41

Did anyone else catch Scotty’s reference to the reason he was assigned a position on the ice planet? If I recall he mentioned it had to do with mucking up a transporter experiment on “Admiral Archer’s prized beagle.”

Poor, poor Porthos!

42

I saw it yesterday and I think it was great(but after Insurrection and Nemesis the bar were pretty low to start with).

But the few things that annoyed me were the following:

  1. Enterprise were built on Earth, and they build it without any security, how about at least fencing it off so not everybody can walk up to it?

  2. A drink called Cardassian something, sure, they had made first contact by the time of the film, but do they have drinks named after each race Starfleet has made contact with, I didn’t hear any Xindi drinks ;)

  3. Spock tonguing Uhura.

  4. Sulu fighting with his shirt on.

  5. Chekov being a transporter wiz, I thought that was Scottys job?

Things that I really liked:

  1. Kirk eating a apple while taking the Kobayashi Maru test.

  2. Reuse of the nasty mind controlling eels from Wrath of Khan.

  3. Karl Urban!

43

Well, Scotty seemed convinced he’d rematerialize eventually, so all is not lost! I’d missed the name of the Admiral, so that is funny.

What’s with Scotty’s sidekick? Is he the JarJar of the ST reboot? Will there be toys?

I enjoyed the film a lot, and I especially liked the new warp-effect. It’s just so abrupt and loud. Awesome.

44

I kept making this mistake too, but the actor is Pine, the other captain’s name is Pike.

45

[Scotty]He tried to ram the bloody thing as hard as possible, but the warp drive wan’t available sir![/Scotty]

46

I’m pretty sure I remember him specifically shouting for full impulse power to the computer. It’s super nerdy but it still bugged me.

47

One if the biggest disappointments from Nemesis for me was that we never really got to see the ultimate super weapon of death work on anything. I absolutely loved that in this movie we got to see the ultimate super weapon of death swallowing whole planets and ships. Loved it.

48

Warp engine- maybe you can use the main warp engine in realspace in JJ’s version…Warp sure didnt work like traditional warp.
Building on Earth- looked cooler- gave Kirk his Luke Skywalker staring at the twin suns moment. Realistic- I have no idea. I can think of a 100 reasons we dont build space ships in space now. Easier to just send the damn thing up when you are done. As for security, um this is Trek, crime on Earth is all but gone, well except for car stealing, and bar fighting. There were like 1000 star fleet people wandering around, I’m sure some of them were red shirts.

49

Saw this one last night. It was AWESOME.

If I took the time to do it, I could identify everything that was potentially annoying about this movie. But I had so much fun, I don’t want to. I’m willing to overlook the 10% of suck because the 90% of awesome was just so, well, awesome.

Long live Star Trek. If they end up making another 5-7 movies of this caliber I just may become a fan again.

50

The Kelvin used the old Cochrane 27AY warp engines. They were highly inefficient–push past Warp 3 for more than a few hours and you’d likely rupture the warp field and fall into a wormhole.

Because of the mild instability of the warp field on the early single-nacelle ships, powering them up would cause a slight warping of realspace around the ship. Though it wasn’t an intended design feature, Captain Komack was able to put this to good use during the battle of Eniar XI. As the Klingon K’ral-class cruiser was moving in for a final disruptor blast, Komack powered up the U.S.S. Lake Champlain’s warp engine, channeled his impulse thrust directly into the warp field, and was able to hit .97 lightspeed in a matter of a few seconds.* This allowed him to maneuver past the Klingon cruiser and and disable its warp drive with a well-placed photon torpedo shot.**

George Kirk of course knew of this famous battle. Though Starfleet Academy engineering profs often used this as an example of how not to treat a starship, the tactical creativity Komack used was highlighted as a prime example of the creativity and ingenuity that starship captains should be prepared to use in dire situations.

And, in fact, Kirk used the same technique to give the Kelvin a speed boost as he rammed the Narada.

  • The rapid acceleration was so great that the structural integrity field was able to keep g forces low enough that the crew wasn’t severely injured, but Komack essentially “bent” the ship, and the Lake Champlain was retired rather than being put through an expensive refit.

** The Klingons were months from the neutral zone at impulse speeds. With no hope of escape, the crew destroyed the relatively undamaged ship rather than surrender. Starfleet Intelligence believes that there may be a strong Klingon cultural taboo against surrender or capture.

51

I liked this movie. I was never a star trek fan, but I’ll watch whatever sequel this cast and crew puts out.

Some of the plot contrivances were a little groan worthy, like Kirk landing right next to Spock Prime the Ice Planet, Kirk overhearing Uhura’s Klingon decode so he put two and two together, the relativeness easiness of the beaming, Spock Prime telling Scotty the solution to warp beaming, and Kirk taking command over the ship so easily.

Things I enjoyed.

Pine’s performance as Kirk, Operatic space battles, checking off as many shout-outs as they possibly can, Karl Urban, the opening scene, the battle on the drill and rebooting the franchise with a healthy, “We’ll do what we want and you will like it attitude”. It really does seem like the whole cast and crew had a blast making this movie.

52

Denny A you are my hero!

53

That sums up my feelings pretty well, except that my number 1 annoyance was the contrivance of Kirk AND Spock Prime AND Scotty all winding up within a few miles of each other on an ice planet, and all arriving there at different times through completely different, uncoordinated means. I think the general awesomeness of Spock Prime’s entrance and the quick pacing of events masks this during the movie which makes it work and at least not detract from the general fun. It’s like your brain shuts off due to the rapid occurance of: Whoa, it’s SPOCK! Whoa, exposition! Whoa, it’s Scotty… and an alien monkey thing! And… we’re back on the Enterprise and Spock is beating the shit out of Kirk.

Kirk getting the head’s up on the Klingon transmission only happened because he was banging the hot green chick, so I’m willing to forgive that one.

54

It’s clear that Star Trek’s writers, like Battlestar Galactica’s, think that characters and action scenes matter and that plot is irrelevant. The new movie does a better job than almost any of its predecessors of letting the characters be themselves and engaging the viewer in their relationships. But the plot feels like pure contrivance:

  • Kirk runs into the man who will become his commanding officer hanging out at a bar in Iowa.
  • Kirk decides to enroll in a military service academy on eight hours notice. He shows up, they let him in.
  • Vulcan is apparently three minutes away from Earth at warp speed. But every other ship in the Federation fleet is apparently days away somewhere?
  • Kirk just happens to meet, on his first mission, the guy who killed his father.
  • That guy is driving a mining ship (!) laden with disruptors and photon torpedoes. I guess it was outfitted in the days that the dude spent pursuing Spock after Romulus was destroyed but before Spock–and this really hurts even to write–managed to deploy a black hole that somehow imploded the supernova that was going to engulf the galaxy. Could Abrams not afford a science consultant?
  • Why does bad guy have to drill a hole to the center of a planet before he can drop in a black hole. Does he not understand how black holes work?
  • When jettisoned from the Enterprise, Kirk manages to land a couple of miles away from Spock and a couple of miles away from Scotty. Spock, of course, arrives just in time to save Kirk from certain death.
  • They then beam what’s presumably several light-years onto a ship moving at FTL speed.
  • At the end, Kirk gets bumped up three grades to Captain and put in command of five hundred people, fresh out of the academy.
  • We’re supposed to enjoy the happy ending because Earth was saved, even though another planet with as many people on it was destroyed. The whole tone of the end of the movie seemed wrong, like people celebrating on September 12th because one of the hijacked planes didn’t reach its target.

Just trying to think about what happened in Star Trek hurts my brain. I know it’s summer movie season, but can’t someone make a $200 million movie that actually makes sense?

Also, if nothing else, I will never forgive Star Trek for opening the door to Spock/Spock slash fiction.

55

I’m not sure he knew the 25 years part, just that he’d show up there. He became Ahab waiting for the great white whale. Spock could have showed up an hour later, not 25 years later, but Nero was going to wait no matter what.

56

Everything else which I deleted, I agree with.

57

As long as we’re picking nits… Why did Earth have no defenses at all? I understand that Bana destroyed some of the fleet, but we saw the Starbase. As I remember it from Starfleet Battles, those bad boys pack some punch.

58

It’s not “a bar in Iowa”, it’s a bar in Iowa near a major Starfleet facility. They show very clearly it’s within easy driving distance of the construction site of the Enterprise. They show that it’s chock full of Starfleet cadets and crew, this is clearly a regular hangout for Starfleet people. The place even has Starfleet-themed salt and pepper shakers. It’s like a bar near Norfolk or Annapolis where tons of Navy people hang out. Pike and Kirk have probably been around each other vaguely before, given that Kirk is the son of an officer who died in the line of duty in a famous incident. Kirk has probably gotten into fights in that very establishment before. And they state outright he’s already taken some kind of aptitude or placement tests, again as a legacy, Starfleet knows all about him and is probably tracking him intently, the decision to join Starfleet, given these realities, is hardly something that came out of the blue in 8 hours, it’s been a question hovering over him his entire life. And it’s hardly a mysterious act of coincidence Kirk winds up under Pike, since he (with the help of Bones) deliberately choose to sneak on to Enterprise. What other commander would listen to him at all, besides Pike? Which ship is the flagship, the strongest, the coolest, the one in charge? Of course he gets on the Enterprise. Deliberate, logical acts taken by characters aren’t conicidence.

  • Why does bad guy have to drill a hole to the center of a planet before he can drop in a black hole. Does he not understand how black holes work?

He doesn’t drop a black hole, he drops “red matter”, which apparently can create black holes, but we have no idea what the rules are for that. Maybe drilling + core drop is more reliable than just plopping the stuff on the surface. Maybe it’s safer for the deploying ship. Maybe he wanted minimum Vulcans to escape and this way works faster. Maybe Red Matter doesn’t work very well in atmosphere. We don’t know. Our knowledge of real black holes is highly theoretical to begin with.

  • They then beam what’s presumably several light-years onto a ship moving at FTL speed.

The difficulty of this is a plot point, and they only pull it off using knowledge from the future. Earlier Trek shows have made plot points of making special or novel efforts to transport over unusually long distance, transport through shields, transport from ship to ship at warp, transport (or the dematerialization aspect of it) being maintained for unusually long lengths of time, altering or duplicating the object or people being transported, etc. Playing with the rules of the transporter is, frankly, one of the core pieces of the Trek universe. If you can accept that these ships can communicate over light years of distance while moving at FTL speeds (i.e, ships can send and recieve information under these conditions), then what makes the transporter fundamentally different? It’s just moving information around in an energy beam of some kind.

59

Overall, I loved the movie. Not high-brow fare by any means, but I had a GREAT time. This will be the first movie I see multiple times in the theatre in a long, time time.

Random commentary of a few things that bugged me and things I particularly liked.

Geek ARGH!!! stuff: The science consultant needs to be sent back to high school physics classes. Black holes to eat a supernova? wait wat? Supernova eating a galaxy? lolwut? etc. etc. lots of total lack of comprehension of how shit works, insterstellar distances, etc.

The “how they meet” coincidence stuff with kirk landing next to spock, where scotty is stationed, and stuff like that is eye-roll worthy, and I think they could (and should) have done a better job with it, but I can roll with it after grumbling for a second or two.

Lens flares bugged me for the first few space shots, then I kinda got used to it or something, because it stopped annoying me. Dunno.

Space being silent. Booyaa! Loved it. Wish they’d used the transition from noisy to quiet and back more often. It was hella effective. Brought on some nice 2001 flashbacks.

Kirk’s birth scene. Sappy as hell, and jerked a tear with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the balls, but jerk a tear it did. Being able to say “goodbye” when Something Bad Happens and other closure type stuff is a big personal soft spot for me, and this scene smacked it hard.

The Kirk recruitment in the bar didn’t bother me. Pike was around, apparently, as part of the recruitment drive to pick up newbies. The bar was where lots of the kids went for a last night out since it was nearby before heading to the shuttles to move out, so Pike dropped by to check up on them (and/or to grab a drink or three himself). A bit overly convenient, sure, but not so far fetched that it really bugged me. I liked the writing for the dialog between Pike and Kirk. Showed Pike having the people-skills of a great captain, and really pushed Kirk’s buttons to get the results he wanted.

Nit: Not so fond of the Bones being scared of space thing. As I recall, it’s transporters he hated, not space in general. Meh. No biggie.

Spock’s childhood scenes were almost straight out of Yesteryear, which I loved, as that’s one of my favorite Trek episodes all around. That’s a great reference. Only way it would have been better is if they’d shown him with I-chaya. Lots of things like this where they threw in bits and pieces of dialog, references, or allusions to old trek bits.

Basically, as long as I didn’t focus on the details, and just enjoyed the ride, I had an amazingly good time. The pacing was excellent, with only a few exceptions. The soundtrack was good, although a bit more variety as the film progressed would have been nice.

60

LOVED LOVED LOVED it! I can let some of the small stuff go very easy.