Agreed, sorta. The most common response to criicism of the new ST movie is that "it did better than all the other movies, so therefore it is the best." I disagree. While of course the other ST films were made by people trying to make money, they still followed ST continuity and belonged in the ST universe (most of them, anyway). By making loads of money, this one may have proven it's fundamentally different from the others. Using the more money = better formula would be like making a sequel to GANDHI and filling it with fast cars, tits and explosions, making a billion dollars, and concluding that you'd made a better Gandhi film because you made more money. Maybe you made a better movie. That argument could go on forever. But is it really a followup to the other film?
I don't agree that this one ran on all cylinders. I didn't find the characters compelling, the plot elements were held together by necessity rather than credibility, and the action was ultimately uninteresting (villain is indestructible until the narrative require that he not be, which is basically the most formulaic action plot ever). I was bored most of the time, and I really wanted to like it. I didn't like the time travel/parallel universe storyline, but that alone wasn't a dealbreaker. It was that the time travel/parallel universe storyline wasn't a storyline on its own, but rather a "clever" fix to issues of continuity. And it was used so poorly! One spaceship was blown up twenty-five years ago, with little loss of life, so now the federation communicators look different! And now Scotty is assigned to an ice planet orbiting Vulcan, never to be noticed by the Federation unless Kirk shows up! Now Starfleet promotes Ensigns to Captain in one week! NOw Uhura and Spock are dating! It was BUTTERFLY EFFECT meets SLIDERS, the notion that one little change will affect everyone dramatically, except they'll all still end up meeting one another and working/living together, only in different ways.
It was a weird, bad movie.
This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 20 July 2009 - 11:45 PM
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).