Star Trek Premiere Gets Standing Ovation, Surprise Showing In Austin

MrKaos writes "Proving that science fiction can still be great entertainment, J.J. Abrams appears to have impressed Star Trek fans at the official world premiere of Star Trek, who gave the film a five-minute standing ovation at the Sydney Opera House in Australia today. Meanwhile, mere hours beforehand, flummoxed fans at the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin, TX, deceived into thinking they were seeing a special, extended version of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, were pleasantly surprised when a disguised Leonard Nimoy greeted them and announced they would be seeing the new film in its entirety. ILM's influence on the film is reported as visually stunning, and lucky Australian fans are scheduled to see the movie first, as it opens a day before the American release."

Comments

Wait...what?

[gnarlyhotep]

"Proving that science fiction can still be great entertainment"

When was this something that needed to be proven? I've found plenty of entertaining science fiction around. Did I miss the elitist newsletter that told us all we had to say science fiction was crap now?

Jeez, miss one meeting...

Re:Wait...what?

[MozeeToby]

I think what he meant was "Proving that science fiction can still be great pop-culture entertainment".

There's a big difference between what a sci-fi fan finds entertaining (speculation about future technology and society, viewing the problems of today through the lens of fantasy) and what the average guy on the street finds entertaining (I'm going to resist the temptation to lampoon the average guy's tastes).

Don't believe me? Look at the most popular 'sci-fi' movies in history (truly popular, not just cult classics) and think about whether or not they are really science-fiction the way you think about it. Pop-culture sci-fi uses the futuristic/technology aspects as plot devices to make a fantasy story work. What makes the new Star Trek movie interesting is that it seems to be both science-fiction as well as pop-culture science-fiction at the same time.

Re:Idea shortage in LA

[TheRaven64]

Am I the only one to see the irony in someone claiming that the solution to the lack of original ideas is to copy ideas from books?

Re:Idea shortage in LA

[nine-times]

Let's not fool ourselves here-- if you think Hollywood has an idea shortage because they're recycling old ideas, stories, and characters, then all of humanity has had an idea shortage for a few thousand years, at least. And I say "at least" because the writers then may have been stealing ideas, but we just don't have records of the ideas they stole.

This era of reboots is fantastic in my opinion. It's what cultures do when they have a rich culture to draw from, which is that they take the old ideas and stories, and reinvent and reimagine them in a way that makes them relevant and poignant for the time. The original series was great for its time, but yeah, it's becoming increasingly dated as a relic of the 60s. The general setup of a band of explorers and the characters themselves, however, still have relevance.

Re:I hope it's better than Nemesis.....

[rpillala]

This post is a better movie than Nemesis.

Re:Better than a refund, and maybe not planned

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can't imagine (though I guess it's possible) even Spock himself would dare show the full movie without authorization. So that may have been planned. The destruction of a print of Wrath... probably wasn't."

Oh, come on. What are the statistical chances of Nimoy being present when any film, let alone a Star Trek film, let alone on the day before release of a new Star Trek film, bursts into flames in the projector and they happen to have the whole new film ready to go rather than only 10 minutes of it? The odds against must be astronomical. (We'll call it the "Nimoy paradox")

It was a dramatic setup. I like it, actually. It's funny (reminds me of a trick Monty Python used to use). But the whole thing was almost certainly staged.