Funny that you should choose this as your example for contrast with
Star Trek (2009) because they both follow exactly the same pattern:
Crisis revolves around an in-universe event as a device to facilitate and explain why the changes to continuity have occurred—just like Nero's time travel—and at its conclusion Psycho-Pirate remembers everything that has happened—just like Spock Prime.
But it's a mistake (one to which I generally note Trekkies are particularly prone among fanbases) to look at it from an in-universe perspective instead of a real-world one anyway. It doesn't really matter whether the fiction internally acknowledges that it has been rebooted. What matters is what the external
effect is for the moviegoing public. For all the direct references
Jurassic World or
The Force Awakens make to their antecedents, they are
fundamentally designed to be new entrance points for people who are entirely unfamiliar with them, and jumping-off platforms for new takes on these properties. (How "new" these takes truly are beyond a surface level...err, that's debateable.)
The essential characteristic of a reboot is not the absolute severing of
all ties of continuity, but rather it is the revival of something from an inactive state, with the definite connotation of there being
some substantial changes in creative vision from the previous iteration. But this doesn't preclude maintaining certain elements as well, and it doesn't necessitate that the changes
not be acknowledged in any way within the fiction. Again, when you reboot your computer you will lose any
unsaved changes to documents, but it is your
choice as to what you save or don't save before restarting. Rebooting a franchise similarly allows filmmakers the liberty to choose what they will keep and what they will discard. It in no way
requires that they choose to discard
everything. Being a remake, a reboot, a sequel, a prequel, etc., are not mutually exclusive of one another.
The Thing (2011) is all them, for example. (It also wasn't very good, IMO, but that's beside the point.)
I know you're not on the reality-denying side of this, but since you bring up
Casino Royale (2006), I'll point out that while it does not follow the preceding films' continuity storywise—which by the way they in turn only
very selectively did with respect to their predecessors in the first place; in effect, the series was substantially rebooted every time a new Bond was cast
—it includes the character of M as played by Judi Dench carried over to give the audience a familiar bridge or anchor from the previous films. The fact that the events of those prior movies don't seem to have happened from the characters' in-story point of view is, again, irrelevant. We the audience know who she is because we've seen her before. This doesn't stop it from being a reboot, nor even rather on the "hard" side of that spectrum.
Exactly. There is no "official" definition of it as established by some "authority" and never has been. It's a neologism that is still in flux, with each commentator applying his or her own parameters to what it means, but in aggregate it is settling on a broader rather than narrower interpretation such as
@DigificWriter's. (And to be clear, he or she is of course free to define it for him/herself as desired, and use it accordingly, but no one else is obligated to follow suit, and his/her definition is no more "correct" and no less subjective than anyone else's.) And when this sense of the word eventually does make it into published dictionaries, its definition will be based on that general usage, because that's what lexicographers do: they
document how language
is used, not
decide how it
ought be.
Orci said in context of ST'09 that he preferred the terms "re-invigoration" or "re-vitalization," just as Burton in context of
Planet Of The Apes (2001) said he preferred "re-imagining," and both of them expressed that their reasons for these preferences were to avoid what they perceived as a pejorative connotation to "reboot" or "remake"; but obviously none of these self-applied terms ever caught on and crossed over into general usage. And what baffles
me is not only that in your mind invoking such terms is somehow
less complicated than just using "reboot" ("hard" or "soft" to be specified when necessary) but that you seem to think one person's specific coinage somehow outweighs general usage. What on earth makes you think Orci in 2009 gets to define what "reboot" does or doesn't mean for anyone but himself, let alone for
all of us in 2016?
As for what is or isn't "a thing": a
soft reboot is quite clearly a thing, as evidenced by the fact that numerous commentators have been talking about them for
at least a couple of years now:
http://www.slashfilm.com/pirates-of-the-caribbean-reboot/
http://observationdeck.kinja.com/what-movies-and-shows-count-as-soft-reboots-1612103466
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/soft-reboots/247403/the-highs-and-lows-of-the-soft-movie-reboot
http://studybreaks.com/2015/10/15/reboot-reuse-recycle-the-rise-of-the-reboot/
http://screenrant.com/movie-franchise-soft-reboot-continuation-discussion/
https://www.inverse.com/article/963...sic-world-2015-is-the-year-of-the-soft-reboot
https://neverfeltbetter.wordpress.com/2016/03/28/serenity-those-left-behind-as-a-soft-reboot/
http://iwatchstuff.com/2016/01/chronicles-of-narnia-will-get-a-soft-reb.php
You can refuse to acknowledge this
reality if you like, but it's quite a silly and petty thing to do, especially when it comes to the arena of discussing entertainment. We're not talking about whether global warming or climate change—whichever you prefer to call it—is happening, or whether the sum of the quantities we call "two" and "three" equals the one we call "five" here, after all. We're not even discussing whether it's better to call the Orlando shooting an example of "Islamic terrorism" or not. There is literally (take that as you will)
no harm that can come of anyone using the term "reboot" to mean something beyond what you think they should. There is nothing to be gained by prescriptivism (or proscriptivism) in this context.
Yeah, yeah, I know...TLDR. Back to Indiana Jones...
Perhaps to avoid people complaining that we could have gotten another film with Harrison Ford playing the character but didn't because they were too eager to start afresh with someone young and sexy? (Not that Ford isn't still the latter, naturally.) Also, as others have said, it seems a likely scenario that Ford's story might be used in one way or another to set up what will follow.
)
