Chris Pine's comments that modern movies can't be cerebral... what about Interstellar? The Martian?

Probably he meant the Kobayashi Maru Scenario? I don't recall a fourth ship exploding in TSFS either...

 

"Gotta nuke something.", which is the mindset of a much larger portion of the American population than is healthy.

 

You know, I've seen that episode I don't know how many times, and this is the first time I noticed the other banners next to that poster.

 

As a point of interest, the "Nuke the whales!" quote is from the Doonesbury comic strip, where it first appeared a long, long time before Simpsons. Berkeley Breathed also did a callback to it in Bloom County.

 

A customer came in to my store the other day with a shirt that read "Save the whale" without any other logo or plural on the "whale" part. I can only assume that the whale they tried to save actually died and the person got the shirt for cheap.

 

I've mentioned in other threads... I think nobody really noticed these themes in ID because they've shown up in so many movies and TV shows that viewers are just used to them.

Kor

 

Well, yeah. It's the same issue as Captain America: Winter Soldier just as one example.

 

Exactly. Though the timing was interesting given the news in American politics, I doubt everyone was paying attention to the same news I was. Also, the interest might have been better if they hadn't waited so long between ST 09.

 

http://trekcore.com/blog/2016/06/justin-lin-and-cast-chat-about-star-trek-beyond/

Link above to a Trek Core article.

Lin is quoted as saying:

"We know this is a big-budget movie, but at the same time let’s not forget that we can have two characters in a room talking, and if we do our job right it’s equally compelling. That’s something we definitely took to heart."

http://trekcore.com/blog/2016/06/chris-pine-talks-jim-kirks-evolution-in-star-trek-beyond/

Link above to another Trek Core article.

Pine is quoted as saying:

"[If we get a fourth movie,] I would like a slower film. That’d be kind of fun. Kirk and team land on a planet and go explore.
It’s not going to happen, but it would be fun to make the Merchant Ivory version; a slow, talky film."

 

I think people noticed the themes in Into Darkness, but just found their presentation "weird".

Like what the point of having people inside the torpedoes was, I will never know - if the Admiral wanted them gone, why didn't he just vapourise them, or do one of a thousand other things that would have been more efficient? Maybe I got the wrong end of the stick? But from what I remember, Marcus knew they were in there. Just seemed like a pretty weird ass forced twist.

Having Khan Singh re-cast as an Anglo-Saxon?

Unlike some, I liked the movie - it was still fun.

But I gotta agree with someone above that the action in the new movies is a little video gamey - instead of the tense sea-going battles of the past, starship battles just seem to consist of the enterprise being swarmed like a Japanese bullet-hell arcade game, and getting 'krumped like Apollo 13 - that might work in a hard sci-fi, where millions of micro-projectiles are being thrown around, but it's not really true to the style of Star Trek's previous space battles. Unfortunatly the trailer for Beyond seems to show more swarm-like stuff, but it will probably still be entertaining enough.

 

The difference is that INTERSTELLAR is a one-off sci-fi flick whereas STAR TREK is supposed to be an ongoing franchise. Nolan and WB didn't need to worry about trying to kick off a viable franchise because that film was all there ever was going to be. Heck, the reason we got something like the former is because Nolan made enough big hits to be able to do a pet project like that. It was a "one for the studio, one for me" kind of deal. When it comes to franchises, Paramount is not going to attempt to make a cerebral Trek film, they're going to go where the money is at with STAR WARS, TRANSFORMERS and MARVEL that are loaded with heavy action spectacle.

 

As much as I would like to see some new Trek along those lines, Interstellar and The Martian aren't space opera. Trek is, for better or worse. And audiences expect that it won't be slow and cerebral.

Kor

 

As much as it pains me to say, I agree with C.Pine. Its gone from fairly niche to blockbuster. As long as its got humour, a good story and our favourite characters, I'll be happy. Throw in a load of cool stuff with effects and action and its the icing on the cake. I love that Trek is getting this level of treatment nowadays.

 

Right, I'll never expect the films to ever become anything more than lowbrow spectacle, which is fine, as long as it's done well. Plus, there's a new TV show coming out and Trek is arguably TV in nature. You get your brainless spectacle in the theaters while getting your cerebral drama on TV. Everybody wins!

 

More discussion on the fantastic writing of TOS.
Quite contrary to the disparaging TOS receives here.

 

Should probably know better than to get involved in this discussion, but I haven't anything else going on tonight, so why not. And just to be clear, feel free to mentally insert "IMHO" into the text that follows anywhere it would make sense, since of course we're largely talking about subjective opinion here.

Star Trek has been a lot of different things over the years. Sometimes it's a comedy. Other times, a mirror (though rarely the most subtle one) on current events and social issues. Sometimes it's a character drama, and other times, yes, it's an adventure story.

The new films try to do all of these things to different degrees, and that in itself is fine. Where it stumbles, however, is execution, though because execution is complicated and hard to quantify, it's easy to fall into the trap of oversimplifying things and saying "there's too much action", or "there's too little intellectualism".

2009 was a decent enough film. I think it had a fairly good balance of many of the things that make Star Trek what it is, though certainly it had more action than prior incarnations. Where it failed for me was, firstly, pacing - it didn't know when to stop and take a breath, and needed to force everything into place with Kirk ending up in command of the Enterprise, and suffered as a result - and secondly, in the characterization of Kirk as an irresponsible ass, which may make sense in the context of the narrative, but doesn't make me eager to root for the character. Now these aren't themselves problems of "too much action", but bad pacing and idiotic male characters do tend to put one in mind of action films, so I could see how someone could watch it, and then come to the (unfair) conclusion that it's just a dumb action film.

Into Darkness, on the other hand, did have way too much action. And lets look for a moment at the earlier Trek films that people say have a lot of action. Wrath of Khan - there's a short shootout between Enterprise and Reliant - the one involving the prefix codes, and then there's the battle in the nebula. The former has maybe 20 seconds of actually weapons fire with a lot of talking in between, while the later is a submarine battle, which I'd actually classify not as action, but as suspense, which is a different thing altogether. Suspense mixed with bursts of action can make for a great film. The Undiscovered Country is similar. There's the bit where Enterprise fires it's torpedoes, Kirk has a brief brawl with that alien in the gulag, and then there's the space battle at the end. The first one isn't even a battle - the Klingons don't shoot back, the brawl lasts all of two minutes, and then at the end, you again have suspense mixed in with the action. The interesting part isn't watching Enterprise get hit with torpedoes - it's the race against time as Spock and McCoy work to rig their return shot, while the assassin on the planet down below gets ready to take out the president. Now back to Into Darkness. Off the top of my head, there's the attack on the meeting, the battle with the Klingons, the Vengeance's attack on Enterprise, bringing it out of warp, the 'space walk', followed by more firefights inside Vengeance, and then finally Spock and Khan's brawl down on Earth. I maybe missing some. There's tons of action, and because this is JJ Abrams, the pacing continues to be horrible, and maybe because of that, there's very little room for suspense. When I sat in the theater watching Into Darkness, one of the big things that stood out for the me was that I was bored. A well done space battle can be a thing of beauty, but at a certain point, I really don't need to see any more explosions.

So yeah, too much action. "But wait!", I hear you cry, "it didn't only have action. There was character drama, and commentary on terrorism and the military!". And you'd be absolutely right. The problem isn't that Into Darkness lacked these elements, the problem is that it addressed them poorly. Kirk's growth as a character was completely undermined by the shameless ripping from Wrath of Khan. I can't appreciate him becoming a better captain if I'm too busy burying my head in my hands in response to a terribly executed 'homage'. The commentary on the military was better, but it just felt kind of obvious, and the bad guy was too clearly evil. The Undiscovered Country works so well because Kirk really did empathize in some small way with the conspirators - he really did hate Klingons, and didn't believe that peace was possible. Kirk in Into Darkness was gung ho about going after 'Harrison', to be sure, but he was divorced from the larger plot of starting a war in such a way that the commentary isn't as strong.

And yes, there are plenty of old-school Star Trek episodes that have the same problems. That's going to happen when you've got a franchise that long-running. The Doomsday Machine gets pretty tedious towards the end too, and I don't think you're going to find many people defending Nemesis, for instance.

So yeah, Star Trek doesn't always need to be Interstellar, but that doesn't mean it has to go to the opposite extreme and be an Avengers film. There's room in between. Or it could go in other directions, and be a comedy, or a romance, any other number of things. The main thing though is that it needs to have originality and good execution. And if Beyond somehow manages to fail, it won't be because it wasn't 'Star Trek' enough, whatever that means, it'll be because the execution was bad, like with Into Darkness. But of course it's not out yet, and I'm cautiously optimistic that it'll actually be really good. For the moment, I trust Simon Pegg.

 

Anyway, your confrontational bait aside, in this thread (which I was talking about) a few people have argued that TOS isn't the cultural phenomenon it's cracked up to be, and someone posted an article with some typical Gizmodo type hyperbole saying "Star Trek was never clever" or something of that sort. I've also noticed this before in the main forum; for example in threads about everything from trekonomics to utopianism. Clearly not everyone, but a few people seem to actively dismiss their favourite franchise in relation to other things. It was intended for them.