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Is a $72.5m Opening Weekend Enough For Star Trek?
brumgrunt writes "At first glance, JJ Abrams' Star Trek has won over audiences as well as critics as it stormed to a $72.5m US opening weekend. However, Den Of Geek sounds a note of caution. Can it hold an audience for a second week? How do its numbers stack up? And as Wolverine looks like its struggling to reach $200m off an $85m opening weekend, is Star Trek yet the huge hit blockbuster that some of the headlines are suggesting?"
Star trek will get the loyal fans from the earlier movies, Wolverine had less of a fan base
Laughter is the best medicine, except if you have a broken rib.
What does it all have to be about the opening weekend?
I don't know much about the industry, so I'd appreciate a good answer.
Rotten tomatoes has it rated at 95%, which means that there are very few critics that don't like the movie. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_trek_11/
The dogcow says "Moof!"
Just use a black hole to redo it until it's successful. Unless it was successful the first time and didn't need a full reboot. Seriously, why did we need to erase everything that happened again? At least the kirk from the other movies always fixes the timeline.
Yes. Considering the last movie didn't even break even and we're only a few days in, this is fan-fucking-tastic for a trek movie.
All us dorks can rejoice ;)
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
The difference between Trek and Wolverine is that fanboys were excited about seeing Wolverine while fanboys were enraged at the idea of a Trek reboot (thus the bigger opening weekend).
Except Wolverine was horrible. Really, really bad. For people who were fans of the characters, the movie completely got the characterizations wrong. For people who just wanted to see a good movie, the writing was atrocious and the story was just weak.
And Trek was really quite good - ESPECIALLY for a Trek film. There was enough there that new audiences could get into it and enjoy it as a film, and it was well done enough that fanboys have to grudgingly admit it was not the worst. movie. ever.
One opens strong and then tanks once people realize just how bad it is, the other opens a little less strong and I imagine it'll keep going strong for awhile.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
The opening weekend of any 'blockbuster' movie is really just a barometer for how good the hype was, how good the trailer is, and how much pent up demand there was for the adaptation. This is true for X-Men, X-Files, Watchmen, Batman, and our beloved crew of the Enterprise. That second week, and the subsequent weeks, is very dependent on the reviews. These are the people who waited for someone else to go see it opening weekend, and then wait to hear what they said about the movie. Star Trek is getting great reviews, and not just from the newspaper shills-- audiences generally like the film. This is different than the (lack of) buzz about Wolverine, and the outright confusion about the Watchmen. It's more along the lines of Batman Begins: your older sister asked you "Really? Another Batman movie?" to which you've replied "oh yeah-- it's that good." Expect a strong 4 week run on Star Trek.
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The commercials always hype any new movie. I did happen to see Wolverine. I'd give it a 7 out of 10. I may go see Star Trek this coming weekend but from what I've read even non Trekkies thought it was great.
am going back to see it AGAIN! This time at an IMAX!!!
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.
What's personal opinion when you can just follow the call of the media outlets!
What's funny is, my girlfriend is begging me to go see it this week. No, she's no Trekkie at all. But what is interesting is that over the weekend she took out my Generations DVD and wanted to watch it.
I've been trying to get her to watch it a little bit with me here and there but no dice. One new heavily hyped movie comes out and all of a sudden she wants to start watching it.
Either way I win, I just find it odd that it took major media outlets hyping/loving it before she would touch it.
I have a feeling a lot of people will see this sort of thing happening. But again, not complaining. It would be GREAT if the Star Trek fan base could be reinvigorated!
According to Entertainment Weekly, 70-75 million is how much the previous movies got in *total* income. So even if this new Trek ended right now, it still did as well as all the previous movies. That's nothing to be negative about.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Are these numbers adjusted for the Thursday opening vs the Friday opening for everyone else ?
Good thing he's not 23, seeing how Captain Nero had a 25 year absence between the day of Kirk's birth and when he attacked Vulcan.
The movie was awesome. It had enough trekkiness to satisfy the trekkies, and it was good enough to satisfy the non-trekkies. Amazingly, I have found more in the closet trekkies than I ever imagined, including my 60 yr old mother-in-law. Unfortunately, I now have dreams involving a remake of the movie Shaun of the Dead starring James Doohan
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Space Admiral Farragut would strongly disagree. (the real wet-navy Farragut was given command of a prize ship at age 12, and attained a command of his own at age 22)
Wolverine is struggling because it sucked. People went to see it and warned their friends away because, though there were some good elements to the movie, it was terrible, as a whole. Horrendous script and patchwork story - it was a movie by committee. We know that a good movie can be made with a superhero character (Batman, and Ironman to name two recent examples) but Wolverine was everything that is bad about a superhero movie.
Star Trek, however, is not going to struggle because it's about as perfect a reboot of the Star Trek franchise as one could hope for. Sure, hardcore Trekkies might rage about this or that and it isn't a flawless movie so someone will try to prove their movie critic cred by picking it apart but the reality is that it's an excellent movie that people are going to recommend to their friends.
Simple lesson to be learned - make a good movie and you'll have long term success. Make a hot movie and you'll have a great opening weekend. Make both and you'll have a great opening weekend and long term success. It's not rocket science.
Yeah, but this one cost a whole lot more to make than any of the previous ones. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/series/StarTrek.php
Surprisingly few single guys there. Mostly middle-aged couples. Mid-40s (like me) or older. Ones I talked to were, like me, Ex-Trekkers (we got lives...) who wanted to avoid the Damn Kids With Their Cell Phones going off, and loud cross-talk, and Hippity-Hoppity "music" and dammit I forgot my point, I knew I had one somewhere around here.
Oh, yeah, we just wanted to enjoy the movie on a big screen without distractions. Which is what the 9AM showing provided. Damn good movie.
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Are you getting a cut of the profits?
I think that most of the $ from the first weekend was mostly all the Star Trek fans coming out in full force. Hopefully word of mouth will help spread that it is a good movie that can appeal to people beyond the average Trek geek.
As a big fan of all things Trek, I am happy to see a Trek movie finally get good reviews and make a lot of $. It has been over a decade (since 1996 and First Contact) since we have seen Trek on top at the box office. And remember, in 1996 there was no such thing as thepiratebay and torrents. Literally 24 hours after Star Trek hit the theaters this past Thursday, it was up with a decent watchable copy on TPB and most other torrent sites. So to see it doing this well in spite of the easy accessibility to most Trek fans is encouraging.
But as a Trek fan, I am a little disappointed with how the storyline stacks up. I mean, Trek is known for having some plot holes here and there, but this movie really just forgoes all notion of continuity or semblance of some of the more recent Trek constants. To name a few:
There are some things I REALLY liked (the CG, the fact that space was FINALLY silent, the constant use of the Z-Axis, etc) and I thought they did a GREAT job with the casting, but I am worried they will totally negate all the Trek that lead up to this...
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Why not? Alexander was King at age 20, and that was real reality, not some sci-fi movie.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
That alien is Balok, from the TOS episode , which, oh dear lord, this thread has gone Full circle
The movie apparently is the most expensive of the Star Trek movies. The first weekend box office was half it's budget which relatively speaking is a bit below average for Star Trek movies. However, given the high quality of the movie and the legs that most Star Trek movies have, I imagine this movie will make an ample profit.
DON'T PANIC! I'm waiting until the geek rush is over. I'll see it in iMAX. No point in fighting with people in Klingon costumes for the best seats. Besides, I didn't get a chance to finish my girlfriend's B'Etor costume.
Die StarTrek, die...what?
Don't let us like that finish your sentences,
a good quotation is best once finished.
i don't hold it against you though, someone who speak german can't be bad.
Crucially New trek is actually pretty good despite rewriting the whole continuity. Wolverine was a pile of steaming turds with rubbish CGI.
You know how wolverine is going to end becasue it's a prequel, Star trek could go anywhere because it's a different universe.
...would just make them dickheads!
"Die StarTrek, die...what?"
It was German. He was really saying: "The Star Trek, the..."
"Struggling" to make 200 million in two weeks? I've been working on my first million for about 22 years now.
Yeah...I've started wondering, am I not a trekkie any more? I didn't really watch the last TV series, I can't even tell you what it was called. I went to see the movie this past weekend and was underwhelmed. Spock was great but on the whole, there was nothing particularly interesting about it. A lot of kids running the Enterprise? Yawn. Time travel? So overdone, and not particularly well done this time. There were none of the interesting, weird, thought-provoking ideas that I'm used to seeing from the first two series. Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but I felt the movie was deliberately dumbed down to try and get greater mass appeal.
JJ Abrams is already on the record saying he would be ridiculously happy with $50 million. $72 million is beyond his wildest expectations. All this nonsense about "is it good enough" is just completely masturbatory. The fact is that it has singlehandedly revived the franchise, and people who have no interest in Star Trek went to go see it. As long as Abrams can keep the storylines less fanboyish (he said he never was a fan, which is a good thing), it seems like he can keep getting people to go see it.
Still good. Look at those numbers and the most successful opening weekend prior to this one was First Contact. This got $30,716,131 for a $46,000,000 budget, or 66% of the budget as the opening weekend gross. This film got just under 50%, which isn't far off. The next-biggest opening was Generations, which only got 60% and then Insurrection with a shade over 30%.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Science fiction. Not science reality.
I will fully admit it was a fun movie and worth seeing once. But like all blockbuster summer movies it was just empty except random references and gags that only a trek fan would really enjoy.
A lot of the characterizations was shallow and the plot was a mess. I wouldn't have bothered seeing it if it hadn't been a Trek movie. But it was still just vapid.
It was kind of like seeing a James Bond movie where Q is absent, Bond gets no gadgets and in fact 007 only shows up for like 15 minutes where he gets rejected by the girl (named Mary Smith) and then shot in the head. Maybe a great movie but it isn't a Bond movie.
Same thing here, good movie just not a trek movie. Oh well, maybe I should just embrace this reboot because there is nothing I can do about it and there is already a plan for a sequel to this prequel.
just travel back in time and redo the script. keep doing that until you guaranteed a blockbuster
just make sure to save the whales, and that joan collins gets hit by a truck
tangential rant: time travel is the absolute lamest aspect of star trek. i haven't seen any good science fiction come out of time travel plots except perhaps the terminator storyline. if you can alter time, where is the tension in the plot? it lets the air of the tires, so to say, in terms of suspending your disbelief for payoff. time travel is a completely lame premise in all science fiction, and that includes the current start trek movie. i can't believe that star trek writers can't write compelling script without this lame crutch. please stop
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This summer is pretty weak compared to years past. Usually there is a movie geared toward teenage boys every week until August.
"Terminator Salvation," comes out in two weeks, but after that there's nothing geared toward the 18-35 male demographic until "Transformers 2" in late July.
This summer is more full of empty weekends and movies geared toward other groups ("Angels & Demons" = adults, "Up"=children [though everyone likes Pixar movies]) than we've seen in a while. With good word of mouth, "Star Trek" should have some staying power against some thin competition.
Many of us loyal fans are royally pissed off with how J.J. Abrams wiped his ass with Star Trek canon in this movie.
I was willing to give him lots of benefit of doubt, but now, having seen the movie, I believe that he fucked it up good. He fucked up everything he *could have* fucked up.
You're not the only one to think that. The story of the movie was flimsy.
Who cares how it will do... More important is what they did with it... Forking the time line so they don't have to pay attention to the original was brilliant. It makes follow up movies open to anything. Introducing Kirk's propensity to bed the Jolly Green Giant's sister early in the show was hilarious. Character development was spotty at best with Bones being nothing more than one line jokes and Scotty being an afterthought... Nice to see Leonard Nimoy show up too... I do wonder why all the crew seem so bloody young? They also really do need a pizza hut or McDonald's on the ship to get a little meat on the crews bones. Visually, this was fun... not the best, but definitely fun. Final verdict, this was fun! Anyone want to bag-off work this afternoon and see the matinee?
You know, I think they could even make a TV series out of this "Star Trek"...
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Actually, look at Wrath of Khan, it made 14 million in the first weekend, and only cost 12 million to make. But I do agree, it's not doing too bad, just not as good as the OP made it sound based on opening weekend alone.
you have to applaud the marketeers for getting the theaters on board to sell this film
when it was more worthy of the STV title.
Considering the previous 10 ST films have averaged about $70M each for their entire runs, I don't think surpassing that figure the first weekend is terribly bad at all. It's a great movie, and word of mouth is powerful. It will continue to do well.
Last year, as the first trailer rolled at the beginning of Cloverfield, I was sitting there completely giddy and in awe of it. And my friends with me were laughing their asses off at me for being such a geek. They had never seen a Star Trek movie, but those same friends ended up going to the midnight showing on Thursday with me, and we're all going back to see it again this Thursday with an even larger group. All of thse folks are being introduced to Trek for the first time and love it already.
$75 million is very good. Mother's Day historically isn't a big movie going day.
On top of that, I'm speculating here, that most moms don't go for action/sci-fi fare.
Rotten Tomatoes: Trek 95% v Wolvie 37%
MetaCritic: Trek 84% v Wolvie 44%
'Nuff said.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
One big difference is that Star Trek is a decent movie and Wolverine was at best mediocre.
The two films could make the same amount of money, and Star Trek would be regarded as a hit and Wolverine as a disappointment. Wolverine cost about $60 million more to make, so it needs to make more money to turn a profit. On top of that, Wolverine is getting compared to the earlier X-Men films, while Star Trek is being measured against the previous Trek movies. X2 and The Last Stand both made over $200 million domestically. In contrast, no Star Trek film has ever done over $150 million, and Nemesis did much less than that ($67 million). It boils down to the fact that the studio had much higher expectations for Wolverine, and it's being judged accordingly.
Go on and mod me a troll but where was the story in the star trek film ?
The 'film' was a set of shorts with the main idea being that this is what star trek could be if you give the creatives a decent budget and decent actors who can act post tng series.
I like what they did with star trek - but there was no story per say in the reboot, and time travel stories suck.
So, there is now plenty of pent-up demand for something -- anything -- related to "Star Trek". The appearance of Leonard Nimoy in the new movie will only make it even more rewarding to view. The best part of all is that the "Star Trek" prequel, unlike the first "Star Wars" prequel, is not specifically targetting a 6-year-old audience.
So, the new movie will easily meet the revenue milestone of $200 million.
"Scott, beam me into the movie theater!"
So, what is it?
The key difference here is that I walked out of Nemesis apologizing for it while feeling it was a decidedly inferior end point for the series. They wrapped everything up, but it felt like finishing a really bad bowel movement. You hope it's all done, you're done for now, and you're glad it's over but not glad it happened.
2009 Trek had me leaving the theater talking about a second and possibly third viewing. In spite of the dumping of almost all previous canon, it followed the spirit well and was a good movie all around.
Nimitz was 21 when he got his first command of a destroyer.
I thought the movie was well done, no real complaints... I actually thought it would do a bit more than that. I was it in IMAX and it was out of this world (sorry). I did think that a great way to get Shatner involved in some way would of been to have him read the "Where no man has gone before" schtick at the end of the film...
You can fool some of the people all of the time
In which years dollars? And how are they defining 'income'?
Rooting around the web I find that Wrath of Khan alone grossed $78 million.
This was better then the last 3 movies combined.
I liked the way the characters were introduced (minus Kirk).
I liked the story line.
I liked the character development.
I loved the fanboy nods.
I hated everything else. The lens-flare was so horrible (in my theatre) that there were entire scenes in the film that I could not see due to the film being completely white-washed. I was tempted to leave within the first 15 minutes due to the lens flare.
The bridge: I have seen the future; and it is an Apple iMac inspired hell. The translucent glass was everywhere and it looked like ass.
The engine room: the scale was completely wrong, and was jarring. I liked the idea of having a 'mechanical' engine room, this looked more like a Detroit Big-3 factory then a nuclear sub.
In summary: The story was decent, the film was distracting. This is the last Trek for me.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Went to see it with spouse, son and daughter on Friday night at 10 pm. It was a much better film than I expected. Most of the audience seemed to be Star Trek fans, although most had not been born when TOS aired. My wife and Daughter went to see Wolverine on Saturday. The main appeal: shirtless Huge, I mean Hugh Jackman.
Everyone keeps saying Abrams wasn't a trek fan, but does anyone know if the actual screen writers (Orci and Kurtzman) are? It's like people forget the director doesn't pull a completed movie out of thin air without the involvement of anyone else.
I liked the film, I guess, and I thought Quinto nailed the young and conflicted Spock, but I would like to declare a moratorium in Hollywood on the use of black holes. A "temporal anomaly" would have been fine. And someone please explain to these writers exactly how BIG the galaxy is.
Though a few more twenty-somethings. (I'm old enough to have been terrified of the Gorn the first time.)
Good clean fun. Characters spot on, even if not very developed (e.g.: yes, McKoy mostly one-liners, but done in just the right Southern-gentleman style). Some logic quibbles that even the clever alternate-history deprecated-consistency concept can't ignore: In ST:TOS they didn't have families on board yet, so how would Kirk have been born on a ship? Why does Enterprise Engineering look lower-tech than *today* when the Kelvin bridge 20 years earlier looks so tech? Never mind, just leave your brain at home.
I compare it to "Lord of the Rings": it would have been impossible to do it perfectly, cover all the details, and satisfy everyone completely, so one must judge it on its own merit and and on whether it reaches the correct tone. LOTR was a success precisely because it was satisfying to the zillion individual imaginations of book fans *and* reached non-fans as well. Similarly, Star Trek is a fun action/adventure movie with enough of the familiar setting to work for fans and enough standalone entertainment to please non-fans.
As long as the sequel isn't a remake of The Cage -- this time with Kirk in the Captain's seat instead of Pike -- I'll be happy. If Abrams tries *that* stunt, the movie will tank big time, and it'll be "stick a fork in it" time for the franchise.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I went to another movie this weekend planning on holding off on ST until the craziness died down. But there was no long lineup of Klingons and Vulcans. It was a normal looking weekend crowd. I suspect that next weekend will potentially have more people go than the opening weekend which might be a record for a blockbuster movie.
... which he promptly ran aground and was then demoted to submarine service
I'll say right from the start that this is going to prove a very successful movie. The theater was packed, people roared with laughter at the parts that were supposed to be funny, cheered the parts that were supposed to be cheered, and clapped at the end. So by all marketing standards, this is a success.
But it isn't a very good movie, if we're actually talking about craft and workmanship.
Michael Bay camerawork is something you're either going to enjoy or hate. Did you think the camera was shaky in Galactica? Did you need dramamine to watch any of the Bourne movies? Then hold onto your butts. In this movie it was like two elephants were having sex on top of the camera. Absolutely atrocious cinematography. I'll be so happy when this fad is over. But this might not bother some people.
Where the movie fell apart is the writing. Even the positive reviews say the villain is forgettable and the plot doesn't make sense. They'll say that's not the point. Really? I thought it was the point. Our Romulan villain has a nonsensical motivation. We bring time travel into the story again and in a highly clunky fashion. Logical shortcuts are made to get our heroes into the academy, establish Kirk as an outsider who then goes on to become bestest dude ever in Starfleet, and have his little battle with the Romulans. The events we see on-screen don't flow from any sense of internal consistency but are visibly imposed by the writers. Consider the skydiving sequence. They cut one from Generations and the idea is really frickin' cool so they decided they must shoehorn it into the movie. Therefore the mining ship must have a laser it dangles off a 1000km cable in order to drill into the heart of a planet. Why a mining ship would do this we do not know. Why the beam had to be lowered into the atmosphere instead of fired from space is not explained. But this does setup a nice option of having a dangerous platform thousands of feet in the air upon which a fight might be had.
There's other instances of anti-logic throughout the film. Kirk goes from being a cadet on probation to being given command of the Enterprise. Not just assuming a brevet command during an emergency but given the post and, one can only assume rank, of captain. Of the flagship of the Federation. A very young and cocky captain made sense in the original series because the Enterprise was not meant to be an exceptional ship. It was not the HMS Victory of the Star Trek universe, it was not a ship of the line. It was pretty much a frigate -- it could range far, defeat anything it could catch, run from anything it couldn't, and get involved with all the adventures big, expensive ships of the line wouldn't. The Enterprise of TNG was the flagship, pretty much a floating embassy and symbol of the Federation. It made much more sense to have someone like Picard in charge, someone who thinks first and shoots second. But to give a kid fresh out of the academy command of his own ship, the flagship? That's almost as illogical as grabbing an engineer from an obscure outpost on a Vulcan moon, throwing him into the engine room and giving him carte blache.
There are visual things that will ruin your suspension of disbelief. The engine rooms for the two Federation ships we saw were filmed in a boiler works and a brewery. The launch pad for the Enterprise looked like a Texas refinery. These kinds of expedients can be forgiven in low-budget scifi. "Hey, we can't afford to build a good set so let's just film inside a decommissioned destroyer and pretend it's our ship." For a $150 million movie, this sort of thing is jarring. It's the kind of nit that would be glossed over if everything else was great but it stands out when the rest of the movie is exhibiting a similar slapdash construction.
Now some people really don't care about this sort of thing. I'm going to make an analogy that doesn't involve cars so bear with me. It's like porno. "Who cares why the hot chick with the tits wants to fuck the guy? She wants to fuck and I wanna see it!" Few people complain about the writing in pornos. But there are people who care about why two people want to fuck. That's called erotica. We don't really have equivalent terms for movies but that's what it pretty much boils down to.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Nero's poorly thought-through punishment for Spock.
*Spoiler alert*
To punish the guy you blame for the death of your world, you leave him on a nearby planet, alone and unsecured, with a nice warm jacket and within walking distance of a federation outpost??
Maybe this new one -is- the correct timeline and it has finally been fixed?
It just took a little longer, and it needed Spock Prime to repair it instead of Kirk.
I've been watching TOS reruns since I was a kid, I've seen everything from Wrath of Khan forward in the theater, and I've tried to watch all the TV shows -- even when they were bad. It's when they were morbidly shitty (Voyager, I'm looking at you) that I had to bail out. So...
Many of us bored fans were bored senseless with how Rick Berman and been trolling in circles with the Star Trek canon in the last several outings.
I had gotten to the point of not caring if this movie was any good or not, because the entire franchise had gotten so moldy and booring but now, having seen the movie, I believe that he dumped everything shitty. Everything I used to like in Star Trek is still there, just without the baggage.
Also, might not need to assume that the entire canon is gone. The details of it are no longer set in stone, so things might play out differently, but the same events can still take place. As a for instance, I'd LOVE to see Carol Marcus in the next one...
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
One thing that I'm not seeing going in a good direction is new Spock's emo. It is going to be hard to play off the whole "that would be logical" aspect of Spock if they are going to have him SPOILERbangingUhuraSPOILER, loosing it when insulted, etc. What makes the character will be gone and we will be left with Spock Fonzarelli.
Great action and superior acting. Exceptional character development, but the plot was lacking and the movie missed the essence of what is Star Trek. Movie rating: B-.
There was a story?
Come on, there was barely enough of a thread for a TV episode. Changing history is older than "It's a Wonderful Life", let alone "City on the edge of forever". It's tougher to be novel and thought-provoking after multiple Treks, and Babylon 5 and Firefly and Battlestar Galactica (the new one).
OTOH it was fun to watch. I was entertained. It's a movie. We can hope for better . . . or at least not ruining itself like the continual retouching of Star Wars. (Han shot first, dammit! And Kirk would too!)
Trust me on this -- see it now, while it's in theaters. Preferably in an Imax, if there's one in your area. The audience I saw it with cheered when the credits rolled; that doesn't happen often.
Yes, it's a reboot of the franchise, and a much-needed refresh. But keep in mind that this is movie-Star Trek, not TV-Star Trek. TV shows plod along and can deal with very deep issues; movies have to move along at a much faster clip.
It appears the film has also taken $112M for global opening weekend, which makes it very likely it'll turn a profit.
Sure, he explained it. But he also screwed up certain canon that *couldn't* be explained by Nero's time traveling. He also added stuff that plain didn't make sense. Delta Vega being within sight of Vulcan? Please. Uhura being of a similar age to Kirk? Please. An Academy non-graduate being made Captain? Please.
Other than the last one you are just nitpicking things that really don't matter in a "reboot". As far as the last one I'm not sure if it was said that he didn't graduate... he was grounded, that's different.
The biggest "offense" I saw was being able to transport to a ship at warp who knows how many light years away. Why even have ships? And now for the rest of the series they are going to have to use every plot device in existance to keep breaking the transporters just so that they can build tension, just as they did in this movie, twice.
Anyway, where's all the optimism of the original Trek? Seems to be completely missing.
Perhaps the optimism started to unfold later in the life of the Federation, we are somewhere between Enterprise (where things were not really all that optimistic) and Star Trek Classic after all. It wasn't all peachy until the TNG era anyway.
I'm confused. What made this a "trek" movie? The fact that they put in the accents? Because to me it was just an "action movie in space", and very little with Starfleet.
Sure, there was a "Fear corrupting the timeline" reference/joke, but what more was there? You basically saw no meaningful interaction between Kirk/Bones/Spock, just a bunch of confrontations, after which the movie hurried along to the next action scene. there was some rowdy stuff in a bar, there was a sex joke/something (with the green chick and uhura) that reminded me more of yet another college 'humor' film than Trek, and there was pointless driving around in cars and motorcycles, to make Kirk seem like a player. But what was there to remind anyone of a civilization/culture that was about space exploration, in stead of, say, police academy? (And what happened to the Utopia Planetia shipyards?) Where was the backstory?
OTOH, there was the guy that roamed the universe not destroying anything for 25 years (why?+yawn@his plight/pain), Spock and Scotty were on the same planet (how+why?), and there was a "Romulan" ship - which looked like an idiotic can opener - that doesn't explode when big ships ram it, but does when a little ship flies into it. (why?) Further, there was katana fighting and orbital skydiving.(huh?) The amount of text in this flick was pretty minimal, with Scotty/Sulu/Checkov getting few lines beyond their introduction, and Kirk & Spock really only talking for the first time when they were slugging it out after barbs that were at the highschool level, (my 12yo sister has more control over herself than "Spock" the tormented guy) there were vulcan kids bullying others (Abrams wanting to mock the superior people who have emotional control? yawn), but there is still nothing that reminded me of Star Trek. A review I saw somewhere mentioned Pike as a "father figure", but you only see him twice, and interacting with Kirk only once; the same goes for pretty much everything: it's all in the interest of making an action flick.
Lastly, I'm tired of fight scenes where bad guys catch but then don't finish off good guys. If you want "believable", just don't let them get caught. This plot device where the bad guy suddenly goes "shit, I'm suddenly distracted by something else, so I'm going to let you live so that you can finish me off in a few minutes" is just crap, and was a boring plot device even before James Bond happened.
Basically, although the plot holes were slightly less annoying than in Nemesis, this was (imho) only the case because of the fast pace of the movie, which doesn't really give you time to wonder. But really, there was hardly any meat to the story. And while it isn't necessarily worse than most summer action flicks out there, it isn't a grain better either; more importantly, it had nothing to do with Star Trek to me.
23 year old's what?
I think Kirk is like around 25, since Nero waits for 25 years (probably not exactly 25years) for Spock to come and we don't really know how long it took from getting Spock stranded to destroying Vulcan? (couple days?, weeks?)
Star Trek probably isn't a movie your mom wants to see. I would guess the numbers would have been higher for Sunday had it not been Mother's Day.
Of course it is.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I spent the first half of the movie seething over certain major events that "changed" the Star Trek universe...but it was explained well and with the explanation it doesn't damage my inner trekker. By the time it was over I wasnt only accepting of what happened but really looking forward to the next adventure.
Without giving anything away...the fact that the old man exists at the end is enough to assure the most ardent Trekker that the canon is still intact.
If anything the new movie makes Star Trek accessible to anyone for the first time since the '60's. My kids never understood Star Trek now they are all eager to see the next one and have even asked to see this one again.
I do think this film will do much better in the long run than Wolverine. Wolverine managed to alienate many of the comic fans by taking too many liberties with the origin to the point that many refuse to see it at all (myself included). Bad reviews have just made it easier to avoid. Star Trek so far has had great reviews and curiosity will make it much harder to avoid. I went into the theatre quite jaded and left with a feeling I have not felt from a Star Trek movie since the first time I saw the Enterprise on a big screen back in '78.
I agree, I thought Wolverine was a decent flick. It's taking a lot of crap from the critics... but, you get to see Hugh Jackman running around with the claws and the sideburns one more time.
I think people are most upset with how Deadpool was treated. However, considering that a Deadpool movie is in the works, I'm sure that Marvel will just "reboot" the character at some point like they did with the Hulk.
Maybe Kirk's close proximity to a black hole during birth warped the local space-time resulting in a.... nevermind. It was a good movie.
Simpsons. "No one who can speak German could be evil". PAROLED.
Err, these things do not happen sanity-based fleets. No Ensign jumps to Captain in 24 hours, bypassing all the senior officers with many more years of experience. As to the level of sanity in the war of 1812, just the fact that you could become a mid-shipman at the age of 12 (or younger) speaks volumes. This sort of thing happens today only in such centres of civilization as Darfur, Somalia and Afghanistan....
And even in such an insane fleet it took Farragut 10 years to make it to Captain.
...that was real reality,...
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Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
"Die StarTrek, die...what?"
It was German. He was really saying: "The Star Trek, the..."
No one you speaks German could be evil!
Why does anyone care about these numbers besides movie studio producers? I've not seen any correlation between movies that I enjoy versus their box office. Often quite the opposite.
That said I loved ST and wish it many sequels.
72.5 mil is actually quite exceptional considering that most of the attendees went to see the movie without a date!
Got MILF? It does a body good!
This doesn't take into account the international sales.. With international earnings included, Wolverine already seems to have made a profit.
Star Trek hasn't even been released to International audiences. I think for a movie that's made 72.5m, it'll do quite well..
In this timeline Data's head should still be in the cave. It would rock if someone (Old Spock?) found it and recreated Data's body. He could join Kirk, Spock, and the new crew!
Unfortunately, I now have dreams involving a remake of the movie Shaun of the Dead starring James Doohan
Sorry, but James Doohan was cremated. He will not be coming back as a zombie no matter how much "green" he drank while being alive.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Movies just reflect the norms of society. Intellectualism is not important in American society. Actually learning something in high school is "un-cool". Today's high-school graduates do not know enough English and mathematics to enter college. Many college administrators lament that colleges must waste money and time on teaching its students what they should have learned in high school.
So, the typical American viewing this movie will not likely perceive any problem with a "cadet on probabtion ... being given command of the Enterprise".
This anti-intellectualism also appeared in movies of decades past. Gene Siskel, the late critic who worked with Robert Ebert in "Siskel and Ebert at the Movies", noted that Richard Gere in the movie, "American Gigolo", committed an act of violence (of which the details, I can no longer remember) in high school. The movie presented the violence as a cool and wonderful thing. Siskel utterly hated this presentation. That was 1980.
Nearly 30 years later, anti-intellectualism in American society -- and the movies -- has only increased.
the real wet-navy Farragut was given command of a prize ship at age 12, and attained a command of his own at age 22)
Err, these things do not happen sanity-based fleets. No Ensign jumps to Captain in 24 hours, bypassing all the senior officers with many more years of experience. As to the level of sanity in the war of 1812, just the fact that you could become a mid-shipman at the age of 12 (or younger) speaks volumes. This sort of thing happens today only in such centres of civilization as Darfur, Somalia and Afghanistan....
And even in such an insane fleet it took Farragut 10 years to make it to Captain.
There's a few other factors. For the argument of Alexander becoming King when young, we've seen infants named king. This does not mean they're up to the task. Alexander was a man of extraordinary ability given the position to fully employ them. But he is an exception, not the rule.
With regards to Farragut, trying to draw comparisons between wartime and peacetime militaries is problematic to begin with but there's also the matter of advancing technology. We would tend to make an equivalency between a fighter pilot from WWI flying canvas and wood biplanes and a modern fighter pilot strapped into an F-22. There is no equivalency. The planes cost a thousand times more, they take more training to fly, and are very damned complex. They have to be for the abilities they possess. So to say that it's reasonable to have someone wash out of the armored cavalry and then finagle a position flying F-22's and point out it happened in WWI, it's just not a reasonable comparison.
Now someone will bring up that war can cause selection pressures not present in peacetime. Someone like a Patton would not have been able to rise to high rank in a peacetime army but was able to get away with his behavior because he won battles. Likewise with Grant; he was a disheveled alcoholic and a failure at most things in life but he won battles; Lincoln said he'd send a case of whiskey each to his other generals if they could fight like Grant. But when peacetime comes, the pressures are removed and things get back to normal. A winning general might be forgiven eccentricities by dint of his service but a drunk without a record isn't going to be cut any slack. In WWII, the Wehrmacht was forced to use boys and old men as infantry. Rest assured, they're not doing so now.
Now I'm sure someone will say that this is all because we mollycoddle kids in this country and don't give them responsibility. Ok, please point out any other navy in the world that would give command of a national flagship to a kid. I'm not talking about a PT boat from WWII. I'm not even talking about a WWII sub. I mean something like a modern diesel-electric, a modern nuke boat, a destroyer. It's just not happening.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Go see it, its brilliant, I hate Simon Pegg, but even him being cast as Scotty (although miscast) didnt spoil it. In fact dont bother seeing wolverine as its sucks really badly, go see Trek twice instead, it looks amazing on IMAX screens. I think it will be one of the biggest money makers this year as no doubt transformers 2 will break all records this year.
Paramount was looking for a reboot that they could build the franchise on. Movie gross will be good, and then factor in dvd/blu ray sales, and they will see plenty of profit. The question should be "Can Star Trek sustain a series of movies?" This was a good movie, but can this reboot keep it's momentum going? Because if they drop a Star Trek V on us, Star Trek will be done.
This weekend I had poor 2nd row seats which made it difficult to take in everything that was happening on the screen. I usually prefer "dull" indie films, but when something is extremely well done, I like it no matter what the genre. A plot AND good action scenes. My one criticism would be that the Nero character should have had more depth. I could see the scenes that explained him ending up on the cutting room floor to make the movie fit into a certain length. Maybe there will be a director's cut.
He had command of a captured prize-ship at that age and rank. As such, his job was to get the ship to a friendly port in one piece and await further orders, and thus as an "expendable" junior officer he was chosen. He would have had experienced ratings for the hard stuff.
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E pluribus sanguinem
Me and my dad are both long-time Trek fans but not Trekkies, we both liked it, sure it was different but it was good. I can see why the frothing cosplaying hardcore Trekkies wouldn't like it - it's definitely much more "mainstream summer action flick" than you'd expect from a Trek movie - but I still give it two thumbs up. Best movie I've seen in a long time.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Star Trek had less of an initial draw, much due to fears it would dissapoint, and some due to the fact it's not a superhero movie.
Now that it's out, and the reviews are in, I think we'll see a strong running over the next several weeks as those who decided to wait run out to see it and the die hards go for the second viewing :)
I concur.
Not only that, but the "science" was abysmal.
They treat black holes as portable, general-purpose plot-line fillers. You apparently can spawn them at will, and then use them to time-travel through them, except when planets get sucked into them (whichever is more convenient at the moment).
Then there is the "supernova", which, somehow by magic, is able to "threaten to destroy the galaxy", spews great globs of fire at multi light year distances that travel faster then light and split planets in halves. Never you mind the fact that any shock-waves form supernovas are mostly things like x-rays and gamma radiation and that they travel at the speed of light, which would make the "sudden disaster" unravel over the course of tens of years, if not more, just across the supposed Romulan space.
Then there are the super-teleporters (the teleporter being a unicorns-in-space type of idea to begin with) which are capable of delivering unstoppable warheads to planets light years away ... wait, no, err ... explosives ... no, err .... individuals to ships travelling faster then light, light years away ....
One could go on....
But to sum it up, I find that the movie is likely to be very successful. That is because I observed a curious relationship between movie-going audiences and the so-called "Sci-Fi" movies: more intelligence insulting the movie gets, more popular it gets. Which is probably some message as to the levels of scientific education and the respect for science of the general public ...
This actually is a long-developing trend in the whole genre, also in print version. The "Science" part of "Sci-Fi" has been shrinking and the "Fiction" part becoming "Fantasy" part more and more, to the point that calling this modern genre "Sci-Fi" is like calling a wart on an elephant: "A Wart with an Elephant Attached". It is of little wonder then that in many bookstores there is only one section: "Science Fiction and Fantasy". They probably should do away with the whole thing and just call it "Fantasy". It would be far more accurate.
For us who do not own stock in whatever company footed the bill for this movie, it is from our perspective more interesting how many people saw the movie, dollars be damned. Why count in dollars, when we can estimate the number of people who saw it? Then you could say something like "750 000 people have seen this move", which is kind of more interesting.
The whole alternate universe/timeline thing sucks balls. This is a poor excuse for a Star Trek film. As an action movie it was sub par. It moved at warp speed. Never stopping to build suspense. It was like watching someone else play a video game. Aside from a few laughs. It was air, an empty horizon. Then an explosion and the credits.
I thought it was good. I've seen probably seen every episode of both TOS and TNG and all the movies. My impression was that it was good but not great. My wife who's maybe seen a couple movies and probably none of the TV shows and my son who's just seen a few TV shows here and there both thought the movie was excellent. If it paves the way for a new TV show though I'm all for it. The Romulans must have had some serious resources and money to build those ridiculously huge, pointy spacecraft in the new movie hehe.
you could pretty easily alter it in significant ways that could never be fixed by an observer unless they were somehow outside of the time line but could look inward. How would you know something was actually changed? From the future point of view that is "history".
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Temporal_core
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Krenim_temporal_weapon_ship
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Year_of_Hell_(episode)
Alternatively, if you prefer a more "classic" approach to the story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Eternity
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The real question here is what is next?
I had no problem with the changes in the timeline, it certainly gives a fresh vision to it and gives a lot of opportunity. However, if JJA only does a few movies, then the opportunity to have a reboot will be lost. Yes, it will be entertaining, but not enough to carry the franchise forward long term. It will kind of look like an Enterprise redux - Enterprise was good at the start, but then the temporal war thing got to be too much. The key, as Rodenberry knew, was the characters and their interaction. Sure, the effects are cool and it is great to see a positive vision of the future, but the characters make or break a series.
The only real solution is a movie or two followed by a Next Gen length TV series with movies interspersed. That is really the best way to bring to bring the mythology up to date and solidify it and to bold go forward where the original Trek didn't go.
My fear is 2 or 3 movies, followed by nothing, in which case it will have been an admirable effort and no doubt entertaining, but long term will only damage the franchise.
A "junior officer" at the age of 12? Commanding, I presume, a crew made up of more "junior" yet, what, 6 year olds? Or far less "junior" sailors? As I said, total fucking insanity, whichever way you cut it.
If one is to trust http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=startrek.htm ...then you are wrong. Also of interest the opening weekend/theaters section. Check out the original motion picture. From http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl 1 1979 dollar is worth 2.58 (So opening of $30,770,166 in 2009 dollars) 2009 dollars. Now if we took a small stretch and made that movie available in the same number of theaters as the latest picture(potential opening of $138,196,463 in 2009 dollars)...The new picture had an okay opening.
Preface : I am a lifelong Trek fan. I'm not "hardcore", I haven't ever been to a convention, but I have enjoyed the franchise.
For those complaining that Abrahms "wiped his ass" with the franchise ask yourself one question:
Would you rather there be no more Star Trek?
That was the option, re-invent & reboot or buh-bye. I'm glad they chose the former. They even took considerable pains to write into the story a plausible reason for it (time travel creating a splinter/alternate main timeline.) Admittedly this is a departure from some of the previous handling of temporal plot lines, but I'm workable because they needed a reboot. You still get Nimoy as Spock. I'm honestly glad he was the only original cast member in it.
My wife is a more intense fan than I am, to the point of having a real emotional attachment to the Trek universe/story. The first 8 minutes of the movie made her cry it was intense enough. She loved it and is already planning when we'll be going to see it again.
Even Nimoy said in an interview said that people who were hurt because it was disregarding previous canon and resetting things were doing so because they had an illogical connection to the minutiae of the universe rather than the story of the universe.
Besides, they didn't reset everything. Apparently Enterprise is still canon. (i.e. reference to Archer and his beagle)
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
It is true that enough media hype and expectations can garner a good opening week.
That's why the second and third week make or break a movie.
It takes a little time for word of mouth to get around.
Indeed. Transporters are too powerful and require too many plot contortions. Every Trek series has had to deal with these devices by finding ways to temporarily disable them and move the plot forward. If transporters would stop working and if time travel were to become impossible, the Trek universe would be better off for it.
.. most things, especially the original series. Spock being both old & young definitely works because he's the best character and Lenard Nemoy rocks. Also, Shatner was such a tool that any dumb ass can play Kirk better. Oh, the transporter effects were cooler looking too.
But the movie basically sucked aside from old Spock and non-Shanter Kirk. It didn't even vaguely try running some consistent plot. It doesn't give much forethought towards other options, killing off the Vulcans was dumb, etc.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
This isn't one movie, it's two distinct movies.
1) A Origins movie where Spock plays the antagonist against Kirk's "rebel without a cause". The Kobayashi Maru
scene was way underplayed. They should have devoted more time to a Kirk/Spock rivalry. Developed more this would have been a killer movie by itself. The Pike tie in is going to be cool when I get to that episode in the original Trek series (stupid DVDs are in original air order instead of stardate order)
2) A alternate universe timeline piece of crap with a throw-away Romulan bad guy. I'll give them creds for developing a motivation for the Romulan antagonist but the whole thing is just too contrived.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Okay, I'll bite. No one has complained as yet -- I'll refrain from a spoiler -- but did anyone else note the physics problem involving a black hole and time dilation? The first time they did it, they got it within reason. Nice work. The *second* time this occurred, however, they missed it completely. Have we forgotten so soon that the entire premise of Andromeda was based on this very situation? :)
The big difference will be that the word of mouth from those who have seen the Trek reboot will keep Trek afloat, whereas the negative word of mouth about the Wolverine origins movie will continue to drag it down.
JJ Abrams is a frakkin genius. He cut the gordian knot of keeping track of 40 years of canon with a masterstroke. He assembled a dynamite ensemble cast. Rather than do Young Kirk as "The One," he built a crew for the Enterprise full of "Ones." And isn't that what the TOS cast was in the first place?
He's set Trek up for several really good movies. And maybe a series.
Oh yeah, real cool they shot the Enterprise engine room in my neighborhood. I live about a mile and a half from the North Hills Bud brewery. Awesome.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
"Die StarTrek, die...what?"
It was German. He was really saying: "The Star Trek, the..."
Well, nobody who speaks German could be a bad man.
I came here for a good argument
I'm glad you brought up the trailers... For my showing it was Terminator Salvation, Good. Then Transformers. Uh oh. And then GI Joe. Oh CRAP! Let me say up front that I'm a trekkie from way back, have seen every TOS episode at least 4 times, probably 8 in most cases, seen every TNG episode, most Voyager episodes, and probably half of DS9 and Enterprise. I've seen every movie at least twice. I've argued the Trek/Star Wars thing over an over with Force Fanboys. I know the monetary unit of measure on the planet Triskelleon, and what the cure for Interspace is. Those are my creds.
Overall, while I like the movie, I have this growing problem with the reboot. Sure, they didn't invalidate cannon, but the reboot stands on VERY tenuous ground. Let's look at Kirk as the main example, but the same kinds of arguments can be made for the other characters, particularly Spock.
Kirk is now a 23 year old cadet who is now captain of the flagship. As he asked Dr. Dehner in TOS about Gary Mitchell and his god-like powers, "But what will he learn along the way?" In the reboot, the answer is basically "nothing"
Kirk doesn't spend any time knowing how the ship, or Starfleet works. He never has put a notation in Commander Finney's file. He never served on the Farragut, so he doesn't know what that sickly sweet smell of the gaseous creature in "Obsession" is up to... he won't know its intelligent and that it is about to multiply. He has no relationship to Commodore Decker, so no real way to stop Decker from commandeering his ship in "The Doomsday Machine"... in fact, in the reboot, Kirk plays the part of Decker almost exactly... I kept waiting for Kirk to say "Belay that order, we are going to turn and ATTACK"... Kirk goes and attacks a ship of far greater power than his own instead of meeting the fleet like Spock wanted to. Hell, when he meets the planet killer, we're likely to have 2 dead Starships instead of one. Will Enterprise now suffer the same fate as Constellation?
Sure, the movie was thrilling, and now we have our heart's desire, Kirk in command of the Enterprise. But it isn't the SAME Kirk. Is he better? Nope. He's a punk. If I wanted to see punks in charge of powerful Starships, I'd just rewatch Star Wars Episode 4.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
I caught ToS on Channel 20 on afternoons after school in the 70's. During the first syndication reruns. TNG came out after I got out of the Army.
Never really liked Voyager. Loved DS9.
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Pay more attention next time you see it: Kirk wasn't 23.
I think considering the state of the economy, 72.5 mil for the opening weekend is pretty good. I saw it on Saturday and I think it was just what the franchise needed-- If the movie had been mediocre or bad-- This would have been the end of the franchise. The only thing I had a problem with was even tho Zachary Quinto was a great Spock-- I kept thinking about to Sylar and comparing the characters. LOL So Spock was an interesting mix indeed.
we'll bail them out. No one shall fail!.... Well, except for the little guys.
Even if it is not enough, we can always go back and alter the timeline so it is....
The plot of Star Trek 12 needs to have tribbles. Lot's of tribbles.
load "$",8,1
Why not? Alexander was King at age 20, and that was real reality, not some sci-fi movie.
Oh good Lord. Alexander was a King. He could do whatever he wanted. He was an absolute ruler. The Federation is supposedly a democratic society, with a military that has a chain of command, where you have to move up in the ranks.
Stop trying to defend the cadet-to-captain malarky from the movie. Whatever else you can say about the flick, promoting a boy over many, many more qualified senior officers in Starfleet is a plot hole too big to overlook. That's just too much suspension of disbelief.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Err, these things do not happen sanity-based fleets.
Is that an apt description of a fleet which has just been partially wiped out by an overwhelmingly superior adversary, where, in the opinion of the C.O. doing the promoting, the ensign in question embodies all the traits sorely lacking in the typical senior officers who have come out of their academy?
This is actually one of the few items in the movie that somewhat followed canon, that Kirk was a sort of command prodigy who advanced very quickly for his years. Just happened quicker here because of the volatility of the situation.
After seeing the new Trek movie, it suddenly dawned on me that the "colorful" characters are what makes or breaks Star Trek movies or episodes.
I really liked the TNG series on TV, but when you think about it, they had to "borrow" some of the most important character elements of the original show, just to make the series really "work".
EG. "Data" was really just a way to re-invent Spock's personality. So much of the "fun" and the "intrigue" in Star Trek hinges on that idea of having a purely logical character trying to understand what human "emotion" is all about. So instead of a Vulcan, you have a robot ... but same principle.
That said though, sure, TNG was never going to lend itself really well to feature-length movies, because it was more of a "soap opera in space" format than the original. I don't say that to "knock" it in any way -- but let's face it. How many soap operas ever got spun off into successful movies? A helluva lot of people watched the "classic" ones like "The Young and the Restless" or "As The World Turns" -- but nope, no movies came from those.
I'm still amazed at people who think the original star trek movies made sense from a science perspective. In fact, I'd go as far as to say of the star trek movies, *this* one made more sense scientifically. Their treatment of black holes was amiss (the time travel was a mistake, not a common thing amongst black holes). An invisible supernova would make for a terrible movie. Speeding up scenarios is also common in movies to create various effects (such as urgency, etc.). Also, I only saw the movie once, so I can't be sure, but couldn't this be the star that was acting as the sun for the romulan world? If that is the case, we're not talking years to destruction, we're more talking about a timespan where I doubt they could even get word out that they're going to be destroyed. Hell, our sun is only about 8 light minutes away.
Yeah...I've started wondering, am I not a trekkie any more? I didn't really watch the last TV series, I can't even tell you what it was called. I went to see the movie this past weekend and was underwhelmed. Spock was great but on the whole, there was nothing particularly interesting about it. A lot of kids running the Enterprise? Yawn. Time travel? So overdone, and not particularly well done this time. There were none of the interesting, weird, thought-provoking ideas that I'm used to seeing from the first two series. Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but I felt the movie was deliberately dumbed down to try and get greater mass appeal.
You raise a great point, and I think we're in the same boat. I think JJ Abrams just managed to put a stake in whatever loyalty I had to the franchise. Rick Berman has been screwing it up for years with his silly time travel stories, so much that he's really mucked the franchise to death. And what does Abrams do? A time travel story.
I didn't even watch Enterprise on TV. That was just too much retconning. Maybe Abrams did me a favor by ensuring that I'd completely lose interest now.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Both movies: entertaining and fun (especially Star Trek).
This discussion? A complete waste of human life.
great ... camera angles.
It would have just been nice if they hadn't tried getting every camera angle in every shot.
It's great that, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, they're hiring epileptic tweakers as cameramen now - then tazing them for added dynamism - but, sweet jesus people, shaky cam is way past stale.
Plus, let's face it, your audience are nerds... They know there's nothing to transmit vibrations in space. So, when a spaceship explodes a few miles from the camera, the camera isn't going to shake with it.
Instead of using the 1st gen Camaro, they could have placed the new 5th Gen Camaro and had some line about "you still driving that classic car".
I wonder how much better it will be after it doubles its wad. I'd rather pay $10 bucks for twice the gross income and get more bang for my bowels. If "star trek" spent 30 million dollars just on advertising and promotional spectacle would great film be any less newsworthy? Can the movie be better than its promotional campaign and still sell as well as total crap? If you can sell crap for 75 million in a week, why waste a good movie ? If you really want news headlines sell garbage instead, like AIG and Chevy. Any idiot can pay to enjoy an excellent film or wait till its free on cable. It takes real commitment to be number one to eat number two and enjoy shit before someone steps in it and ruins the magic.
Having never really been into Star Trek (Expecting incoming).. and have always been more of a Star Wars fan myself, prior to going to see this film I was dubious as to whether or not I would enjoy it. After the first 3 minutes I thought "This could be a really good film". I can't remember time passing whilst I was in the cinema as I was too engrossed in the film. At the end I was asking myself where the time had gone and wondering if they are going to be making any more. The answer to which I have to say I hope not. The reason I say I hope they don't make any more is that I believe that they have made an excellent film and I would love to see them make another one of the same quality or better (maybe they will prove me wrong) but I doubt they will (and I hope they can) at least not for a while.
The casting was well done and the cinematography was excellent. All in all a well paced, well made film that will appeal to (most) Trekies and newcomers to the franchise.
For once the hype they have placed on a film has been worth it and (for me) it was worth the £7.50 I paid.
I haven't heard a bad word said about this film so far, but no doubt I will from some fanboi complaining about the layout engine room (which I thought was better) or something the like. All I can say to these people is get over yourselves.
All in all I hope everyone has as much fun as I did when I went to see this film.
Ok.. Let the flaming commence!
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flamebait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
it looks like the answer is yes, based on this observation reported in the times -
"'Star Trek' seems poised to hold fairly steady next weekend given that its ticket sales rose from Friday to Saturday, a sign of strong word-of-mouth buzz, said Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst for Hollywood.com."
Remember what "officer" means in the military even today. Officer does not mean senior. Officer is a "commissioned" rank as opposed to non-commissioned ranks which describes most sailors, infantry, soldiers, etc. As a midshipman, Farragut was technically an officer and outranked seamen even if they had decades of experience. On board a ship, the majority of the crew would not be officers but seamen. Also not all ships require the same number of crew. A sloop requires far fewer crew than a frigate.
In the war of 1812, the frigate USS Essex on which Farragut was stationed took 10 ships within a three month period. So if a boat is captured, the typically practice would be to send an expendable junior officer. It's not surprising that Farragut would be given command of a captured ship especially a smaller vessel and especially if nearly all other expendable junior officers were commanding other captured ships or waiting at port to re-join the Essex. The Navy would never appoint a seamen in charge of a vessel unless there were no officers available.
If you remember TNG, this hierarchy was shown before. In "Disaster" Counselor Deanna Troi was left in charge of the Enterprise bridge as she was the senior ranking officer even though Chief O'Brien and Ensign Ro were on the bridge.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Unlike most good Trek, this one seemed to lack a vision or theme. Its just an action film, although as an action film its fun.
It did however have some major holes in the plot I think. Things that are just illogical to my thinking:
* Why was THE ENTIRE FEDERATION FLEET off in some too far distant sector, leaving Earth (and the rest of the Federation come to think of it) completely unprotected? If it was that urgent a situation, why did they leave 1 state of the art and 6 seemingly reliable ships behind? Why did those ships have no crews? Does no one in the entirety of Starfleet understand what a reserve is? Were there absolutely no Starfleet people left on earth outside of the Academy? /v/ sound and they don't replace it with a /w/ sound. They might do that in Polish, but not Russian.
* If the situation was that urgent that we had to strip the entire federation and all of starfleet to go to the Laurentian Sector (or whatever it is), why didn't they take the Academy personnel as well? Why didn't we see that story instead of the one we did, it sounds like it must be quite a fight?
* After three years training, apparently Ensigns are capable of taking over all operations of an unfamiliar starship including command roles they are untrained in, even though their training was being interrupted. Why bother with a rank structure, obviously the things are easy to learn to use.
* Why did they have to make Chekov into another Wesley Crusher type? Wasn't the first time, one time too many?
* If they are busy changing canon so severely, why did they leave Chekov with the rediculous Russian accent that they had in the first series. Russian has a
* The ship is hypermodern. Why did Chekov have to run down to Engineering to fiddle with the transporter? For that matter why didn't he take the elevator which in canon is perfectly capable of getting him there.
* Why was it that in every case that Spock might have chosen to be Logical, the solution to the situation was to be emotional. Never once did it seem like being Vulcan was a good thing or a preferable thing.
* Why did Uhura act the way she did towards Spock, seemingly out of the blue? We never see it established that they are in a relationship, but she leaves her post to go comfort him like her job is unimportant.
* For that matter, whats wrong with the Captain's chair? People were fleeing it and turning over command to whomever on a regular basis. It seemed like people couldn't get off the bridge fast enough.
* If they jumped from the shuttle into the atmosphere, what propelled them there? They were outside the atmosphere when they left the shuttle by appearances. When they did hit atmosphere, why didn't they burn up? At the angle they were coming in at (right angles to the surface) they would have bounced in any case of course. Why when the finally reach the drillhead are they travelling a mere kilometer a second? What slowed them down? Oh, when you use one of those parachutes it has an automatic retrieval button that pulls it back into the backpack (without a need for repacking one assumes, must make the Jumpmasters nervous). We see this with Kirk's parachute. However Sulu has to cut his away because he lands on his back and cannot roll over I presume. Why doesn't it have an automatic release? Where is the backup chute?
* Sulu says he is interested in "Fencing", but they gave him some sort of folding oriental martial arts sabre instead. Do they not know the difference?
* The whole mention of the fact that we can't teleport between moving objects seems rather silly when absolutely everything is moving all the time even if it seems to be stationary. They could have come up with something better I think. As well in the early series, McCoy didn't like the Teleporter because it was new-fangled and he didn't trust it. In the new movie it seems to work just fine and the matter was never brought up, this missed out on being able to show how McCoy prefers old fashioned things (and thus establishing him as a So
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
"He's a punk."
He's a punk who despite tremendous odds saved his ship, it's former commander, and Earth.
He's Kirk.
Factor in when they were release and ticket prices. The only reasonable trek films were the first two, the first heavily borrowing from an early episode. When did it come out, 30 years ago?
I liked Wolverine.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Oh good Lord. Alexander was a King. He could do whatever he wanted. He was an absolute ruler. The Federation is supposedly a democratic society, with a military that has a chain of command, where you have to move up in the ranks.
Prove it. It is a sci-fi movie. They can do anything they want regarding advancement.
Stop trying to defend the cadet-to-captain malarky from the movie. Whatever else you can say about the flick, promoting a boy over many, many more qualified senior officers in Starfleet is a plot hole too big to overlook. That's just too much suspension of disbelief.
Not really. One just needs to be able to separate fiction from reality. I don't believe in Orcs and such, yet I enjoy Lord of the Rings as entertainment. I don't think there is a Platform 9 3/4, but I enjoy Harry Potter. I don't try to force Star Trek into compliance with the real world any more than I do these other shows, or, for that matter, A Fistful of Dollars. I go to be entertained, and in that they all succeed.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
The original Star Trek was a comedy from the point of view of science too, but the grave errors were spread across multiple episodes and so not so glaring as when crammed into one short movie. But at least the original Star Trek "tried" (somewhat) to be at least within the same ballpark as the scientific theories and guesses of its time, whilst this movie does not even bother. In fact it feels as the director has active disdain for science and instead replaces it with "scientific sounding gobledey gook" as a cheap device to get the background for his "plot" going and set the stage for lots of explosions.
I disagree. The "science" in this movie is far, far below the already pathetic level of the other Star Trek franchise "assets".
No, it was some generic "galaxy destroying", "supernova", which apparently blew up and was able to get its shock-wave move so fast as to travel to Romulus faster then Spock could to the star itself, at which point Spock was to put his portable, just-add-water-and-presto black hole in it ... which would be the classic "close the doors after the horses have gone" case. Never you mind how he got there bypassing the shock-wave, which by then was apparently already light-years in diameter. Even if the star was the very one around which Romulus orbited, the thing makes no sense whatsoever as the black hole would be far too late to stop it from "destroying the galaxy", given that the star has already blown up and consumed the planet, which of course would not merely "break in half" but be entirely absorbed by the expanding star at such a short (astronomically) distance. Spock arriving in his little ship would be the very definition of "pointless" at that stage of things, yet in the movie he clearly deploys his squirt-gun black hole, which then expands and stops the "explosion".
Nonsense. From the very beginning to the very end.
I always view story reboots and retellings with an open mind. There's always some artistic liberty that they can have. Obviously the exact bridge style of the original series would not have worked for a film over 40 years after.
All of the little liberties I really haven't had a problem with (the engine room, the phaser guns)--because they did a damn good job of keeping to the original characters.
The casting for this movie was absolutely fantastic, and really could not have been better casted. Chris Pine and Zach Quinto played fantastic characters. I've always been more of the "Spock" fan myself (hey, I'm a nerd who likes to think before acting) and the role was played EXTREMELY well. Not only was it played extremely well from an acting standpoint, but the writing for the role was great--the younger, more conflicted Spock. It was very good for the film and story, as it gives a bit more...individual character to Spock than the original series did.
As far as the enemy, the film wasn't really about the enemy they had to go up against. And to be honest with you, I'm sort of really tired of movies that show insurmountable circumstances with an over-confident near-invincible enemy but somehow some individual comes out to save-the-god-damn-day-when-nobody-else-could. There were obviously powerful things regarding this Romulan mining vessel and some of its capabilities, but not once did I get the feeling throughout the film that his vessel was invincible EXCEPT to the Enterprise crew.
If you need an example of the above paragraph of how NOT to do it, think Independence Day.
I don't mind the camera work that some people complained about, in fact, to be honest with you they're probably only complaining about the camera work because they have very little else to complain about, and they just like to gripe.
Yeah, dont forget that Alexanders father was king Philip II. The bloodline is most important for kings and gueens and also for the priesthood and kings family...
He was not some "mysterious pig herder" who would fight for kinghood. He had the right to name himself a king becouse of his bloodline.
Kingships are inherited. But if you're saying in the new movie I'll get to see Kirk die of malaria, poisoning, typhoid, encephalitis, & booze, then I'm sold.
Many of us loyal fans are royally pissed off with how J.J. Abrams wiped his ass with Star Trek canon in this movie.
I was willing to give him lots of benefit of doubt, but now, having seen the movie, I believe that he fucked it up good. He fucked up everything he *could have* fucked up.
They nuked cannon ST, and annoyed the trekkies?
This is a movie I have got to see.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Only here could a Star Trek movie generate this much debate. BTW: I liked the movie.
more cowbell
Nowadays all movies need their action heroes to be 20 something, not because they are making daring artistic decisions, but because teenagers are the main cannon fodder of the movie industry.
This has led to illogical decisions like the one rightly lambasted by the other poster.
A masterpiece will not ask us to suspend disbelief to the point of stupidity, because that would be patronizing (you can patronize teenagers, they are normally stupid, not their fault, it is lack of experience, but you shouldn't do that with adults and old timers, they will see through your inane holes in the plot and call you to it, as the previous poster rightly did).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Dear goodness ...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Which is the very definition of "insanity" I spoke of. How the fuck does one enlist to become an "officer" at the age of 12 in any sane navy?! Specially when there are "seamen [that] had decades of experience" around to choose from, even if they were in this case, I assume, drafted against their will?! Doesn't one have to attend a Naval Academy to become a "commissioned" officer? Or is any 10 year old who jumps up with his hand held high and calls "Pick me! Pick me! I wanna be an officer!" good enough?!
Total lunacy.
...kinda like releasing a Sherlock Holmes movie where he runs around with a giant gun killing people until he solves the crime
You're a *genius*, man! A Steampunk Action-Adventure Sherlock Holmes!
Really, Hollywood should've done that, instead of messing up League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Just use a black hole to redo it until it's successful. Unless it was successful the first time and didn't need a full reboot. Seriously, why did we need to erase everything that happened again? At least the kirk from the other movies always fixes the timeline.
Ah, but that in itself is a paradox. If the movie is successful among the general public and critics, it will be dissected by the fans and deemed mediocre at best for not adhering to some nebulous metric of 'faithfulness' to the original. If it is successful to the fans, it will invariably contain contain all of the eccentricities that made it more cerebral, thus leaving out any action sequences: e.g. diplomatic missions and descriptions of non-existent fantasy tech. The only reason we haven't been consumed by a singularity is because a natural space-time bubble has formed around these two groups, keeping them separate from one another. They live in their own universes, where one group Kirk vs Picard, and another enjoys pretty explosions. And, I think we can all agree, this division is for the best. Otherwise we'd be inanely arguing forever about ... *shoom*...
On the other side of existence, the Great Prophet Zarquon approaches a mic:
'Er, how are we for time? Have I just got a min-'
And so the Universe ended.
$72 million is only $35 million in 2008 dollars
I wonder if the fact that the movie is available in IMAX delays what would normally be opening weekend income. There are far fewer IMAX screens so most people who want to see it in that format won't be able to view it at that time.
For example here in Ottawa there is only one IMAX screen playing it and if we estimate 20 showings over the weekend at 400 people per showing that's only 8000 viewers. Not much for a city of a million.
I'll be more interested to see first-week sales figures.
That was not far from the truth. One overhead shot of a dude in agony per movie is acceptable, if a bit old hat.
But three? One when the main character is 12?
It's like the director watched the last Star Wars, and thought it had a good ending. Then he had his eureka moment, "Let's do that three times, and it'll be three times awesomer!"
can you adjust for inflation please? thanks
Well, yeah, but this film's production budget is $130-150 million. That's versus $47 million for First Contact, and $58 million for Insurrection. That doesn't include marketing/distribution costs ($50m-$90m). Of course, that $75m doesn't include worldwide revenues. It's Hollywood with their creative accounting, so doing the math here on what's profitable is nigh-impossible. But the bottom line is that you can't directly compare the movies because this one was much more expensive.
I think the media coverage of Star Trek's box office numbers will only enhance those numbers. People sit up and take notice when the media predicts a film will be a box office hit, the result is people go and see the movie.
If I produced a film, I wonder who I could bribe to get that kind of publicity?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Is it wrong that my first thought after seeing the film was "Well, crap - now who's going to go back in time and save Zefram Cochrane?"
See, the interesting thing to me is that this new alternate universe not only has changed the lives and stories of the original cast, but might very well change the entire lives of the TNG-era casts as well. Hell, some of them might not even exist now. And it takes balls to annihilate Vulcan and not push the reset button.
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
You read a review and the ensuing comments of a film and expect to NOT see spoilers?
Well you wont let it happen again will ya?
In the 1800s people got married younger, had children younger, joined the military at younger ages. In the Civil war, males as young as 11 joined as drummer boys. Farragut enlisted as a midshipman which is an officer cadet.
Around the turn of the century, it was not uncommon for criminals to be pressed in military service as sailors. For those that were not forced to join the Navy, some do not qualify for officer positions and some did not want such positions. Not every seamen that enlisted wanted to be a Captain; some of them wanted to be at sea or to complete their enlistments and move on. Generally speaking those that came from more affluent families could get their sons into officer roles whereas some did not have the option. In Farragut's case, his biological father was a cavalry officer in Tennessee and fought in the American Revolution, and his adopted father was also a Captain.
These days it requires going to the Academy, but even in the Navy today, an Ensign fresh out of the academy with no experience out ranks some that are not commissioned. It is based on rank, not experience.
Again, a hundred years ago, things were different as to who could join the Navy. Back then, it was not unheard of that a 12 year old boy would be left in charge of the family while the head of the household was away. Or that children as young as 5 worked in factories. Or a 12 year old would be put in charge of a sailing vessel.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Being king is hereditary, being a captain is not...
Thanks.
Way too many plot holes... I found myself laughing at the movie more than I was sucked in. Fine, I get the whole alternate time-line thing and I'll bite for the sake of a story, but the tech was way off base from the original. In Next Gen, they constantly had to worry about staying in orbit to stay within transporter range. In the movie, 'Scotty' informs us that he can beam stuff between planets in the same solar system "which is easy by the way" as he says. So how did technology regress by next gen? Also, what the hell is red matter? What a crock, we are supposed to buy that? Also, the shameless ripping off from Wrath of Khan and Nemesis got tiring. Nero was a ripoff of Nemesis' villian, while the abandoning of Spock was too reminiscent of Kirk being abandoned in Wrath of Khan. Also, the captain would not lead a tactical assault team on Nemo's ship, just not starfleet regs... Spocks story made little sense, as did Nero's reason for hating him. Apparently Spock didn't try to save Romulus hard enough, but since when was it his responsibility to rescue Romulus? What about the times the federation helped the Romulans with the Borg or Species 8472? I guess earth got no credit for that lol... Awful reboot IMO, panders to the lowest common denominator.
And they want to see it. I suspect the drop off this coming weekend will not be nearly as big as for Wolverine.
> Would you rather there be no more Star Trek?
Sure, absolutely.
Nor am I upset that JJ didn't get to do "Lawrence of Arabia II".
The new galactica, with it's explorations of social and philosophical ideas (what is torture, what is "human"?, is democracy important? is Six incredibly hot in a red dress? er.. well... picture her with green skin) was closer to Trek than this movie was.
Check out the pilot to Caprica, they explore other things and it looks promising.
> The story of the movie was flimsy
The _story_ was flimsy? What wasn't? Most of the acting was poor to middling, at best. There was no attempt at any development, either plot nor character. It was all action action action.
And I didn't find the action - with the exception of the sword fight - particularly interesting either. Ships are either utterly overwhelmed by the bad guy, or escape without a scratch. There's no real "fighting".
There wasn't a single point in the movie where I was ever even wondering "how will they get out of this", let alone on the edge of my seat. It was boring.
We would tend to make an equivalency between a fighter pilot from WWI flying canvas and wood biplanes and a modern fighter pilot strapped into an F-22. There is no equivalency. The planes cost a thousand times more, they take more training to fly, and are very damned complex.
But the big change would be for the pilots involved, not command. MacArther wouldn't need to know how to fly an F-22 to take advantage of it's greater range, speed and armaments.
Nepotism, superiority complexes of "upper classes", their raging sense of entitlement and general bigoted stupidity do explain a lot. But then again they did inherit their ideals from the feudal British, who were, amazingly, even more moronic.
None of which goes to "sanity". History is full of examples of utter, sheer, imbecilic, barking at the moon, rabid lunacy. 12 year old "officers" in charge of ships is one of them.
Most tv of that era that wasn't complete trash was shot on 35 mm film. Not super quality perhaps but far higher then what tv of the era was capable off. So yes, if they still got the original material a high quality copy could me made. As has been done with lots of other film material.
The GP might be a trekkie, but the parent is a twit who mouths off about stuff he has no knowledge about.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Thank god, not an other child hood memory raped.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Naval officer "cadets" joined the navy at around age 12 throughout the entire Wooden Walls period (2 centuries). So every officer at the battle of Trafalgar had been in the navy and at sea since before they were old enough to shave.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
I cannot really care about another crappy trekky movie but I'm happy with either outcome. If after the first week it fails and ends up a disappointment like Watchmen, then the crappy trekky franchise is dead and this time it's going to be forever because no-one will be so foolish as to invest in that pile of dung anymore.
If it is a success, which is more likely, it will be even better because the new movie COMPLETELY ERASES the old trekky stuff. It's not just dead, Jim, it has CEASED TO EXIST! No more the-next-crapulation, no more deep-shit-nine, no more whatever-I-can't-be-bothered-to-remember-the-titles. Even the pathetic old series sinks forever into the toilet bowl of history and is no more. Think of it! All the novels (who wastes good toilet paper on crappy trek anyway), comics, everything made irrelevant forever! It's like shitting on the face of all the basement-dwelling, bad-smelling, ludicrously-dressed trekkie pedophile geeks everywhere!
Yes, because this is not the old, pathetic, crappy trek. This is something for the real people, the beautiful people, the athletic, sports-loving, action fans. This is jock stuff, to which nerds cannot relate.
So, either way, we win and nerds lose.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Which, as I already pointed out, has nothing whatsoever to do with sanity. In fact it is patently insane. History is full of drooling idiocies which were widely accepted as "normal" at the time.
Hmmm... OK, let's maybe have an on-topic post about this, eh? :-)
"Den of Geek sounds a note of caution" Riiiight. Like some random SciFi site with a name like 'Den of Geek' carries any sort of real authority or credibility on the inner workings of the business of Hollywood. The truth is that in all likelihood Star Trek is already in the black and the flick hasn't even been released in 2 of the biggest overseas markets yet: China (5.15) and japan (5.29)... This doesn't even take into consideration downline profits like pay cable, basic cable, broadcast rights, DVD sales, etc.
As someone who makes his living 'in the business' one of the things I've learned over the years is that marketing departments regularly inflate budgets on mainstream films and deflate them on indie films. In my career I've been privy to the actual budgets (including marketing spend) for more than a dozen mainstream movies and in every case the real budget was between 30% and 50% lower than what the marketing department was claiming the budget to be. The more 'effects driven' the movie, the more inflated the budget typically is.
The reason for this actually makes some sense... When part of the sell is the spectacle, inflating the budget is one of the cheapest ways the marketing department can hint to moviegoers that the special effects are going to be "so kick-ass your mind will literally be blown out the back of your skull all over the movie-goer behind you" without actually saying it. Since every entertainment venue from ET to IMDb picks this stuff up and runs with it, it lends a "breathless" sort of credibility to the whole affair... And it doesn't cost an extra dime of the marketing budget to do.
Worry not, everybody involved in this (and every other movie you're likely to see this year) will make their money back plus a healthy profit. The "risks" involved in making movies are- to a large degree- all Hollywood smoke and mirrors, as usual...
---As my daddy used to tell me: "You gotta be smart before you can be a smartass."
> As he asked Dr. Dehner in TOS about Gary Mitchell and his god-like powers, "But what will he learn along the way?" In the reboot, the answer is basically "nothing"
But that does bring up one of the other few scenes I liked. After watching one of the worst bits of acting in the movie during the whatever Maru simulation, Spock points out that the entire idea is to teach the fleet how to operate even facing certain death. As Spock points, by "winning" the scenario, Kirk actually LOST the scenario.
Now that, I think, is an interesting point. If they had gone down this road a little more I think I might have enjoyed the movie a little more. But no, after pointing this out they then turn around completely and allow the character to do anything he wants with no fear whatsoever.
Thinking back over it again, I realize in retrospect that what made the earlier shows (not a huge fan, have watched some of the original and NG) work was that Kirk wasn't superhuman, he was _experienced_. His capabilities were clearly hard won, and you could see this in the stars on his chest. And Picard? That character oozed experience in every missing hair on his head. We weren't watching superhumans, we were watching extremely _qualified_ humans, which is, in my books, a very different and much more believable reality.
Well, its budget was an estimated 150 million, so it would be quite negative if it ended now.
Most of the time officers were from upper class families because they could read which was vital for planning, following orders, issuing orders, etc. That's not to say that good officers could not be found amongst lower classes if they demonstrated skill or bravery.
What you called "imbecilic, barking at the moon, rabid lunacy" was often times neccessary and practical.. You've captured a sloop while at sea. You need someone to sail it to the nearest friendly port. Most of your capable officers are either (1) sailing all your other captured vessels or (2) waiting at port after capturing other vessels as it may take weeks or months to get to that port. Your only available officer is a 12 year old. By the way, this is the 1800s most sailors were likely illiterate. So mostly likely you are going to send over the 12 year old who can navigate and read a map. Also if you are sending over a 12 year old, most likely you are not sending him to port alone. If you are down to that level of reserves, you will most likely be escorting the vessel back to port, but you need someone in charge that handle the daily tasks of sailing a vessel. While we can't know what the sailor thought, we do know that they did not mutiny when placed under the command of a 12 year old so they must have not thought the idea as too "insane".
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
When the average life expectancy is around 35, 12 seems a lot older.
"Die StarTrek, die...what?"
It was German. He was really saying: "The Star Trek, the..."
No one who speaks German could be all bad...
That's another thing, why did Scotty use Archer's dog as his guinea pig for his transporter experiment and not just some insect? Why the Admiral's dog? Did he have to be on Saturn on a tight deadline?
Ahhh, so any culture different from yours is wrong: full of insane, drooling idiots. Not everyone has the same values, nor lives the same way. That doesn't make them stupid, or crazy, just different.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What's the big deal? We've already survived the biggest reset of all to the Star Trek mythology: In TOS, Earth had avoided nuclear war and destruction. In TNG, we didn't avoid it at all. This changed history and the message.
Then, we had the other soft resets (for you VT100 fans):
Vulcans go from being a metaphorical example of not letting emotion run away with you to Oprah-savable, emotional cripples.
Cochran goes from enlightened explorer to dance-challenged lech in it for the money.
The Enterprise goes from something the Klingons originally describe as Federation Battle Cruiser to a weak sister that folds at the first or second weapons hit.
And if you really were a fan of TOS, you demanded that the next boat out would be of the Dreadnought class - complete with three nacelles and a whole lot of firepower. And we got to see that exactly once, at the end of TNG series, with Ryker flying it in a dress.
Oh - did I leave out that the uniform for the babes were miniskirts, while later the men wore dresses? Or that uniforms went from comfy and casual-appropriate to stiff poly requiring the Picard maneuver?
The only thing that a Star Trek reboot needs to be truly successful and in keeping with the original mythology - is for it to be simply Star Trek - that means that it contains co-ed and multi-racial crews, advanced computers, Vulcans, tranporters, warp drive, phasers and bad guys. Ya got that, ya got Star Trek. Trek fans forgive everything else.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
And maybe, just maybe people over thirty left their brains at the door and enjoyed some entertainment. You sir, are a fucking toolbox.
"though there were some good elements to the movie, it was terrible, as a whole"
So we'll watch Wolverine in .mkv format on our 60" LCD later this summer for free.
It's hard to bitch about free movies.
I just got back from seeing it, and this is not a good movie. It's a fun bad movie. If you really like Star Trek, this is not for you.
*SPOILER*
In the final action scene where they are trying to escape from the black hole, the brilliant trick to survive should have been to go into it and thus reboot the reboot. That's all I really wanted, and it didn't happen.
Great casting, terrible script, shaky-cam action, and a gazillion lense flares. Its so full of holes I won't even bother to pick it apart.
When it hits my UVerse box, I'll watch it. Until then, I'm not spending ticket $$$ ($18-20/person) + food + parking + gas + time on the movie...
As a plus, I won't have to look at the back of some no-talent ass-clown's head, listen to demon spawn cell phones, have to smell someone's farts, or deal with imbeciles who have weak bladders sitting in the middle of the aisle.
Oh yeah, did I mention - NO COMMERCIALS either?!
Remind me again, WHY I want to go to the movie theater?
> That was the option, re-invent & reboot or buh-bye.
Precisely. Even if a company would be insane enough to finance another conventional Trek film after Nemesis, only a very few ultra-hard-core fans in rubber forehead appliances and mouldering cosplay regalia would have gone to see it.
They could have just rebooted without explanation, as was done with Casino Royale. This would actually have simplified the plot and freed up 20 minutes or so for other things. The time travel angle was a nod towards die-hard fans, which appears to have been unappreciated.
So, fine, there's going to be a subgroup of intense trekkies who are very unhappy with the reboot, who would, perhaps, rather there be no more Star Trek unless it included Shatner or Stewart (depending on which camp you're in). I'm ok with that. I don't think Berman-era hardcore fans have the numbers to make or break a nationally released film, and their ire may (as implied in the Onion skit) actually have an opposite effect. It's all good. I'll be seeing the film again this week.
> I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
We do, but you have to put up with white-hot hate from both established parties.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Who gives a fuck ? The so called libertarians are all over this one, even though the trek universe holds no promise for their ilk. Wankers. IIRC, Christopher Pike was the original (TV) captain. But obviously, Kirk is more well known, so lets go with the money. They won't be getting my money (or my download).
> Yeah...I've started wondering, am I not a trekkie any more? I didn't really watch the last TV series, I can't even tell you what it was called.
Funny, neither can I...
> [...] Enterprise [...]
Ah, that rings a bell.
Yeah, sorry, I don't believe you. If you can't recite at least the name of every TV series (there hasn't been that many) you never were a Trekkie. Especially the name of the last series "Enterprise" for chrissake. It's not like the name has never been used before.
I only watched the first three or four episodes, but at least I remember the frigging NAME.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yes TNG was more of an ensemble show, which is hard to carry to the big screen because there's no "Big 3" like the original had. The TNG worked together as a whole, and more like a family that came to visit each week, and that does not work on a 2-3 year movie cycle.
Another thing later shows were missing was Gene Roddenberry saying, "Yeah nice story, but what's the point?" He rejected a lot of stories if he felt they lacked a moral, and I think that's what brought down series like Voyager and Enterprise. They were okay storywise, with lots of CGI and crap, but don't make me want to go back and rewatch them.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
We saw this on Mothers Day, I left disappointed. Sure, it had decent acting, fast action, millions of hours of CPU time in CGI effects, decent music and sound - but it was not a well written story. It doesn't have to be consistent with all the previous Star Trek universes, that's not the problem. Why, oh why can't we get Sci-Fi written for the large or small screen that doesn't depend heavily on time travel ?? This has become the lamest plot trick in the book - "Hey, let's have the Bad Guy be some heavy from the future who travels back in time to change history". There are some writers who can still make time travel work (Orson Scott Card comes to mind) but the writers of this Star Trek failed miserably. Maybe the sequel (??) will be better ....
Gosh, mod'ed up to +5. I wonder how that happened?
Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB would seem to disagree with your friends.
Doesn't mean much - both those sites get push-polled every time a major release comes out.
As would I: I think this is the best Star Trek movie I've seen (and I've seen them all).
Yeah, the latest is always the "best" to a marketer.
Wolverine was a vaguely entertaining but ultimately shallow and formulaic popcorn flick. Star Trek has breathed life into what seemed to many a dead franchise.
The trek movie is a very shallow, formulaic action movie. Stop pretending it's deep or meaningful.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
True if you don't work for Paramount Pictures.
You have to allow for inflation and the decreased buying power of the unit of currency (in this case, USD) over time.
This is why GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) is the all-time box office champ instead of TITANIC (1997) simply because the U.S. Dollar could buy more stuff in 1939 as opposed to 1997.
Nowadays, companies give less for the same price and are hesitant to charge more for the same amount of goods and services because they know nobody will pay higher prices for stuff unless they ABSOLUTELY have to.
I still stand by my original comment. 75 million means this new Trek made the same amount of money in ONE week, as previous movies made during their whole run. I call that a success.
And if Paramount really did spend 150 million making the movie, then they are fools. Like that old saying goes, "Fools and their money are soon parted." The only justification I can think for that huge expenditure is if the sets will be reused for Trek Reboot Part 2 (already being scripted), in which case the cost can be split over the two movies.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Yes, you are one of those 'hard to please' purist type Trekkies.
If anything, the swordfighting scene WAS canon that was kept: Sulu was an excellent fencer in TOS. And I assume that the character you were speaking of was the one Kirk found with Scotty? I'm sorry, not even close.
And the plot resembling "Year In Hell"? OK, if every plot involving time travelers changing the timestream to create a new alternate is somehow "almost" exactly the same, then YIH copied ST4TVH, STTNG, and even TOS. The story isn't the act of making a new timestream, it about what happens from that point forward, which was the whole fucking point behind the reboot.
The characters were fine... you couldn't focus on ALL of them in a two hour movie, plus the main characters in TOS always were Kirk and Spock. Don't worry, this film will spawn at least one if not more sequels.
Destroy canon? Completely rewriting the story? Did we watch the same movie? The whole fucking point was to start with NEW canon, without completely invalidating the existing canon. Absolutely nothing they did in this film in any way invalidates what came before, and in fact honors it in the best way possible. So go ahead and watch your reruns of TNG and DS9 (all good stuff BTW) and leave the enjoying of something fresh and new to me and most everyone else.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
The product placements.
Nokia and Budweiser? What a depressing future.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
This movie blew chunks! I was ready to walk out about 1/2 way through. Only stayed in the hopes it would get better. I'll never have that 2 hours of my life back!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
*At time of writing.
> They treat black holes as portable, general-purpose plot-line fillers.
True.
> Then there is the "supernova", which, somehow by magic, is able to "threaten to destroy the galaxy",
Funny you should mention that, it reminded me of Robert Heinlein's posthumous book "Variable Star", wherein a sun goes nova and produces enough gamma radiation to sterilize planets light-years distant. (Of course, this doesn't happen immediately -- speed-of-light limits apply.) On a profoundly different scale, Schmidt's "The Sins of the Fathers" also deals with this topic.
A little yahooing shows that a single supernova threatening life in a good part of the galaxy is a plausible, if unlikely, scenario. Of course, it wouldn't happen like it was shown in the film. I took the break-up of Romulus as a visual for the masses, who wouldn't necessarily have gotten a biosphere dying from gamma radiation. I agree it could have been done better.
> Then there are the super-teleporters [...] which are capable of delivering unstoppable warheads to planets light years away [...]
Um,... what? Sorry, I don't remember that scene.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'm sorry, but I didn't like the new movie. I am a Star Trek fan, but not a die hard Trekkie. Seen (and liked) all the movies and all the shows except a few of the DS9's and Voyager's - both of which were getting a bit tiresome towards the end.
Jumping from action shot to action shot, scenes no more than a couple of minutes long - most less than a minute - and not keeping the camera still, it seems to be targeted to the 90's generation that grew up with cheesy action cartoons and have short attention spans (probably due to said cartoons). The "I'm a doctor not a..." from Bones seemed to have been thrown in just to get it in and didn't fit where it was said.
In short the whole movie was one short action shot after another all strung together designed to please the 20 something and younger crowd used to this type of entertainment.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Wiping the slate clean is good. I like to believe that Sybok didn't make it off Vulcan, and hence the fifth movie can be erased from cannon for good (not just by the Word of Gene Roddenberry outside of the films.)
As for the plots we liked, think: The Botany Bay is still drifting through space.... Whales are already extinct on Earth.... The Klingons still hate the Federation.... the possibilities are still there.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Having the failure who played Syler in Heroes cast in any movie is a disappointment, particularly as Spock. I don't mind Star Trek, but seeing this guy as Spock makes me think twice about bothering to see this in the cinemas..such a poor actor.
Video Review:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/trekkies_bash_new_star_trek_film
Yes, yes, the witch-hunts, executions of 4 year-olds by burning them on stake for "heresy", Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades and on and on and on were all just "cultural differences". Silly me.
Get a fucking grip. 12 year olds (on average) lack the cognitive ability and emotional stability to handle many a task, chief amongst them being service in combat. Thats developmental biology, not "culture". Not to mention the fun effects of PSTD on kids after watching people around them getting torn to bits in combat. Growing up to be a fucked-up, zealot religious nut as a desperate way to cope with these kind of experiences would probably be the "best" possible outcome one could hope for ... which incidentally was what happened to pretty much all of these "officers".
"Just different" my ass. Why, Charles Manson then had just "different values" and was "mis-understood" too, I presume, no? He just wanted to "live not in the same way" as the rest of inflexible and oppressive us, poor thing. How is your campaign to let him out going, by the way?
You are missing the point, again. What was insane is the fact that 12 year olds were on a warship as "officers" to begin with. Also your rationalizations are rather hollow as it is virtually certain that the ship of which he was "in command" was brought to port not by him but the vastly more experienced sailors who were stuck with this "captain". Taking credit for success of others is also quite expected part of the "upper class" attitudes.
Probably the instant death penalties for disobeying their "betters", life-long brutal conditioning to obey the "nobility" no matter how insane their orders, and the sailors' desire to get to port and thus some kind of safety had far more to do with this then the leadership abilities of a squeeky-voiced, pimple-faced 12 year old.
Well, given the emotional stability and cognitive abilities of an average 12 year old, it would explain much of the utter, rabid cretinism that positively oozes out of all history books.
Err, no. Ignoring for the moment that the "magical" properties of the movie "supernova" had to do with the speed of the propagation of the shock-wave, its composition and the means of "stopping" it, no supernova could produce a burst powerful enough to wipe life in the entire galaxy. Milky Way is far too huge for that. Remember that the density of any shock-wave decreases exponentially with distance from its source, and while gamma radiation can reach lethal to life levels at distances of tens or even hundreds of light-years, our galaxy is over 100 thousand light-years in diameter. There is no star in our galaxy massive enough to produce a burst that powerful. In fact, astronomical objects of such power are visible only at the edges of our observable Universe, indicating them to be also the furthest back in time as the light of their explosions took billions of years to get to us. Such astronomical objects, being relics of the long past stages of the expansion of the Universe, are no longer anywhere near our galaxy.
The Enterprise ejected Kirk, marooning him on a planet near Vulcan on which Scotty was also present. Then it immediately went to warp. It took Kirk hours (by which time the ship would have been hundreds of light years away - according to the new super-fast motion as presented in the movie where it took something like 20 minutes to get from Earth to Vulcan) and probably turning-around to get back to Earth, having overshot it many many times, at which point Scotty beamed Kirk and himself to it.
I am joking of course about the overshooting bit, but that is the only "logical" outcome if one takes the hilarious, gigantic time and distance inconsistencies in the movie.
Last weekend? It was the end of finals week and I was studying my ass off. Now it's Miller Time and I'm going to enjoy seeing a half-dozen good movies in the next month or so.
You missed my earlier point. This was the 1800s. People married younger, had children younger, worked in factories, joined the military. This is not unheard of even today in agrarian societies that children work at younger ages. Joining the navy at 10 as officer cadet was commonplace. And your bias against "upper classes" has nothing to do with the argument at all. Again, the upper classes are the ones mostly likely to read and be able to navigate. This is the 1800s; there were no GPS or satellites. Oceanic navigation required a skill that your average seaman would not possess. Getting a ship safely to port would require the skill of the crew and the skill of the captain.
Crews have mutinied for far less than being under the command of a 12 year old. And how do you know that the crew simply didn't respect him and the captain. You don't know. All you have is your bias against the "nobility".
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
> no supernova could produce a burst powerful enough to wipe life in the entire galaxy.
's not what I said.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yes - it will hit $200M easily. a]it already garnered $35M from foreign which has never been a major market for prior ST movies. b] it was up against the second week of Wolverine and unlike Big W, JJ Abrams has made a good film that will appeal to non-trekkies ... much bigger audience.
Jim in the mild west.
Ps I worked on both ST-DS9 and Voyager.
>> Um,... what? Sorry, I don't remember that scene.
> The Enterprise ejected Kirk, marooning him on a planet near Vulcan on which Scotty was also present. Then it immediately
No no, the original quote was as follows:
#####
> Then there are the super-teleporters [...] which are capable of delivering unstoppable warheads to planets light years away [...]
Um,... what? Sorry, I don't remember that scene.
#####
I certainly remembered the scene where they transported to the Enterprise while it's in warp. This was explained with some hand-waving. I allowed it because they didn't use the word "multiphasic", which was apparently required by law whenever someone explained anything in any Trek show made in the last two decades.
However, I must have been looking around for that errant sour patch kid when someone teleported a warhead to a planet light years away. When did that scene occur?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It didn't in the movie, but that would be the obvious logical outcome of such changes in the Star Trek universe. If one can beam (by means that apparently cannot be stopped easily) to a ship in warp light years away, the reverse is also true, and thus any ship could attack any planet, or any other ship, by simply beaming a powerful warhead onto it by means essentially unstoppable (with the exception of total blanket "jamming" of everything in vicinity as was in the movie). This would have drastically altered the entire dynamics of the Star Trek universe, and it was the chief reason for which the teleporters were a short-range, finicky devices in all the previous instances of Star Trek.
But it was what the movie claimed, amongst a whole lot of other nonsense.
I am sure that there was a just short step from swinging a rake around to captaining a ship at high seas!
And so was joining a Jesuit convent to spend the rest of one's life flogging himself in "penitence". There were a lot of stupid things that were "commonplace" throughout history.
Which were not likely to be had by a 12 year-old mid-shipman either, never you mind that the required instruments, charts and navigation books were extremely expensive and kept under close scrutiny by the top officers, and certainly not used on most junior cadets as training props, thus putting them in danger of destruction, likely leading to the loss of the ship itself. And so he clearly had help of some more experienced navigator, most likely one of the real officers of the captured ship.
Oh, bullshit. The penalties for disobedience and mutiny were severe on ships, flogging to near-death of crewmen for any most minor offence against their "betters" was commonplace. The incidents of mutiny were very rare indeed, to the point that each and every case is individually recorded and famous.
Alexander was royalty and raised to command. His subjects had no choice but to follow them because people, even those as disagreeable as the Greeks (fine, Macedonians) generally prefer to keep their heads attached. This was not the same thing. Kirk was a CADET (someone who holds no authority to give orders) on academic probation for cheating. Oh, and he incited a mutiny. Under no circumstances would he then be given command of Starfleet's FLAGSHIP.
I think they made an exception in Kirk's case because he saved the entire fucking Federation of Planets, and had an entire crew of Starfleet personell willing to raise hell if he didn't remain as Captain.
My first reaction to this slashdot note is "Is it out already?" I must have missed something. But then I've mostly given up on TV and always flip channels as soon as commercials come when I do watch. Or maybe there's some really bad or unrecognizable advertising.
What we need is science fiction, from the future. I want to see the 27th century, I want to hear characters talking about the "post-electricity" era. Or something.
Enough of these fucking prequels, they're boring and stupid.
Maybe we need all the movie studios to go bankrupt so they're replaced by people who can make entertaining movies.
You're also forgetting Admiral Lord Nelson, Captain in the Royal Navy at age 20.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral_Lord_Nelson
Command of a prize ship was most likely given as an honor, like a birthday gift. He was simply taking a captured ship into port. Imagine you are boating on a lake for your 12th birthday, and your dad says "Go ahead, son, take the wheel. Steer us out to that island."
Study a little history (even just read Wikipedia and follow some links) and you'll find vast differences between Farragut and Kirk. Farragut joined as a cadet (midshipman) at age 10 or 11, which was common practice at that time. Kirk joined Starfleet at around age 19-21 (presumably their drinking age, as shown in the bar scene, is similar to our current US drinking age). So, at age 22, Farragut had served in the navy for 11 or more years, all of them on-ship, as opposed to Kirk's three years of schooling.
At 22, Farragut was given a small ship, not the *flagship* of the US Navy. Farragut wasn't even promoted to the rank of commander until 17 years later, at age 40, and captain at age 54.
Hey, it's Fen from K5. Check me out in my journal. Hope things are well.
For most of human history, a boy was expectd to take on the duties of a man at about 14-15. We used to collectively believe in individual responsibility, and that was how responsibility and judgement were taught - plunge directly into life. Of course, wiser heads would keep an eye on youth, to help limit the damage of the inevitable screw-ups, but teens would learn that actions have consequences directly, not kept in a padded cell. How do you learn judgement if you never get to make any decisions?
For the past few centuries, in most walks of life, you'd leave home at about 12 to live with whatever master would teach you your trade, though still treated as a boy for a few years. In the navy, because of the need for leadership training, a midshipman was in many ways treated as a man immediately, though he'd still be spending a lot of time in classes, and was beaten less brutally than an adult for screw-ups.
Usually, a leiutenant would be given captaincy of a prize, but leadership *had* to go to an officer, and a midshipman counts. While technically he'd be in charge, if he had even an ounce of sense he'd just tell the ratings (senior crewmembers) to do their job and leave them to sort out the details. Presumably the Captain trusted his judgement at least that far, as the majority of the Captain's pay (at least in the British navy) came from those prize ships actually making it home.
But 12 year old midshipmen died often in combat, because everyone in the navy did. Combat in the age of "wooden walls" was amazingly brutal.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There's a few other factors. For the argument of Alexander becoming King when young, we've seen infants named king. This does not mean they're up to the task. Alexander was a man of extraordinary ability given the position to fully employ them. But he is an exception, not the rule.
And so is James Tiberius Fucking Kirk. Which the people around him recognized.
Honestly I was a little irked by how quickly he was made captain, and thought they could have at least thrown up another "Three years later..." transition before showing him being officially handed the keys to the Enterprise. But really -- arguing against actual historical examples of young people successfully promoted to positions of power because they are rare and exceptional? When the whole freaking point of the movie is that James T Kirk is destined for greatness no matter what the timeline? That's just silly.
I mean I think its safe to say that they don't do promote cadets to captain normally, and that this timeline's Checkov will still have to wait another 20 years (or whatever) before he gets his own ship. So, exception that proves the rule indeed.
The enemies of Democracy are
The biggest "offense" I saw was being able to transport to a ship at warp who knows how many light years away.
I saw that as believable as a one-time fluke. Future Spock had the equation, past Scotty was able to make it work once on his heavily-modified equipment, but I see no reason to believe that past Scotty could do it again without Future Spock's help -- who could easily say he has moral Prime Directive-ish objections to doing it again. Or there could be limitations to "transwarp teleporters" that the movie didn't mention: maybe its range is limited, or it takes too much power to run routinely.
Perhaps my favorite aspect of the movie is that they didn't shoot for scientific accuracy -- warping between stars within minutes, being able to see Nero a hundred yards from Saturn right over San Francisco, etc. I couldn't stand it when TNG would spout crap as a way to advance the plot; better just "do it" than try to bullshit about it. This movie was basically a rip from the TOS books, lots of adventure and each character able to shine in their own right.
My other favorite thing was that the Enterprise was actually allowed to kick ass. ALL of the other movies had some lame excuse why the Federation's flagship wasn't up to snuff, either outclassed by V'Ger or surprise-attacked by Khan or self-destructed or glitchy or obsolete...
LOL, aye, I did but I thought I had read somewhere that the dead may not be ...dead.
> This would have drastically altered the entire dynamics of the Star Trek universe, and it was the chief reason for which the teleporters were a short-range, finicky devices in all the previous instances of Star Trek.
I haven't watched all previous instances of Star Trek, so I guess you've got me there. In one of the novels is a ship that travels by repeatedly teleporting itself lightyears ahead, but that's arguably not canon. (Although I spotted a couple of "novel-only" nods in the film, but that puts us in a gray area where we probably don't want to be.)
You have a compelling argument, though, and I can't immediately think of a counter to it, except that perhaps the technology was banned, as were the "phasing shields" or whatever they were in TNG, (which would explain why we've never heard of it before) and of course that transporters still won't work through shields, making this more a terrorist weapon than a weapon of war.
But the best answer was that it was just bad writing. It'd make more sense for the base to have a shuttle, but that would have required another set and additional special effects.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> But it was what the movie claimed, amongst a whole lot of other nonsense.
I took that as hyperbole (which admittedly would be out of character for Spock). And you're right, there was a lot of nonsense. Not quite as much as Star Trek V, but nevertheless.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Specially when there are "seamen [that] had decades of experience" around to choose from
Seamen who mostly lacked the skills need to be an officer, such as literacy.
Newbie commissioned officers often command soldiers and sailors with decades of experience. There are lots of command skills that can't be taught any other way. Not the least of these skills is learning to respect and leverage the wisdom and experience of your "inferiors".
Come to think of it, all hierarchical organizations work this way. I'm one of the oldest people where I work, and am not a manager. So I take order from folks much younger with less experience. Is this discrimination of some sort? No, it's a logical response to the fact that I'd make a cruddy manager.
When you condemn the sanity of 19th-century navies for having 12-year-old officers, your benchmarks are shaped by some big cultural assumption.. This has nothing to do with insanity. It's a change in attitude towards child labor. In 1812, puberty was pretty much the standard time for entering the workforce. Come to think of it, I'm reading a biography of Lincoln, who started working on his father's farm at 3! Even he considered that much too young, but it was a matter of economic necessity, not his father's personality issues.
Now we consider the teens to be a time for maturation and education, not work. All in all, a drastic improvement. Though I often think we've gone too far to the other extreme, judging from all the college grads I see with extremely narrow and prejudiced world views.
By the way, how old are you?