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Nimoy May Be the Star of the Next Trek Film?
ajs writes "Moriarty, over on Ain't It Cool News is running a column about the upcoming J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie. In it, he discusses some theories about where the movie is going, but doesn't reveal his sources. He claims that Nimoy's Spock, not the younger versions of the original Trek trio, will be the primary star of the film; and that the movie will make some very substantial changes to the Trek lore in a way that is internally consistent with what went before, but opens up many more options for future franchise films or series. If he's right, there are some pretty substantial spoilers in the column." Obviously, as unverifiable speculation this should be taken with a grain of salt. Live long and prosper.
I sure hope they don't pull a George Lucas by changing the past storyline to better align with the future series that have already been produced (eg. TNG, DS9, Voyager).
And with Doohan having passed on, there's already a very essential element missing. You just can't have Spock without Scotty.
This is just baseless speculation. It sounds like this guy just pulled the whole thing out of his bunghole. Then again I have to admit I've always hated AICN.
I'd watch that.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
...wasn't he always?
Frankly, the biggest problem the Star Trek franchise has is its own fans.
There's a big difference between being respectful of a story and hamstringing yourself to meet some fanboy's idea of "canon." There are long and drawn-out discussions all the time in Trek fandom about how this one inconsequential element of some story doesn't mesh with years of backstory which is itself internally inconsistent. They can't seem to let go of these whiny nitpicks.
Look at the new Battlestar Galactica -- Ronald D. Moore took the old BSG "canon" and completely ignored it. He realized that from a storytelling standpoint it would be too limiting to bother sticking with the old story -- after the destruction of nearly every human being, going to a "casino planet" is a betrayal of what could be an incredible storyline. RDM took the essence of what BSG was -- humanity is on the run against an insidious and implacable enemy and reduced it to its essentials. The result is infinitely better than what came before.
I hope J.J. Abrams has the pure chutzpah to do just that with Star Trek. Reinvent the franchise. Give it new life. Change things around and craft a story that can attract a new generation of fans rather than appealing to the people who spend all their life studying the minutiae of the shows.
At its core, Star Trek is Horatio Hornblower in space -- a valiant young captain and his intrepid crew going out an exploring a new frontier. The new film should be true to that spirit, but if J.J. Abrams just sticks to what comes before, he's passing up on an artistic opportunity.
I've been a fan of Star Trek all my life, but the franchise grew stale and repetitive. This is the chance to give it new life, and in order to do that J.J. Abrams will have to royally piss off a lot of Star Trek fans who indignantly demand that the series match their vision of what Star Trek should be. If he does it right, a whole lot of Trekkers will be calling for his head, but the franchise will (dare I say it), live long and prosper after years of neglect.
Startrek has a problem. Wait, before you gather your torches and pitchforks hear me out.
The problem is: Startrek is really old. That is not said that it is bad - I quite enjoyed TOS when it ran on TV, and I rather liked most of the "sequels" (like TNG, DS9, Voyager, etc.) to a certain degree. I loved the movies. But Startrek, or rather the Startrek universe has become the equivalent of really old code. The kind of code that was written when C was at it's peak and because the application was good and functional it just has been extended and rewritten over the time. And now you are standing in from of 50k lines of code, some in C, some in C++, some ported from C to C++, all written by several dozens of different editors (with different styles and paradigms) with over the last two decades. And someone had the bright idea to use assembler to squeeze some out some MS from an inner loop. Short, a demonic cross between a patchwork quilt made from used yarn and spaghetti-code. And now you are supposed to implement that new shining feature - without breaking anything.
The Startrek universe is riddled with minor and major plotholes and inconsistencies. Of course, many of the got patched and re-patched when the popped up, but every time a new story is added to the canon some more or less obscure fact will exist to prove the inverse. Of course, the tools to patch them up exist - including the dreaded RETCON - but still there is too much too contradictory information.
So what would you, the programmer do, if faced with the demonic code mentioned earlier and the prospect of managing it for the next forseeable future. Use the well-know way and write on or be bold and pull the plug and start from (almost) scratch?
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
Abrams is simply doing a retread and once the dust settles people will go back to being tired of Roddenberry's creation.
This is a complete retread, why bother? There is so much left unexplored in the Trek Universe, now if he was giving me the story of Kirk's younger brother, who rebelled and became a smuggler, then we might have something. Tell me the story of the people who aren't military officers, much loved by their quadrant spanning government.
We are all just people.
Except if you're going to do a Star Trek movie that's not cannon, why not go all out and I don't know... maybe make something original? Maybe instead of beating the dead Star Trek horse, make up your own cannon?
:/
Yeah, I know it's Hollywood and originality is too much to expect.
Yep, they worked well together and gave that series most of its charm.
But they aren't required for a "Star Trek" episode or movie or series.
There is so much material out there. Why don't any of the "writers" use it? Look at what most people consider the "best" Star Trek movie. You know which it was. And it was written with the restriction of being based off of a single episode.
Why does it always come back to getting the original cast into the "new" material? I'm sure that people here can come up with ten different, decent concepts that do NOT involve any of the established characters or contravene established canon. Why can't the writers do that?
They've already done a Trek where they used the "but its not the same timeline" excuse to muck up the history. It was called "Enterprise", and it tanked. I saw nothing in TFA that would indicate this idea would do any better. Yes, Paramount needs to attract new fans. But they need to do so without pissing off the old ones.
;-)
Instead of trying to redo the same old story with whats left of a aging and thinning available cast, they should take a hint from "The Next Generation" and move further in to the future with a new series and new characters.
Or give us a movie based on DS9
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I'm sick and tired of the maintainers of the Star Trek franchise trying to recapture the Original Series style and universe. That series failed for a reason. It had such a good movie run due to Shatner, Nimoy, and DeForest Kelly, as well as the epic nature of the stories. In the latter respect, the movies were successful because in style and substance they were the opposite of the failed series.
Star Trek: TNG was by far the most expansive and interesting universe, and has always been far and away the fan favorite. I don't mean by self-styled critics who ramble on about emotional dynamics and relationships. Star Trek: TNG was popular because first and foremost because of Patrick Stewart, but second because it, like the Original Series movies, cast the ordinary in the extraordinary.
Teenage boys and middle aged men and women did not watch Star Trek: TNG for character development and intricate relationships. They watched it because it rose above the trash on the rest of television, because it had ethics and virtue and told us what was right and what was wrong, and set things right by the end of every hour. Star Trek: TNG was a Greek morality play in a fantastically imaginative, yet intimately believable universe.
It was NOT Dawson's Creek or Buffy the Vampire Slayer in space. It NOT not a campy western in space.
Until the caretakers of the franchise look back and understand this, they will continue to fail to recapture that success.
A lot of people writing on this board want Star Trek to become more dark, the characters less gung ho and somehow, that will make them "more realistic". That's patently absurd.
Let's understand this, guys that get to command state of the art "ships-of-the-line" are better than the rest of us average joes, just as much as guys that make it through Annapolis, then, work their way through years of active duty, to command an aircraft carrier or a ballistic missile submarine, are better than the rest of us. The whole point of the existence of military culture is to vett through thousands of young men to ultimately produce a handful of people that know how to take a state of the art system costing billions of dollars into battle. We expect these people to be gung-ho, idealistic, and confident, and our expectations of the bridge staff of one of 13 ships of the line in the Federation should be more, not less. After all, if you figure that the likes of NCC-1701 had only 400 or so crewman, out of a Federation population of tens of billions, you would expect that every man or woman on that ship would be of first rate education, character, and quality.
Roddenberry, for all of his other faults, nailed this exactly right on the head. Writers that want to have officers dragged down by "personal issues", filling people with all manner of dark character conflicts, really, are just catering to the masses. Yes Virginia, not everyone has mommy issues, and those that don't, get picked for the big jobs that you don't.
This is my sig.
Star Trek failed for the same reasons many TV shows fail. Some of them air in the wrong time slot, some of them fail to find sponsors, some of them are gutted by shortsighted producers ... Star Trek arguably experienced all of the above.
... one drunken country doctor was good enough for them, 'nuff said.
I read Shatner's book about his years with the Star Trek TV show. He said that the reason the show was canceled was ratings... more specifically, the way they used to do ratings at the time.
In the days of the original series, ratings were simple: what show has the most people watching it? That's the winning show.
These days, they slice the ratings much finer. They break ratings down by "demographics". And if they had done that with the original Star Trek it would have run for many more than three seasons, because it had a total lock on several very desirable demographics (people with lots of money they could spend).
If I recall correctly, Shatner said that the change to how ratings are calculated came just a couple of years after the original series was canceled. Just another way in which Star Trek was ahead of its time.
The original Enterprise didn't need no damn social worker
What I liked was that they got scripts from all over, including scripts by noted science fiction writers. Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, and more... there were some weird and really different scripts, and it was great. The modern Trek series were much more constrained.
At a Trek convention, I had a chance to ask one of the executives of TNG a question. My question was "Some of the original series episodes were just plain silly, just funny; for example, 'I, Mudd'. Will there every be any episodes of TNG like that?" The answer was something like "Episode Foo was pretty funny." I no longer remember which episode was the "Episode Foo" but I had seen it and a) it wasn't that funny and b) it certainly wasn't completely goofy. And, I never saw any new Trek episode (TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise) that was.
P.S. IMHO the genius of "The Trouble with Tribbles" was that it was almost completely goofy yet there was a shred of plot that hung together and was satisfying. You got to laugh a whole bunch, and they actually foiled a nefarious plot!
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
You've definitely got something here.
Roddenberry's dream was that in the future, humanity will be perfect. We'll all have worked out our differences, and there will be no crime, poverty or disease. In fact, there will be no money, because everyone will have whatever they need, thanks to replicator technology. All conflict must therefore come from encounters with alien species that aren't as evolved as we are.
But that dream just doesn't fit reality. Looking back over the last several thousand years of recorded history, I've seen absolutely no indication that human nature has changed one bit. Sure, technology has changed a lot, but people are still people. The Bible is full of examples of kings committing atrocities, businessmen and religious leaders being asshats, hypocrisy, racism, corruption, greed, etc. etc. We still have these problems today, and we will still have these problems in the 24th century.
Star Trek VI hinted that there are at least some humans who don't get along with everyone, and Deep Space Nine (created after Roddenberry's death) showed that greed still exists. I'd like to see that taken a few steps further.
Step forward in time a generation or two after the return of Voyager. The Federation isn't operating efficiently, not everyone has access to everything they want, and advanced technology can't fix everyone's problems. Starfleet Command has appeared to be in great shape for a long time, but behind the scenes, things have been falling apart. Several of the outer planets have formed their own alliance and decided to secede from the Federation, which has led to civil war. Alliance spies have infiltrated Starfleet to gain military intelligence, and some members of the Federation Council are of the opinion that desperate times call for desperate measures.
You could definitely come up with all kinds of interesting stories in that kind of environment. Plan a story arc, the way Babylon 5 was planned out. This has the disadvantage that viewers may get left out if they jump in in the middle of the series or miss a few episodes here and there, but the advantage that you can actually have character development and an overall plot! You still have to wrap up the main story in 42 minutes, but it frees you to move in new directions. What if the show was about the crew of the Enterprise G, but the captain and a few bridge crew members have personal ties with friends and family on Alliance worlds, and by the end of Season 1 they've decided the moral thing to do is to switch sides and turn against the Federation, helping to defend the freedom and liberty of the Alliance from the Federation oppressors?
Surely there are some good science fiction writers out there who can come up with better plot ideas than I can. Paramount just has to be willing to turn over the reigns to somebody with real vision.
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After Firefly, Serenity several seasons of BSG, Star Trek just seems a bit 'quaint.'
Software Wars
Don't forget, Voyager changed the past with Tom Paris.... when he had his incident on TNG, his name was Nick Ricardo. The name of this episode was 'The First Duty' Furthermore, don't forget Janeway made it to Admiral before Picard did, and all she had to do was break the Temperal Prime Directive to get there. In Picards defense, he never had to cheat to make his goals. I guess thats how affirmative action works in the future.
WWPD - What Would Picard Do?