Star Trek
Written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
Directed by J.J. Abrams
Release date: May 8, 2009
Stardate: 2258.42
Captain’s log. The U.S.S. Kelvin is sent to investigate a peculiar spatial phenomenon, and as they approach, a gigantic ship, the Narada, comes through it and immediately fires on the Kelvin and pounds the crap out of it. At the request of the Narada‘s captain, a Romulan named Nero, Captain Robau takes a shuttle to the Narada to discuss surrender terms. Robau leaves Lieutenant George Kirk in command with orders to evacuate the ship if he doesn’t report in fifteen minutes.
Nero asks if Robau recognizes a particular ship or the face of Ambassador Spock. Robau recognizes neither, but it’s not until Robau gives the date that Nero loses his temper and kills him.
The Narada fires on the Kelvin. George is forced to stay on the bridge, as autopilot is non-functional, and he needs to use the Kelvin to protect the shuttles—on one of which is his very pregnant wife Winona, who gives birth to their son while escaping on one of the shuttles. The last thing he hears is his son being born, and they name him James Tiberius after both their fathers.
The Kelvin collides with the Narada, destroying the former and leaving the latter adrift while the shuttles escape.
Jumping ahead a decade or so, we look in on a young Jim Kirk, who has stolen his stepfather’s antique Corvette convertible and driven it over a cliff, barely saving himself, and then is stopped by the police. On Vulcan, a young Spock is tormented by his classmates after his lessons. This is their 35th attempt to elicit an emotional response, and it works this time after they call his mother a human whore, thus proving the universality of “yo mama!” as an effective insult.
Years later, Spock goes before the Vulcan Science Academy to see if he will be accepted, though he has also applied to Starfleet Academy to keep his options open. He is praised for accomplishing so much despite the disadvantage of his human mother, which prompts Spock to metaphorically flip them off and head off to Starfleet, to Sarek’s obvious displeasure.
At a bar in Iowa, Cadet Uhura orders drinks for her friends and is hit on by a drunk Kirk. Her fellow cadets pick a fight with Kirk, calling him a townie, and he gets his ass kicked, until they’re stopped by Captain Pike. Pike kicks the cadets out of the bar, and then he talks to Kirk—he did his dissertation on the Kelvin’s fate, and he admires George’s career. He challenges Kirk to enlist in Starfleet, having seen his aptitude tests (which are off the charts). Kirk evinces no interest, at least at first.
But the next day he gets on the shuttle for new recruits, seated next to McCoy, fresh off his divorce and finding himself with nowhere to go but Starfleet.
Three years later, the Narada arrives at a set of coordinates and a ship flies through another spatial anomaly just like the one the Narada came through twenty-five years earlier, carrying Ambassador Spock.
Kirk tells McCoy he plans to take the Kobayashi Maru test an unprecedented third time, then visits Gaila, a fellow cadet, in her dorm room, until their mad, passionate nookie-nookie is interrupted by Uhura, her roommate. Uhura mentions a Klingon armada that was wiped out at a Klingon prison planet. That’s probably important-ish.
Kirk is able to destroy the Klingon ships menacing the Kobayashi Maru and rescue the latter’s crew, thus beating the simulation, which, we discover, was written by Spock, who’s mildly peeved. Kirk is brought before a review board, where he and Spock have it out with regards to no-win scenarios.
However, they’re interrupted by a distress call from Vulcan. The primary fleet is engaged elsewhere, so cadets are assigned to the ships on Earth, the Enterprise under Pike among them. Spock is Pike’s first officer, and while Uhura is initially assigned to the Farragut, she bullies Spock—her boyfriend—into putting her on Enterprise. (He put her elsewhere to avoid the appearance of favoritism.) Kirk isn’t assigned anywhere due to being on academic suspension, but McCoy gives him symptoms of a virus so he can bring him on board as his patient.
The fleet heads to Vulcan, which is reporting disastrous seismic activity. The Narada is drilling a huge hole in the planet with a particle beam, which also neutralizes communications and transporters. The Enterprise is lagging behind because Sulu—filling in for the ill alpha shift helmsman—forgot to reset the inertial dampeners before going to warp.
Kirk convinces Pike that it’s an attack, not a natural disaster, based on both the Klingon report Uhura translated and what happened to the Kelvin on the day he was born. Spock and Uhura (reluctantly) back him up. Because the dude at communications can’t tell the difference between Romulan and Vulcan, Uhura is assigned to bridge communications, but she doesn’t pick up any transmissions—not from the fleet, either.
They come out of warp into a disaster area, as the wreckage of the rest of the fleet is littering Vulcan’s orbit. Nero holds back from destroying the ship once he realizes it’s Enterprise. He hails them, taunting Spock (to Spock’s abject confusion), and then gives the same terms to Pike that he gave to Robau two-and-a-half decades earlier. Pike agrees to shuttle over, but he assigns Kirk, Sulu, and Chief Engineer Olson to take a shuttle to Vulcan to disable the drill, thus restoring communications and transporters, and then they’ll be able to rescue Pike.
Pike also promotes Kirk to first officer for reasons known only to the voices in his head, and leaves Spock in charge of the ship. They take off in the shuttle, with Kirk, Sulu, and Olson doing a HALO jump to the drill from Pike’s shuttle. Olson waits too long to open his chute and falls off the drill and is vaporized by the particle beam.
Kirk and Sulu land safely (barely), and two Romulans attack. Sulu takes care of both of them with his sword (Kirk just gets his ass kicked). However, the drill has done its job of getting through to Vulcan’s core, at which point Nero tosses a bit of red matter into the big hole. It will create a singularity within Vulcan, destroying it. He also retracts the drill, so Kirk and Sulu are now plummeting to their deaths. Thanks to Chekov’s mad transporter skillz, they’re beamed back. Spock beams to Vulcan to rescue the people (his parents among them) who are in the katric ark, through which transporters and communications cannot penetrate. He is unable to save Amanda, however, who is killed as the planet is destroyed.
Uhura tries to comfort Spock, and they share a kiss in the turbolift.
Nero has imprisoned Pike, and tries to get the subspace codes for Earth’s protective grid. Pike refuses. Nero says that Romulus was destroyed and the Federation did nothing—Spock did nothing. Pike has no idea what he’s talking about since as far as he knows, Romulus is still intact.
Spock orders Sulu to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet. Kirk insists that they pursue Nero before he destroys Earth, which is what he’s on course for. Their argument gets heated, and Spock has security take Kirk away—which he resists, so Spock neck-pinches him and puts him off the ship onto the ice planet of Delta Vega. Kirk heads for the Starfleet outpost on the world, and is almost eaten by a couple of different native animals before he runs into a cave and is saved by Ambassador Spock.
The ambassador mind-melds with Kirk and reveals the whole story: a supernova was endangering the galaxy in the late 24th century. Spock destroyed it by using red matter to create a black hole, but he could not do so before Romulus was destroyed. Nero arrived with the Narada to exact revenge on the ambassador for the death of his family on the homeworld, but both Spock’s ship, the Jellyfish, and Nero’s fell into the black hole and traveled back in time. Nero traveled farther back, and so he had to wait for the Jellyfish to come through 25 years later. Nero took the red matter from Ambassador Spock and used it to destroy Vulcan while the ambassador watched.
Kirk is also devastated to learn that in Ambassador Spock’s timeline, Kirk’s father lived and saw his son take command of the Enterprise.
Ambassador Spock and Kirk proceed to the Starfleet base, where they encounter Scotty and Keenser, who mistake the duo for their relief. Apparently, at some point in the main timeline, Scotty created an equation for transwarp beaming that would allow them all to beam onto the Enterprise even though it’s at warp and far away. Sure.
The ambassador beams Kirk and Scotty to the Enterprise, with poor Keenser left behind. Scotty winds up in a series of water tubes that are present for no reason the script bothers to explain. (Apparently they’re turbines. Because that’s totally how a ship that travels faster than light would work.)
Spock has security bring Kirk and Scotty to the bridge, where Kirk refuses to tell Spock how they beamed aboard. Kirk then taunts Spock for not being emotional enough regarding what happened on Vulcan—mostly to get him to realize that he’s not emotionally fit for duty, something Ambassador Spock told Kirk to do. As with the little kids, it’s mentioning Amanda that sets him off. “Yo mama” really does work!
And since Pike made him first officer, and since he was never formally relieved of duty, Kirk is now in charge. He orders them to pursue the Narada. Chekov devises a method that will allow them to come out of warp near Titan, thus hiding them from Nero’s sensors within Saturn’s rings. Kirk and Spock beam onto the Narada from there—and to Kirk’s shock, Uhura gives Spock a goodbye kiss.
They beam aboard and immediately wind up in a firefight. Spock mind-melds with an unconscious Romulan to get the location of both the red matter and Pike. They board the Jellyfish, which recognizes Spock, making him realize that there’s more going on here than Kirk has let on.
Spock takes off on the Jellyfish, while Kirk continues to search the Narada for Pike. Spock blasts his way out of the Narada and destroys the drill, thus saving Earth. Nero beats the crap out of Kirk, but then stops when he realizes what Spock has done. The Jellyfish goes to warp, and the Narada gives chase. Kirk kills Nero’s lieutenant, then rescues Pike.
The Jellyfish goes on a collision course with the Narada. Nero tries to destroy it, but the Enterprise shows up and takes out their missiles. Scotty beams Kirk, Spock, and Pike aboard. McCoy takes Pike to sickbay while Kirk and Spock offer Nero assistance. Nero refuses, so Kirk has Sulu fire on him, and the ship is destroyed and sucked into the singularity made by the red matter.
The Enterprise is almost sucked in as well, but Scotty ejects the warp core and detonates it, thus enabling them to clear the singularity’s gravitational field.
Much later, on Earth, Spock meets Ambassador Spock, and the latter encourages the former to remain in Starfleet, while the ambassador will help establish the New Vulcan colony.
Kirk is allowed to retain the rank of captain for no compellingly good reason, while Pike is promoted to admiral, and Kirk keeps the Enterprise. Spock signs on as his first officer, and the ship heads off into the wild black yonder.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Red matter is, er, something that can, uh, create singularities. Kinda. I think.
Fascinating. Ambassador Spock tried to save Romulus with an experimental Vulcan ship and red matter, but failed to do so. He also told Kirk that he couldn’t meet his counterpart due to grave consequences to the space-time continuum, but that was just to make sure that Kirk and Spock were able to work together in this timeline as they did in his.
I’m a doctor, not an escalator. McCoy’s nickname’s origin is finally explained, as is why only Kirk uses it. When he first meets Kirk, he says that all he had left after his divorce were his bones.
He’s only part of the medical staff initially, but is made chief medical officer when Dr. Puri is killed by Nero’s initial salvo.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu forgets to take off the parking brake (basically) before they go to warp, which keeps the Enterprise from being destroyed in the first wave of Nero’s attack on Vulcan. He also does a nifty bit of flying to get the ship to come out of warp in Saturn’s rings.
He’s only flying the ship because the alpha shift helmsman has lungworm.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura gets made alpha shift communications officer because the person assigned initially doesn’t know the difference between the Vulcan and Romulan languages. Her field of study is xenolinguistics, and she’s stunned when she discovers that Kirk actually knows what that word means.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty has been exiled to Delta Vega because he attempted to prove his transwarp beaming theory on Admiral Archer’s prize beagle. He’s made chief engineer off camera.
It’s a Russian invention. Chekov is only seventeen, and is described by Pike as a wiz. He comes up with the plan to fly into the solar system and is the one who beams up Kirk and Sulu while they’re falling.
Go put on a red shirt. Olson wears a red shirt and dies because he’s an idiot. The security guards do start a bar fight, but they all seem to survive.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Kirk flirts with many women, most notably Uhura, spending most of the movie trying to find out her first name. (He only learns it when Spock says it out loud.) The only one he actually gets anywhere with is Gaila—who’s probably dead now, since she was assigned to one of the other ships in the fleet.
Spock and Uhura are also an item. As I’ve stated before, the seeds of this relationship can be found in several episodes of the original series, notably “The Man Trap,” “Who Mourns for Adonais?” “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” and most especially “Charlie X.”
Channel open.
“I am Spock.”
“Bullshit.”
–Ambassador Spock identifying himself and Kirk failing his disbelief roll.
Welcome aboard. The preexisting characters are entirely re-cast, with the half-exception of Spock, as Leonard Nimoy came out of retirement to reprise the role of Ambassador Spock. Chris Pine takes over the role of Kirk, with Zachary Quinto as the younger Spock, Karl Urban as McCoy, John Cho as Sulu, Simon Pegg as Scotty, Zoë Saldana as Uhura, Anton Yelchin as Chekov, Bruce Greenwood as Pike, Ben Cross as Sarek, and Winona Ryder as Amanda. All the above save for Cross and Ryder will return in Star Trek Into Darkness.
Eric Bana and Chris Hemsworth, who have respectively played the Hulk and Thor in Marvel movies, play Nero and George Kirk. Jennifer Morrison plays Winona, Faran Tahir plays Robau, and Greg Grunberg (a childhood friend of J.J. Abrams who appears in many of his productions) does the voice of Kirk’s stepfather; Grunberg will return as Commander Finnegan in Star Trek Beyond. Trek veteran W. Morgan Sheppard (“The Schizoid Man,” The Undiscovered Country) has an uncredited role as a member of the Vulcan Science Council.
In what turned out to be her final role, Majel Barrett reprises her longtime vocal portrayal of the Starfleet computers.
Trivial matters: This film takes place in an alternate timeline, possibly one created when Nero’s crew went back in time, or possibly an existing alternate time track that both the Narada and the Jellyfish traveled to when they went through the singularity. While other changes in history made by time travel have been reversed (“The City on the Edge of Forever,” “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” First Contact, “Past Tense“), the episodes “Mirror, Mirror” and “Parallels” established that there are alternate time tracks in which different decisions were made and remain permanent in those timelines.
Ambassador Spock is established as still being involved in Romulan politics in the 24th century, as seen in the “Unification” two-parter and “Face of the Enemy.”
The scenes of Spock being tormented as a child were inspired by similar scenes in the animated episode “Yesteryear.” Spock refusing entry into the Vulcan Science Academy was mentioned in “Journey to Babel.” Kirk cheating to win the Kobayashi Maru test was established in The Wrath of Khan, though it wasn’t until this film that we learned that Spock programmed it (he said only in Wrath that he never took it).
This is the second time first names established in a Vonda McIntyre novel have become official onscreen: it was in Enterprise: The First Adventure that Kirk’s parents were established as having the first names of George and Winona, and they were used regularly in tie-in fiction going forward. The previous time was Sulu’s first name of Hikaru from The Entropy Effect being used in The Undiscovered Country.
In addition, Uhura’s first name of Nyota was established onscreen here, after first being used in William Rotsler’s Star Trek II: Biographies in 1982. It was one of several names suggested for Uhura, though it was the most popular one used in tie-in fiction; others include Penda in several works of fanfic and Samara in the FASA role-playing game.
The movie was novelized by Alan Dean Foster, who also novelized every episode of the animated series back in the 1970s. Foster was specifically requested by Bad Robot to do the job. IDW did a comic book adaptation by Tim Jones, Mike Johnson, David Messina, Claudia Balboni, & Gaetano Carlucci, though it wasn’t released until early 2010. Closer to the release of the film, IDW did three supplemental series: Countdown by Jones, Johnson, & Messina, which dramatized the events in the 24th-century that led to the destruction of Romulus and both Nero and Spock going through the black hole; Spock: Reflections by Scott & David Tipton, Messina, Federica Manfredi, & Arianna Florean, which focuses on Ambassador Spock’s life right up until he went into the black hole; and Nero by Jones, Johnson, & Messina, which details what Nero did during the 25 years between the Kelvin‘s destruction and Ambassador Spock’s arrival in the altered timeline.
Admiral Archer’s prize beagle is a reference to the lead on the TV show Enterprise, who commanded the first starship with that name, and who had an affinity for beagles.
McCoy’s divorce, long considered a part of the character’s background but never seen on screen, is established here as the reason why McCoy joins Starfleet.
The planet where both Ambassador Spock and Kirk are exiled, and to which Scotty and Keenser are assigned, is named Delta Vega as a callback to the planet where Kirk was forced to kill Mitchell in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
Pike ends the movie in a wheelchair, a nod to his status in “The Menagerie” confined to a chair. He’ll be walking around again, albeit with a cane, in Star Trek Into Darkness.
The Klingon prison planet where an armada was destroyed by Nero was intended to be Rura Penthe, from The Undiscovered Country. A deleted scene established that Nero and his crew were imprisoned on Rura Penthe, which explains what they were doing for the 25 years between the Kelvin‘s destruction and Ambassador Spock’s arrival in the alternate timeline.
There was new Star Trek being produced for the screen consistently every year from 1986 (The Voyage Home) to 2005 (“These are the Voyages…,” the final episode of Enterprise). The four-year gap between the end of Enterprise and the release of this film was the longest drought between Trek productions since the five-year gap between “The Counter-Clock Incident,” the last animated episode in 1974, and The Motion Picture in 1979.
To boldly go. “Thrusters on full.” This movie served a very important function, and it’s one that it deserves ample credit for: it got the world at large interested in Star Trek again.
This is no small accomplishment. The decade prior to 2009 saw the only new Trek being produced being the following: Voyager, a flawed show that never captured the audience the way TNG did, nor had the critical praise that DS9 received; Enterprise, the only modern Trek show to fail in the marketplace; and the movie Nemesis, the swan song for the TNG cast that was a disaster both financially and artistically. Many folks were saying that the franchise needed a break because there was “too much” Star Trek, which is a stupid and wrong argument. There was actually less of Trek at this point, as from 1986-1999 there was always a TV show in production, and from 1993-99 that number was doubled, plus a movie every couple of years like clockwork. Meanwhile, Trek novels were regularly hitting the New York Times best-seller list, and merchandise sales were at an all-time high. Nobody started saying there was “too much” Trek in the 1990s.
No, the problem wasn’t too much Trek, the problem was too much bad Trek. And the audiences fell away like leaves in autumn.
Enter Bad Robot, who decides to reboot the original series for reasons passing understanding. I’ve never liked the idea of doing prequels, as Trek is at its best when it moves forward. If nothing else, there’s the technology issue—take out the warp drive and transporter, and the tech we saw in the original series is less sophisticated than that of a current big-city office building. To try to re-create that in the 21st century is just asking for trouble. Enterprise didn’t really manage it, and neither did this film. (Discovery faces the same issue.) And it’s telling that, as I said above, the last time they did a prequel it failed.
The biggest fear, though, is re-casting the roles. Desilu caught lightning in a bottle fifty years ago when they put William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley together, and there was no guarantee that that would happen again.
In that, at least, the fear turned out to be unjustified. Indeed, the acting is superlative throughout this film, which is one of the reasons why it’s so watchable. Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and especially the amazing Karl Urban simply nail their roles.
Pine has, in many ways, the easiest task, because his Kirk is the least like the one we’re familiar with, because he grew up without a father. (It wouldn’t be a J.J. Abrams production if one of the characters didn’t have major daddy issues.) In fact, he gives us a Kirk that embodies every stupid and not-really-true stereotype about the character: he’s constantly hitting on women (the mainline Kirk was a much more subtle flirt), he’s constantly flouting regulations (I’ve gone over that before, just read what I wrote here and here), and he’s overall, as my dear friend and colleague David Mack put it on the Captains of the Final Frontier documentary, “a punk—but a punk with potential.” I also have to confess to loving the fact that Kirk doesn’t win a single fistfight at any point in the film—the bar, the drill (where Sulu has to save his sorry ass), Spock attacking him on the bridge, on the Narada (he only wins that one by getting the lieutenant’s disruptor).
Quinto and Urban, though, have to channel their predecessors, Quinto with the added joy of having to do so with the original in the same movie. To their credit, they both pull it off perfectly. In particular, the conversation where Spock and McCoy discuss his response to the destruction of Vulcan and the removal of Kirk being a high point.
The movie is a fun, fast-moving romp, with a good character arc for both Kirk and Spock. It’s interesting, I haven’t actually watched this film since its 2009 release, and I had forgotten what a good job both the script and Quinto did with Spock’s war between logic and emotions, dramatizing the events of his youth from “Yesteryear” and “Journey to Babel” and doing a nice job of showing his difficulties, exacerbated by the destruction of Vulcan. And Kirk’s maturation actually works in the abstract.
Overall, the performances elevate the film considerably. Nobody ever went wrong casting John Cho or Anton Yelchin in anything, Simon Pegg is a delight as Scotty, Zoë Saldana is a fine Uhura, Bruce Greenwood brings gravitas to the role of Pike, and Faran Tahir, Chris Hemsworth, and Jennifer Morrison do excellent work on the tension-filled prologue (I wish I could say the same for Ben Cross and Winona Ryder, but they make almost no impression as Sarek and Amanda except to make us long for Mark Lenard and Jane Wyatt, the only re-cast roles where I felt that way). Plus, of course, you have Leonard Nimoy, who can not only put lipstick on a pig, but make the pig look good.
Unfortunately, this film needs all the elevating it can get, because while it succeeds in pacing and mostly in acting, everything else is a total mess. For starters, one person I didn’t list in the previous paragraph is Eric Bana. Nobody went right casting Bana in anything, and I have yet to see him give a performance where I actually gave a rat’s ass about the person he was playing. That streak remains intact with his lifeless performance as Nero, which does a great deal to suck the life out of the plot.
Not that the plot is anything to leap up in the air about. Nothing that happens in this movie makes any kind of sense. Why are cadets in uniform hanging out in a bar in Iowa? Pike just decides to recruit Kirk because Pike wrote about his father once and the kid (who was just in a bar fight) has good aptitude scores? If the shuttle Kirk and McCoy board is for people enlisting, why are the cadets in uniform (who must have already enlisted) on it? Most of the fleet is apparently in the Laurentian system, yet there are seven ships just sitting in dock without crews? Why does Pike make Kirk first officer? Why does the fleet never seem to actually leave the Laurentian system? Spock puts Kirk off onto a random planet that just happens to have Ambassador Spock and Scotty on it? Spock relieves himself of duty but then volunteers for a mission? And what the fuck is red matter anyhow?
Oh, and transwarp beaming? What the ever-loving hell?
Plus the contrivances to get everyone where they’re supposed to be are laughable. Having the CMO killed in the attack, paving the way for McCoy to take over, I can buy, ditto Sulu becoming helmsman because the alpha-shift guy got sick, but Uhura getting to be on the bridge because the communications officer doesn’t know languages? Scotty just magically becoming chief engineer because, I dunno, he’s just standing there, plus his predecessor was a total fucking moron? (Seriously, Olson may be the single stupidest person in the entire movie, possibly the entire franchise, and I include the Pakleds in that consideration.)
When everyone was gathered at Starfleet HQ at the end, I expected Kirk and Spock to be drummed out of the service—or at least demoted—for their idiotic and insubordinate behavior. (Leaving aside any other considerations, both of them committed assault on fellow officers: Kirk on the security guards, Spock on Kirk.) Instead, they were rewarded, and Kirk was given command even though he hadn’t even finished his tenure at the Academy yet. Right.
This film also has the worst set design in the history of Trek. We’ve got an engine room that looks like a brewery (mostly because that’s where they filmed those scenes, and who thought that was a good idea?), and we’ve got a bridge that looks like the Apple Store. And, of course, the lens flares blinding the viewer every five minutes. Seriously, the Enterprise bridge was one of the most perfect designs for a control center ever conceived, and J.J. Abrams managed to completely blow it.
It is, I admit, more fun than I expected to see new versions of the crew we all know and love on the big screen. The actors do superlative work with what they’re given, but what they’re given is simply dreadful.
Warp factor rating: 3
Next week: Star Trek Into Darkness
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest work of fiction is “Live and On the Scene” in Nights of the Living Dead, edited by Jonathan Maberry & George A. Romero, an anthology of stories set around the events of Romero’s seminal 1968 zombie film.
Not to mention that the entire argument about the KM test being about fear, or facing death, or whatever, (because this movie is never really clear what the point of the test really is) would be completely derailed by two points: first, Kirk did take the test de novo, and failed, and you have his reactions from that first time if you really care; and second, if you really want to know Kirk’s reaction to a no-win situation, you got it — he will move heaven and earth (including sleeping with a green chick with the computer password) to find a way to win. That’s actually useful and important character info.
This was also the movie that demonstrated (as later confirmed by Star Wars: The Force Awakens) that JJ Abrams et al. have no idea how space works — every place in the entire galaxy seems to be about five minutes away from every place else, and that’s even before you get into this whole “trans-warp beaming” fiasco.
Maybe before Scotty got caught in the water pipes, he fell into the engine room’s chocolate river?
This is a minor point, but I groaned (loudly) in the movie theater at the “all I have left is my bones” explanation for McCoy’s nickname. He’s “Bones” because “sawbones” is an old slang term for a doctor. it’s that simple. There was no reason to make up a strained explanation like the one the movie gives.
I agree that the Abrams films (now retroactively dubbed the “Kelvin Timeline” films by the latest Star Trek Encyclopedia) are full of conceptual and logic holes — but then, so is The Wrath of Khan, whose plot doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. But whereas I don’t enjoy TWOK that much, I do generally like ST ’09, to the point that I’m willing to look beyond its copious amounts of nonsense and absurdity. I don’t know why I judge the two so differently, but maybe it’s that the Abrams film has more emotional weight for me. What I like about Abrams’s work is his emphasis on character and emotion. That’s evident in this film — even in the biggest action/spectacle sequences, notably the parallel sequences of the Kelvin‘s destruction in the opening and the Narada‘s destruction in the climax, Abrams’s directorial focus is firmly on the people and their emotions rather than the visual spectacle going on around them. And that’s what makes it work for me, especially in the ending. I love it that Abrams directs Nero’s demise in a way that makes us empathize with him and share in his remorse rather than cheering and celebrating his death. So while the plot and the science are as absurd as anything we’ve ever gotten in a Trek movie (and that was already a very high bar to clear well before 2009), it’s the character work and emotion that ground it for me.
I agree with Keith about the casting — it’s amazing that all the main cast was so successful at recapturing lightning in a bottle, embodying the original characters so well… or in some cases even surpassing them. John Cho and Anton Yelchin are/were both significantly better actors than George Takei and Walter Koenig — indeed, one could argue that they’re the two finest actors in the ensemble, which makes it a shame that they were relegated to such minor roles. (Especially in Yelchin’s case, now that he’ll never have the chance to do another.) And I’ll take Bruce Greenwood over Jeffrey Hunter any day.
The character work with the leads was also quite good. The depiction of Spock’s journey was excellent. Yes, Kirk was closer to his pop-culture caricature than to the real thing, but the idea of these films was to do a coming-of-age trilogy, to show the characters growing into the heroes we know, and as the lead, Kirk has the longest journey to get there. So it’s kind of amusing and metatextual that he starts out being the caricature and has to grow into the real thing. But I’m getting two movies ahead of myself there.
I think there’s a simple change that could’ve made the plot much more coherent: Instead of having the attack on Vulcan come immediately after the Kobayashi Maru hearing, do a time cut to four years later. Have the attack happen in 2262, with Kirk as a lieutenant transferring aboard the Enterprise from another ship (maybe the Farragut?) along with McCoy. That way, Kirk has some experience already, and it’s not entirely random to make him second officer. Plus, it corrects the anachronism with Chekov being 17 in 2258, when in “Who Mourns for Adonais?” he was 22 in 2267.
@3/Sybylla: I disagree that there was no reason for the new explanation. Yes, it was based on “sawbones” from the Old West, but your average present-day moviegoer isn’t likely to know that, because it’s no longer the 1960s and Westerns aren’t a ubiquitous form of entertainment anymore. And movies have to be efficient, so there wouldn’t have been time to throw in some kind of digression into Old West exposition in order to explain the basis of the nickname to the audience. So within the context of a movie introducing the character to new viewers, it makes perfect sense to come up with an explanation that can be tied into the exposition about McCoy’s divorce, thus allowing the two ideas to be efficiently conveyed in the same conversation.
Besides, there’s no reason they can’t both be true. Maybe the reason Kirk was so amused by McCoy’s “nothing left but my bones” line is because he was aware of “sawbones” as an old nickname for doctors and was tickled by the coincidence.
Odd. This is just a blank page. It is almost like this movie does not exist. DOES. NOT. EXIST!
I wish they’d make a Star Trek movie again, there has been nothing since Nemesis.
I did hear that JJ Abrams made a demo reel as an audition for Star Wars around this time though.
I don’t like films where the main characters are assholes. Therefore I would have disliked this one even if they hadn’t called their assholes “Kirk” and “Spock”. As it is, that made it worse.
Some other things I generally dislike in a film: revenge plots and characters with daddy issues.
Oh, and I’m a single mother. So I just love the notion that of course the hero must become an antisocial jerk if he grows up without his father.
I was honestly surprised when I watched The Force Awakens, and all the main characters were competent and likable.
“Pike also promotes Kirk to first officer for reasons known only to the voices in his head . . . ” “Kirk is allowed to retain the rank of captain for no compellingly good reason . . . ” A cadet becoming magically the Captain of a starship (equivalent to some cadet from the naval academy in our world visiting a nuclear submarine and being put in charge) makes this film fantasy and not science fiction. I view it as Star Trek in name only, and an embarrassment.
“He gives us a Kirk that embodies every stupid and not-really-true stereotype about the character: he’s constantly hitting on women (the mainline Kirk was a much more subtle flirt), he’s constantly flouting regulations ….” He’s the Kirk that exists in the mind of the general culture, not as the character was actually portrayed in the old series. I’ve liked Pine since he appeared as Nate’s dead high school buddy Sam Hoviak in Six Feet Under, and anyone who’s seen Hell or High Water knows what a powerful, moving actor he is. But he’s continued to play Kirk throughout all these films as, at heart, a kind of a frat-boy with a smirk. Doesn’t anything make this guy grow or change? It’s a little sad that Pine’s been given the chance to play what could potentially be the most complex character in American visual science fiction and yet he seems vaguely embarrassed to be doing so.
Lance Parkin makes an interesting point in The Impossible Has Happened: The Life and Work of Gene Roddenberry that, after the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and its huge box office, Paramount realized that many more people would go to see a Star Trek movie than the relative handful of vocal fans who might care about things like Kirk’s character development or plot points making sense science-fictionally. So all the following films were made with this huge general audience, who may have only been vaguely aware of the details of the series, in mind. And this film certainly comes out of that same strategy. Which makes sense for Paramount the money making entity, if not for the potential of what Star Trek have been.
I enjoyed the movie. My main take away though was that Starfleet must have completely abandoned every bit of military and historical tradition to make the decisions that it did. It felt to me like Starfleet was essentially brand new and still flailing away at how to deal with crises, command decisions, and getting disparate people pointed in the same direction at the same time. It makes no sense with even a inkling of how a real military operates but a lot more sense if it’s a proto-military organization working things out in a vacuum (cough).
I grew up in the 1980s watching Star Trek reruns and never once – not once – did I wonder why McCoy was nicknamed “Bones.” I didn’t wach westerns; I didn’t know; and it didn’t bother me, or really even occur to me to wonder. Maybe that just makes me non-curious. At some point I learned the derivation, and thought, “Oh, that’s interesting” – but it didn’t add anything to my enjoyment of the character. The “nothing left but my bones” line also just doesn’t sound like anything anyone would say. “Nothing but the shirt on my back” would be a more natural idiom.
I actually quite enjoy this movie a lot, but there are some flat-out stupid things about it, most of which Keith pointed out. It’s a popcorn movie and doesn’t feel much like Star Trek, but it’s a heck of a fun ride.
One of the problems I started noticing with J.J. Abrams movies is how heavily he relies on nostalgia and that’s where the movies flaws start (Trek 2009, Into Darkness, Force Awakens). Abrams has good ideas, and is a good producer, but as a director and storyteller, he jumps way to hard on the ‘remember this thing from the original? Wasn’t it great? See how its here! See!’ like Khan in Darkness (especially Spock yelling Khaaaaan, for like reasons). I was actually happy that Abrams did not come back for Trek Beyond, that movie was actually better without the heavy nostalgia use.
I enjoyed NuTrek 2009 when it was in theaters though, and I enjoy watching now because the cast really sells it, anyone else and it wouldn’t have worked.
Design wise I really liked this version of Enterprise, and for whatever reason the ship seemed to have the best action scenes.
@5 “I think there’s a simple change that could’ve made the plot much more coherent: Instead of having the attack on Vulcan come immediately after the Kobayashi Maru hearing, do a time cut to four years later. Have the attack happen in 2262, with Kirk as a lieutenant transferring aboard the Enterprise from another ship (maybe the Farragut?) along with McCoy. That way, Kirk has some experience already, and it’s not entirely random to make him second officer. Plus, it corrects the anachronism with Chekov being 17 in 2258, when in “Who Mourns for Adonais?” he was 22 in 2267.”
You have provided me with my head-canon going forward, thank you. :)
@11/MikePoteet: “The “nothing left but my bones” line also just doesn’t sound like anything anyone would say. “Nothing but the shirt on my back” would be a more natural idiom.”
So? That just means McCoy is creative enough not to settle for a hackneyed cliche. Plus he’s from 250 years in the future, so who knows what new idioms have shown up by then?
@12/Loungeshep: I think the overuse of nostalgia in STID was more Damon Lindelof’s doing than Abrams’s (it was Lindelof who insisted on redoing Khan). I think ST ’09 did a pretty good job of avoiding falling back on nostalgia. Aside from a couple of things like the “Yesteryear” callbacks and the Kobayashi Maru, it made a point of taking things in a new direction. The whole reason it destroyed Vulcan was to say that all bets were now off, that they wouldn’t just be rehashing the old and the familiar and that anything could now happen. So Lindelof’s influence on STID worked against what Abrams had originally intended to set in motion in this film.
It’s odd to me that nobody ever particularly criticized Abrams as a director until this film, but once this one film came out, people suddenly began applying their opinions of its flaws to Abrams’s entire career, even when it made no sense whatsoever to do so. For instance, I’ve heard people accuse Abrams of being sexist, even though virtually every TV series he’s ever created or co-created (Felicity, Alias, Fringe, Undercovers, everything but LOST and one unsold pilot) has had a female lead, and even though the Mission: Impossible film he directed was the first in that series to have a strongly portrayed female co-star (who actually ended up single-handedly saving the hero and defeating the villain in a marvelous subversion of conventional action-movie gender tropes). I think fans these days are too quick to make it personal, to make their criticisms about the creator’s whole character rather than just about the shortcomings of a single work.
So I wrote this after I saw it
Like krad, I like the character focus and acting, but, man, the fridge logic hitting as you walk out of the theater
@15/wiredog: The “cliff” was in a rock quarry. In this image, you can clearly see the very straight, rectangular cuts along the cliff face, revealing that it’s an artificial construct. And Kirk drives the car through the property fence a few moments earlier. (And yes, there are rock quarries in Iowa.)
They destroyed Vulcan, as I said, to prove that all bets were off and anything could happen now. It wouldn’t just be a retelling of TOS; it would be the same characters leading different lives and having different adventures. The only way to make that crystal clear to the audience was to make a massive, radical, unmistakeable change to the shape of the Trek universe as we knew it.
There was a lot not to like in this movie and a lot to like. I liked NuSpock and NuScotty and NuBones, didn’t like NuKirk in the slightest (he demanded a good ass-kicking in literally every scene), mostly meh about NuChekov, NuUhura and NuSulu.
But one of the things that really bothered me is that Kirk didn’t know Uhura’s name. Seriously? I work on a military base and in like 30 seconds I can look up the name and rank of anyone working on the base, and get their phone number and e-mail address to boot. You can’t even begin to tell me that Starfleet Academy doesn’t keep records on every student and that Kirk wouldn’t have looked her name up already.
@12, @14, I actually thought the nostalgia was even more so in Beyond, but a bit more subtle.
I really like this movie. I acknowledge it’s flaws, but like it anyway. I have friends who say it ruined Trek, but I disagree. It opened it up to new audiences. If old Trek is your thing, the originals will still be there. I enjoy this for what it is, Popcorn Trek.
@16,
I get why Abrams blew up Vulcan. I don’t like it, because it was pretty stupid with the red matter and alll. But I just don’t get how the Vulcan race is now extinct or some crap (Spock says they’re extinct at some point). This is the Federation, there are something like 150 planetary members and lord knows how many colony worlds. There are Vulcans all over the place in embassies, colonies, science academies, Starfleet, traders, etc. Sure, 90% (estimate) of Vulcans are poof!, but 10% of several billion is still a more than big enough number to work with that the race is far far far from “extinct”.
Concur. I like the cast, I wish they could get a decent movie to be in.
Quinto’s Spock is great: it’s like his face is always showing “I am a creature of pure logic, and I’m really angry you don’t get that.”
@17/ragnarredbeard: I figure Kirk felt it would be cheating to look up Uhura’s name. He wasn’t just trying to get information, he was trying to get her to warm up to him. Since she was evidently cagey about revealing her first name, he felt it would be a mark of success if he earned her trust or liking enough that she’d choose to reveal it to him — and maybe that would lead to her revealing other things to him.
I’m probably going to get struck down for this, but I might as well get it out there.
Unfortunately, I had precisely the opposite reaction to the the leads (minus Karl Urban – that man is a gem). Pine’s Kirk never captures the “honorable barbarian” that Shatner established, but that could be explained as a director’s choice based on the changes to the history of the character.
Quinto’s Spock, on the other hand, is just unwatchable. He’s not Spock. He’s not even a Vulcan. His default emotional touchstone is always anger. The easiest way to see this for me – re-watch the various micro emotions that Nemoy was able to portray with a single word: fascinating. Almost every, single time he utters that word in OTS, it carries a different weight or connotation. Quinto can’t seem to ever NOT be angry and annoyed. And we can’t make any excuses about him being “different” than Prime-Spock as his life, up to the point of the film, should be basically the same.
Quinto, good as he is elsewhere, is in my opinion the worst on-screen Vulcan, and I really can’t understand it. Mark Leonard, Tim Russ, Kirstie Alley, even Rocco Sisto playing Sarak’s aide in TNG were all MUCH better (can’t speak to Enterprise’s Vulcans – didn’t watch the show).
It’s an okay action movie but not much more than that. Kirk is an aggressively unlikable bonehead, representing the gym bros in the audience I guess. Spock is a little better, though I’ve never cared for Quinto’s acting. His Spock seems to be suppressing one emotion, anger, rather than many. He’s pon farr Hulking it most of the time. But Urban does a fine job with McCoy, if this was a greatest hits collection of McCoy’s grumblings.
Which leads me to JJ Abrams. I’ve never quite understood why he has such a following. Since this movie, he’s been running a fairly standard nostalgia playbook, making a checklist of all the iconic elements and wedging them into a save-the-cat super plot with lots of easy soap opera emotion sprinkled about, but this is really a bigger problem in Hollywood movies right now and not just his.
As for his style, if that’s what you want to call it, it’s very pretty but the way he frames shots still shows his televisual roots, with too many closeups and medium shots for my liking. Couple that with all the sparkle-sparkles and camera gymnastics and girls in their underwear and Mr. Abrams’ Star Trek comes across as Michael Bay Lite. (Fightin’ words, I know, but there it is.) At least he did a better job with Rey than with Uhura and Carol Marcus. Lesson learned.
I didn’t bother to see the movie. It was a shame since I thought the casting was wonderful but my suspension of disbelief fused out at idea of Starfleet Command giving a starship to a crew of cadets PERMANENTLY. Also I hate destroying Vulcan. Yeah they’re dicks but we’re used to having them around.
But first and foremost I really, really hated the idiotic coincidence of the entire bridge crew all being at the academy at the same time. Kirk and Spock are close enough in age to have been at the Academy together if not in the same year but McCoy and Scotty were nearly ten years older, and may never have attended the Academy at all and Uhura and Sulu are several years younger and probably entered after K&S graduated. And of course Chekov was nearly ten years younger than Kirk and was in elementary school when Jim was at the Academy.
I really enjoyed this film, never saw the controversies swirling about it, and found it a fine successor to the throne. The second in this series left me colder, and the third left not a dent; at points; it simply bored me. Christopher Pine and Zachory Quinto – great performances. A previous poster, ChristopherLBennet, said it better: “I agree that the Abrams films (now retroactively dubbed the “Kelvin Timeline” films by the latest Star Trek Encyclopedia) are full of conceptual and logic holes — but then, so is The Wrath of Khan, whose plot doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. But whereas I don’t enjoy TWOK that much, I do generally like ST ’09, to the point that I’m willing to look beyond its copious amounts of nonsense and absurdity.” But I like III: The Search for Spock more than TWOK any day. I never wanted to see the characters from TOS die out on screen as actors aged and passed away, and I wanted a reboot with Matt Damon as Kirk shortly after Good Will Hunting – in reading the novels and the comics, while Shatner is truly an actor I love (from his Twilight Zone on out), I knew there were other versions of Kirk waiting to happen, and look forward to them with some optimism.
@22/youngheart: I think Quinto does an excellent job playing Spock. Yes, he’s relatively more emotional than Nimoy’s Spock, but remember that the bulk of this movie is set in 2258, four years after “The Cage” happened in the Prime timeline and seven years before “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Spock Prime at this age was an intense fellow who shouted a lot and grinned at interesting alien plants. There’s also the fact that this Spock goes through a horrible tragedy in the course of this film. As he eventually admits, it makes him emotionally compromised. And it’s… logical… that in the wake of that tragedy, he’d turn more to his bonds with his human crewmates to help him through it, and thus mature into a somewhat more emotionally open being than his counterpart. If anything, it would be unrealistic if he turned out exactly like Spock Prime after such a devastating change in his personal timeline.
As for Pine, the young Kirk he’s playing isn’t supposed to be the same as the older Kirk that Shatner played either. He hasn’t yet grown into that person. I think that once we get to Beyond, Pine is playing a much more familiar version of Kirk. Heck, I felt his Steve Trevor in Wonder Woman was very Shatner-like at times.
As for Urban, I have to admit I don’t get the admiration. If anything, I find him the least effective of the recast crew. The others manage to capture the essence of the characters without merely imitating them; they bring their own interpretation so that it feels authentic. But Urban is basically just doing a straight-up impression of DeForest Kelley. It’s a very good impression, but it feels artificial compared to the others. He’s not making the role his own, he’s just aping someone else. But then, I’ve never been a fan of Urban’s acting. I first saw him as Julius Caesar in Xena: Warrior Princess, and I found him very bland in that role.
@24/princessroxana: Only Kirk, McCoy, Uhura, and apparently Sulu were classmates at the Academy. Spock had graduated at least four years earlier and was working as an instructor at the Academy. Scotty had already made it to lieutenant commander and was assigned to Delta Vega. McCoy was explicitly older than the others, entering Starfleet late in life because of his recent divorce (which is consistent with his unofficial backstory). And Chekov was in an advanced learning program of some sort; I think he was in his first year, while the others were near graduation.
And really, there’s no canonical basis for assuming Uhura is significantly younger than Kirk. Nichelle Nichols is only a year and nine months younger than William Shatner. And Peter David did a DC comic making Kirk and Uhura Academy classmates way back in 1991.
I see that Keith has skipped the latter three TNG movies.
When discussing this movie in relation to the parade of Trek movies, there is the minor problem of how to identify it. “Star Trek 11”? “Star Trek 2.1”? Me, I simply call it by its year (“Star Trek (2009)” or “Trek-2009”) because that pattern works for the slew of reboot(ish) projects this century is known for.
The action beats show that J.J. Abrams is a fan less of “Star Trek” than of “Star Wars.” He got his directorial wish with “The Force Awakens” (2015) but it’s unclear if he directed Trek-2009 as an audition for any potential future “Star Wars” projects or just because it was available.
Most of the discussion I’ve viewed has been on TrekMovie.com (yowsers, ya gotta trudge through a lot of irate fan-spleen-ventage to find the thoughtful points) which has inferred that the team (director Abrams, writers Kurtz, Orci; plus Lindelof in 2013) wanted to have their cake and eat it too. The movies insist on callbacks to established fragments of lore (names, characters, drama beats), but without earning them, and without understanding how they relate; up the action to draw in a new audience but rely on background known only to established fans. The same pattern applies to their “Bayverse” Transformers movies. Shall we call this the cargo cult approach to scriptwriting?
I’m not sure I agree with any of the supposed plot flaws here; don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a perfect movie by any measure, but I think it’s more average than bad.
Truthfully, I think most of these plot questions are easily resolved with just a bit of thought; for example, why are there in uniform cadets in a bar in Iowa? Presumably because they’re building a number of starships in the area, and they’re probably assigned to that ‘base’ or whatever it would be.
Perhaps the ships were getting ready to accept the newly graduating class of cadets, perhaps with a mixture of senior officers, before heading off. The reason they don’t have crews is because the group of seven ships were newly manufactured because Starfleet and the federation is growing, etc.
For me, the biggest concern (and one that was proven sadly correct in the next movie) was that too much of the movie seemed to be built on references to the original series. To the point where it doesn’t really feel like it was really trying to do anything new with itself.
Quoth Christopher: “For instance, I’ve heard people accuse Abrams of being sexist, even though virtually every TV series he’s ever created or co-created (Felicity, Alias, Fringe, Undercovers, everything but LOST and one unsold pilot) has had a female lead,”
In fact, Lost was supposed to have a female lead. In the original conception, Jack was supposed to die one hour into the two-hour pilot and Kate was supposed to step up as the lead. The network balked at that, and so it was rewritten, with Kate’s backstory shifted to Rose. (This explains why the backstories for Jack and Kate are so mediocre — they were not part of the original conception of the show.)
Quoth Phillip Thorne: “I see that Keith has skipped the latter three TNG movies.”
Nope — they were part of the TNG Rewatch:
http://www.tor.com/series/star-trek-the-next-generation-rewatch/
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@27/Phillip Thorne: The thing to keep in mind about the “Supreme Court” making these movies is that they weren’t all of the same opinion about things. Orci and Lindelof were the biggest Trek fans, Kurtzman moderately so, and Abrams and Bryan Burk not so much. (Lindelof was not a credited writer on the ’09 film, but he was part of the “Court,” the brain trust that planned out the first two films like a TV writers’ room.) And yet Orci and Lindelof were on opposite sides in STID — Lindelof insisted on Khan, Orci wanted a new villain, and Lindelof won.
So what you see as “having their cake and eating it too” is the result of that process of balance and compromise between differing preferences and perspectives. For instance, I’m fairly sure that the script Orci & Kurtzman wrote made a lot more scientific sense than the film we got; Abrams ditched a lot of the science stuff and threw in the wilder stuff we got because he was less concerned with technical accuracy and more with visceral impact. He values character and emotion above all, which is commendable, but in his case it sometimes comes at the expense of plot logic and plausibility. (Which is why I think he was much better suited for Star Wars than Star Trek.)
@28/xomic: “More average than bad” is a good description. The movie’s flaws aren’t that different from the flaws in any of the previous Trek movies — many of them were just as scientifically absurd and fanciful and had just as many illogical plot shortcuts, or nearly so. The problem isn’t Abrams, the problem is movies. As Keith has said many times in these rewatches and elsewhere, the American blockbuster feature film is a poor format for capturing the things that make Star Trek work.
@30: I know we’re jumping movies, but I always wondered, why did Lindelof has such a huge need for Khan? Why Khan? Into Darkness was doing well with mystery terrorist/former section 31 agent, they really didn’t need to shoehorn in khan at all. Maybe that’ll get explained in the next rewatch. I mean if Khan is in the movie then the movie really needs to really be KHAN and not ‘surprise, lolz iz Khan! Cue Spock screaming Khan while Kirk dies in the engine core!’
I’m not slamming Abrams at all, I enjoyed his Treks and his Star Wars. His movies lately just seem to rely too much on having some kind of reference to original material, but otherwise are fun to watch.
#31 I think you may have answered your own question there. The reference is the thing. Khan is iconic. Khan is marketable. Khan can be a “mystery box” and sell tickets. It’s the business model.
Abrams is a marketing guru first, director second.
@21, Really? This is Kirk. The man who wanted so badly to win the KM that he cheated to make it happen. He’d really not look at the class list to get a name? Seriously?
@16 If their intention was to be able to bring us the original crew and leave the original stories behind why the heck does the very next movie revolve around Khan????
I just don’t like the idea period. Being I watched the original TV series as a pre-teen, I will NEVER except anyone other then Shatner, Nimoy, Kelly and Doohan as Kirk, Spock, Bones and Scotty. But hey since Hollywood is so out of original ideas all they can come up with is movie remakes or movies based on comic books. Well I guess what ever sells right?
@32/Curly: Again, Khan was put in at Damon Lindelof’s insistence. Abrams was in charge, but he wasn’t the only person involved.
@34/sdzald: Same answer. There were five men with different ideas developing these first two movies, and what we ended up was the sum of the outcomes of their various debates. In the first film, the goal of novelty won out, but in the second, nostalgia won out for whatever reason (though I have the impression it was simply because Lindelof refused to budge and kept pushing until the others just gave up).
And “Hollywood is out of ideas” is a ridiculous notion. The majority of Hollywood movies ever made have been adaptations and remakes; indeed, they were even more common in the early days of Hollywood than they are today. For example, the Judy Garland Wizard of Oz from 1939 was the seventh film adaptation since the book’s publication in 1900. And it’s not evidence of loss of quality — many of the films considered the greatest ever made in America are adaptations of pre-existing works (e.g. Casablanca, Psycho, The Godfather, the aforementioned Wizard of Oz, etc.). People have been accusing Hollywood of “running out of ideas” for at least 85 years now. The irony is that the people saying that are the ones being repetitive and unoriginal.
Or maybe too many of the remakes today are just bad films.
Most movies have always been bad. Sturgeon’s Law: 90 percent of everything is crud. It’s not “today,” it’s not “remakes.” It’s true of every category and always has been. Pick any random film from the 1930s, the 1950s, or the 1980s, and you’ll find it’s just as bad as any of the bad films being made today, and probably worse in a number of ways (e.g. it’ll be more crudely made and have more racism and sexism). The belief that movies in general were better in the past is an illusion resulting from the fact that most of the terrible films get forgotten and ignored, so our familiarity with past movies is biased in favor of the better ones. But the better ones have always, always been the minority.
Hmmm… never realized that. I might chew on this for a while. Thanks, Chris
The night this opened in the Dallas/Fort Worth area we’d had a tornado watch, but we’d also had straight line winds, so we called the theater to make sure the midnight showing was still happening. It was, and we drove through the end of the storm to get there – only eight miles; it felt like more. I expected the theater to be empty. Half the surrounding neighborhoods were without power, and there were downed trees everywhere.
But by the time the previews began the house was packed, which is good. You can watch art films in an empty theater and lose nothing, but a Star Trek film requires being able to groove on the crowd energy. Or at least, for me, that’s part of the experience.
Maybe it was the fact that until about an hour before showtime we’d been convinced we were going to lose our roof (we didn’t), but I enjoyed the film because of one thing: after all those movies where it felt like William Shatner was being more himself than the Kirk I’d seen in reruns for my entire childhood (I’m about the same age you are, @krad – within a year, I think) Chris Pine’s performance made me LOVE Captain Kirk again.
I agree with your view that Star Trek is best suited for the kind of storytelling television can offer. I agree with your assessment of the plot of this movie. And I agree that the performances are what made the movie. But for me, it will always be the film that gave me back Captain Kirk.
@5/ChristopherLBennett I remember really liking that line from McCoy and the ‘origin’ for his nickname. Yeah, I always accepted it as a reference to sawbones, but medicine has already changed so much NOW that it’s not a stretch to believe that hundreds of years from now, where everything is done with nanites and lasers, the association of ‘sawbones’ with a surgeon would be lost.
#35 Again, “Who’s the more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows him?” ;-) Probably not the wisest action to hitch your wagon to Lindeloff’s idea.
As for remakes, yes it’s true there have been a great many remakes throughout film history, but the number of them and sequels and prequels and requels and bizarre adaptations have increased in recent years. I mean we now live in a world where The Gong Show is on TV again, where emojis are getting their own movie. Surely now it’s a new Golden Age of Trash Culture.
I only ever went to see this because a woman I was dating was interested. Based on the reactions I witnessed, I was certain it would be a hit, but I was equally certain it would ruin Star Trek forever after. So far, it seems I was right. Star Trek may be the name on it, but this is not Star Trek. I haven’t the energy to go into why this is a terrible film, and most of the points have been made already, but I must say that Abrams gets progressively worse with each film he directs. I’ve reached a point where I won’t see any film he directs, and I’ll be highly suspicious of any that he writes. The man can’t tell story to save his life, and he successfully ruined two major franchises for me.
@37/Curly: The number really hasn’t increased. People have been thinking that for generations too. It’s just that we don’t remember the majority of older movies — just the really good (or sometimes really bad) ones that stood out from the pack. So that creates the illusion that movies in the past had less of the routine, forgettable, trashy stuff we see today. But it’s always been there. Good grief, there were countless sequels back in the day. The first shared cinematic universe was the Universal Monsters franchise back in the ’30s and ’40s. There were seven Frankenstein movies in 15 years; the fifth crossed over with the Wolf Man, and the last two crossed over with the Wolf Man and Dracula. The original King Kong got a cheesy, forgettable sequel just nine months after the original. There were six Thin Man films in 14 years, plus a radio series and later a TV series. There were nine Ma and Pa Kettle films, 28 Blondie films (based on the comic strip) in just 13 years, 44 Tarzan films from the silent era through the early ’70s, etc. The idea that sequels are more common today than in the past is simply wrong. Early Hollywood was littered with long-running film franchises that dwarf the ones of today. (Which kinda stands to reason, since they didn’t have television yet, so movies, along with radio, had to be more of an outlet for serial fiction.)
And, dude, I’m from the generation born into the world where The Gong Show was on TV the first time around. Trust me, there was just as much trash in the ’70s as there is today — even more so in some ways. Heck, when it comes to comics and superheroes adapted to film and TV, when it comes to science fiction and fantasy on the screen, there was a far higher ratio of trash to quality when I was young than there is now.
Actually the idea turbines made sense to me. I don’t care how advanced the technology is, the law of Thermodynamics applies, with that level of energy generation there will be a concurrent amount of heat and even if you vent it into space there has to be a way to get it from the heat source to the diffuser or whatever. And sometimes, the best and most efficient method is still water. So the conceptd make sense.
Now, the whole beaming someone into the tube at just the right angle so that they oh, don’t merge with the side of the tube, and the giant spinny slicy blades of doom, unless a nod to Galaxy Quest? Nice sight gag, but dumb.
Excellent rewatch, Keith.
Does anybody know why the ship is called the Jellyfish? I’ve been wanting to know that for 8 years now.
@41/MeredithP: Because it kinda looks like a jellyfish from the side. They wanted something that looked organic and unique, and somebody decided that something resembling a jellyfish would do that, and since it was just a production/script nickname that the audience would never hear, they took the simplest route and named it after its inspiration. If they’d actually intended to use a name for it onscreen, they probably would’ve come up with something more Vulcan-sounding.
CLB@16
Thanks! I’ve been wondering about that cliff for 8 years now. Haven’t bothered to rewatch the movie
Red matter is the most dangerous sunstanice in the universe; so we’re going to load a bunch of it onto this tiny ship and launch it into space with only a single crew member on board.
But right about the casting. This may,be Karl Urban’s best performance, and Hemswoth is very memotable in a small role.
I blame everything on Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman. Those two are the biggest freaking hacks in the business. Any time I see work with their name on it I walk out of the theater (or turn off the tv) completely disgusted. Although at this point, if I see either of them listed in association with a movie, I just won’t go. That’s what saved me from The Mummy.
I think Chris Pine is a decent actor but I’ve never really bought his portrayal as Kirk. Quinta does a good job but Urban is amazing. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an actor resurrecting another actor’s work. I’ve seen all three reasons solely for him. He’s just wonderful. Since Bones has always been my favorite character, I’m incredibly grateful they casted him for the role.
I like Saldana for Uhura and Cho does a great Sulu but I can’t get behind Pegg. He sounds good but he’s like a dwarf from the LoTRs films; there solely for comic relief. Of course, Chekhov is the same. Scotty deserves more than that.
Overall, I love to complain about this movie while raving about Urban. But it’s nothing compared to my hatred for Into Darkness.
I had high hopes for this one. When they released the photo of Pine and Quinto in the same poses as an old Shatner/Nimoy promo pic, I actually laughed. Yes! They were going to do it right.
How wrong I was.
Sure, the actors, for the most part, resemble their predecessors. Quinto does a passable Spock, especially a younger one. Urban, as someone said earlier, seems to be a McCoy’s best grumpy bits thingy, but still made me believe it was the same character. I did miss the quieter moments that McCoy used to excel at. It was nice to see Uhura given more to do, although making her primarily Spock’s girlfriend and just coincidentally a communications office was irritating. (You’re answering a distress call and you’re arguing with a superior office about what ship you’ll be assigned to temporarily? You need to work on your priorities.) Sulu and Chekov were just there. Scotty seemed to be stuck in a manic phase and just needed to settle down a bit.
But the “plot”. Oh lord. What a mess. It was basically a Saturday morning cartoon where the cadets take over the ship because all the adults are idiots. Pike wrote a paper about George Kirk and JTK is the one who recognizes the “lightning storm in space” reference, even though he was literally minutes old at the time? Sure, he could have read that reference later but in that case, Pike should be even more aware of it.
A doctor responding to a distress call is allowed to take a patient along for the ride? Really? It’s basically a call back to Amok Time but in that case, it was to save Kirk’s life when he slipped him a mickey. This time, it’s just to stop a cadet who’s facing a disciplinary hearing from feeling all mopey about being left behind. And Pike’s reaction is to make him first office when he leaves the ship? What, there weren’t any actual officers aboard?
And it just goes downhill from there. Kirk’s father has to stay on board his ship and steer since the auto pilot is out. But he’s not sitting at the helm and doesn’t seem to actually be doing anything. We just needed to leave him behind so Kirk can grow up fatherless, which we all know automatically turns people into jerks. </Snark> Everyone is together at the Academy except for Scotty who coincidentally Kirk just happens to lad walking walking distance of when Spock puts him into an escape pod instead of the brig. Oh, and he runs into Old Spock whom Nero has dropped on the same planet just as coincidentally within walking distance of Scotty’s outpost. Old Spock even tells him where it is. He wasn’t running from the Giant Space Lobster. He was just hanging out in a cave.
So Spock remembers something Scotty created and manages to cobble it together with an old shuttle transporter (which we never saw shuttles having before) and then, for some reason, sends Scotty along with Kirk for no reason other than getting Scotty on the ship for no good reason.
Kirk then thinks that Spock is the acting the same as when he was infected by spores and gets Spock to lose control so Kirk can then be Captain. They then confront Nero, who is pretty much totally forgettable as a villain, and NuSpock pilots the Jelly fish into Nero’s ship which somehow turns it into a black hole (because it’s an Abrams show so we need a mysterious red ball in there somewhere).
Finally, when Kirk offers to save Nero, Spock talks him out of it! Kirk then grins like an idiot, as if killing someone who’s now helpless is what being human is all about . Sure, Nero has been snarking that he doesn’t want to be saved but Maltz did the same in TSFS and Kirk didn’t whip out a phaser and kill him. So, instead, we get “Fire Everything”.
Then we’re back home and Starfleet, being idiots, give their newest and most advanced ship over to a group of cadets with no experienced officers aboard.
Roll credits.
Yikes. My bran started turning to mush just remembering all that.
What a great opportunity and what a waste of potential.
KRAD’s 3 is being generous.
P.S. – – Oh, and Kirk was all set and ready to leave without a first officer until old Spock told nu Spock that he’d take care of the last 10,000 Vulcans and he should go hang out with his friends. SPock shows up and offers to be first officer and Kirk say “Okey-doke”.
@46
That’s the part I hated the most. Years ago, I remember seeing a fan written alternative for Nero’s fate. He gets captured and sent to a Federation prison–run by Vulcan counselors. Ha-ha! Well, it would have been more poetic than simply getting blown to bits and sucked into a black hole.
@46/kkozoriz: “We just needed to leave him behind so Kirk can grow up fatherless, which we all know automatically turns people into jerks.”
Thank you! I was beginning to think that I’m the only one bothered by this.
You forgot to mention that Keenser is played by Deep Roy, probably best known for having one of the coolest names in Hollywood, and for playing the Oompa Loompas (all of them) in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He’s also, according to TVTropes, one of only two people to have appeared in Star Trek, Star Wars and Doctor Who — the other one being Simon Pegg.
My favorite part was Pike as Kirk’s mentor / father figure. I wish they would have kept Pike as Captain for a couple movies with Kirk as first officer and Spock as science officer. I thought they were in too big a hurry to get the characters in their familiar roles.
My problem with prequel /reboot movies is they always want to provide a backstory to things I don’t need explained. I never really needed to know why Kirk called Mccoy Bones. I have the same issue with Daniel Craig’s Bond films, I never needed to know why he started drinking vodka martinis shaken not stirred.
I was wondering where Kirk’s older brother Sam was. Shouldn’t he still exist in this timeline if it diverged at Kirk’s birth and the destruction of the Kelvin? George Kirk never mentioned another son in his final conversation with his wife. Also the films treated George Kirk like he was an important figure in the original timeline and Kirk growing up without him was a big difference but Kirk’s parents were never seen or even mentioned in the show or movies so it was hard for me to really feel his death made that big a difference. At least Spock’s mother Amanda we met a couple of times and she was mentioned often throughout the series. I felt her loss more than Kirk’s father’s.
I’ll admit – it’s not a bad movie. As an action sci fi popcorn flick, it’s actually decent.
But as “Star Trek” it is absolutely terrible. My second biggest problem with the film is the destruction of Vulcan. You do that in a franchise that is supposed to be about an optimistic look on humanity’s future? And an even bigger problem, is that nobody cares. Sure, they cry and scream and act all angsty, but nobody cares enough to try and fix the timeline.
That alone would have probably been enough to kill the movie for me.
But there’s more. As others have mentioned, our “heros” are complete jerks here. They don’t just have OOC flaws (as in The Undiscovered Country). They act like a bunch of moronic teenagers which makes it completely impossible to sympathize with. And Kirk drives a car off a cliff? WTF?
OK, so I get that Abrams did these things to give a message of “we’re shaking things up”. But it is the specific direction in which this “shaking up” takes place which alarms me. It’s a complete anti-thesis of what Trek was always about, so whats the point of even calling it “Star Trek”?
In short, this film is so obviously a cash-grab on the name “Star Trek” that it hurts. Sure, the old films also did this to some degree, but it was never this obvious and never this jarring.
As for Keith’s praise that “it brought Star Trek back into the public awareness” – I don’t agree. All this film did was generate public confusion: It made people associate the words “Star Trek” with something it is not (and by now, with two more NuTrek films and the promos of “Discovery”, it seems that this new dumbed-down direction is going to be the norm).
I see this as a great cause for concern, and not as something praise-worthy at all.
Fascinating. Ambassador Spock tried to save Romulus with an experimental Vulcan ship and red matter, but failed to do so. He also told Kirk that he couldn’t meet his counterpart due to grave consequences to the space-time continuum, but that was just to make sure that Kirk and Spock were able to work together in this timeline as they did in his.
This actually bothers me more than anything else in the movie. If any of a million things went differently, Earth would have joined Vulcan as a pile of space kibble. Obviously the script had to come up with a reason for Spock Prime to stay out of the action, but they chose an awful one. Spock risked the lives of however many billions of people live on Earth in this era… because he “could not deprive (Kirk) of the revelation of all that (Kirk and Spock) could accomplish together?” This is truly and bizarrely wrong-headed, and imagine how that scene plays out if in fact the mission failed and everybody on Earth is now dead. My headcanon is that there’s more going on with his inaction here, although I have not settled on exactly what.
But as “Star Trek” it is absolutely terrible. My second biggest problem with the film is the destruction of Vulcan. You do that in a franchise that is supposed to be about an optimistic look on humanity’s future? And an even bigger problem, is that nobody cares. Sure, they cry and scream and act all angsty, but nobody cares enough to try and fix the timeline.
Planet destruction is as old as the franchise itself. The events of “The Changeling” kick off with the destruction of a planet of 4 billion people. The Immunity Syndrome creature and The Doomsday Machine also have “planet death counts” in high numbers. This version of Star Trek is not less optimistic merely because it shifted the destruction from “planet the viewers have never heard of” to “planet the viewers have heard of.”
Fixing the timeline: From their perspective, this isn’t the broken timeline, it’s just their lives. It’s only an “alternate” timeline because we as viewers happened to see the other one first. “Fixing” the timeline would mean going at least as far back as the incident with the Kelvin, which effectively means erasing most of their lives. Expecting people to erase their own existence in service of some abstract notion of “timeline repair” is unrealistic. They don’t discuss it directly, but they may also be well aware that attempting to fix the timeline risks making it worse. And perhaps more importantly, they do not actually have the means to do so. Even if they wanted to “fix” things, how would they go about doing so?
Regarding Kirk’s blatant womanizing in this movie, I always thought Kirk in the tv show was portrayed as a womanizer because that’s how all of the lead heroes in action shows of the 60’s, 70s and even into the 80s were portrayed unless it was a show about a married couple like Hart to Hart. Kirk was no different in that regard than the Cartwrights, Barkleys, Steve Austin, Starsky & Hutch or even David Banner. I always assumed the studios did that because they were afraid that if they didn’t show their unmarried lead male character actively pursuing women every other episodes then audiences would think he was gay. So I never considered his womanizing a part of the character so much as a part of the times the character was created in.
@55/dunsel
Would you’ve said the same thing if it were Earth instead of Vulcan?
Vulcan is a founding member of the Federation and the homeworld of one of the main characters. That’s a pretty big step above just another “planet the viewers have heard of”.
Besides, can you name one way in which NuTrek is optimistic? It’s not like the entire film is flowers and butterflies with Vulcan’s destruction being the sole moment that sours eveything.
As for changing the timeline:
Spock Prime, at the very least, should have attempted it. And even if we find some in-universe reason for him not to do so, it is still a very disturbing artistic choice by the film’s creator: A guy changes history, destroys an entire planet (alla ENT: Twilight) and the resulting cynical skewed timeline becomes reality, end story.
Maybe you can swallow all of this with no problem, but I can’t. Sorry.
@49/TBonz: “Kirk is a punk. Not very likeable and not my Kirk.”
Again, he’s supposed to be the younger Kirk who has yet to mature into the guy we know. The screenwriters took a cue from Diane Carey’s novel Best Destiny, which approached the teenage Kirk in essentially the same way, as a directionless punk who needed an adventure aboard the early Enterprise (under Captain April and George Kirk in that version) to set him straight and save him from a life of delinquency. I guess I give the film’s Kirk a pass because I’ve seen him approached this way before.
“Scotty? Eh. I like Pegg, but he’s *not* Scotty.”
The way I see it is: Doohan always said that Scotty was 99% James Doohan and 1% accent. So it kind of seems appropriate to me that Pegg’s Scotty is 99% Simon Pegg and 1% accent.
“Uhura – preferred the original.”
The original never had much personality or backstory, or even a full name. I’m just glad she got fleshed out into a full character.
“And WTF Romulus? Couldn’t evac your citizenry ahead of the destruction?”
Evacuating a planetary population of billions would take quite a long time. Assume the empire has 5000 ships that can hold an average of 2000 people and can ferry them to a safe planet and come back for a new load maybe once every 2 days, to be generous. So that’s 5 million evacuees per day. If the planet’s population is 10 billion, then evacuating them all would take 2000 days, or just under 5.5 years. The blast wave apparently travelled faster than light (much as in Generations and TUC), and it reached Romulus even sooner than anticipated. They wouldn’t have been able to evacuate that many people.
“And hey, Spock, go ahead and dump Kirk on a planet and almost kill him.”
To be fair, Kirk was supposed to stay in the safety of the escape pod until Scott and Keenser could come to retrieve him. He just unwisely chose to ignore the pod’s warnings and venture out recklessly into an unknown and hostile environment.
@52/Mike: “I was wondering where Kirk’s older brother Sam was.”
He was that kid on the side of the road when Kirk drove by in the Corvette. There was an earlier scene, which was scripted and shot but cut out, which featured Sam complaining about their treatment by their awful Uncle Frank and running away from home. It was right afterward that young Jim decided to steal Frank’s prized antique car as his own gesture of protest. But that scene was cut out of the film, so young Jim’s dialogue in the drive-by shot was redubbed to change “Sam” into some random kid called “Johnny.”
@53/OThDPh: “nobody cares enough to try and fix the timeline.”
They can’t. The timeline diverged 25 years earlier, and they lack the technology to do anything about it. Remember, in Prime, they didn’t even realize time travel was possible until “The Naked Time,” which was set 8 years after this movie. (Well, okay, Archer had known about time travel a century earlier, but evidently that was classified and not common knowledge prior to “The Naked Time.”)
And Spock Prime has the knowledge, but not the resources — and there are all sorts of ethical questions about erasing a timeline that’s had 25 years of its own independent existence. Plus, the underlying model of this film was a more scientifically literate one than the one previous Trek used (say what you like about Orci and Kurtzman, but they did more science homework than Abrams did), in which a new timeline does not “erase” an old one but coexists alongside it. There was no need to “fix” the timeline, because the Prime timeline still exists in parallel and is unaffected by the events in the Kelvin timeline. Evidently the Spock of 2387 has learned enough about temporal theory to understand that this timeline’s existence does not threaten his own. But if he tried to tamper with history and undo its formative events, that might threaten his own timeline, for all he knows. (I put in some discussion implicitly explaining all this in my novel Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock, though I had to do it indirectly since none of the characters in that novel would be aware of the events of this film. But I tried to set up how 24th-century temporal theory would’ve advanced to the point that Spock Prime would understand why he couldn’t and shouldn’t attempt to undo the Kelvin events.)
“They act like a bunch of moronic teenagers…”
Again, the whole idea is that they’re nearly a decade younger than the characters we know and we’re seeing them come of age.
But are they actually teenagers or just Young Adults
@58, Its true that evac might take a while, but Romulus’ star was supposed to have gone supernova. That’s not the kind of thing that happens overnight. It takes megayears to get that far. Romulus would have been fried looooooooong before its sun went super as the star’s corona expanded out several AU over millennial timescales. Just really poor scripting in this movie.
There are so many differences in the Timeline between Real Trek and the JJ Verse that it must always have been an alternate universe, like the Mirror one, anyway. There is nothing to fix in that regard.
As for the destruction of Romulus perhaps the whole explosion faster than light which would destroy the galaxy involved those Omega Particles from ST:Voyager? The Romulans were dicking with them, which caused their star to go unstable and the resultant Omega explosion would unravel the fabric of spacetime unless a big sucky magic black hole could suck them back in?
Obviously the assholes in Section 31 decided to not bother with saving lives but instead go with that whole genocide to build Federation power plan they’d loved since the Dominion War stalled the deployment of the Jellyfish until they’d made sure Romulans were eradicated as a potential rival. See, we can still use Star Trek to hold a mirror up to modern America, if we assume something as underhanded and basically evil as that. Section 31 as the worst parts of the NSA, CIA, and those politicians who can only think in zero sum ways, and whose actions result in a new world where everyone is a jerk and all that is good is turned to ash. JJTrek is a perfect analogy then.
Quoth OmicronThetaDeltaPhi: “As for Keith’s praise that “it brought Star Trek back into the public awareness” – I don’t agree. All this film did was generate public confusion: It made people associate the words “Star Trek” with something it is not (and by now, with two more NuTrek films and the promos of “Discovery”, it seems that this new dumbed-down direction is going to be the norm).”
I should’ve been clearer — after this movie came out, there was a spike in interest in past incarnations of Trek. Novel sales, DVD sales, comics sales, merchandise sales — they all went up. Trek books started hitting the Times list for the first time since the 1990s.
And I’m not talking about the hardcore fan base, I’m not talking about people who post on nerdy blogs or go to conventions, I’m talking about the general public, who had stopped caring about Trek. This movie got it back in the general public’s consciousness.
As I’ve been saying here for the past couple of months, the non-Bad Robot movies didn’t exactly scream Trek, either. The only movie that really fit the mold of seeking out new life and new civilizations and showing Trek‘s compassionate, exploratory side was The Motion Picture, and it was a piece of crap.
Everything I’m hearing about Discovery, mostly from my friends Kirsten Beyer (one of the staff writers) and David Mack (writing the first Discovery novel and working closely with the production staff), indicates that you’re wrong about that, FWIW, though we’ll all find out for sure in September.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@59/ragnar: The star that went supernova was not Romulus’s own star. If it had, the planet would’ve been destroyed minutes later, and there would’ve been no time for Spock and the Vulcan Science Academy to arrange to “stop” the ongoing supernova. Yes, I know, it doesn’t make anything remotely close to sense, but the stated order of events in the movie is: supernova happens unexpectedly, Spock arranges to try to counter its effects, Spock sets out in the Jellyfish with red matter, blast wave reaches Romulus before Spock can prevent it. So it was a different star that blew up. (The Countdown prequel comic called the star Hobus, though that’s not canonical.)
@60/random22: There are tons of differences between TOS and the movies, TOS and TNG, TNG and ENT, etc. — not to mention all the internal contradictions within each series, like Kirk’s middle initial changing, Spock going from keeping his mating drive a shameful secret to blabbing about it casually to a stranger, Data using contractions routinely until it was suddenly asserted that he didn’t, etc. Every time a new incarnation of Trek has come along, some fans have mistaken differences in artistic interpretation for in-universe differences and insisted that it must be an alternate universe. But canon has glossed over those discrepancies and pretended it was all a single consistent universe after all. The differences between Kelvin and Prime are no greater than the many, many, many inconsistencies within Prime.
That said, the recent Star Trek Encyclopedia did put forth the hypothesis that the timeline changes caused by Nero’s incursion in 2233 might have somehow propagated backward as well as forward. Which gives future filmmakers more freedom to intentionally contradict Prime continuity if it’s useful for them to do so.
I came out of the theatre loving it and wrote a very favorable review on my personal blog.
Which I came to regret: because within a few weeks, the only parts of the movie I could remember were the terribly stupid parts. “Red Matter.” The secret to becoming a spaceship captain is to stowaway and then publicly humiliate your acting commanding officer. Everything in space is so close together, you can see a planet in another star system blowing up in real time, clear as day, bigger than seeing a full Moon from Earth. And so on. And so on.
Star Trek (2009) isn’t quite as insultingly stupid as Star Trek Into Darkness, but it’s cut from the same cloth.
I can live with reinventing characters with new actors–it says something about Trek’s cultural endurance that its characters have joined Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Dracula, and others as a franchise that transcends a single cast, and without the literary roots. I actually liked the way design elements–sets, costumes, props, ship models–referenced TOS while updating the ’60s sensibilities of the originals with early-21st-Century aesthetics. What sticks in the throat is a movie that makes no sense whatsoever when the spectacle is stripped away; a movie that is ultimately nothing more than a spare and poorly-assembled skeletal frame from which a number of thrilling-but-vapid gags have been hung: never mind that these characters are incoherent and the plot makes no sense and everything is kind of stupid when you get down to it, here’s a bunch of things exploding, here’s a couple of guys parachuting from outer space, here’s a fistfight, and somebody just said something funny we’re hoping is quotable!
In the totality of all movies ever made, Star Trek and its sequel aren’t the worst movies ever made (I never saw Beyond–fool me once, shame on… you, fool me twice and… shame on… shame on… won’t get fooled again, and all that). They’re adequately-to-well acted, well-shot, well-edited, the effects are nicely done; we are not talking Manos or The Room or Glen or Glenda, here. But in the realm of large budget, professionally produced, studio-made films by people who are adequately talented and understand the basics of their craft, the 2009 Trek and Into Darkness are pretty awful. Awful enough you could almost call them scams without being completely unfair or irrational: the rubes are promised something for their money, and it’s really debatable that what is being served up in exchange for their cash is anything near the quality entertainment that was advertised, much less something recognizably connected to the branding it was proffered under. It’s really very depressing.
I remember when this came out I described it as “so good you’ll ignore the stupid plot.”
I enjoyed watching all the characters have fun in familiar roles, and I loved the scene where they figured out that their lives had changed from what they should be due to the Romulan ship showing up in the past. They practically looked straight at the audience and screamed, “Everything’s different! It’s going to stay different! Deal with it!”
I was annoyed that they were dealing with time travel, and unlike every other instance they used time travel in Star Trek they didn’t try using it to fix anything. When young Spock hopped on old Spock’s ship I thought he was going to put two and two together and go rescue the Kelvin.
I also hated the villain and his motivation. I agree with krad’s assessment of Bana, but not a single member of his crew even said to him, “Hey, your wife’s not dead yet. She might not even be born yet. How about we just send a message to Romulus to prevent everyone from dying in the first place?”
@42/CLB: ” Because it kinda looks like a jellyfish from the side. “
I just googled. Holy crap, I never noticed that before. Bad Trekkie, no biscuit! (I don’t pay much attention to ships…)
On an emotional context, I think the movie works, especially if you see it from Spock Prime’s point of view.
I like to see it as a sequel to Unification and ST: Generations, more than anything. The way I see it, Spock Prime has lived a very, very long complicated life, has had very messy arguments with his father, and ultimately was as far away as possible from him when he passed away – and he had the chance to mend bridges with his father when he first got resurrected – they made the same mistakes over again, according to Perrin. He also lost a brother he barely got to know (ST5). At the same time, he never had the chance to say goodbye to his oldest friend, who supposedly died saving the Enterprise B, only to resurface 78 years later and die once again while saving the Veridian people from certain doom.
Back at the end of ST: Nemesis, I always felt there was room for Spock to resurface, given the newfound willingness by the Romulans to establish dialogue with the Federation, post-Shinzon, post-Dominion War. ST09 uses that as a starting point to essentially start over (I’m glad that Orci and Kurtzman at least acknowledged TNG history before resetting the timeline). Thanks to Nero and the time travel shenanigans, Spock Prime is able to relive his past and revisit his old friend. And Nimoy inhabits the role beautifully, infusing a mixture of pride, emotion and logic to a version of Spock I was thrilled to see this late in the game.
As for the rest of the movie, I stand by the emotional resonance, but it’s not without its flaws. The script is in such a hurry to blow through the plot that it really stumbles through introductions and puts more than a few Trek conventions aside in the chase for the climax. I credit Abrams for at least giving some focus on Kirk and Spock’s personal issues, letting them anchor viewers into the journey.
As for the cast, they’re stellar. There’s not on false note played. Everyone inhabits the old roles with confidence and conviction, especially Greenwood as Pike. I even appreciate Ryder and Cross as Amanda and Sarek (as to why they’ve recast the role with James Frain on Discovery, who knows).
Contrivances are aplenty. How convenient it was for Kirk to be dropped into the very planet that Spock Prime happened to be marooned, isn’t it? And how was Delta Vega able to survive the black hole’s pull if Spock was close enough to view it with naked eyes? Why did 12 year old Kirk drive straight towards an abyss? He’s supposed to be rebellious, not suicidal. Isn’t the Enterprise supposed to have a second officer ready to take command in the event of the captain and first officer being MIA? That’s the person Pike should have appointed to be the new first officer instead of Kirk.
Regarding the transwarp beaming equation, I assume Spock Prime gained this from the older Scotty we’ve seen in TNG’s Relics. It would make the most sense. That would clearly be 24th century technology – polluting the past with future technology implications aside.
I don’t have a problem with Eric Bana in the role of Nero per se (he’s better in other roles, though). I do have a problem with the character. It’s not that I don’t understand his pain or willingness to seek revenge for the loss of Romulus. It’s that it’s too simplistic. There’s not a lot of moral ambiguity in that. It’s a plain revenge-seeking drone just like Montalban’s Khan, even less interesting than Shinzon.
@krad: I’ve never read a better description of the Enterprise bridge than yours. If there’s one aspect that will seriously date the 2010’s in future decades, it’s the idea that Apple Stores were seen as state-of-the-art shopping malls.
I for one am glad Abrams chose to dial down the use of lens flares on Force Awakens, because in Trek 09, he blinded more than a few viewers, including myself. It’s cool at first glance. It’s distracting the second, and it only gets nauseating with repeated viewings. It also detracts completely from the established aesthetics of the franchise. Even going through different DPs and production designers on multiple shows and films, both the TOS and TNG era managed to establish some kind of visual consistency. Trek 09 throws that away. At the very least, ST: Enterprise had the excuse of being set a century prior to Kirk’s era, and it didn’t detract that much visually.
Regardless, I still enjoy rewatching this now and then, mostly for the performances and little moments such as Spock’s romance with Uhura. Pine and Quinto nail the lead roles, and Nimoy’s never been better as Spock. The plus side? This arrangement allowed for me to enjoy Nimoy in the William Bell role afterwards on Fringe.
Having said that, it’s clear from this film and its successors that Trek is still best served as a TV show. You can’t hook this much history on a movie franchise alone, which only gives us glimpses of the story every three years. It took Paramount long enough to realize that. I only hope Discovery works for the best.
One detail I forgot to mention. It’s a very flawed film, but it has what I consider to be the best opening teaser for any of the 13 films. George Kirk’s sacrifice gets me every time, and it’s one of the rare instances that Giacchino’s score rises to the occasion. Pre-Thor Hemsworth nails it. Jennifer Morrison’s criminally underused by the way.
I had a few nitpicky objections about this movie, which seem insignificant next to the movie’s more major flaws, but for some reason they stick in my mind.
1. Uhura ordering a drink with “Cardassian” as part of the name. Cardassians aren’t seen until the 24th century. Yes, I know it’s possible that they were known in the 23rd century and were just never seen, but I wish Abrams hadn’t pushed this particular button.
2. The choice of Delta Vega as name of the planet Scott was on. It bears absolutely no resemblance to its namesake planet in WNMHGB (ice planet vs. temperate, monsters vs. devoid of life besides the plants conjured by Mitchell).
3. A tribble on Scott’s desk? Really? How does a Starfleet officer even know about tribbles this early on?
4. Speaking of Scott and Delta Vega, that bit about Admiral Archer’s prize beagle struck me as odd. Given the time frame, Porthos must have died decades ago and this would have to be a new beagle.
@56/Mike: I’ve never seen TOS Kirk as a womanizer at all. What the writers did was come up with a great many creative ideas to have him kiss a different woman every fourth episode without ever having him seduce a woman for fun or easy sex – stuff like brain washing, chemical tears, lending out his body, pretending to be his own evil counterpart, seducing enemies in order to get out of trouble, to name but a few.
@58/Christopher: “The screenwriters took a cue from Diane Carey’s novel Best Destiny, which approached the teenage Kirk in essentially the same way, as a directionless punk who needed an adventure aboard the early Enterprise […] to set him straight and save him from a life of delinquency.”
You said that before in one of the early rewatch comment threads, and that’s why I never read the novel. So thank you for that. Because I dislike this particular origin story, and it bothers me that I encounter it so often. It almost seems to be the default origin story for male characters, with the emerging message that a reckless, rebellious youth is a requirement for greatness. And I’m fairly certain that this message is wrong. One of the things I really liked about “The Autobiography of James T. Kirk” was that the author wrote a very different, and more plausible, young Kirk. (And I don’t like “Tapestry” either.)
“The original never had much personality […].”
I disagree. The original was charming, tough, caring (hugging Chapel in “What Are Little Girls Made Of”), playful (teasing Spock and Charlie in “Charlie X”), technically inclined (repairing the communications console in “Who Mourns for Adonais”, admiring the cool new spaceship in TSFS), and a good singer. She had a lot of personality, especially for someone who didn’t appear in a great many scenes.
“Again, the whole idea is that they’re nearly a decade younger than the characters we know and we’re seeing them come of age.”
That isn’t an excuse. My thirteen-year-old daughter is more mature than these people.
@69/JanaJansen: Adding to the maturity comment, I can’t help but wonder what if Harve Bennett had managed to produce and release Starfleet Academy back in 1990/1991 (instead of ST6). How his take on younger versions of Kirk, Spock, etc. would have fared for that matter. I know that version had young Bones taking care of his ailing father prior to becoming the Enterprise’s CMO.
Yeah, Uhura gets fleshed out as Spock’s love interest. What an advance.
@63/Eric
Here I actually agree.
I think the cast of this movie was superb. I would have actually loved seeing a thoughtful high-quality reboot of the TOS era with these guys acting as our heros.
But that’s not what we got, which is such a shame.
@61/Krad
True. But it’s a matter of degree. Undiscovered Country – with all its flaws – was about forging a peace with a sworn enemy. First Contact was about humanity’s first contact with extrateressterial life, which is as Trekkish a motif as one can get.
ST2009 – on the other hand – has nothing on this front. It’s just a brainless action movie with the words “Star Trek” stamped on it. Not a bad brainless action movie, but that’s what it is.
@58/CLB
The film is set in 2258, so James Kirk is supposed to be 25, McCoy 31, Spock 28 and Scotty 36.
And even if they were supposed to be teenagers (which they’re not) this does not excuse their immature behaviors. Most 16 year-olds don’t behave like that, and those who do are brats who will never amount to anything in their life anyway.
The notion that Starfleet will accept such a bunch of misfits as cadets is already straining believability to a breaking point. The idea that one of these misfits is instantly promoted to a f***-ing captain of a f***-ing starship is so absurd that isn’t even funny.
Besides, there’s something really really annoying in having the exact kind pompous “cool” boys who always bully Trekkies and nerds in general, at the helm of the beloved Enterprise. Even if this notion made any kind of in-universe sense, I would still have hated it.
57: Viewing a planet as “more important” because of its political relevance (founding member of Federation) or because it’s “the homeworld of one of the main characters” is, in my view, silly. The people murdered by Nomad don’t matter less because their planet was not (as far as we know) a founding member of the Federation and we don’t know anybody from there. For all its flaws, Star Trek: Generations gets this exactly right. A planet we have never heard of matters just as much as Earth or Vulcan.
“Besides, can you name one way in which NuTrek is optimistic? It’s not like the entire film is flowers and butterflies with Vulcan’s destruction being the sole moment that sours eveything.”
I am not neccesarily disagreeing with the idea that NuTrek is less optimistic. I am merely disagreeing with the contention that it’s less optimistic because a planet was destroyed. That concept has been part of the franchise since day one. And I reject the notion that some fictional planets are more equal than others (including fictional versions of Earth).
Re: Timeline “fixing,” 58 answered better than I could.
As I said a few rewatches back, I really wish they’d had the guts to actually reboot Star Trek instead of giving us a load of alternate timeline copout. When I first watched it, I was wondering if maybe this could be the origin of the prime characters up until the point Vulcan exploded, when I went “Ah! New continuity. Bold decision” and sat back to enjoy it. Then Leonard Nimoy turns up. And lovely as it is to see him again, suddenly we’re back in the same old continuity and the film’s basically saying “We just erased all of existing Star Trek except Enterprise from history.” Abrams has claimed otherwise, people have written whole novels trying to say why not, but if you go down that route we’re in the same cosmology as Marvel Comics where changing history doesn’t change anything, it just creates a new timeline. Which would mean that, for instance, the crew in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” died for nothing because both timelines would still exist either way. It seems I’m behind everyone else because it was only a few weeks ago that the solution hit me: Nero didn’t create a new timeline, he and Spock Prime travelled to a parallel universe. The prime universe has always existed, the Abramsverse has always existed, they have, do and always will exist independently of each other. Phew, I can sleep again.
To be honest, I suspect the decline of Star Trek had less to do with whether there was too much of it or whether it was any good but more than it was resembling less and less what people thought of as Star Trek. To most people “Star Trek” doesn’t mean “A bunch of people on a spaceship talking about the Federation with Klingons in it”, it means “Kirk and Spock, and maybe that Picard guy if that’s all that’s on.” (Telling the same stories in the same way as you were fifteen years ago, the real failing of Enterprise, might not have helped.) This was pretty much the only way Star Trek could get a shot in the arm, since no-one would want to see a film about Captain Thingie and the Enterprise-Z. And it was the right time for it to happen. We wouldn’t have accepted recasts in 1991 when Shatner et al were alive and reasonably well. But the decade leading up to this film was the point where the original cast started dying and we realised that if we were going to see the original crew again it would have to be new versions. It was the only way to give Star Trek new life, instead of serving up warmed over leftovers with spin-offs of spin-offs of spin-offs. In a way, criticising Chris Pine for playing Kirk different from William Shatner is like criticising Michael Keaton for playing Batman different from Adam West (which people did). That said, Karl Urban is instantly McCoy with one off-screen line of dialogue.
It’s hard to tell whether the film was trying to make Uhura’s fanon first name canon or whether someone googled “Uhura’s first name” and didn’t realise it didn’t come from the series. Either way, I stubbornly refuse to accept that it’s Prime Uhura’s name as well. Memory Alpha insists it is because Nichelle Nichols and Gene Rodenberry mentioned it a few times. I eagerly await the day when a bored Voyager staff writers announces the first officer’s real name was Eric Chakotay and it becomes canon.
I’m sorry but does anyone else think the computer not understanding Chekov’s accent is one of the most racist jokes in Star Trek history? It’s probably meant to make us fondly remember TVH but in 2009 hadn’t we got past “Ha-ha, foreigners sound funny!”? Was the universal translator on the fizz or what?
It has become a staple that the first installment in a series has to be The Origin Story. It’s not a new phenomenon: As someone pointed out, TOS could start with the crew all on the ship mid-mission (and start with any old episode) but TNG had to have a proper first episode of the crew meeting up and coming together. (Later series were even more pronounced.) Here though, they not only want to tell the story of how Kirk became captain of the Enterprise but also the story of how he joined Starfleet and how he was born. Result: He goes from cadet to captain in a few days, because we need him in his proper role by the end. Yeah.
I think it’s largely unknown in the US but for some of us, Chris Hemsworth will always be best known for his regular role in Home and Away. That provided me with at least one handy in-joke, but more on that in a couple of rewatches’ time…
62: That said, the recent Star Trek Encyclopedia did put forth the hypothesis that the timeline changes caused by Nero’s incursion in 2233 might have somehow propagated backward as well as forward. Which gives future filmmakers more freedom to intentionally contradict Prime continuity if it’s useful for them to do so.
I’ve mentioned it on Tor in the past, but it seems to me that the natural assumption has to be that the past changed too, because all the time travel done by people in the “future” now won’t happen. E.g., suppose that the Star Trek IV probe shows up and Kelvin Kirk and Spock get the same idea to travel to the 1980’s to steal a humpback whale. Are they really out of luck because the other Kirk and Spock “already” stole George and Gracie? That’s one possible way of handling it, but it’s equally plausible to say that the past has been changed because PrimeKirk and PrimeSpock never went back to steal George and Gracie the events of that year changed. Add in all the other time travel we know about (and all the other time travel that happened but the viewer never saw) and the Nero incursion would naturally make numerous changes, both backwards and forwards.
@68/richf: “1. Uhura ordering a drink with “Cardassian” as part of the name. Cardassians aren’t seen until the 24th century. Yes, I know it’s possible that they were known in the 23rd century and were just never seen, but I wish Abrams hadn’t pushed this particular button.”
It’s not just possible, though, it’s actually canon according to DS9.
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Iloja_of_Prim
@63/eric: “Everything in space is so close together, you can see a planet in another star system blowing up in real time, clear as day, bigger than seeing a full Moon from Earth.”
Since that scene was in a mind-meld vision, I took it as a symbolic representation of Spock telepathically sensing the destruction of Vulcan, as he sensed the Intrepid‘s destruction in “The Immunity Syndrome.” Although I guess The Force Awakens proves that isn’t what Abrams had in mind.
Anyway, it’s unclear whether Delta Vega is in a different star system or in the Vulcan system. Really, there aren’t any good candidate stars en route from 40 Eridani to Sol that could be it.
And you really shouldn’t avoid Beyond on the basis of the first two movies. Beyond is from a different creative team, and they bring a different sensibility to it. It has less nonsensical content and it feels more like TOS, albeit with a lot more action.
@66/Eduardo: “I even appreciate Ryder and Cross as Amanda and Sarek (as to why they’ve recast the role with James Frain on Discovery, who knows).”
Probably because Cross was more expensive or less available than Frain, or wasn’t willing to commit to a recurring gig.
“Regarding the transwarp beaming equation, I assume Spock Prime gained this from the older Scotty we’ve seen in TNG’s Relics. It would make the most sense.”
People keep forgetting that TNG established the existence of interstellar transporter technology in “Bloodlines.” It was called a subspace transporter rather than transwarp beaming, but it did the same thing, allowing transporter use across interstellar distances, so there’s no reason to doubt that they’re the same technology. (Especially since the term “transwarp beaming” wasn’t meant to apply merely to beaming across interstellar distances, but specifically beaming from a planet onto a starship at warp — so not “transwarp” in the previous sense of “beyond warp,” but in the sense of “across warp,” beaming from the outside of a warp bubble to the inside. Although the writers of the second film forgot this.)
“I for one am glad Abrams chose to dial down the use of lens flares on Force Awakens“
There was no reason to expect him to use lens flares in Star Wars. They’re not a universal trademark of his work, they’re something he adopted specifically for Star Trek because he saw it as a visual pun on ST’s “bright future.” As in, “The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.”
@68/richf: DS9 established that Dax’s second host Tobin had known the exiled Cardassian poet Iloja of Prim on Vulcan in the 22nd century. (I showed the circumstances of their meeting in my novel Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic.) So yes, Cardassians as a species were known to the Federation by the 23rd century, even though there wasn’t regular contact with their government yet.
As for the two Delta Vegas, I always figured they were both properties of the Delta Vega Mining Consortium or something. As for tribbles, it’s an alternate timeline that diverged 25 years earlier. Plenty of things could’ve changed in that time, so there’s no reason tribbles couldn’t have been introduced sooner.
And yes, the beagle can’t possibly be Porthos. For that matter, Admiral Archer probably isn’t Jonathan. He’d have to be 146 years old, which is implausibly old for a 22nd-century human. It’s far more likely that it’s a child or grandchild of his who inherited his love of beagles.
@69/Jana: Fair point about Uhura’s personality. I guess what I meant is that her character didn’t have a lot of specifics established — we saw how she acted and related to people, but we had only the barest hints about her background and her life beyond her work. She never even gained an official first name until this very movie.
@71/princessroxana: Yes, being Spock’s love interest is one of the things Uhura is, but she’s much more than that. She’s also Kirk’s gadfly, basically taking over McCoy’s traditional role — the one who refuses to buy his crap and challenges him to be better. The moment we know he’s found it within himself to be a worthy leader is the moment when Uhura finally expresses trust in him. He wasn’t good enough until she decided he was good enough.
And if anything, I’ve always seen it less as that Uhura is defined as Spock’s love interest and more that Spock is redefined as being Uhura’s love interest. She’s the aggressor in the relationship, the more emotionally mature one, the one who draws him out and gives him the freedom to be more connected, more emotional. Yes, it’s a supportive role, but it’s anything but a subordinate one. She’s able to be supportive to a Vulcan because she has such enormous strength and commitment of her own.
@74/cap-mjb: “but if you go down that route we’re in the same cosmology as Marvel Comics where changing history doesn’t change anything, it just creates a new timeline. Which would mean that, for instance, the crew in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” died for nothing because both timelines would still exist either way.”
First: Realistically, the model that a new timeline would coexist with the old makes infinitely more scientific and logical sense than the model that it would “overwrite” the old. Physically and mathematically, there’s virtually no way for the latter to happen. Two timelines that branch apart even slightly will swiftly accumulate so many progressively greater differences that the quantum probability that they could reconverge again becomes infinitesimal. The “overwriting” model is preferred by fiction because it has higher stakes — a time travel story where your original history is in no danger of being erased is less dramatic — but the coexistence model should be seen as the natural default.
Second: I don’t understand why so many people assume that every time travel must happen the same way — that if two timelines can coexist, it automatically means that all timelines must coexist. Physics doesn’t work that way. The outcome of a physical process can be different when the initial conditions are different. For instance, letting go of a ball while standing on the Earth’s surface will have a very different result from letting go of a ball while orbiting out in space, and lighting a match in a 20% oxygen atmosphere will have a very different result from lighting a match in a 100% oxygen atmosphere. So even in a fictional universe where timelines can be overwritten, that doesn’t mean that it must always happen that way. There could be some cases where a timeline is overwritten and other cases where the two timelines coexist, depending on the specific physical conditions of the time travel.
“It’s hard to tell whether the film was trying to make Uhura’s fanon first name canon or whether someone googled “Uhura’s first name” and didn’t realise it didn’t come from the series.”
Uhura was referred to as Nyota in numerous tie-in novels, and we know that Kurtzman & Orci were familiar with at least some of the novels (indeed, they cited my debut novel Ex Machina as one of their favorites, which may be why I’m easier on their films that many fans are).
@77/ChristopherLBennett “Since that scene was in a mind-meld vision, I took it as a symbolic representation of Spock telepathically sensing the destruction of Vulcan, as he sensed the Intrepid‘s destruction in “The Immunity Syndrome.” Although I guess The Force Awakens proves that isn’t what Abrams had in mind.”
I’ve seen that rationalizarion all over the place, and I just don’t recall anything in the movie to support that interpretation, nor am I buying it. It’s not just TFA that demonstrates that that isn’t what Abrams had in mind: Into Darkness also plays fast and loose with distances. (The example that irritated me most being the Enterprise‘s nearly-free-fall from the Moon to Earth in minutes, a trip that takes around three days without significant applications of thrust to speed things up. Lest you think I’m picking a lone and rare nit, how far is it to the Klingon border? And those are just off the top of my head.)
I should also point out that the rules about distance and the passage of time in movies are soft and floppy, and that it’s really the kind of thing that becomes a source of trouble in a movie that’s just not all that good. Time and distance are a totally incoherent mess in The Empire Strikes Back, for instance (How long does it take to get from the Hoth System to the Bespin System, and is that enough time for someone to go from Hoth to Dagobah and nearly complete their Jedi training and then fly from Dagobah to Bespin before a carbonite slab has a chance to cool down? Enh, who the hell really knows?), but it doesn’t really break the movie because it’s otherwise a very well constructed, engaging film. The defense isn’t, as some people have it, that Star Wars is fantasy and rules don’t matter (Tolkien would like to have words with you if you think time and distance don’t need to be adhered to in fantasy works), the defense is that critiquing Empire‘s sloppy handling of the issue is absolute legitimate, but the film has so much credit in the other column they can give that particular demerit a pass, or even just have a nice laugh about it.
For me–and it seems maybe for others–Star Trek (2009) just doesn’t build up enough pluses in the credits column to make up for the liabilities. I didn’t think about the distance issue in Empire for years, but I thought about it in Trek while I was watching the film and then it stayed with me, like a gnat trying to fly into my eyes that refuses to be waved away, and then after a while that obnoxious gnat and its friends, neighbors, family, and professional colleagues were all that was left. It was what Gahan Wilson, back in his film critic days, referred to as a plot lump, and one that wouldn’t stay down.
—–
I won’t rule out seeing Beyond eventually, if it’s on Netflix or something. But no–although I read some good reviews (and some not-good reviews, honestly), I think I’d rather indulge my Trekiness in other ways. It’s enough of the same players, even if Orci and Kurtzman and Abrams and Lindelof are all gone away, for me to think that throwing more money after it would be throwing good money down a hole after wasted money. I can think of a few hundred other Trek things I’d rather spend the cost of a DVD on, including books, comics, and games; time-wise I’m in the middle of an epic rewatch that hasn’t reached Voyager yet and Beyond is the length of, what, three episodes? Four? But thank you for the recommendation.
@79/eric: It’s not about whether the movie intended that interpretation, which it clearly didn’t. It’s about whether I can reconcile it in my own mind with the Trek universe as I understand it. As viewers and readers of fiction, we are allowed to be active participants and interpret a work. We aren’t required to be couch potatoes just passively absorbing what’s fed to us. We get to add things in our minds that aren’t in the text. Star Trek fans have been using their own imaginations to think up ways to fix plot and logic holes in the show since the 1960s.
Beyond is 2 hours, 2 minutes long, which is about 2.7 times the length of a Voyager episode.
@80/ChristopherLBennett Yes, I am aware that we can be active participants interpreting a work. Where I may disagree with you is in defining as “interpretation” what I would call “Rewriting the inadequate material presented in the work so that it becomes more acceptable than what was originally proffered.”
To be clear, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with rewriting a story to make it “better” in some way. Shakespeare made an entire career out of it. (Of course the flip side of that is that Thomas Bowdler made a career out of it, too. Which is why I had to rewrite the first sentence of this paragraph from “nothing wrong” to “not necessarily anything wrong.” I guess it depends on how you’re doing it and why.) But the fact that I mentally rewrote a story to make it better–or that I had to, because it wasn’t good enough to stand on its own in the first place–doesn’t repair deficiencies in a work (much less salvage it).
So I could watch three Voyager episodes, roughly, in the time it would take to watch Beyond. Yeah, Voyager is probably a better use of my time these days, even if one of the episodes is that one where flying too fast mysteriously turns Janeway and Paris into horny newts (oi).
Very interesting comments from everyone. To boil it all down, I think the movie is the result of what happens when a studio wants to kick-start an old franchise and so they hire a “hip” director and think of a contrivance (the convenient alternate-timeline) so they can re-imagine the characters to fit into the more macho/aggressive and less-nuanced style of plot that is in vogue these days. But they knew they had to fan-service the shit out of it as well, so they make sure Nimoy shows up, they throw some tribbles in there, and they pepper the plot with other things that will give long-time fans of the franchise that warm gooey feeling of nostalgia, even as they watch new faces and personalities inhabiting those iconic roles.
I liked the casting, but the way they coarsened the personalities of, well, everyone left me a bit cold. I know that’s the age talking, but with this movie and each successive movie in this timeline, I see them moving further away from the characters in favor of choreographed and highly-editing action scenes. I can get that on almost any other screen in the metroplex. And I agree with some of the others; these characters, especially the two leads, are immature, impulsive, vindictive little brats. If it wasn’t for Spock’s ears, I’d question Sarek’s paternity status.
@78/ChristopherLBennett: Yes, well, physically and mathematically you can’t travel faster than life. If a fictional universe has established a set of rules as to how that universe works, then they have to stick to it, not suddenly change them and expect the audience not to notice. Otherwise Kirk might as well just have saved Edith Keeler and happily lived out a life with her in the 1930s secure in the knowledge that his crew and the rest of the Federation were getting on with their lives in the old timeline.
Maybe someone on the writing staff knew what they were doing adopting Uhura’s non-canon first name but I think JJ Abrams has gone on record as saying he had no idea it wasn’t canon until the internet backlash started. So apparently they didn’t tell him.
Ahem. That was meant to be “faster than light”. Obviously.
@82/fullyfunctional: I’m not sure “hip” is a word that makes sense here. Star Trek was only the second feature film Abrams had directed; he was big as a producer/writer and very occasional director in TV, but not anything like a name director in features at that point. (Indeed, he had fewer directorial credits to his name at the time than Jonathan Frakes had had when he was picked to direct First Contact.) Abrams wasn’t chosen to direct based on trendiness or something, but on the strength of his first feature film for Paramount, Mission: Impossible III. That was a film adaptation of a Desilu TV franchise from the 1960s, directed and produced by Abrams and written by Kurtzman & Orci, and it was a successful relaunch of an M:I film series that had been moribund for 6 years. That made it a close parallel to the situation with Star Trek, so Paramount figured that if that team was able to pull it off with M:I, they could do the same with ST.
@83/cap-mjb: I find it bizarre that there would be an “Internet backlash” to finally, finally giving Uhura an official first name. Nothing is canon until it shows up onscreen, so who cares where it came from? If they’d made up an entirely new first name for Uhura, like, say, Safira, it would’ve had just as little basis in “canon,” so it’s utterly nonsensical to think “canon” makes any difference here. Too many fans use “canon” as a bludgeon and an excuse for bullying and hating, and they deserve to be ignored.
Also, you’re dead wrong to say that prior Trek had a consistent set of rules about how time travel worked. In fact, just about every possible interpretation of time travel rules has shown up in Trek at some point. Yes, sometimes we have the overwritten-timeline model like in “City on the Edge” or “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” But we also have self-consistent causal-loop time travel in “Assignment: Earth” and TVH, where what the characters do in the past is part of what their history was all along. And we have an implication of a coexisting-parallels model in “Yesteryear,” when Spock wishes Thelin long life and prosperity in his reality just before he goes back in time to reset his own. There’s even the weirdness of DS9: “Accession,” where the past is changed at the end but everyone remembers both versions. The claim that ST has ever had a single, uniform model of time travel is laughably untrue.
@85, fair enough; I used “hip” as applicable to someone in tune with the zeitgeist, and Abrams work in TV certainly established that he knows what the younger demographic wants to see.
@74,
“I’m sorry but does anyone else think the computer not understanding Chekov’s accent is one of the most racist jokes in Star Trek history?”
Russian isn’t a race. I really wish people would stop that. Its perfectly fine to not like the joke (and it was and still is painfully unfunny to watch it) on the grounds that its anti-nationalist, like an Irish or Polish joke, but its not racist.
@86/fullyfunctional: I don’t see how that’s a problem. The whole point of doing a new version of something is to introduce it to a new audience, not just to cater to the people who are already fans. Star Trek was never meant to be retro or nostalgic. The original series was daring and cutting-edge and boundary-pushing and convention-defying. Visually, it broke new ground — it was part of the first wave of NBC shows in full color, and it created visual effects of a complexity that had never been achieved on television before. Storywise, it was the first non-anthology science fiction TV show to be written as an adult drama instead of a children’s/family show, and it was quite daring in its handling of social issues and pushed the envelope on sexuality. The only things that were retro about it were the classic orchestral scoring and Jerry Finnerman’s noir-influenced cinematography; in every other respect, it was modern and new. So I quite liked the fact that the new movies were updated in their visual and storytelling style. Star Trek should be modern and forward-looking. That’s the way to be true to the spirit of the original.
And as far as appealing to the younger demographic, isn’t that the whole reason Chekov was created? This, too, is true to the spirit of TOS.
61. krad, I’m glad to hear that about Discovery. I’m actually really looking forward to that series and find it funny how people are so willing to hate on it based on a short preview and some set photos.
@87: To be fair, I didn’t actually specify that it was racist because he’s Russian. Maybe it’s anti-Slav?
Re the Cardassians: It was canonically established in TNG’s “Chain of Command” (only their third appearance!) that within living memory they had turned from a peaceful spiritual people to the more militaristic society we’re familiar with. So the 23rd century Cardassians would probably have played a very different role on the galactic stage.
@90,
Slav isn’t a race either.
@91/cap-mjb: Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t even see an implication in the exchange you’re talking about that it was within living memory. Madred asked Picard what he knew about Cardassian history, he said they were once a peaceful people with a rich spiritual life. That says to me that it’s a more obscure fact, something with a longer timespan than within less than a century. When I swap out the fictional references to various real-life historical references within living memory, none of them sound like reasonable dialogue to me, but it does when I swap it out to something more on the order of multiple centuries.
@88 As I said, I completely acknowledge That my preferences for these characters to remain a little more cerebral and thoughtful and less edgy and impulsive is my age talking. That said, I think these days there’s still room for character driven scifi, especially with a franchise like this one. I’ll leave my comments on the other 2 movies for the future, but with each successive film I see them moving further away from character and more toward formulaic action. In my view, the characters are becoming more one dimensional and predictable. The fundamental nature of this version of these characters has now been established, and I hope they decide there’s some value in letting them develop beyond their “gosh aren’t I intense?” one-note personalities.
Since 2009 I’ve seen people say Star Trek needs to move forward and Abrams did just that with this movie. How so? He simply took a ’60s television series and gave it a big budget gloss. There’s nothing I can find that says this version of Star Trek is progressing beyond 1969. Risk in rebooting is not risky enough.
TNG, DS9 and some elements of Voyager were bigger steps forward. Gone were the dumb miniskirts (Yes, I know it was empowering for women at the time, but they still look ridiculous, like Seven’s catsuit. Are you an officer or a waitress delivering coffee?), and we routinely saw women admirals giving Picard and Sisko orders. Plus we had great characters like Dax and Kira. I didn’t see any of that in this movie or its sequel (Beyond made a baby step in the right direction with Commodore Paris and Sulu I suppose). Either be true to adapting TOS or truly move forward into our future, not the 1960’s version. You can’t have it both ways.
@95/marc7: Any incarnation of Trek that exists exclusively in movies is doomed to be more superficial and action-driven than an incarnation that exists on television. That’s just the nature of American movies these days. I’m actually a bit disappointed that the upcoming Discovery TV series is set in the Prime universe instead of Kelvin, because a Kelvin-based TV series could’ve finally given that continuity the depth and sophistication that it couldn’t get from movies alone, and that might’ve improved opinions of that timeline as a whole.
58. ChristopherLBennett – “He was that kid on the side of the road when Kirk drove by in the Corvette. There was an earlier scene, which was scripted and shot but cut out, which featured Sam complaining about their treatment by their awful Uncle Frank and running away from home. It was right afterward that young Jim decided to steal Frank’s prized antique car as his own gesture of protest. But that scene was cut out of the film, so young Jim’s dialogue in the drive-by shot was redubbed to change “Sam” into some random kid called “Johnny.””
So what you’re saying is that Sam actually wasn’t the kid on the side of the road. They thought about it but he’s actually some kid named Johnny.
Who knows why Johnny works better than Sam. If fans catch the name, it’s an Easter egg. If newbies don’t, not’s no big deal. They essentially made it no big deal for everyone.
“And Spock Prime has the knowledge, but not the resources — and there are all sorts of ethical questions about erasing a timeline that’s had 25 years of its own independent existence. “
Spock does have the resources. NuSpock gets the Jellyfish back for the climax. Swap the red matter into a shuttle and let Old Spock slingshot around the sun.
And the universe of COTEOF existed for hundreds of years after McCoy traveled back in time. They had no problem changing it that time. As Kirk said in his log: “We have only one chance. We have asked the Guardian to show us Earth’s history again. Spock and I will go back into time ourselves and attempt to set right what ever it was that McCoy changed.”
@58/Christopher: “The screenwriters took a cue from Diane Carey’s novel Best Destiny, which approached the teenage Kirk in essentially the same way, as a directionless punk who needed an adventure aboard the early Enterprise […] to set him straight and save him from a life of delinquency.”
Which is the main reason I dislike that book. The character of JTK is unlikable throughout.
Also –
“He also told Kirk that he couldn’t meet his counterpart due to grave consequences to the space-time continuum, but that was just to make sure that Kirk and Spock were able to work together in this timeline as they did in his.”
In other words, Old Spock wanted to ensure his Nu counterpart didn’t have the opportunity to have a life of his own. He wanted it to be as much like Old Spock’s as possible. “Sorry Nu Spock but you’re destined to be second banana to a frat boy for a large part of your life. It was good enough for me so I’m doing what I can to ensure it’s good enough for you too.”
And let’s not forget that transwarp beaming came back in Into Darkness where the technology is now man portable and able to beam you from earth to the Klingon Homeworld. Yes, I know ADF tried to fix it in the novelization but that’s not who the move portrayed it. So who needs fleets for colonization? Just beam your colonists to their new planet and if someone needs medical help that isn’t available, just beam them back. At least prior Trek tended to ignore their one off technology. JJ Trek doesn’t do that but they tend to ignore the real possibilities of it.
On the acting of the principals: I am willing to allow that the problems I have with Chris Pine’s Kirk are due to the writing and directing of the character. Like JanaJansen @69, I dislike and disagree with the notion that great leaders are likely to have been reckless, rebellious youths. This Kirk is an immature, obnoxious punk and I didn’t believe him as a starship captain until the third movie. And no, I don’t accept that as a believable character arc.
On Quinto’s Spock, I agree with Youngheart80 @22 and Curly @23 that this Spock’s default emotion seems always to be anger or annoyance. I’ve tried to figure out whether this is partly appearance; his face at rest looks to me rather pouty. But in any case, I found it very off-putting.
I mostly did not like how this movie and the next handled Uhura in relation to Spock. She does seem to be focused on arguments with Spock at inappropriate times and in inappropriate ways. And while I grant some of the positive things CLB says @77, I think it’s extremely difficult for a female character to be paired with such an iconic, central male character as Spock and not be defined in relation to him. People didn’t say “they made Spock Uhura’s boyfriend”—they said “they made Uhura Spock’s girlfriend.” Given that imbalance, I’d much rather they had given Spock some other girlfriend and let Uhura be professional and highly competent *and* have a more developed personality through interactions with colleagues (and perhaps a lover/family who are planetside).
I find it interesting that the miniskirts didn’t show up here until comment #95. I was seriously irritated that they decided to go with the miniskirt uniforms. These were a bit less laughable in the 1960’s, when some serious professional women actually wore miniskirts to work. (Though it never seemed to me to be remotely believable as a practical outfit to wear daily on a spaceship.) When women in American society currently (2009) are *not* usually wearing miniskirts to work, these uniforms seem even more bizarre. I don’t think we have to get into all the hoary arguments about whether body-revealing outfits can be empowering for women to conclude that they don’t make sense as Starfleet uniforms. And that therefore they have been chosen (even if by the women themselves) solely to engage the male gaze.
@54 dunsel—Yes! Yes! Yes! Maybe the script needed a reason to keep Spock Prime out of the action, but as you say, this was a totally wrongheaded one. Does the survival of planets and species depend on Spock and Kirk becoming friends? No, just the survival of the franchise. In-universe, it’s really not worth risking what Spock Prime is willing to risk here.
And on a far less consequential matter: I stand with those who found the whole ex post facto derivation of the nickname “Bones” to be painfully contrived and unnecessary. Yes, CLB, there may be new idiomatic expressions in centuries to come, but this particular one in all its awkwardness was so obviously invented to explain the nickname that I also groaned. You don’t have to know the term “sawbones” to deduce that “bones” is some sort of reference to a physician’s attention to our innards.
I have to admit that I hated this movie when I saw it in IMAX – too loud, too much lens flare, and I got a headache. I’m not sure I could ever be cool with hanging the plot of a comedy action film on an act of genocide (even of a made up alien species). And all the characters are arseholes; Kirk in the reboot is a total tool, and Spock dating Uhura while she’s still a student and he’s in a position of power over her makes him look a bit skeevy tbh (I’m not into the pairing in general, I must admit, but I’m not against it necessarily – but, to be fair, a lot of Spock’s flirtations in the original series were also skeevy).
The casting is great, though. And I did enjoy Leonard Nimoy as Ambassador Spock (RIP), as well as getting to see John Cho’s magnificently structured face on a very big screen.
98. Saavik – Also, in regards to Kirk calling McCoy “Bones” because of his divorce. It seems like a dick move, reminding him every single day that he lost everything to his ex-wife.
Besides, he didn’t lose everything but his bones. He’s still got flesh over them. The statement “Lost everything but my bones” makes no sense.
@98/Saavik: “People didn’t say “they made Spock Uhura’s boyfriend”—they said “they made Uhura Spock’s girlfriend.””
The value of an idea is not in how many people say it. Many of the most important ideas start out as minority opinions. To me, if something is the conventional wisdom, that’s all the more reason to question and challenge it. Personally, when I hear people defining Kelvin Uhura in that way, I see that as an expression of their own gender bias, because they choose to focus exclusively on that single aspect of her character and ignore the rest of how she’s actually portrayed in the film.
I’ve seen it said by at least one African-American female commentator that it’s a major positive step for an American movie to portray a black woman as someone worthy of being loved and desired. That’s certainly progress from TOS, when the initial hints of flirtation between Spock and Uhura got quashed pretty quickly and she and Sulu were the only two characters who never had a romantic plotline. After all, it’s not a bad thing to be loved, to be in a healthy relationship. It’s only a problem if that’s the only thing that defines a character, and that is not the case with Uhura in this movie. I think Uhura is defined here by her strength, and love is a form of strength.
@101 ChristopherLBennett: I guess I don’t see why Uhura can’t be loved and desired by a character who offers as much emotional labour to the relationship as she does, instead of expecting her to do all the work.
And heck, if they’d done something really wild like given her a forbidden relationship with a Romulan or something like that, she could have also have had a character arc.
I do think the Spock/Uhura relationship explains a lot of the differences between this Spock and original timeline Spock, though. Because Quinto’s Spock is getting a lot of his emotional needs met by a serious girlfriend at this point in time, whereas original series Spock didn’t even want to admit he had emotional needs until later on when he’d stumbled into intense codependent friendships with Kirk and McCoy, it makes sense to me that he’s more openly emotional and closer to his human side. Though, FWIW, I never watched Into Darkness so there could be more stuff contextualising things in that film that I don’t know about.
@101 CLB–I am not judging the movie’s treatment of Uhura by how people in general spoke of the relationship. I am saying that when a female character gets romantically linked with such an iconic, central male character, she is likely to be seen in relation to him and to be overshadowed by his character in people’s minds. So I’d rather have kept Uhura free of Spock’s romantic orbit, and given her a lover who would not be a more important character in the Star Trek world than she is. That’s not even to mention the teacher/student and Starfleet hierarchy power issues which other commenters have referred to.
Uhura is defined as being Spock’s girlfriend because that’s mostly all she is in these movies. Besides her usual job answering the phone, she worries about Spock, argues with Spock, looks longingly at Spock, etc. Meanwhile Spock has other worries besides her. There’s his planet, his species, his parents, Starfleet, his future self, and so forth. He’s a complete character. There’s a lot of stuff in the story for him to chew on, and Uhura, while being elevated from a glorified button pusher, doesn’t get much else to do besides have a relationship with another lead character and deliver the usual plot beats. (Nice she finally got a first name though!)
They come close to giving her a great hero moment with the Klingons in the sequel but we’ll get to that.
Somehow this comment ended up on a different post even though I’m certain I posted it on this thread. Just mentioning it in case it happens again and there’s a database issue…
I don’t dislike this movie – I reserve that for Into Darkness – but I couldn’t resist the temptation, and this movie made me commit filk for the first time in a couple of decades. The idea of writing Red Matter Ball to the tune of Cyrkle’s 1966 song Red Rubber Ball was just too delicious to pass up.
@93/Idran:
Madred says that people starved before the military took over but that doesn’t happen anymore and then recalls being a starving child on the streets. Either Madred is very blinkered (which isn’t impossible but it suggests a great capacity for self-delusion) or the military took a long time to make things better (which again suggests their role in 23rd century politics was very different) or the military taking over and organising better living conditions happened in his lifetime.
“Nobody went right casting Bana in anything”
Chopper. He was mesmerizing in that. But unless you happened to be in Australia at just the right time, you probably missed it. And since then… yeah.
Was there any explanation of why anyone should recognize Romulans or their language, given that nobody had seen them for over 100 years in Balance of Terror? If Nero had pointed them in that direction earlier, the timeline should’ve been even more divergent.
@70/Eduardo: “I know that version had young Bones taking care of his ailing father prior to becoming the Enterprise’s CMO.”
That’s sweet. And it would have acknowledged the events of ST5, something ST6 didn’t do.
@87/ragnarredbeard: “Russian isn’t a race.”
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, Russian is a race. One of the definitions of “race” given there is “a group of people who share the same language, history, characteristics, etc.” This obviously isn’t the biological definition, but the notion of human races in the biological sense is controversial anyway.
@95/marc7, 98/Saavik: I love the miniskirt uniforms. Always have. I hadn’t expected the reboot films to use them, given that so many people seem to dislike them these days, and I was surprised and delighted that they did.
That said, they chose the wrong model. The female TOS uniform mirrors the male one rather closely, with long sleeves, colourful short dress vs. colourful sweater, and black tights vs. black trousers. The Kelvin uniform looks more like the TNG variety – a more casual outfit with short sleeves and bare legs. But that was an alternative uniform, worn only occasionally and by members of both sexes. To me, it looks less like a believable futuristic uniform and more like a summer dress.
This is probably a good moment to say that I love the scene in The Face of the Unknown where Aranow admires the interior of the Enterprise with its “vivid colors and minimalist design sense, and its crew with their bright, crisp uniforms”, but wonders why the males cover their legs with “those drab, restrictive black garments”.
@101/Christopher: “That’s certainly progress from TOS, when the initial hints of flirtation between Spock and Uhura got quashed pretty quickly and she and Sulu were the only two characters who never had a romantic plotline.”
At least Uhura got the delightful scene in “The Man Trap” where the salt vampire appears to her in the form of a hot black guy because she was “just thinking of someone like [him]”, and the “Sorry, neither” line in “The Naked Time”. Sulu didn’t get anything like that.
Also, there’s a difference between giving the only female in the main cast a romantic plotline with a guest character and giving her a romantic plotline with another, more prominent member of the same main cast. The former adds to her character; the latter runs the risk of diminishing her character by making her so-and-so’s girlfriend instead of a person in her own right. And apparently that’s how Uhura’s portrayal in this film appears to some viewers.
Jamoche: As you guessed, I have not seen Chopper. I specifically said I’d never seen him give a convincing performance because I figured there might be a good performance out there that I’d missed. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
101. ChristopherLBennett – “I’ve seen it said by at least one African-American female commentator that it’s a major positive step for an American movie to portray a black woman as someone worthy of being loved and desired.”
That would be great except that she’s constantly after Spock to work on their relationship, even at the most inappropriate times. Heading to Vulcan on a rescue mission? Great, let’s have an argument about what ship she’s going on. It’s a temporary mission. A one off. Go do your job and we’ll talk about it when there aren’t people in danger of losing their lives.
Or let’s have a discussion about where our relationship is going while we’re on final approach to our enemies homeworld where we’re supposed to be in great danger. Yeah, that’s the perfect time to discuss our relationship.
The problem is that Spock and Uhura aren’t give time alone to simply talk like two adults. It’s always wedged into a crisis situation or a turbolift. The JJ verse movies don’t give people these quiet, character building moments for the most part.
I have no problem with the concept of Uhura being elevated to major character or the fact that she’s in a relationship with Spock. It’s the execution that bothers me. The character doesn’t come across as empowered. She comes across as whiney and clingy. But that’s a problem with most of the characters in the reboot. They took one characteristic and made that pretty much the entire character. There’s no nuance. No subtlety. It’s because they’ve gone full on action movie. Kirk’s a rebel. Spock’s fighting his emotions (Seriously, when Spock is getting into fist fights in all your movies, you’ve got a problem), McCoy is always grouchy, Scotty’s always a jokester. Sure’ there’s one or two moments where the characters act differently but it’s almost like they’re tossed in there for plot servicing and then it’s back to their default characterization.
@104/marc7: “Uhura is defined as being Spock’s girlfriend because that’s mostly all she is in these movies.”
I don’t agree. In the first film, her adversarial relationship with Kirk is just as important to the story. True, she is cast in a sexualized role in that interaction, but that’s entirely on Kirk’s side, and Uhura doesn’t let herself be affected by it. And in Beyond (spoiler alert), she’s broken up with Spock, and her primary role in the story is as the character who interacts most directly with Kraal and learns the most about him.
@108/Jamoche: “Was there any explanation of why anyone should recognize Romulans or their language, given that nobody had seen them for over 100 years in Balance of Terror? If Nero had pointed them in that direction earlier, the timeline should’ve been even more divergent.”
According to “Balance of Terror,” Earth and the Romulans negotiated a peace treaty over subspace radio a century earlier. They must have known each other’s languages in order to do that. And ENT established that Enterprise made the first human contact with the Romulans in 2152 and that Hoshi Sato was able to translate their language, while also establishing that the Vulcans had prior familiarity with them.
@109/Jana: “This is probably a good moment to say that I love the scene in The Face of the Unknown where Aranow admires the interior of the Enterprise with its “vivid colors and minimalist design sense, and its crew with their bright, crisp uniforms”, but wonders why the males cover their legs with “those drab, restrictive black garments”.”
Aw, thanks! I always like to establish that there’s more than one way of looking at things.
The reference to Admiral Archer’s beagle is funny, but I wonder if they have lengthened the lifespan of beagles, or if Scotty’s misadventure really was within 10 years of the end of Enterprise.
Also, you didn’t mention Admiral Madea in the “Welcome Aboard” section
I guess we could call him Admiral Perry, but that would imply he was the first to contact Space Japan
Why is it so hard for people to accept that the Archer dynasty just breeds beagles? My grandad bred cairn terriers, always had them as a pet and just decided to set up his own breeding practice. Something my brother and my uncle have taken on since his passing. Why, despite the obvious timeline problems, do people insist that the Archer is Duchess himself and the Beagle still Porthos?
Also, why does it seem like Scotty’s entire JJverse characterization is straight from the final scene from Trouble with Tribbles? He does hijinks with transporters and animals, yay.
Jeez, I just didn’t think of it, I wasn’t insisting anything. Good point though, it makes sense that there’s multiple admirals in the Archer line, and multiple beagles.
@116/random22: Archer said in “A Night in Sickbay” that he grew up with dogs and couldn’t remember not having one, but Porthos didn’t come from within his family; he was the pup of a beagle belonging to “an old girlfriend’s mother.” Archer had been crazy about that beagle, evidently more than he was about the girlfriend, since the relationship with the mother lasted beyond the breakup. The beagle had a litter with four males that were named after the Musketeers, and Archer adopted Porthos when the pup was 6 weeks old.
Of course, there’s nothing to preclude Archer from continuing to favor beagles once Porthos is no longer with him, or from his descendants inheriting the preference.
Ooh, if someone wrote a book about Porthos’s adventures, it would have to be called The Voyage of the Space Beagle.
Although I suppose Porthos having a super-long life span would remove one of the nitpicks about “These are the Voyages”…
As a beagle owner myself, I guess I was just wanting to believe that Porthos lived a healthy 50 or so years. Of course, it heavily implies that Scotty kills the little guy, so that’s not great.
“I’m afraid he’s right, captain. There is nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can’t play Parrises Squares”
-from the Star Bud script
@119/cap-mjb: TATV is set only 6 years after season 4, or about 10 years after we first saw him. We don’t know how old he was as of “Broken Bow,” but beagle lifespans can be typically 14-16 years and some make it to their 20s. So I don’t see a continuity issue there.
@120/jacob: In order for Porthos to have been the beagle Scotty mentioned, he would’ve had to live to well over 100. About 107 if he’d been a year old at the start of ENT and if Scotty had conducted his experiment a year before the movie.
I believe there was a deleted scene at the end of the movie where the beagle rematerialized safely from transporter limbo. It did happen in one of the tie-in comics.
Oh, yea, and why were they building starships on the planet surface, and not out in space? That was weird. I guess if you wanted to be really charitable you could speculate that they were maybe just building the framework and then they were going to beam it up into space or something, but it just didn’t make sense (except JJ thought it would make a pretty shot).
A pretty much spot-on review, Keith.
I like STAR TREK (2009) overall, but with a few major reservations.
I thought it was a fast-paced, exciting, funny, and at times even poignant adventure. It’s basically Star Trek filtered through a Star Wars mentality.
It did what it set out to do, which was make Star Trek accessible to a new audience and forge a new direction. (Well, a POTENTIALLY new direction, as it turned out. Grumble grumble Into Darkness grumble grumble.)
I felt that Abrams and Co., by showing the creation of a new timeline, managed to show respect to, and incorporate, everything that came before, while also making a break from the past and taking things in a new direction–one in which the futures of these characters are not set in stone.
In terms of the stuff I didn’t like, I’ll start with the look of the new Enterprise. It lacks the grace and beauty of the TOS version–and especially the revamped version of the ship as seen in the first six movies, which remains my all-time favorite spaceship design. And the interiors of the new Enterprise did not particularly impress me either. The bridge is too BUSY. There are too many people working on it, and too many duty stations and consoles. The previous versions of the bridge were much simpler, much easier to comprehend, and it was easier to figure out where everything was and where everyone was stationed. With the new bridge, aside from the captain’s chair and the helm/navigation console, I get no real sense of where the science and communications stations are.
Like you, Keith, I did not care for the new engine room at all.
What I thought worked:
The first third of the movie is damn near PERFECT. I feel that the opening scene, with the Kelvin and the Narada, is one of the most gripping and powerful sequences in Star Trek history.
By and large, I thought the cast was terrific, even when the material they were given was not as good as it should have been.
Chris Pine carries himself well during the action and fight scenes, and he’s good at portraying a rough-around-the-edges Kirk who’s developing his notorious magic with the ladies. He is also good during the more comedic moments. And during his scenes with Leonard Nimoy, he more than holds his own. But even though we’re seeing a younger Kirk here, I felt he should have been portrayed as a bit more intelligent, more thoughtful, more cultured, and more strategic. Unfortunately, the situation would not be rectified at all in Into Darkness. But it did improve significantly in Beyond, no doubt a result of new writers and a new director taking over. And as I’ve said elsewhere over the last month or so, Chris Pine has finally gotten the chance to REALLY play Captain James T. Kirk… only he does it in Wonder Woman.
To this day, I don’t feel that Zachary Quinto has ever really captured the essence of Nimoy. In this first movie, I found his delivery to be a bit on the robotic side on occasion, and even arrogant at times. There was none of the wisdom, the dignified demeanor, and the gentle wit that Nimoy brought to Spock.
I loved, and continue to love, Karl Urban as McCoy.
In just this first movie alone, Zoe Saldana’s Uhura got more to do, and more characterization, than Nichelle Nichols was given in all six original movies combined–and maybe even the TV series, as well. Though I didn’t, and will never, like the romance between her and Spock.
Loved Anton Yelchin as Chekov. His tragic death still makes me very sad.
My main criticisms with regard to Simon Pegg’s Scotty are the same as yours, Keith.
Eric Bana. He’s… okay. Nothing more, nothing less.
As for Leonard Nimoy… it almost would have been enough just to see him back on the screen as Spock after 18 years. It’s clear that Nimoy had a good time playing Spock again. There’s a warmth, a sense of comfort, and a level of gravitas in his performance that is almost palpable.
There were some rough spots with this first outing, to be sure, but I walked out of the theater with the feeling that Star Trek had gotten the shot in the arm that it had needed for quite some time. A shame that the creative team blew it so badly the second time around.
I can’t help but feeling (after reading more of the comments) that the real issue with the film is that it’s not the original actors or sets playing the characters.
I mean, let’s be honest here, take any criticism about distance or time or technobabble, and look at any other episode or movie of Star Trek and you’ll find the exact same flaws. Why do these things get a pass but this movie doesn’t?
@125. xomic – the simplest answer is that the TV show did a lot with a shoestring budget. This multi-million dollar movie should have been better in every way, instead of not quite coming up to the standards of a TV show made on an unconditioned soundstage with sets made of styrofoam and Christmas lights with costumes made from placemats. And yet, it’s not nearly as good.
@123/Jacob h: One suggestion that’s been proposed is that the Narada attack made Starfleet more security-conscious, so that they moved their ship construction groundside. There’s some precedent in some images we saw in TNG (“Parallels,” I think) of groundside construction going on at Utopia Planitia on Mars. Why it happened to be near Kirk’s hometown, though, is another question, although Roberto Orci has handwaved it as being a memorial to George Kirk.
@126/JanKafka: That’s really not fair… TOS was shot on a relatively tight budget, yes, but its production values were top-notch for its era. Associate producer Bob Justman was a master at finding ways to achieve more with less money, and a lot of the props and miniatures were essentially given to the production for free through various bits of bookkeeping sleight-of-hand. (The original phaser/communicator/tricorder props were written off as prototypes, I think, and the Klingon battlecruiser model was built and donated by AMT in exchange for the model kit rights to same.) Its look hasn’t aged well because the technology has advanced so far since then, but for a TV series of its time, it was remarkably polished and sophisticated in its visuals. Heck, it had four or five of the top visual effects houses in Hollywood working on it on a rotating basis in order to achieve the unprecedented level of optical effects it had to turn out.
@111/princessroxana: Hey, you’re a princess now? Congratulations!
“A short tunic is a perfectly practical style of dress aboard ship, not so much off I admit.” – Who knows? Tunics have been around as working clothes for many centuries, and the TOS tights are probably made from some futuristic material that’s as durable as the men’s outfit – not that that’s saying much…
@118/Christopher: “Ooh, if someone wrote a book about Porthos’s adventures, it would have to be called The Voyage of the Space Beagle.” – This reminds me of my favourite line in the 2005 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film: “And I thought the beagle was a dead giveaway!”
@124/Glenn: I don’t mean this as unfriendly as it probably sounds, but if you consider that “developing his notorious magic with the ladies” (which I don’t think he ever had, but that’s a different story), then you’ve met some very unusual ladies.
@125/xomic: Let’s not forget the criticism that the heroes are assholes. As far as I am concerned, that’s a dealbreaker.
@128/JanaJansen
I’ll try to accept your comment in the spirit that I think you intended it to have. That said, your comment was still snarky and presumptuous, considering that you don’t know a thing about me.
Consider this:
Kirk undoubtedly had a magic with the ladies. Granted, the Kirk we knew from TOS was not a thoughtless, inconsiderate, reckless, promiscuous cad. But the Kirk we knew from TOS was 34 years old, a seasoned and decorated officer, and someone who had already come into his own as an adult and as a human being. Overall, we know very little about what Kirk was like in his youth, aside from him being “a stack of books with legs,” a tough instructor at the Academy, and a “positively grim” target for Finnegan’s practical jokes. We also know that he was quite active romantically. In terms of canon, there was Ruth, Carol Marcus (and either of these two could have been the blonde lab technician he almost married–or she could have been someone else entirely), Areel Shaw, Janet Wallace, and Janice Lester, to name just a few.
No, Kirk was not getting laid in each and every episode. But the show never shied away from showing off Kirk’s–Shatner’s–innate charm and appeal and magnetism. It was very easy for women to fall for him: Edith Keeler, Janice Rand, Helen Noel, and the mentioned-but-not-seen Helen Johansson. We also saw that he could make women fall for him exactly when he needed them to, even if they were initially his adversaries — Deela, Shahna, Kelinda. Hell, look at the effect he had on Rayna Kapec. She only knew for a few hours, and the emotions her stirred up in her led to her demise.
So yeah, he had a bit of magic about him. Sorry, but it’s true.
And since there is so little that we know, canonically speaking, about what Kirk was like in his youth, it was absolutely fair game to establish in STAR TREK (2009) that–at least at first–he WAS very immature, even thoughtless and a bit of a cad. The implication, as least as far as I was concerned when I first saw the movie, was that he learned quickly that this kind of behavior was wrong and he OUTGREW IT. I was able to accept that–within the context of STAR TREK (2009).
But Abrams, Orci, Kurtzman, etc. lost me when, in Star Trek Into Darkness, they CONTINUED to portray Kirk in that manner–as a sleazy horndog and a creep hellbent on bedding multiple alien women at the same time. That was an appalling portrayal of the character. But we’re not talking about Into Darkness here. We’re talking about the previous movie. And in that context, not knowing what would come next, I had no problem with them showing, as I put it, Kirk “developing his notorious magic with the ladies.” He was DEVELOPING it. He was not PERFECTING it.
In closing — I don’t make any assumptions about your personal life, Jana. I’d appreciate it if you don’t make any about mine.
Thanks.
@122/ChristopherLBennett:
Oh, no, neither do I, don’t get me wrong. But there are people out there (naming no names…) who see it as evidence for their Big Theories that TATV never happened, okay?!?! (Hey, I’m not a fan of the episode either but…really?) To be fair, I don’t think their point is that Porthos is still alive so much as that he doesn’t appear to be any older.
@129/Glenn: I think part of the point of STID, though, was to show that Kirk hadn’t yet matured and needed to grow through the events of the film. It seemed that the filmmakers recognized that they’d rushed Kirk into the captaincy absurdly fast in the first film, so they wanted to do a second film that acknowledged he was still too unseasoned and then forced him to earn that seasoning over the course of the story. But I guess we’ll get into that next week.
@130/cap-mjb: How can you tell if a dog is getting older? As far as I know, they don’t get gray hair or have any of the characteristic human signs of aging. They just get less active and energetic.
When Uhura gets a scene like McCoy and his father in Final Frontier, something that gives her character greater depth and history outside of life on the Enterprise, then I’ll be impressed. So far, her elevated role among the ‘big three’ seems rather trite. Well intentioned but empty.
@131/CLB
I could–and did–accept an origin story showing that Kirk was a bit of a jerk and an ass and had a lot of growing up and a lot of learning to do before he became the Kirk we knew in TOS.
But two movies of him being someone that no one in their right mind would accept as a leader? That’s too much for me.
But like you said, more next week!
@133/Glenn: Well, I give the filmmakers credit for implicitly taking the criticisms of the first film to heart and trying to fix their mistake of rushing Kirk into the captaincy. Heck, they basically did the same thing I tried to do in my cancelled sequel novel to the movie, which also involved Kirk having to face the consequences of his inexperience and gain some seasoning and maturity as a result. I just assumed they’d pick up the second movie with Kirk already presumed to have earned his command, so I figured my book should show him earning it in a way the first movie didn’t really manage to do. Turns out the filmmakers apparently saw the same deficiency I did. So if the book had ever been published, it would’ve been superseded by the sequel’s events anyway, since it wouldn’t be logical for Kirk to go through basically the same arc twice.
@131, CLB: It depends somewhat on the breed and the color of the dog’s coat but yes they do go gray, generally around the muzzle, and I had a small terrier who went bald. They also tend to lose their teeth.
@128, Jan: I finally broke down and registered but it wouldn’t let me use Roxana so yeah, now I am a princess
@129/Glenn Greenberg: I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to insult you, or make assumptions about your personal life, or sound snarky. I only tried to say, in a humorous way, that I don’t agree with you.
I guess my introduction (“I don’t mean this as unfriendly as it probably sounds…”) actually made it sound worse. I’m an idiot. Again, I’m sorry.
So… let my try this again:
I find Kelvin Kirk’s attempts at flirting disrespectful, arrogant and off-putting, whereas I’ve always had the impression that TOS Kirk likes and respects the women he interacts with, be it professionally or romantically. I don’t think there’s a road that leads from the one kind of behaviour to the other; the underlying mindsets are too different.
Kirk had quite a few romantic relationships in his past, but no more than I would expect from a person (of either sex) who is outgoing, friendly, intelligent, reasonably good-looking and interested in a relationship, and who nevertheless never manages to establish one. Is that what you mean by “magic”?
Deela picked him because she found him pretty. In the episode script she even calls him her “pet”. Shahna had spent all her life as a fighting machine. She referred to her mother as “she who bore me”. Kirk may have been the first person who ever was nice to her. Kelinda thought that kissing was fun, but she wasn’t romantically interested in Kirk, she was interested in Rojan. Rayna had been built to be a lover; Flint merely needed some random guy to trigger her emotions, because the unchanging environment she grew up in, with him as its sole, unchanging occupant, wouldn’t do the trick.
Kirk didn’t have to be special in any of these cases. (Why the TOS writers decided to tell so many stories where the lead ends up kissing the woman of the week is a different matter.)
113. ChristopherLBennett – “According to “Balance of Terror,” Earth and the Romulans negotiated a peace treaty over subspace radio a century earlier. They must have known each other’s languages in order to do that. And ENT established that Enterprise made the first human contact with the Romulans in 2152 and that Hoshi Sato was able to translate their language, while also establishing that the Vulcans had prior familiarity with them.”
And yet this movie says that Romulan is so similar to Vulcan that the original communications officer can’t distinguish it from Vulcan. Then why is everyone shocked to find out they’re related to the Vulcans in BoT?
MALE LIEUTENANT: Sir, I’m not sure I can distinguish the Romulan language from Vulcan.
PIKE: (to Uhura) What about you? Do you speak Romulan, Cadet?
UHURA: Uhura. All three dialects, sir.
PIKE: Uhura, relieve the lieutenant.
Making Romulan indistinguishable from Vulcan was stupid.
124. Glenn Greenberg – ” Chris Pine has finally gotten the chance to REALLY play Captain James T. Kirk… only he does it in Wonder Woman. “
Exactly what I told the wife when we saw WW a couple of weeks back.
127. ChristopherLBennett – “One suggestion that’s been proposed is that the Narada attack made Starfleet more security-conscious, so that they moved their ship construction groundside.”
Which the Xindi attack should have told them was a bad idea. As to making it a memorial to George Kirk. Do they do the same to all the other Starfleeters who’ve died in the line of duty or just the ones who’s punk sons will stop by the side of the road a gaze wistfully at the ship under construction?
131. ChristopherLBennett – “It seemed that the filmmakers recognized that they’d rushed Kirk into the captaincy absurdly fast in the first film, so they wanted to do a second film that acknowledged he was still too unseasoned and then forced him to earn that seasoning over the course of the story.”
Yeah, that extra ten minutes of seasoning where he went from Captain to cadet to first officer and back to Captain really must have had an effect on him. But that’s a story for next week.
@135/princessroxana: My cousins had an older beagle until a few years ago, and I don’t remember him (I think it was a him) having gray fur that I could see.
Anyway, again, TATV is set only about 10 years after the start of the series, so Porthos could’ve been as young as 11 or 12, not quite elderly for a beagle. So there’s really no basis for complaint there.
I guess beagles aren’t one of the breeds who gray then.
Star Trek (2009) is a fun popcorn action movie but it doesn’t feel like real Star Trek to me. My main interest lies in the new TV incarnation of Trek and I wouldn’t shed a tear if there isn’t another movie with this same cast and crew/Kelvin timeline. That said, this cast does extremely well with their takes on their respective TOS characters. And I like Eric Bana but mainly because I think he’s so handsome.
138: Two possible explanations.
1) Uhura does mention that there’s three dialects. Maybe the dialects are very different and only one of them sounds similar to Vulcan, and that happened to be the one in use during the events of this movie. They used the other one to negotiate the treaty. That kind of makes sense, actually– the Federation doesn’t seem to really hide its identity, so they’re probably aware that Vulcan is a founding member of the UFP and made the common ancestry connection long before the Federation did. Keeping that a secret would be highly valuable– imagine the infiltration possibilities of sending in Romulan agents who can just blend in as Vulcans. So naturally when they negotiated a treaty they chose the dialect that wouldn’t give away the secret.
2) Or the universal cop-out: The changes to the timeline mean that Romulan language is more similar to Vulcan language in this timeline (as I argue in 75, the radical changes to the “present” also change the “past” because all the time travel that occurred in the future no longer happens or happens differently, which could stretch all the way back to the Romulan/Vulcan split). None of the time travel we saw on screen would account for that, but given how much time travel there has been in the tiny sliver of the universe we have seen, it’s reasonable to conclude that time travel happens on a roughly constant basis.
I am surprised that the soundtrack is not given better mention. I love the film, though I admit if it has JJ Abrams name on it I am pretty much on my knees watching the film with stars in my eyes. He has been a genius ever since he created Alias for the small screen. My favorite film of Abrams will always be Super 8. His film knowledge is hard to surpass. He knows how to look back and find the magic that the original characters created and bring it to the new generations. That has been his greatest gift to sci-fi. He has been given a torch to preserve Star Trek and Star Wars for the future and he has done a brilliant job!
@127/ ChristopherLBennet
I completely agree! Bob Justman et al were geniuses at prop and set and costume design and acquisition, especially considering their budget.
The point I was trying to make was that they did so much with so little, while the NuTrek movies, with their blockbuster budgets, didn’t manage to evoke anything like the imagination and sense of wonder (or beauty) of the TV show. And it would be my fondest wish that they’d once more turn to science fiction writers for scripts – and science fact checking – the way the TV show did.
(I tried to post a reply earlier, but it didn’t go through.)
@143/CER: “I am surprised that the soundtrack is not given better mention.”
It’s weird — I’m usually a big fan of Michael Giacchino’s work, but somehow his Trek scores don’t quite work for me. The main melody just seems a bit awkward and labored somehow, and I get tired of hearing it after a while.
@140 My now ex-beagle definitely started to change her fur color as she aged, not quite going gray but she got a lot more white along her snout then she did as a pup. I don’t know if that’s normal or not but graying beagles is definitely a thing.
Of course, as Christopher L. Bennett says, that doesn’t mean “These Are The Voyages…” got anything wrong in terms of what Porthos looks like.
I actually want to echo a bit of what @74 said: I don’t think the argument was ever that there was “too much” Star Trek, but rather that Star Trek seemed to have run out of ideas. There was too much familiarity in Trek, too much of what we had already seen a million times before. Voyager started out with the premise of enemies having to band together to survive, but it quickly transitioned into TNG season 8. Enterprise started out with the premise that space travel was new and scary with proto-technology, but it quickly turned into ST:DSV, and everything Trek was still there just maybe with different names (e.g., hull plating that acted exactly the same as shields). The TNG movies (except for First Contact) felt more like big-budget extended episodes of the series than the grander scale we generally expect from movies. And many of the novels by the late ’90s felt like they were written by Peter David copycats and were increasingly reliant on crossover storylines (sorry Voyager haters, but you have to read the VOY novel to see how the story ends); they felt formulaic as opposed to the earlier novels that felt driven by the authors’ interest in the characters.
Star Trek had become a template that transcended series and format. Every movie, every episode, every novel of one series felt like an episode of another series. It wasn’t that there was too much Trek but too much sameness in Trek. The fact that it was also BAD Trek certainly made it worse. But I think by the time the badness really set in, the audience had already fallen away. Remember, DS9 is widely considered to be among the best of Trek, and its ratings were never as high as TNG’s.
Three is probably overly generous, given the way KRAD has treated certain other films where he had the opportunity to criticize them not solely on their merits as a film but in light of (in this instance), history – not only of a specific universe but also generally in political, cultural and social terms; as well as a work of science fiction and genre generally. The nicest thing I could say about this film, which I saw twice (once as a free preview) was that it was generally well-cast and the acting as far as how well it did justice to getting an audience member who was familiar with the previous original cast could view these as younger representations of that familiarity. It also succeeded as popcorn entertainment but it didn’t make any great strides in large part because of that – it was pretty stupid even if you didn’t compare it to Star Trek. And that was the problem with the film: its obtuse embrace of its own idiocy, which has been so much better enumerated here and elsewhere.
I’m not sure Star Trek is only best served in television. Some of what certain fans of the franchise would prefer probably is better served with longer form, arc driven story-telling, but some of what those and other fans enjoy is very character based and driven by the relationships of those characters and the stories told around them. I do not feel any of the reboot films accomplish either.
@148/_FDS: Interesting. I feel the characters and relationships are the one thing that really work about the Abrams movies. His ideas are often ludicrous, but he always focuses on character and emotion first, and that’s what I like about his work. His Mission: Impossible III establishes more about Ethan Hunt as a character in its first four minutes than the previous two films established in four hours.
I like the Uhura Spock relationship. It was foreshadowed in TOS, so it’s not from out of nowhere. I do like to picture the conversation where Spock tells her that he’s married and that there’s a 50/50 chance that one day he will be overcome with lust for his wife. A lust so strong that he will kill to have her and die without her. They will then have lust fueled sex in way he probably can’t have with anyone else. And BTW, it would be illogical for Uhura to be upset in any way by this.
Of course T’Pring was probably killed with the rest of the Vulcans, so Spock is in big trouble once Pon Farr hits.
@150/percysowner: One of the storylines in the IDW tie-in comic did address Spock’s pon farr, even though the comic is set nearly a decade before “Amok Time.” The comic assumes that a lot of TOS’s events happened years sooner. (Its first two storylines are near-exact retellings of “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “The Galileo Seven,” but then it starts doing “remakes” that go farther afield from the original episodes, along with more original stories, which eventually become the norm.)
150. percysowner -Of course T’Pring was probably killed with the rest of the Vulcans, so Spock is in big trouble once Pon Farr hits.
Being a movie, I’d imagine that T’Pring and Stonn and T’Pau all survived. After all, it lets them re-do Amok time if they feel the need to.
T’Pring could also be the reason old Spock told NuSpock that he should return to the ship. Perhaps he’s met the younger T’Pring and she’s ditched Stonn for a Spock that’s not only an accomplished Ambassador and scientist but also going to be home now instead of wandering the galaxy like his younger self would have. Spock gets the girl a century later!
@150, not sure why Spock would be in trouble. If the bond is broken, its done done done.
For myself, the main reason I think Trek can be better suited for television is that what The Original Series and (to a lesser extent) TNG did reasonably well was the serial anthology format that was a thing for a while, wherein every standalone episode can visit a different genre, setting, and supporting cast framed by the regular cast and premise. (Wagon Train was the model Roddenberry referred to in his elevator pitches for the show; Love Boat and Fantasy Island were later takes on the format with the added twist that LB and FI usually featured two intertwined stories, typically one serious and one light, per episode.) So if you liked ghost stories and hated westerns, or vice-versa, wait another week and you’d get something more to your tastes.
Doing that kind of narrative experimentation and genre-crossing is a lot harder with a big-budget franchise feature. The instinct, when you’re gambling with so much money, is to revisit what worked in some earlier project that’s considered a proven success. If TNG veers off into X-Files territory with an episode like “Schisms” and it alienates some percentage of the audience, it’s only fatal if they stop coming back (it will be okay, the next episode has puppies); that happens in a summer tentpole film, it’s fatal.
I say all this, but one of the odd things about the original cast films is that when you take them together, there’s a certain level of genre-hopping that emerges. TMP is a first contact story, TUC is a political thriller, TFF is maybe a kind of heist film where God (or just another godlike alien) is the McGuffin inside the bank vault. Etc. How much of that is a happy accident because the movies were saddled with diminishing budgets and expectations as time wore on is a subject for conversation, I suppose. But maybe the conclusion after all is that the problem isn’t that Trek doesn’t belong on the big screen, but that Trek doesn’t need to be a big budget franchise, if that’s somehow possible. Which… it isn’t. But in the abstract, film economics aside, maybe slashing the budgets and doing a lot of smaller, more varied Trek films is what’s called for.
O’course… put that way, it starts sounding like a TV show again.
That is what killed Enterprise though. The episode “A Night In Sick Bay” was so bad the audience up and left and never came back. That was a dumb episode, a really dumb episode which decided to do the slapstick 1970s British Sitcom genre. Still better than Dear Doctor and its praise of genocide though.
#154 eric
You raise some excellent points. And the line between television and film appears to be getting fuzzier by the day. For me, I look at the Marvel movies not as a “Cinematic Universe” but a big budget TV series. Those movies now feel less like standalone films and more like episodes; not shown every week but every summer. Star Wars is headed in a similar direction. A throwback to the serials they were aping in the first place.
But notice they are doing slight variations within their respective formulas. Winter Soldier had the feeling of a political thriller, Rogue One a gritty war film, and so on. Maybe Star Trek could do likewise. Not grim and gritty; that’s been done to death. But something different from the last three movies with their madmen out for revenge with super ships and super weapons would be welcome.
@155 random22:
To me, Enterprise arrived stillborn: a grating cast (the only characters I didn’t want to see die in a warp core explosion were the doctor and the dog); a prequel (as if the Trek universe timeline made any sense before TNG started to treat it with any rigor); created by two of the weaker overseers of the franchise (Ron Moore having sought greener pastures); saddled by the studio with a staggeringly incoherent metaplot (what the hell is a “Temporal Cold War,” anyway?).
In short, I don’t think the problem with Enterprise was a standalone episode format; if anything, that was one of the show’s few relative strengths, seeing as how the episode arcs were frustratingly nonsensical (seriously, “Temporal Cold War”?!) and the lack of cast chemistry meant the show was sometimes improved whenever somebody wasn’t in an episode (“Doctor’s Orders,” focusing on the only two not-awful members of the crew with just a touch of the not-unbearable Jolene Blalock, isn’t completely horrible).
As everybody always says, Enterprise started to improve some in its final season, though the case is usually overstated. The final season is mediocre, which is great heights above the badness of the preceding years. Like somebody wrote upthread, the problem with Trek in the oughts wasn’t that there was too much Trek, it was that there was too much bad Trek. Enterprise was a dubious idea executed badly. DOA.
@156 Danny:
Thanks.
You’re right, MCU has been doing a decent job (in my view, anyway) of working in variations. Critics are right that there’s a bit of a formula and hard limits to how far a film can stray within the franchise, but having said that, they’ve raised a tent that can have a ’70s-ish conspiranoia thriller like Winter Soldier, an Inception-ey concept film like Doctor Strange, and a comedy heist like Ant-Man all under the same big top. Which is something.
If there was a way to do that with Trek on film, it would be a step in the right direction. It would just take a lot more guts than anyone at Paramount is likely to have, and the gamble would be sizeable enough they’d be better off risking less money on it. But if they could do a horror movie one summer and a period romance the next (for example), it would be true to the spirit of the original series (“Wolf in the Fold” and “City on the Edge of Forever,” anyone?).
@157. I largely agree with everything you said, except I’d swap Malcolm out for Doctor Phlox (more like Doctor Neelix if you ask me, or possible Doctor Moreau-in-Space) as the non-canine survivor of that warp blast. I actually kinda liked Malcolm “I’m competent” Reed in the show. Too bad he so often got paired with Trip “hold ma beer and watch this” Tucker.
I wanted to like the show so much, I really did, and I tried sticking it out but they lost me with the 24-but-In-Space third season. I’ve seen a couple of fourth season episodes and some of them are not the worst. That is about as good as I can get on the show, some of the season 4 episodes were not the worst.
I have to agree with you about the lack of cast chemistry and the utter lack of thinking things through from the writing staff.
144. JanKafka, Very insightful comment. The decline of Star Trek began with the loss of its science fiction writers and their replacement with drama-and-personal-conflict-only obsessed television writers. Although writers like Jerome Bixby, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Bloch saw their treatments and scripts heavily revised, at least some of their essential ideas seeped through. And then there were the Trek-first writers who were also SF writers, Dorothy Fontana and David Gerrold. And crucially there was Roddenberry, whose revisions on the first thirteen episodes and later contributions helped define his humanist approach to science and his treatment of Kirk as a humanistic and ethical character (in his Mirror, Mirror rewrite, Private Little War, Savage Curtain). This era can be seen as lasting through the original series, the perhaps under-rated animated series and up to season one of the Next Generation. After that, I would argue, the decline began, to the point where, today, Star Trek the franchise is essentially kitsch or a parody of itself, while ironically, the more campy appearing original series continues to show relevancy. In the era of NSA and CIA spying on laptops and iphones, police with body cameras, and computer control of automobiles being threatened, to site only one type of pressing social concern, you’d be better off going to Conscience of the King, Court-martial or The Ultimate Computer in search of metaphorical relevancy than Into Darkness or an old episode of the Next Generation. No other program from the past, not even Twilight Zone, shows anything like this ability to perpetually renew its own relevancy, whatever its dated surface presentation. It, at least, is certain to survive, one of the greatest in the history of television series.
#160
I don’t like Into Darkness either, but I appreciate its attempt to make some commentary on the War on Terror, albeit in a very sloppy, conspiracy theorist, nonsensical manner. And to say only TOS is still relevant to the issues of today simply isn’t true. Episodes of TNG and especially DS9 still connect with the issues you listed.
161. Danny
It’s not that the old show alone deals with these topics, but that, in my opinion, its approach remains fresh and curiously relevant. I’m sure the Next Generation often touches on these issues, but it hasn’t resonated with me, even though I’ve seen most of the episodes fairly recently. Next Generation, after Roddenberry’s decline, is mired in an increasingly right-wing Reagan era world view, with some truly appalling later episodes. It certainly deals with issues of war and “terrorism,” but often disturbingly. I’ve seen as much of DS-9 as I care too, about half. On the other hand, DC Fontana’s Ultimate Computer seems more resonate than ever with regard to the issue of computer and technological influence on our lives, while Kirk’s “the stars are still there, Bones,” speech lingers in my mind. But if you love Next Gen or DS-9, or Enterprise, or not, great. It’s all a matter of personal opinion.
@147/Scott Miller: Technically, that’s incorrect when you say DS9’s ratings were never as high as TNG’s. The premiere episode “Emissary” scored huge ratings that surpassed TNG and the subsequent episodes also had high ratings but then gradually dropped off and never approached those heights nor TNG-level again. Otherwise I agree with what you said about same/bad Trek. It felt stale. Voyager never took advantage of its concept and became the sexy Seven of Nine show. And Enterprise was just generally boring.
@143/CER: I like the music too, especially the main theme. Giacchino makes emotionally resonant music. I loved his themes on LOST.
@162: Quote: “Next Generation, after Roddenberry’s decline, is mired in an increasingly right-wing Reagan era world view, with some truly appalling later episodes. It certainly deals with issues of war and “terrorism,” but often disturbingly.”
At the risk of sparking a conversation on polarized political terms – which I desperately, vehemently do NOT want to do; there’s enough of that around these days ;) – your statement piqued my interest. I never really felt manipulated by TNG on those terms, and would be very curious to know your thoughts as to why you hold that opinion, especially to know which episodes in particular you are thinking of….
Does everyone have their blood pressure medication handy? Fingers poised above their keyboards? Ok, here we go:
I really like the Enterprise theme song.
Quoth Jacob H: “I really like the Enterprise theme song.”
STONE THE HERETIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, kidding, mostly
1. Cool bad guy
2. I liked the “other timeline” angle as far as it went in THIS movie
3. but I knew there would be “Other timeline” problems. Kirk HAS to be captain even though it makes no sense. The same way Wolverine is always an X-men even if aliens blew up Canada in 1702.
I love this movie so much
@166, Me too. At first I thought it was odd and off but I came to really like it. Pity the same didn’t happen with the series. Like TNG I watched for a while because I really liked the actor playing the captain (yeah, I love Scott Bakula) but eventually not even he made it worthwhile.
@166 & @170
I liked the theme song of Enterprise too.
And as long as we are speaking heresies, I must add that I also liked the series itself very much. Yes, it had flaws. Yes, it could have been much much better. But it was set in such an interesting period in Trek history, that I still loved it for what it was.
(and unlike many people, I thought the 3rd season was great. I loved how the humans start with a gung-ho 20th century “us vs them” mentality which slowly changes to…something else. It was a wonderful season-long character arc for Archer and Co)
165. fullyfunctional
I’d site Melissa Snodgrass’ The High Ground, from season 3, as a typical example of Next Gen’s style of Nightline-like state propaganda. Like you, I don’t wish to be overly critical. Next Generation was a good show, it just reflected the rightward shift in society in the same inevitable way that the original series reflected its own era. Snodgrass’ The Measure of a Man is a great episode, getting everything right. It’s when they tried to be topical, instead of staying metaphorical, that their courage tended to fail.
@172 Kevin – wow! Funny that you responded with that specific episode, which is at the very top of my list of most hated Star Trek hours, and is the primary reason for my general dislike of the Beverly Crusher character. I didn’t respond to it in the way you did, just in terms of how it infuriated me that there are no consequences for Crusher’s blatant refusal to acknowledge the security risks not only to herself but to her crewmates, leading to her kidnapping, leading to risks to the Enterprise not to mention the deaths of several people, nearly including her son. The whole Stockholm Syndrome thing made me want to puke, and although I generally appreciate when the good guys have flaws and the bad buys have some redeeming qualities, I wasn’t at all compelled to have any sympathy for that terrorist child-killer Finn just because he was a good doodler. Yikes. I regret asking you the question because you reminded me of that hour of dreck that makes my blood boil. :)
Some of the plot hole questions seem unfair. I mean, “why are redshirts in a bar in Iowa?” I feel like the answer is obvious – they’ve been assigned to guard the nearby shipyard, or are on temporary leave near that shipyard. Or “why are cadets and enlistees on the same shuttle”? I don’t know… maybe because they’re going to the same place? Obviously instructions would only be given for people who don’t know the drill – the enlistees.
I’m not saying the movie is perfect, but some of the very nitpicky questions in this review have easy, obvious, and plausible answers, and are irrelevant to the plot besides. Into Darkness suffers from some gaping plot holes, mostly Khan’s seeming omniscience, but this one does not, not to the same degree.
I walked out of Star Trek (2009) muttering “great, another damn origin story.” Two millennia after starting in medias res (in the middle of things) we’re swamped with “tell it from the beginning, and don’t leave out the dull parts” and endless reboots (because the term “remake” has somehow become tainted).
Star Trek had lured me into movie theaters for every film from The Motion Picture to Insurrection. I watched Nemesis on DVD. The reboot did lure me back, but it was the last Star Trek film I’ve seen. I’ve been waiting ever since for the news that they’ve decided to “boldly go where they hadn’t already been several times over.”
I actually find myself hoping for a reboot of the reboot. Just trusting in the audience, they announce that they’ve returned to the Prime universe. It’s in that period between the end of the series and the beginning of the movies (so Kirk is a long way off from being an admiral). And then they do something that befits Star Trek.
@175/JohnD: I don’t think the word “remake” has been “tainted,” I think it’s just that it tends to refer to a single story, while “reboot” means reviving an ongoing series that’s been inactive for some time, like restarting a computer. We don’t hear “remake” as often anymore because so many things these days are series rather than standalone works. Even single movies are frequently hoped to be springboards for new series.
While I agree that I prefer Trek to move forward instead of doing prequels, I really can’t agree that redoing the tech to something more fitting the production era is wrong. I think it’s the right way to go, otherwise, you’re stuck doing New Voyages or Star Trek Continues… nothing wrong with those fan productions, but they’re just retro clones that end up being simple copies of the show they’re homaging. Not bad, but just not my cuppa.
I found this movie to be fun, that’s all, but I don’t feel the need to see it again.
@@.-@ – Chris: Yes, having them all be officers out of the academy would have made it better.
@17 – ragnarredbeard: The only way to rationalize the business with Uhura’s given name (and this just occurred to me, I have been bugged by this until now) is that legally, according to her culture, she might not be under the obligation to have her first name as part of her Starfleet records, and she only tells it to people she’s close to.
@21 – Chris: That works too, but he would have eventually, even unvoluntarily, heard it around at some point.
@30 – Chris: <<“More average than bad” is a good description. The movie’s flaws aren’t that different from the flaws in any of the previous Trek movies — many of them were just as scientifically absurd and fanciful and had just as many illogical plot shortcuts, or nearly so. The problem isn’t Abrams, the problem is movies. As Keith has said many times in these rewatches and elsewhere, the American blockbuster feature film is a poor format for capturing the things that make Star Trek work.>>
I have to agree in full with this, and it irks me that people forgive things in the original cast films that they berate in the Kelvin ones. I guess it’s because they don’t feature the original actors, but I wish they’d just admit that’s the reason for their bile.
@35/39 – Chris: Thank you. I’m so tired of “Hollywood is running out of ideas”.
@@.-@1/42: In the comic Countdown, the ship was designed by Geordi, and he named it that way.
@66 – Eduardo: Every iteration of Trek is full of stupid contrivances in service of the main cast or plot. Are you telling me that Picard didn’t have an entire compliment of at least 50-100 helm-trained and very capable Starfleet officers on board his ship (and that’s not counting the officers from other departments who are rated to fly it)? Yet he chose to install Wesley Crusher as helmsman in his alpa shift. And that’s just an example.
@68 – richf: No, no, she said “Kardashian”. :)
@74 – cap-mjb: I think the Chekov “Wiktor Wiktor” joke is stupid, but it’s not THE most racist joke in the history of the franchise, when it had McCoy being racist to Spock every other episode. Yeah, those were not exactly jokes, but still…
@89 – Jason: Oh man, don’t get me started on the idiots hating on Discovery just because it’s not any of the shows that came before. Whine, Whine, whine, every single time something about Discovery is posted…
@177. Thanks for reminding me. The Discovery show posted some props and uniforms and they are dumb, dumb, dumb. The STD trainwreck just keeps on chuntering.
@158 – Eric: Yeah, the MCU takes its cues from the actual comics, where one story can be a space opera, another a political intrigue one, another a sort of comedy, heist story, etc; all including superhero fights.
@171 – OmicronThetaDeltaPhi: I’m with you, I liked Enterprise and its song.
@178 – random22: Gee, thank you for sharing your thoughts on that. Me? I like what I see, particularly the Starfleet stuff.
@170 You’re welcome :)
In seriousness though, one of the uniforms -the medical one, I think- looks kinda like one of the TMP uniforms. I kinda liked the TMP uniforms though, so that is actually a positive. I have a pretty solid track record of liking things everyone else will go on to hate and hating things everyone else seems to love, so my scorn is a compliment to your own taste and my approval a sign they may need to worry.
I am going to try to keep an open mind on Discovery, even if it sucks at first. As I said on another thread awhile back, if I had started with TNG in the first season and passed judgment on the series then, I may have never bothered to stay with it. Fortunately for me I guess, I didn’t pick up the show until syndicated reruns, somewhere in season 3 I think. The Discovery previews are visually impressive, and I love the casting, so fingers crossed. I just have to find a friend who is going to spring for the CBS all access charge. I realize holding out on principle is a meaningless gesture, but screw paying CBS for the right to watch a single new show along with thousands of re-runs. The first tier fee doesn’t even eliminate commercials. Fight the power.
To add to the fashion discussion, I don’t like any Star Trek uniforms that are high-necked and stiff. They look uncomfortable. It makes me think of McCoy in “Journey to Babel” – “I feel like my neck’s in a sling”.
@182
Really? I think a proper upright collar is much more professional looking. I would trust an officer who has a proper collar more than I would one without. I can’t stand the turtle neck uniforms though, slovenly to my mind. You can maybe let your ratings wear one of those, but your officers and senior NCOs should have a proper collar on their uniform.
@181
I’m hopeful the shenanigans regarding the CBS all access and withholding the reruns will lead to a new golden age of proper fanfic again. The best fanfic was always written by people who were fans but had only limited access to the source material. They got their info from other fans (oh the blessed fanon, which led to some wonderful meta) or from show synopsis and went forth and created masterpieces from it. Ranma fandom, as an example, died a swift and sudden death the moment everyone got instant access to the source material but prior to that was a thriving industry with all sorts of permutations. I’m hoping the exclusionary model that CBS has picked will cause an upswing of pirated material, half understood plots, and fanon-to-fanon misunderstandings which will recreate that golden age of fandom gone by.
@183/random22: It is an awful thing to wish for an upswing in pirating. That deprives the creators of much of the income they need to continue to afford doing their work. A lot of creators today struggle to make a living because so many people are getting their creations without paying for them that they can’t earn a decent profit. What if Discovery is so heavily pirated that it doesn’t make enough of a profit to get a second season? Fans who commit piracy are not only hurting the thing they claim to love, they’re hurting themselves by decreasing their odds of getting more of it.
@CLB: While I accept your proposition that I am an awful person full of awful views just in general, I must point out that not all piracy is equal. Piracy from people who can pay, would pay, but are not paying just because they can pirate is bad, but piracy by those who can’t pay (price, location, lack of payment options, etc), or on behalf of those who wouldn’t buy it in the first place and are only watching because it is free, is not taking a single penny out of the creators purse. Those were pennies they were never going to get in the first place, and if the show proves its worth to those pirates they may very well move onto buying merch or even paying for the show legally when and if they can (still waiting for my legit box set of Knights of God, for example, my copies all have the 1980s UK adverts in the middle of the show), so it effectively forms a venue for advertising and promotion. It is just another permutation of circulating old VHS tapes or second hand book sales.
Like I say I have a lot of awful views on account of being an awful person, but liking a bit of fandom piracy is not one of them.
@185/random22: “I have a lot of awful views on account of being an awful person, but liking a bit of fandom piracy is not one of them.”
Don’t you mean “lawful”?
@186 No, I’m apparently awful. I like too many problematic things, I don’t support enough of the right causes actively enough. So I’ve just accepted I’m an awful person.
Supporting a bit of fandom piracy is unlawful but not awful though.
I’m sorry, I’m feeling a bit morose and sorry for myself today for some reason.
@187/random22: In that case, let me tell you without further jokes that I enjoy your comments.
I currently don’t have cable and I don’t want to spend $ to get a basic package and then add $ to get Space (in Canada) in order to watch one series. If that’s what Paramount expects in the age of cord cutters then they have nobody to blame except themselves if STD fails. Now, in the rest of the world (except for the US) Netflix has picked it up and reportedly paid enough to cover the production of the entire first season. If it doesn’t get a second season, it won’t be because of piracy (No, I’m not planning on pirating it. I’ll wait for it to show up on Netflix in Canada or borrow the DVD from the library when they’re released). Like the movies, I no longer feel the need to be there from day one.
Hi all–the discussion is getting off track , and I think it would be best to get back to discussing the movie and the original post.
@CLB
Since when are CBS or Paramount the “creators” of Star Trek?
The mods seem to want us to discuss the Star Trek 2009, so I’ll frame my comment with that in mind.
For the past 8 years, Paramount has treated our beloved universe as nothing more than a cash cow. A source of brainless blockbuster movies. They have also declared a legal war on the the actual fans who are trying to keep the old Trek spirit alive.
So no, they are not “the creators” of anything. They are greedy business people who are throwing 40 years of legacy down the tube for dollars. So while I don’t condone piracy, I do think your heartfelt speech of “depriving the creators from the ability to continue their artistic work” to be completely laugable.
And I do condone – whole heartedly – creating fan films which do the Star Trek thema justice. Bitching about how awful a movie is and then pirating it is wrong (not to mention hypocritical), But bitching about how awful a movie is and then creating something better is high commedable (even if you technically don’t have the legal rights to do so. IMO if the right owners are completely botching their jobs, they should not have any legal protection).
Of-course, in the current legal climate, there’s no chance of us actually getting this “golden age of fan fiction”. Your “poor starving creators” can (and will) stomp any such attempt like a giant crushing an ant. Good to know the franchise is in such good hands, heh?
OmicronThetaDeltaPhi: By your logic, if I don’t like one of my neighbors and think he’s a total ass, if he treated me and my family badly, then it should be perfectly okay for me to break into his house and steal the jewelry and cash in his home. After all, he’s not a proper caretaker of his household, so he deserves to be robbed.
Somehow, I don’t think that argument would be very convincing to the cops who arrested me or the judge and jury in the District Attorney’s (completely justified) case against me in court.
BTW, Christopher was referring to the people who create works in the Star Trek universe when he meant “creators,” not the creator of it. Gene Roddenberry never actually owned it anyhow, because that’s not (and never has been) how television works. But speaking as someone who routinely creates work in fictional settings owned by other people, people who pirate the work are stealing from me and taking money out of my mouth and keeping me from making a living. Period.
Your opinion that Bad Robot are poor caretakers of Star Trek does not justify illegal behavior. You poll any random selection of humans, and you will find a wide variety of opinions on whether or not the Bad Robot films are any good and as to which Star Trek incarnation is worthy of respect, and a lot of those opinions would be contradictory. Which is why legality isn’t based on subjective notions like “worthiness.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I apologise for dragging things off topic, and for my maudling self pity. Sorry.
@193/random22: Hey, everybody around here drags things off topic all the time. And one short comment doesn’t constitute “maudlin self pity”.
I know we should get back to the topic, but just one more point to clarify: I was thinking of the fact that CBS All Access is something fairly new, and releasing new series in that format is something that hasn’t been proven viable yet (I know The Good Fight is already out on CBSAA, but I don’t know how well it’s doing). My concern is that if Discovery is too heavily pirated, then it might not make enough of a profit on CBSAA for the studio to consider it worth renewing for a second season. If fans want the show to succeed, they need to be willing to invest in it, to prove to CBS that it’s profitable for them to keep making it.
195. ChristopherLBennett – If CBS wants the show to succeed, they should make a show that convinces the fans that it’s worth the additional expense to watch it. Blaming consumers for not buying what you’re selling is a losing proposition. It’s like Microsoft blaming consumers for buying iPods instead of the Zune,
Is it the fault of the fans that each of the reboot movies has done worse than the previous ones?
Box office comparison – ST vs STID vs STB
Obviously, by your reasoning, it’s the fault of the fans for not showing up instead of the creators for releasing a movie that people didn’t want to watch or were willing to catch on video or Netflix instead of shelling out $$ to see it in the theatre.
Look at the graph linked above. After 90 days. ST09 had brought in about $250,000,000, STID made $225,000,000 and STB $158,000,000.
Is it – “Those darn fans just don’t know what’s good for them and stopped giving money to STB! It’s entirely their fault if a fourth movie doesn’t happen!”
Or, is it “Well, what we’ve been doing isn’t working as well as we thought. Maybe we’re doing something wrong?”
I always though Beyond got stiffed. It is a much better (albeit flawed by its bookends which give still unearned weight to Kirk) movie than Into Darkness, but it shows what happens when showrunners make a monumentally bad decision. A lot of the people who showed up last time just stay home or turn off the next time. It creates a mountain to climb that even a subsequent good movie or good decision can’t get over. It fritters away the goodwill that was there that lets those watching overlook other flaws. A bad movie, a bad casting decision (yeah, I’m never letting “Admiral Janeway” in Nemesis go), a bad storyline, they can all be a franchise killer if they are bad enough.
The quintessential Trek example is Enterprise’s Dear Doctor which had a huge audience for that episode due to it being marketed to hell and back, but was so bad that most of the people that tuned in for it just didn’t come back the following week or ever again. It was so bad it not only turned off the newbs but it made the regular fans give up too, no matter that the show eventually turned a corner and started getting better. It just could not get over that bad episode. Or like how Doctor Who in the 1980s never recovered from Colin Baker’s amazingly bad first adventure and his “I am the Doctor, whether you like it or not” pronouncement was met with a heart chorus of “not” and the sound of channels being changed. Classic Who got better again after that bad casting and bad writing, but it never got the audience back.
@196 is right though. Trek has only itself to blame if it loses its audience, for this vacuous movie and its follow up, and if people just stay away. It has to deliver on its promises and 2009 was short on delivery, it has made us all wary,
@195: “If fans want the show to succeed, they need to be willing to invest in it, to prove to CBS that it’s profitable for them to keep making it.”.
I’ll invest in it. I am a subscriber to a cable package and I have been getting CBS as part of that package for decades. I am perfectly willing to continue that arrangement. What I am not willing to do is to pay an upcharge for an “all access”, “all” being defined as one show plus a bunch of reruns of old shows. And CBS is so generous they will even still let me watch the commercials. In fact, they INSIST – unless I pay yet another upcharge.
No, I would change your statement to read: “If CBS wants the show to succeed, they need to be willing to offer it on CBS without gouging the viewer, so the fans can decide whether it’s worth watching.” As I said, fight the power.
Oh, and to try to steer back to the topic in a gesture toward our intrepid moderator, I agree with Omicron’s suggestion that the re-booted Trek films have missed the mark. The fetish for mindless special effects, implausible physical conflicts, and cardboard cutout characters (Exhibit “A”: Admiral Marcus) may have been an attempt to capture the millenial viewer but in doing so they have made Trek indistinguishable from any number of other sci-fi and superhero franchises. The soul of Trek is about empathy, tolerance and friendship with those who are different. There are traces of that message in each these movies, but they are buried beneath all the whiz-bang visuals, evil villains, exploding planets, crashing Enterprises, and uber-intense main characters. There’s no time for subtlety or reflection. I think they should just get it over with and let Michael Bay direct the next one.
There are, of course, many reasons why I’m sad that Leonard Nimoy is no longer with us. But ONE of the reasons is because I wish he could have read Keith’s saying, “Plus, of course, you have Leonard Nimoy, who can not only put lipstick on a pig, but make the pig look good.” I laughed out loud when I read that one.
Aw, thanks, Corylea. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@192/Krad
A very strange response, given that I’ve been very clear that I’m against piracy.
You’re actually equating fans who pour the hearts into nonprofit projects with “robbers”? You really believe that people with a decades-long emotional attachment to a given fictional universe, should be legally persecuted for following their hearts?
Well, thank you for summarizing so well everything that’s wrong in the current situation.
Let me tell you something:
I’m sick an tired of Paramount and CBS treating us creative folks as some kind of enemy. It’s getting really really annoying. And it is even more annoying when the masses (and even intelligent writers-in-the-know like yourself) are jumping on that band wagon.
You know, there’s a part of me that just wants to scream “f**k Star Trek. They don’t have a monopoly on optimistic thoughtful sci fi. We should create a new fictional universe and then we’ll be able to free tell whatever stories we want”.
Just a reminder, as things seem to be getting a bit heated, to keep the tone of the discussion civil and in keeping with our moderation guidelines.
OmicronThetaDeltaPhi: my sincere apologies, I misread your post as justifying piracy. Mea culpa.
As for the crackdown on fan films, Paramount had no choice after Axanar, sadly. This isn’t the place to get into that, though I’d be happy to continue that part of the conversation in private. (My email is Keith at DeCandido dot net.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I was not going to see this movie back in 2009. Some dude playing Jim Kirk? Ridiculous! Then someone let slip that Leonard Nimoy himself was in this film, and I thought, if it brought Nimoy back to being Spock after eighteen years, good enough for me. Also, I remembered Kirk saying, “People can be frightened of change,” and I didn’t want to be one of those.
I’m glad I did go see it. It’s a fun ride. And then after a few hours you stop and think about how very little of this movie makes anything like sense.
The recasting is perfect. Zachary Quinto’s Spock is largely arrogant and annoyed, but so was Nimoy’s Spock early on. Chris Pine’s Kirk is an annoying jerk, but you get little glimpses of the Kirk he will be, even while he’s being an annoying jerk, a credit to Pine’s acting. Zoe Saldana fully brings Nyota Uhura to life (that’s her name, so deal with it), and I love Uhura gets to be a full character, and have a relationship with Spock, which doesn’t diminish her in any way. IMHO, the Spock-Uhura relationship was overdue, and felt perfectly natural; the only reason we didn’t see it earlier was stupid 1960s racism, although we saw awesome glimpses of it in early TOS. It’s one thing the movie gets right, so I can’t bring myself to despise Abrams as many fans do.
John Cho knocks it out of the park as Sulu, and Anton Yelchin is a delight as an even younger Chekov. And I really enjoy Simon Pegg as Scotty.
But man, Karl Urban really nails McCoy. Yes, I agree with you, CLB, he’s totally impersonating DeForest Kelley. But what an impersonation. Urban brings the loveable curmudgeon Kelley portrayed back to us. “All she left me was my bones.” Sold.
Bruce Greenwood made Christopher Pike a nuanced character we actually give a damn about, even if he was basically Obi-Wan Kenobi to Kirk’s Luke Skywalker, and makes Kirk first officer for no compellingly good reason.
The actors performances make the movie, and it’s a good thing too, because man this movie is dumber than a bag of nails. I walked out of the theater, like “Yay, Star Trek!”, then later as I’m thinking about the actual movie, I’m going, “Wait, what?”
I am re-watching this myself right now for the first time since 2010. I will say that for all its faults with the plot, the chemistry between the actors is amazing. I particularly loved the scene in which Kirk meets McCoy for the first time. You could tell right there that the two characters would be friends forever and they captured the spark in their relationship perfectly. I would give the film a 6 out of 10.
@krad or ChristopherLBennett or anyone else involved in Star Trek creations:
Do any of you know what the future of this film franchise is in light of Anton Yelchin’s death? This is a very sad loss and I read on Wikipedia that they will not recast the role of Chekov.
Will they simply write Chekov out of future films and give him an off-screen, or will they replace him with a new character as tactical officer?
I think his portrayal of Chekov was excellent and he perfectly captured the naïveté of the character.
@210/RMS81: We don’t even know if the filmmakers themselves have decided what to do about Chekov, since the next film is still in the development phase and anything could change at this stage. I think the simplest thing is just to write him out and say he transferred somewhere. After all, Chekov was only in 36 TOS episodes, less than half the total, and 0 animated episodes. It’s not like the character is indispensable. And both Sulu and Chekov were underused in all three films, despite being played by the two best actors in the ensemble. Yelchin’s loss is tragic, but a Chekov-less fourth film might finally give John Cho enough to do.
@210 I hope they recast Chekov as a woman, and say it is the exact same character as before. Give us an in-universe trans character.
RMS81: I have no inside knowledge, and as Christopher said, neither does anyone else, given the early stages of development of the film, but my guess would be that they establish that Chekov has transferred to the Reliant and the newly-graduated-from-the-Academy Ensign Jaylah is the new navigator.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I put on JJ Abrams “[title censored because it doesn’t belong]” with low expectations a year or two after it premiered, and turned it off halfway through. No, I didn’t expect much, but I still tried to give it a chance, and maybe in some ways it’s not a bad movie. Trouble is, at its core it’s a JJ Abrams movie, not a Star Trek movie, and that’s why I turned my back on it and didn’t even give a second though to Into Darkness. Part of me wishes I could remember specifics, but on second thought, I’m fine forgetting the whole thing.
I completely agree with the thought that Trek shouldn’t do prequels, it should move forward with new ideas and new personalities, not rewrite the book on existing characters. That’s why TNG was a smashing success: the existing TOS fans weren’t going to be convinced by TOS 2.0 (if you love the original, you’re probably more turned off by a blatant facsimile), and you attract a lot more new fans by striking out in a new direction. The old is an anchor point to start from, not ground to be criss-crossed again and again.
I do wonder what my reaction would have been if they’d made this movie as something other than Trek – it probably would have fared better. A rose by another name is still a rose, but if I ask for a rose, you’d better not hand me a tulip…
I thought Star Trek 09 was watchable, but more so in the first few viewings. It really gets old fast for me compared to the MU Star Trek movies (although, admittedly, ST:V and Nemesis give me pause). I agree with Krad about all the core TOS recastings being a high point. The one thing I disagree with is Eric Bana being lifeless. I don’t think he was superb or anything, but he was hardly lifeless. The plot, however, is a Greg Grunberg convertible wreck, compete with its Sabotage.
The casting was first class. I even liked the upgraded look but the plot, teens save the world lost me, yes I know they’re not teens literally. Also they killed Amanda. I hated that.
The casting was first class. I even liked the upgraded look but the plot, teens save the world lost me, yes I know they’re not teens literally. Also they killed Amanda. I hated that.
@62/Me in 2017: “The star that went supernova was not Romulus’s own star.”
We now know, thanks to Star Trek: Picard, that it actually was Romulus’s own star, which makes a lot more sense (aside from the illogic of an inhabited planet around a supernova-capable star, but that ship sailed with Minara, Fabrini, and Beta Niobe). I tried to post that already, but the message didn’t go through.
Which means that Spock’s declaration that the star had gone supernova and that he didn’t have much time even more problematical. Using our system as an example, if Sol went supernova, the first effects, travelling at the speed of light, would arrive in about eight minutes. So Spock is somehow going to stop the supernova in just a few minutes?
It doesn’t matter how many retcons they throw at it, it was and still is stupid and they should have known better. Just because something is a retcon doesn’t make it better.
Just look at The Trouble With Edward. It shows that not only did Starfleet know about tribbles, they were responsible for their rapid breeding. Yes in the original, Spock and McCoy and the entire rest of the crew and the computer had no idea what tribbles were, let alone what their breeding habits were like.
Yeah, this movie and Picard still have problems reconciling with each other, though I’ve said it before.
At this point I’m mainly of the opinion that if the original problem was intended to be that Romulus’s own star was going up, then they should’ve established another populated star system well within range of the fallout from Romulus (Remus/Romii always seem to be in the same system, so they’d have gone up when Romulus did IMO) to explain why Spock didn’t just pack it in after Romulus was engulfed. I can just about dream up some Treknobabble reasons for why collapsing a singularity in the middle of an exploding star wouldn’t involve the rapid death of the now-established 900 million souls still on the planet, but they mostly involve red matter having different or additional properties to those established onscreen.
@220/wizard: The scenario described in the movie was self-contradictory even by its own lights. The supernova happened first and then the Vulcans tried to use Red Matter to stop it? How is that supposed to work? That’s like trying to disarm a bomb after it goes off.
At least the Picard version makes more sense in that the supernova was predicted in advance and people had time to prepare. We can assume that the Vulcans prepared the Red Matter before the supernova and hoped to get it there in time to prevent it. Maybe the idea was for the RM black hole to suck up enough of the star’s mass to relieve the pressure on the core and prevent the supernova. And then the supernova went off earlier than predicted and Spock was too late.
So all of that makes more sense in the Picard version than in the movie version. The remaining part that doesn’t make sense is why Spock went ahead and activated the Red Matter anyway. Unless — hey, this is just occurring to me right now as I type this — unless he started the release process moments before the supernova, and then it happened while the process was underway but before it was completed. Yeah, that would explain it. You’d have to assume that what we were shown in the mind meld sequence was presented in nonlinear order, but that’s reasonable enough given how memory works.
Or, we can accept that thing happened just as we were shown and realize that things just work differently in the Trek universe. Like a supernova threatening the entire galaxy. Or a red liquid that can create black holes. Or a cadet being immediately promoted to Captain of a major ship as part of his graduation. Or the guy who actually takes out the bad guy being totally ignored for his actions. Or only 10,000 Vulcans being off planet at one time out of a population of billions.
Or that they just say and do things because they’re kewl.
@221/CLB:
I thought the whole idea, as odd as it was, was that this supernova threatened the whole galaxy. In that sense, stopping the supernova before it did more damage seemed to be the implied point. Spock was just too late to prevent the destruction of Romulus, that’s how I interpreted it at the time. In Picard, I’m glad it was simplified down to just being the Romulan star going supernova, even if that muddies the waters with regards to why Spock bothered to stop it after the fact.
@222/kkozoriz:
We could accept it, but if we follow cannon as it is now, that decision seems to have been made for us in Picard, haha.
@223/Thierafhal: “I thought the whole idea, as odd as it was, was that this supernova threatened the whole galaxy. In that sense, stopping the supernova before it did more damage seemed to be the implied point.”
It’s not about the intentions, it’s about the utter impossibility of the mechanics. You can’t suck the radiation from a supernova back in after it’s already been released. It’s expanding outward in all directions at the speed of light. Nothing you do at the point of origin is going to make it magically reverse course or go away. If someone claps their hands and you grab their wrists a split-second later, it won’t prevent people from hearing the sound. The sound waves are already spreading out, and nothing you do to their source afterward will erase them.
You can’t stop a supernova that’s already happened. The movie said that, but it’s absolute gibberish. A supernova is not a slow, ongoing event. It’s a single gigantic explosion. Like I said, you can’t disarm a bomb after it blows up. If a movie character says “The bomb’s explosion endangered the whole city, so I initiated a plan to halt the explosion after it took place and before its effects could spread too far,” you’d see instantly that that was complete and utter idiocy, an impossibility as described. Explosions don’t work that way. Once the thing explodes, it’s too late to stop it or undo it.
@224/CLB: I totally agree with you. Sorry, I should have read your original comment more carefully because you did take the intent of the writers into account; my bad
@224 – “Nothing you do at the point of origin is going to make it magically reverse course or go away. If someone claps their hands and you grab their wrists a split-second later, it won’t prevent people from hearing the sound. The sound waves are already spreading out, and nothing you do to their source afterward will erase them.”
That would be true if we didn’t have magical Red Matter, now with more Plot Device ™.
We’ve seen that time travel and faster than light travel exist, both of which could prevent you from hearing someone clap their hands after they’ve done it. If Red Matter has those properties, and there’s nothing to say that it doesn’t seeing as it has the ability to create a singularity, they it could theoretically suck all the radiation back in for all we know
We’ve seen numerous cases where things that we have seen happen are somehow prevented from happening due to various technobabble solutions. How many times did the Enterprise explode in Case and Effect, only to be perfect intact at the end?
@227 I call that solution a Heisenberg Compensator solution: We need this kind of effect. This effect is impossible regarding real physics. Ergo, we will invent something that explicitly does that impossible thing.
And I cannot disagree with you that they could imbue red matter with those properties. I would still not begrudge CLB his right to roll his eyes at said properties because it’s like the super tool in episode 10 of Picard, it’s just a bit TOO convenient. But the problem is, they didn’t really give it the properties it needed to work like that in dialogue. All it seems to do is create tiny black holes. Or maybe tiny portals in subspace that destructively suck matter through them, considering I’ve heard often that black holes need a crap ton of matter to work…
@227/woz: Well, a black hole just needs to be dense enough that all its mass fits inside its event horizon. In theory, a black hole can have a tiny mass, though it would have to be formed through some exotic process and would quickly evaporate from Hawking radiation. Generally it takes the gravity of a dying star considerably more massive than the Sun to collapse into a black hole.
However, black holes don’t magically reach out and suck things in like they’re shown to do in fiction. From a distance, a black hole of mass M will exert exactly the same gravitational pull as a normal star of mass M. It’s just that a regular star is large enough that the gravity at its surface will only be maybe a few dozen times Earth’s gravity — but in a black hole, all the mass is concentrated in a point, so you can keep getting closer and closer to the center of mass, with gravity going up by the inverse square law until the escape velocity equals and surpasses the speed of light. So you have to be close to a black hole — much, much closer than the radius of a normal star — before its pull becomes great enough to become a problem. (Unless it’s a supermassive BH of the kind found at the center of a galaxy, that is.)
Which is why it’s so nonsensical to suggest that setting off a black hole in the position of an exploded star will somehow suck back in all the matter and radiation that’s already expanded well beyond the star’s position. I mean, if a star is massive enough, then when it goes supernova, its core will collapse into a black hole anyway. That’s how black holes are usually formed, in fact. And yet their radiation and expelled atmospheres don’t get sucked back in.
@228 – But that’s not how black holes are depicted in Star Trek so it’s unfair to the show to expect them to follow real world physics. Where did all the mass from the Red Matter come from when the black hole was used to destroy Vulcan? Why would the spatters of Red matter create such a large black hole that would crumble the Romulan ship rather than simply pass through it?
For that matter, how could Voyager 6 pass through a black hole?
I agree that, if you stop to think about anything in this film, it makes no sense. However, the pacing is so tight and the performances are of such quality that I never actually do stop to think about anything while watching this film, which means I always enjoy it. It’s only later that I feel a little bit let down. It’s like the Star Trek version of a very expensive candy bar. And of course I’m grateful for it having relaunched the franchise, even if the results have been mixed.
@Christopher
Ehh, it makes sense that stopping the explosion is a good thing when the supernova is apparently going to keep going and consume the galaxy due to nonsensium.
That was how COUNTDOWN did it, I believe.
@231/C.T. Phipps: “Ehh, it makes sense that stopping the explosion is a good thing when the supernova is apparently going to keep going and consume the galaxy due to nonsensium.”
You’re missing the point. Obviously stopping an explosion is a good thing. The problem is that the explosion has already happened by the time Spock gets there. It doesn’t matter how good an idea it is to prevent something if you’re already too late to prevent it. Nothing Spock does at the source can magically suck back or erase the radiation that’s expanding outward at the speed of light. It’s already too far away.
@232 Basically. The thing they needed red matter to do, they did not define red matter as actually being able to do it, and while Trek has plenty of things they do that are pretty close to impossible by physics as we know it, they at least tend to have standard rules for how they break them. Warp drive is beyond our possible energy requirements for the entire planet but solve that, and we already have a concept. Transporters are insane in terms of power and storage but again, the concept is basically “well, we solved those problems somehow”. I just don’t know what the physics are for “pull back a supernova that may be practically magic in and of itself”. If I demand that my wrestling physics be consistent, I certainly will demand that my Star Trek physics be consistent as well.