How weird. I just rewatched Star Trek: into Darkness (newly streaming on Netflix) and all of the above were absolutely central to the plot and story. The stopping and analyzing in particular. There’s an awful lot of talk about revenge in this movie–and not a lot of actual vengeance being taken–Kirk repeatedly ends up taking the high road throughout the film. Khan is the only one who really follows through on his desire for murderous revenge. Khan’s grand scheme is thwarted when Spock uses his own megalomania against him. That terrible violence occurred despite our heroes’ best efforts is in the nature of drama. It’s fascinating to observe how people seem to come at a movie with a gut antipathy and retroactively find all kinds of justifications for it that simply don’t hold up.
Star Trek is one of these shows that has had tremendous success despite its terrible production values. The (short bus) special effects, the remedial acting, the cardboard and Styrofoam sets have meant that the show must appeal on another level for people to enjoy it. Now these Abrams movies have beautiful sets, amazing effects and the acting is the real deal! I can’t help feeling that this fact alone–the fact that the films ARE spectacular and tremendously entertaining on a pure movie level–is experienced as some kind of aesthetic betrayal. Abrams’ movies are too sleek and entertaining–they must be terrible!
HKCavalier nailed my feeling about the new Trek and its relation to the old school Trek. I kind of feel like all of the nay sayers tend to view the old school Trek through rose-colored revisionist glasses. TOS Trek had some amazing episodes, especially for its time but for the most part it was pretty mediocre and completely unrealistic. That doesnt necessarily make it bad, there are in fact, a lot of reason why TOS was great. For one, it tackled many of the social issues facing us at the time. But please dont act like it was epic TV because if it was it would have lasted more than 3 seasons. Abrams took a classic series that was barely on life support and breathed new life into it. And he did so in a way that left the continuity of the old Trek completely intact. People cry out how he destroyed Trek but all of the old Trek exists untouched by Abrams hand and the universe in which its portrayed still exists virtually untouched. The only real change Abrams made was to remove Spock from the original timeline, far after TOS had its run. If you dont like what Abrams has done, thats cool, thats understandable even but please stop with the Abrams has destroyed Trek crap because he didnt. It was mortally wounded far before he got his hands on it. If anything he has given it new vitality.
I’d argue that pretty much every Trek iteration has had excellent effects for their time and budget. I was about as awed watching ‘into Darkness’ as I was when I saw “The Best of Both Worlds.” or “Undiscovered Country”.
As for your thematical comparison, I think you’re right in a broad sense, they’re true to the original characters (unless I start thinking about how, as just one example, Spock beams Kirk onto a frozen wasteland inhabited by monsters which by all rights should have killed him, etc), but then you’re ignoring the sensibilities by which the new films are directed. Conan (the Cimmerian), by and large, chooses the moral highground too, except that in between storypoints he cleaves people in half. To me, the films are paying lip service to Roddenberry’s vision, not adapting it to modern times.
I think you’re all wrong. I think Star Trek - at its core - is truly about a bunch of nerds arguing about what it’s about, over the internet. And nothing has caused more forum arguments than the latest movies, so I think they’re doing a pretty great job.
Yeah … no. All in the Family was meant to lampoon Archie Bunker and show how out of touch his viewpoints were, despite his best intentions. That was the entire premise for the show. Star Trek was not some clever way to hold Kirk’s behavior up to the light and have the audience come to the conclusion that there’s a better way. It was a space western which drew on morality tales and depended on a heroic figure to draw ratings. There was plenty that was subversive (just ask Takei), but not in the vein as All in the Family.
Well, if it wasn’t for Kirk, it sure was for Worf. That said, I feel there were plenty of original series episodes where the crew is incapicitated or subdued, despite kirk’s machismo and strut, until they found a wily way without using force (except that one time kirk made a bazooka out of cardboard and ground dirt… dammit)
I think the dislike of the Abrams films comes more pointedly from the repulsive scripts that Roberto Orci repeatedly shits out. His obsessions with “magic blood” and incredibly strange lack of understanding of how morality and heroism work is reflected in the Treks just as much as they’re reflected in his Transformers films. Into Darkness’ problems here are compounded by the fact that it’s not only a retread of material done substantially better in the original series and film, but takes Kirk through almost the exact same character arc as the first film.
Shifting the third film completely under Orci’s control is a terrible idea in terms of trying to make a good movie, but it’s possible that it could create such a pure and unrestrained example of Orci’s putrid worldview as expressed through his screenplays’ ethical viewpoints that it really helps contextualize the shortcomings of his other work so far. Sort of like what Blade Trinity did for David Goyer.
I can’t figure Goyer out. He writes absolute crap like Blade: Trinity and so many others. But then he pens Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Dark City.
Don’t know if you’re familiar with John Rogers. He was the head writer/showrunner of Leverage, which is a great heist show if you’re not familiar. He doesn’t have time for it anymore, but at one point he was a pretty damn insightful blogger, and a couple of his political posts (The Crazification Factor and I Miss Republicans) have become widely circulated. Also, when I started following his blog (which was before Leverage), his only screenwriting credits were for Catwoman and The Core (he then added Transformers to that rarefied company). What I learned from this is that when it comes to writers in Hollywood, just because someone’s name is attached to a script doesn’t mean that it will reflect their writing ability, because most scripts go through dozens of rewrites by people whose names never land on the project. Writers are essentially working at the whim of others, so the director (or in some cases the producers, if the director is also a hired gun) deserves the blame for shitty scripts. Somehow Damon Fucking Lindelof appears immune to this, with the ability to ruin every script he touches.
How frustrating is it that Paramount failed to parlay the success of the new films into a larger Trek franchise “rebirth?” Star Trek was mega-popular for exactly as long as both movies were in theaters and then it went away. Twice. Why they didn’t have a TV series prepped to piggyback on these movies is beyond me.
Star Trek 3 will release on or around the 50th anniversary of the franchise; I hope Paramount knows how much that milestone means. Doctor Who and James Bond set very high bars – hiring Orci does not inspire confidence at all.
(Oh, my mistake; there was that terrific Star Trek video game last year, which featured very tense co-op door opening.)
The Star Trek television franchise was not as lucrative as you seem to believe it was. The reason they didn’t have anything prepped after the last movie was because the ratings on the tv shows prior to that had steadily declined over the years. Compared to what they cost to make, the returns weren’t nearly big enough. Even when the TNG movies were in theaters, the tv shows weren’t exactly doing gangbusters.
I don’t see how a new Star Trek TV show would generate the kind of revenue Paramount would want nowadays. The movies are popular because they are so unlike the old versions. More action, more effects, more urgency. I doubt a TV show in the style of the movies would happen. The budget just isn’t possible. You’d end up with something talky and static, with slightly better production values than Voyager - which wouldn’t bring the movie audience at all.
Oh i fully intend to never see anything from this New Star Trek stable again, so yeah i’ll join you on the boycott stuff. Not that it is going to stop the dive to the bottom/lowest common denominator trend. Sign of the times. Soon it will be ‘Reality Star Trek TV’ with Abrams and whatever-this-new-guy-is-called-whom-is-taking-over-while-Abrams-screws-Star-Wars doing studio commentary on why Uhura cheated on Spock with Kirk and why Scotty ended up in a gay relationship with that alien side-kick of his. Probably Bones will be doing crack and most episodes will finish with some currently-cool gangsta raper band with lots of near naked booty shaking around. That’s the future.
Atleast we have the other decent Star Trek films to pass on to our kids, and the Next Generation makes a great DVD series. Just pretend this current train wreck isn’t happening and it will all be ok. Other Sci-fi series will be born and 1% of those will be half decent :)
Yeah, I’ll also join your guys boycott. Or, actually, I have already acted upon the boycott with the second movie.
I still can’t understand why they had to take the Star Trek I was fond of and turn it into yet another boom-bang-pow action-franchise.
Well, actually the reason is clear, of course: money - you can get more folks into the theatre with a braindead movie that’s just about the action. A forgettable setup like this won’t form a community that gathers in conventions and becomes almost emotionally attached to the franchise, but it WILL bring in (appearently many) more of the folks that are going to the movies on a random night and will watch anything that looks mainstream enough. And that’s more than enough for Paramount these days, obviously.
This is also why I think Telefrog is spot-on with his assessment that there’ll be no new ST series anytime soon. Well, chances are there’ll be no new space-based scifi shows at all anytime soon, which is what saddens me the most.
But hey, that’s how it is. I’m just wondering how many movies this “timeline” will last before they feel the need to reboot the universe AGAIN.
Well, the next obvious reboot would be TNG. Because now there’s the zany opportunity of making Picard an actual Frenchman! Fire ze torpedo and attack patterne bravo, mon ami!
Picard’s obvious lack of an even remotely French tinged accent proved to me that at some point in the history of the Star Trek universe, England gave in to world pressure and conquered France.
