The Kelvin Timeline Trilogy

[pst]

if there isnt to be any more Kelvin movies then just a shame the 3rd movie wasn't more of a trilogy capper building on/concluding what was foreshadowed in ST09/ID - The Shat, the Klingons, more timetravel/alt reality stuff (but obviously not concluding the timeline), just a total extravaganza of trekkiness for the 50th!

after the flack into darkness took for not taking the opportunity to make the kelvin timeline its own unique universe, did we ever really need shatner in these movies?

yeah the klingon threat was an unfulfilled promise (it should've paid off in into darkness itself) but i think beyond is a sweet, appropriate end to the series if that's what it ends up being...

 

[Tosk]

It's a bummer that they weren't always great, but I'm still glad they happened for the most part.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I'm totally fine if this is it for the Kelvin Timeline. I enjoyed all three films a lot, but then I always felt Trek movies should be bigger in scale and more action-oriented than any TV episode and they delivered on that, IMO. I actually enjoyed each film more than the one before, although I felt the villain's main motivation in Beyond was kind of weak.

I dunno, I think after three films though maybe it's time to do something different with Star Trek XIV though. I'm not sure if it should be a Kelvin TNG movie, a Kelvin TOS-spinoff movie with a new crew, or a movie with a totally clean slate that ignores both Kelvin and Prime continuity.

 

[Lance]

Do Generations properly. Hire James McAvoy to play a Kelvin-verse Picard and have him trying to convince Pine!Kirk to leave the Nexus, when it's the one thing that will return Pine!Kirk's father to him.

On second thoughts, maybe not.

 

[Relayer1]

after the flack into darkness took for not taking the opportunity to make the kelvin timeline its own unique universe, did we ever really need shatner in these movies?

It's the only reason I can see for doing another one...

 

[F. King Daniel]

It's the only reason I can see for doing another one...

It's a good thing they've got more imagination.

 

[Sakonna]

I've always been a big fan of all three Kevlin Timeline films. I have never really understood the disdain for "Into Darkness", from my vantage point each film has been an improvement from the preceding installment. I remember seeing "Into Darkness" with family, and walking out we were all praising how perfectly it kept the Star Trek essence alive while also fulfilling all the imperatives for a big summer blockbuster. We were baffled later when the fandom consensus emerged that the film has in fact done the exact opposite, trampled the Trek essence in favor of being a blow-out action pic.

I'm biased, since casting is what I've spent most of my life doing, but I really think the casting was the most crucial element in making these films work. All 7 characters are perfectly cast, and if any one of them had been wrong, it could have thrown off the whole endeavor. (And one of the 7 I had cast in a project of mine years previous, and it stands as one of the great nightmares of my career, as the actor in question is an absolutely vile, despicable, awful human being [or at least was at that time, people change and we haven't directly crossed paths again] -- usually I cast the project and they go off to shoot it and I no longer need to be involved, but in this case the actors extreme misbehavior had me pulled into crisis management every damn day. But even this garbage human being fits their Trek role so perfectly I enjoy watching them play it and totally forget about how terrible my direct involvements with them were!)

 

[Tim Thomason]

i assume this is directed at me.

in star trek 2009, i'm a shipyard bar patron, you can see me when uhura does her little tour of the bar. in star trek into darkness, i'm walking outside the kelvin archive and later i'm fleeing from the vengeance as she crashes into SF. you can't see me into darkness very clearly, unfortunately (despite all the closeups of shocked-looking extras).

Man, your character had the worst luck. First, the Archive explodes in London, then you move halfway across the world only to see a starship crash into the bay. You're a futuristic Frank Tower.

 

[pst]

Man, your character had the worst luck. First, the Archive explodes in London, then you move halfway across the world only to see a starship crash into the bay. You're a futuristic Frank Tower.

at least i was apparently a drinker.

 

[Smellmet]

the actor in question is an absolutely vile, despicable, awful human being [or at least was at that time, people change and we haven't directly crossed paths again]

Spill the beans.

 

[pst]

And one of the 7 I had cast in a project of mine years previous, and it stands as one of the great nightmares of my career, as the actor in question is an absolutely vile, despicable, awful human being

i won't make you divulge any secrets. but i will share that when i was on the set of star trek 2009, it was all smiling faces. on into darkness, there was a lot of tension and whispering that chris pine and zachary quinto weren't getting along (quinto and cumberbatch were on set when i was there, they seemed fine).

 

[Khan 2.0]

I'm biased, since casting is what I've spent most of my life doing, but I really think the casting was the most crucial element in making these films work. All 7 characters are perfectly cast, and if any one of them had been wrong, it could have thrown off the whole endeavor. (And one of the 7 I had cast in a project of mine years previous, and it stands as one of the great nightmares of my career, as the actor in question is an absolutely vile, despicable, awful human being [or at least was at that time, people change and we haven't directly crossed paths again] -- usually I cast the project and they go off to shoot it and I no longer need to be involved, but in this case the actors extreme misbehavior had me pulled into crisis management every damn day. But even this garbage human being fits their Trek role so perfectly I enjoy watching them play it and totally forget about how terrible my direct involvements with them were!)

i won't make you divulge any secrets. but i will share that when i was on the set of star trek 2009, it was all smiling faces. on into darkness, there was a lot of tension and whispering that chris pine and zachary quinto weren't getting along (quinto and cumberbatch were on set when i was there, they seemed fine).

Wow back in the 90s it was the pages of the trek issues of Cinefantastique for this type of gossip.. now its BBS!

 

[F. King Daniel]

i won't make you divulge any secrets. but i will share that when i was on the set of star trek 2009, it was all smiling faces. on into darkness, there was a lot of tension and whispering that chris pine and zachary quinto weren't getting along (quinto and cumberbatch were on set when i was there, they seemed fine).

I seem to recall a clickbait site publishing something to that effect waaaaaay back when.

 

[pst]

Wow back in the 90s it was the pages of the trek issues of Cinefantastique for this type of gossip.. now its BBS!

now i feel terrible for even discussing it.

I seem to recall a clickbait site publishing something to that effect waaaaaay back when.

now i feel worse.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Eh, don't feel too bad. They seemed all pally-pally in the BTS vids from Beyond so even if they were at each other's throats in 2013 maybe they sorted it out.

 

[saddestmoon]

I remember how excited I was, first glimpsing the USS Vengeance in STID (based on one of the trailers) - and I still love that starship!

The movie didn't disappoint either!

 

[DarKush]

To the OP, I think the Kelvin trilogy overall provided three action-packed, at times thrilling stories, on a scale larger than the other Trek films. That being said, I think they started great in 2009 and went awry with Into Darkness, which negatively impacted Beyond. It also didn't help Beyond's fortunes that Paramount didn't take advantage of to do more with the 50th anniversary of Star Trek.

As it stands I think all three Kelvin films have a lot of re-watch value. They have big action, lots of emotion, and very good production values. The weakest was Into Darkness, but that's because of the creative choices made, not the talent involved or displayed on screen.

That being said, I'm fine with them stopping at Beyond. I think the Kelvin films did what needed to be done, they kept Star Trek alive when it needed to be. And the 2009 film maybe made Trek cool in a way it's never been. However, they took so long to make a sequel they let the excitement fizzle, and Into Darkness didn't relight the match. Beyond was fine, however it also suffered from similar plots to the previous Kelvin films, with that Starbase just being a substitute for Earth.

Now that Trek is back on the small screen I'm fine with giving the Kelvin films a rest. Personally I wish they would just say Discovery is in the Kelvinverse so that could open the door for the occasional guest spot from the Kelvin Enterprise crew.

 

[Malaika]

My money is on Pegg being the difficult actor lol

as for the question of the thread, I'm a fan of these movies. I loved the first one that remains my favorite of the trilogy. Stid and beyond were good, they weren't bad BAD but they weren't always, exactly, the actual sequels I expected after the first one. I think the trilogy started with this huge potential to do new bold things thank to another reality, change the status quo a bit, do something that wasn't just for old fans like me etc etc .. but then it seems like the creative team got scared and started to fall in the nostalgia trap that culminated with Beyond that, frankly, was blatantly written to placate reboot haters and 'old fans' who didn't like certain aspects from JJ's trek.
I'm disappointed because I feel like they could've done much better, but they wasted the potential of this trek.
I always though that trek was too stuck by nostalgia to do anything truly new with it, so I believed a reboot was doomed to fail by, ironically, the original thing. This reboot seemed to prove me wrong at first...only to eventually lose itself in nostalgia anyway. This probably is the thing that makes me sad.

Beyond is, I guess, OK as the ending of the trilogy and, truthfully, it wasn't as bad as I expected before watching it. However, I really don't want it to be the end of this trek because it just isn't.. enough. It was too disconnected from the first two too, and the characters have no real evolution. They are stuck in some sort of limbo trapped by tos nostalgia, and it isn't cool. In a way, sometimes I feel like Pegg&Co didn't know what to do with the characters and their stories and essentially left it to the next writers to truly take the responsibility of having to continue a story that was started by another team. To truly do something, anything.
so again, it's ok but not enough. From my perspective, we never really got THE sequel of the first one so there is still a lot to do and a good amount of potential that is just waiting to get used.

that said, the fact I find flaws in the sequels isn't mutually exclusive with my also being someone who genuinely likes this trek and is a 'fan' of it, and would defend it, especially when I feel like these movies are still good products that don't deserve half of the hatred and vitriol I read some say about them.
The good is much more than the bad for me and I believe JJ&co deserve credit for doing something I didn't even think anyone could do. They really gave the characters and trek a new life.

 

[DarKush]

I'm not sure where the Kelvin films can go further at this point. The Kelvin films dared to be the first true Trek blockbusters, since perhaps The Motion Picture, and I can't see them escaping the big traps/pitfalls of blockbuster films which up the stakes. I can't see them doing a story about scientific exploration for a big budget Kelvin film. I see them doing action movies, war/invasion storylines, and with dashes of romance, humor, and derring-do.

To me the best place to continue the Kelvin universe is the small screen for live-action, but also continue comics series like To Boldly Go and finally start pumping out Kelvinverse novels. While a television show set in the Kelvinverse won't have the budget, and will lack in spectacle, I think that format allows for a deeper exploration of the characters and the contours of the alternate reality, that we aren't going to get a lot of in big budget films with blockbuster aspirations.

I can't see them not doing some big battle with the Klingons or the Borg if they do another Kelvinverse film. If it's to be believed that the Trek movie brand, if not the brand itself, is tarnished, then I can't see the suits not swinging for the fences by bringing in a full-on Klingon heavy film or resurrecting the Borg, the last major villain that achieved some mainstream popularity. And they would also have the selling point of Kirk versus the Borg, something we have yet to see in live-action. The To Boldly Go comics has already brought in the Borg and I could see live-action Trek doing it as well.

As it stands I think we have a nice trilogy of films, with something of a character arc for Kirk and Spock. And the new films also gave Uhura a new importance while at the same time developing a different side to Spock that we haven't seen much of in the Prime Universe. And the casting for the main characters was great, though unfortunately we didn't get to see as much character development or character moments for the rest of cast besides Kirk and Spock. But at least Scotty got a new friend with Keenser. And Jaylah was a cool new addition that would be neat to see in the Prime Universe at some point. I really wish that Discovery was either in the Kelvinverse or could use Kelvin characters. Anson Mount looks so much like Jeffrey Hunter its amazing, but I would've liked to have seen Bruce Greenwood as Pike again. Greenwood-Pike on Discovery would've been interesting.

 

[JKM]

I love the Kelvin films for the most part. They brought me into the Star Trek fandom after all, but near and dear to my heart is ST09 and more so STID. I know STID wasn't a perfect film, but most of my issues with it were cosmetic, such as perhaps making it so that John Harrison wasn't Khan, removing Spock's Khan scream or at least change it to just a yell of anguish, etc. I love those first two and re-watch them every few months.

And while I can understand the love for STB, it is not, to my mind, as good as the first two and is the weakest of the three. I was so disappointed by it. I'm one of those people who likes more of the character driven story lines, showing all the character's interactions and their relationships, what makes them who they are and the journey on the way.

STB felt to me like it ripped the soul out of the story and the story was all that was left, it felt like a list of must-haves with a tic next to each item. And not to mention, it was a story that did not match what had been advertised before it came out. It did remind me of a TOS episode, but episodes have a whole season to tease and bring along relationships between characters. A movie has only about an hour and a half to make the same impact and for me that formula did not work for the large screen. To me, if we end the Kelvin timeline here, it will have gone out with a whimper and not a bang and I will feel sad about that.