Are Star Trek I and Star Trek V essentially irrelevant?

[Captrek]

He acts like a jerk to a lot of people. I'll never get the fascination with sfdebris, RLM, so on and so forth. The whole "tellin' it like it is" craze is borderline understandable, I guess, but so much of what they nitpick about is just going seriously overboard.

I’m a fan of RLM’s scathing reviews of the TNG and Star Wars films. They’re insightful and very funny. A big difference between RLM and what I’ve seen from SF Debris is that RLM’s reviews save the insults for the movies and the decisions by the filmmakers. They don’t attack the fans the way this SF Debris review does.

 

[sonak]

He acts like a jerk to a lot of people. I'll never get the fascination with sfdebris, RLM, so on and so forth. The whole "tellin' it like it is" craze is borderline understandable, I guess, but so much of what they nitpick about is just going seriously overboard.

I’m a fan of RLM’s scathing reviews of the TNG and Star Wars films. They’re insightful and very funny. A big difference between RLM and what I’ve seen from SF Debris is that RLM’s reviews save the insults for the movies and the decisions by the filmmakers. They don’t attack the fans the way this SF Debris review does.

um, I don't get that impression from SFdebris on this at all. Doesn't he basically say that if you do enjoy TMP, he's sincerely happy for you and doesn't want to attack anyone for their subjective tastes?

I think he's basically saying there are a lot of fans of TMP who assume that if you don't like it, then you're an action movie junkie with a short attention span, and there are a lot of those types of fans for both this movie and 2001.

I also liked his point that not having a lot of action is NOT synonymous with boring, as TVH has very little but is not boring like TMP is.

 

[Cyke101]

He acts like a jerk to a lot of people. I'll never get the fascination with sfdebris, RLM, so on and so forth. The whole "tellin' it like it is" craze is borderline understandable, I guess, but so much of what they nitpick about is just going seriously overboard.

I like RLM, even though I only agree with maybe half of his reviews, but I think part of that is the mixing of self-depricating humor (yes, I know it's a fictional character) with the reviews themselves.

But no, I can't like sfdebris, either. True criticism is about offering your judgment through analysis, not about making a priority out of proving everyone wrong (and, ironically, I stopped reading/listening to him when he got the definition of Marxism wrong in order to bash TNG. You can dislike one or both, but at least get the basic ideology right).

 

[CoveTom]

oh, and TVH was VERY popular and had almost no action at all, so it's not about the action.

That's true, but that led to another problem. The insistence on comedy. Studios are notorious for having a successful film, and then trying to duplicate it by insisting that subsequent films are similar.

Because TVH was a phenomenal success, and because it was largely a comedy, Paramount then decided that the key to Trek's success was comedy. And so we have the horribly out-of-place comedy shoehorned into films like TFF and Generations where, instead of being funny, it was just plain painful.

For both action sequences and comedy, if those things come organically from the needs of the story, they work fine. When they come from a mandate that "this is what sells, so put it in the film," they invariably fall flat. And, unfortunately, the attempt to arbitrarily insert elements from TWOK and TVH, because they were the most successful films, has really hurt many other Trek film efforts.