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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?"
The reviews have been very good for the Star Trek movie as well, more so than for Wolverine. Should have some impact for people who aren't necessarily old fans at least.
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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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.
I would have to say it is the best Star Trek movies yet because it was not just like all the other Star Treks. It was nice to watch a Star trek movie without it seeming like a 90 minute episode. Nice musical scores, great directing and camera angles.
Maybe it's my personal experience, but every single person I have talked to has said it is not faithful in it's representation of star trek
Then every person you've talked to is dense. This movie is quite clear about the fact that it's an alternative universe/timeline trek, and even sets up the rationale for the differences.
It's not "faithful" to the previous Star Trek universe, because it's *not* the previous Star Trek universe. The basic social structure is the same (Federation, Klingons, Romulans, etc.), and many of the characters are the same people, but the major characters undergo some very different life experiences and are somewhat different people as a result.
I think it was a great movie, and I look forward to more movies and TV shows that explore this alternate timeline, with an angrier, more aggressive Kirk who is also a hero and a starship captain at a younger age (lots of opportunity for stories about a less experienced but still excellent captain), a more outspoken and assertive Uhura, and a more openly emotional Spock (who is, nevertheless, still struggling with his dual heritage).
There's no doubt about it that this is a *different* take on the Trek universe. I, for one, find it an intriguing one and I'm very interested in what can be done with it.
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Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB would seem to disagree with your friends. As would I: I think this is the best Star Trek movie I've seen (and I've seen them all). 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.
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
I haven't seen Wolverine so I can't compare the two.
I *might* be one of those "hard to please" Trekkies who just can't be happy ... but I've never been to a convention, I can't speak Klingon, I've never dressed up in a Star Trek costume, I didn't care much for TOS (though I did like the 4th and 6th movies and didn't mind 2) or Enterprise. Voyager was "watchable". Mostly I was a really big fan of TNG and DS9.
I strongly disagree with those who say that this was the best Star Trek movie. I think First Contact or The Undiscovered Country were both far better. CmdrTaco said in his review that it was the least cheesy Star Trek flick but it had a freakin' sword fighting scene and they even approached George Lucas-like territory by adding a superfluous and annoying Jar Jar Binks like character... ugh! :(
Needless to say I absolutely hated the movie. If you're looking for pure eye candy with absolutely no substance what-so-ever then the movie might be "OK". But I didn't even like it as an action flick. I found the action scenes to be full of pretty CGI but boring to watch. Maybe I would have liked it if I were stoned.
However, my main beef with the movie was that the plot was extremely unoriginal. The plot was almost exactly the same as the Voyager episode "Year of Hell".
There were some funny moments. Maybe if I judged the movie on it's comedic merits it would watchable a 2nd time.
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
The romance between Spock and Uhura was completely cliche and unnecessary.
Kirk was made into a "rebel without a cause, who finds his cause" Hollywood cliche.
The Romulans now look different, and not for the better. They were extremely unlikable, provided nothing in the way of depth. Served only as a plot device for a very unoriginal plot.
Aside from Kirk and Spock there was absolutely nothing to any of the other characters. Checkov bordered on disgraceful. He was made into pure comic relief (which didn't even work on that level). There was nothing to his character except his funny accent which kept being used to make unfunny and tasteless jokes. Sulu offered nothing either and was basically "Harold" (from Harold and Kumar fame) on the bridge of the Enterprise... oh and he could fence. Was that an attempt to pay tribute to Picard or just an excuse to do a pointless and extremely cheesy sword fighting scene (I can't believe CmdrTaco thought this was the least cheesy Star Trek film!) ?
The end of the movie did not only destroy canon. It destroyed all future Star Treks. As a TNG and DS9 fan I felt betrayed by Star Trek paying absolutely no regard to future events that will unfold in the Star Trek universe. This is why I stopped watching Enterprise and didn't like The Phantom Menace. You go into a prequel wanting to see fictional history in action and instead you get something completely different that pays no regard to fiction that you loved. Everyone is saying "they realized that it's hard to do a good prequel and so this was a smart move"... no it wasn't! It was pure cowardice! They avoided the topic all together and took absolutely no risk. And in doing so wrote a script with absolutely no substance. No story telling. No regard for what made Star Trek. There's breaking canon to make a good movie, and there's completely rewriting the story from scratch. They chose the latter and didn't even write a good story. I'm really surprised that the "hardcore" Klingon-speaking fans aren't completely outraged like the Star Wars fans were after Phantom Menace.