Fun fact: Jaylah was named after Jennifer Lawrence.
For some stupid reason, I just thought of something.
Now I’ve never been the best at following complicated TV shows/film series - especially if I wasn’t really interested in them. I’ve always been surprised at folk who were able to quote chapter and verse of TV series and such. I’ve never gotten into repeated viewings, supplemental reading, etc. But at least while I was watching them, I had no problem keeping track of what was going on in Buffy/Angel, James Bond, Star Wars (1st 3)… But with the majority of film/TV, I tend to consume it pretty superficially. It doesn’t stick with me over time, building up a persistent history/arc/etc.
I think the frenetic filming of so many modern movies (Transformers, Marvel, SW/ST reboots) exacerbates this tendency of mine. The chases, explosions, and fights are so disorienting and overpowering, that I do not internalize the ongoing underlying themes. I know i saw the 2 previous ST reboots, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing about either of them. But I could tell you a heck of a lot more about TOS, Next Gen, DS9, and even Voyager. Sure, part of it is the diff betw a weekly series over years and movies at lengthy intervals. But I was able to follow and retain older action films/franchises like DieHard/Terminator/Predator/Alien…
Not stating anything earth (or space station) shattering. Just observing something that came to me.
A lot of their leadership got murdered in the second film, though. I could see a desperate organization turning to the guy who has saved the entire federation twice and offering him a spot. It’d be good PR, at least.
Indeed, there are probably quite a few Starfleet officers who got promotions a lot earlier than they would have due to Khan’s boardroom antics.
How many spaceship engagements are going to be resolved by fisticuffs? Does the Space and Naval Warfare Center have an estimate?
Not meaning to spoil an entirely unrelated movie, but we just watched a 2014 movie in which the villain used a swarm of small bots to exact his revenge – and the heroes won by sucking them through a circular portal into space. That made Star Trek Beyond feel surprisingly derivative.
Big Hero 6.
I thought Beyond was just pretty good, but they defeated the bot swarm by discombobulating them with the power of the Beastie Boys. The only thing that got sucked into space was the Macguffin magical weapon, and the big bad.
It’s my impression the macguffin weapon was a swarm of nanobots, like a miniaturized version of the “bees.” And if it wasn’t, thr y didn’t do much to differentiate it.
I thought it was a bioweapon (whatever that means), with magical black dissolving gunk.
Oddly enough they referred to this in the movie, although in the opposite way. Scotty mentions that the old ships were built in space and weren’t as tough as the ones built on the ground (like the Enterprise). He’s not sure if it will survive exiting the atmosphere.
So how do we find out? Drop the ship off a cliff and bounce it off a couple of mountains before flying into space. It might have been an old ship but its plot armor was top notch.
Which IMHO, was the silliest of all of the silly ideas that they came up with. It was still entertaining, especially from the front row.
It’s things like this that really drive home the point to me that the production team isn’t even trying to avoid the stupid and it makes it hard to take the new ST movies very seriously. It’s like the writers have no ideas for plot point resolution other than to serve the rule of cool.
Why are our heroes dropping the ship off a cliff? Rule of cool.
Why is Kirk riding a motorcycle into battle? Rule of cool.
Why is the alien swarm sent into a tizzy by The Beastie Boys? Rule of cool.
And so on and so on…
I was a very big ‘meh’ for me.
I liked a lot of the characterisations, Quinto and Urban were particularly good I thought.
My two big issues:
- Major plot porblems, and
- as with other posters the rule of cool was seriously trotted out to cover a lot of stupid.
A few of specific things that glitched for me;
- Use of transporters and other solutions is forgotten as soon as it’s convenient, as has been said the end sequence would have been a lot less tense if one of those police shuttles showed up, or someone thinks to transport Krall.
- I think Simon Pegg should have been reigned in on the writing front, I think some of the one liners and forced comedy went too far, and he seems to be channelling Shawn of the Dead into Scotty, in making him appear almost incompetent at times, he’s close to simply being comic relief in this movie.
- Magic swarm ships. Just this. How did they ignore Enterprise’s shields? Everything in the Trek universe points to small ships like that being utterly useless against a capital ships shields.
- No life on the planet? This one made me laugh to myself. Spock announces there is nil to very little life on the planets surface, promptly thereafter the Enterprise saucer section crash lands into a fairly extensive forest, and as the characters wander through it, we are regaled with all sorts of animal sounds and calls. Yep no life there at all. :smack:
To be fair, there was a quick throwaway line of technobabble about why the swarm passed through the shields unfazed (something about shield frequencies not working; hint to the antagonist’s origin maybe?). It was easy to miss in the chaotic battle/editing. But that could be another rule of cool thing. The moviemakers wanted a swarm ripping apart the Enterprise, functioning shields would have gotten in the way, so conveniently they don’t work.
I learned many years ago half the futuristic technology available to them won’t be remembered when it would be useful or it will be unusable for … reasons. They can ignore transporters or waste our time while they try it and Chekov says “I can’t get a lock, the gravimetric fields are too unstable!”
Same either way. We know the transporters aren’t going to save the day all the time because that would be boring.
Seems to me if I lived in a place that had a location where I could fly around in a big circle, I’d be doing that all the time because that shit is cool.
I got great joy out of that moment because my best friend started his first car in a somewhat similar manner minus the hitting mountains and launching it into space part. But I can see how it would not have worked for some others, especially bearing in mind the line about how the ship was more fragile because it was built in space. Then again, starships smacking into things constantly seems to be a feature rather than a bug of the Kelvin timeline.
I am much less impressed with the security on Yorktown, which is apparently Greg Grunberg and a few other dudes who move at his speed when responding to a crisis. I know the villain was ex-Starfleet and presumably knew some override codes but a physical barrier such as a lock would have kept him out of the air circulation thing and ended the story right there. Or any of the thousands of security officers on the station could have responded. I was hoping when the Franklin popped up with the enemy ships embedded that all the Starfleet officers who ran outside for a look would be holding phasers and the soaked enemies would be looking down the barrel of way too many guns. But of course one guy gets away and only one guy can chase him.
That bugs me about the movie. They’ve scaled the universe of Trek up but also scaled it down at the same time. It’s a vast universe but there’s only like forty people in it at any given moment.
Greg Grunberg must be reeeeally good friends with Abrams or something. Roles in Star Wars and Star Trek? Friends in high places and all that. I have nothing against the actor or anything, I"m sure he’s a nice person, but he’s starting to show up like a Wilhelm scream.
I kind of like the idea of Abrams dragging prior cast members into all of his productions. I know he’s not involved with Star Wars any more, but it would be funny to have Chris Pine and company playing Storm Troopers or Resistance cannon fodder, while Daisy Ridley and her posse could be a squad of Romulans.
At the same time, just imagine the complaining at the transparent stunt casting.
Thanks, I must have missed that line.
I just got back and I have to say, “I loved it”. I was OK with ST-09, very disappointed with ST:ID, but this was the best since “First Contact” and the most true to the spirit since, what, maybe “Voyage Home”.
From the Escheresque station to the touching tribute to Nimoy there was not a false note in it.