Trek XI piece in Time offers praise for TNG

[Mordock]

Writer Lev Grossman has written a short piece about the new film for Time, but, interestingly, he has built it around his fondness for TNG:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1893488,00.html

TNG wasn't dirty and real like Star Wars or degraded and cyberorganic and cosmopolitan like Blade Runner. This was the other future, the one that wasn't ever actually going to happen, but you wished it would. And it was riveting. Unconstrained by plausibility or topicality, TNG was free to be playful and sexy and self-aware and melodramatic and often just plain dramatic.

 

[Anwar]

It's nice to see not everyone had forgotten that it's not a bad thing for sci-fi to not be grimdark 100% of the time.

 

[zephramc]

Very nice. Thanks for sharing Mordock. I thought this was humorous...

But the aughts have been a boom decade for the revival of seemingly terminal franchises. Batman Begins redeemed the Caped Crusader from the hell of Batman & Robin. Casino Royale restored a vividness to James Bond that I wouldn't have believed possible after Die Another Day. The new Battlestar Galactica was a triumph. Superman Returns ... well, you can't blame them for trying.

 

[tranya]

I'm not sure how a film with 9000 lens flares can be considered "grimdark."

I'm glad to see them pandering to the TNG crowd as it might get some Trekkies into the seats, just as much as I'm thrilled to see this movie blasting away the tired, staid, corporate, and just plain sanctimonious tone of TNG.

 

[TheLonelySquire]

Writer Lev Grossman has written a short piece about the new film for Time, but, interestingly, he has built it around his fondness for TNG:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1893488,00.html

TNG wasn't dirty and real like Star Wars or degraded and cyberorganic and cosmopolitan like Blade Runner. This was the other future, the one that wasn't ever actually going to happen, but you wished it would. And it was riveting. Unconstrained by plausibility or topicality, TNG was free to be playful and sexy and self-aware and melodramatic and often just plain dramatic.

Listen, I like TNG and have the complete series, but no way is it the future I hope we would have. Far too vanilla for me. And dramatic? I don't think so!

 

[Tomalak]

I swear that if the Enterprise-D sets weren't beige, people wouldn't make such tired generalisations. Staid, undramatic? Whatever.

 

[Anwar]

Exactly, I mean if the bridge looked the way it did in "Yesterday's Enterprise" all the time, but everything else was the same, nobody would complain.

 

[JustKate]

"Undramatic"? You have got to be kidding. People are funny, that's all there is to it.

Edit: And by the way, I don't kneel down every night and pray for a "dramatic" future. I doubt anybody does. Drama - such as TNG - is great to watch but to live? Not so much.

 

[Amaris]

Great article. I hope, however, with great fervor, that he is wrong about Star Trek being ours. That we can feel that intimacy with the characters again, and revel in it.


J.