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Remember that IMAX Star Trek movie they were going to make way back in the day - at the 'height' of Star Trek popularity. I think the only name they had signed on at the time before it died in the arse was Colm Meany.
-------------------- "Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica." - Jim Halpert. (The Office)
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Snay: In response to your question, I think I was duped into seeing the Digital IMAX thingamabob (ie 'fake' IMAX). Well at least I know better for next time, and knowing is half the battle.
AndrewR: Yep there was an IMAX movie planned that went no where. There was also the Planet of the Titans movie which was never made, which is okay with me as the story was...how shall I say...horrible.
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Wasn't Planet of the Titans from way back before they made TMP?
-------------------- I have plenty of experience in biology. I bought a Tamagotchi in 1998... And... it's still alive.
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All things considered it was pretty good. Not what I expected, but good.
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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OK, first off: if I want to see ships with engine rooms that look like they've just lugged a camera-crew down to the nearest power-station, I'll go pick up a Space: Above and Beyond box-set.
Which will also nicely fulfil my quota for seeing mere kids given power and responsibility far beyond anything that would ever happen in real life.
But, putting aside the sheer mind-bending impossibility of a 25yo being bumped all the way to Captain with only three years' stint at the Academy, and assuming that there's no real reason why Uhura and Sulu shouldn't be within a couple of years of age to Jimbo, or why Chekov shouldn't be some sort of genius who's at the Academy at age 17, so I can guess I can live with that.
Hated the silly little zappy phaser bolts from the ships. Old Spock. . . didn't feel like Spock. He wouldn't just give up. OK, now he was back in a timeline that had already been altered (ie he couldn't just go forward in time to save Romulus, because Nero & co had already gone back further and altered things already) but this is Spock we're talking about. He'd figure something out.
And Kirk just happens to run into the one cave on an ice planet where he's hiding? That's stretching plausibility too far.
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I dunno. I thought it was quite convenient for Yoda to be hiding on Hoth, saving Luke the trouble of making it to the Dagobah system.
quote:Originally posted by Mars Needs Women: I too liked Pike's uniform at the end. Hopefully those silly TMP red uniforms won't come to fruition in this universe
I'm mildly colour-blind so I could be wrong, but I don't recall red uniforms in TMP. I don't actually recall any colours in TMP, to be honest. Do you mean the red TWOK uniforms? Because those were awesome.
My take: I liked it. Yeah, there maybe wasn't enough "Rodenberry-ness" in it, and I dislike the "everyone is the same age" thing and Kirk's rapid promotion (would it have killed them to put in a "3 years later" bit at the end?), but it was good fun and gives me hope for the next one. I thought the actors were all good. Interesting comparison between the pure-homage of McCoy and the very-different interpretation of Scotty, but if you're going to hire Simon Pegg (who has now managed Star Trek AND Doctor Who. If he could only get himself into Star Wars he would probably die of happy happy geekness).
I was worried that Kirk's dad's death was going to be hockey, but I was actually quite moved. Best line in the film was "Your father was captain of a starship for 12 minutes. He saved 800 lives, including yours. Can you do better?"
Also, my girlfriend thought that Kirk was hot. I was unimpressed by his grey boxers, to be honest.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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Yah, the whole opening scene with Kirk senior piloting the collision course while talking to his wife had me almost in tears. It was a very good start.
Kirk's allergic reaction was great. Did anyone catch it... was it Retinox that McCoy gave him? I remember he was having trouble with his eye...
The joke with Kirk trying to find out Uhura's first name was good.
I was a little distracted by the various plotholes (such as why one drop of red matter creates a black hole that will sometimes destroy a planet but still send a ship back in time intact while a whole giant glob of red matter will create a smaller black hole that will destroy a ship but not send it back in time). But overall I thought it was good. I love the new look. The uniforms rock. I may go see it again.
The one thing noone has commented on that I thought was amazing was how they set up both Kirk and Spock to be rebels and loners in their respective cultures. That's one aspect to Kirk's character and the relationship between the two that was never fleshed out in TOS.
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I'm gonna guess no... cause you wouldn't think they'd want robots running around with weapons and police powers. At least not pre-Data. But calling someone "citizen" seems quite robotic.
I was a little distracted by the various plotholes (such as why one drop of red matter creates a black hole that will sometimes destroy a planet but still send a ship back in time intact while a whole giant glob of red matter will create a smaller black hole that will destroy a ship but not send it back in time).
Nononono. See, that makes perfect sense. Red matter (and where did they come up with that? Were they trying to make it sound stupid?) works by defying all logic. That's why it worked so well against Vulcan.
-------------------- "Don't fight forces; use them." --R. Buckminster Fuller
quote:I was a little distracted by the various plotholes (such as why one drop of red matter creates a black hole that will sometimes destroy a planet but still send a ship back in time intact while a whole giant glob of red matter will create a smaller black hole that will destroy a ship but not send it back in time).
When Spock shot the red matter into the Hobus star/supernova, his ship and the Narada were sucked into the resulting black hole after the fact. When Spock's ship crashed into the Narada, the red matter was detonated inside the Narada. That's two totally different scenarios.
Anyway, I went to see the movie again with my father. He really liked it (but he also liked Nemesis, so his credibility is somewhat suspect ). Although I pretty much felt the same way I did on the first viewing, one thing that kinda irked me this time was the Spock/Uhura thing. The relationship was fine, but the kissy-face was a bit annoying.
Some other tidbits:
- Nero's wife was tattooed as well! So strike yet another observation down from the "Countdown" comic, which stated that Nero's crew only got tats after Romulus was destroyed as a symbol of mourning. Apparently Nero, his crew and his wife were all members of some worker-class caste, and they had the tats from the get-go.
- I definitely heard the ship names Hood, Farragut, Antares, Walcott, and Truman, so five of the seven other Starfleet ships are accounted for (six, if you count the wrecked saucer with the name "Mayflower" allegedly printed on it).
- After seeing the film again, I definitely believe that the Enterprise is larger than its TOS/TMP counterpart. I doubt it's 2500 feet, but it is bigger.
- The scene with the Romulans on the drilling rig that Kirk and Sulu fight off: Their uniforms reminded me of something, especially the two-toed boots one guy wears. Then it hit me: they looked like Klingon uniforms! I think they stole Klingon clothing in the deleted scene on Rura Penthe (remember, Nero was sporting just rags in the trailer with the two Klingon guards). This is one scene that they really need to put back in, since they even mention the prison planet and the 47 ships Nero destroys in the dialog, and it would better explain where Nero was in his 25 year absence.
- Ship analysis: I could better see the Kobayashi Maru scene with the ships (I first saw the movie on IMAX, sitting in the front row, so I had a lot of head-turning which was why I missed a lot). The Klingon "warbirds" looked remarkably like regular D-7's, and the KM seemed to look astonishingly like this ship:
I could definitely make out a Kelvin-style nacelle above the saucer. There are seven other major Starfleet vessels besides the Enterprise: three with round Kelvin-type saucers but with smaller nacelles under the saucer; one three-nacelled ship with Kelvin-type nacelles and a saucer with cuts in the back; two ships with half-saucers and two Kelvin-type nacelles above the saucer and two secondary hulls below the saucer; and one final ship that looks like a half-saucer with four nacelles (although this could also be another of the previously described ship...not too sure about this one). All the ships can be seen for a few seconds on the viewscreen before they go to warp. As I said before, the two clearest ships were the three-naceller and one of the two-nacelled, two-secondary hulled ships. I'm not sure I buy that the Narada was a "simple" Romulan mining vessel from the 24th century. It looks nothing like a Romulan ship, and it's just fucking huge. But hey, it was better than the Scimitar.
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Well, I've finally seen it and have had a lot of catching up to do in these threads.
My major impressions: the tempo of the whole feature was incredible, I haven't felt this pumped when leaving a theater in a long time.
I actually liked Giacchino's music, it wasn't as Horn-section patriotic as Hans "one-trick pony" Zimmer, and yet not as syrupy-sweet or chirpy as Danny Elfman. Overall the soundtrack was pretty intense, conveying the desperation and soberness of the plot events for most of the time. It felt consistent with the music quality of LOST (which I think is above-average for a TV show). The composer also exercised self-restraint regarding the many humurous scenes of the movie, not ruining them with silly-tunes or a trumpet going wah-wah-waah ("my ass functions like a floatation device"), again just like "LOST", where humor segments are allowed to stand on their legs and work on their own merit without being played off.
Nod to Psyliam: I was very thankful for the solemn grounding the movie got from the opening scene, I got a lot out of it. The very fine line mommy Kirk was balancing on, trying to work with that unbearable acceptance and letting go, it was tough there. George's "Tiberius" gag was funny and at the same time made it all feel worse, since he wanted to distract her and make her feel better.
I knew the special effects would be ice cream, but the new, crisp take on Warp entry was unexpected, and nice. Some might dislike the brevity of the sequence, but I appreciated the angle that if you go ftl you go FTL. To the person who disliked the new ship phasers, I agree somewhat but at the same time it seemed to me like the beams behaved differently in different parts of the film, in accordance with variable charge, yield and spread that was probably available to the federation ships, and I thought some of the phaser volleys from the Kelvin were impressive. Also, I've long ago accepted that every Trek movie so far changes the phaser/torpedo effects from that of its predecessor, which is nice. The new photon-launcher sound was fresh, and accurately enough it didn't feel nearly as powerful as the Ent-E's quantum torpedo action, just as it should be. Also, the torpedoes themselves seemed to be the same kind of blue-white as the one the Enterprise used against that asteroid in TMP.
I enjoyed the slow, battleship-like maneuvering of the Enterprise through the debris field of Vulcan, reminded me of her handling in the TWOK nebula, elegant and purposeful. Also, the USS Roger Young + asteroid in "Starship Troopers". What also reminded me of TWOK was when the Enterprise micro-jumped into the fluffy rings of Saturn or Titan or whatever, and then broke cover slowly, very much like the moments before the endgame-volley in the nebula of TWOK.
Was there anyone more than me here that at first thought the red ice monster was the Clover-species from "Cloverfield"? Obviously it had a different face and was 20 times smaller than Clover, but there was a part of me that wanted it to be the real deal, like the Alien-skull in "Predator 2".
I liked what they did with the Brainbug (Speculum Montalbanus), they should've done that mode of insertion in TWOK too, imo. Scared the crap out of some of the girls in the audience, they even stopped texting.
If there is a weak point in the movie it's the speedy "future-events" exposition by Spock, I wish we'd been shown the future events as they happened, with Year 2387 starships thrown in, but at the same time I recognize what twenty minutes of that (instead of two) would've done to the budget.
From one thing to another, the sheer amount of punishment Kirk got in this movie was staggering. Like some director said in Empire magazine (paraphrased), "We must remember that actors take the job to receive attention, and for that they must be forever punished". Kirk suffered more than in any other movie, and he wasn't even the kind of kickboxer he is in TSFS or TFF. It was good for the balance in the movie.
-------------------- "I'm nigh-invulnerable when I'm blasting!" Mel Gibson, X-Men
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I'm personally a little chagrined and astonished to see how many people like this movie. Forgetting its Star Trek aspirations (which I can eviscerate at length, if asked), from a simple movie-making/storytelling standpoint, it sucks.
Too much lens flare, exceedingly rapid editing. It seems to rely on dazzling the audience and throwing stuff at them too fast to process. The "score" is a series of short cues, mainly brassy flares. It became apparant very quickly that the composer didn't know what do do after thirty seconds of that and it just sort of trailed off until the next brassy blare. I forgot anything original that score might have contained as soon as I was out of the theatre. Nothing whistlable, as with Goldsmith or Horner.
The villain was too undeveloped, in character and motivation. A moviegoer shouldn't have to rely on a tie-in comic prequel to explain who one of the main characters is. An entire necessary sequence around him was cut, and I don't know why. I won't give spoilers, but it leaves it to the audience to fill in that gap in the story. That's sloppy storytelling.
The main character has no real arc or evolution. He starts callow and arrogant, and ends callow and arrogant and gets rewarded for it. There's no revelation, no maturation, no price paid for his reward.
Time travel is a weak mechanic in any story, at best. When it's presence is a surprise, as in Lost In Space, it works for story reasons. When it's the main mechanic for everything that happens during the movie, it's too easy for it to break down -- especially when the wrong model of temporal/quantum mechanics is used.
And they should have gne to the trouble to build an actual set for Main Engineering, instead of using a brewery with a couple of strategically-placed touchscreens and a big water pipe. That's hopefully not a spoiler, Masao. We see Engineering in trailers.
My take on this film was that it was a tremendously fun roller-coaster ride, as long as one left their brain at home. I plan to see it again, if I get the chance, but I won't be too upset if I miss it before it leaves theatres.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
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![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
). Although I pretty much felt the same way I did on the first viewing, one thing that kinda irked me this time was the Spock/Uhura thing. The relationship was fine, but the kissy-face was a bit annoying.
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