Why a reboot was necessary (IMHO)

Discussion in 'Star Trek Movies: Kelvin Universe' started by Charles Phipps, Jun 13, 2013.

  1. Quantum_Penguin

    Quantum_Penguin Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    Do I really have to substantiate this in the Trek XI forum?

    I don't literally mean everybody thinks everything is fresh and original in NuTrek. I was using hyperbole to express frustration with an opinion I don't agree with. And I fully acknowledge that it is my opinion and mine alone.

    Furthermore, I don't only talk about Star Trek only on TrekBBS. "Fresh" or some variant such as "new" or "ground-breaking" are the terms I frequently hear applied to nuTrek in conversations with people in real life. And no, I don't keep a list of conversations where people have expressed a particular opinion to me, nor would I expect anyone else to.

    And my opinion is that those opinions are unfounded.
     
  2. Opus

    Opus Commodore Commodore

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    It's Phresh!
     
  3. Clancy_s

    Clancy_s Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    Not for you clearly but it worked for me (I've not seen WoK)
     
  4. Hober Mallow

    Hober Mallow Commodore Commodore

    I'd prefer all future Trek reboots leave out the Ferengi, Bajorans, Prophets, Q, and every other alien created for the Berman-era spinoffs. (And I don't even know what an Augment is. Something from VOY or ENT?)
     
  5. Ovation

    Ovation Admiral Admiral

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    Really? So the people I've talked to who've never seen WOK (yes, there are quite a number of such people--many of whom have seen the latest Trek film) who found the scene compelling--they're what, lying? The scene may not work for you, but you are hardly the arbiter of what works for everyone else.

    As for "barely really gotten to bond", how the hell would you know? I "bonded" with my two best friends within weeks of meeting them--to the point where I would have sacrificed just about anything for either of them then (more so today). Kirk and Spock have been "out there" well more than a few weeks and have experienced any number of "bonding moments" to which you are not privy. Who are you to decide how well they've "bonded"? You can decide you don't find it is compellingly portrayed, of course, but your attempt at arbitrarily fixing the amount of time necessary to bond is rather flimsy.


    Again, perhaps that's true for you. It certainly isn't true for everyone. First time I tasted single malt whisky, I hated it. I now have 23 (at last count) different types in my liquor cabinet. Found my first Guinness revolting. It is now among my favourite beers. Hated REM's music when I first heard it. Now among my favourite bands. Couldn't stand bluegrass music when I first heard it. My collection of bluegrass albums now numbers in the dozens. I could provide more examples if you wish.
     
  6. Hugh Mann

    Hugh Mann Lieutenant

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    If a movie requires you to watch it several times before you like it, then it's a crap movie.
     
  7. BillJ

    BillJ The King of Kings Admiral

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    Please don't try to tell me what's going on in my head when I watch a movie. It's incredibly fucking rude. Though I doubt you really care whether you come off as rude or not.

    You know why I like any given movie? Because they're enjoyable to watch. I disliked This is 40 because I didn't have fun watching it. I like Star Trek Into Darkness because I had fun watching it. Nothing more, nothing less. For some reason you seem incapable of recognizing that people want to have fun when they go to the movies.

    I can respect that you dislike Star Trek Into Darkness but I'm honestly tired of you looking down your nose at people who do.

    You can't seem to let go of the fact that people don't respect your genius by liking the same things you do. Get over it, people are unique creatures and different things stimulate us in both positive and negative ways.
     
  8. BillJ

    BillJ The King of Kings Admiral

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    This is simply bullshit.

    Saw Anchorman with my wife in the theater and hated it. Was up sick one night a year later and watched it and loved it.

    Sometimes things can effect how we see a form of entertainment.
     
  9. Ovation

    Ovation Admiral Admiral

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    Why? How is a movie fundamentally different than any other art form where one's appreciation for a particular example of a form can change from one instance of exposure to others? I've already listed a number of examples where I began with an intense dislike of something and came to enjoy that thing immensely. Was my list of examples not compelling because I didn't include any movies? Or do you simply think I was lying?
     
  10. Hugh Mann

    Hugh Mann Lieutenant

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    Your comparisons are meaningless since you compared unlike things--a movie is neither a drink nor a song.
     
  11. BillJ

    BillJ The King of Kings Admiral

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    Keep hanging onto that single-mindedness. :rofl:
     
  12. Ovation

    Ovation Admiral Admiral

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    If you bothered to read what I wrote, you'd have noted I was responding to an observation that claimed
    which is something I dispute (and will continue to dispute, given the numerous times this has proven false in my life. "something" is not terribly specific, so I provided examples from a number of categories--including music as that was one of the alleged proofs for the assertion.

    As analogies seem insufficient to make my point, I will include movies:

    Blue Velvet
    The Shining
    Smokey and the Bandit
    Alphaville
    Thin Red Line

    Each of the above is a film that I did not like (in some cases, viscerally so) upon first viewing. Each is now in my collection and gets reasonably regular repeat viewings (and I don't do that to torture myself). I await a persuasive and articulate explanation for why my examples remaining meaningless. :rolleyes:
     
  13. Charles Phipps

    Charles Phipps Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I'm going to treat this post seriously and I hope you'll do the same. The whole point of my essay isn't that Star Trek 2.0 is fresh and new. The point of my essay is that Star Trek 2.0 is written for newcomers to the franchise as much as the old fogies of Trek. It's written for the explicit purpose of attracting a new generation as well as appeasing old fans. A new Trek series could have been fine but if you would object to being told what a Ferengi, Klingon, or transporter is like my wife needed to be told--then you are not going to be the kind of audience the franchise needed to be appealed to.

    Star Trek: The Wrath of Nero and Star Trek: Into Darkness aren't great movies. They're mindless popcorn spectacle which are impressive less because of their plots (which have massive holes in them) than because they're very effective MPS. Compared to the Star Wars Prequels, they're about a thousand times better at being pretty but brainless fun. There's a message in ST:ID about drones, terrorism, and fear which is a bit on the late side but at least it's Star Trekky.

    The thing is that franchises need to be living things and a franchise with no outgoing product is going to die. Star Trek created the serial science fiction drama as we know it but it's been ripped off wholesale to the point we have several critical series which never would have existed without it. Whole sections of film and television as well as RL tech have been influenced by it and its activities. None of that is going to prevent it from rotting on the vine if material which doesn't create fans isn't produced.

    ST:TOS, ST:TAS, ST:TNG, ST:DSP, ST:VOY, ST:ENT, and ten movies is a pretty vast canon for new fans to have to devour in order to understand the series. Creating a new jumping-on point is vitally important. There's enough in the Prime Universe already to go well beyond most series. Ending it isn't a bad thing other than in terms of fanboy continuity love.
     
    Last edited: Jun 17, 2013
  14. Quantum_Penguin

    Quantum_Penguin Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    I appreciate your candor and I apologize for letting my frustration bleed through in my first post. My frustration is not directed at you in particular and I should have stayed more on point with your OP. Part of that frustration has came from sharing my criticisms with friends online and off and then having them brushed away as the rantings of a "fanboy" just because I reject to Trek 2.0 on its own merits.

    I'm not a fanboy. I'd have preferred a total reboot with no relation to prior continuity in fact, and I feel that JJ Abrams' decision to reference the prime universe works to Trek 2.0's deficit.

    You are right that continuity has been a sticking point for some fans, but I don't think devotion to continuity has ever been the issue for the production staff or the public at large. The powers that be played fast and loose with it during the production of Enterprise, even having the Borg show up and be defeated by the crew of a vessel from 200 years before TNG. And from the beginning in TOS, there's the problem of how long ago Khan left the Earth, or whether the Enterprise is an Earth ship or a UFP vessel, or whether they are operating under UESPA or Starfleet. Continuity frequently went out the window for the sake of telling the story they wanted to tell and the fans invented explanations to tie up the loose ends.

    Would some fans object to a prequel featuring Kirk and Spock which had a larger than expected Enterprise, or Delta Vega close enough to see Vulcan, or any number of other "continuity nods" in Trek 2.0? Sure. But the general audience wouldn't know the difference (and they didn't) and I doubt the majority of fans would care either. Star Trek continuity has always been plastic, much like Doctor Who, which has managed (up until recently perhaps) to tell new and exciting stories in the original universe.

    And I also don't see why it would be necessary, in the scope of any particular story set in the Prime universe, to explain who the Cardassians are or how many factors are on the warp scale. If a story was set in the Prime universe the writers would only bring up the continuity which was relevant to the story and then condense that into a few establishing lines, as they did with Khan in TWoK or Locutus in FC. Most people probably hadn't seen Space Seed before TWoK or didn't know Picard's history with the Borg when they saw First Contact, but the films simply established how the characters knew one another and moved on. It wasn't necessary to go into the whys and wherefores of how it happened, it was just a premise of the story and the basic story would still have been comprehensible if it involved completely different characters.

    I do think STID came closer to a nice balance of action and character than the first film did and got very close to standing on its own as a good film. The relationship between Spock and Kirk was very well fleshed out to the point that I felt like I was watching really well written characters who just happened to be named Kirk and Spock. They felt new to me even though I'd seen TOS. Even bringing in
    Khan was fruitful as the writers developed a subtle rivalry between Kirk (the man who thought he was perfect) and Khan (the man who is perfect).
    Although they were using the same basic premises and personalities, the writers created something fresh and interesting that hadn't been touched upon in quite the same way before.

    And then they piled on the homages,
    such as Kirk putting his fingers on the glass as he dies or Spock calling up Prime Spock to determine that Khan is untrustworthy. That was put in there just for the sake of fanwank and it makes the new characters look like they can't stand on their own. As much as I love Nimoy seeing him once in the first film was more than enough. In fact, I would have preferred to see the Trek 2.0 crew get together without his help at all
    .

    These moments disrupted the flow of the film for me and evem brought up the bitter taste of The Search for Spock which did a great job of ruining the dramatic impact of TWoK. As much as I love Spock up and kicking in the 24th century, I think bringing him back was an artistic failure of Prime Trek. And lo and behold
    they do it again with Kirk in STID, practically in the space of a commercial break
    .

    You sum up the reasoning for the reboot as
     
  15. Charles Phipps

    Charles Phipps Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I understand your opinion and I actually have an interesting line of thought for it. Star Trek is sixty years old and has influenced pop culture ridiculously, as I mentioned, but that total reboots have already happened. Babylon Five, IMHO, is literally just JMS' version of Star Trek. It's the same program, only with none of the copyrighted elements. Ron Moore has been more or less clear his version of Battlestar Galactica is "his" version of Voyager. Even the writers of Mass Effect have gone out of their way to state that their video game world is how they wanted to see a Star Trek series.

    Much like James Bond has influenced every single spy work since Doctor No was released, either in opposition to or in like to, Star Trek saturates science fiction/fantasy. A reboot that creates a mostly new universe isn't that new a concept when you have a franchise that is almost omnipresent in our lives today. Re-imagining Star Trek must be done in a way that makes it recognizably the same property but also fresh, IMHO.

    Funny, you should mention ENT and the Borg because "Regeneration" is basically the moment where the series gave up the ghost for me. Not that it was BAD, mind you, but the fact that it occurred to me they were attempting to win over fans by using fan-favorite characters because they didn't have the confidence in their own programming to continue the story. It's like Wolverine being in so many Marvel comics, he's a popular character and we want people to "tune in" so to speak.

    For me, ENT's problems were primarily the fact they wanted to recapture the glory of TNG, DS9, and even TOS without actually having anything to build for themselves. It's "borrowed glory" to create a phrase where the creators had a jumble of contradictory ideas that turned off fans because it was obvious they wanted you desperately to like them without really being willing to earn it. It's why the gratituous sex in both ENT and VOY turned off so many people--it was obvious they were pandering because they didn't think you'd like them otherwise.

    Any new entry in the franchise needed to have confidence in itself and being full-speed-ahead. To an extent, this means that it wasn't necessary to have Chris Pine's Kirk and Spock anymore than Captain John Colt of the U.S.S Whatever but JJ Abrams walked into the franchise with a radical idea he pulled off. Despite a movie completely based on time travel, it was apparently easy enough for the audience to comprehend that general movie-goers weren't confused while Trekkies were paid attention to.

    I liken Old Spock to McCoy's appearance in "Encounter at Farpoint." A way of saying that they're welcome.

    This is the Doctor Who formula, in a nutshell, but New Who functions on a slow reintroduction system. Season 1 was the Return of the Daleks, Season 2 was the Return of the Master, Season 3 had Davros, and there were other things too. You're right the Wrath of Khan didn't need Space Seed to be enjoyed. Likewise, a lot of TREK fans don't know Zephram Cochrane wasn't invented by ST:FC. I do think, however, that the basis of a good jumping on point is there's an immediate hook.

    They COULD have done it differently but they chose to do it this way to give audiences a sense that they don't need to be familiar with the entirety of the franchise to fully understand it.

    I'm not trying to force this reboot down your throat. There's a lot of things I would have done differently (and probably made the film half its budget back). I'm just saying that I think the "Crisis on Infinite Treks" they did versus a total reboot or a new series/movie in the main universe gave new fans an introduction to the setting. That it was an easy introduction into the setting for fans of JJ Abrams other works and open to the public at large.

    Much like the Marvel superhero movies that made Marvel superheroes not only mainstream but semi-popular ones like Iron Man massively famous.
     
  16. wjaspers

    wjaspers Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    Bullshit. You do not rewrite/reboot Mozart-Bach-Beatles-Elvis, just to please new fans. If you rewrite/reboot Elvis you call it Elvis vs JXL, not Elvis.

    You became a trekkie because you saw a bright future, others went for SW because they liked the fighting going on in a fairy tale. You not became a trekkie because the show was cool. You want a cool ST? then do not call it ST, or at least have the decency to call it JJ ft. ST.
     
  17. Charles Phipps

    Charles Phipps Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I take that bet and raise you 3 bars of latnium. Star Trek is being reimagined/rewritten ALL THE TIME. Every series brought something new to the table in hopes of creating something lasting and while it stumbled over itself, let's not pretend the JJ Abrams universe is anything REALLY new. It's just an extension of what's gone before taken to the next logical step.

    I will agree, however, it's kind of amusing to see countless non-Trekkies heading to the Star Trek movie for Good vs. Evil plus non-stop action while Star Wars' last three films were about trade disputes and separatism.
     
  18. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Augment = augmented human. ENT's term for Khan's people. They did a trilogy of episodes in their 4th season involving Arik Soong (Brent Spiner) and a group of them, which works as a prequel to Space Seed/Wrath of Khan and Into Darkness.
     
  19. Charles Phipps

    Charles Phipps Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I don't know if we're ever going to return to Star Trek Prime Universe or if 2.0 is the future forever, I will say, though the franchise has been breathed new life into and we should be grateful for that. I have the novels and MMORPG as an "epilogue" for the setting (rather than a continuation) and all good things must come to an end.

    But I feel confident the setting will continue and a new series will happen now.

    Which pleases me.
     
  20. Hober Mallow

    Hober Mallow Commodore Commodore

    I personally don't care for the new JJ version of Star Trek, but I'm all for rebooting Trek. It's the only way to keep it alive. Sherlock Holmes has been kept alive for over a century because new writers have kept it going. Sometimes it's set in the 19th century, sometimes in the 20th century (where Holmes foils Nazi plans) now in the 21st Century with the Cumberbatch series, and there was even an animated series in which Holmes and Watson are solving mysteries a couple hundred years in our future. Superman gets a film reboot every few decades or so.

    All that aside, let's stop pretending Star Trek hasn't already been rebooted before. The movies with the original cast were a reboot. TNG and the Berman-era spinoffs were a further reboot. Star Trek fans need to decide why it is they watch Star Trek in the first place: to be entertained by a story involving Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise or to simply have a delusion reinforced that Star Trek is somehow real and must be represented as a consistent universe which can never be tampered with. The latter is a waste of time when you realize the various ST TV and film series never have been one consistent narrative.