Star Trek Beyond

Yeah, are you sure you watched the movie? He wasn’t an alien. That was a large… plot point.

Hmm. My bad. Like I said, forgettable villian!

I wanna see a full space fleet battle in the next one. Let’s see some new Klingon action or something!

While the whole abondoning ship battle was well done from the inside, I felt very ambivalent about the space side of the attack… the sheer volume of the mining ships take away from any kind of tension, since the overwhelming amount of them meant either they’d be deterred using a bullshit gimmick or the enterprise was doomed, and lo and behold, both things happened. Whenever you see an overwhelming force like that in a movie, it always has the opposite effect on me, since if it’s more than the characters can handle, then it doesn’t matter, because obviously the baddies don’t win, and no hero will die to a crowd unless it’s some kind of metaphor.

Add to this that it was done using fairly standard procedural fx tools (we used them as far back as the Matrix to do the sentinel swarms) and they just look like a cheap way to fill the screen, spline paths filled with particle geometry sprites, rather than bespoke ships with a sense of place. It’s not a knock against CG, since every spaceship these days will be, and I guess it was kind of cute that they went meta with it and acknowledged the procedural nature of them as the way to destroy them; but then, yup, it’s the old exhaust port trick to blow up the death star. Again, cute with the music, but cute just doesn’t make it a weighty and an earned solution to me.

Anyway, the whole swarm was logistically challenging, if you had two troopers per ship like we saw a couple of times, there must have been 4 million guys in that army, just sitting there in their launch racks eating rations I guess, on the off case they were going to board a ship that day, but then at the end obviously just expendable since the Yorktown was a suicide mission. Should have been a small dangerous fleet of thirty fighter ships or so doing the same things, but I guess someone liked the cheap flocking visual with the surfing enterprise I suppose.

Just a little point of order, you seem to be bringing the later battle in the movie where they defeat the swarm into this, but I was just talking about the destruction of the enterprise. You have a valid point that when the force is so overwhelming you felt out of it, but when I watched last night, even though I knew this time that the Enterprise would be destroyed, it was still thrilling to see it all go down.

Now, it is valid that what they ultimately did to defeat this enemy later in the movie is relevant, but I would still count that as a separate action sequence that I wasn’t bringing into this. That other sequence wasn’t nearly as exciting.

That was me! :) Yes, the Scimitar/Romulan/Enterprise battle in Nemesis is a very good one. As is the short General Kang vs Kirk in ST6. Those are good choices.

I’ll have to see Star Trek 2 again, it’s been too long, I don’t recall many of the details of that nebula fight anymore.

ST6 was easily the best Trek movie… it had everything, character moments, strange worlds and creatures, meaningful differences between races that intertwined with their politics, great space action (in space and inside ships, the zero-g moment was amazing at the time) and a nail-biting finale that was tense instead of overbloated.

ST2 nebula fight was basically two lumbering men o’ war sail ships cannon-fighting in the fog, so it was of course, awesome, even if in execution super simple stuff. Tension build-up, what a strange concept nowadays!

That’s my main problem with Undiscovered Country. I almost wish they’d pulled a Big Trouble in Little China* and skipped the whole sequence.

*Egg Shen pops back up after everyone thinks he was killed by a demon. Jack asks Egg, ‘How’d you get away from that thing?’ Egg replies, ‘Wasn’t easy!’ and it’s never mentioned again.

Sofia Boutella <3

Undiscovered Country will always be my favorite because it is filled with so much reverence for the original cast but it’s also just a really great story about the Federation. It’s a true turning point in Trek lore that involves the cast in a significant way but shows just how ingrained their Klingon hatred had become and vice versa. The dinner on the Enterprise is so incredibly tense and yet they do a fantastic job of slipping in humor that is perfectly placed. I love that it’s a mystery story and they unravel it with the audience together. It’s just so super cool.

“Shields… SHIELDS!!”

Sulu gets such an awesome turn as a character too. Excelsior as a ship is incredible to look at in the films and to see him as its Captain is heartwarming and gives you as much pride as a fan as he seems to feel as a Captain (and an actor playing that role). Man… I could go on for hours… the magnetic boot assault sequence… of course the final confrontation with Chang… Spock and Kirk coming to terms with their age and how it affects their view of an entire race of beings… Spock mind melding the fuck out of Kim Cattrall!

“FLY HER APART THEN!”

Interesting aside is that it’s the first time I can remember an extended cut of a film on video having such massive ending changing scene put back in. When the film appeared in theatres, the sniper was a Klingon. When it came to video they added back in the sequence where Kirk removes the mask and you find out the sniper is from the Federation! It was such a small change but has huge implications for the story.

Anyway, I love it. Khan is right there with it. Nemesis, as noted above, is excellent and I never understood why people didn’t like it at the time. I’m a fan of the new films too. I really like the current cast and I think the films are really well made. I like how they turn history on its ear. I didn’t read anything about them before going to see them so I was completely floored by the Khan reveal in Into Darkness. Nimoy Spock’s conference call with Modern Spock where he talks about how he didn’t want to tell him anything that could influence the current timeline, etc. but then he says just how dangerous Khan is gave me chills. That was a superb sequence.

Call them lazy if you want to or whatever, but I have really enjoyed them, including Beyond.

What!? I’ve never seen this!

Yep! It was absolutely crazy for the time! If you see it on television, I think this is the version that is shown. It was among the first “Director’s Cut” versions of films that I can recall. I was working in video rental at the time it came out. My brother and I (he’s a huge Trek fan) were floored because if you blink, you’ll miss it, but it’s a major change.

And that Sniper was ODO! ;)

Yeah, VI is my favorite too.

That was the moment when that movie well and truly flew off the rails for me. It’s played as a big DUN DUN DUN reveal, but it means so little to our characters old-Spock has to Skype in and tell them why it matters.

It’s fanservice as a substitute for storytelling.

Ugh. I hate Into Darkness so much.

You do realize that many in the audience would have no idea just how dangerous Khan is, right? It IS a big reveal, and that’s especially true if you didn’t know who Khan was in the prior universe. How could those characters know? They didn’t meet him before and never marooned him elsewhere. The dynamics of Khan are totally different in Into Darkness but one thing needs to be conveyed and that’s how he’s one bad mofo beyond all others.

Yeah, I’m with Soren on this one. Usually I agree with you, Dave, but I can’t go with you there on the garbage fire that is Into Darkness.

I love the Khan reveal in Into Darkness because it’s clearly playing to the audience, and the Enterprise crew has no reaction. But then why would they? Here, let’s watch it. You can watch his whole spiel or just skip to about 1:10 for the big moment:

That made me laugh in the theater, and it still makes me laugh today. I still enjoy the movie, and you guys haven’t even mentioned the stupidest part yet, Khan’s superman blood is able to bring people back from the dead?? Sure, why the hell not!

Yes, that’s precisely my point. That he’s Khan doesn’t matter - the audience needs to be told point-blank that this is very important indeed. He could remain Farty McFartface or whatever his name was until that point and it would have no impact on the movie. It’s just cheaply elevating the stakes by dropping a reference for people who have seen Wrath of Khan. And then they wouldn’t have needed to interrupt the movie for an expository Skype call.

Khan was just a one-off villain in a middling one-off episode until they brought him back and made him iconic by the shit he did in the movie. No one needed to tell Kirk or the audience why he was bad news. Kirk knew because of his past, and the audience felt it because of of what Khan did, and how Kirk reacted.

Yup. I didn’t even know Khan was from the old series until years after I saw Wrath in the theater. I thought his backstory in the movie was some script handwave to get to the good stuff. Which totally worked! Khan was a badass out for revenge. That’s all I needed to know.

His “reveal” in Darkness was dumb. The whole movie was indulgent fanservice wankery.

I feel compelled to point out that the old movie does tell you Khan is scary before showing you him being scary. Chekhov pieces together what the name “Botany Bay” means before Khan shows up and he starts panicking. “We have to leave. Right now!” A moment later Khan appears and Chekhov’s terror is well justified.

It’s a pretty smart setup.

I need to watch it again, but by this time in Into Darkness, he’s shown himself to be a killer and quite formidable. He’s hiding on the Klingon homeworld and is rather deadly in every appearance by the time Spock talks to Spock. I didn’t feel like the audience needed to be told point-blank… I just thought of that scene as reinforcing just how serious this guy is, and the fact that Kirk and his current crew know nothing about him is the reason Spock has to ask in the first place.

Up until that point in the movie, they also thought he was “John Harrison”. Now, the creators have said they maybe shouldn’t have tried to hide his real identity, but they did. Logically, Spock asking Spock who this guy might have been in the other timeline makes total sense given how things unfold.