, it’s entertainment and it worked as such. Could it be better? Sure. But it could have been worse. And since it would be a serious risk to try and REALLY recapture the original, we might as well do an alternate interpretation.
BTW, good to know the Nokia brand is expected to survive 160 years into the future 
Talk about your silly product placements.
Of course the insider lines were coming at you a bit too fast and furious. Finally, after so many dire warnings, someone gets beamed inside a piece of machinery; “Fascinating”; “…a doctor, not a physicist”; “all she left me in the divorce were my bones”; “I AM Spock”; “I am NOT our father”.
The look of the E was good overall except IMO for all the *&^%$# pipes (goes as well for the Narada). Yes, it is absurdly capacitous for a spacecraft, but it always was (because you had to fit a camera dolly through the corridor) so that’s consistent. Yes, I’ll buy that the premature encounter with a superiorly asskicking alien force served as a technology driver and probably changed some ideas at SF as to how ships should be built. And now we know Voyager’s secret: 50% of the space inside a Starship is made up of shuttlecraft
In any case I had fun seeing them do their thing and getting into the familiar characters in slightly different manners. Had a ball at the slapstick with McCoy’s endless bag of hypos inducing all sorts of disturbing symptoms on Kirk while smuggling him aboard.
Yeah, but taken to the total extreme – it*** is ***canon, though annoying “say what?” canon at that, that in Starfleet even officers in their most esoteric support staff corps (e.g. Troi) must complete the full command-school training sequence, in order to be promoted.
It neeed not mean McCoy has to get exactly the same curricular program as Kirk – Medical Officers may have a track in which they spend 4 years at Academy to (a) become a fully trained, qualified astronaut, 'cause even Redshirt Cupcake has to be a fully trained astronaut (in these classes he coincides) and (b) do an entire whole new doctoral course in Xenomedicine (in these he doesn’t). So we are back to the TOS Roddenberry line where every crewman, even enlistees right off the street and jamokes like Redshirt Cupcake, start as Academy-graduate OC’s.
However as we see from the new Mr. Chekov, if you’re a Boy Prodigy you can be holding a regular commission in your teens (so Wesley was NOT an aberration! just an abomination…) Besides in the 22d Century, it may be average for a Starfleet officer to complete the equivalent of a half dozen full doctorates in his/her career time.
Though we also see that this Starfleet’s Personnel Regs make Substantive/Relative Rank just some sort of formality, and everything actually works on the basis of Operational Rank, that you get not by passing tests or completing courses or time in service or eval interviews, but by proving you are awesome… but I suppose one can’t resent a provision that says: Save The Whole World = instant Captain with your own ship. (The way I like to think of it, Cadet 1st. Class Kirk is frocked to Captain, 'cause it’s the title attached to the job he proved awesome at: it’ll take awhile for the Permanent Rank to catch up). Neat also that the Captain in this age can appoint the First Officer at will.
All of which… I suppose … is something to do when your fleet regularly gets whomped, your battle line(*) torn apart and your service ranks badly decimated two or three times per decade and need to quickly rebuild. It gets a certain odd mix of flavors that way: there are professionals like Pike and Uhura, but McCoy seems to join as almost a Foreign-Legion thing, Kirk does an “I got nowhere else to go” thing and Spock does it to tell the Vulcan Council to go get crammed. They obviously can evaluate mental and physical aptitude so precisely that age and experience are of little concern for joining.
(* Oh… and AGAIN, the Rest of the Fleet is uselessly somewhere else where they can’t make it back in time… )
Lessee, what else…
[ul]
[li]Somewhere, in another alternate reality, Christine Chapel is strangling Lt. Uhura. Um… Spock, would you and Nyota like to have this transporter room to yourselves? We can go use the other one, really… :o " I wanted to avoid the appearance of favoritism… right; now you’re on the Enterprise." In any case, realizing Spock stole the score even before Kirk started the game, shows he’s awesome, too :D[/li]
[li]Oh, and Gratuituous Zoe Saldaña Strip = Good. Very good. Give whoever had the idea a medal. I will countenance no refutation. Lame scene with Orion girl? Yes, very lame and bad makeup, but it leads to Zoe Saldaña strip. Forgiveness and mercy are in order 
[/li]
[li]OK, so we got a ship full of the Romulan version of postapocalyptic style. Good riddance to browridges, though it’s odd to see them go skinhead. Trenchcoats, klingonlike bladed weapons, tribal tattoos yet to grow on me. [/li]
No offense to Eric Bana but I kept expecting the Ricardo Montalbán accent to issue from the Narada’s communications… just sayin’ , y’ know…
In a way Nero DID do good for his own homeworld anyway. Now that we KNOW that there will be a superduperultragiga"nova" (more like a sdugGRB, if you ask me) 125 years from “now” that’ll wipe out half the galaxy if let go unattended, everyone can probably pre-empt the disaster. And God knows what THAT will cause…
[li]OK, so who was surprised that the head of the Vulcan Academy Council was a bigoted asshat? Anyone? Bueller? *Enterprise *did a lot to lay the groundwork on the Vulcans’ pervasive superiority issue. [/li]And what were they doing in that cave?
[li] “If their ship’s laid out sensibly I should be beaming you into an empty cargo hold”… all right how many people here knew the moment that was said, that they’d end up in the middle of the main deck? (and why do Bad Guys hate railings?)[/li]
BTW Nero obviously subscribes to the outdated edition of the Evil Overlord procedure manual, leaving their most valuable resource totally unprotected and free to fly off.
[li] OK, Federation Health Department: Priority One a galactic survey of all Mind-Controlling Parasite life-forms, for their total erradication.[/li]
[li]Alright… Oy …* Red Matter*… Og help us :mad: So, it’s something that if you implode it, it creates an instant singularity large and persistent enough to swallow a whole planet:confused: aaargh… Brain… tryingto… Escape. Head. :rolleyes: This makes the remodulated tachyons through the deflector array look like solid Golden Age hard SF… [/li][/ul]
To me, the product placements for Nokia and Budweiser were distracting but not as egregious as the conversation about Slusho (a fictional soft drink which J.J. Abrams amuses himself by working into his various projects). It’s a silly conceit to begin with, and inserting it into the Star Trek universe made as much sense as Mel Brooks directing the next Bond and having 007 insist that M use the cone of silence. Except that would actually be funny.
All legal Trek merchandise is authorized, and that includes probably close to a thousand oftentimes wildly conflicting novels by this point. They can’t all be canon, hence Roddenberry’s proclamation that only the filmed stuff is canon.
I’ll never understand why people think Enterprise was the first Trek to show Vulcans to be bigoted speciests when Spock always gave just as good as McCoy, and Deep Space Nine even acknowledged it in Take Me Out to the Holosuite when an entire ship of Vulcans agree to play a baseball game to help their captain try to humiliate Sisko.
They’d be leaning on them all day.
As for Scotty and barfights, just don’t call the Enterprise a garbage scow in his presence or there will be… tribble.
You can, however, insult Kirk all you want and Scotty won’t mind.
Dang it, McCoydidn’t attend the academy. The University of Mississippi and Medical school.
He presumably got his medical undergraduate degree there. Perhaps Starfleet Academy offers graduate degrees.
I have no idea how realistic this is, but a lot about Starfleet is unrealistic.
That’s what I said: noncanonical, but still authorized. Suggestive, not determinative.
Because it was the one where they repeatedly and openly rubbed it in – not just the normally thinly veiled xenophobia but also the superiority complex, the feeling that they should get away with what others don’t (spy site at “shrine”) and the urge to put others in their place – not just individuals, a-la McCoy or Sisko, but entire peoples.
Unlike TNG/DS9 Klingons, Vulcans had not been that deeply elaborated as a culture, it was always an individual representative (Spock or Tuvok) so it was hard to really nail them down. With the TOS Vulcans we got the advantage of having the Spock character establish for us that they were NOT really superior, merely more in control, and HE knew it; but we never saw much of the Vulcan-on-the-street who may be less sympathetic. It was part of the story that young Spock had faced prejudice because of his origins, but it was only once mentioned seriously at length, and by the time we meet him he has already grown a thicker skin, so his digs at humans were never really hateful, just kind of cynical ("…the very flower of mankind…" “Nobody’s perfect, Saavik”) and even T’Pau’s objections to “out-worlders” at the ceremony are quickly overcome… Meanwhile even Kirk gets in a sarcastic line about “Must be tough, having bad blood like that”…
TOS would lead to expect that mature Vulcans would hold back on acting out on their prejudices or expressing them for the record, because it’s not logical or beneficial – not to have the Chairman of the Vulcan Academy openly insinuating in public to Spock that he could have been an Affirmative Action pick. But it would have always been an issue, when you thought about it, that a society where “show no emotion” is a core value could use it as an instrument to force everyone to toe the line and just suck what they give you…
DS9’s ballgame was probably the major pre-Enterprise instance in which we see a break with this expectation and the Vulcans failing to keep up to the image as a group. But Enterprise took that notion long lying about and ran with it, showing it to be a pervasive pattern more disturbing than a mere point of pride or personal issue of individual Vulcans.
I thought that was one of the show’s few strengths, myself. I’d’ve been happy if the Tellarite and Andorian characters had been introduced earlier on and we had lots of conflicts among the four races which would (the audience knows) eventually settle down into a cooperative Federation. The Suliban and Xindi things were just wastes of time when there was already ample opportunity for exploration of and dramatic conflict with established races.
He apparently does in THIS timeline… one more thing to change…
Disclaimer: I haven’t read this entire thread.
Blather. Not mandatory reading.
I grew up with the original series and over the course of my life really HATED star trek. Not the show, but the nerdwars that resulted from the dorkwads arguing over every little bit of a fictional world filled with fictional characters. And that was just my brothers. When I discovered there was a whole subculture of Fans who were dorktacular, I wrote off the entire series as being too dweeby, even for me and have never watched any future genus of the series out of pure spite. [/blather]
That said.
I loved the movie.
Every actor nailed the original characters perfectly, giving fresh life to what I always thought were one dimensional characters. Hellova daunting task, if you think about taking on acting an iconic role that is known across the planet. ( Yeah, so is MacBeth, but MacBeth is never on cable or in rerun land.)
The pace was fast and engaging.
My only complaint, and I’ve seen the movie twice now, is that Nero ( the bad guy) was not even remotely scary or twisted or pyschotic in the Usual Bad Guy way. Too me, when he addressed Captain Pike saying, “Hello, Christopher.” I thought he sounded like some surfer dude-smart ass and giggled a little too loud in the theater.
My friend and I like to diagnose various physc. issues with characters.
Spock: Asberger’s.
Kirk: Impulse issues, gigantic balls syndrome, enters into fights he never wins.
McCoy’s: Paranoid.
I will be buying the DVD and wish the series would reboot all the old episodes with this kind of pacing, FX and depth.
I think the “Hello, Christopher!” bit was supposed to be smart-assed. I giggled, too.
He definitely could have been scarier in other parts, though.
I actually really liked that part. After all these years of hearing the bad guys speaking a certain way on the view screen it was jarring but really fun hearing something completely unexpected. They had to have done that on purpose.
Good point. There seems to be a school of Bad Guy Over Acting lately. This was underplayed, but I thought almost flat.
Which would indicate that the timelines diverged before Kirk Sr. bought the farm.
Execution aside, the why is answered by yourself.
The two series preceding it weren’t that great either. The only marketable show and cast were that of TNG and those movies went nowhere fast.
I’m all for another two movies (IIRC) that are supposedly scheduled. Young minds, fresh ideas, I should be tolerant
Okay, I watched it on Imax so I know I missed like 40% of everything, but:
Why is nobody concerned about the Truth Crayfish that was presumably still in Pike when they brought him back to the ship? Or that he’d probably given up the codes while he was captive?
Why did they have to go get him? Couldn’t they just beam him out?
You misspelled “always.” 
I, too, liked Nero’s offhanded greeting of Pike. He actually said, “Hi, Christopher,” didn’t he?
Dr. McCoy met Pike in the transporter room to take him back to Sickbay to extract the Truth Crayfish (nice phrase, BTW) and treat his wounds. His torture, and maybe the Truth Crayfish, left him confined to a wheelchair, at least for now. They didn’t beam him out of the Romulan ship sooner because they wanted to give Kirk and Spock a chance to steal the timeship and the red matter. Once Spock got away, Kirk went right to Pike to free him.