STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS - Grading & Discussion [SPOILERS]

[Franklin]

I keep reading a lot about how the new franchise doesn't "live up to Roddenberry's standard." Face it, Trek got good when Gene died. DS9 would never have aired had he lived and had any control.

For the courts review I submit exhibit A: Gene Roddenberry's writing credits:

The Cage
Mudd's Women
Charlie X
The Menagerie, Part I
The Menagerie, Part II
The Return of the Archons
Bread and Circuses
A Private Little War
The Omega Glory
Assignment: Earth
The Savage Curtain
Turnabout Intruder
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
TNG:
Encounter at Farpoint
Hide and Q
Datalore


I rest my case.

Most of those are good episodes. Only a few real clinkers on the list. I think the point you may be trying to make is there is variance among them in quality and the type of story being told. Of course, no one ever said the series wasn't a versatile platform for storytelling, or that the writing of one person can be uneven. (Except maybe folks who get hung up on "the vision thing" and the overal purity of the product.)

 

[Jolaris]

There was one single thing I dreaded more then anything for the last year....
That this movie would be a remake of TWOK and that it would be just as 'meh' as ´09, good as a flick but no Star Trek-soul.
´09 was to me a one night stand, it was fun while it lasted but I felt so very emotionally drained and empty afterwards.

Then a few days ago a friend told me to watch TWOK in preparation for the movie and suddenly all my hopes were dashed of seeing a good movie.
As the credits rolled my first conscious thought back in the real world was: "Well played J.J Abrams, well played!"
Or to put it in more emotional terms: BOOOOYAAAA! STAR TREK... IS... BACK!!!
For me it was the best Star Trek movie since 1996.

And after having a night to sleep over it, yup not a one night stand, still very much in love with it.
Still have goosebumps actually.
Even though I saw the Tribble resurrection coming a mile away Kirk's death actually made me cry, only to make me laugh out loud at Spock's heroic BSOD. I don't think I ever cried at a Star Trek movie before.

 

[Pauln6]

The point is not the magic blood... it is the whole setup.

Why do they need to capture Khan to get that blood sample, if they have 72 (!!! ) other augements waiting ON BOARD there.

Plus... this magic blood leads to something, they have created with that transwarp transporter.
Essentially you do not need starships in this reality anymore. Every single person, who watches the movie (as is capable of logical thinking) will ask him/herself the essential question: why didn't Starfleet use the transwarp transporter to follow Khan to Kronos?
The same problem occurs when you think the return from the dead through to the end: You now have the magic blood... death is history.

So, in essence TREK 3 doesn't need starships, nor doctors. The heroes cannot die anymore. That's loss of impact, loss of drama, although I am sure, that Orci and Kurtzman will simply forget that ridiculous plotpoint in the sequel.

Just lay back and enjoy the SFX, action ride, and do not pay to close attention to logic.
New TREK is like TRANSFORMERS and G.I. JOE. Simple, absolutely dumb, loud entertainment which is in essence about nothing but nice visuals and SFX.
Enjoy it as such, or leave it alone.

While I don't like these issues I think perhaps your overall stance is too much hyperbole. A tribble is a fairly simple life form. Kirk survived because his body was intact but his cells had been damaged by radiation. Although the biology was not explained in scientific detail, I think the serum is not that much of a miracle - it's more like an injection of super-powered stem cells.

However - it is stupid to suggest that such a serum would not already exist. Harrison is a product of 20th century science. Enhanced individuals are outlawed but this serum should already exist.

Similarly, in Trek 2009 I was annoyed that the transporter could travel over a light year. I think you can imagine my disgust when it's used to send someone 20+ light years onto not just an enemy planet but their homeworld.

However, despite them making an overpowered plot device about 500 times more powerful there are many ways that they could place restrictions on use - massive cell damage from use (where is Khan's blood when you need it?). It is a terrible, terrible plot device.

I really hope that they NEVER return to it in the animated series but then I said that after the last movie and they took it even further...

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

These are the episodes of Star Trek for which Gene Roddenberry received a sole teleplay credit:

The Cage
The Menagerie, Part I
The Menagerie, Part II
A Private Little War
The Omega Glory

These are the episodes for which he shared a credit with another writer:

Bread and Circuses (with Gene L. Coon)
The Savage Curtain (with Arthur Heineman)
Encounter at Farpoint (with D.C. Fontana)
Hide and Q (with Maurice Hurley)
Datalore (with Robert Lewin)

The episodes listed uptopic which are not included here are those for which the teleplay is credited to other writers and Roddenberry received a sole or shared "story by" credit.

As I mentioned before, a "story" can be anything from a one or two sentence premise to several pages. With rare exceptions scene breakdowns, detailed action, dialogue and character development are inherent in the teleplay itself. The teleplay is the actual script, the blueprint from which the episode is budgeted and produced. WGA contracts establish much higher payments and percentages of residuals for the author(s) of teleplays than for those awarded story credit alone.

BTW, I searched using the list of episodes presented uptopic as my basis. Therefore, if there are episodes that Roddenberry was credited for that were not in that list I've missed them in mine as well.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

´09 was to me a one night stand, it was fun while it lasted but I felt so very emotionally drained and empty afterwards.

You're sleeping with the wrong people.

 

[Cinema Geekly]

These are the episodes of Star Trek for which Gene Roddenberry received a sole teleplay credit:

The Cage
The Menagerie, Part I
The Menagerie, Part II
A Private Little War
The Omega Glory

These are the episodes for which he shared a credit with another writer:

Bread and Circuses (with Gene L. Coon)
The Savage Curtain (with Arthur Heineman)
Encounter at Farpoint (with D.C. Fontana)
Hide and Q (with Maurice Hurley)
Datalore (with Robert Lewin)

The episodes listed uptopic which are not included here are those for which the teleplay is credited to other writers and Roddenberry received a sole or shared "story by" credit.

As I mentioned before, a "story" can be anything from a one or two sentence premise to several pages. With rare exceptions scene breakdowns, detailed action, dialogue and character development are inherent in the teleplay itself. The teleplay is the actual script, the blueprint from which the episode is budgeted and produced. WGA contracts establish much higher payments and percentages of residuals for the author(s) of teleplays than for those awarded story credit alone.

BTW, I searched using the list of episodes presented uptopic as my basis. Therefore, if there are episodes that Roddenberry was credited for that were not in that list I've missed them in mine as well.

Add to that, I think the larger point of that list was that the creme de la creme of Star Trek both in shows or films do not appear.

Gene may have had a vision of the show when he started it, but ultimately the very best of Star Trek was done by other people.

To this day I can't stand the glorification of Gene. He had a great idea for a TV show, and he had some good ideas about how life should be in the future (by-in-large) but he isn't responsible for the shows best work.

In some cases Trek's best moments came from people who were just doing a gig and were never Trek fans.

 

[dulcimer47]

Here's a question for the Nerd Rage about "ripping off Wrath of Khan"


Was the Dark Knight a ripoff of Batman89?

This actually illustrates an important difference between Star Trek (prior to J.J.) and every other "franchise"...

Star Trek never rehashed their own stories before now (actually even '09 isn't a rehash, but STID clearly is).

Batman, Superman, X-Men, and many, many others retold their stories over and over again.

Joker is in a comic then in a 60's TV show, then in an 80's movie, then in a 00's movie, and it doesn't really seem like a ripoff, because that's what Batman has always done.

In the hands of J.J., Trek is now just "another franchise"...

Maybe in the next movie, the crew will have to go back in time to save the dolphins!

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

At least four of the outstanding TOS episodes were written by people who were among the most successful of sf prose authors before even trying their hands at television writing: Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Jerome Bixby and Norman Spinrad.

Take away their episodes and the original Star Trek is diminished by at least ninety percent.

 

[Phily B]

Star Trek never rehashed their own stories before now (actually even '09 isn't a rehash, but STID clearly is).

Er...

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Star Trek never rehashed their own stories before now (actually even '09 isn't a rehash, but STID clearly is).

This pretty thoroughly misses the point, because what ultimately doomed oldTrek was that the various producers repeated the same few storytelling and stylistic moves over and over and over, with little real evolution, for nearly forty years.

 

[Franklin]

I think the A.O. Scott review in The New York Times is the first I've read good or bad that takes be aback. He's a very respected reviewer, but one wonders if even this review is bad just because it's not the kind of movie he wanted to see. I think he's too professional to do that, but there are elements of it in the review, especially his dislike of the militarization of Starfleet and that he wishes the movie had the "wit and sincerity" of the old series (again romaticizing the past).
His "rotten" reviews at Rotten Tomatoes start at 2.5 of 5 stars. He thinks STID is that bad? Anyway, this one surprised me kind of like the Roger Ebert review of ST09 did.

Link:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/05/1...rected-by-j-j-abrams.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

 

[marksound]

Star Trek never rehashed their own stories before now (actually even '09 isn't a rehash, but STID clearly is).

Yeah ... no.

TMP was blatant in its 'rehashing' of "The Changeling." "The Naked Now" ripped off "The Naked Time." The one with Pulaski's rapid aging is too reminiscent of "The Deadly Years" to be a coincidence. And so on, and so on ...

It's been said that there are only so many stories to be told. Eventually any franchise is bound to revisit one of its own.

 

[BillJ]

While I haven't seen Into Darkness yet, I pulled this nugget from the Writer's Guide of TOS:



Sounds like Abrams understands Trek just fine.

 

[Phily B]

Star Trek never rehashed their own stories before now (actually even '09 isn't a rehash, but STID clearly is).

Yeah ... no.

TMP was a blatant in its 'rehashing' of "The Changeling." "The Naked Now" ripped off "The Naked Time." The one with Pulaski's rapid aging is too reminiscent of "The Deadly Years" to be a coincidence. And so on, and so on ...

It's been said that there are only so many stories to be told. Eventually any franchise is bound to revisit one of its own.

Nemesis was a far bigger rehash of TWOK than this film!

 

[BillJ]

Star Trek never rehashed their own stories before now (actually even '09 isn't a rehash, but STID clearly is).

You clearly have no idea what your talking about.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Star Trek never rehashed their own stories before now (actually even '09 isn't a rehash, but STID clearly is).

Er...

I wonder how many episodes this guy's seen?

Here's an old thread listing many of Trek's recycled stories: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=128174

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

You guys don't understand - it's not a "rehash" if they do the same thing over and over as long as they change the names of the characters and the shapes of the bumps on their foreheads.

 

[dulcimer47]

My "Star Trek: Transformers" comment is actually completely accurate, as both are action/explosion/CGI-focused messes written by Orci and Kurtzman.

I'd rather see Patrick Stewart play a flute or read every part in the script by himself than these last two movies.

J.J. is the director, that's true, so I should have said, "J.J.'s writing team."

I'll absolutely compare 7 years of episodes to 2 films because those 2 films are what has replaced the legacy of Star Trek on TV for the time being, at least.

Kirk chopping wood was hardly even integral to the story, let alone the resolution of the story, as the magic Khan blood is. It's terrible writing and there's no way around that.

Of course Star Trek isn't real, that was obviously not my meaning. However, sticking a "Star Trek" label on something doesn't make it Star Trek, which is my main point here. If you put a Star Trek label on Fast and the Furious 6, does that make it Star Trek? Of course not, which is basically what has happened to this franchise.

 

[Franklin]

While I haven't seen Into Darkness yet, I pulled this nugget from the Writer's Guide of TOS:



Sounds like Abrams understands Trek just fine.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

My "Star Trek: Transformers" comment is actually completely accurate, as both are action/explosion/CGI-focused messes written by Orci and Kurtzman.

No.

Completely accurate would be simply to say "both movies were written by Orci and Kurtzman and others." The rest is no more than your personal opinion, for which no evaluation of "accuracy" can be vouchsafed.