Star Trek review (5-9-09)

This movie is actually what made me curious to go watch the original series and I was surprised by how good it is, cheesy like you said, but good. I mean before this movie I had only seen one episode of the original series and that was tribble trouble. But beyond that and some well known quotes from the show I had absolutely no knowledge of anything. So I think this is actually a good thing, it invites younger generations to take a look at a classic show. Just like the new transformers movie, despite how bad that was, got me into watching the cartoons again. Or how the new Batman, Spider-man, and X-men movies made me want to go find the cartoons again and watch the series that I grew up with. I know I'm not an 70's/80's child so I don't have the same series as you might have had. I was a 90's kid, I grew up with Batman Beyond and X-men Evolution and Transformers Armada, not the originals. But that's kind of the point isn't it. All of these series get reinvented all the time and sometimes they don't always connect. But they invite more people in and possibly make them curious to watch the originals especially when they are done well and do the original justice. I mean just last night I watch the second Star Trek movie, Wrath of Khan, with my little brother who is thirteen and he liked it. Why? Because he saw the new movie first and it gave he basic knowledge of the series it was based off of. Enough to let him in enjoy the old movie.

Oh and a scenes where there is no lens flare off the top of my head:
1.Kirk and McCoy on the Starfleet campus talking about Kirk taking the test a third time.
2.Inside the Starfleet base on Delta Vega while talking with Scotty.
3.On Vulcan when Spock is saving the elders.
4.When young Kirk is driving the car down the dirt road and over the cliff.
5.Basically any scene that happens outside on a planet.

True, I don't know the director so I wouldn't know if it's a style thing or not. Who knows. -shrug-

I love when Spock gives that big speech on the bridge and is like “THIS IS A DIFFERENT TIME LINE! THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT!” Loved this movie, thought it was really fun, exciting and well paced :)

bunf [Moderator] 06/03/2009 07:05 PM: “Thanks for wasting my time with a sanctimonious rant against nerds instead of….you know, reviewing the fucking movie.
No wonder you cant keep a job, you never get to the point.
And penultimate means second to last, it is not a synonym for ultimate”

Wow!
I'm all for making bunf a synonym for asshole.
Who's with me?

Yeah I stopped after TNG. I tried picking it up again with enterprise, the Scott Bacula prequel series. Its really good but Im never home when its on. Picard to the world!!!!!

As a startrek fan, and a guy that just watched this movie, THIS MOVIE SUCKS!!!

JJABRAMS REKILLED GENE RODENBERRY
and abrams make something without timetravel, fuck your divergent timeline bullshit

I'm a second generation ST fan, my dad has every ep. of the originial series on VHS

The casting was good though

Sorry Spoony, Star Trek isn't suppose to be simple. I really thought this plot was simple as crap bc i could pic out seens that were just completely bullshit. Yes, Nero is a dumbass and his ship is retardedly planned. All the Romulans look like Russian mafia.

I really agree with the second half of the video

Oh, plus, Highlander sucked.

I thought it was a nice reboot of the series. And at least now we don't have to endure acters in green rubber lizardmen suits fighting William Shatner who is wearing a corset to keep his beerbelly in.

I doubt Matt Damon would ever be the choice for Picard. I know you're being silly, but to even dare think of spitting on Picard's good name is just abominable. It was a movie made for the purpose of re-imagining the series and allowing them to branch off without the burden of the past franchise. Hard to deal with a little, but a very bright move rather than getting bogged down in the past (cough cough STAR WARS EPISODES 1-3 cough cough)

jj abrams actually apologized for the lens flare.

i actually liked this movie and i dont get angry over contradictions between star trek movies because the original show was almost pure contradiction and silliness but thats what i liked about it.

btw, the kelvin was in empty space. my thought is that the black hole takes you back in time but leaves you in the same spot. since everything in the galaxy orbits the galactic core, the romulan system wouldn't be in the same spot. though, then the galaxy would be rotating the wrong way. pong far is once every seven years. oh, and im still upset that scotty, chekov, sulu had such small roles and parts of the story

yea, you are right. it was just the best thing I could think of to figure out that scene. kudos on the catch

People complain about the timeline… its DIVERGENT. Meaning that the timeline of TOS and Next Gen and so forth, HAPPEN. It's just not happening in the same continuity, the new gen Star Trek is a separate time line that ignores the events on the continuity we grew up with. There's also a seperate timeline where TNG, Voyager and the like happen which is the one we know.

If I'm making any sense AT ALL.

Anyway, I'm going to go on what Spoony said about Spock, notably about Spock and Uhura.

Spock and Uhura in several episodes of TOS had quite a “Romantic” experience, it was subtle but there. There was one episode, I believe it was Charlie X where Spock plays his little vulcan lute and Uhura sings vocal, they share a few “looks” which could be construed as being romantic looks.

Alright and back to Spock's emotional outbursts. Well, Spock still hasn't learned to control his emotions as well as he should, given the first episode that never was, under the command of Christopher Pike in TOS Spock would often smile, yell and even laugh here and there silent as he may be, you see him laugh. I think it was trying to go back to that. But many people never saw Menagerie except in the episode “The Cage” which used clips from the Star Trek pilot.

OH and… McCoy … Mr. Urban … he DOES need to stop that. It's creepy. DeForest is busy looking down on us from Heaven and going, “Ok, am I supposed to be reincarnated or something, did I miss a meeting? “

The red matter was a terri-bad idea.

A little tip about Deep Space Nine.

Feel free to skip to said third or fourth season. Seriously, feel free.

Anyhow, TNG episodes tends to play around randomly on TV, not always in a very linear manner. So… Go ahead, it's not like you'll spoil yourself to death.

I really liked this movie. It was a really good, solid movie. I didn't think it was the best movie ever made, but when you think that it was a Star Trek movie, it could have been much, much worse. Casting was superb and I laughed at the short Shatner impersonation at the simulation. Only thing that I didn't like that much was the Spock/Uhura thing, but even that could have been made in way that was worse than what is shown there.

While the timetravel plot was a bit cheesy, it did give this series a good reboot, by keeping the original timeline intact and explaining that this movie takes place in a different timeline. Now the new timeline doesn't have problems with the multiple series + multiple movies + multiple books. One must remember that this is Star Trek and timetraveling seems to happen every other week in this universe.

But you can't never please these fanboys. They will always complain about pretty much anything. Only way they could (maybe) be happy if they resurrected Roddenberry to make a new script and brought back all of the original cast (resurrected/de-aged them while they were at it) and used the sets used in the original series. And still someone would complain that Spock didn't have the exactly same plastic ears he used in the Episode 6 of the first season…

I really liked this movie. It was a really good, solid movie. I didn’t think it was the best movie ever made, but when you think that it was a Star Trek movie, it could have been much, much worse. Casting was superb and I laughed at the short Shatner impersonation at the simulation. Only thing that I didn’t like that much was the Spock/Uhura thing, but even that could have been made in way that was worse than what is shown there.

While the timetravel plot was a bit cheesy, it did give this series a good reboot, by keeping the original timeline intact and explaining that this movie takes place in a different timeline. Now the new timeline doesn’t have problems with the multiple series + multiple movies + multiple books. One must remember that this is Star Trek and timetraveling seems to happen every other week in this universe.

But you can’t never please these fanboys. They will always complain about pretty much anything. Only way they could (maybe) be happy if they resurrected Roddenberry to make a new script and brought back all of the original cast (resurrected/de-aged them while they were at it) and used the sets used in the original series. And still someone would complain that Spock didn’t have the exactly same plastic ears he used in the Episode 6 of the first season…

Okay, let me preface this by saying that I am actually a HUGE fan of the new Star Trek movie. In fact, I never cared for the original series at all until I saw the 2009 Trek, and now, having gone back to watch the series with a fresh perspective, I’m an avowed fan- so this film was like my gateway drug.

Now, having said that, I agree that it did have some serious plot holes. The black hole device, as you mentioned, really doesn’t make sense, nor does it seem logical that Spock actually used the red matter AFTER Romulus was already gone. Why bother at that point? The answer to both problems, it seems, comes down to really ambiguous wording and even more questionable science: Spock intimates that the star that explodes in the future threatens not just Romulus, but the entire GALAXY. While this is quite literally impossible (one star explodes and it destroys the entire galaxy? That’s like a single bullet killing an entire stadium full of people!), if we assumed that it was true, it would justify turning the star into a black hole, because it wouldn’t necessarily have to be the star that Romulus orbits (so Romulus would still have a sun), and it would explain why Spock felt the need to implode the supernova after all of Romulus had already been obliterated. Then again, it’s all just a device to explain why Nero and Spock are in the past to begin with, so I guess the writers felt that specifics weren’t important.

As for Nero and co. just hanging around and doing nothing for 25 years, there’s at least a decent explanation for the plot hole. In the original cut, Nero and his ship (the Narada) were captured by the Klingons after the Kelvin disabled it in battle, and all the Romulans were sent to Rura Penthe until, 25 years later, Nero managed to escape, break out his crew, recapture their ship, destroy an entire armada of Klingon cruisers (a plot point that stayed in the movie- it’s the message that Uhura translated at the Academy, the one that helps convince Pike that Kirk was right about Vulcan being under attack), and lie in wait for Spock for something more like a day or two. Of course, this explanation opens up a whole other can of worms- How did Nero know exactly when to break out to intercept Spock? How did they find and recapture their ship when they were stuck on a prison planet, and the ship was probably being held in a shipyard somewhere? For that matter, shouldn’t the Klingons have reverse-engineered the Narada years ago and conquered the Federation with a fleet of enormous superpowered warships by now? Abrams decided after an early cut to eliminate this explanation for their absence and simply leave it up to the viewer’s imagination- maybe they were repairing the ship? They are stuck in the past, and it can’t be easy to patch up a ship that big with no tech support- but remnants of the Klingon prisoner sub-plot linger in the film (like Nero’s missing left ear, which was intact when we see him murder the Kelvin’s captain).

But I don’t understand why any Trekkies would feel like this film invalidates any of the other films in the series, or any of the TV shows- any sci-fi geek of sufficient status should understand the concept of parallel worlds! Hell, that’s what Sliders was all about: worlds that diverged in some way from the one we’re familiar with, all existing simultaneously on different planes of reality. Just because Nero and Spock’s interference created a new, separate timeline doesn’t mean the old one doesn’t exist anymore! If Quinn Mallory were there, he could easily punch a wormhole into the adjacent dimension and end up in a world where Kirk’s father lived, Vulcan is still intact, and Christopher Pike still ended up in that beeping electronic chair. Frankly, I think Pike should be happy that someone screwed around with space-time…

This is science fiction, after all. Who says we can’t have TWO canons?