[civilian_number_two]

Gobbler: The getting married took a year and a half, yeah. The divorce took 10 years.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 25 April 2011 - 03:09 PM

[Otal Nimrodi]

Star Trek was alright and I kinda liked it.

I mean, most of your points are correct.

The Kobayashi Maru thing may have been taken straight out of Wrath of Khan, but it makes a good point about the character. Problem is that its never followed up with. If they have something like that, it establishes "Kirk is the kinda guy who will screw the rules if it means he wins"

That's something that I felt REALLY should have been followed up more.

That said, I didn't HATE it. I didn't feel like exploding with anger, and I don't feel like it disrespected the franchise. I feel like perhaps the writers didn't fully understand Star Trek, but at least they understood a little of it.

To me, all the things (Tribble, Orion girl, stupid red shirt) feel like things that the writers put in not because it was all they knew about Star Trek, but because it was all anyone ELSE knew about Star Trek.

[civilian_number_two]

I think it did disrespect the franchise. When your advertising, again, the stuff that supposed to make me want to watch the movie, says things like "this isn't your father's Star Trek," and when your carefully-selected review excerpts include lines like "Star Trek is finally cool!" (not their fault the reviewers said it, but yeah, their fault that they excerpted that line and put it onto their newspaper ads), then I dare say you are making a movie about Star Trek while not liking Star Trek. And when you go out of your way to try to convince me that you've found a way to drop all continuity while simultaneously respecting continuity, well then you've insulted my intelligence too.

A big-action, all-running, all-screaming, all-emo, tits-and-explosions Star Trek movie might have been cool. It just bothered me that they decided to make one of those and also make it stupid, arrogant, insulting, and pointless. Yes, you hated it. You just haven't gotten yourself to admit it yet. This is not a support group, bu the way, for folks who already hated the film, in which I am apprarently the minority. This is an intervention, wherein I sit you all down and I explain to you why you really did hate the film and you are currently in denial because you subconsciously needed it to be good. The founding parent of popular science fiction, and JJ Abrams gave it a hate-fuck and he stuffed its body under a rock. Yes, you're angry. Yes, you're in denial. Come to terms with it and embrace the anger.

I never got to meet him by the way. But I did get a chance to tell Brad Bird that THE IRON GIANT is the best contemporary American animated film that I have seen. So I have that.

[Otal Nimrodi]

No, I really did not hate it. I mean, it wasn't the best movie. But honestly, I didn't hate it. I'd still rather watch Wrath of Khan, but I can honestly say I really did like that movie. I had fun.

I guess the advertising was insulting, but the people who advertise it aren't the people who write it or the people who act in it.

[civilian_number_two]

No, but the people who wrote it and who directed it and who acted in it gave interviews admitting that they never really watched "the old show." It was a strategy from the beginning. JJ Abrams was the Executive Producer. To suggest he didn't know what he was doing ... They were distancing themselves from the original series, because the movies didn't make money anymore and the last few series were bad, but the title was still marketable. So they said "let's throw everything out and just steal the names!" and they wrote the simplest revenge flick they could imagine, and they threw in time travel cause JJ likes time travel, and they made sure that everything was different. Star Trek used to be about these nerdy little details and it all added up to a somewhat-believable universe, like the Tolkien stuff. In this one they just ignored it all, did no research, rewrote backstories, blamed all the differences on TIME TRAVEL, and all the similarities they made possible by MAGIC and FATE. MAGIC and FATE by the way have no place in proper science fiction, any more than a PROPHECY belonged in a spy thriller (ALIAS).

JJ had no business doing Star Trek, and he ruined it. You would rather watch WoK because for all its own weaknesses (there are some) it had characters and it felt like it belonged in Star Trek. You "don't hate Star Trek: the Rebooting" (yes you do, admit it) because there is nothing remarkable enough about it to hate. It's not the best, but you had fun. Well, so you say. I say there is something remarkable about it, but that its pace was such that most people didn't take the time to notice. It is like the last DIE HARD movie, fast-paced and insanely stupid. Not that I would ever do it, so I don't advocate that you do, but if you watched it a second time I bet it would annoy the hell out of you. If it doesn't, then either you are carved out of stone or you really really didn't like Star Trek in the first place, and you were just waiyting for a guy like JJ to come along and give it the hate-fucking it deserved.

[Otal Nimrodi]

Well that's a bit vicious. I did like Star Trek. I like all of them (except every episode of Enterprise not taking place in an alternate universe after the word Xindi was mentioned). But the movie was, well, fun. I don't care that it wasn't Star Trek because, while I did LIKE Star Trek, I wasn't desperately in love with it.

Its like D&D 4.0. Since its clearly NOT The Original Series, and clearly not in the same continuity I'm not going to compare them.

Although I don't consider Star Trek: TOS to be on the same level as Tolkein with world-building. It was good, but it wasn't THAT good. I didn't honestly feel like it was a real world. And (from what I understood) when they referred to 'the old show' they meant The Original Series. The movie doesn't show great love for Star Trek, but I honestly wouldn't call it hate-fucking it. They clearly understood it enough to make a few references that WEREN'T the common ones (Kirk doesn't know Uhura's first name, and it ends up being Nyota. Her name isn't mentioned in The Original Series, but I've read several novels where she's referred to as Nyota).

It wasn't perfect, but I'd hardly say the movie is contemptful of the series.

[civilian_number_two]

Yeah funny enough that "Nyota" business is the sort of thing that burns me. It's the sort of loose research the writers do to look like they did serious research. "Hey apparently Uhura's first name was held back for ages, along with Kirk's middle name. The entire TOS never mentioned either." "Oh, ok, let's make sure to get both into the movie somewhere, and in key moments, too, like Kirk will shout his full name at a guy in battle gear riding a space motorcycle, while Uhura's name will be treated like a big mystery but we'll reveal it as part of a love-triangle thing." "BRILLIANT!" Funny you mention it as a nice little detail, because it's the kind of nice little detail, like reprising the role of the green girl that Eddie Murphy made so much fun of, that made me think this was just a flashy movie with very little substance and sprinkled with little dashes of nerd-bait. Not as bad, of course, as the whole Kobayashi-Maru scene, which was cringingly awful, but added together the few dozen of these dumb little moments really got opn my nerves. It's like they wanted to make it LOOK like they cared about the details, even if they left out the fact that Kirk was in his late 30s when he Captained the Enterprise, and was considered impressively young for THAT job, and he had a complicated backstory including service under several commanders and in various important events. So they didn't care about THAT stuff, but they got that "Nyota" name in there. Ok, these writers really know their stuff and they really care about getting it right. (I know I know, TIME TRAVEL changed everything but kept everything the same, however the writers saw fit ... )

Yeah, I honestly found it contemptuous. I know that's harsh, but to me this "reboot" (the very idea of which is insulting to start) was not terribly dissimilar to the STAR WARS prequels. Those too were packed with little details expected to please the nerds (the guys like Boba Fett; let's get Boba Fett in there." "It's twenty years earlier." "Ok, fuck's sake, his dad then. What's wrong with you?"). Generally when I can tell I'm being pandered to, that's when I start the hating.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 12 February 2011 - 04:55 AM

[Otal Nimrodi]

I don't know, I suppose I didn't really care as much to hate it. The movie felt to me like it wasn't trying to be related to the shows that came before, so I tried to avoid judging it that way.

I tend to try to judge anything not claiming to be a direct sequel/prequel on its own merits, even if its a remake/reboot type of thing.

Very useful when you read as many comics as I do.