World Premiere/Advance screening discussions [SPOILERS GUARANTEED]

There was an article about Spock and Uhura in one of the old The Best of Trek books.

 

Hey! You brought out the asshole in me. It's not hard to find but still...

I did want to mention though that at least the Spock/Uhura thing has its seeds in the canon. That's not a bad thing.

 

I'm not having a problem with the fact that Spock and Uhura are dating - just the way it's being done. And I'd have wanted her to be a bit warmer and have more of the original Uhura's personality. In my opinion she is the one character most different and least like the original one.

 

But, Polaris, he is not stating that the way they did the reboot is wrong in his opinion. He's just stating that it is absurd to claim that you have to do away with the old universe in order to attract the general audience. The general audience does not know what was the old universe, nor does it care. So, they could just as well have done an exciting, action packed film which does fit the previous Star Trek universe.

 

I don't think that's true at all, Dennis.

Psychological stability and or "character" are VERY important attributes for a ship's captain, esp a military captain. It makes sense that Starfleet would test for it, just as real navies do.

And the concept wasn't original to WoK...they refer to the "psychosimulator test" in "Bread and Circuses" (Merrick failed his). Janice Lester was scrubbed for unfitness in "Turnabout Intruder".

 

I don't quite agree. In my opinion, at this point, the old Star Trek universe has become such a burden that it's become necessary to state quite explicitely that it's a thing of the past. In order to succeed, the new Star Trek movie must convince the general audience that it is not just another Trek movie, but that it is, in fact, the only Trek movie one needs to care about.

 

How does Nero kill Robau ? Does it have anything 2 do with severing the head?

 

IIRC, when Kirk asks the computer where he is after being thrown out of the Enterprise. And I think when Chekov asks for the mission briefing. If there was anything else, I forgot (maybe some general warnings on the Kelvin)

 

Plus the last TNG movie wasn't exactly a resounding success, and are we really sure a general audience wants to pay money to watch a bunch of noobs flying around spouting technobably every five minutes.

 

Yes, I'm sure everyone agrees on that.

 

The previous Star Trek universe was not an exciting, action packed place. Hadn't even been close to that for decade.

Nor could you make an action-adventure movie with this kind of pace and scope out of the introductory story of the Star Trek crew.

As any number of folks have pointed out in arguments, the original series built plausibility into the backstories of the characters by referencings bits and pieces of their lives as accounts of personal evolution, incident, setback and progress over decades; that's the way human beings actually live and so it adds believability to this future fantasy world.

If you look at any actual Trek episode or movie, however, in order to be exciting events necessarily take place in a relatively compressed time frame. To do otherwise makes the story ridiculously episodic and attenuated.

This is similar in principle to what had to be done with Zephram Cochrane's story in moving him from "Metamorphosis" to "First Contact," just on a larger scale.

The TV episode for which Cochrane was invented was general enough in referencing his backstory to leave the viewer free to fill in the details of his life and importance in plausible fashion - perhaps he was the "Einstein" of spaceflight, providing the seminal theoretical underpinnings of what might be assumed to be decades of research, development, engineering and testing by vast teams of scientists and engineers working step by step to build the first warp drive.

To use him in an action-adventure movie, Cochrane became Einstein, Oppenheimer and Henry Ford and Yeager (at least) all combined into one character. He became the fulcrum of history, doing it all and doing it within an abbreviated period during which he could interact dramatically and pivotally with one or two other characters in the story.

Fans have constructed all kinds of plausible timelines for the lives of Kirk, Spock and McCoy - so have novelists, so did Harve Bennett. None of them were focused and compressed enough to use as the framework of an action movie about their first adventure aboard the Enterprise. As it is, even at least one of the laudatory early reviews has described Orci and Kurtzman's script as episodic, what with leaps across twenty-seven years and at least one title card within the body of the mifl (talk about clumsy) informing the audience that the narrative is jumping across three years.

 

Not action-packed? Seems to NEM was, even if it did suck complete ass. I also remember the ads claiming it was "as good as Star Wars". Both ENT and DS9 had plenty of action towards the end of their runs. DS9 also had the added advantage of having story, plot, character development, and not sucking.

As for the argument that a reboot was needed because the old continuity was some kind of burden, I disagree completely. If anything, this reboot simply proves that the people calling the shots couldn't really figure out what needed to be changed. Here they've changed the look, the universe, the characters, basically everything except what they actually should have - all the old cliches, the face-palm worthy humor that only Trekkies would get, and they even threw in some one-dimensional characters and a plot that really doesn't make any sense at all for good measure.

 

Even Ron Moore, who masterfully used the Trek continuity to DS9's advantage said that working within that framework increasingly became a burden.

 

So? If he did say that, that would be his opinion. And really if that was the case, why did he try to start working on VOY?

 

While everyone has a right to hold and express an opinion, not all opinions are of equal interest or worthy of equal respect for their content. "Just Moore's opinion" is a lot more interesting and likely to have the merits of being based in experience, close observation and professional competence than that of most fans.

 

Which would be ironic considering how much flack he caught for some of his writing.

 

Enterprise was certainly action packed...and it was often better executed than previous Treks.

RAMA

 

I thought: This is a good premise. That's interesting. Get them away from all the familiar STAR TREK aliens, throw
them out into a whole new section of space where anything can happen. Lots of situations for conflict among the crew. The premise has a lot of possibilities.


I also liked that part:



I have heard Rick saying things like, "Kirk is the prototypical sixties hero. He had a babe in one arm and a phaser in the other." That's kind of his popularized image of Captain Kirk and what that whole series was about. But really it was about Kirk as a man, as a character, as a human being, and what he experienced out in the
galaxy, and the way he led that ship. What people remember about that show are not those plot lines. [...] But in truth,
its really because they fell in love with those people. People ran around dressing up like Kirk and putting on Spock ears. They didn't run around waving signs about the politics the show espoused, or what the sociopolitical commentary of the show was. That was all interesting, good stuff, but it was the people that they were seeing on the screen each week that they cared about.

(http://hypatia.slashcity.org/trekshack/moore.html)