Obviously not.
In addition to spoiler code, this board should consider adding "Warning: opinion about to be stated as fact" code.
Kind of a pissy response to
lawman's very reasonable and reasoned post, don't you think?
Hey, I'll admit that Paramount got my money. They got it times for this film: once at the drive-in, once for the DVD (on sale) and once for the Blu-Ray (also on sale; I wanted to see if the best picture I could get would improve things). in much the same way that I tried to give ENT a fair shot by suffering through all of it, I've tried to give AbramsTrek a fair shot, as well. And after all that, I still find it to be a below-average film with what could have been great VFX, if they hadn't been spoiled by the cinematographic decisions of its hotshot director, who, quite frankly, managed to make the entire film look like Amateur Night.
I don't think
Trek, as a franchise, has ever been perfect. But I do expect a significantly-higher level of professionalism at the budget accorded to this movie. And, after 4 years of double-speak from B&B about how ENT was supposed to be a "whole new vision, not your father's
Star Trek" and getting little but backstory retellings of what they thought were the fans' favorite trivia - and getting it pretty much wrong every time - I was disappointed that the so-called "reboot" of the franchise was yet another shortcut through time in order to get away with changing everything while still having an excuse for it, while at the same time wasting my time with 'cute' in-jokes to show me 'just how much the writers are fans, too." On top of that, I just don't buy the whole "New fans don't know anything about the old show and wouldn't accept it" while redesigning the ship 'just enough' that it looks too different for many old fans to accept it and not different enough for the new fans to know or
give a damn! To me, that's an incredible waste of time and effort for a lousy payoff in both directions.
You know what? I'm a fan of
Trek and even
I'm sick of fans' ideas of what makes a
Trek story. Why? Because we rarely come up with anything new
either - we mostly indulge in backstory trivia and beating every dead horse that beams in. And for me, that was a big part of AbramsTrek, too. I don't give a rat's ass about how all these characters came together - never have! Let's see what their
next adventure is, not rehash their past. For a franchise supposedly intent on showing us the future, it sure has indulged in a lot of useless necrophilia and nostalgia in this past decade.
As for what Abrams did that was "original" - how original is adding lens flares to a film? How exciting is it to
not be able to see what you've paid good money to see? Just shine a flashlight in your own eyes every 5 seconds for two hours and tell me you got your money's worth for the ride - it was annoying, and it had no purpose other than to act as a replacement for actual excitement. It was unprofessional, IMO - it was a cheap gimmick. As was the crap about 'trying to make it more realistic and accessible' - by using a brewery and a 1930's generating plant as plausible interiors for 23rd century
starships. I'm frankly flabbergasted by the amount of spin that's used to try to sell that in the extras on the discs, esp. when they say that it would've been impossible to make something that 'believable' in CGI. If Ryan Church can imagine it in 2D, I don't for a second believe that it couldn't be made 'real' in 3D. Sorry, but those interiors scream "Roger Corman" to me, or worse,
Space Mutiny - all those years ago, we laughed along with Mike and the 'bots as they pointed out the silliness of a warehouse being used as the bowels of the
Battlestar Galactica; if only we'd known then ...
I felt cheated by AbramsTrek. They held out candy and then cheaped out on us. They promised us something new and then littered it with bad in-jokes that only pointed out how they were failing to serve even one master, let alone two. They took some decent progress that's been made in melding CGI and live-action seamlessly and realistically, like camera movement and focus-pulls, and beat us senseless with overcooked visuals and a director who thinks physically knocking the camera back and forth improves the storytelling.
Trek needed a serious director, not a hotshot who thinks that everything should be "cool," and who can't seem to find a solid story with both hands and one of his many flashlights. It needed less fanboy silliness and more maturity - not that the story needed to be deadly serious or "good science fiction," but if it's not going to be good science fiction, it should, at the very least, be a good, sensible story. For me, it really wasn't.
And see - I managed all that without an ounce of hatred
. (oh, and I may be the only one here who thinks Urban's McCoy was the worst parody in the film - except maybe for Yelchin's Chekov.
Man that was bad! Those both belonged in an SNL skit, not in this movie.)
