Paramount Confirms TWO Star Trek films currently in the works!
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I'm actually looking more forward to Star Trek 4 than Discovery Season 2. Not that Discovery is bad, it just gets a big ol' "meh" from me right now.
Before the season 2 trailer, I was resigned to eventually watching both, with no particular enthusiasm,
Same. And I'm not exactly hugely enthused about the Kelvin movies to begin with!
On a related note for Paramount -- the new Mission Impossible movie seems to be doing very well at the box office.
That's extremely good news for the studio and for the future of the Trek film franchise.
Paramount badly needed a big screen success story with this new MI.
That's extremely good news for the studio and for the future of the Trek film franchise.
Paramount badly needed a big screen success story with this new MI.
Comparing the MI movies with the JJTreks.
1 - (big budget reboot of 60s series from big name director) big box office hit/critically acclaimed.
2 - (4y later. Written by 2 Trek writers. Same mountain climb opening as Trek V) even bigger BO hit (by almost 100m ww) but not so good critically/less smart more action.
3 - (ST writers/producers/director/pegg) big drop in BO (over 100m ww and ends up even less than 1st) but considered much better/more reflective of the original tv series.
4 - biggest box office of all by big margin/takes series to next level/considered best one by many/even more like the tv series.
So hopefully ST4 will be Treks 'Ghost Protocol'
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Really? In my experience, the first M:I film is fairly poorly regarded. At least, M:I fans despise it for its portrayal of Jim Phelps and its general deconstruction of everything that made the series what it was. Wikipedia says reviews were "mixed to positive," and it's only 62% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was also really, really not a good movie and its story made no damn sense.
That's a very, very generous appraisal of an incredibly dumb and incoherent film. M:I:II is the one that most fans of the series try to forget.
M:I:III is definitely far better than its predecessors, and one of the two best of the film series, but it's hardly anything like the TV series. It's more like Alias: The Movie. M:I was a show about amateur agents using their intellects and cunning to pull off subtle, intricate con games, heists, and psychological manipulations, but M:I:III was about professional spies who worked under a massive federal bureacracy and whose training seemed to revolve exclusively around fighting and weapons.
Here I agree. Ghost Protocol was the one film that really felt like M:I to any significant degree, although it was also very much in the vein of its filmic predecessors.
Probably because Empire magazine (uk) gave it the coveted 5 stars at the time so just recalled that?
But yes the Jim Phelps thing and the convoluted plot really annoyed fans. Its still shocking they did that. Why not just have had Graves back as Jim and killed him off ?(then had Nimoy come back as Paris in MI2 instead of Hopkins lol)
I guess it was just the logic of plot twists, the villain turning out to be the last person you'd expect. Which made sense as far as it went -- there's no shortage of stories where the hero's admired mentor turns out to have been the evil mastermind all along -- but the filmmakers failed to consider the depth of the fanbase's attachment to this particular character.
It also failed in that it was based on a series known for teamwork and then kills the team.
That was a deliberate deconstruction. Brian DePalma loved shocking twists, and what was more shocking than starting out with what looked like the standard formula and then tearing the whole thing down? In a way, I can't blame them for their ambition in trying to break and reinvent the formula rather than just copying it. The best episodes of the series were often those where the plan went off the rails and the team had to improvise, rather than the usual formula where it went off without a hitch and there was no suspense to speak of. To make it work as a movie, they pretty much had to break the formula somehow, to raise the stakes through an initial failure. It's just that the way they chose to go about it didn't really work.
Fair enough, but, as you noted, that deconstruction didn't really work. Also, the whole thing with Phelps' wife felt very out of place.
Let's put it that way: The first Mission:Impossible is a really great spy movie. Just not a good adaption of the television series.
When I saw it first, I loved it! But I wasn't into the original series, never really saw it, and thus was unaware his mentor was supposed to be the protagonist from the original show. I can totally see people getting pissed off by that. I would be as well if I would have been a fan. The only redeeming part in this is that it's at least not the same actor (but Jon Voight), so one can easily pretend this is an alternate reality.
But overall, I still think it is the best of the M:I movies, and a genuine good spi-fi movie that is noticeably distinct from James Bond, Jason Bourne and other spy movies, and basically introduces the template for the whole series, with unexpected plot twists, betrayals, complicated break-ins, cool stunts and everything.
Funnily enough, I think the fan reaction to the first one is completely comparable to that of JJ. Abrams Star Trek 2009 reboot. That was a really entertaining space movie in itself, and is arguibly the reason a lot of younger audiences had their first encounter with Star Trek. And yet, being a fan of the original, I hated parts of it. The utter ignorance on how Trek works on a basic level - travel times, technology and all - and most importantly the attempt to replace the old continuity with a newer, "cooler" one (even though disguised as an "alternate" timeline - the original was not supposed to be revisited after that one), the unnecessary destruction of multiple planets including fan favourite Vulcan (really, the only recurring friendly alien planet in Star Trek), and how they completely misunderstood the characters' cores (Bro-Kirk instead of by-the-book TOS Kirk, unstable "last-of-his-kind"-Spock instead of "bridge-to-other-cultures" Spock). There is just too much wrong with it on a fundamental level for me.
And yet, it's a super entertaining space movie. One that got many people to check out that nerdy space stuff in the first plae again. And everyone that got into Star Trek because of it probably feels a lot like I feel about the first Mission:Impossible. I'm aware of the grudges toward it. But they depend on the work in context with the previous material. On it's own, without being too deply connected the original stuff, it's really pretty good.
When I saw it first, I loved it! But I wasn't into the original series, never really saw it, and thus was unaware his mentor was supposed to be the protagonist from the original show. I can totally see people getting pissed off by that. I would be as well if I would have been a fan. The only redeeming part in this is that it's at least not the same actor (but Jon Voight), so one can easily pretend this is an alternate reality.
But overall, I still think it is the best of the M:I movies, and a genuine good spi-fi movie that is noticeably distinct from James Bond, Jason Bourne and other spy movies, and basically introduces the template for the whole series, with unexpected plot twists, betrayals, complicated break-ins, cool stunts and everything.
Funnily enough, I think the fan reaction to the first one is completely comparable to that of JJ. Abrams Star Trek 2009 reboot. That was a really entertaining space movie in itself, and is arguibly the reason a lot of younger audiences had their first encounter with Star Trek. And yet, being a fan of the original, I hated parts of it. The utter ignorance on how Trek works on a basic level - travel times, technology and all - and most importantly the attempt to replace the old continuity with a newer, "cooler" one (even though disguised as an "alternate" timeline - the original was not supposed to be revisited after that one), the unnecessary destruction of multiple planets including fan favourite Vulcan (really, the only recurring friendly alien planet in Star Trek), and how they completely misunderstood the characters' cores (Bro-Kirk instead of by-the-book TOS Kirk, unstable "last-of-his-kind"-Spock instead of "bridge-to-other-cultures" Spock). There is just too much wrong with it on a fundamental level for me.
And yet, it's a super entertaining space movie. One that got many people to check out that nerdy space stuff in the first plae again. And everyone that got into Star Trek because of it probably feels a lot like I feel about the first Mission:Impossible. I'm aware of the grudges toward it. But they depend on the work in context with the previous material. On it's own, without being too deply connected the original stuff, it's really pretty good.
I don't agree. The first movie doesn't make any sense at all. The vital clue that supposedly exposes Phelps as the traitor doesn't logically prove a damn thing, so the whole plot falls apart. The acting is bad, including from Cruise, even though it's the same year he got an Oscar nod for Jerry Maguire. The lead character has no real personality beyond getting ticked off that his team was killed and being fine with sleeping with his boss's wife. (Ethan Hunt gets more character development in the first 4 minutes of M:I:III than in the entire 4 hours of the preceding two films.) And the climactic action ends with a moment that's egregiously stupid, nonsensical, and insulting to the audience's intelligence --
not only is it physically impossible for a speeding bullet train to stop dead in an instant, but why would its operators want to when a crashing helicopter is closing on them from behind?????
So it's actually a pretty bad spy movie -- and yet, ironically, it's one of the better adaptations of the TV series compared to its successors. The first act captures the style and approach of the series pretty well until the betrayal happens and the whole thing tumbles down. And the later gambits Ethan and his partners pull over the course of the film feel more like the series than most of the big solo action sequences that came to dominate Ethan's MO in the sequels. The difference is, the original M:I film was a direct response to and deconstruction of the TV series, whereas the later films just evolved into Ethan Hunt action movies that paid lip service to elements of the TV series but mostly created their own separate style and approach.
As I think I mentioned, there's never really been any evidence that it was anything else. I'm actually a bit surprised that people tend to assume it's a continuation, because there's never been any direct mention of any characters or events from the show, just the reuse of a character name for a very different character. Though there's never been any hard evidence either way (unless you count Rogue Nation's claim that the IMF is only 40 years old), I've always tended to assume it's probably a reinvention rather than a sequel.
Where in the world did you get that idea? Not "supposed to be?" How would that even work? Paramount and Bad Robot control the films, but CBS controls the TV franchise and owns the property overall. Paramount and BR had no authority to tell CBS they couldn't do more Prime continuity shows -- and indeed they've now done just that with Discovery. True, CBS held off on a new series until the first three BR films were done so as not to steal their thunder, but that never meant that the Prime universe was meant to be dead forever.
The intent of the films' makers was merely to free themselves to tell stories about Kirk's Enterprise without being encumbered by past continuity. It wasn't about imposing restrictions on anyone else, even if they'd had the power to do anything of the kind.
Ten years younger than TOS Kirk, more immature and unseasoned. It amazes me how many people don't get that these were origin stories meant to show how the characters evolved into the way they were in TOS. Naturally they had to start out different, because there's no story if there's no character growth or change. The intent was always to evolve Kirk from an immature hothead into a seasoned and disciplined commander, and that's the arc we get over the three films we now have.
I agree with that with one caveat, and that is with Kirk. His development may very well have differed, maybe significantly, from his prime counterpart because of his father being killed at his birth. In the prime timeline his father being in his life probably meant his character grew up differently. Gary Mitchell referred to Kirk as a stack of books with legs. Kirk in the Abramsverse was very intelligent, but I inferred that his changed upbringing meant he was much more undisciplined then his prime counterpart. Who Kirk is at his core is likely the same, but how he reaches his potential differed and perhaps some of his behaviors are different. He's a bit less confident and sure of himself in STID and Beyond then Kirk of the original series (where he has those moments but he projects confidence).
For the remainder of the characters much of their origins probably remained unchanged. Obviously they were assigned to the Enterprise much younger than they were originally, however, who they are and their attitudes and discipline are probably largely similar to their prime counterparts, including Spock.
Oh boy, disagree with almost everything here. I mean, yeah, this movie has dumb stuff in it (a helicopter following a bullet train through a tunnel), but nevertheless, Brian de Palma delivered one of the most influential and best spy movie in not-just-recent movie history.
Well, but it clearly was intended as a direct continuiation. They even originally wanted the same actor to play Phelps - but he understandably refused, not wanting to completely ruin his famed character.
That's not how business work. Not at all. CBS held off on a new series without Bar Robots involvement during the run of three BR movies because they weren't contractually allowed to. But they probably were allowed to create a television series together with BR. Which they refused, and instead let the contract expire. But that they even split the television rights in the first place is a pretty clear indicator that, would they have been content with JJ Abrams products, they would have gone forward with switching the franchise to the "new" timeline.
But here is the thing, though: Young Kirk was a nerdy bookworm, much more interested in his studies than in girls. That's well established in the television series. His more confident, rule-breaking cavalier-persona came only later, as a consequence of his experience and successes.
The problem is: nuKirk and nuSpock differ SO MUCH from the original, that they indeed have nothing in common any more and are truly not the same character under different circumstances, but truly different, new character. Which then makes it completely meaningless they are called "Kirk" or "Spock", since they have literally nothing in common with those characters instead of their names and superficial looks.
I agree about Kirk. I think his father missing in his life in the Abramsverse has a lot to do with that. Spock is a bit different. I think before Vulcan was destroyed he was probably much the same as prime-Spock at that time. He was a hot head as a youth, which is consistent with "Yesteryear" and then he chose the Vulcan way. He was arrogant and had that superiority most Vulcans have by the time he meets Kirk. I think Vulcan being destroyed is probably the reason for his character changes later in Star Trek (2009), STID and Beyond.
As I wrote 6 weeks ago: I remain unconvinced that any new Star Trek movie will go into production anytime soon. There is too much behind-the-scenes disarray, not even counting the talk about a (separate? or same-continuity?) Tarantino movie. Paramount would be foolish to mount such a big expensive production until its own situation stabilizes, and that would be the case even if Beyond had been a big hit. I don't think the evident success of M:I Fallout has any relevance, as its production began long before the current dispute over control of CBS/Paramount/Viacom. If anything its success will make Paramount a more attractive takeover target. Yes, I know that a director and screenwriters of movie #4 have been announced, but there have been similar announcements for other would-be-noteworthy movies that didn't ever make it into production.
Yeah, absolutely. It helps that young Spock's story was already shown on screen, even if only animated in TAS, so JJ Abrams movie simply could redo that stuff. Young Kirk was something that was always only talked about - and arguibly wouldn't make for a great action movie, following a model pupil and cadet rise through the rank without much conflict.
But nevertheless, at the end of ST09, the characters are so far removed from their original characters, that calling it a "prequel" or "reboot" simply doesn't cover it anymore, the divergence is so big,they are essentially entirely new and different characters who's personality has nothing to do with their original appereances anymore.
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