Star Trek Into Darkness ::: May 17, 2013

The White Tuxedo wrote:

Anyway, the film has no content. It rides on charm, not on well-drawn character or consistently paced development of those characters.

Charm will get you far enough, though. Farther than most of the STAR TREK films go, Next Gen or otherwise.

Arkadin wrote:

The White Tuxedo wrote:

Anyway, the film has no content. It rides on charm, not on well-drawn character or consistently paced development of those characters.

Charm will get you far enough, though. Farther than most of the STAR TREK films go, Next Gen or otherwise.

Not if there isn't an interesting story. It won't get it far enough for me. And yeah, most Trek flicks fall short, even in my opinion. I'm not asking for the world, just a well-written flick. Charm isn't enough for me. It's enough for a lot of people who just wanna see stuff get blown up. There's enough of that in Hollywood, why does Star Trek have to be that now too?

I always bring up BATMAN FOREVER and DIE ANOTHER DAY because I see them as nuTrek's equals in their respective series. Surely as a Bond and Batman fan you don't think they're enough?

The White Tuxedo wrote:

I always bring up BATMAN FOREVER and DIE ANOTHER DAY because I see them as nuTrek's equals in their respective series. Surely as a Bond and Batman fan you don't think they're enough?

BATMAN FOREVER and DIE ANOTHER DAY don't have charm, so they're a bad point of comparison.

I think the best description of Abrams Star Trek movie is that it's a Trek movie for people who aren't truly fans of Trek.

In order:

1. Sterile Trek
2. Popcorn Trek
3. Popcorn Trek 2: The Sequel
4. Popcorn Trek 3: The 80's
5. Shatner Trek
6. Nostalgia Trek
7. TV Trek
8. Trek Hard
9. Liberal Trek
10. Die Another Trek
11. MTrekV

Arkadin wrote:

The White Tuxedo wrote:

I always bring up BATMAN FOREVER and DIE ANOTHER DAY because I see them as nuTrek's equals in their respective series. Surely as a Bond and Batman fan you don't think they're enough?

BATMAN FOREVER and DIE ANOTHER DAY don't have charm, so they're a bad point of comparison.

I think they're a good comparison in terms of overall quality and fidelity to their franchises.

Charm is fine, I'm not against it. I'm actually all for it. I just wish it had a coherent script. It didn't. But it was "fun", because it had a big budget and lots of explosions. It's a fine enough movie for most people to watch once, and to be entertained for two hours. But they could have called it "Space Adventure Movie" and saved Trek the trouble. But they wanted another tentpole franchise, and they used the name "Star Trek" that they had lying around because they knew that even though most people think Star Trek is gay they at least know the name. Well, it was really the opposite order.

I have to say that it's frustrating that nobody seems to give us the benefit of the doubt when we say we don't think it's a good piece of Star Trek. It's like living in an alternate reality where DIE ANOTHER DAY won Best Picture and all Bond fans have to look forward to are sequels to it, but are pretty much shot down by non-Bond fans if they try to say it was crap.

Oh well. It's not the end of the world, this new series shaping up to be crap. If it's all down payment for a good show down the line... A guy can hope, right? Because Trek, at the end of the day, is really a television niche product.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

I think they're a good comparison in terms of overall quality and fidelity to their franchises.

I don't. Charm is an invaluable commodity when you're serving up popcorn entertainment. The fact that BATMAN FOREVER and DIE ANOTHER DAY have nothing of the kind puts them in a lower class. They're both much, much worse.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

But it was "fun", because it had a big budget and lots of explosions.

It was fun because it put together a fairly enjoyable cast of people who did well with the material they were given. It's not really the budget and explosions that carried the movie through. It's more that the film gave people characters they enjoyed.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

It's like living in an alternate reality where DIE ANOTHER DAY won Best Picture and all Bond fans have to look forward to are sequels to it, but are pretty much shot down by non-Bond fans if they try to say it was crap.

I don't know. I know plenty of TREK die-hards in my life who loved the flick.

That's all fine. I still think we could have gotten a much better flick. I sure hope that in the years to come the hype fades. I don't think this is the Trek equivalent of the Anti-Christ , but it doesn't have much going for it for me.

And like I said, it's frustrating. Star Trek can be a hundred times better than that movie, but it seems like an uphill battle to say that to anyone.

And you know what. I say the comparison does stand. Even if the flick has charm, it's braindead. It has an incoherent story and does not deliver on the whole arc of James T. Kirk becoming a captain. It's got the names and props of classic Trek (some more faithful to their original counterparts than others), and it's wrapped up in a Michael Bay movie. The fact that the cast is charming, to me, doesn't save the film, it just sorta keeps it on the event horizon, hovering over the abyss.

You like Superman, and you a lot more about him than I do. I happen to enjoy Superman III (for the absurdity of it), but I know it's shit and I'd never try to convince you that it's better than most Superman comics and movies.

I don't wanna keep beating this dead horse. I'm not some bitter fanboy set to explode or anything. I think my view is very reasonable, but it seems to gain no traction with anyone other than Sykes, Python, Tubes, and Hilly. And trevanian too.

Salomé wrote:

I think the best description of Abrams Star Trek movie is that it's a Trek movie for people who aren't truly fans of Trek.

Just like CASINO ROYALE is for Bond.

That's not to say they're aren't Bond and Trek fans who like (or even love) these "begins" stories. It's just that they're designed in a way that appeals to a much wider set of demographics, for good or bad.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

I still think we could have gotten a much better flick.

Easily.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

And you know what. I say the comparison does stand. Even if the flick has charm, it's braindead.

Braindead + charm is substantially different than just plain braindead. It's the difference between having an okay time and having an awful time. BATMAN FOREVER, DIE ANOTHER DAY, these films are nails on a chalkboard, and not because of how they treat their characters, but just because they aren't really enjoyable in any capacity. TREK manages to be marginally entertaining.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

You like Superman, and you a lot more about him than I do. I happen to enjoy Superman III (for the absurdity of it), but I know it's shit and I'd never try to convince you that it's better than most Superman comics and movies.

I guess that's kinda where we depart. I'm not unacquainted with TREK, and I find a lot of it wanting.

I'm in the camp that views NuTrek as "fun schlock", it's when I try watching it as a Star Trek film that I start throwing shit around like Worf.

It doesn't work on any level for me, except for perhaps costume design and sound design. I also liked that it was the first Trek film to really have the budget to make Roddenberry's future feel like a fully developed world, apart from just a couple of starship bridge sets.

But that's about all that worked for me.

I think it was actually lacking a bit in imagination when compared to Roddenberry's vision. Take the engine room. They used - I believe - the interior of a brewery for those scenes. Why? Because Abrams lacks the creative vision to come up with something more original? Because it obviously wasn't a budget issue...

I think he wanted "real" locations.

Still, it was pretty retarded. The ship in the beginning, the Kelvin, has something like a factory in it. And it doesn't at all jive with the exteriors.

Salomé wrote:

I think it was actually lacking a bit in imagination when compared to Roddenberry's vision. Take the engine room. They used - I believe - the interior of a brewery for those scenes. Why? Because Abrams lacks the creative vision to come up with something more original? Because it obviously wasn't a budget issue...

No I agree there, I'm not saying it surpassed Roddenberry's vision, I'm saying that on average the films never had the budget they needed to expand Roddenberry's vision much beyond what we saw on the TV shows, which were these claustrophobic ship sets. Especially the TNG movies, which just felt like more expensive TV episodes, where even when we went to a planet it was a cheap village or some other location without great expense.

Trek XI was the first time we saw urban locations on Vulcan outside of a cartoon episode, for example. Otherwise whenever we went to this ultra advanced co-founder of the Federation, we were in the middle of the desert, perhaps we'd get to see a temple. Even when we went to Starfleet Headquarters on Earth, they always framed the matte paintings so the background was always the Golden Gate Bridge and the water of the Bay and rarely anything even approaching a glimpse of the city beyond. I mean, I didn't particularly LIKE Abram's concept of urban Vulcan or future San Francisco -- but I LIKED that a Trek movie frinally was given enough money to SHOW them, to expand a little bit beyond the confines of the Enterprise bridge.

We saw some urban Vulcan in S4 of ENTERPRISE. Just a few shots. They look a bit like Coruscant, but I prefer the design to what we got in nuTrek.





It's a shame really, because as TVTrek was cancelled in 2005, perhaps forever, the technology was just coming to a point where exotic planet exteriors could be created more easily with CGI.

Of course, it was TOS that got the upgrade, if you want to call it that. Still, TOS-R has some nice design work, at least I think so. I'd rather have seen TNG remastered if any show had to be.

Looks like Coruscant.

Does this look like the architecture of a logical society to you?

It was built into the side of a mountain or something. Some logic in it, perhaps

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

Does this look like the architecture of a logical society to you?

I just think it looks ugly.

I think the last Star Trek movie is very like BF and DAD, in that most people seemed to quite like them when they came out, but less and less with the passing of time

a case of "repent at leisure"...

http://blog.games.yahoo.com/blog/739-new-star-trek-game-warping-to-consoles-in-2012

Oh, yippie.