The phaser sucks! The art direction and production designs in this movie are awful. I do think the movie will be a big hit however the look of the film is very important to me! That is just the type of fan I am.
Rationalized New Phaser (Small review)
- Thread starter Johnnymuffintop
- Start date
So I was trying to think what this reminds me of and at work to day it finally struck me.... Porter Cable tools! A lot of their power tools look like this with the 50's-esque chrome finish. I always liked that. Much like the new Enterprise, this phaser design is growing on me too.
--Alex
--Alex
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Here's a couple of images of the real prop originally posted on the RPF:
So, yeah, it doesn't really look like the toy.
It looks like an old garden water hose nozzle ... what a dumb way to evoke the 60s.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Here's a couple of images of the real prop originally posted on the RPF:
So, yeah, it doesn't really look like the toy.
Huh. Looks a lot more like a real tool than a movie prop. That's a first for Star Trek.
The shot from ST:TUC is a nice reminder of why it was way past time to reboot Trek.
Oh dear. Star trek might be popular with kids again. The horror.
A movie about spaceships that kids can't enjoy is pretty much a waste of time.
SOLARIS, 2001, DEEP IMPACT, 2010, TMP, SOLARIS again ... NOT hugely kids-oriented, but everybody who sees movies would already know that, right?
Now movies with spaceships that are pitched at an infantile kid level ... like BLACK HOLE, MESSAGE FROM SPACE, STARCRASH, ICE PIRATES ... those are mostly wastes of time.
Boring.
Fantastically well made and well intentioned but...boring. And a structural mess.
Good but not great film.
Good film. Wish it had kept some of the style and the realistic depiction of space travel from 2001, though.
Dear God, boring. And marketed to kids anyway.
Horrible movie. Just excruciating on every level.
True. Well, except for the ones that were.
Yeah. Those all sucked too. You forgot The Last Starfighter, which was a kid's film and also very good.
Guess there's no correlation after all between appealing or not to kids and being a good film.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
That very last part is true, but it is more significant to consider that I wouldn't have posted in the first place except to correct the wholly erroneous (deliberately erroneous?) notion of the other poster, which seems to exist only to buoy up the ILM guy's 'parts gotta move cuz of childhood' rap .... I mean geez, I love the ejector seat in GOLDFINGER, but I don't need Bond in a powerloader every time out (in fact, I'm of the opinion that it is best that if you give him something like that, that it breaks and he has to improvise.)
As for your earlier stuff in the post ... I wasn't saying these were good or bad, just that they weren't aimed at kids. If you think 2001 is a structural mess, that is your op, and if you don't like either SOLARIS, that is too. That doesn't mean you're childish, just not your thing. I don't agree about with anything you said about 2001, and think the second SOLARIS would have been better if it had been even more slowly paced (there is a twice as long docking version out there somewhere and I WANT IT.) But I do really like LAST STARFIGHTER. d
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trevanian
Rear Admiral
I started writing it with a divided list between pre-adolescent and juvenile, but then my fingers got tired. Apologies to one and all. (but with BLACK HOLE, they really rewrote and cut it down to be aimed very very low in age, except for the gratuitous pg stuff.)
I enjoyed the hell out of "2001" as a kid; so did the other kids I knew who were into science fiction. "2010," OTOH, is crap at any age.
A movie about spaceships that kids can't enjoy is pretty much a waste of time.
Yes, but there's a difference between making a smart movie that kids can also enjoy and making a 'dumbed-down' movie that courts to Joe Sixpack. For a reverse example I think of the 'Powerpuff Girls' - a great cartoon series that LOTS of kids enjoyed, but lots of young adults and adults also enjoyed because of how smartly it was written. Adults noticed subtle things about it that most kids didn't.
I haven't seen the new 'Trek' film yet so I'm reserving judgment on it as a whole. However, the revolving phaser barrel feels stupid, gimmicky, and impractical to me. It makes me think of the thalaron 'purse' Senator Tal'Aura left in the Senate at the beginning of 'Nemesis' - an excuse for a VFX gimmick. The overall shape and texture of the phaser feels okay in a trying-to-invoke-the-50s kind of way, and as Johnnmuffintop shown it could be possible to 'fix it' to make it more traditionally acceptable, but I can't get past that damn barrel. I saw some of the toys at K-Mart yesterday, and while I'm sure some kid will buy one and have a fun time with it, I don't think it's worth my fifteen bucks.
I haven't seen the new 'Trek' film yet so I'm reserving judgment on it as a whole. However, the revolving phaser barrel feels stupid, gimmicky, and impractical to me. It makes me think of the thalaron 'purse' Senator Tal'Aura left in the Senate at the beginning of 'Nemesis' - an excuse for a VFX gimmick. The overall shape and texture of the phaser feels okay in a trying-to-invoke-the-50s kind of way, and as Johnnmuffintop shown it could be possible to 'fix it' to make it more traditionally acceptable, but I can't get past that damn barrel. I saw some of the toys at K-Mart yesterday, and while I'm sure some kid will buy one and have a fun time with it, I don't think it's worth my fifteen bucks.
Of course there is. Throwing around references to junk like "Ice Pirates" was nothing more than a strawman.
The sad thing is, the design changes (like this one) really don't contribute anything to the film. Not long ago, I went to see a local screening of "The Wrath of Khan" which turned out to be anything but, so yeah, I've seen the Abrams movie. And there's nothing that they did in this movie that wouldn't have worked as well, if not better, if the designs had been kept far more faithful to the TOS designs.
I've got an old power drill (I keep it as a backup) that was pure metal, much like the phasers you see here. It's perfectly suitable for use in a nice, cool, climate-controlled environment. However, it's absolutely useless in a hot situation (like working outdoors during warm weather) since your hands end up sweating and it become impossible to hold the thing. Interestingly, the drill I've got also has a "trigger bar" much like you see here... which makes it virtually impossible to keep the thing straight and drill a true perpendicular hole without using some sort of drill guide.
More recent drill designs have totally abandoned this concept. They have grips which... well... GRIP. They have triggers which only require one finger, so you can keep it steady with the remaining three (plus your thumb) They remain cooler to the touch, or warmer to the touch, depending on the environment.
The "raw metal" design style is simply impractical.
As for the rotating barrel... anyone who's familiar with firearms (and I know there are quite a few here) know that, when replacing major hardware (such as a barrel) you need to recalibrate the sights. There is an inevitable "tolerances" issue that results in the target point being different.
Now, with this device... unless there's a targeting scope sensor pickup on each barrel end, and a display screen tied to that... I can't see any practical way of ensuring decent aim, much less of ensuring a precise "repeatability" of aim point after each "barrel swap."
Then there's the whole "tactical/stealth" thing. This sort of thing is easy to see, even from great distances (especially if there's daylight shining on it). There's a reason that "tactical" firearms are always dark or muted colors.
BTW, side note... I'd not noticed the apparent thumbwheel, so thanks to Gep for pointing that out. It give the device a LITTLE more utility, anyway.
Overall... when I look at this new design, I see something that copies the aspects that don't really matter (general "from a distance" appearance), removes a couple of poor elements from the original design (the snap-in #1 unit and the unprotected emitter barrel), adds several bad "new spins," (finish, spinny-barrels, bad trigger) and just... in general... "misses the point."
But like I said, they could've done the exact same movie using exact TOS props and nobody but the hardcore fans would've noticed, or cared.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Bullshit, you make these ludicrous absolute claims like there's something to them, with NOTHING to substantiate it (what the hell else is new) then keep going on after being called on it?
Go crawl back to someplace where the mods will protect you from the real world, like the abrams forum.
Good point.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
I don't find it informative in the least, thank you, since we have been discussing LIVE-ACTION movies here.
And not that it matters to the sycophants, but for the record, I'm pretty sure ICE PIRATES is actually more representative than most listed up there, just because (and correct me if I'm wrong) the movie really DOES fall into the Roger Guyett moving parts kiddiegasm, since there's a ship that splits into two or three ships during a chase.
So ICE PIRATES, by catering to that stunted kid in some of us, may be more germane to abramstrek in execution than some of the more highminded fare.
Are you serious? Medium says nothing about story or content. Those are the qualities that need comparing; otherwise, this is just a pathetic attempt to dodge the issue.
Dear God, there were moving parts on the Discovery in 2001.
WHY DID KUBRICK MAKE A FILM FOR IDIOTS????? 
Right. So the highly superficial resemblance of some technical elements between the two forms powerful evidence against the new film you haven't even seen.
Which side of this argument is getting distracted by shiny objects, again?
What I don't like about this is the wear and tear on the phaser. As someone who has been around guns his whole life I find this unrealistic for average use. It looks more like something pulled out of a tool box from under a couple of wrenches. Anyone who lets their weapon get that bad would surely spend time in the brig. Starfleet is military and this would not fly. Sure it looks cool on the screen, but not very realistic.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Are you serious? Medium says nothing about story or content. Those are the qualities that need comparing; otherwise, this is just a pathetic attempt to dodge the issue.
Dear God, there were moving parts on the Discovery in 2001.
Right. So the highly superficial resemblance of some technical elements between the two forms powerful evidence against the new film you haven't even seen.
Which side of this argument is getting distracted by shiny objects, again?
Dude or dudette, I'm not the guy bringing up how space movies HAVE to appeal to kids. And if you can't see the difference between antennae and hatches and the more trivial moving parts, well, less power to you.
I'm not the one arguing they have to. I'm saying appealing to kids does not automatically invalidate the film having worth to adults. There's no correlation between the two.
The new Enterprise has a moving deflector/main sensor dish. (Which, by the way, so did the original; there's a hinge built into the connector attaching the dish to the secondary hull.) That and the unclear "moving fins" reference are the only moving parts issues relating to the ships in Trek XI that I'm aware of. So unless the "moving sensor/communications array" on the Discovery is being held to a different standard than the "moving sensor/deflector/communications array" on the new Enterprise... well, less power to your argument.
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