Star Trekkin' into a migraine review
POSTED BY: Wishimay
UPDATED: Tuesday, June 11, 2013 19:04
VIEWED: 6886
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I was very conflicted on Star Trek - the movie is a hell of a lot of fun, but it doesn't hold up to much thought, and bordered on spectacularly stupid in places. So many plot contrivances and conveniences.
The magic blood was beyond stupid, and its use was terribly telegraphed. Why have starships if you can teleport literally ANYwhere in the galaxy? Why would the Klingons completely abandon an entire section of their planet, when it seemed perfectly inhabitable. Why don't the Klingons have any planetary sensors or defenses? Why would a top-secret shipyard have zero security, and broadcast on an unsecured chanel? And since when does it take less than 5 minutes to travel between Klingon space and Earth, even at warp??
Yeah, it was fun - but it saddens me that Star Trek has joined the "turn your brain off" club. That's not what Trek should be.
Excuse me while I soak in all these sweet, sweet conservative tears.
"We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." -- Rick "Frothy" Santorum
"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"
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Quote:
Originally posted by ecgordon:
I won't argue with anyone who likes Abrams' Trek films. All I'll say is they are generic SF action films, with only cursory nods to Roddenberry's vision. They are popular for a reason, all flash, very little substance, which is what I could say about almost any SF film these days. I saw the first one once, probably never will again. Won't bother with this one either.
Yep. They're fun and popular because they appeal to the lowest common denominator at every turn.
Excuse me while I soak in all these sweet, sweet conservative tears.
"We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." -- Rick "Frothy" Santorum
"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"
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Quote:
Originally posted by Storymark:
Why would the Klingons completely abandon an entire section of their planet, when it seemed perfectly inhabitable. Why don't the Klingons have any planetary sensors or defenses?
That bothered me, too...They showed just a flash of the Klingon Moon Praxis as having ALREADY exploded when in The Undiscovered Country Kirk was about to retire at the time Praxis exploded. Apparently, the moon having already exploded is why the Klingons were in disarray... (with John Harrison having had a hand in blowing it up??)
But then, in rewrites who cares who you confuse in order to contrive a plotline...
Found this about it...
http://trekmovie.com/2013/05/15/trekmovie-uncovers-hidden-john-harriso
n-starfleet-memorandum-on-into-darkness-viral-site/
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Quote:
Originally posted by Zeek:Quote:
Originally posted by ecgordon:
I won't argue with anyone who likes Abrams' Trek films. All I'll say is they are generic SF action films, with only cursory nods to Roddenberry's vision. They are popular for a reason, all flash, very little substance, which is what I could say about almost any SF film these days. I saw the first one once, probably never will again. Won't bother with this one either.
This is something I touched on talking to one of my friends recently. JJ's Star Trek seems so generic that I wonder what he'll do differently with Star Wars. My guess is nothing. There will just be lightsabers in the same kind of action packed adventure ride through plot hole nebula.
Welcome to Star Wars! The difference is, that approach actually works for Star Wars. Hopefully Abrams will avoid the weird child-romances and brother-sister incest stuff and stilted emotional reactions/dialogue that George liked to throw in. Otherwise, I don't really have too many worries here.
I don't know much about Star Trek, never got into them because it was all too philosophical for my tastes while ignoring the big obvious questions that the setting seemed to raise (and only Deep Space Nine dealt with those). But I imagine most of you serious Star Trek fans are probably not very happy with this direction.
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Quote:You got to consider that Star Trek plays worldwide www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=startrek12.htm
Originally posted by Storymark:
Yep. They're fun and popular because they appeal to the lowest common denominator at every turn.
"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"
Imagine you are a twelve year old boy watching this movie in Shanghai and you don't speak English. The movie would look brilliant. It is the greatest Star Trek with the biggest special-effects budget in your short lifetime! It is music, fights, and starships crashing faster than you can read subtitles. Who reads subtitles to explain Kirk in bed with the long tailed cat women? Or drunk Scotty? Or that "John Harrison" is the villain? Or that there are (spoiler) two villains? The next Star Trek 3 needs three main villains or you're not getting your money's worth.
If all you had in Shanghai was the Chinese subtitles to explain the story, you won't have time to read them, because of all the action, and won't realize what's wrong with this movie. But if you do understand English and you didn't notice what's wrong, your spoken English comprehension skills need improvement to better than lowest common denominator levels of a twelve year old boy.
The Joss Whedon script for "Serenity," where Wash lives, is
Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by two:Quote:You got to consider that Star Trek plays worldwide www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=startrek12.htm
Originally posted by Storymark:
Yep. They're fun and popular because they appeal to the lowest common denominator at every turn.
"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"
Imagine you are a twelve year old boy watching this movie in Shanghai and you don't speak English. The movie would look brilliant. It is the greatest Star Trek with the biggest special-effects budget in your short lifetime! It is music, fights, and starships crashing faster than you can read subtitles. Who reads subtitles to explain Kirk in bed with the long tailed cat women? Or drunk Scotty? Or that "John Harrison" is the villain? Or that there are (spoiler) two villains? The next Star Trek 3 needs three main villains or you're not getting your money's worth.
If all you had in Shanghai was the Chinese subtitles to explain the story, you won't have time to read them, because of all the action, and won't realize what's wrong with this movie. But if you do understand English and you didn't notice what's wrong, your spoken English comprehension skills need improvement to better than lowest common denominator levels of a twelve year old boy.
The Joss Whedon script for "Serenity," where Wash lives, is
Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/two
Is there a point in there somewhere? Do you not realize they dub most big movies for foreign release (as they did for this one)?
Hell, the 2009 Trek was the first one to even do much business overseas - and even then, it made twice as much money domestically.
Excuse me while I soak in all these sweet, sweet conservative tears.
"We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." -- Rick "Frothy" Santorum
"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"
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Just saw ST - Into Darkness.
To quote Max Guevara - " You're not even trying "
As before, the cast was awesome. But the story ... meh.
And to be honest, I'm really over this alternate universe crap. Where we kinda sorta see reference to the original series, but not really, where events and people are still a part of THIS crew's 'verse, but more in a Fringe sort of way, and not so much in Dr Whovian sort... I don't know.
Wake me if something interesting shows up.
Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen
Resident USA Freedom Fundie
" AU, that was great, LOL!! " - Chrisisall
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Quote:I get that they are rebooting the franchise and largely I am not that concerned about faithfulness to continuity. It is more how they constantly treat basic suspension of disbelief with a shrug of the shoulders. In the 2009 film, Captain Kirk went from a fledgling ensign to a full ship’s captain in the space of a day. In 2009 they invented Scotty’s transwarp teleportation – in 2013 Benedict Cumberbatch casually uses it to teleport all the way from Earth to the Klingon Empire. This is never more evident than during the opening scene where Kirk tosses aside the Prime Directive with a shrug of his shoulders, whips out a handily concealed scroll and pins it to a tree during their flight from the natives causing them to all fall in worship, they then dive off the cliff to find the submerged Enterprise before conducting a miraculous teleport rescue of Spock from the exploding volcano. The original and next-gen series involved technobabble solutions but there was the sense beneath all the talk of positronic circuitry, dilithium matrixes and inverse tachyon pulses where you could at least believe that the writers had invented a consistent science-fictional technical schema tying everything together; but here you get the impression that Kurtzman, Orci and Lindelof are thinking why does it matter what happens when all of it is BS. The film almost feels like a constant series of improbable deus ex machina plot devices – Scotty turning up in Marcus’s ship at a convenient moment, the miracle cure of Khan’s blood, the scroll – produced out of the hat to save the day.
Originally posted by AURaptor:
Just saw ST - Into Darkness.
To quote Max Guevara - " You're not even trying "
As before, the cast was awesome. But the story ... meh.
Perhaps the worst part of this is the climactic scene where [PLOT SPOILERS] Chris Pine’s Kirk enters the warpcore to reactivate it, in doing so giving his own life. This is a clear homage to the moving death of Spock at the end of The Wrath of Khan – but in being replayed here, it lacks any pathos. We, for one, can guess that the film is not going to kill off the franchise’s central character (The Wrath of Khan at least lacked that certainty, being given real world boosting by Leonard Nimoy’s constant vacillation over leaving the franchise). Moreover, the inherent tragedy of the scene is undercut by its coming in such obvious quotation marks where Orci, Kurtzman and Lindelof seem to think it is clever replaying the scene but with the twist reversal where it is Kirk being killed and it is Spock who roars “Khaaaaan!”. The subsequent realisation that Kirk can be revived by a sample of Khan’s blood is a plotting wave of the magic wand that becomes a comic-book death of the first order. http://moria.co.nz/sciencefiction/star-trek-into-darkness-2013.htm
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