Nero's hatred of Spock makes no sense.

[VOODOOXI]

Spock was the only person who attempted to help Nero and the rest of Romulus.

Of all people why travel through time (and waste 25 years of his life)in an attempt to kill the single person in the universe that tried to help him? Why not just go back in time and save Romulus?

If he insisted on revenge why not kill the people who refused to listen to Spock?

Am I missing something here? If not Nero's motivations make zero sense and he may be the dumbest of all trek villians.

 

[The Wormhole]

This movie could have benefitted from explaining Nero's backstory and clarifying things somewhat. And don't say the Countdown comics explain it, they don't. In fact, Countdown makes Nero's motivations make even less sense.

 

[VOODOOXI]

This movie could have benefitted from explaining Nero's backstory and clarifying things somewhat. And don't say the Countdown comics explain it, they don't. In fact, Countdown makes Nero's motivations make even less sense.

Agreed.

The events of Countdown make Nero's actions even more unexplainable.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Spock was the only person who attempted to help Nero and the rest of Romulus.

Of all people why travel through time (and waste 25 years of his life)in an attempt to kill the single person in the universe that tried to help him? Why not just go back in time and save Romulus?

If he insisted on revenge why not kill the people who refused to listen to Spock?

Am I missing something here? If not Nero's motivations make zero sense and he may be the dumbest of all trek villians.

Nero didn't have the power of time travel, it was the actions of Spock that allowed him to go back into time. The only way he could have directly changed those events was if he had waited over 100 years (assuming he was still alive) and then attempt it.

With that possibility eliminated, his only action was revenge.

 

[SalvorHardin]

The Countdown comics explain Nero's actions perfectly.

It's just that some don't seem to understand that people (or aliens) when under extreme pressure, when faced with loss and the death of entire civilizations don't just sit there unaffected and act rationally. They are blinded by pain and hatred.

They go mad. They don't think clearly. Their anger may be misdirected.
Nero based all his hopes for help on Spock. Spock took him to Vulcan promising to deliver salvation. All Nero got was ...well nothing.
What he saw was Vulcans refusing to help, letting his people die and then Spock terminating the threat for everyone else.
Nero is supposed to be an irrationall, pain stricken man.

Of all people why travel through time (and waste 25 years of his life)in an attempt to kill the single person in the universe that tried to help him? Why not just go back in time and save Romulus?

If he insisted on revenge why not kill the people who refused to listen to Spock?

First of all neither Nero nor Spock chose to travel in time. It was an accident.

Second Nero did kill those responsible who refused to listen. He killed all the surviving Romulan politicians back in his universe. And before he had a chance to kill the Vulcans too he was sucked back in time.
So he continued his revenge from there.

And though it's not on screen we can always assume that he took care of the Hobus star problem during those 25 years. Or at least those years he spent outside a Klingon prison.(which prison couldn't have helped his fragile mind at all)

 

[NCC74894A]

From what I gathered in Countdown, Nero fell out with Spock because he perceived Spock as too sympathetic to the High Council's reasons for rejecting Nero's proposal (they didn't trust the Romulan Empire with all the advanced tech they would have had to share). Add to that a heavy dose of garden-variety racism (Nero blamed all Vulcans for letting Romulus die) and there you go.

In any event, as Salvor has already pointed out, Nero and the other Romulans are, well, emotionally compromised by having witnessed the destruction of Romulus. Indeed, even the act of shaving their heads and tattooing their faces, a variation on an ancient Romulan mourning custom (according to Nero they normally just painted their faces, and the paint would fade along with their grief), was meant to keep them in a permanent state of anger toward the Vulcans and the Federation. People who let their emotions dominate their thinking can do some strange and otherwise unthinkable things. Just ask Spock.

 

[VOODOOXI]

From what I gathered in Countdown, Nero fell out with Spock because he perceived Spock as too sympathetic to the High Council's reasons for rejecting Nero's proposal (they didn't trust the Romulan Empire with all the advanced tech they would have had to share). Add to that a heavy dose of garden-variety racism (Nero blamed all Vulcans for letting Romulus die) and there you go.

In any event, as Salvor has already pointed out, Nero and the other Romulans are, well, emotionally compromised by having witnessed the destruction of Romulus. Indeed, even the act of shaving their heads and tattooing their faces, a variation on an ancient Romulan mourning custom (according to Nero they normally just painted their faces, and the paint would fade along with their grief), was meant to keep them in a permanent state of anger toward the Vulcans and the Federation. People who let their emotions dominate their thinking can do some strange and otherwise unthinkable things. Just ask Spock.

That's kind of a stretch isn't it? Besides 99% of the people who are going to see this film have no idea the Countdown comic even exists.

 

[datas_cat_spot]

Well for Humans at least, behavior like this happens regularly. Fortunately not always with destructive results. Blaming a doctor when a patient is lost in the OR, ect. Old Spock and the other Vulcans behave rationally and try to save what they can when faced with the destruction of their planet. Romulans go off the deep end.

 

[Bisz]

Nero's motivations are for sure one of the weak points of the plot. They are not explained well, his relationship to Spock is not explained well, the supernova and how all that went down is not explained well.

I think the movie could have used some tweaking. They could easily have eliminated the Scotty in a tube and the ice monster scenes and used that time to elaborate on the plot. I know that if you want to appeal to a wide audience you don't want to riddle the movie with technobabble, but honestly, I think even Non Trek fans would question the whole supernova-Nero stuff as it was presented on screen because it just wasn't very good.

 

[NCC74894A]

From what I gathered in Countdown, Nero fell out with Spock because he perceived Spock as too sympathetic to the High Council's reasons for rejecting Nero's proposal (they didn't trust the Romulan Empire with all the advanced tech they would have had to share). Add to that a heavy dose of garden-variety racism (Nero blamed all Vulcans for letting Romulus die) and there you go.

In any event, as Salvor has already pointed out, Nero and the other Romulans are, well, emotionally compromised by having witnessed the destruction of Romulus. Indeed, even the act of shaving their heads and tattooing their faces, a variation on an ancient Romulan mourning custom (according to Nero they normally just painted their faces, and the paint would fade along with their grief), was meant to keep them in a permanent state of anger toward the Vulcans and the Federation. People who let their emotions dominate their thinking can do some strange and otherwise unthinkable things. Just ask Spock.

That's kind of a stretch isn't it? Besides 99% of the people who are going to see this film have no idea the Countdown comic even exists.

It's not a stretch at all. Everyone has their breaking point. Most of us just haven't reached it yet. Nero, on the other hand, has been driven way past it. Once that happens, all bets are off.

 

[SalvorHardin]

From what I gathered in Countdown, Nero fell out with Spock because he perceived Spock as too sympathetic to the High Council's reasons for rejecting Nero's proposal (they didn't trust the Romulan Empire with all the advanced tech they would have had to share). Add to that a heavy dose of garden-variety racism (Nero blamed all Vulcans for letting Romulus die) and there you go.

In any event, as Salvor has already pointed out, Nero and the other Romulans are, well, emotionally compromised by having witnessed the destruction of Romulus. Indeed, even the act of shaving their heads and tattooing their faces, a variation on an ancient Romulan mourning custom (according to Nero they normally just painted their faces, and the paint would fade along with their grief), was meant to keep them in a permanent state of anger toward the Vulcans and the Federation. People who let their emotions dominate their thinking can do some strange and otherwise unthinkable things. Just ask Spock.

That's kind of a stretch isn't it? Besides 99% of the people who are going to see this film have no idea the Countdown comic even exists.

It's not a stretch at all. Everyone has their breaking point. Most of us just haven't reached it yet. Nero, on the other hand, has been driven way past it. Once that happens, all bets are off.

 

[Samuel T. Cogley]

Agreed, Nero's hatred of Spock makes little sense.

When Spock was explaining what went wrong in the future, I was grasping for answers.

Spock boiled it down to: "I promised to help them. But I was too late."

That's it? What the fuck?

Luckily, I was so distracted by the pretty bells and whistles, that I happily stopped caring about Nero's motivations and went right back to enjoying the hell out of the movie.

Could what happened to Nero make him snap and act like he did? Possibly.

But from the perspective of the moviegoer's understanding, it would have been better for the writers to give us something a little more rational to work with, especially since even Spock seemed to think that Nero had justification for acting the way he did.

It could have been something as simple as having two planets that needed saving, and Spock chose one, leaving Miss Tessmacher's mother in Hackensack, New Jersey to die. Problem solved.

 

[cubbie]

I agree, the hatred of Spock, someone who was trying to help Nero and couldn't doesn't make much sense. I can understand why Nero hated Vulcans, but not Spock.

 

[Ptrope]

Besides 99% of the people who are going to see this film have no idea the Countdown comic even exists.

It's not a stretch at all. Everyone has their breaking point. Most of us just haven't reached it yet. Nero, on the other hand, has been driven way past it. Once that happens, all bets are off.

I have to agree with VOODOOXI, and it's a sad commentary on the "franchise" attitude that in order to get all of the story for the movie, you've also got to buy the comic - even though, as pointed out, 99% of the audience have no idea it even exists. The movie really should stand on its own, and whether he needs a grief counselor or not, Nero's rabid plan for revenge makes absolutely no sense in the context of the film. He doesn't need to know anything about time travel - the simple fact is that he knows he now has over a century before the star will explode, and he somehow knows that Spock was also caught in the black hole and somehow knows precisely when and where Spock will emerge. If he's rational enough for a deduction that complex, he's rational enough to team up with Spock and make sure the event never happens in his own time. As soon as he has Spock, he knows he has the technology to prevent Romulus's disaster - he doesn't need the approval, help or even the knowledge of either the Romulans or the Vulcans in order to prevent the supernova's destruction of his people.

It's a gaping hole in the plot, and seems to have been conveniently ignored because, well, to do otherwise would mean none of the changes that 'revitalized' Star Trek would have happened nor even been necessary. It's sacrificing good storytelling for a predetermined outcome of the plot (something we got for 4 years already on TV).

 

[Jeri]

Romulan culture is based on paranoia. They assume enemies everywhere, within their own culture -- and certainly from outsiders, especially Vulcans. Their history of paranoia starts with Vulcans; it's why they fled.

Virtually no one trusted Spock's mission, and he lived underground on Romulus most of the time. Given the paranoia, a grief-crazed Nero's logical path to Spock was understandable.

 

[T'Paul]

It would have been a 5 minute movie if Nero just zoomed over to the "City on the Edge of Forever" planet and went back and warned Romulus.

 

[cubbie]

It would have been a 5 minute movie if Nero just zoomed over to the "City on the Edge of Forever" planet and went back and warned Romulus.

Harlan Ellison would have demanded $5 out of the $10 paramount would have made from that movie

 

[T'Paul]

It would have been a 5 minute movie if Nero just zoomed over to the "City on the Edge of Forever" planet and went back and warned Romulus.

Harlan Ellison would have demanded $5 out of the $10 paramount would have made from that movie

Well they also could have used a chrono deflector, or zoomed around the Sun, or flown into the Nexus.

 

[Jeri]

Harlan Ellison would have demanded $5 out of the $10 paramount would have made from that movie

Ha! I love that. And it wouldn't have been released for 10 years.

 

[Ptrope]

It would have been a 5 minute movie if Nero just zoomed over to the "City on the Edge of Forever" planet and went back and warned Romulus.

Well, that's kind of the point (although why would he? He was already back in time). To my mind, if the story you 'want' to tell can only be told by completely abandoning common sense in the motivations and actions of your characters, tell a different story. Don't tell me that this was the only possible story that could've been Star Trek. A McGuffin and a gaping plot hole? A nonsensical 'motivation' for the chief villain? Might as well be Dr. Evil. Or Transformers (oh, wait ... ). I don't care how culturally ingrained the Romulans' paranoia is, when given the chance to save his entire race, would he instead scour the galaxy destroying every chance they had of being saved just to get revenge for something that hasn't happened? In essence, Nero himself was the sole agent responsible for his own people's destruction.

If they wanted to make Star Trek nothing but popcorn, just to be financially successful, it's a good move, but it could just as easily have been something else - surely Paramount, in pursuit of cash, could've said, "Hey, Trek hasn't gone so well lately - what if we hired that Abrams kid to create a new franchise? We could merchandise the hell out of it because he's made a pretty good name with the mainstream audience, what with that Lost show of his."

Star Trek has had its share of dumb moments - no argument there - but if the idea is to make a success of Star Trek, specifically, why use its dumbest moments as the bar?