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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.
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.
davejenkins.com |
Why did they need to erase everything that had happened? Answer: to become free of the arthritic horror of Backwards Compatibility.
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)
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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"Die StarTrek, die...what?"
It was German. He was really saying: "The Star Trek, the..."
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.
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.
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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...
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Hmm, relationship advice from a Slashdot poster. Sure, I'll take it "under advisement".
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
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.
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