Teenage Samurai Vampires sounds awesome!
Do fans want the prime timeline back? Part 2: Poll edition.
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This production, STID in particularly, is the closest anything has felt to the old spirit of Trek and enjoyment I had from it in nearly 20 years.
Star Trek Into Darkness is the most fun I've had with Trek since seeing The Undiscovered Country in theaters in 1991.
I'm sure plenty of people roll their eyes because I keep going on about how Trek should be fun. But if I'm not having a good time, what's the point of watching?
It felt like "Star Trek" to me and many other fans of TOS.
This production, STID in particularly, is the closest anything has felt to the old spirit of Trek and enjoyment I had from it in nearly 20 years.
Star Trek Into Darkness is the most fun I've had with Trek since seeing The Undiscovered Country in theaters in 1991.
I'm sure plenty of people roll their eyes because I keep going on about how Trek should be fun. But if I'm not having a good time, what's the point of watching?
Well that's the point really, and everytime I've watched this movie or seen it with others, it's the most enjoyment I or they have had from Trek in years.
As it should be. That's one major reason I don't want the continuation of what we had before, it wasn't fun anymore, not for a good long while.
Well, Enterprise did have it's moments and I have it on DVD for that. Buty going forward I want someone to put the simple fun and thrill back into Star Trek.
Abrams is going a fine job, audience figures and disc sales are a good indication the audience at large thinks so too, I can only hope anyone who takes over does as well or better.
"Bound" is my favorite episode of Enterprise because it is so fun too watch and I swear Gene's ghost was in the room with whoever wrote the script.
"Bound" is my favorite episode of Enterprise because it is so fun too watch and I swear Gene's ghost was in the room with whoever wrote the script.
I saw that one only last week, it was nice to see the sisters back in the latest Enterprise novel.
Um... okay. Then you don't have any inherent problem with reboots? I guess we agree then. If that's the case, how does that square up with your previous point (unless I was reading it wrong) that if a Star Trek writer wants to use Kirk and Spock, then he should just create his own characters and his own universe -- a point I'm still not grasping.
The difference is that Logan's Run did an excellent job with their characters.
The Abrams movie actors did the opposite.
Let's do the math, shall we ?
TOS, counting episodes and movies: 84.4 hours. Add TAS to that, if you want.
TNG, same count: 142.1 hours
ENT, Idem: 70.4 hours
So TOS has more hours than Enterprise, and that's it.
Dammit, BillJ beat me to it. By two days !
Into Darkness is the most fun I've had with Trek since the last movie.
I'm sure plenty of people roll their eyes because I keep going on about how Trek should be fun. But if I'm not having a good time, what's the point of watching?
Exactly.
Give TOS the credit it deserves, it continued in the later series. Spock, Scotty, and Bones are alive and well in Next Gen, Voyager touched on Captain Sulu, DS9 sported that TOS time traveling episode and other TOS based episodes and characters like Kor, and Enterprise filled in the pieces before and after TOS.
Actually, that kinda does!
I dunno, I wouldn't harsh on the actors: they very clearly dig their characters and want to do a good job and sell the heck of what they're working with. I'd actually love to see Pine's Kirk in something less pulpy; inhabiting the role of Kirk without doing a Shatner impression but still making the character recognizable is no mean feat, and he largely pulls it off. For me it's more a question how the characters are written.
Timewalker, I guess here's why I'm confused. This--
--makes it sound like you'd have no problem with a reboot if done right. But this--
--makes it sound like no reboot would be acceptable to you.
Some actors can rise above badly-written material. Some can't.
You seem to be trying to pin me down into 100% one or the other.
I don't mind a good reboot. The Logan's Run TV series was close enough to the book and movie and the actors were good enough as Logan and Jessica to make it work.
Or take Shakespeare. Some people thought Kenneth Branagh was godawful arrogant to even dream of doing Henry V, considering that Laurence Olivier had already done it. But Branagh did it right. It's an excellent period movie, and so enjoyable that even my grandmother loved it - and she had never seen any Shakespeare before in her life.
Or consider First Knight (starring Sean Connery, Julia Ormond, and Richard Gere). This is a movie about King Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot... and there's not a hint of Merlin, Mordred, Morgan, or any magic whatsoever. The knights are there, the round table is indeed round, everyone's concerned with honor and chivalry... but there's no supernatural stuff. It's quite refreshing to me, although I'm sure there are people who hate it for the exact reasons I love it.
Now take Abrams' version of Star Trek. It doesn't work for me. It's some combination of the writing, the acting, the actors themselves, the overabundance of telling instead of showing, along with reliance on special effects and explosions to move the story forward... A good story is more than having people recite lines and hit the plot points. For me this stuff just doesn't add up to a good story. It certainly doesn't add up to what I'd expect of something calling itself Star Trek.
IIRC, Shakespeare's historical plays were originally performed in contemporary clothes. So no togas in the 1599 production.Timewalker said:
Of course the familiar legend of Robin Hood is something that was built over time. Elements like Friar Tuck and Maid Marian being added after the first stories appeared. Even the time period varies in some tellings. (Sorta like TOS
) King Arthur has similar "problems".
Meh. I don't think even Meryl Streep could have made Uhura's "time-for-me-to-be-the-bitchy-girlfriend-on-the-commando-mission" scene sing any better than Zoe Saldana did, personally. If the writing is in a register or genre that I can't really stand, it can be a pretty steep order to make it entertaining.
A lot also boils down to expectations. If I'm expecting pure-pulp camp, I can forgive a lot -- not everything, but a lot -- that would irritate me in a different genre. James Earl Jones' Thulsa Doom from Conan would be inexcusably corny horseshit in a historical drama, but in pulp he can work... precisely because I've been set up to expect it. Likewise if a kung fu movie has a barely serviceable plot, who cares? I'm there for the kung fu. If some kind of plot happens that isn't visibly a retread of Enter the Dragon, it just gets added points.
So I can agree with this:
... because what partially harshes my buzz on JJTrek is precisely that it's pretty much pure-pulp science fantasy. The JJTrek films, had they been sold as Star Wars films, would actually have really impressed me. Or not, but at least would not have hit any glaring false notes. Sure they would still have had flubber-physics and absurdly compressed relationships and flimsy plots... but with Star Wars that was already part of the deal. It's pure pulp, for all the Joseph Campbell horseshit they later tried to wrap it in; it was always in the same register as Doc Smith's Lensmen.
Whereas with Trek, while we've seen Trek be everything from outright goofy to comedic to compelling and dramatic to action-oriented to one-bad-attempt-at-imitating-Kubrick... we've never seen it just being pure pulp. Some people can make the leap to just straight enjoying it as such -- and most especially general audiences can, which is what has always made SW a license to print money no matter how shitty it got (and no wonder the brand's owners wanted their slice of all that sweet, sweet money). Others, not so much.
Absolutely true dat. Pulp has just never been its whole DNA before.
(I wonder... does "The Cage" really qualify as Trek at its most "cerebral"? To what extent is "cerebral" desirable, and can it also be fun?)
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Could be. A few of Roddenberry's ideas were great, many were goofy, many were truly awful, I'd question how many of them were that indebted to pulp.
Or at least to strictly sci-fi pulp. Mixtures of different grades and types of pulp are also definitely in there; he was open about wanting to basically do Gunsmoke and/or Naked City and/or Wagon Train in an SF setting, all of which arguably had their own particular admixtures of different brands of pulp. Indeed even when he was doing call-outs to the "classics" or to Shakespeare... when you really think about it, Shakespeare was the pulp of his day, it was only the craftsmanship of his poetry that ultimately elevated him above his peers. So you could maybe say that Trek was 75% mongrel pulp.
I always thought The Cage gets called "cerebral" because the aliens heads were so big.
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