I liked Renegades, but wasn't a fan of the "Starfleet" inspired costumes. I'd prefer to see something different in future films, that looked more "real world".
Possibly soon. Possibly half-past never. I guess since it's not technically Star Trek anymore they can keep it behind a paywall as long as they want.
So is Renegades not going to be released free to the public now? I got this promo for the Atomic Network SUBSCRIPTION STREAMING service, which heavily promoted Renegades.
According to Atomic Network's Instagram, Renegades: The Requiem part 2 will finally be released to the public... November 9. Don't rush, guys
The entirety of Renegades: The Requiem is finally available to view for free on Atomic Network (you just need to sign up with an email address) It was nice seeing lots of Trek alumni again, and seeing the continuation of a Star Trek story featuring Star Trek characters with the serial numbers filed off is... unique.
Okay, so after much delay, the full REQUIEM (parts one and two now edited together as a single one hour episode) has been released for free on the Atomic Network site, as long as you sign up with an email account. I watched. The production values are pretty amazing for their low budget.... the CGI space battles are gorgeous and the limited practical set design is well done. While the new uniforms are a step in the right direction, they all are ill fitted and significantly detract from the professional look. I kept thinking maybe they should have spent less money on awesome practical Mos Eisely aliens (and they do look fun and great!) and instead had a professional tailor on set full time to tweak the hero uniforms. The story: Considering the producers had to do a mad scramble to change names and ship FX designs when the Fan Film Guidelines dropped, the story is surprisingly coherent though lacking much weight. By changing character names, it does weaken the impact of different characters appearances, since there is minimal individual character story/development, and the show simply relies on fans being happy with seeing old familiar faces. While Requiem has slightly better production values than the first movie, it is far less ambitious. The first movie Star Trek Renegades had more story movement, more set pieces and better character arcs. While flawed, it played more like a proper movie or pilot episode. Requiem, however by comparison, feels very stagnant. All plot and key events are revealed while characters sit in park, or sit in a bar, or sit on a bridge, etc. There is lots and lots of exposition, long monologues about dark threats to the Fed... er, I mean, Confederation given wonderfully by Walter Koenig. But in the end, it is all stuff that happens off screen. There is one big bad guy, but again, we are told how evil and horrible he is, how he has betrayed the principles of Confederation, but he really never does anything. I know this was originally planned as a 3 part episode, so maybe much of the action and character development was cut for budget reasons? ....but it still results in mostly all talk and little show, making the plight of our heroes very difficult to fully embrace or deeply care about. There are two big epic space battles and as I said before, the CGI is beautiful. The editing is awkward and they feel like they go on far too long and the bridge reaction shots, with the crew shaking around in their chairs, never quite works. This is Walter Koenig's show and he gives a truly grand final performance. The downside of this, most of the characters set up in the first movie are shuffled to the sidelines or background or are killed off. Overall, an interesting, if somewhat underwhelming, fan film. One can only "what if..." it may have been like if the whole Axanar scandal hadn't ruin everything.
It would have been exactly the same film, but with the Star Trek names and ships. They were 2 days into filming when the guidelines were released and changes were made.
Tried watching Renegades: The Requiem on the Atomic Network site today and... "Sorry, this video does not exist." What's up with that? Only the first half is on Youtube so... how do we watch it?
I finished the Renegades novel, "Judas War" today and I thought it wasn't too bad a read, especially if you liked Star Trek: Renegades and especially the non-Trek "The Requiem" (I've only seen part one of that, the part that's on You Tube). There were some slight grammar issues, but for the most part Judas War was a fast-paced read that served as a prequel to the Renegades fan films. I enjoyed the first half of the book more, Spoiler which was more rooted in the Confederation (Federation) and FleetCom (Starfleet) than the second part which was building up the literal renegade crew on the run premise of the series. I liked how there has been some thought put into the future history of the Confederation, though not enough of that was explored in the book. Some of the other things I didn't care for were: I wish the writing had been more descriptive for basically everything. I wanted to get a better idea of how the aliens, and also human characters, were supposed to look, how the ships, and costumes were supposed to look, but physical descriptions were very scant. I just chalked it up to maybe the writers and other Renegades creators weren't certain how everything was supposed to look when they wrote the story. I also wish there had been even more divergences between Star Trek and Renegades. Once again, not sure when this story was written, but it still had Trek-technology or the same names for the technology and I feel like the story needed to change those things to fully break it away from its Trek origins. Spoiler While Lexxa Singh is the main character of the webseries and the book, in the big dramatic showdown she basically was sidelined and I thought that was strange especially when so much is made throughout the rest of the book about how formidable she is. I also don't think the story left us with a clear sense of who the Icarus crew would be, which I think would be a nice set up for the series. Most of pilot and "Requiem" Icarus characters weren't in the story, with the exceptions of Singh and Ronara from what I could tell. That being said, the story did end on a mysterious, ominous note that I would like to see wrapped up at some point. I also was hoping that Corin Nemec's character would be in the novel because he seems to have a personal animus against Singh and I thought this story would've been a great way to show us where that animus was born. While I liked the title "Judas War" a lot, and the book did have quite a few space fight scenes, I wished we had gotten a bigger fracas. The story did lay out some of the stakes, but it meant little to me because the story didn't do enough to establish how big the Confederation was, gave enough of its history, or how many races are in it, so I could get a better sense of how devastating a civil war could be. And what happens in the story didn't seem to me like it could start a civil war, despite the readers being told that more than once, in part because I didn't have a real sense of what the Confederation's history, or how large it is. We get a little of that, but not enough for me. I also didn't see how Lexxa and the Icarus being on the run or 'stolen' prevents or impedes the conspirators who want to take over the Confederation. All that being said, I thought it was an entertaining read and a nice window into the Renegades universe. I really liked the idea of doing a media tie-in novel to a webseries and I hope other series do the same thing.
I'm really fascinated by Renegades' bootleg Trek universe, and it's super cheap as an eBook so I'll give it a go!
Just finished it. A very quick read, and hugely enjoyable. I'd go as far as to say it was better than either of the Renegades episodes and wish it had been filmed instead. Watching the episodes, I had no idea Lexxa was a former FleetCom commander, or the backstory of the Icarus. It was a rich backstory, if a little Into Darkness-ish. There seemed to be one continuity hiccup, where early in the book Lexxa was a peon nobody, part of an unsavoury merchant's crew until Kovok recuits her but then later, she was a successful merchant captain herself prior to recruitment. Kovok gets a little bit of new and de-Trekked backstory, where he was genetically engineered by Sector 6 to have telepathic abilities. Definitely worth a read if you enjoyed Renegades. And a shame we probably won't get any more from this universe.