What's keeping me out of the theatre....

[Cheebo]

And the posters were right. Even if you didn't like Roger Moore as Bond he WAS James Bond. Not a fake bond or wannabe Bond. Not liking something doesn't mean it isn't real or established.

The posters were promotion, the selling of a notion. That's fine for courting hiveminds exhibiting lemming-like behavior, but I can make my own choices about drama (and toothpaste and all sorts of other things) without being told who is (or SHOULD BE) what, ACCORDING TO THE PEOPLE SELLING THE PRODUCT.

But it isn't up to you to decide who is Jim Kirk and who it isn't. That's up to Paramount and the powers that be, you can decide to not like it or like it but you can't claim Pine's Kirk isn't Kirk. Because he is, whether you want him to be or not. Chris Pine is Captain Kirk. Full stop.

 

[Warped9]

Just wait until I actually see this film and post my assessment. I'll need fireproof protective gear.

You ain't kidding, buddy. I've posted my favorable reaction to the movie many times and still I've been "skewered" by the (rubber) rapier wits of the cheerleaders.

I admit to curiosity about aspects of the film and how characters have been inyterpreted. Bruce Greenwood is a good actor and while not my first choice for Pike it isn't a bad one. And really there's little we know of Pike beyond the one episode. The guy portraying McCoy has also got me curious.

But as I was debating with some younger guys who saw it yesterday I'm bummed by changes made for a reboot that strike me as wholly unecessary, almost as if meant to deliberately alienate older fans.

I'll see.

 

[ST-One]

I haven't seen the movie, so forgive me for injecting this viewpoint into the thread. But Stiles' motivation was a long family history, which is certainly as valid a motivation as any for characters in drama. As for the guy sitting next to wannabeKirk in the clip from Abrams, he strikes me as jingoisitic, making a comment in more of a 'I want RED DAWN to happen so I can realize my potential' kind of way, not as a serious valid character motivation.

Probably less motivated even than the assassins in TUC, who previously set the bar pretty low for the 'enlist in starfleet' / best o' the best tradition.

So? This Olsen-character is supposed to come across as an idiot.

So in a sense, this incarnation of TREK is supposed to really echo back to even before the very earliest version of GR's Trek, (2 years before GL Coon), when in a CAGE outline, he has the Cap kicking somebody off his ship for shooting an alien out of general xenophobia, the idea being that folks like that shouldn't even be on starships in the first place, but this guy somehow got through the screening process. (while the guy in Abrams is just your typical 'enlist in SF' type, I guess, and it is like signing up for a tour in our middle east, no empathy or special 'qualify as human(e) skillsets required.)

A straw man to make the less-straw men look more substantial?

This character is just there so that our heros can look even better.

But I guess you'll have an insulting, arrogant dismissal for this also.

 

[ST-One]

almost as if meant to deliberately alienate older fans.

I'll see.

Once you have seen it, you will realise that Abrams and Co. got out of their way to not alienate older fans (but they did so without harming Star Trek's mass-appeal).

 

[trevanian]

So? This Olsen-character is supposed to come across as an idiot.

So in a sense, this incarnation of TREK is supposed to really echo back to even before the very earliest version of GR's Trek, (2 years before GL Coon), when in a CAGE outline, he has the Cap kicking somebody off his ship for shooting an alien out of general xenophobia, the idea being that folks like that shouldn't even be on starships in the first place, but this guy somehow got through the screening process. (while the guy in Abrams is just your typical 'enlist in SF' type, I guess, and it is like signing up for a tour in our middle east, no empathy or special 'qualify as human(e) skillsets required.)

A straw man to make the less-straw men look more substantial?

This character is just there so that our heros can look even better.

But I guess you'll have an insulting, arrogant dismissal for this also.

As usual, you give me WAY too much credit. I can't possibly top your last reply (plus, isn't it more fun when we agree, like for those 7 picoseconds a couple weeks back?)

Okay, maybe there WAS a bit of insult and arrogance in that last 'graph, but I'm really not being dismissive. Not at all.

Honest.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

And the posters were right. Even if you didn't like Roger Moore as Bond he WAS James Bond. Not a fake bond or wannabe Bond. Not liking something doesn't mean it isn't real or established.

The posters were promotion, the selling of a notion. That's fine for courting hiveminds exhibiting lemming-like behavior, but I can make my own choices about drama (and toothpaste and all sorts of other things) without being told who is (or SHOULD BE) what, ACCORDING TO THE PEOPLE SELLING THE PRODUCT.

According to The Last Action Hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger is Hamlet.

 

[trevanian]

And the posters were right. Even if you didn't like Roger Moore as Bond he WAS James Bond. Not a fake bond or wannabe Bond. Not liking something doesn't mean it isn't real or established.

The posters were promotion, the selling of a notion. That's fine for courting hiveminds exhibiting lemming-like behavior, but I can make my own choices about drama (and toothpaste and all sorts of other things) without being told who is (or SHOULD BE) what, ACCORDING TO THE PEOPLE SELLING THE PRODUCT.

According to The Last Action Hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger is Hamlet.

that settles it: prince of denmark AND guv'nor of CA, he really HAS done it all. (or to put it in trek terms: ceasar and christ: they had them both.)

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Chris Pine is Captain Kirk. Full stop.

Well, he is now anyway and the vast majority of fans who've expressed an opinion seem to accept it just fine.

Just as Daniel Craig has been a smashing success as James Bond despite yowling and stamping of little feet by the sort of droolers who put together www.craignotbond.com.

 

[trevanian]

It's a serious pity the CnB folks didn't actually take time to get some talented folk aboard and get their shit together ... kind of like the yippies who undercut their own position to the detriment of their intentions, or PETA, which might actually accomplish something good if it weren't so hell-bent on going off half-cocked.

Oh yeah, that 'majority trumps' thing again ... how did that work out for Gore? Or the country?

 

[trevanian]

And the posters were right. Even if you didn't like Roger Moore as Bond he WAS James Bond. Not a fake bond or wannabe Bond. Not liking something doesn't mean it isn't real or established.

The posters were promotion, the selling of a notion. That's fine for courting hiveminds exhibiting lemming-like behavior, but I can make my own choices about drama (and toothpaste and all sorts of other things) without being told who is (or SHOULD BE) what, ACCORDING TO THE PEOPLE SELLING THE PRODUCT.

But it isn't up to you to decide who is Jim Kirk and who it isn't. That's up to Paramount and the powers that be.

You're talking about product; I'm not. I'm talking about something that started as part of a product and really took flight as a result of creativity on the part of the makers AND connectivity on the part of some viewers, which in some small yet important way, made things feel different. Not in a 'this bar of soap makes me feel fresh' way, but in a 'I look at things differently' way.

If you insist on pushing the product notion, well fine; you can repackage and put 'new&improved' on the next iteration, but that isn't what I'm talking about, so I feel absolutely free to evaluate your new product at a remove and find it lacking.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

Just wait until I actually see this film and post my assessment. I'll need fireproof protective gear.

You ain't kidding, buddy. I've posted my favorable reaction to the movie many times and still I've been "skewered" by the (rubber) rapier wits of the cheerleaders.

I admit to curiosity about aspects of the film and how characters have been inyterpreted. Bruce Greenwood is a good actor and while not my first choice for Pike it isn't a bad one. And really there's little we know of Pike beyond the one episode. The guy portraying McCoy has also got me curious.

But as I was debating with some younger guys who saw it yesterday I'm bummed by changes made for a reboot that strike me as wholly unecessary, almost as if meant to deliberately alienate older fans.

I'll see.

Here's what I posted over in Trek XI under the thred title "Red Matter is the Key":

"To understanding the movie's philosophy, that is. The red matter of the movie looks llike like nothing so much as red gumballs (particularly in that one delightfully surreal sequence where the screen is filled with out-of-focus globules of the stuff), signalling us that this movie is a bubblegum entertainment, nothing more.

Those of us trekkies who were fans of TOS as a somewhat cerebral and self-serious presentation of solid pulp SF in a serious dramatic format (easy to forget, in this post-NuBSG world, just how groundbreaking that was) were right to dread this movie and many of us, with good reason, will despise it. In many ways, it is a betrayal of what we looked to Star Trek to be. But mainstream media science fiction has grown a great deal since 1966 and, in a world that has given us 2001, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, eXistenZ, Children of Men and even Robo-Cop (shrewd and devastating satire, there), do we really need Star Trek to be brainy? Yes, this new movie is a travesty in the truest sense of the word but it is an infectiously enjoyable travesty, with a heart that fills the space where its brain should be and a delightfully sophomoric sense of whimsy. (Plus, the old canard about Kirk romancing green women has finally been made real.)

In short, and in spite of it being everything I feared it would be, I liked--no, loved--this movie. Seems I still have taste for the red matter after all."

And, in reference to the movie presenting us with a Star Trek that, even taking into account the time travel-inflicted changes, is fundamentally incompatible with the best (or, at the least, the most serious) eoisodes of TOS:

"Comics have been doing this for for years--look at all the radically different Batmen we've had over the years, ranging from the wholly innocuous to the relentlessly grim. Likewise James Bond--at least in the movies. But, because the seriousness with which Trek handled itself right out of the gate, it has been locked into a ever-more constricting and ever-less interesting canon. It became a mass-market future history but without the kind of powerhouse SF writers you would need to keep such a thing interesting.

The thing is, for all the cerebration I mention in my first post, Trek was, from the start, set in a universe only a few steps removed from Flash Gordon serials--that was part of its sublime appeal, how it could present such beliavable, "grown-up" characters and situations in a setting that was so patently absurd, even by the standards of the literary SF of its time. This movie disposes of the grown-ups early on and gives the ship (now looking more like a child's toy than ever before, inside and out, complete with the Willy Wonka pipe-werx and an alien Oompa-Loompa) to the over-grown children, most appropriate for a film pitched at the children of the third (or is it fourth?) consecutive generation plagued by Peter Pan syndrome."

 

[trevanian]

"Red Matter is the Key":

"To understanding the movie's philosophy, that is. The red matter of the movie looks llike like nothing so much as red gumballs (particularly in that one delightfully surreal sequence where the screen is filled with out-of-focus globules of the stuff), signalling us that this movie is a bubblegum entertainment, nothing more.

So this red stuff ... visual equivalent to GQ's omega 13 bubble helix, or more closely aligned to the too-pretty-to-seem-deadly radiation-of-the-week from NEMESIS?

(I just picked up THE TRIP on DVD and am wondering how the psychedelic stuff from that flick would cut with what you're describing. )

 

[T'Bonz]

Folks, do NOT put spoilers in the damned thread without spoiler tags. If you're a regular and you do this (not someone who just joined and might be ignorant of the rule,) you will be warned.

 

[ST-One]

"Red Matter is the Key":

"To understanding the movie's philosophy, that is. The red matter of the movie looks llike like nothing so much as red gumballs (particularly in that one delightfully surreal sequence where the screen is filled with out-of-focus globules of the stuff), signalling us that this movie is a bubblegum entertainment, nothing more.

So this red stuff ... visual equivalent to GQ's omega 13 bubble helix, or more closely aligned to the too-pretty-to-seem-deadly radiation-of-the-week from NEMESIS?

Nope, neither.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

I haven't seen the movie, so forgive me for injecting this viewpoint into the thread. But Stiles' motivation was a long family history, which is certainly as valid a motivation as any for characters in drama. As for the guy sitting next to wannabeKirk in the clip from Abrams, he strikes me as jingoisitic, making a comment in more of a 'I want RED DAWN to happen so I can realize my potential' kind of way, not as a serious valid character motivation.

Probably less motivated even than the assassins in TUC, who previously set the bar pretty low for the 'enlist in starfleet' / best o' the best tradition.

wannabeKirk

Chris Pine IS James T. Kirk.

Well, how can I argue with that? This POV of yours is put forth in EXACTLY the same fashion as movie posters from the 70s told us that 'Roger Moore IS James Bond' (and it was quite convincing to those audiences who loved Burt Reynolds car chase movies.)

Who could DARE argue with such an assessment?

Chris Pine plays Kirk as he is in the public imagination: a green babe in one hand and a ray gun in the other, as Rick Berman once described him. What he does not play is the "positively grim" "stack of books with legs" who was deadly serious about his job, the Kirk we know. (The film does tell us that Kirk is a genius but we never see him do so much as crack a book.) Pine's Kirk is more Han Solo than Shatner's Kirk. But that's just what Pine said he intended to give us and Abrams seem to want just that. Quite frankly, as much as I prefer the other guy (I love how much of an obsessive prick Kirk is for most of TMP, for example), I'm not exactly complaining. Pine has a lot of charm.

 

[trevanian]

With a future film, I'm guessing they can't just reverse course and make Kirk into something like the reserved commanding figure from BALANCE OF TERROR and CHARLIE X, can they? Would seem like too much of a swerve, plus it'd put whatever Qunito/Pine chemistry that is in there at risk (though I think it'd probably help with establishing any Spock / McCoy dynamic, assuming they are even willing to tackle that aspect with other actors.)

 

[Brutal Strudel]

I don't think Abrams has any interest in that kind of Kirk. He wants Star Trek to be more like Star Wars--he said he found Trek "talky." Upon seeing the movie, I understood why he worried he might take Trek into Galaxy Quest territory. If he'd had episodes like "BoT" in mind, I really don't think that would have been a concern.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

With a future film, I'm guessing they can't just reverse course and make Kirk into something like the reserved commanding figure from BALANCE OF TERROR and CHARLIE X, can they? Would seem like too much of a swerve, plus it'd put whatever Qunito/Pine chemistry that is in there at risk (though I think it'd probably help with establishing any Spock / McCoy dynamic, assuming they are even willing to tackle that aspect with other actors.)

I don't think Abrams has any interest in that kind of Kirk. He wants Star Trek to be more like Star Wars--he said he found Trek "talky." Upon seeing the movie, I understood why he worried he might take Trek into Galaxy Quest territory. If he'd had episodes like "BoT" in mind, I really don't think that would have been a concern.

Suffice to say, I enjoyed the movie but I wished that Kirk was a bit more reflexive. I wanted there to be a scene or brief bit with Bones, Spock, Pike, or even Uhura where Kirk had to confront that perhaps he was wrong about his choices (e.g. the Kobayashi Maru Test) or even admit that he might be wrong.

 

[bismarck_1892]

almost as if meant to deliberately alienate older fans.

I'll see.

Once you have seen it, you will realise that Abrams and Co. got out of their way to not alienate older fans (but they did so without harming Star Trek's mass-appeal).

Yes, that's why they made a complete reboot by destroying Star Treks most enduring and favorite and famous race.

 

[Noname Given]

almost as if meant to deliberately alienate older fans.

I'll see.

Once you have seen it, you will realise that Abrams and Co. got out of their way to not alienate older fans (but they did so without harming Star Trek's mass-appeal).

Yes, that's why they made a complete reboot by destroying Star Treks most enduring and favorite and famous race.

What? They destroyed Earth and humanity?