The first few? Okay, I'll grant you that TMP was slow, although I'd call it more "stately" than "agonizing." But virtually everyone agrees that ST2 was the best in the series, and #3 and 4 are quite similar to it in pace.
At any rate, this is Star Trek. I'll always take substance over style, pacing notwithstanding.
Well, to be honest, while 2 and 3 weren't slow-paced for those days, they are for today's (and even yesterday's) standards.
I don't really think cinematic storyteling standards have changed that much (except for special effects). But then, a lot of my favorite films are from the '80s. And a lot of my other favorites are from the '30s. So perhaps audiences only familiar with recent big-budget movies think everything has to be hyperkinetic. (But do such blinkered audiences even exist, in this age when everything ever released is readily available on DVD?)
And until I'd seen the new movie, I hadn't even realized how slow-paced Trek (even all the series) really was. It was my most loved universe, but all action and even most stories -- where every plot point had to be meticulously explained -- were very slow paced. No wonder non-trekkies fell asleep whenever I'd try to treat them to a good episode or movie.
Most of the time, nothing actually happend! No real battles, no real personal plots (or they would strangely vanish the next episode) and all mysteries and technobabble-solutions would be explained point by point by point until even the viewer with the least IQ would be able to make the necessary connections.
I'll agree that TNG (especially in its first and last seasons) overdid it with the technobabble stories. TOS, though, not so much. And as a general rule, I
like a story that takes the time to explain what's going on. (Or at least explain enough to make it clear that the
writers have thought through the logic of it all—something clearly not the case in this film.)
And the occasional standout episode like "Balance of Terror" aside, Trek was never really
about action and battles. It was about
science fiction, and the allegorical stories SF can tell, and most decent SF isn't battle-driven.
I like substance. Really, I like it a lot. Give me a universe, an absolutely epic, intricate and complicated story and lots of personal character development that continue over a long course. Both in a series and in a movie.
Okay. On this we can agree. I like
Lost, for instance. Also pretty much everything Joss Whedon's ever done.
I just don't see anything at all in this movie that promises that kind of potential.
To be honest, I would have liked it if the new Star Trek movie was split in 2 parts, where there would be a lot more substance (and more action to offset it with). But then again, I doubt as many people would watch it as they have done now.
Well, I don't think the mass audience is as dumb (or at least impatient) as Paramount seems to believe. If it really is, though, and if maximizing audience has to trump fidelity to the material, then frankly we're in a no-win scenario, because Trek designed to sell to that audience is no better than no Trek at all.
