Longtime lurker, first time poster:
You can defend the 60s design as a classic of its era, and I'd agree. You can't defend it now.n.
What? Sure you can! It's a beautiful piece of design.
The
production values we associate with it may seem dated (just like the styrofoam rocks on every planet the crew visited), but the ship itself, and especially the bridge, represent a beautiful melding of form and function. And within the particular fictional reality at hand, it represents the state of the art for the 2260s. The design aesthetics of the period are well established.
That's not to say I object to the
concept of a redesign... but I think they should at least have stuck to something a little closer to the elegant proportions of the original ship. (A saucer that sweeps forward from the front of the engineering hull, not the back, for instance; or an engineering hull itself that hasn't been half scooped away. The new ship looks... front-heavy. Tipsy.) And I frankly think the new bridge will look dated long, long before the TOS version does.
As for the debate over the trailer, and Abrams' intentions? Well, as I wrote
on my blog, my reactions are mixed:
There are two aspects to this, I suppose... what the trailer tells us about the
story, and what it tells us about the
style of the film. Both involve a certain unavoidable amount of guesswork… but at the very least, insofar as the trailer is presumably intended to entice me as a potential viewer, it’s not quite hitting the mark.
As noted elsewhere, I have no fundamental objection to the idea of “reimagining” Star Trek. Based on the dribbles of information and imagery released thus far, I don’t necessarily agree with every aspect of what’s being done with this film, but I’ve been willing to remain cautiously optimistic.
That remains
mostly true in the wake of this trailer. It appears from what we see (and it’s been largely confirmed in interviews with Abrams and others) that this is first and foremost a coming-of-age film for James T. Kirk. Nothing wrong with that—and it opens up a genuinely unexplored niche in Trek history, never previously touched on except in scattered bits of dialogue...
I do think it’s important to respect established Trek canon where possible, but I’m not obsessive about it. Other long-time fans mostly seem willing to split that difference as well: e.g., as
Tom Bondurant writes,
Without canon, Star Trek is merely a collection of stories. With it, though, Trek is a vast centuries-spanning galactic tapestry. …
[The new Trek] all looks familiar, but obviously it’s been changed — and for some, those changes are dealbreakers.
[But] when you get down to it, Star Trek is about the boldly going… and for something like this to work, it can’t be hamstrung with minutiae.
It’s got to be a dicey proposition to attempt to please both dedicated fans and broader audiences, and I don’t envy the screenwriters. Certainly, as Bondurant also notes, the path of least resistance would have been simply to connect the dots of those scattered bits of dialogue from the original series… but that would offer little that’s novel or imaginative, and probably please nobody. This film will no doubt be full of Easter eggs for the fans, but it won’t build the story around them.
To my eyes, most of the tweaks to canon that are visible here can be accepted as either (A) artistic license, or (B) side-effects of the film’s time-travel plot. Putting all of the familiar bridge crew on Pike’s ship may be a bit of a stretch, but in general I’m willing to play along... Bob Orci
has promised that most of this stuff will be explained along the way. (Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect is the presence of Chekov, who as we all remember was an Ensign fresh from the academy during the FYM, easily 10-12 years younger than Kirk—so I can’t imagine how he could be part of the bridge crew years earlier, when Kirk himself was not yet an officer. Was it really necessary to include him at all? Does Chekov have fans?)...
But
stylistically?…
That’s a whole other kettle of tribbles. Perhaps the trailer’s not really reflective of the film as a whole: frankly, I hope not. Because this thing is shot and cut at such a frenetic pace that it could induce heart arhythmia. Almost every moment seems to focus on super-fast, in-your-face action. The music is much the same: nothing familiar (nor particularly dramatic; I certainly hope it’s not the actual score from the film), it serves mainly to drive home the roller-coaster pace of the thing. Every frame is bursting with sights and sounds, to the point where it blurs into sheer chaos.
Trek has never been about roller-coaster rides. It’s not about sensory overload. It’s about a sense of wonder, and imagination, and idealism. It’s about stories that unfold at a more measured pace, and action that (when it comes) makes sense and has maximum dramatic impact. When there’s an adrenaline rush, it’s
earned.
What this trailer’s sensibility reminded me of, more than anything, was Star
Wars. (And not just any Star Wars—worse, the Star Wars
prequels, with an aesthetic that leaves you feeling overstuffed yet undernourished.)
That’s why my reactions are mixed, and my expectations, unavoidably, somewhat lowered. I just hope that the red flags raised by this trailer aren’t representative of the finished product. That would undermine Trek far more than any story point or set redesign possibly could.
) and I was introduced to Star Trek through TNG, although after watching TNG, I watched TOS (albeit, not every episode) and I really liked it. I never really watched DS9 or Enterprise but I watched most episodes of Voyager as it used to be the slot between The Simpsons and Brainiac on Sky1.
