That’s great to hear, since Karl Urban has been woefully underutilized in the previous movies.
While some of the banter between him and Spock and Jim are shown in the trailer, but I thought there was a lot more too. He actually does stuff in this movie too besides make wise cracks… He just nails the character. I would enjoy the movie for that reason alone. Then again, I loved what he had in most the other movies too, just wished they’d added more.
About the podcast on Star Trek Beyond, I thought there is no colon in the title. It is like “Star Trek Into Darkness”, there is no colon there either.
Unless someone is determined to start another wikipedia edit war.
I decided to combine these two suggestions. So I watched Amok Time in the background while my wife was cooking dinner. She was ignoring most of it. But the little she did absorb convinced her she never wants to see anything associated with Star Trek again.
I’ll try to change her mind tomorrow morning. In retrospect, showing her the first TV show older than the 80s was a bad idea.
On the other hand, I hadn’t seen that episode since about 1999, and found it fascinating. Now I’m wondering what Vulcans will do in the Kelvin timeline once the Ponfar time comes. In Amok Time Spock was called back to his home planet for Ponfar. But that home planet has now been destroyed.
If my wife really doesn’t want to go tomorrow, I do have a backup plan. My favorite aunt is visiting my parents from the east coast. Maybe I can drag her along with me. Or my mom. She’s a huge Star Trek fan.
First of all, I’m going to assume you’ve see both of the first two movies of the reboot thing that’s happening.
At the end of Star Trek (2009), Ambassador Spock tells Margin-Call Spock that they’ve found a planet they can start to colonize with the survivors. In Into Darkness, I think they refer to this as New Vulcan.
So I assume all Wednesday night Business Time will be handled there.
-xtien
“This is where the frontier pushes back.”
Sadly, I think it’s hard for some to accept that there are people out there who have disliked or had no interest in Trek for years, decades even, but they like the new movie verse. I have a handful of friends in this camp, and I would never show them the old stuff, again… they already dismissed it once already. The new stuff… they just like it.
Yes, unfortunately she seems to placed in the role of high school love interest for Spock.
I was kind of indifferent when they first introduced that relationship, even open to it. Three movies in I’ve decided the writers have created a crutch for themselves with her. The new lady in the movie is a lot more interesting in Uhura, and I don’t find that acceptable. They need to fix it. Uhura is not just some Vulcan eye-candy, although a few of Bones’ line about the relationship are worthwhile. They can keep the relationship but she just needs more; every movie doesn’t have to start with Uhura being mad at Spock too.
The old stuff looks and sounds ridiculous. I watched the original series as a small kid when there were a lot fewer channels than there are now. I generally enjoy about half the OS movies, and still can’t figure out why there’s a II after the Motion Picture movie which I found unbearable to watch. And for a lot of people who have been on the planet for at least a couple of decades, they’ve already been exposed to Star Trek and rejected it… the new series has given the fandom fresh blood for reasons that have nothing to do with the original series… and that’s okay. They don’t have to like the OS series to like these movies.
I feel there is enough fandom throws in there to make it a little more enjoyable for some of us who enjoy more Trek outside this movie verse… but man I’d pay my 8 bucks to see the banter. I love it. It makes me completely overlook the fact that supposedly some super advance ship is needed for something and then the other seems to do it just fine later.
I think you’re right about this. The last two movies they have engineered a relationship conflict and resolved it. I forgot my feeling about that at the beginning of this one. I felt like, “Wait, didn’t you have them in a tiff the last time around?” Which, of course, they resolve.
Agreed. But that episode provides a great window into not only the relationship between Spock and Kirk, and what that means to both of them, but also sets the table for understanding how complex Spock is when it comes to emotion, so that his shifts in this movie make sense to a newcomer.
-xtien
I guess for me, there is nothing in that episode that makes me care about Spock or Kirk if I didn’t already care about them from the beginning. Because of my age, maybe… I learned to care about them in the better movies. It was years later before i understood and watched some of the OS again, and by then I overlooked the styrofoam sets and stupid kirk girl of the episode stuff because I’d already cared about Trek and started watching TNG.
If OS never clicked the first time around it’s certainly not going to be better decades later when the age shows even more on this stuff.
Regarding Uhura, it would be more interesting for her to be facing the pressures of hanging with her own species than it is for Spock.
Just got back from seeing this. In my personal rating system for the “Kelvin Timeline” Trek, I’d go Reboot, then Beyond, then Darkness as a close third.
I thought the writing was good - the inter-character banter was right up there with the original series, and as mentioned above, the McCoy/Spock interactions were great. It was nice that they gave Yelchin a fair amount of screen-time for his last role, though I suspect it might have been at the expense of Saldana.
The direction was was well-done. Despite all the endless movement and action, Lin managed to keep me fairly informed as to where it was all happening.
I enjoyed the little asides here and there in the movie, but I was relived that they never appeared to be actively winking at the audience the way that Abrams’ movies always seems to be. Kirk’s line about tearing his shirt… again… was pretty good. And I liked the various theories on why the Franklin disappeared – theories that would have been tinfoil-hat territory in any other universe: “Some say a giant glowing hand carried it off.”
So I enjoyed it, but like Into Darkness, this movie doesn’t seem to hold up to even a cursory close look at the plot. My spoiler-laden questions below:
Spoilers! And also Questions!
OK, so I get that the bad guy was a disillusioned proto-Federation guy who never quite adjusted to life after wartime. That was nicely telegraphed in the scene where he was watching Kirk’s logs. That’s an old trope and well-worn, but it’s fine… it worked in well with the overarching (and sort of anti-Trump) theme of everyone being stronger if we all work together rather than trying to be a lone hero/strongman.
But… why was he there, exactly? Sure, he’s nuts, but he apparently had the technology to leave the planet at any time with his bee-ship/swarm. Seems to me that he could have left the planet pretty much whenever he wanted and carried out his evil plans in comfort elsewhere. I guess he was just using the planet as a base of operations while looking for the doomsday weapon?
Next, where was he getting his troops? The bad guy referred to only three of them being alive when he made his last log entry, so I reckon that meant him, his #2 guy who kind of disappeared after the fight with the new girl, and the traitorous woman. So, who were all the foot trooper/guards? Were they all robots? Mercenaries? Seems like there were at least two of them in each bee-ship even though the bee-ships were apparently controlled centrally.
The Big Bad was shown using captured Federation tech to hack into the Yorktown computers… tech that was cited as being from captured Fed probes. That’s fine, but wouldn’t he have simply used the existing communications systems from the Franklin?
And for that matter, how did he manage to lose his own ship? You could argue that after all this time maybe he simply didn’t care about it any more, but given the cobbled-together nature of his base you’d think that maybe a nice couch or maybe a working transporter device would have been good addition. Did he never think to look for it or to wonder why it wasn’t there any more?
Finally, the Ultimate Badass Bio-Weapon, so dangerous that it had to be broken into two and scattered across the galaxy, was pretty lame. Seems like everyone already has disintegration beams that are a lot more efficient than this slow-moving flesh-eating nano thing. I guess we’re supposed to imagine it multiplying and becoming super-massive?
Non-Spoilers but Just to be Safe
The Federation power-creep seems to be accelerating pretty fast here. The tech on display in this movie seemed to be much closer to The Culture than TOS or even TNG, despite the fact that the Federation is still supposed to be in its infancy.
I mean, I liked the kind of throw-away line used to justify the Yorktown structure: “Oh, we didn’t want to show favoritism towards any one Federation member, so Starfleet built this city-sized structure that utilizes artificial gravity for modern-art purposes out in the middle of nowhere so as not to offend anyone.”
Cool, but holy crap - this is a long way from having to take over an old Cardassian mining station due to budgetary reasons.
Also, I guess it’s cheap and fast enough to simply build a new Constellation-class heavy cruiser in this frontier station rather than sending the crew home to Earth while a new one is laboriously constructed in Idaho.
We don’t really know how he lost his ship, but obviously he was looking for it, or else Jayleh wouldn’t have set up her hiding tripod things to hide it.
Throw out more questions! This is fun. Do I qualify as a Star Trek nerd now?
-Tom
Well, mostly I guess it was when he hopped in one of his ships and left the planet, flying the ten minutes or so necessary to get to the massive Trekopolis. Or when he sent his agent off the planet. Or when he attacked the Enterprise in space.
Is it bad that I thought Andreas Katsulas did a better job in the same makeup than Elba?
I guess when he said “drones”, I thought he was referring to the fighter craft. Given that they didn’t seem to have any weapons but rather just ran into stuff, I figured they were what were being used to drill for stuff. But I suppose the humanoid pilots could be the drones themselves. That simply raises the question of where he got the ships from though.
I reckoned she was hiding the ship as much from the roving Max-Max gang aliens as much as the Big Bad. But maybe that’s what drove him off the cliff into full-up madness: “Dude! Where’s my ship? It was right HERE teetering on this cliff!”
You’re getting there, but in your reply you didn’t reference a single episode or movie from the body Legacy Trek available to you. Instead, you mentioned Babylon 5, which is a Class VII Federation misdemeanor punishable by being banned from the holosuite for two weeks or a fine of forty bars of gold-pressed latinum.
Oh crap. I just remembered this:
-xtien
So when you heard the piece in the new movie you didn’t crack a smile like I did from memory I am… guessing.
No, or I would have brought it up on the show (which I did not). I think I was too caught up in the moment. And it’s weird that I did not! Especially since I had just seen the movie that day or the day before. Totally goofy on my part.
Now I’m wondering if I missed how Kirk was reacting to it as it happened.
-xtien
Well you’re in luck… there is an easy cure for this problem; you must see it again.
You said you thought he had the technology to leave the planet “at any time”. I thought you were asking why he didn’t leave when he was initially stranded.
As far as leaving in the time frame of the movie, why would he? He was waiting to get the coordinates of a Federation or Star Fleet or whatever location he could blow up. That was pretty much the McGuffin for most of the movie’s running time, wasn’t it? That location. The whole premise is that Idris Elba has been using various sneaky tricks to eventually find Yorktown.
Which obviously recalls the plot of “And Then There Came A Lost Warrior”, one of classic episodes of TOS in which Commander Dooblegoober attacks the Starfleet Federation Military Depot in the Bipblorble Nebula and Kirk uses a Dilithium Phase Protoninator to foil him.
There. Now I’m a hardcore Trekkie.
-Tom
Ha. I’ll probably be seeing all three this week. Since I’m considering taking my son to this one now that he’s back from a trip.
-xtien