Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Because the movie studio gets a bigger share of the ticket sales in the earlier weeks. As time goes on they get less of a cut as the theaters get more.
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.
Rotten tomatoes has it rated at 95%, which means that there are very few critics that don't like the movie.
Which is precisely why the summary says "At first glance, JJ Abrams' Star Trek has won over audiences as well as critics".
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.
davejenkins.com |
This word you keep using; I do not think it means what you think it means.
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
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.
Best Slashdot Co
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!
"Die StarTrek, die...what?"
It was German. He was really saying: "The Star Trek, the..."
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.
From Websters...
Critic:
1. a person who judges, evaluates, *or* criticizes: a poor critic of men.
2. a person who judges, evaluates, or analyzes literary or artistic works, dramatic or musical performances, or the like, esp. for a newspaper or magazine.
Emphasis mine.
A movie critic doesn't necessarily dislike a movie... They judge or comment on them. There are tons of critics of the new Star Trek film. Read any review in any newspaper/blog, and you are reading a movie critic's remarks.
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 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.
Critics generally like it. Fans generally like it. The public generally likes it. We're only one week into it and it's already being debated as if Apple produced it -- I half expect somebody to complain that the new Star Trek movie doesn't support Ogg or that it sucks as a smartphone. We all know that a year from now the movie will be raking in the dough from video sales, and a question like "What about the SECOND week?" will seem even stupider then than it does today.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
An Enterprise bridge designed by Apple
Wasn't it in The Next Generation? No tactile feedback on consoles, consistent UI everywhere even when it comes at the expense of usability, and no fuses anywhere (saves a bit of manufacturing cost and keeps the margins high). Sounds like an Apple design to me...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Sure it didn't hit $90 million, but Paramount wanted $50 million in the first weekend, so $72 million beat its expectations.
Most of the Trekkies I know liked it so much they plan to see it again. I'm not much of a Trek fan, but I may even go with them when they do round 2.
You know, I think they could even make a TV series out of this "Star Trek"...
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
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)
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.
SPOILERS: So lets see, you're upset they didn't hit the reset button? This is a time travel episode where everything does NOT go back to how it was before the time travel. Think: Yesterday's Enterprise except they didn't send Enterprise C back. Think: The Year of Hell except the totally unexplained destroy the timeship and everything works out ok waving of the hand doesn't occur.
Essentially they explained it in the movie: It's an alternate reality -- alternate timeline. Spock and the Romulon's getting yanked into the blackhole back in time changed the original timeline. Wonder if Q cares enough to fix it.
Do you Gentoo!?
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)
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.
What about second breakfast though?
Oh the humanity... ...seriously... you behave as if this were some actually important matter, like Peter Jackson's disgusting rape of Lord of the Rings.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
And thank god he did.
Honestly the old start trek was ridiculous. Sanitized, clean, WE must do it this way because it is good and right to do....
God that made me sick.
I loved enterprise because it was gritter, the ship broke when anyone sneezed, and the humans got their asses kicked at every turn. Plus willing to cross the line into "kind'a-evil" in order to get the mission completed is very human.
The movie I really hope is a lot more of what enterprise showed it could be. I want kirk standing in front of the federation tribunal giving everyone a double middle finger and then runs out killing guards and vowing to make the endorians extinct simply because he hates their chowder.
Out of control, ruled by emotion, ready shoot aim... THAT"S humanity. and that makes for a better trek storyline.
Honestly, DS9 should have had a lot more crime and unrest, and voyager should have ended with cannibalism.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Come on, other Star Trek films & series have 'screwed up' their own canon plenty of times. Please try to learn to live with this, or you will go mad: they're not perfect!
Remember the outcry around Ron Moore's re-imagining of Battlestar? It was brilliant, yes, but it was different, and how dare he!!!
Yes, this is different to the Trek we know. Accept it as such, and you can enjoy it. Refuse to accept this, and you're denying yourself a whole new franchise. Those that refused to accept the new Battlestar denied themselves a series that was considered by many to be one of the very best things on TV. Personally, I loved the new BSG and I thoroughly enjoyed this Trek film, despite many plot points that just annoyed me, not least Delta Vega looking to be about 500'000 km from Vulcan, and Nero's poorly thought-through punishment for Spock.
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
> Delta Vega being within sight of Vulcan? Please. Uhura being of a similar age to Kirk?
Okay, at this point you're grasping at minor details. Look, you can't do a reboot without breaking a few eggs. Thank your stars Uhura didn't end up becoming a white male in this reboot (*cough*BSG*cough*).
Go somewhere random
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.
No I expect some fans to start linking to websites on how he was really born on Romulus and not Riverside, Iowa. There will be claims on how it's really all a large conspiracy by the Romulan Empire to place a operative into the highest levels of Starfleet. After all that's why Kirk ignores the Prime Directive so much. And by the way, searching the personal quarters of Kirk, you will find the bones of Jimmy Hoffa.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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
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.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
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
SPOILERS
I've seen others echoing the criticism of Kirk being made captain, so I just want to say...
The entire series of sequences between Kirk and Pike was that Pike believed that Kirk was a different caliber of man, and therefore worthy of bypassing the traditional "climbing of the ladder". Kirk had a battlefield promotion to First Officer, and then to Captain.
Pike's promotion to admiral obviously put him in a position where he could defend Kirk's continued existence as captain of the Enterprise.
You also had Nimoy's Spock deciding not to live in obscurity in this new timeline, so no doubt he debriefed Starfleet on his knowledge of James T. Kirk.
Hmmm... that makes me think of another interesting point... Spock also brings vast and detailed knowledge of future tech back with him, which he displayed a willingness to share; that gives the rebooted franchise a tremendous loophole to make use of any technology seen in any of the Trek franchises.
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
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.
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.
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.