dan_bevan said:I'm still unsure if this is the right way to go. Reinventing the series could be a good idea if it's done the right way, for example when the Batman Begins film was released, i think it re-invented Batman brilliantly and was similar to the original 2 films.
The flaw with this oft-made argument is simple... the movies are not in any way the "source material." The source material is the comic books.
The thing that made the first Batman movie remotely watchable was that it attempted, for the first time, to approximate the "feel" of the comics. But it did so in a freakishly stylized way and, original popularity aside, the film really doesn't stand up very well.
Besides... the filmmakers screwed up a CORE point of the character. Batman never uses guns. EVER. Yet in that movie, he had machine guns and rockets on my car and plane. TOTALLY out-of-character.
They got this RIGHT in "Batman Begins." After you've watched this movie, you know why he hates guns so much, and you'd never expect to see him use one. That's true to the SOURCE MATERIAL.
The further the movies (or the 60s TV show) deviated from the original conception of the character, the worse the shows were. True, for a brief time in the 60s they actually "changed" the comics to more closely reflect the TV show... but that thankfully ended when Denny O'Neil came on board at DC Comics.
"Batman Begins" is almost directly lifted from three of the best Batman stories of the past several decades. They didn't really make up anything... they just faithfully translated things that had already been done. And as a result, the film was WONDERFUL.
See, this is CRUCIAL to get. THEY DID NOT REINVENT ANYTHING. They simply decided to be true to the original material. And that's what made for a great movie.
If the filmmakers for this new Trek film do the same thing... stay true to the source material (in terms of characterization and just general FEEL as much as in terms of details!)... they'll most likely do well. On the other hand, if they try to "reinvent" it, I fully expect a disaster. Much like the disastrous "reinvention" of "Lost In Space" (which actually made the original TV show look GOOD by comparison!)
However with the Star Wars prequel films, i didnt find them that great and because of that, i think it has made me think worse about the original 3 star wars films.
So if the new Star Trek film is a failure then not only will it kill off Star Trek completely, it will wreck people's memories of Trek when it was at its best.
A reasonable point, but I disagree. See, I think that it's been schlock crap like "Voyager" that has "ruined people's memories of Trek when it was at its best."
This movie is starting from a point where people have already "had their childhood's raped" and we're just sorta hoping that someone will come along and fix all of that. If they don't... it's no big deal... we'll just have to accept that the corpse-like thing we keep glancing at is really a corpse and not just someone in a really sound sleep.
Birth of the Federation, Fall of the Federation, Earth-Romulan War, WWIII, Eugenics War, Post-Dominion War, Federation Civil War, Starfleet Academy, Focused on Federation Civilians for a Change, Klingon-focused, Romulan-focused, Borg-focused, All Mirror Universe All the Time, Far-Future SuperDuper Tech, Crossover with Star Wars, Farscape, Firefly, Stargate, BSG, Babylon 5, Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (not all at once, tho).
window dressing.
