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Which is to say, I finally got around to seeing the movie.
Yes, on the night of the AI finale. What, you think I'm going to stay in and watch that bloated thing when I can just Tivo it, jump to the end, find out who won, and be done with it? Oh no no no.
Anyway.
SPOILERS A-PLENTY! SPOILERS AHOY! HERE BE SPOILERS! YEA VERILY, EVEN UNTO THE VERY END! IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS, GET THEE HENCE, GET THEE GONE, GET OUTTA HERE!
Basic opinion: Lots of fun, very satisfying, and it is vitally important that you do not think about it for even one second. Else you will wind up with things like, "Wait ... it took Enterprise five minutes to get from Earth to Vulcan at maximum warp on the way out. Then Nero beat up on the ship for a bit. Then they fixed the warp engines while Pike went over to Narada and got tortured for a while. Then Enterprise zapped off to rendezvous with the fleet, with a pit stop for Spock to defy all Federation protocol -- which would, on its face, have been sufficient evidence of being compromised by the situation -- and dump Kirk on Delta Vega. [We will ignore, for the sake of sanity, the fact that several someones should have pointed out to Spock that this was, to put it mildly, excessive.] There Kirk was deus-ex-machina'ed -- thrice, even -- back onto the ship. But... he was on Delta Vega overnight, from what they showed. How is it that Enterprise was still close enough for Spock/Scotty's transwarp transporter thing to even work? How did they know where it was? And how is it that, after a day of zipping in a completely different direction, Enterprise was close enough to Earth to be able to get back to it in time, despite Narada being a more modern and more powerful ship that was essentially undamaged and could have warped to Earth in less than five minutes? Even if it took a few hours for the brain thing to extract the defense codes from Pike's brain -- and we won't think about that right now, either -- by the time Enterprise caught up with them, Narada should have been able to destroy Earth and a few other Federation planets."
That way lies madness. Don't go there.
(That said ... the one moment that did make me roll my eyes a bit, even at the time, was when Scotty is about to transport Kirk and Spock to Narada and he says, "If this ship is built sensibly, you're going into the cargo bay and it should be nearly deserted." Let us ignore, for the sake of argument, that without accurate sensor readings, expecting to land in an empty part of the ship was pretty stupid. Let's just focus on Scotty's comment. "If this ship is built at all sensibly..."
Now, let's just have a look at Narada, shall we? Let's shall.
That ship looks like the unholy union between a squid, a porcupine, an orchid and Edward Scissorhands. It is not even vaguely aerodynamic. It doesn't even look habitable. Where does "sensible" come into it, exactly?
Also, the bit at the end where Kirk doesn't have Enterprise withdraw to a safe distance from the growing black hole. And pointlessly firing phasers at a ship that was in the process of being destroyed anyway. But. ANYWAY. Not going there.)
Overall, it was a fun ride. I liked that they injected humor into it, although I thought a lot of it was badly placed -- the bit with Scotty and the ride through the coolant tubes was particularly ill timed -- and I thought that the cast did an excellent job of evoking the characters as previously acted without becoming trapped by those characterizations. (Karl Urban did come perilously close to the edge, though.)
That said, I did mind what they did with Uhura in one spot, quite a lot. They go out of their way to show us that she's competent, that she's got Mad Skillz and that she's good at what she does. And then ... they shove her into the spot for The Girl and they just leave her there. I get that they were using her character to show the differences between Spock as he was and Spock now. But they compromised both her character and Spock's by having her essentially force him to show her the favoritism he was trying to avoid to get her onto Enterprise, and then she had nothing to do once she was there. It would have taken very little to make that all work to the character's advantage; they could have shown her being angry about being assigned to Farragut, but doing what a Starfleet officer should and accepting the assignment, only to have it changed at the last minute becaue Spock realizes he's being stupid and she's best qualified for the job. Then they could have given her a little to do by employing an old Trek chestnut, and have Narada jam all outgoing transmissions, while allowing ships to receive information. (Yes, I know radio doesn't quite work that way -- it was one of the things that old Trek used to get dinged for -- but so what? It's not as though they paid any attention to the "science" part of "science fiction".)
I do think I had a very different experience from most of the people whose comments I've seen, not because I was comprehensively spoiled -- though I was -- but because I read the graphic novel, Star Trek: Countdown before I saw the movie. The movie does a decent enough job of making Nero work, but it doesn't do well about explaining why so much of his hatred is focused on Spock. Without Countdown, you don't understand that Nero and Spock were flitting about the galaxy together, trying to get the Romulan High Comand and the Vulcan Council to allow them to deal with the extra special super duper exploding supernova, or to evacuate Romulus while there was still time. (No, that super supernova doesn't get properly explained in Countdown, either.) That they stole the red matter ship from Vulcan together. That Spock's attempts to talk people into things cost them time, and they got back to Romulus just too late. (Also, the Romulan high command managed to escape from Romulus, although they weren't able to save the system. Since his wife lost her life, Nero thought there was no reason that they should live, so he killed the high council himself.) Without all that backmatter, the Nero/Spock story doesn't quite hang together so well. That said, I noticed that Nero's wife had a cast credit at the end, which must mean that she had lines at one point; all we get of her is a still hologram. I wonder how much of Countdown might be laying on the cutting room floor because someone said, "You know, all this character and story development is great, but you're looking at a three- or even a four-hour movie. What say we cut this down a bit, hmm?"
I've also seen a bit of complaint that the film didn't feature the sort of "big idea" that Trek is known for. Roger Ebert notes, "The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." Thing is, though, those questions were always the hallmark of the television series; the movies only rarely went into those waters, usually at their peril. To the best of my recollection, the only ones that really headed for the Big Idea were the original "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (all that Vger and alien merging stuff, and what constitutes humans and do we need to keep it and all that) and "The Undiscovered Country", about saving your enemy because it's the right thing to do. Of those, The Motion Picture was resoundingly unsuccessful, both in terms of storytelling and somewhat in terms of business; moreover, unsuccessful or not, it relied vitally on 20 years of character and actor continuity -- it expected you to know who these characters were, what they meant, what they were talking about. "The Undiscovered Country" managed to integrate its big idea much more successfully, but again, relied on the audience to know these people, these characters, and it could use a lot of shorthand to get much of the Big Idea across.
This year's "Star Trek", on the other hand, while it relied on a certain amount of character knowledge, really needed to reintroduce all of them to us, and also to reassure us that we would recognize and like these versions of the characters. When you've got to cover all that ground, Big Ideas are kind of hard to incorporate. One should also perhaps note that, at least as far as science goes, this film had absolutely no way to deal with a scientific Big Idea; when the science is so bad that even people who are terrible at it can say things like, "but ... black holes don't work that way", then your science really REALLY stinks. (It's also worth noting that the original series discarded its Big Idea pilots -- twice, although both were televised later -- to settle for "The Man Trap" as the first televised episode. Big Idea episodes are not necessarily the best ways to introduce your audience to your characters.)
Anyway. Lots of fun, lens flares are noticeable but not particularly bothersome, Amanda Grayson nicely Frigidaired -- along with all of Vulcan -- and don't think too hard about it.
Hey, here's a fun thought: now that Vulcan's been destroyed, and presumably Spock's intended along with it, "Amok Time" never gets to happen. Since ponn farr was tied to both the place and a person (we shall ignore, for the sake of sanity, the Voyager episode that dealt with it, because that just sucked) and neither exist, the great Vulcan secret can remain safely hidden.
Yes, on the night of the AI finale. What, you think I'm going to stay in and watch that bloated thing when I can just Tivo it, jump to the end, find out who won, and be done with it? Oh no no no.
Anyway.
SPOILERS A-PLENTY! SPOILERS AHOY! HERE BE SPOILERS! YEA VERILY, EVEN UNTO THE VERY END! IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS, GET THEE HENCE, GET THEE GONE, GET OUTTA HERE!
Basic opinion: Lots of fun, very satisfying, and it is vitally important that you do not think about it for even one second. Else you will wind up with things like, "Wait ... it took Enterprise five minutes to get from Earth to Vulcan at maximum warp on the way out. Then Nero beat up on the ship for a bit. Then they fixed the warp engines while Pike went over to Narada and got tortured for a while. Then Enterprise zapped off to rendezvous with the fleet, with a pit stop for Spock to defy all Federation protocol -- which would, on its face, have been sufficient evidence of being compromised by the situation -- and dump Kirk on Delta Vega. [We will ignore, for the sake of sanity, the fact that several someones should have pointed out to Spock that this was, to put it mildly, excessive.] There Kirk was deus-ex-machina'ed -- thrice, even -- back onto the ship. But... he was on Delta Vega overnight, from what they showed. How is it that Enterprise was still close enough for Spock/Scotty's transwarp transporter thing to even work? How did they know where it was? And how is it that, after a day of zipping in a completely different direction, Enterprise was close enough to Earth to be able to get back to it in time, despite Narada being a more modern and more powerful ship that was essentially undamaged and could have warped to Earth in less than five minutes? Even if it took a few hours for the brain thing to extract the defense codes from Pike's brain -- and we won't think about that right now, either -- by the time Enterprise caught up with them, Narada should have been able to destroy Earth and a few other Federation planets."
That way lies madness. Don't go there.
(That said ... the one moment that did make me roll my eyes a bit, even at the time, was when Scotty is about to transport Kirk and Spock to Narada and he says, "If this ship is built sensibly, you're going into the cargo bay and it should be nearly deserted." Let us ignore, for the sake of argument, that without accurate sensor readings, expecting to land in an empty part of the ship was pretty stupid. Let's just focus on Scotty's comment. "If this ship is built at all sensibly..."
Now, let's just have a look at Narada, shall we? Let's shall.
That ship looks like the unholy union between a squid, a porcupine, an orchid and Edward Scissorhands. It is not even vaguely aerodynamic. It doesn't even look habitable. Where does "sensible" come into it, exactly?
Also, the bit at the end where Kirk doesn't have Enterprise withdraw to a safe distance from the growing black hole. And pointlessly firing phasers at a ship that was in the process of being destroyed anyway. But. ANYWAY. Not going there.)
Overall, it was a fun ride. I liked that they injected humor into it, although I thought a lot of it was badly placed -- the bit with Scotty and the ride through the coolant tubes was particularly ill timed -- and I thought that the cast did an excellent job of evoking the characters as previously acted without becoming trapped by those characterizations. (Karl Urban did come perilously close to the edge, though.)
That said, I did mind what they did with Uhura in one spot, quite a lot. They go out of their way to show us that she's competent, that she's got Mad Skillz and that she's good at what she does. And then ... they shove her into the spot for The Girl and they just leave her there. I get that they were using her character to show the differences between Spock as he was and Spock now. But they compromised both her character and Spock's by having her essentially force him to show her the favoritism he was trying to avoid to get her onto Enterprise, and then she had nothing to do once she was there. It would have taken very little to make that all work to the character's advantage; they could have shown her being angry about being assigned to Farragut, but doing what a Starfleet officer should and accepting the assignment, only to have it changed at the last minute becaue Spock realizes he's being stupid and she's best qualified for the job. Then they could have given her a little to do by employing an old Trek chestnut, and have Narada jam all outgoing transmissions, while allowing ships to receive information. (Yes, I know radio doesn't quite work that way -- it was one of the things that old Trek used to get dinged for -- but so what? It's not as though they paid any attention to the "science" part of "science fiction".)
I do think I had a very different experience from most of the people whose comments I've seen, not because I was comprehensively spoiled -- though I was -- but because I read the graphic novel, Star Trek: Countdown before I saw the movie. The movie does a decent enough job of making Nero work, but it doesn't do well about explaining why so much of his hatred is focused on Spock. Without Countdown, you don't understand that Nero and Spock were flitting about the galaxy together, trying to get the Romulan High Comand and the Vulcan Council to allow them to deal with the extra special super duper exploding supernova, or to evacuate Romulus while there was still time. (No, that super supernova doesn't get properly explained in Countdown, either.) That they stole the red matter ship from Vulcan together. That Spock's attempts to talk people into things cost them time, and they got back to Romulus just too late. (Also, the Romulan high command managed to escape from Romulus, although they weren't able to save the system. Since his wife lost her life, Nero thought there was no reason that they should live, so he killed the high council himself.) Without all that backmatter, the Nero/Spock story doesn't quite hang together so well. That said, I noticed that Nero's wife had a cast credit at the end, which must mean that she had lines at one point; all we get of her is a still hologram. I wonder how much of Countdown might be laying on the cutting room floor because someone said, "You know, all this character and story development is great, but you're looking at a three- or even a four-hour movie. What say we cut this down a bit, hmm?"
I've also seen a bit of complaint that the film didn't feature the sort of "big idea" that Trek is known for. Roger Ebert notes, "The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." Thing is, though, those questions were always the hallmark of the television series; the movies only rarely went into those waters, usually at their peril. To the best of my recollection, the only ones that really headed for the Big Idea were the original "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (all that Vger and alien merging stuff, and what constitutes humans and do we need to keep it and all that) and "The Undiscovered Country", about saving your enemy because it's the right thing to do. Of those, The Motion Picture was resoundingly unsuccessful, both in terms of storytelling and somewhat in terms of business; moreover, unsuccessful or not, it relied vitally on 20 years of character and actor continuity -- it expected you to know who these characters were, what they meant, what they were talking about. "The Undiscovered Country" managed to integrate its big idea much more successfully, but again, relied on the audience to know these people, these characters, and it could use a lot of shorthand to get much of the Big Idea across.
This year's "Star Trek", on the other hand, while it relied on a certain amount of character knowledge, really needed to reintroduce all of them to us, and also to reassure us that we would recognize and like these versions of the characters. When you've got to cover all that ground, Big Ideas are kind of hard to incorporate. One should also perhaps note that, at least as far as science goes, this film had absolutely no way to deal with a scientific Big Idea; when the science is so bad that even people who are terrible at it can say things like, "but ... black holes don't work that way", then your science really REALLY stinks. (It's also worth noting that the original series discarded its Big Idea pilots -- twice, although both were televised later -- to settle for "The Man Trap" as the first televised episode. Big Idea episodes are not necessarily the best ways to introduce your audience to your characters.)
Anyway. Lots of fun, lens flares are noticeable but not particularly bothersome, Amanda Grayson nicely Frigidaired -- along with all of Vulcan -- and don't think too hard about it.
Hey, here's a fun thought: now that Vulcan's been destroyed, and presumably Spock's intended along with it, "Amok Time" never gets to happen. Since ponn farr was tied to both the place and a person (we shall ignore, for the sake of sanity, the Voyager episode that dealt with it, because that just sucked) and neither exist, the great Vulcan secret can remain safely hidden.
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From:
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I agree with you that Scotty's trip through the coolant tubes was misplaced, and its only purpose(s) seemed to be to 1) tip off Spock that they were on board (which I'm sure they could have found another way to do and 2) allow Pegg to make a joke about a towel.
"They go out of their way to show us that she's competent, that she's got Mad Skillz and that she's good at what she does. And then ... they shove her into the spot for The Girl and they just leave her there."
Have you not SEEN the original series then?
Compared to the actual Uhura, this woman was given TONS to do.
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action."
This I think is also Ursula's gripe. Sorry to say that I read it the other way 'round, and I don't mind who I piss off: The treatment of Big Ideas in the television series(s) was usually shallow, facile, treacly, simplistic, and often felt forced, as if they were obliged to cram a Big Idea into every episode. The Picard series in particular often felt like an After-School Special to me, and it's the main reason I didn't connect with it and fell out of the Trek universe pretty much after that.
I like that there are underlying messages in this universe, but they don't have to be rubbed in all the time like Roddenberry always wanted to. And I think Abrams was right when his first impulse was to produce entertainment and not a sermon - although the two do not, I stipulate, have to be mutually exclusive.
P.S. All the gray-streak dye in the world would not suffice to turn Winona Ryder into Jane Wyatt.
From:
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Well, so did I. I just don't think that anyone who had looked at Narada for even a tenth of a second would think that "sensibly built" had anything to do with it; nobody would say that about that ship.
Have you not SEEN the original series then?
Compared to the actual Uhura, this woman was given TONS to do.
Which was good. But they went halfway there, and then failed to follow through. They put her on Enterprise ostensibly because of her skills, and then made it impossible for her to use them, thus sticking her in as The Girl. Which, in a way, I wouldn't have objected to if they'd let Spock be honest about why he was doing it -- she was good at what she did, and he just plain wanted her around. It's wretched grounds for command-level decisionmaking, but it would have humanized him a bit more, a bit earlier. I objected not only to her getting sidelined that way, but also to her forcing Spock to do exactly what he hadn't wanted to do in exactly the way he hadn't wanted to do it. I think she was better than that.
This I think is also Ursula's gripe. Sorry to say that I read it the other way 'round, and I don't mind who I piss off: The treatment of Big Ideas in the television series(s) was usually shallow, facile, treacly, simplistic, and often felt forced, as if they were obliged to cram a Big Idea into every episode.
I point out purely for the sake of argument: that was Ebert's issue, not mine. I don't think this movie could have accommodated a Big Idea without collapsing completely -- the alternate time stream theory was as close as it could get, and it handled that as quickly as it could, because if you think about it at all, you wind up wondering how it is that Narada created an alternate time stream dislocating events from prior to its actual arrival (the disappearance of Kirk's older brother, for example -- though apparently he's on the cutting room floor with most of Countdown, from what I hear).
P.S. All the gray-streak dye in the world would not suffice to turn Winona Ryder into Jane Wyatt.
Considering as her sole real purpose in the plot was to exist so that Spock could watch her being murdered in front of his eyes, I don't really mind that, myself.
From:
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From:
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I am impressed that you got nitpicky about something completely different than I got nitpicky about (though your nitpicks are just as legitimate). I'm still wondering why a single drop of red matter is enough to make a planet go boom and/or create a black hole, but an entire sphere of it doesn't wipe out a chunk of the solar system.
From:
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They covered it with the "no favoritism, because you're awesome" idea, but I never had the impression, from the original series, that Uhura was anything BUT awesome. She went on away missions, when the rest of the away crews were almost invariably male.
The fact that the longest scenes that featured her were 1.) Kirk hitting on her in a bar, and 2.) her taking off her clothes with Kirk watching from under a bed made me want to throw things at the screen.
On another note, I thought Karl Urban was the best thing about the whole movie.
From:
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I vote for hand wavey sciencey wi-ency stuff!
From:
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I still want to see it again. Things blowed up real good, and there was Simon Pegg. (Needed more of him, though, and not in that stupid water tube scene.)