Posted on 05/10/2009 12:14:38 PM PDT by pabianice
Edited on 05/10/2009 3:43:21 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
My wife and I saw the new Star Trek movie today. It is a long, very loud, two-dimensional, inadvertent look at what we as a society have lost in the past 40 years.
SPOILERS ***********************************************
The good news is that the FX and production are state-of-the-art. The bad news is that the plot is embarrassingly stupid and retro, the acting ranges from good to awful, and the production as a whole is one huge rock video. On top of that, the movie is so horribly loud that the audience had to block its ears several times.
J.J. Abrams, the man behind the incoherent "Lost," is the man behind this film, and it shows. Just as "Lost" long ago lost any semblance of sanity, his Star Trek is all about "updating the story." In the process of "updating," he has lost the bubble (as we Navy fliers say).
In touch with the contemporary 18-35 year old ethos, Abram's Kirk is a misunderstood genius who brawls and [expletive deleted by Mod] his way into his 20s, clearly not appreciated for what he is. He goes to Star Fleet Academy as an after-thought, challenged by a Star Fleet officer to do something worthwhile. Abrams rewrites and otherwise disregards the Trek canon at will to help support his thin as tissue rewrite of the Kirk-Spock legend. After all, today’s film-makers can’t be expected to actually be coherent over time. Do not expect anything in this film to gel with what has been told about Trek in the past 40 years; we are told that meddling with the time line has changed what we know to have been the case. What a lazy, dishonest way out.
The simple fact is that the original Trek was clasped to the bosom of the first fans because: (1) the stories were entertaining; (2) the acting was excellent (give William Shatner credit – why he has been vilified since is a discredit to a very fine actor; (3) the writing was largely imaginative, thanks to scripts from some of the greatest scifi writers of the 20th century; (4) given a meager budget, the show still looked good; and (5) teenaged boys who could not get dates adopted Trek like a starving man grasps a pizza.
The Trek saga had shown its age recently after Star Trek 10 cratered and there seemed to be nothing left for Trek to say. Paramount’s old cash cow needed to be put to sleep or somehow redone. Enter Abrams and a boat-load of new actors raised in the era of Grand Theft Auto IV and Madonna videos. The best-known actor in the new Trek (aside from Leonard Nimoy, who reprises Spock as a 200-year-old) is Zachary Quinto – the creepy character Syler from “Heroes,” which has been disintegrating for two years thanks to lack of plot). The rest of the cast are handsome/beautiful actors and actresses who are forced by the script to “re-imagine” the original characters. And this effort is largely disastrously bad. Perhaps the only successful one is Carl Urban, who does an excellent job of recreating Dr. McCoy in a younger version just the way we in the audience might have imagined (although in this version McCoy is also a graduate of Star Fleet Academy, unlike the original story line). The rest of the characters are pure Abrams: louder-than-life empty suits. Uhura is reduced to the love slave of young Spock (!) An Orion slave girl is now a Star Fleet cadet, bedding every other cadet she can find (very liberated). The new Kirk – Chris Pine – has the thankless task of trying to channel Shatner, a task he is clearly not up to. Instead, we see Kirk as a hot-headed, ready-fire-aim loose cannon.
The command architecture of the new “Enterprise” makes no sense, either military or literary, with the captain inexplicably making Officer Candidate Kirk the XO during Kirk’s first space mission, which he attends only through fraud. All the characters of the original Trek are made contemporaries in this re-telling and its hurts both story line and common sense. There is non-stop action (see: “video games”) but the audience is left unsatisfied since none of the characters are presented as more than two-dimensional cut-outs, with the names of familiar characters but no depth. You just don’t give a crap about any of them. The fighting scenes are ridiculous, with multiple killing blows given characters who suffer only a split lip(is it me or are today’s younger people such couch potatoes that they have never sparred in a dojo and are clueless about what being beaten senseless really does to someone?). So, after multiple beatings and phaser hits and jumps from 40 feet that do no damage to the people involved, the audience has been largely desensitized to what has occurred on-screen.
As the movie passes two hours and I was thinking strongly of a bathroom break, the story ends on an Alice And Wonderland plane. The new Kirk, having won the day through impossible fighting skill, genius IQ, daring good looks, and sheer force of will, is promoted from Cadet (E-2) to Captain (O-6) and given command of Enterprise. I couldn’t help myself – I burst-out laughing. Abrams – impatient with how the real world works and a child of I Want It Now! – simply discards any sense of reality and ends this story with Kirk in command of Enterprise without having had to bother with inconveniences like advancing through the ranks by proving competence and maturity and receiving the endorsement of his superiors – a process which actually take 21-22 years in the real military. Presto! We have Jimmy Kirk, boy genius, in command. This may seems fine in Abram’s world of Hollywood dementia, but all it did was make the audience at this showing laugh.
The rest of the plot is a re-telling of The Wrath of Khan. Ricardo Montelban had more dramatic flair in one finger than the current bad-guy actor (Eric Bana) has in his entire body. He’s a menacing as your junior high school guidance counselor.
In a broader sense, this movie shows what we have lost. Look at Flight of the Phoenix. The 1965 film with Jimmy Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Hardy Kreuger, Ernest Borgnine, et all, is gripping story-telling. The 2004 remake is hideously bad, with non-dimensional characters and an awful script yukking it up in a tale of desert survival. Today’s audiences don’t know the difference. Today’s audiences don’t know the difference between a qualified, patriotic presidential candidate and an empty suit who really shows his hatred for his own country.
Apace, the new Star Trek dumbs-down Trek to the 12-year-old level and leaves the viewer bored and with an ear-ache. The first sequel is due out in 2011.
They did it right from the start. By killing George Kirk in the first 10 minutes they dramatically moved things away from old canon.
What past momentum? Paramount killed the past momentum, and a lot of what hurt momentum was 40 years worth of constantly changing canon (Star Trek canon has always had consistency issues). This movie has already made more money domestically than Nemesis made for its entire global run.
They didn’t trash the past, they set it aside, and it wasn’t for the sake of shock value, it was to get rid of 40 years of baggage. All that mighty canon, constantly changing, with nobody being sure what at any given moment is canon or isn’t, has been dragging the franchise down. Of course keep in mind too, by doing the kind of clean break they did it’s always possible, should someone be dumb enough to want to put the albatross of old canon on their neck, to do further “original time line” stories.
According to Paramount Voyager is canon, of course during its run Paramount said at one point it wasn’t, just another shining example of the problem with canon. But of course it’s Roddenberry-Berman time line canon, not Abrams time line canon.
The original series had money...IIRC, in the trouble with tribbles, the tribbles were being sold, as was the alcohol. In fact, I think there was mention made of possible profit. Also mining for money, etc.
past momentum of the pre-existing fan base. You have had months teaser leaks to the fans. You have forums like FR but dedicated to Trek. We even have fan based productions. Star Ship Exeter comes to mind which has the same production value and quality as the original series. Of course it has the same production value and quality as the original series. (it is still pretty good for what it is)
I noticed the serious cross generational attendance. Many Fathers and sons were in the theater. Many whole families with children who probably only know enterprise at best.
I think the shrinking revenue was a direct result of the “oprafication” of the trek stories. Voyager could have been called the Cheese and Whine series.
My greatest hope on this new incarnation is that it continues to be a family friendly experience. It was GOOD to have a movie you could take the entire family to an actualy theater, overpay for popcorn-candy-drinks, and walk out not feeling ripped off by hollyweird.
(BTW I did notice the young spock fight scene was an almost copy of “yesteryear” from the animated Star Trek. Of course variations of spock as captain alternative timelines have appeard in a number of the paperback books.)
I just hope the suits protect the franchise from collapsing into political correctness preachiness that drove much of the fan base into indifference.
For the record, I am looking forward to 2011 for the next installment. (then again with the drek hollyweird puts out it may be the next time I actually go into a theater)
You are right Mr.Rogers, it was vaguely mentioned. But whenever the fate of some alien was at stake, they were given transport to somewhere else without any mention of how they would support themselves or who would support them -- it was just all mysteriously "taken care of" by The Federation.
In the original 60s version, there were definitely UN implications to the Federation, but it actually played out that the Federation was more like NATO, with the Klingons being the Soviets and the Romulans being the Chinese. This simply scaled the earth to the galaxy.
Also true, Richard Kimball -- it was much like NATO. But the Federation was a unitary democratic government, and they acted as though "sovereignty" was an archaic and outdated concept that created wars.
Spock's line about "The needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few", as I said, sounds much like socialist -- and even communist-- political theory. Believe it or not, it did cross my mind at the time I heard it, but I enjoyed it for what it was -- scifi fantasy.
‘I think it is interesting that McCoy is the one of the big three that did not change.’
He’s a Doctor, not a changeling!
But all that “momentum” resulted in last TV show getting under 3 million viewers an episode and the last movie getting total grosses of 67 million. That’s not momentum, that’s an anchor. Trek has been bleeding fans as every new show or movie found a way to annoy another section of the fan base, and meanwhile the large history has proved daunting to new fans. That momentum resulted in there being no Trek of any kind in production for the first time since the mid-70s. From the fits and starts to create Phase II which finally resulted in the first movie through to the cancellation of Enterprise there had always been some sort of Star Trek in the works. But then in 2002 for the movies and 2005 for TV the momentum of Star Trek ran out.
One of the big points of this movie, from Paramount’s point of view, was opening up to a new fan base. Trying to get some momentum again. That generational attendance is a sign that the succeeded. A lot of the people I’m talking that have seen and loved this movie classify themselves as not Trek fans or former Trek fans. My mom had gotten tired of the franchise, too preachy, too much talking, not enough happening, she wasn’t going to see the new movie, then I saw it and was blown away and convinced her to give it a shot. She loved it, she said it’s the return of Star Trek.
I think as long as Abrams is tied to it things will stay on a good course. He’s shown no fondness for soap boxing in any of his other projects, he likes action, he likes intrigue, he likes hot chicks in scanty costumes.
Next time I’m going to a theater is Memorial Day, Terminator Salvation, finally the post Judgment Day war against the machines.
If that were the case, why aren’t all movies in that territory. Where were these critics to talk up The Love Guru?
I agree, the last “oprafied” whine treks were dragging the franchise.
The momentum was from the long time fans who know the original series and wanted to divest the franchise of all that is janeway.
Kirk: Bones, hand me a napkin please.
McCoy: Damn it Jim, I’m a doctor not a busboy!
But where are those fans? They’ve been laving the franchise in droves since about the second season of TNG, many getting sick of the Berman junk, others just getting old and dying.
Check out the links below. The first one is the revenue picture of the movies, the second is the ratings up through 1999, the final is Enterprise ratings so it takes us from 2001 through 2005.
http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/series/StarTrek.php
http://www.treknation.com/articles/ratings_history.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Enterprise
What you see in this is pretty constant decline in revenue across the board. The movies had some occasional bumps, but long Janeway showed up Trek was losing its license to print money, the momentum was disappearing, and by 2005 gone. “Oprafication” probably had something to do with it, but baggage has a lot to do with it too. Here’s an interesting sentence I found on Wiki “The six television series comprise a total of 716 episodes - 10 of which are feature-length - across 23 seasons (30 when counting seasons that aired concurrently).” That makes over 700 hours of canon TV, plus another 20 odd hours for the movies. That’s a daunting back story for new fans to get into, and it’s a lot of opportunities to drive away old fans.
That’s where the reboot comes in, all stuff, some of which is good, much isn’t, goes away. It’s a fresh start to draw in new fans, hopefully satisfy the old (and from what I’ve seen it mostly has), and to drop the writer’s bible down to something actually useful.
Wiping away an entire history - even a fictional one - does not satisfy this fan. I’d been happier if they just had new actors take over and run some new missions in the 4th and 5th years of the original Five Year Mission.
The end product here reeked of McBlockbuster... tons of CGI, explosions, tissue thin plot and character development.
“Actually the rest of the review too as this is the first I have heard bad about the movie. It is at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes right now with 226 reviews. That is unheard of for most movies on there, and especially for a wide release summer tent pole. “
The Invasion of the body Snatchers 1956 got 100%
The Invasion of the body Snatchers 1978 97%
The Last Temptation of Christ 81%
Black Hawk Down 76%
The Passion of the Christ 50%
An Inconvenient Truth (Al gore) 93%
Can’t make everybody happy. It’s making a lot more people happy than any other Trek movie though.
OK nobody defending the old ways, which include the first Star Trek movie, is allowed to complain about tissue thin plot or character development. Sorry but that’s just pot and kettle silliness.
Nah, go twenty times. Make sure you make another million for Paramount and Abrams. And don’t forget to buy the Grandkids all the cereals, toys, and other tie-ins (the real reason this was made). It’s your duty.
AHHHHHHhhAaaaaHHHaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAHHH!!!! GOOD ONE, Cat!!
Go see it twenty more times. It’s your duty! Abrams needs more money!
I kept looking for Hiro, Claire, or HRG to come running onscreen, stab Spock in the back of the head, and then call for a containment team.
Yep.
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Me, either. I tried watching it a few times, but finally gave up out of sheer boredom and disbelief. Horrible "acting", ridiculous plots; it was just dreadful.
I know a lot of people who have stopped watching it, saying it’s going nowhere. Watch and see, they won’t know how to end it, either, it’ll just be stupid.
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