To ST-One and Trekkerguy: Sorry, gentlemen, but that simply is not true. Some people (you guys) look at this stuff and say "looks good." Others--myself, say--look at it and say "looks bad." Neither of us are neutral. Saying that you are does not make you so. It just makes you a liar.
"This movie could be shit or gold," you say? I've said it several times myself. I'm just saying that, based on the evidence, shit seems more likely. Pretend all you want, but the content of your posts and the way you seek to silence the critics (ain't happening, btw) shows that you expect gold. That's your right, of course. Just stop being so snide to those who disagree, please.
Well, I'm currently looking at this in two ways... (1) will this be a good movie, and (2) will this movie be "of a piece" with the Star Trek that's been a major part of my "recreational side of life" for essentially the entirety of my 43 years of life?
I suspect that it's going to be a good movie. Not a GREAT movie, but a good one... one that the majority of people who shell out their $10 for a ticket will not feel cheated to have seen. But also, most likely, not one that the average moviegoer will feel all that enthused about after they walk out of the theater. Some movies "change everything" for the audience, but that's rare. This is almost certainly not going to be one of those movies.
On the other hand, I really expect to come out of the theater thinking "that wasn't Star Trek." I'm hopeful, still, that this may turn out to not be the case, but I think it's more likely to be this way. I suspect we're going to be shown stuff that's "A new take on Star Trek" rather than something that is "Star Trek" (aka, something which doesn't tell us to forget what we've spent the past 40+ years getting familiar with).
I get very tired of some of the folks on here referring to "TOS canonistas." That's simply a bullshit argument... by villainizing the people who disagree with you, you can then pretend that you don't have to seriously address the real, significant issues that these people raise. Of course, it's true that nobody HERE has to address those issues... this is just an internet BBS, after all. But the issues are still legitimate and will inevitably affect the movie... SOMEONE will have to deal with them... just not the majority of folks posting on this BBS.
I suspect that the average moviegoer won't care about the changes to anything... but that they also won't buy Trek merchanise, go see the flick more than once, buy the DVD, etc, etc. They'll forget about it immediately upon walking out of the theater. Nothing wrong with that, either... and that audience NEEDS to be served... they make up a larger percentage of the general population than the "fans" do.
The real issue isn't a choice between "fans" and "general audiences," though, and every single freakin' time I see someone raise that particular red herring, it just drives home how dishonest the argument is. The goal here really should be to make a movie that appeals to THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE, not just to one subsegment of the potential audience. That means telling a great story with great characters and a plot that's both intelligent and exciting. But it also means not contradicting 40+ years worth of history unless there's a truly compelling rationale for doing so.
Nobody expects the bridge to be made out of plywood flats with backlit transparencies for "view panels" and cast-resin gumdrops for buttons. NOBODY HAS EVER SUGGESTED SUCH A THING. Nobody has ever suggested that the exact same velour used in the original first-season shirts needs to be used, or that every single character from the entire run of Trek needs to make a cameo appearance. The only suggestion has been that the designs should reflect the same underlying concept.
The way I've always described it is like this... imagine that there's a "real Star Trek reality" that the original series was trying to replicate and reflect. In some ways, they deviated from that "reality" but they were still trying to reflect something "real." The new movie, ideally, would take the approach that the original series was a cost-limited attempt to do exactly that, and that with the more advanced (but still not 23rd-century) tech we have now, and the larger budget, they can get closer to that mythical "reality" than they could do in the 1960s. But both are trying to approximate the same thing, and thus should have the same GENERAL appearance, the same general feel, and shouldn't cause the audience to say "waitaminute, that's not what it used to look like."
Instead, they audience should find themselves not really noticing the difference at all, until they go back and watch the old stuff and say "well, now I've seen what it REALLY looked like, and I can see the flaws in the old stuff now."
With the new uniforms, you can argue that's what they've done (and other than the two quibbles I've mentioned before, I think that they did an acceptable job there). The concerns are really with the sets and ship designs... and we don't really know what we're seeing, except that in a reality that's clearly not the one we saw in TOS, we see an academy-uniform-clad Kirk sitting on a very different bridge with TOS-era crewmen. So either everything from TOS has been flushed... or we're seeing an "alternative timeline."
I'm hoping that it's the latter, rather than the former. But it's perfectly reasonable for people to be worried about it turning out to be the former... and if it does, it will turn away a great many of the franchise's long-time faithful audience, while not really gaining any new "faithful" audience members.
