5 Things Star Trek Fans Must Admit About The Film Franchise
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The trailer is nearly meaningless to me. I recorded my impressions of it on a thread or two here and just put the trailer on the shelf. I know some of our more enthusiastic members seem to have dissected the entire film on the basis of the trailer. People can work away with that but sussing out the entire film is beyond my capacity to divine. I don't have much confidence in the writing team with the next one but I'm pinning hopes on Pegg's sincerity and enthusiasm that I maybe pleasantly surprised like I was with the recent Star Wars one. I do get a genuine thrill when bleak expectations of mine get overthrown in the event and maybe that'll happen with this next one. 
As a movie, it is very flawed. But I still watch it once or twice a year because it is very entertaining.
I did spot a special effects shot from Star Trek III in there.
Yeah. I've gotten to the point where I think TUC might actually be the worst TOS film. But it's fun as hell. From Takei memes to Kirk v. Kirk to the ridiculousness of Scooby-Odo--which isn't even in the Bluray version (Poor Rene.), there's just so much awesomeness there.
But the plot is a mess, if not conceptually absurd. And that's after you account for how time-specific it is. Shit, even by the time the film came out, the world had already moved on.
But the plot is a mess, if not conceptually absurd. And that's after you account for how time-specific it is. Shit, even by the time the film came out, the world had already moved on.
I've seen this article before. The people who write these articles always seem to assume there's a huge Star Wars/Star Trek crossover audience. I know there's some crossover and I've definitely seen Episodes I-VI, but saying "hey Star Wars episode I wasn't as good as episode IV" isn't really some sort of excuse for the dumb dumb writing and plotting we get from Abrams Trek.
Star Wars was already stupidly written - Star Trek wasn't quite as stupidly written.
The devil is in the details - a few examples:
"Blaster" vs "Phaser" - one of these is basically onomatopoeia from comic books - the other is a synthesis of scientific principles we know about to invent a fictional technology.
"The Death Star" - no legitimate political organization is going to call any WMD "Super Epic Mass Killer 5000." They would call it "Imperial Orbital Security Platform" or something to take the malevolence out of it - to alienate the device from its actual purpose. By contrast, you'll almost never have Star Trek villains who seem to wholeheartedly embrace the idea of them being evil like the Empire does...
Funnily enough, that movie also had Meyer out-Abramsing Abrams. He blows up a celestial body in the first five seconds, and characters can see (not to mention, feel) it when they really shouldn't be able to.
Come to think of, the exact same scenario is a pretty big part of TWOK's backstory as well. Kinda hard to hang shit on Wars/Transformers/etc overuse of super-weapons, when Trek itself goes 'Planet just exploded. We don't know why!'
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He blows up a moon which we somewhat seem to believe is mostly a power station/mining colony. That's a lot different from blowing up multiple populated home planets of major races in the series.
No, it's not. One explodes due to bullshit tech, the other explodes due bullshit tech...and sends shockwaves all the way across the damn universe.
And I take it back - Meyer blew up a planet (the same explosion semi-decimating a second planet), a moon, two ships, and a nebula to make a planet...which then later exploded.
The Trek universe is apparently a very fragile place. Very volatile.
And I take it back - Meyer blew up a planet (the same explosion semi-decimating a second planet), a moon, two ships, and a nebula to make a planet...which then later exploded.
The Trek universe is apparently a very fragile place. Very volatile.
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I thought TUC was the most tightly written of all the TOS films. It mightn't have the best dialogue but it's a fine film. It's just a simple retelling of the Chernobyl-Perestroika events. The dumb scenes that are in it don't overshadow this film.
It is the theatrical release on Blu-ray.
You feel that way because you like it. It is as chock full of non-sense as the Abrams films.
Insurrection and Into Darkness performed very similarly in the U.S. box office relative to their budgets.
That's not true at all. There's no "magic blood" get-out-of-jail cards. There's no rip-off TWOK scenes. There's no congestion in that film in which various plot strands struggle for space. There's no OTT FX. These two films are vastly different beasts.
-- That Spock just happened to have on him.
-- And Spock couldn't tell Kirk and McCoy (and hence the audience) that he was going to track them, because there's no drama after that (then we find out Kirk apparently knew).
-- And Kirk never loses his tunic.
-- And McCoy never sees it and says, "Hold still, Jim. You have a bug on you," and swats it, therefore disabling it and they are truly stranded.
I know. I'd just gotten so used to seeing it the other way.
What's that's supposed to mean? That's like implying that if both country A and country B have similar GNP/GDPs relative to their populations that they're somehow equally geopolitically relevant.
Except Chernobyl didn't end with some ridiculous Russian/Chinese/British/American conspiracy to continue the war. Seriously, "A Starfleet admiral and lieutenant, a Romulan ambassador, and a Klingon general..." sounds more like the opening line of a bad joke.
Under any scrutiny, the Romulans seem to be the only ones to really have a plausible agenda for the whole affair.
Both Chang/Cartwright's motive is utterly absurd: I want to keep fighting my enemies, so I'm going to commit treason and conspire with them. That's one giant shot glass of whiskey-tango-fox.
The film also presents an alternative motive for Cartwright: that is, the "mothballing of Starfleet." This ties into Meyer's determination of further militarizing Starfleet--or rather, making it a pseudo US Navy. This isn't about the old "is Starfleet a military?" argument. The truth is really somewhere in the middle.
However, the classic monolog pretty clearly states the Enterprise's mission; it says nothing about fighting Klingons. And, of course, there are plenty of people who laud TUC while they're standing in the "nuTrek isn't Gene's vision" line.
But that's all irrelevant, really, because, like Abrams, it was Meyer's film, and he was in well within his right to do whatever the hell he wanted.
The problem I have is the conceit that, even if Starfleet's primary function was the defense of Earth, that the only thing it had to defend it from was Klingons. I'm just about 100% sure that no single person in the US/British/etc. navies opened the newspaper on April 27, 1986 and said to him/herself, "Oh shit. I'm out of a job."
Then there's the idea that Praxis exploding would mean the immediate end of the Klingon Empire. For one thing, Klingons are marauders and conquerors. I doubt they'd be so dependent on one moon facility. None the less, in Star Trek terms, "Key energy production" means dilithium. And yet, later, the film goes on to show us another place Klingons get their dilithium.
No one could argue that the issue was the explosion wave itself cause irreparable damage the qu'nos system. But that was not at all indicated in the film, and, even if it were, that'd fall into the same "that's not how it works" science tin can as the magic blood. Not to mention, Meyer had already pulled that gag out of his shorts once.
Then there's the whole whodunnit plot itself. On the surface it seems so perfectly planned that it makes one wonder how four people who don't like each other very much could so meticulously coordinate and execute it. But on closer inspection, one finds that it's not so perfectly planned at all. In fact, it's dependent events progressing in very specific succession. If things didn't play out exactly as they do in the film, the whole conspiracy falls apart. There are simply way too many unknown variables. On their own, anyone seems pretty nitpicky: Kirk's log entry Valaris chooses to record just happens to be so damning; Burke and Samno being so willing participants; the foremost Xeno-biologist in the Federation not knowing anything about Klingon anatomy (as if he'd never seen one before); Martia. However, add them all up, and a pattern begins to form. And the whole deal with the phasers was pretty thin in a "it has to be this way because plot reasons" sort of way.
And, yes, all these things are easy to overlook in favor of the enjoyment of the film--which takes us right back (once again!) to square one.
This pretty much sums up the last couple years of arguments.
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