381

He’s Dead Jim.

382

plonk

383

You can plonk me too. I thought TDK was too far on the dark side, and lacked the hope it needed at the end. Batman taking the fall for Dent ruined it somewhat for me. (No freakin’ spoiler warning, if you haven’t seen it by now, you’re not that interested.) Perhaps it was like The Empire Strikes Back, and TDK didn’t really have an end, and the next movie will bring Batman’s redemption and a sense of post-Bush hope to Gotham, but for now, it was just too bleak–if I were Bruce, I’d give up hope and head back to the Batcave and run the Batmobile engine until the fumes overcame me. It was a brilliant movie with spectacular performance and production values, but the story was just too DARK Knight.

As for Star Trek, saw it with the spawn for the third time today. I’m now sated until I can buy it on Blu-ray and nerdishly freeze-frame all the cool new starship classes headed off to rescue Vulcan. (First movie I’ve seen three times at the theater since Star Wars in 1977. Though that one’s now up to four, since I saw the bastardized remastered edition at the theater in the 90s.) Hopefully in Paramount’s never-ending quest to sell you the same Star Trek products over and over again, there will someday be a special edition with image stabilization applied and no lens flare.

384

Well Denny, let’s just say you’re not Robin material and leave it at that.

385

Speaking of the casting, again, I’m wondering if my ho-hum feelings on Scotty (Pegg) and Chekov (Yelchin) have more to do with their lack of screentime and how they seemed to be mostly comedy toss-ins. In a sequel, I hope they take a more serious angle and can develop the characters a bit more. Otherwise, I felt the casting was great.

386

I my vote is Pegg yes and Chekov no. Unless that kid is hiding talent and saving it for a bigger part in the sequel, I just do not see him being better the next time around. He had his chances, but it was all flat to me.

Pegg was perfect in every scene. Maybe a bit too wacky/over-the-top for some, but I liked his nervous joviality in the face of imminent danger.

387

Yep never explained in TOS.

388

Only one nit to pick from me and I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned it:
Where the hell did Spock Prime get firewood for a camp fire on an ice planet?!? Gah!

389

They beamed him down to watch his planet dissapear with a nice wooden chair, which he broke apart. Also, that giant beast on the ice planet sure was scared of that twig with fire on the end of it.

390

Of all the nits, the only one that really bugged me was Spock looking up to see Vulcan absorbed by the black hole. How was that possible?

  • The planet he was on was in frighteningly close orbit to Vulcan
  • He was on one of Vulcan’s moons
  • Nero left a Romulan Holomatic™ Sky Projector so that Spock could view the planet’s destruction in Real3D.
  • The mind-meld image of Vulcan being destroyed was symbolic of Spock knowing it was happening, but he never actually saw it.

If it was either of the first two, then one would think the black hole would imbalance/destroy the rest of the star system that Spock, Kirk, Scotty, and Ensign Muppet were in.

391

Yeah, that one is the only one that really bugged me too Denny. One the first watch I thought it had to have been Vulcan’s moon. But then wouldn’t something that close also be pulled into the singularity?

On a second viewing yesterday, I also noticed that it definitely had the look of a “hologram” of sorts, the same kind that they showed in the Romulan mining ship all the time (like in the beginning of the movie, where he “throws” a hologram over at the Captain of the USS Kelvin, asking the location of Ambassador Spock’s ship). So I’m guessing what they did was leave him stranded near the Federation colony, (far enough away that he couldn’t warn them right away), and left him with a holographic live-feed of sorts.

So Option 3 in your list would be my guess after watching the movie again yesterday.

392

Except that’s not a nit. It’s a stup plot point that is beaten over your head like a sledgehammer.

393

Watched it last night.

I concur with the sentiment that they nailed the characters and the world but completely failed to provide a coherent plot. I was only mildly uncomfortable with it all up to the point where Kirk gets saved by Spock and they all walk to Scotty. Seriously???

Other than that the stuff that was making me uncomfortable was just the “he’s Kirk, therefore he’s better than everyone else and we shouldn’t question when everyone automatically respects and promotes him even though he’s being a jackass.” It’s a problem a lot of movies have where we’re supposed to just know that the main character is badass and forgive the plot when it bends over backwards for them.

Still I enjoyed it. Simon Pegg was fucking hilarious and was the highlight of the film for me.

394

OK well I went and saw it again because I’m a gigantic nerrrrrrrrrrrrd and I still love it ALSO

…I’m going to leave my former argument with Meister over the Kobayashi Maru exercise alone. It’s dead, Jim. Except that Kirk does say, in his defense, “The test itself is a cheat!” Couple other things, though.

-They didn’t just shoot the drill the first time because they had the Romulan ship bearing down on them. They were supposed to clandestinely infiltrate the drill head and detonate charges, immediately thereafter beaming back aboard and hopefully beaming Pike back as well (a very outside chance and Pike knew it going in). Unfortunately Ensign Redshirt blew it (in a pretty lame manner, admittedly) and they had to improvise. They also didn’t know what the drill was for the first time.

-Kirk as a boy didn’t just steal his stepdad’s car for a pointless joyride - the Star Fleet megatowers loomed in the distance in nearly every shot that showed which way he was heading in the car. He was running away from home, to Star Fleet, where his mom was currently, something to that effect. It wasn’t completely stupid. In fact, that quarry/ravine was probably formed by the mining necessary to provide raw materials for the Star Fleet base or something to that effect.

-I noticed that for most of the film, Nero has a deformed right ear (no point!) and a big circular scar over the right parietotemporal region of his head. However, he doesn’t have that before he attacks the Kelvin. I think that’s pretty sweet that Kirk’s dad probably did that when he rammed the ship with the Kelvin.

-The reason the Romulan ship had a big gaping open area with no railings was because that was where the drill assembly was housed when retracted (and serviced for repairs).

-I think it’s pretty neat the way Spock losing his mother in the new timeline is a big part of why he ends up in Uhura’s arms. Without his mother dying, his father probably never admits so boldly that he loved her to Spock, thereby validating Spock’s own burgeoning feelings for Uhura.

-The ship Spock Prime uses to ferry the red matter around in is stupid. There, I said it. Weeeweeeweeeweee

Apologies if anyone else said this stuff already. I tried to keep up on this thread!

395

This is the most likely explanation. Spock was able to sense the death of the Vulcan crew of the USS Intrepid from light years away in the original series, as well as the arrival of V’Ger in the first movie in Klingon space while on Vulcan.

396

It ain’t possible. Yeah, they played it pretty fast and loose on this account. I’d have to go with the mind-meld theory.

I prefer the term “Ensign Ugnaught” myself!

397

Are we REALLY talking about the same television series?

398

I just finished reading the book and found it considerably more satisfying than the movie as it dealt with a lot of my pet peeves.

Here are just a few it resolveD:

  1. The kid hitchiking when young Kirk is driving the car is Kirk’s big brother who is running away from home because their step father was just such a jerk to them.

  2. Kirk drove the car into a quarry and it is explicitly called that in the book.

  3. The star that exploded exploded 130 years prior to it hitting Romulus. It was a super giant and the shock wave wasn’t detected until it was nearly too late.

  4. The shockwave’s progression increased in velocity over time which wasn’t expected which is why Romulus was destroyed.

  5. When Spock Prime meets Kirk in the cave, Spock explicitly says that the odds of them meeting at that time in that place are so astronomically tiny that “Dr. McCoy would argue that it is proof that there’s a higher power at work.” When they happen to run into Scotty, another big coincidence Spock starts hypothesizing that the timeline is trying to repair itself as these coincidences seem absurdly unlikely.

  6. Earth-based defenses had specifically attacked the drill but had been unable to damage it do to the Romulan ship intercepting shots and surface fighters that had attempted to destroy the drill.

  7. The Romulan ship had to be destroyed at the end to prevent it from time shifting again. The Romulan ship could not operate warp drive and have its shields up at once. It needed warp drive to perform the time shift. The Enterprise was able to destroy the ship because it had its shields down.

  8. Kirk was sleeping with the Orion chick because she was one of the technicians on the test and through her was able to learn how to break in and install his subroutine.

  9. There are numerous very excellent scenes not in the movie that were in the book including:

a. More discussion about Admiral Archer’s prize beagle.

b. The very last scene in the book is Admiral Archer’s beagle materializing on the transporter of the Enterprise.

c. Uhura talking to the Orion chick in Orion-Prime about how Kirk had bedded half the females at the academy - not all of whom were humanoid only to discover that Kirk also speaks Orion-Prime and that she’s exaggerating and that all of them were humanoid – he thinks.

d. The debate between Kirk and Spock at the hearing is much more interesting and makes it clear that Kirk would likely have won the debate.

e. Some great lines about how “Kirk never loses - the man doesn’t know how to lose.”

f. The super nova was not going to “destroy the galaxy” but because it was a super giant, it would definitely have wiped out a lot of habitable planets in the alpha quadrant.

g. The Romulans had every intention of taking their ship back to Romulus after they were done. They didn’t before our of fear of losing control of their ship. The crew debated with Nero over whether they should destroy any Federation planets other than Vulcan and were anxious to destroy the star that destroyed Romulus and then return to Romulus.

h. The ship was an “exploratory mining” ship that was heavily armed because it was left to fend for itself in very remote areas and often had very valuable ore on board that it needed to be able to protect.

399

Excellent. Thanks Brad.

A few of those things could have easily been worked into the script and taken little time and not taken away from the film’s flow. Especially Spock Prime talking about the coincidence of them all meeting.

400

I don’t think you mean “penultimate”.

And the idea of Trek as hard sci-fi makes me giggle. If you want to argue that Trek was inspirational to scientists or the show had a nice pro-science stance, that’s fine, but hard sci-fi? No.