Lost in space: 'Star Trek' movie review (1 1/2 stars)

I’m not whining at all. I’m pointing out the real history of this thing you’re claiming JJ ruined. It’s never bothered me when there’s bad Trek, I just didn’t watch it (though currently I’m on a project to watch all the Trek, an often times painful project, especially now that I’m two seasons into Voyager).

Part of the problem here is that Trek fans loves to bitch and moan. That’s really all they’ve been doing since it came back (meaning TMP). Now admittedly they’ve often had good reason to, for all the reasons I outlined above. But they’ve gotten so fond of listening to themselves complain they don’t even understand the implications of their complaints anymore. Now that they’re declaring JJ Trek the worst thing ever they don’t understand that means they’re trying to convince people that Undiscovered Country, or Generations, or Insurrection, or every episode of Voyager, as actually good. They aren’t, they’re crap. They’re crap you probably complained about just as vocally when they came out as you’re complaining about JJ now. Problem is this time you’re wrong.

Star Trek was a very original series that broke ground in a lot of areas. However it was not the first sci-fi series by a long shot, so suggesting it had a much more important cultural role that it did would be a mistake.

I understand nostalgia. You watched it as a kid or at a formative time in your life and got all wide eyed as your mental vistas were expanded. That kind of nostalgia is a powerful thing, but it doesn't change the objective measure of anything.

I love the "Violent Femmes". Their music has a lot of significance for me. Just because I like them it doesn't mean that I think they are the worlds greatest band. I can be objective enough to realize that that their talents and sound, while pleasing to me, might not appeal to everyone. I can look at the album sales, their single platinum album, and see that I value them more than most. That's ok.

Kirk was always supposed to be a wunderkind, swinging up the ladder quickly often times cheating (Kobayashi Maru). He’s 25 when he gets command in the reboot movie, 6 years younger than in the old time line, but remember he lands there on accident because so much of Starfleet got wiped out. And really in the original timeline he was brash and immature too, how many times did he ignore the prime directive?

“Frankly, J.J. is to the franchise what the Doomsday Machine was to the USS Constellation.”

Yup

Especially if Feinstein, Boxer, and Pelosi are all there when it happens. I don’t see any other way of getting rid of them.

“Commander Powell: [in cryogenic deep freeze after passing away] Tell me Doolittle. How are the Dodgers doing?
Doolittle: They... they broke up. They disbanded over fifteen years ago!
Commander Powell: Aah... pity. Pity.”

hehehehe

Doolittle: Hello, Bomb? Are you with me?
Bomb #20: Of course.
Doolittle: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?
Bomb #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.
Doolittle: Fine. Think about this then. How do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: Well, of course I exist.
Doolittle: But how do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: It is intuitively obvious.
Doolittle: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist?
Bomb #20: Hmmmm... well... I think, therefore I am.
Doolittle: That’s good. That’s very good. But how do you know that anything else exists?
Bomb #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me. This is fun.

I prefer Ricardo over this guy

BTW I did watch PBS Sherlock Holmes that pretty good

Bendcit is no Ricardo Montiiban LOL!

OMG Bill Shatner was classic in that SNL skit ROFL

Too bad we couldn’t get a Star Trek with both great stories AND action.
Star Trek TNG episode Yesterday’s Enterprise comes to mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesterday’s_Enterprise

The entire federation stuggling against a common enemy

Stu, there’s crap and then there’s crap. Some folks like certain Trek franchises, others like another. My former fiancee loved TNG, while I was mild about it. I loved TOS, while she was mild about it. Like any written play, not everything can be top notch. Even some well-written stuff can be a misfire if you have the wrong people acting it.

Here’s a brief encapsulation of my opinions of the given franchises or movies...

TOS = Incomparable, laid the foundation for the franchise.

Animated Series = Valiant attempt to continue the series as a cartoon, above average.

TMP/1 = While generally panned by most Trekkers as being overlong and slow, it actually is my personal favorite (and I met the director, Academy Award winner Robert Wise, who did both “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music” along with the sci-fi landmark, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and edited the film most consider the best American film ever made, “Citizen Kane”). Wise himself was critical of it. The problem however wasn’t with the actors, but with the script and Roddenberry’s constant revisions. As I said, it is my favorite, but I don’t attempt to force others to accept my opinion on it. I think what adds to my liking it is Jerry Goldsmith’s majestic and magnificent score.

TWOK/2 = Generally considered the best of the franchise by fans, a more action-adventure fare in contrast to the slower 1st film with the single best villain (who could only be played by Ricardo Montalban, his signature character). I had only some minor problems with it (namely having to do with the actors playing Khan’s crew, whom were far too young and of the wrong ethnicity).

TSFS/3 = Also above average, with some minor problems (I didn’t care for the recast of Saavik, but that had to do with Kirstie Alley getting a bit greedy with her demands for a return). I liked Christopher Lloyd’s Kruge, who was a decent match for Kirk.

TVH/4 = A bit too comedic for my tastes, but it was quite popular when it came out. The “Save the Whales” stuff was a bit too preachy, but served the plotline. It would’ve been interesting had they filmed it as they wanted to initially with Eddie Murphy. Over time, I’ve come to dislike the character of the marine biologist, Gillian (though I liked her work on the soap, “Ryan’s Hope”). She was too shrill and grating, and her being removed from the 20th century a little too problematic.

TNG = Coming out as it did during the run of the films, it was very much looked forward to by the fans (as I was one of them at the time). It didn’t, however, grab me as TOS did. Although Kirk is one of a kind and you can’t expect clones, Picard was not quite my cup of tea (too much a bureaucrat of the United Nations ilk of the modern era, not the old 1960s version). I did come to respect his different take of a Starship Captain. Too long to get into any personal beefs or gripes with the series as a whole, although I felt some of the supporting characters were too bland. The character of Riker should’ve gone off to become a Captain within a few years. In a real Navy, you couldn’t get away with being a clinger to your Captain as he remained for so long.

TFF/5 = I have to admit now this one was a letdown. It seemed promising enough with its nice Yosemite Park opening, but Shatner’s direction was a misfire, and he didn’t get to fulfill the vision he had for it. I liked the eye candy of Cynthia Gouw’s Romulan Ambassador, but she all but vanished after getting to the Enterprise. Sybok was an interesting character that I would’ve liked to have seen more a backstory on (though Roddenberry detested this film so much he proclaimed Sybok to be non-canon). Shatner and crew were also starting to show their age here.

TUC/6 = Christopher Plummer’s villain was excellent, if second only to Khan. More of a parable on the fall of the Soviet Union, of course. My biggest problem was the largely edited-out parts involving the collaborationist and assassin Col. West, which was little more than a thinly-veiled slanderous portrayal of Oliver North.

DS9 = A darker version of the Trek universe, though a curious version of what would happen when the universe comes to one place rather than exploring the galaxy. Showed promise, though I wasn’t much into that pseudo-religious stuff Sisko was involved with. Of course, eventually they gave Sisko a little ship along with Worf to get back to the roots of exploration. Most of the episodes I watched just once (unlike with TOS & TNG) and haven’t seen them again since they aired. As with TNG, though, some of the characters were a bit too bland (Bashir & Ezri Dax).

GEN/7 = Curious pairing of Kirk & Picard, although many fans remain disappointed with Kirk’s death (too inauspicious an ending). Malcolm McDowell was a highlight, though my ever-increasing dislike for Whoopi Goldberg makes her hard to take (even in small doses). Still probably the best of the TNG movies.

VOY = Coming at a time of dangerous Trek oversaturation. I’ve actually yet to see all the episodes. I thought Kate Mulgrew was trying to do an impersonation of Shatner’s Kirk. At least in sending the ship way out into the Delta Quadrant, they could come up with a whole new universe. Unfortunately, Voyager was like letting a bull loose in a China shop. Whereas Kirk & crew tended to fix problems, Janeway tended to create them. Ultimately, it was a bit of a misfire in my estimation (though with Seven of Nine, great eye candy).

Unfortunately, because of Jeri Ryan’s casting, it had an enormous impact on the political future of our country (it was her ex-husband that was the original opponent of Zero’s for the IL Senate — their marriage was ruined as a result of her moving to L.A. to film the show. Had Jack Ryan won the Senate seat, Zero would still be in the IL legislature today and not President).

FC/8 = This one I had a serious beef with the casting and altering of TOS canon in making Zefram Cochrane an Earthbound giant and embittered drunk rather than a NASA-type astronaut (James Cromwell is a good actor, just thoroughly wrong for the part). It made little sense that humans in hiding after the apocalyptic Wars period in the mid to late 21st century would be launching a warp ship from the woods. The Borg stuff was OK, but marred by the rest of the story.

INS/9 = A glorified TNG episode, and only an average one at that. Disappointing and marked a clear deterioration of the film franchise at the box office.

Enterprise = A second foray into attempting to portray the pre-TOS era after FC, but was a fiasco in my estimation and I was bitterly critical after it came out. This one took a sledgehammer to a lot of the history and canon of the entire franchise, rewriting the Vulcans as sinister oppressors of humanity and dragging in other races and scenarios that clearly came from AFTER the TOS era. Even the ship was too advanced to be a pre-TOS ship. Though Scott Bakula was promising, the rest of the aforementioned problems were too much to overcome (and it, of course, was cancelled before its expected duration). I ended up missing out on many of the eps in the latter 2 seasons and still have yet to see them.

NEM/10 = I actually thought this one was an improvement on the prior two TNG films, but it also didn’t perform as well at the box office. However, Data’s sacrifice was too much of a rip-off of Spock’s. I think a big problem is that the TNG crew never was able to credibly make the transition to film. It probably would’ve been better to have done made-for-tv film specials every 2 years or so.

Now we get to the central issue of the thread... the reboot.

What is my central beef with the reboot ? That it is, simply put, completely and thoroughly unneeded and unnecessary. Why take established and beloved characters that are intertwined with the actors that portrayed them and recast them with a sophomoric class that doesn’t remotely come close to the original ? The excuses that it is a prequel and using that as being acceptable to rewrite the timeline from there doesn’t cut it. There’s virtually nothing in the first film “reboot” that was done correctly. What was Kirk’s mother doing in space, for example ? She wasn’t supposed to be on a ship, let alone giving birth. The villain himself was too close to a rehash of the clone Picard villain in ‘Nemesis.’ The casting was wrong, the ship’s look was wrong, the characters placement was wrong.

Set aside all of that, toss out all of the history and look at it as a film and it was still too problematic. It came off as derivative with just a lot of weird stuff (what was with NuUhura’s entrance that was a rip-off of Roller Girl’s entrance in “Boogie Nights” ? That was just plain bizarre). The film also clearly had a LOT of scenes cut that would explain things (or at least explain the gutted revisionism) simply in the name of jumping from one action scene to another. I know a lot of moviegoers today can’t tolerate a stationary scene that lasts more than 3 seconds, but pardon me if this viewer does (and makes me long for TMP’s “slowness”). If a film starts to produce a Baz Luhrmann effect in me (read: nausea/motion-sickness), it will inevitably get a thumbs down.

You like it for entertainment value ? Fine. I don’t. I said before that Abrams could’ve and should’ve moved past the TNG/DS9/Voyager period into the 25th century with a new Enterprise (say Enterprise-F or -G) and crew/characters. From there on, he could’ve done what he pleased without completely rewriting established history and characters. Problem is, even if he did exactly that, I still take exception to the Abrams style of filmmaking (and WTF is with that lens glare crapola ?). Although I’m a fair-to-mild Star Wars fan (secondary to Trek), I am not looking forward to the mess he is likely to make with the continuing saga of Wars films (not to say Lucas was a master with scripts or casting with the prequels), though I have a suspicion he will not be nearly as destructive to his beloved ‘Wars’ canon as he was to ‘Trek.’

Post #90 should interest you.

The Doomsday Machine effectively scrapped the USS Constellation. JJ Abrams made the two most profitable movies in franchise history. This does not seem analogous to me.

It is noted that some die hard ST:TOS fans have their panties in a bunch and this is apparently making them irrational.

TOS incomparable? Really? Spocks Brain incomparable? Miri? Gamesters of Triskelion? The simple reality is that a lot of TOS is just plain silly, usually entertaining, but often kind of dumb. Yell “I am Kirok” and hug yourself and comeback and tell me TOS was incomparable with a straight face. I mean I love the show, but part of loving it is accepting the warts of which there are many.

The animated series was cute. For saturday morning fair, especially in that era, it wasn’t too terribly stupid.

TMP is atrocious. It’s just plain stupid. The plot is bad, the acting is bad, and the film drags with all those closeup pans of the ship. I mean I understand why they did it, it was the return of Trek and on the big screen even, I remember being among the people giving the model a standing ovation in our theater. So maybe in that time for that audience it was necessary, but upon further viewings that movie is just bad.

Wrath, great movie. Only great movie in the originals.

Search, terrible. “Klingon BASTARD you killed my son. Klingon bastard you KILLED my son. Klingon bastard you killed my SON.” Nuff said.

Whales, terrible. The ultimate proof of that the myth that even numbered Treks are good is wrong. One even numbered Trek is good, and this ain’t it.

TNG has so many issues. Start with Roddenberry wanting there to be no conflict (the source of all drama), and then the terribly thin characters. Second half of season 4 really shows the problem, there’s a lot of “single character” (industry term for a story that primarily involves one character, others are obviously present, but one person will have most of the screen time) eps there, and you quickly learn the only characters that can actually carry a show are Pickard and Data. Got better in the final 3 seasons... after Gene died and they could have conflict.

FF - crap.

UC, the only reason people like this one is that FF is so bad UC seems good. It’s not. By this point it’s obvious they’re running out of ideas and Gene could very well be insane.

DS9, to me the ultimate proof of what a good show DS9 was is the holodeck episodes with Vic. They’re actually good. Every other episode of Trek that revolved around the holodeck has always been crap because as a story hook it exists only for lazy storytellers. The fact that they could actually make good holodeck eps shows that was a writers room of skill. Sure they still clunked a few, no Trek show would be complete without a few episodes that make you feel shame. But clearly the best of the spinoffs.

Generations... ugh. I love Malcolm MacDowell but even he couldn’t save it. The problem is they took everything that made TOS dumb and everything that made TNG boring and made a dumb boring movie.

The tragedy of Voyager is they actually probably wrote their best character ever for this turkey, the holo-doctor. And it’s then completely wasted. I’ve been on a “watch all the Treks” mission lately and am up to V and very well might abandon the mission. I’ve got 4 1/2 more season to go and it’s just so bad. If anything ever “ruined” Trek, as so many claimed JJ did, it was this.

My biggest beef with FC is that nobody explained to Trakes that movie screens are big. He directed the movie just like an episode, which means it’s all closeups and extreme closeups. I remember seeing where the Borg Queens makeup was peeling in the corners of her mouth on every extreme closeup (which is 90% of the time she’s on screen). This was the last Trek I paid to see until JJ, I simply couldn’t take it anymore.

INS you nailed it.

ENT - since I’ve always thought the whole canon worship was dumb I never worried about their “violations”. It was really my indication of how retarded the majority of Trek fans had become. Their constant harping about the communicators being smaller completely ignoring that by that time cellphones were smaller than TOS communicators just really made me question their sanity. I kind of enjoyed the show all the way up until the temporal cold war plot started. Didn’t bother to stick it out.

Nem was junk.

All you need to do is look at the size of our two posts to see why the reboot was absolutely necessary. Should have been done before. The fact of the matter is Trek has WAY too much canon, and it’s often contradictory, and it’s a prison for story telling. Especially with the way fans obsess on it.

Why not take beloved characters and recast them? It’s a normal part of movie and TV story telling. Look at how many versions of Sherlock Holmes there have been. Bond. Dr Who. Spartacus. Reboots, recasts, and just plain redos are a part of the industry. They’ve been around forever, they used to be the norm. Nobody expected the Batman TV show to have anything to do with the serials that had come before, new show, new people, new stuff. Trek had broken that model when they kept TNG in the same world, and then with 25 years of same canon story telling added into it they proved why the old model existed.

It’s not a prequel, it’s a separate timeline. Which is convenient if anybody is ever dumb enough to want to try to tell stories in the old canon again. All that crap is still there completely unaffected by the events in the JJ movies. Paramount has even talked about putting a new show in the old world, just to satisfy the gripers.

Your complaints show EXACTLY why they wanted to reboot. The only reason those things aren’t “correct” is because they break a canon that was overwrought, over complex, and over analyzed.

Sorry but the reviewers disagree. They find the movie well constructed, and entertaining. And I agree. Really the ONLY people that don’t like it are the canon worshipers. And they bitch and moan about EVERY new Trek that comes out, that’s where they get their actual pleasure from Trek, complaining about it.

I don’t care if you don’t like it. Your happiness is not on my concern list and never will be, and really it’s all opinion and opinion isn’t worth discussing because everybody has their own and who really cares about anybody else’s. The problem is when you start saying it’s not really Trek or it ruined the franchise that’s talking about absolutely, discussable non-opinion items. Which is when I start pointing to the long history of DREK in Trek’s history. I see no way anybody could do anything after Voyager that ruined Trek. If Trek was ever ruined that’s when it happened, if it didn’t happen then it can’t happen.

No JJ absolutely should NOT have done anything in the post Voy canon, for exactly the reason I’ve said. That much canon is a story destroying albatross on the neck of story tellers. A lot of writers didn’t want to have anything to do with it. That was demand number one from JJ and his people, they didn’t want anything to do with that canon, they either got to reboot or Paramount had to hire somebody else. And all indications are they weren’t the first to make that demand.

Again remember he DIDN’T rewrite established history. All that history is “preserved” in that other timeline, available for the creation of new content as soon as Paramount finds somebody dumb enough to want to wear the albatross. He didn’t destroy Trek he SAVED it. It was dead before he and Paramount finally came to terms, and if had followed the old canon people would have stayed away from it in droves in much the way they stayed away from the last 4 movies, and there wouldn’t be another movie, and there wouldn’t be talk of doing something new in the old canon. If he had followed your path there’d be no new Trek, it would actually have been destroyed.

"TOS incomparable? Really? Spocks Brain incomparable? Miri? Gamesters of Triskelion? The simple reality is that a lot of TOS is just plain silly, usually entertaining, but often kind of dumb. Yell “I am Kirok” and hug yourself and comeback and tell me TOS was incomparable with a straight face. I mean I love the show, but part of loving it is accepting the warts of which there are many."

Incomparable in that without it, there's nothing that could've come from it. Contrast it with 'Lost in Space', which was CBS's attempt to do their own sci-fi show by trying to rip off Roddenberry before he formally launched Trek. That show's early eps (the pilot especially, with its dark mood) was great sci-fi until it veered into the absurd. Aside from the bomb of a reboot movie, it went nowhere. That could've easily been Trek, but wasn't. You refer to subpar episodes, but even those are still considered memorable today (and quotable). Can't say that about LIS. The first season was largely excellent and had a huge budget for the time. Second was still good. Third was a decline (in large part due to the fact that it had to make considerable budget cutbacks) and Roddenberry was not an active participant (of course, sometimes not always a bad thing). The fourth season that they were planning for was to prominently feature William Campbell's Koloth character as a running foil for Kirk. Had it received support and the ample budget from the first season, that could've been memorable (but alas, not to be).

"The animated series was cute. For saturday morning fair, especially in that era, it wasn’t too terribly stupid."

It was a bit too sophisticated for children. At least they held to canon. ;-)

"TMP is atrocious."

I'd expect you'd disagree with me. Of course, it was meant as the launch episode for a 2nd Trek series. It was going to pale to Star Wars being released 2 years after. One wonders if they'd have done better to have gone ahead with that series. I know I'd have loved to have seen it (the downsides is that Nimoy would not have been in it and Goldsmith wouldn't have done the score for a tv series).

"Search, terrible. “Klingon BASTARD you killed my son. Klingon bastard you KILLED my son. Klingon bastard you killed my SON.” Nuff said."

The Klingon bastard did kill his son. I liked the end of the world fight scene, too. The destruction of the original Enterprise was also thoroughly shocking and packed an emotional wallop which has never been matched (who mourned for the Ent-D when Riker crashed it in GEN ?).

"Whales, terrible. The ultimate proof of that the myth that even numbered Treks are good is wrong. One even numbered Trek is good, and this ain’t it."

It was still funny to see them go to San Francisco circa 1986 (what threw me off was that marine museum, not located in Sausalito but way down in Monterey -- minus the whales, which I visited a few years after the movie). It brought in a lot of non-Trek fans to see, which made for good box office (with Eddie Murphy, would've done even better, back when he wasn't box office poison). Injecting some humor after 3 deadly serious prior films probably helped some (one thing that had been missing that had been in the series).

"TNG has so many issues. Start with Roddenberry wanting there to be no conflict (the source of all drama), and then the terribly thin characters. Second half of season 4 really shows the problem, there’s a lot of “single character” (industry term for a story that primarily involves one character, others are obviously present, but one person will have most of the screen time) eps there, and you quickly learn the only characters that can actually carry a show are Pickard and Data. Got better in the final 3 seasons... after Gene died and they could have conflict."

I'll readily admit I was not a Rick Berman fan. I thought it was a big mistake for Denise Crosby to leave the show when she did, as hers was a much more interesting character than most of the others. Of course, had she stayed, we wouldn't have gotten gems like "Yesterday's Enterprise" for her to make a guest appearance in. The worst character, bar none, was Wesley Crusher. Having him in a regular position to save the ship did serious credibility damage. Kirk would've dropped the kid off at the nearest starbase. Unfortunately, I believe Wesley was one of Roddenberry's bad ideas (and that was named after him, his middle name).

"UC, the only reason people like this one is that FF is so bad UC seems good. It’s not. By this point it’s obvious they’re running out of ideas and Gene could very well be insane."

Gene died during production of TUC. Still, I thought it was a good film (though I'd add I also didn't care for the weirdly reworked Valaris character, who was clearly supposed to be Saavik).

"DS9, to me the ultimate proof of what a good show DS9 was is the holodeck episodes with Vic. They’re actually good. Every other episode of Trek that revolved around the holodeck has always been crap because as a story hook it exists only for lazy storytellers. The fact that they could actually make good holodeck eps shows that was a writers room of skill. Sure they still clunked a few, no Trek show would be complete without a few episodes that make you feel shame. But clearly the best of the spinoffs."

It gave James Darren an opportunity to show off his Sinatraesque singing talents, although it seemed a little weird such a character from that era would hold such fascination for the DS9 crew.

"Generations... ugh. I love Malcolm MacDowell but even he couldn’t save it. The problem is they took everything that made TOS dumb and everything that made TNG boring and made a dumb boring movie."

Naah, it wasn't that bad.

"The tragedy of Voyager is they actually probably wrote their best character ever for this turkey, the holo-doctor. And it’s then completely wasted. I’ve been on a “watch all the Treks” mission lately and am up to V and very well might abandon the mission. I’ve got 4 1/2 more season to go and it’s just so bad. If anything ever “ruined” Trek, as so many claimed JJ did, it was this."

I might rewatch it myself at some point, even though I know it was a bit of a letdown. Having watched Mulgrew on "Ryan's Hope", it was hard for me to see her as anything other than Mary Ryan Fenelli.

"My biggest beef with FC is that nobody explained to Frakes that movie screens are big. He directed the movie just like an episode, which means it’s all closeups and extreme closeups. I remember seeing where the Borg Queens makeup was peeling in the corners of her mouth on every extreme closeup (which is 90% of the time she’s on screen). This was the last Trek I paid to see until JJ, I simply couldn’t take it anymore."

At least he didn't have lens flares going off everywhere... *cough*

"ENT - since I’ve always thought the whole canon worship was dumb I never worried about their “violations”. It was really my indication of how retarded the majority of Trek fans had become. Their constant harping about the communicators being smaller completely ignoring that by that time cellphones were smaller than TOS communicators just really made me question their sanity. I kind of enjoyed the show all the way up until the temporal cold war plot started. Didn’t bother to stick it out."

...and neither did a lot of the audience. For reasons unrelated to the show, I missed a lot of it. And we obviously disagree on canon. There's a difference between worship of it and respect for it. You sorta sneer at it in the same way the left does when we on the right insist upon trying to stick to the Constitution. They think it's something old and outdated and worth flaunting, precisely why our culture is in the disastrous shape it's in now.

"All you need to do is look at the size of our two posts to see why the reboot was absolutely necessary. Should have been done before. The fact of the matter is Trek has WAY too much canon, and it’s often contradictory, and it’s a prison for story telling. Especially with the way fans obsess on it."

And I completely disagree. So many stories have not been told and they can be done well within the framework of canon.

"Why not take beloved characters and recast them? It’s a normal part of movie and TV story telling. Look at how many versions of Sherlock Holmes there have been. Bond. Dr Who. Spartacus. Reboots, recasts, and just plain redos are a part of the industry."

For some things, it makes no particular difference. For others, it does. This is one instance where it just plain doesn't work, because it has a direct and negative effect on the entire starting point of the franchise. It would be like having a character nuke London in Sherlock Holmes's time, or having James Bond's parents not die in a skiing accident at Chamonix. With those alterations, you've completely remade them. Abrams just not only did that, but the casting itself was so damn bad. These actors looking like high-schoolers playing dress up. Changing the basic motivations of the characters, too, it's just one bad thing after another. The ludicrous Spock-Uhura 'romance' as another example.

"They’ve been around forever, they used to be the norm. Nobody expected the Batman TV show to have anything to do with the serials that had come before, new show, new people, new stuff. Trek had broken that model when they kept TNG in the same world, and then with 25 years of same canon story telling added into it they proved why the old model existed.

It’s not a prequel, it’s a separate timeline. Which is convenient if anybody is ever dumb enough to want to try to tell stories in the old canon again. All that crap is still there completely unaffected by the events in the JJ movies."

Call it "separate", it still doesn't change the fact that the characters, their motivations and some other basic alterations Abrams inserted simply don't work and don't make sense. One other question, this was Captain Pike's ship, so where in the hell was his crew ? Those people should not have been where they were at the time they were there.

"Paramount has even talked about putting a new show in the old world, just to satisfy the gripers."

Us "gripers" who actually want it to make, y'know, sense ?

"Your complaints show EXACTLY why they wanted to reboot. The only reason those things aren’t “correct” is because they break a canon that was overwrought, over complex, and over analyzed."

They tossed out everything that made Star Trek, Star Trek. The basic framework, the motivations, even the characters characters. Instead we get children playing adults that have no discernable resemblance to the characters other than the names. Like Justin Bieber playing George Washington or Kim Kardashian playing Margaret Thatcher. Actually, it's worse... those would be memorable for how ludicrous such a casting is, in the case of the Faux Trek, it's that they're so utterly forgettable.

"Sorry but the reviewers disagree. They find the movie well constructed, and entertaining. And I agree. Really the ONLY people that don’t like it are the canon worshipers. And they bitch and moan about EVERY new Trek that comes out, that’s where they get their actual pleasure from Trek, complaining about it."

Nope. I'd love to have a Trek film I could enjoy with good actors, a good script, no f*ing lens flare, and history and motivations that fit the characters. Instead I got JJ Abrams taking a great big dump on the whole thing.

"I don’t care if you don’t like it. Your happiness is not on my concern list and never will be, and really it’s all opinion and opinion isn’t worth discussing because everybody has their own and who really cares about anybody else’s. The problem is when you start saying it’s not really Trek or it ruined the franchise that’s talking about absolutely, discussable non-opinion items. Which is when I start pointing to the long history of DREK in Trek’s history. I see no way anybody could do anything after Voyager that ruined Trek. If Trek was ever ruined that’s when it happened, if it didn’t happen then it can’t happen."

Problem is, and we know there was subpar Trek, but that TNG/DS9/Voyager didn't flagrantly rewrite over the basic history and characters of TOS. If they had a bad episode/bad writing or lousy character, it only effected that show. Enterprise started to go in the revisionist history direction, which was bad enough, but these were at least new characters. What Abrams did was chuck it all in the toilet and completely ruin established characters. You're entitled to your own opinion if you like it, but I and many many others don't. It was completely unnecessary and wrong.

"No JJ absolutely should NOT have done anything in the post Voy canon, for exactly the reason I’ve said. That much canon is a story destroying albatross on the neck of story tellers."

Absurd. If he was to be let loose, and he should never have been, let him do the distant future of Trek beyond what was already there. It's a weak argument to call canon an albatross.

"A lot of writers didn’t want to have anything to do with it. That was demand number one from JJ and his people, they didn’t want anything to do with that canon, they either got to reboot or Paramount had to hire somebody else. And all indications are they weren’t the first to make that demand."

In which case, he should never have been hired. Period. I think what he did was outright malicious. We'll see if he shows a similar trend with SW.

"Again remember he DIDN’T rewrite established history."

Yes, he did. I've said that from jump street. From the moment Kirk's mother was on a starship giving birth, that was revisionist history.

"All that history is “preserved” in that other timeline, available for the creation of new content as soon as Paramount finds somebody dumb enough to want to wear the albatross."

Oh, quelle horror ! A set frame, established characters, motivations that make sense !

"He didn’t destroy Trek he SAVED it."

Naah. He made FAUX Trek. It's not Star Trek. Trek for dumb, horny teenagers with short attention spans, low IQs and who are distracted by shiny lens flare.

"It was dead before he and Paramount finally came to terms, and if had followed the old canon people would have stayed away from it in droves in much the way they stayed away from the last 4 movies, and there wouldn’t be another movie, and there wouldn’t be talk of doing something new in the old canon. If he had followed your path there’d be no new Trek, it would actually have been destroyed."

Baloney. I could've done a helluva lot better with a film than that no-talent hatchet man. I'd certainly have shown a lot more respect for it than he has. It was insulting, and now with this second abomination in the pipe, he's kicking us in the balls and thumbing his nose at us again. But hey, so long as YOU like it, why not ?

Star Trek? Just give me an hour and half of T’Pol prancing around in her Vulcan cat suit would be just fine for me.

How 'bout T'Pau ? She has that unstoppable hotness thing going like Helen Thomas. ;-D

First season of TOS is hit or miss. Some are good, some are junk. Season 2 is really when it hit stride, mostly good to great eps. Season 3 of course had tons of issues. But it’s still not incomparable, you can tell because we’re comparing it.

I enjoyed TMP when it first came out. It was great, Trek was back and on the big screen. It was a dream come true. Unfortunately on subsequent viewings I realize it’s mostly fanboy porn, with tons of pregnant pauses so we can (as we did) cheer the first appearance of every main cast member, and the ship, and the first time the ship moves, etc etc. Again given its audience and timing those were probably necessary and good, but without the audience it’s stilted and slow.

I mock the Klingon bastard line because it’s emblematic of the problem with the movie. It lacked proper direction, when faced with trying to decide which reading to go for they said “yes”, once through the line would have sufficed, 3 times with the emphasis on a different word every time, silly. And then there’s the problem with him only having met his son one movie ago, and barely knowing anything about him, but now we get to go through the line 3 times. Blowing up the Enterprise was pretty cool though, I’ll give them props for one (1) unexpected story turn there, which is more than we’d get in the next 7 movies combined.

There was some fun jokes in saving the whales. But Trek time travel plots are always problematic, and it was just a thin stew, felt like an episode that got stretched.

Yeah the DS9 crew was probably over fond of Vic, but he is a cool character, and the writers leveraged him for some good stories. Unlike every other holodeck episode.

Honestly Generations so did not impress me I’d forgotten Malcolm was even in it until last year when one of my co-workers brought in a bunch of trading cards from the movie he was selling. I saw the card with Malcolm and I was stunned, had to go look it up on wiki. I remember next nothing about that movie.

One of hte big problems with Janeway is they decided their first female captain needed to be their smartest captain. So where the others would ask for options and the supporting characters would spew technobabble Janeway did all the spewing. Had to really suck for the actors since all they got to do in those scenes was say they’ll do their part in 4 hours. Really wasted a perfectly good Vulcan too, once the captain is the one that knows all the science your Vulcan gets stuck being security chief.

I don’t see any problem with the casting. Actually I quite like them. Sylar is an excellent Vulcan, and there’s nothing wrong with him having a romance, we know Vulcans do that (else no Spock) and he’s only half Vulcan anyway. Urban is great. Yeah everybody has that hyper youth look, but that’s modern Hollywood, nobody is allowed to look over 30 until the character needs to look over 60.

Trek has a whole galaxy so yes obviously there’s “more stories”. But the problem with the canon is it chokes it off. You gotta make sure you’re not combining races wrong. What you want a betazoid? Remember they got trashed during the Dominion War. That Gorn seems to smart. And that’s not he right button for that. It’s why other franchises scrub constantly. There’s no indication the current Bond had his parents die ever, different set of canon.

It’s not “call it separate” it IS separate. Both internally (as explained by old Spock) and externally (as shown by Paramount talking about doing new stuff in the old canon).

It DOES make sense, that’s part of the problem you have with it. Frankly it makes more sense than most of the Trek.

The problem with Trek fans is there is no difference between worship and respect. The Trek fans that care about canon WORSHIP it, that’s the crowd that has given Takei crap for pushing the “wrong” button for decade, that’s the crowd that whined the ENT communicators were smaller than TOS communicators. If they could actually stop at just respecting canon it wouldn’t be such an albatross. But thanks to the button obsessors Trek canon is a trap, it’s a source of preventing stories where canon should be the fountain of new stories.

Every time you throw out that “faux trek” crap you show you’re just another canon worshiper whining. It’s Trek, it’s REAL Trek, that really is honestly (you can check the reviews) better than at least 60% of the Trek that came before it. Better than 2 entire 7 season SERIES of Trek (TNG and Voy). Maybe it doesn’t align with your favorite parts of Trek, but that doesn’t make it faux, it just makes it not your favorite. I wouldn’t call Voyager faux Trek, because it’s just as Trek as the rest, it’s CRAP Trek but it’s still the genuine article.

No they didn’t toss what made Trek Trek. They brought Trek BACK from the oblivion of debate club hyper-liberalism that had ruined it. It’s back to TOS Trek, fun, adventurous, kind of silly, decent messages, and not bogged down by a need to push a political agenda. It’s the Trek I grew up watching, and that by and large we haven’t had since TMP brought it back.

It is quelle horror, because they’ve had a hard time getting people to want to work in the old canon. If the old canon was so desirable to work in the job never would have been offered to JJ because somebody else would have signed on. Nobody did. Finally they had to accept the fact that most filmmakers with a history of success don’t want to be in that old world, they want to work from scratch, so they gave into the demand. Mock it all you want, the empirical evidence says Trek canon is an albatross that people don’t want to wear.

If you could do such a better job DO IT. Get an agent, get in front of Paramount AND DO IT. They want something in old canon. Go ahead. Meanwhile out here in reality JJ saved Trek whether you will admit it or not. I’m going to see the movie this weekend, with my mom, just like the old days. We’re both excited for new Trek. Sorry you can’t enjoy it, but that’s on you. 88% fresh, you’re the outlier.

Anyway, I’ll spare JimRob’s bandwith any further on long responses to say that we just don’t see eye to eye on this, at least with respect to the “reboot.” I recall we had a similar discussion some time back (I remember your Sulu pushing the wrong buttons comment), and I took issue then.

I put myself in the category of respecting canon, not in the Sulu pushed the wrong buttons nonsense (the latter of which whose adherents would deserve the ire of Shatner’s famous SNL retort of “Get a life !” Then again, he took a lot of heat for that, because those ultrageeks were the ones who spent boatloads of bucks to see him at conventions where he made more than a few dollars doing the circuit on).

I’ve never met Shatner, but have met Takei and never chided him about pushing the wrong buttons. If I did, it would be time for me to step back (of course, I’ve done that more than a few times). I was going to the conventions back to the ‘80s but haven’t been to any in some time. When I was about 12, I joined a popular paramilitary group based on Starfleet and obtained an officer rank. I think how odd it was then, close to 3 decades ago, when I went to one of the super-conventions that had a meeting within the con of Starfleet members and there were grown men in their 20s and 30s who were dressed in military fatigues saluting me as an officer, as they were only enlisted and NCO rank. We even had a banquet and were serenaded by Nichelle Nichols.

Those events seemed bigger and more real in those days. For many of the newer “stars” appearing at such functions, especially the reboot, I wouldn’t go if you gave me free tickets, it’s not the same. They lost people like me when they decided to change it into something unrecognizable. You disagree, of course, but I’m telling you that many feel the same way as I do. I think it’s rotten when they toss off decades-long fans like me for folks that like the cheap, the shallow and the shiny, with a few explosions thrown in.

“...the Trek feature films have followed a peculiar pattern: even-numbered Star Trek films have always done well at the box office (with the exception of Nemesis). Odd-numbered films, on the other hand, have either failed miserably or still succeeded, but had a few glaring flaws that kept them from that coveted “top spot”.

That’s interesting because I have noticed that the odd numbered WinOSes do well and the even numbered ones don’t!

I’ll bite. What are your reasons?