Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effects

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

Sharr Khan said:
I'll say I enjoyed "Enterprise" sometimes... though I can't think of a good reason but for continuity porn to even mention it or anything else tangantil to Star Trek.

Given the "anything else" I'll agree with you - there's no reason other than "continuity porn" to feature most of what hard-core Trek fans say they want to see in the movie.

 

[Balthier the Great]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

Psion said:

ZZYFRX said:
When I first heard of the project I thought it was a desperate attempt by Paramount to squeeze the last few dimes out of a dying franchise, but I also held out a slim amount of hope that they would be smart and do a total reboot a la BSG. Trek has been crippled by the 40 odd years of canon (most of it insipidly horrid) to ever make a compelling story. But then when they announced it would be a prequel and honor existing canon, I knew the project was doomed.

Umm ... ZZYFRX, I was this close to dismissing you as a troll on this subject, but then you spoiled it by posting the above. And you're right. There is so much nonsense that has worked its way into Trek over the years that I don't even know where to begin to clean it all up. Even if you dismiss everything after the original series, you have to put up with a chronology that directly contradicts our own, technology that looks a bit dated compared to what we have today, and notions about space, physics, and biology that are positively quaint. The original show spoke to the audience of that era. It warned against societal ills while pointing to an optimistic future as a beacon to guide us along a just and noble path.

I disagree that a movie that holds true to the original canon must be a bad thing. I can imagine it turning out quite good. But all of that delays the inevitable; a Star Trek that starts with fresh ideas, true only to the essence of the original, while giving viewers and fans a creative and new look at a universe we all know so well that we've become a bit jaded and bored with it. I don't want Star Trek to become the next Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers; a scratched and faded serial held dear only by an aging audience while younger minds dismiss it as naive.

I want a reboot so badly I sweat Trek cliches. But I also want it done perfectly. Roddenberry, Coon, Solow, Justman, and all the others captured lightening in a bottle forty-three years ago. I want the same thing to happen again today. A new show with the same values as the original, but with a fresh look at science and science fiction so I can once again be proud of watching a show that inspires future astronauts, engineers, techies, and doctors for another forty-plus years.

I still don't see why you have to ditch cannon. It could be done without touching cannon (and really how much cannon can be dealt with in a 2-hour movie?). It isn't the history of the universe that doesn't work -- it's the approach to storytelling.

The best approach is to pretend no one knows about Trek. Don't do the standard cast and encounter the standard aliens. Don't do the standard plots (transporter malfunction episodes, "help our holodeck is trying to kill us" episodes, Borg episodes, time travel episodes) and instead focus on doing good science fiction. The problem isn't the cannon, it's the overdone plots and samey characters.

And unless you fix the writing problems, you can reboot all day long and nothing will change. Get great scifi writers and turn them loose and you'll probably be a hit.

 

[Vigilance]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

jon1701 said:
I honestly dont know why you post here.

So he can troll the rest of us and hopefully dampen the amount of enthusiasm and excitement we have for the picture, all while staying barely within the rules of the board, hoping one of us flames him so WE get chastised by the mods for his trolling?

 

[scotthm]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

ZZYFRX said:

scotthm said:
Have you no interest in the next Star Trek project?

When I first heard of the project I thought it was a desperate attempt by Paramount to squeeze the last few dimes out of a dying franchise... when they announced it would be a prequel and honor existing canon, I knew the project was doomed.

Oh, that explains your interest in this forum.

Personally I've decided to be optimistic about the project until I'm given good reason not to be.

---------------

 

[Chris_Moderato]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

I liked Enterprise. I don't care. It was entertaining. I'd like to see an Archer cameo, considering I've heard he apparently died that day after 1701 was launched. I think that was part of the Enterprise Mirror episode that didn't actually make it on screen or something. Either way, glad to see 1701 is in it, now tie up some Enterprise loose ends!

 

[Psion]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

BalthierTheGreat,

Did Kahn Singh rise to power in the 1990s? What about that orbital nuclear missile launcher from the 1960s? When was NOMAD launched again? How's Christopher's mission to Saturn doing? According to the chronology, sleeper ship technology became obsolete in 2018 because of advances in sublight propulsion technology ... um ... suspended animation still hasn't been invented. If we stopped making Voyager probes at 2, how did Voyager 6 fall into a black hole after it was launched in 1999?

Does Kirk command his ship under the authority of EUSPA or Starfleet? What is a Class M planet and why did Sargon's atmosphere-less planet qualify? Why was Spock so emotional in "The Cage/Menagerie"? If Vulcans are telepaths, why didn't the barrier at the edge of the galaxy -- which dialog explicitly tells us affects people with high ESP ratings -- make Spock change the most? Is Kirk's middle initial 'R' or 'T'?

Given that Vulcans and humans evolved on separate worlds and therefor have less in common than humans and household mildew, how can Spock be a hybrid? Is there a giant Spock clone helping Keniculus Starros on the planet Phylos? Did the Enterprise really go to the center of the galaxy in "The Magicks of Megas Tu"?

What do you think of the idea of women's uniforms in 23rd century Starfleet being miniskirts so high you can see their panties? How about the notion that women can't command a starship as discussed in "Turnabout Intruder"?

As fans of the show, we've been lovingly falling all over ourselves trying to explain these and other oddities of Trek for four decades. The fact is, they're mistakes. Or the product of another era. I'm not proposing that canon be discarded only for the sake of discarding it. I'm proposing that it's time for a new generation to look at Star Trek and see what it means with forty new years of ideas in science, technology, history, and science fiction. Strip it down to its fundamental core and rebuild it fresh. The original isn't going anywhere.

Star Trek is almost a genre unto itself. I propose that there's no harm in going back to square-one every thirty, forty, or fifty years and plugging new values into the equation. Science fiction writers of today largely distance themselves from Star Trek because all that canon represents a mine field where one misstep results in tons of hateful mail. They're also looking to write stories that are relevant to today, not the 1960s. Imagine Star Trek with stories written by Cory Doctorow, Vernor Vinge, Peter Hamilton, Orson Scott Card, Harry Turtledove, Neil Gaiman, or Greg Benford. You're absolutely correct that we need to let good writers loose on it, but we have to get them interested in writing for it in the first place. And once they are interested, cutting away the canon will be exactly what it takes to let those writers loose.

 

[Holytomato]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

ILM did great work on the Transformers & The Mummy Returns Anubis Warriors (the only reason to see the movie. Side Note: This was before Underworld Part 1 came out. Ymm.)

ILM will do Star Trek: Legacy's version. Count on it. :thumbsup:

 

[Jack Bauer]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

While I'm in favor of a total reboot the new movie is essentially a reboot of a sort whether anyone involved admits it or not.

 

[ZZYFRX]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

Holytomato said:
ILM did great work on the Transformers & The Mummy Returns Anubis Warriors (the only reason to see the movie. )

You're joking, right?

The effects for The Mummy Returns was an embarrassment to ILM, especially the Anubis Warriors which looked cartoonish and totally unfinished.

 

[Jon1701]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

Jack Bauer said:
While I'm in favor of a total reboot the new movie is essentially a reboot of a sort whether anyone involved admits it or not.

What he said.

Stuff IS going to conflict with canon. I dont care what they are saying at the moment. Honoring canon and strictly adhering to every single line of written dialogue for the last 40 years are two very seperate things.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

Yep.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

jon1701 said:Stuff IS going to conflict with canon. I dont care what they are saying at the moment. Honoring canon and strictly adhering to every single line of written dialogue for the last 40 years are two very seperate things.

Exactly correct. Don't be silly. Some of you are talking in absolutes that simply don't apply to a ~2hr movie.

There is a massive difference between "strictly adhering to every single line of dialog for the last 40 years" and "avoiding overt CONTRADICTION of anything already established."

The fact that people keep saying that it's inevitable is... just weird. In a two hour movie, it would take REAL, ACTIVE EFFORT to contradict pre-established elements. It would take very little effort to simply "sidestep" that issue by not addressing anything that has been addressed before.

Unless a particular point is a driving element of the story, THERE IS NO COMPELLING REASON TO ADDRESS THAT POINT AT ALL, is there?

You don't want to talk about George Kirk, or Sam Kirk, or Wynona Kirk? Fine. Write a story that doesn't address Jim Kirk's family. But don't decide to call Kirk's parents "Mark and Suzy Kirk" and give him a dozen sisters and no brothers. That simply is UNNECESSARY, and would be utterly counterproductive.

There is a huge difference between the "fawning over every detail of canon" perspective and the "let's try to avoid contradicting anything" perspective.

 

[ancient]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

jon1701 said:

Stuff IS going to conflict with canon. I dont care what they are saying at the moment. Honoring canon and strictly adhering to every single line of written dialogue for the last 40 years are two very seperate things.

I think that much is obvious. All 10 of the previous movies have canon discontinuities. Not to mention an impressive number of episodes. Canon adherence is not Trek's lead boot, and never has been.

 

[Balthier the Great]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

Did Kahn Singh rise to power in the 1990s? What about that orbital nuclear missile launcher from the 1960s? When was NOMAD launched again? How's Christopher's mission to Saturn doing? According to the chronology, sleeper ship technology became obsolete in 2018 because of advances in sublight propulsion technology ... um ... suspended animation still hasn't been invented. If we stopped making Voyager probes at 2, how did Voyager 6 fall into a black hole after it was launched in 1999?

[/QUOTE]

Do me a favor -- google the term FICTION. It was made up then and it's still fake. Nobody making the show thought any of that stuff would actually happen, it was just background to the stories that they were telling.

But, I guess X-men is shit too, since we don't actually have mutants running around. Any story that has events that either can't happen or haven't happened are worthless. I think most of fiction, other than cimeys are pretty much rendered worthless by this kind of thinking.

Star Trek is almost a genre unto itself. I propose that there's no harm in going back to square-one every thirty, forty, or fifty years and plugging new values into the equation. Science fiction writers of today largely distance themselves from Star Trek because all that canon represents a mine field where one misstep results in tons of hateful mail. They're also looking to write stories that are relevant to today, not the 1960s. Imagine Star Trek with stories written by Cory Doctorow, Vernor Vinge, Peter Hamilton, Orson Scott Card, Harry Turtledove, Neil Gaiman, or Greg Benford. You're absolutely correct that we need to let good writers loose on it, but we have to get them interested in writing for it in the first place. And once they are interested, cutting away the canon will be exactly what it takes to let those writers loose.

I'd love to see that as well. There's just one problem with reboots. Other than BSG, most of them suck. They'll randomly change things to make it "edgy" or reinterpret the orignial until it bears no resemblance to the original other than the title. I didn't like the modernist take on either Lost in Space or Planet of the Apes. In both cases, what happened wasn't good science fiction, and it wasn't true to the original.

Lost in Space started life as a rather campy and almost funny adventure of a family in space. It was turned into a dark dreary action-adventure featuring a Giant Spider Doctor.

Planet of the Apes had pretty much the same thing happen to it. In the original, the planet was Earth in the far future, and the humans were brutes who couldn't speak and lived by scavenging off the apes fields. It turned out that apes evolved to be more intelligent and man became stupid after a nuclear war. In the New POTA, it's a different planet, and the planet was seeded with humans and apes from an orbiting spaceship. It was mostly an action-adventure film, but it didn't have much to do with the actual original version.

That's the problem with "rebooting" a series. In most cases, the changes are for the worse. Usually what you end up with is a generic action adventure story set in the univeres of the original, but that has absolutely none of the substance. They'll change either Spock or McCoy into a woman, just to have a love triangle. Half the budget will be blown on pyrotechnics. It will be "edgy" and try to be "cool" but I can't imagine that working for long. And I've never heard of a reboot working when so many people had the old-cannon memorized. BSG worked in part because old BSG had only a small following.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

There was nowhere for "Lost In Space" to go after the TV series but up, and the movie was actually quite a bit better than the series.

 

[Jon1701]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

Cary L. Brown said:

jon1701 said:Stuff IS going to conflict with canon. I dont care what they are saying at the moment. Honoring canon and strictly adhering to every single line of written dialogue for the last 40 years are two very seperate things.

Exactly correct. Don't be silly. Some of you are talking in absolutes that simply don't apply to a ~2hr movie.

There is a massive difference between "strictly adhering to every single line of dialog for the last 40 years" and "avoiding overt CONTRADICTION of anything already established."

The fact that people keep saying that it's inevitable is... just weird. In a two hour movie, it would take REAL, ACTIVE EFFORT to contradict pre-established elements. It would take very little effort to simply "sidestep" that issue by not addressing anything that has been addressed before.

Unless a particular point is a driving element of the story, THERE IS NO COMPELLING REASON TO ADDRESS THAT POINT AT ALL, is there?

You don't want to talk about George Kirk, or Sam Kirk, or Wynona Kirk? Fine. Write a story that doesn't address Jim Kirk's family. But don't decide to call Kirk's parents "Mark and Suzy Kirk" and give him a dozen sisters and no brothers. That simply is UNNECESSARY, and would be utterly counterproductive.

There is a huge difference between the "fawning over every detail of canon" perspective and the "let's try to avoid contradicting anything" perspective.

I cant tell if you agree or disagree with me here, Cary.

To clarify my position :

Broadly speaking I think it would be a good idea to keep it within the established history of Trek, I dont want anything radically different onscreen nor do I think this will be the case. I am less concerned about the smaller details, the throwaway lines of dialogue from 40 years ago.

That stuff doesnt matter.

Take the original premise. Take the original characters and setting and make a movie out of them. A good movie.

Thats all I want.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

jon1701 said:I cant tell if you agree or disagree with me here, Cary.

I was agreeing with you, and calling the people you were responding to "silly." Sorry for a bit of poor wordsmithing there!

To clarify my position :

Broadly speaking I think it would be a good idea to keep it within the established history of Trek, I dont want anything radically different onscreen nor do I think this will be the case. I am less concerned about the smaller details, the throwaway lines of dialogue from 40 years ago.

That stuff doesnt matter.

Take the original premise. Take the original characters and setting and make a movie out of them. A good movie.

Thats all I want.

And, all whining to the contrary, I think that all of the audience (even those here, both those who say "throw everything away or it will suck" and those who say "keep the beehives or it will suck") really only want that. :thumbsup:

 

[Jon1701]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

Cary L. Brown said:

jon1701 said:I cant tell if you agree or disagree with me here, Cary.

I was agreeing with you, and calling the people you were responding to "silly." Sorry for a bit of poor wordsmithing there!

Ah, thought so. :thumbsup:

 

[VonHelton]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

23skidoo said:
ILM doing the Enterprise is a no-brainer. But wait for all the goodwill to evaporate when it's revealed that the Enterprise is being redesigned. That said, hopefully the ILM folks are experienced enough to be able to come up with a way of presenting the TOS Enterprise in a way that's faithful to the TV series. If not ... I think that's going to lose a lot more ticket sales than if the NX-01 makes a cameo appearance (and if it's not a reboot, I hope it does. It's already been established that it's in a museum in the TNG era anyway, so let's see the museum.)

Cheers!

Alex

No doubt it *WILL* be redesigned, so might as well look forward to it, folks. If we built the Big E today, it would look nothing like it's 60's counterpart.

 

[Thomas E. Johnson]

Re: Enterprise will appear in next Trek film; ILM doing effe

VonHelton said:

23skidoo said:
ILM doing the Enterprise is a no-brainer. But wait for all the goodwill to evaporate when it's revealed that the Enterprise is being redesigned. That said, hopefully the ILM folks are experienced enough to be able to come up with a way of presenting the TOS Enterprise in a way that's faithful to the TV series. If not ... I think that's going to lose a lot more ticket sales than if the NX-01 makes a cameo appearance (and if it's not a reboot, I hope it does. It's already been established that it's in a museum in the TNG era anyway, so let's see the museum.)

Cheers!

Alex

No doubt it *WILL* be redesigned, so might as well look forward to it, folks. If we built the Big E today, it would look nothing like it's 60's counterpart.

I don't want it to be redesigned! Just make it look like the Defiant from "Enterprise: In A Mirrior Darkly!" Thats all!