How can you praise this movie and bash VOY, ENT and Nemesis?

[neozeks]

This is a thing that totally puzzles me. People say the old timeline got stale and boring. They blame Voyager, Enterprise and Nemesis for killing the franchise. This movie is hailed as a reinvigoration, making Trek relevant again or somesuch. And yet, surprisingly, when i look at the movie what do i see? The same thing people were complaining about in VOY or ENT or NEM, only now it doesn't really matter cause it's, you know, fun!

When Enterprise played with canon and continuity it was a big deal, now Abrams and co. take the easy route and throw it away, and now - canon and continuity aren't really that important (just to make clear, i'm not a canonboy, i didn't complain about it in ENT, i'm just observing). When they made Vulcans arogant and unlikable it was bashed. Now the movie makes them out and out racists and it's fine. And ENT even resolved that with the whole kirshara thing in the fourth season.

Voyager was bashed for the crew and the mood being too happy for a ship alone in the other side of the galaxy. Now, Vulcan is destroyed (i would say just for the shock factor), and yet by the end of the movie by the action of the charachters and the general atmosphere you couldn't tell a BSG-scale genocide just took place (ahem, 6 billion people, please!). Yes, we see Spock agonizing a bit (though to me seems it was more because of the death of his mother), but the rest, well, y'know it's sad and all but we can't ruin Kirk becoming captain. It's not as bad as the oldBSG and the casino planet, but you get the gist.

People complained charachters on Voyager never changed. Well, Kirk jr doesn't really change either. No journey, no consequences for his actions (say, cheating), nothing, he's just destined to become The Captain. Harry Kim was ridiculed for remaining an ensign for seven years (and if you want to go even further back, Wesley for becoming just an ensign). Now Kirk, completely inexperienced, barely out of the academy, if even that, gets the flagship! But hey, it's not really important for the story, so it's ok.

Going on - plotholes, inconsistencies, silly coincidences (or if i may say bad writing) - check, but while Nemesis was torn apart, here it's forgiven. Technobbable - i was amazed to see some reviews praising it for getting rid of technobable - ahem, red matter? Transport in warp over how many light years pulled out of the hat? The drilling rig conveniently blocking transporters and coms?

Cliches? Whew, boy! Time travel? Check. Romulan villain (although we had one just in the last movie)? Sure. Pupil/mentor a la Skywalker/Obi Wan? Yes. Two guys beam through shields it seems and defeat 10 times the number of oponents? Yup. Oh, and there's a huge chasm in the middle of the ship for the evil guys to drop in. No railings, of course! Come to think of it, what was exactly original in this movie? Okay, i'll give you there was no reset button, but it's an alternate timeline so we don't need one. Now, staying in the original timeline, say post-Nemesis and then destroying Vulcan, that would have been BRAVE.

Now, what exactly is then the improvement that this movie brings us? Better writing, original ideas? I don't really see them. Sure, it was fun, it had nice (though essentially pointless) nods to the originals, the actors were good. But, Voyager was also often fun, with lots of action. ENT had lots of nods to the 23rd and 24th century Treks. Nemesis had Patrick Stewart and Brent Spinner.

And then, why was a reboot exactly needed? What is so superior in this movie that couldn't have been done in the original timeline?
Sorry, if i came off as snarky at times, i'm just in such a mood. I really want a good discussion here. If i'm wrong, please tell me where i'm wrong.

 

[MvRojo]

Well, I've liked all the shows, so I'm safe.

 

[Cyrus]

Yeah, basher dudes. You have been challenged. Defend your case.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Trek XI is basically well written, well cast, is exciting, and has a point.

VOY had a good cast, a strong premise, and writers who were too scared/lazy/untalented to actually develop it.

ENT had a strong premise, if we assume BOTF was the premise, and again, writers who were too scared/lazy/untalented to actually develop it. If the premise was really "random space tourism plus nonsensical time travel" then it wasn't a premise worth spending ten seconds on.

I've blanked Nemeshit from my mind, so I can't even recall why it was so awful. But it didn't help that the TNG characters were always pretty dull and had long since worn out their welcome by then.

People complained charachters on Voyager never changed. Well, Kirk jr doesn't really change either.

After two frakkin' hours? Geeze, a little impatient, aren't we? VOY characters didn't develop after 100 hours, that was the problem. Trek really needs to be back on TV, rassin frassin...but since that isn't going to happen, at least not with the movie cast, we will have to be happy with the character development that is possible for a movie series, and I think I'd deduced where they're going with this.

 

[pookha]

. Now the movie makes them out and out racists and it's fine. And ENT even resolved that with the whole kirshara thing in the fourth season..

you must have missed when tpau first meet kirk and bones.
plus amanda's description of spock's childhood from journey to babel.

i liked the shows..
nemesis was stupid.

 

[Sharr Khan]

only now it doesn't really matter cause it's, you know, fun!

You answered your own question, unlike all those others which tended toward the plodding this was in your own words fun. Perhaps thats' the element which was lacking from the last few incarnations of Trek - fun?

Sharr

 

[CordrazineOD]

The movie makes Vulcans racist? How so? The Vulcan Science counselman's attitude about Spock's lineage and mother is totally consistant with the attitudes of many Vulcans that we've seen throughout all Star Trek history.

 

[dahj]

And then, why was a reboot exactly needed? What is so superior in this movie that couldn't have been done in the original timeline?

You could not have had young Kirk and Spock. Had this movie been made exactly the same only with Generic Human Captain and Generic Alien First Officer it would never be near 200 million $ by today, and nowhere near the praise it's getting. Fact of the matter is, those two dudes do make all the difference.

 

[Vigilance]

Neozeks, I really think you need to name names and provide examples here because I really haven't seen ANY of what you're claiming.

You say lots of people loved this movie for the same reasons those same people hated Enterprise and Voyager?

Provide examples.

Because frankly, unless you can, this is just another veiled attack on folks who dared to like this movie, which is getting really old.

 

[theFirebottle]

I started to hate Voyager because the writing was inconsistent and mostly poor, they hammered on the reset button instead of letting significant events be significant, betrayed their own premise in doing so, and the characters were dull, inconsistent, and the ones I was initially interested in never got nearly enough development.

I do not demand the same level of complexity and detail from a film as I do a series. Voyager had seven seasons with which to make things significant, develop long term consequences for short term problems, and make its characters dynamic and complex. It didn't, repeatedly and for seven years. The new movie had two hours to introduce an entire new continuity, set up a crisis, and get together the Enterprise crew. How can you expect it to spin out the consequences of what happened? The purpose of it is to set up the events; the consequences will get dealt with later. Your complaint that it didn't deal with the consequences of its events is the equivalent to saying Voyager's pilot episode didn't play out what happened in the subsequent few seasons of the show!

As for technobabble, I think you don't really understand what people are complaining about. Voyager's technobabble was poorly researched ("deuterium ore" for fucksake), shallow, and meaningless ("reverse the polarity"). If a Trek writer is going to use a thing and doesn't want to bother explaining it, then he/she should just use it and move on. Like FTL in Battlestar Galactica: it doesn't get any tedious, nonsensical, unscientific explanations, it's just there. Pretty much like the drill's disruption of communications and beaming. Nobody steps aside and tries to figure out how the drill does that because they don't have time and we (the audience) don't have the patience to watch them distract us from a tense plot for pointless technobabble some writer looked up on Wikipedia and threw into the script because it sounded advanced.

In conclusion, Jesus H. Christ put some line breaks and paragraphs in your post. I'm not responding to half of what you said because it's a nigh unreadable wall of text.

 

[neozeks]

Neozeks, I really think you need to name names and provide examples here because I really haven't seen ANY of what you're claiming.

You say lots of people loved this movie for the same reasons those same people hated Enterprise and Voyager?

Provide examples.

Because frankly, unless you can, this is just another veiled attack on folks who dared to like this movie, which is getting really old.

Well, i can't name names, it's just the general feeling you get when you read people's comments. And i'm not saying they loved the movie because of it, i'm puzzled they were ready to excuse the very same same failings.

 

[neozeks]

I started to hate Voyager because the writing was inconsistent and mostly poor, they hammered on the reset button instead of letting significant events be significant, betrayed their own premise in doing so, and the characters were dull, inconsistent, and the ones I was initially interested in never got nearly enough development.

I do not demand the same level of complexity and detail from a film as I do a series. Voyager had seven seasons with which to make things significant, develop long term consequences for short term problems, and make its characters dynamic and complex. It didn't, repeatedly and for seven years. The new movie had two hours to introduce an entire new continuity, set up a crisis, and get together the Enterprise crew. How can you expect it to spin out the consequences of what happened? The purpose of it is to set up the events; the consequences will get dealt with later. Your complaint that it didn't deal with the consequences of its events is the equivalent to saying Voyager's pilot episode didn't play out what happened in the subsequent few seasons of the show!

As for technobabble, I think you don't really understand what people are complaining about. Voyager's technobabble was poorly researched ("deuterium ore" for fucksake), shallow, and meaningless ("reverse the polarity"). If a Trek writer is going to use a thing and doesn't want to bother explaining it, then he/she should just use it and move on. Like FTL in Battlestar Galactica: it doesn't get any tedious, nonsensical, unscientific explanations, it's just there. Pretty much like the drill's disruption of communications and beaming. Nobody steps aside and tries to figure out how the drill does that because they don't have time and we (the audience) don't have the patience to watch them distract us from a tense plot for pointless technobabble some writer looked up on Wikipedia and threw into the script because it sounded advanced.

In conclusion, Jesus H. Christ put some line breaks and paragraphs in your post. I'm not responding to half of what you said because it's a nigh unreadable wall of text.

There, fixed, now you CAN respond to the rest.

As for consequences, don't you think the consequences of destroying the probably second most important planet in the Federation would leave pretty much immediate ones? Like not behaving like it didn't just happen a few hours or days ago?

Oh, and technobabble, ok, you got a fair point there but i think there was also a different aspect to the complaining - that using technobbable was just to easy a way out of most situations, you know plot drive etc. Like when the writers couldn't think up anything better, they just conjured something up - like say, transport to a ship in warp!

 

[Lord Lunacy]

This is a thing that totally puzzles me. People say the old timeline got stale and boring. They blame Voyager, Enterprise and Nemesis for killing the franchise. This movie is hailed as a reinvigoration, making Trek relevant again or somesuch. And yet, surprisingly, when i look at the movie what do i see? The same thing people were complaining about in VOY or ENT or NEM, only now it doesn't really matter cause it's, you know, fun!

Ouch...that last massive paragraph hurt my eyes, so I left it out.

Young kids don't want to see old farts talking about random technobullshitwhatchamahoozits from series that aired while they were either born...or worrying about overly stuffy politics and morality. The best way to attract the young crowd is to give them a fun film free of all the canon deadweight of their parents Trek. In this mission, JJ succeeded quite well. Just knowing Trek is number one over Wolvering and T4 is pretty amusing to me.

All the tighter, more cerebral story telling can be added now that the foundation has been rebuilt. As the new audiance matures, they will come to appreciate it just as the last few generations did. Hell, if the second movie does well, we might just get another series!

 

[ChristopherPike]

I haven't... except for precious few aspects that deserve praise

and

I never have, since they were a) fine, but exhausted its premise early on, b) fantastic and shouldn't have been cancelled, not with all the juicy stuff developing or c) yes... well, you can't win them all.

 

[archeryguy1701]

Huge Trek XI fan here. I liked Nemesis. It got slightly chunky around the middle, but overall, it entertained me. Enterprise was pretty good, especially the final two seasons. But, like any show it was hit and miss sometimes. I will admit that I'm not a big Voyager fan, but that's because it seemed like it was the same-old, same-old done the same way as before and a decent number of the main characters annoyed me. I try to avoid judging based on the things you listed. Rather, I try to judge on how entertaining it was. And I was very damned entertained with Star Trek, and pretty entertained with Enterprise and Nemesis.

Technobbable - i was amazed to see some reviews praising it for getting rid of technobable - ahem, red matter? Transport in warp over how many light years pulled out of the hat? The drilling rig conveniently blocking transporters and coms?

I don't think "technobabble" means what you think it means. The most explination the Red Matter got (really, it was this simple) was basically, "Ignite red matter and it makes a black hole." If you count complicated names, then you might be able to count the long-range transport. It really didn't get that much description. The drill blocking stuff? Again, no technobabble there. Just a quick and dirty, "Tansporters and communications are down." Here is what technobabble looks like:

The secondary gyrodyne relays in the propulsion field intermatrix have depolarised.

 

[Vigilance]

Well, i can't name names, it's just the general feeling you get when you read people's comments. And i'm not saying they loved the movie because of it, i'm puzzled they were ready to excuse the very same same failings.

Well, I think your post is anything but a "general feeling", at least it's not written that way.

You are using specific examples, cliches, plot holes, inconsistencies, the "up-ness" of the crew and on and on.

It gives the impression that you see people complaining about these things in the case of Voyager and Enterprise, while turning around and praising Trek XI for the same things.

Because if that isn't what you're talking about, then what's the point of your post?

 

[neozeks]

Well, I think your post is anything but a "general feeling", at least it's not written that way.

You are using specific examples, cliches, plot holes, inconsistencies, the "up-ness" of the crew and on and on.

It gives the impression that you see people complaining about these things in the case of Voyager and Enterprise, while turning around and praising Trek XI for the same things.

Because if that isn't what you're talking about, then what's the point of your post?

Wait, you want to say people didn't complain about those things? What did they complain about then?
And like I said, i'm saying that they are praising the movie IN SPITE of the very same things Trek got bogged down earlier. I'm just not seeing anything new, 'reinvigorating' in the movie.

 

[archeryguy1701]

^Except for maybe that fact that it's fun.

 

[neozeks]

Trek XI is basically well written, well cast, is exciting, and has a point.

VOY had a good cast, a strong premise, and writers who were too scared/lazy/untalented to actually develop it.

ENT had a strong premise, if we assume BOTF was the premise, and again, writers who were too scared/lazy/untalented to actually develop it. If the premise was really "random space tourism plus nonsensical time travel" then it wasn't a premise worth spending ten seconds on.

I've blanked Nemeshit from my mind, so I can't even recall why it was so awful. But it didn't help that the TNG characters were always pretty dull and had long since worn out their welcome by then.

People complained charachters on Voyager never changed. Well, Kirk jr doesn't really change either.

After two frakkin' hours? Geeze, a little impatient, aren't we? VOY characters didn't develop after 100 hours, that was the problem. Trek really needs to be back on TV, rassin frassin...but since that isn't going to happen, at least not with the movie cast, we will have to be happy with the character development that is possible for a movie series, and I think I'd deduced where they're going with this.

You know, that thing you said about VOY pretty much sums up my feelings about the movie. And i definitely wouldn't say it was well written, what with all the plot holes and no charachter development. Nor did i get any specific point except the generic 'misunderstood rebel overcomes doubt and with the help of friends defeats the baddie'. Which is so original.

Yes, after two frakking hours! There are plenty movies that last two hours and have lots of character development, right?

 

[Jayson]

Who exactly is the "people" in this scenario? I would image people who like the movie or hate the movie have all sorts of variety of opinions on the Trek shows. For example I liked the movie and I feel TOS and Ds9 were the best. I also like Voyager and Enterprise better than I do TNG. Janeways is my second favorite captain behind Kirk and I think Ds9's second season was it's best. Most Ds9 fans proably don't even like the second season and most Ds9 fans proably won't admit they liked Janeway better than Sisko, even if they do like Janeway better.

I guess what I am saying is people aren't cliches. People are going to have a variety of opinions on trek and you can't really judge those opinions based on their opinion of the movie.

Jason