Abrams is Destroying Star Trek like Lucas has Destroyed Star Wars — Page 3

Great to see they are using the iconic original series Star Trek shooting location Vasquez Rocks (also known to fans as Gorn Rock) in this movie.

I must say, that is a respectful nod to the original series.

Some Star Trek: The Original Series episodes filmed at Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park are;  "Arena", "The Alternative Factor", "Shore Leave", and "Friday's Child"

C3PX said:

ChainsawAsh said:

Am I the only one who's excited for this new movie?  And who actually really likes the new Enterprise design?

Remember, this is supposed to be a reboot, is it not?  Or am I mistaken on that?

 

That is probably the one thing that bugs me the most about this movie, this thing is a "sort-of" reboot, but in the past they have hesitated to actually call it a reboot. That is why they have Nimoy to play Spock and make this a time travel thing. I would have much rather this thing be a full out reboot, forgetting all that has happened up until now, instead of using time travel as a way to make it a sequel and a reboot at once. If they wanted Nimoy in the film, a cameo as Spock's dad or an older Vulcan teacher at the academy would have been cool. They could have included Shatner in the film in this manner as well.

Totally agree.  I did not want to see Judi Dench in Casino Royale of rthe same reason.

Yeah, I felt the same way about Dench too. I actually really like Judi Dench, but I wished M was played by another actor/actress since it was a reboot. Still doesn't bother me as much as this, since Casino Royale and QS are in a different continuity from the previous Bond films, it is easy enough to shake off. The new ST on the other hand, is kind of claiming to be both, by going to the end of the current continuity and using a time travel plot to return to the very beginning of continuity and starting over.

It reminds me of them feeling the need to pass the ST film torch from Kirk to Picard by having them share the same movie. Sure, it wove the TOS crew films tighter together with the TNG crew films in an odd sort of way, but it really wasn't needed, and was one of the weaker bits of the storyline. Reminded me of those silly debates I used to have with other kids when I was younger, "Picard could out smart Kirk any day of the week!" "Oh yeah! Well Kirk could kick Picards butt before he even had a chance to start thinking"

I need to make a comment before I log back out for a real long time.

The reason why Star Trek began to suck began with TNG. Some hack job liberal writers got together and began to spew their evangelical message with all the fervor of fundamentalists. Sure, Rick Berman has his share of the blame, but the writers were the ones who ultimately burned the ship. It got to be too preachy.

If you look back at the list of fan favorite episodes, none of them had a moral message. Best of Both Worlds? All Good Things? Those were when Star Trek was fun. DS9 understood this, as did the last season of ENT. Voyager never did, and certainly the latter half of TNG didn't.

JJ Abrams understands this and has always understanded this in his other work.

I don't give a damn if most of the Trekkers don't like the new Star Trek. Go watch your TNG, you who were in your twenties and thirties when TNG came on. Give those of us who grew up with Star Trek from a young age something cool again.

That is all.

Count Dushku said:

I need to make a comment before I log back out for a real long time.

The reason why Star Trek began to suck began with TNG. Some hack job liberal writers got together and began to spew their evangelical message with all the fervor of fundamentalists. Sure, Rick Berman has his share of the blame, but the writers were the ones who ultimately burned the ship. It got to be too preachy.

Wow, "liberal", "evangelical message", "fervor of fundamentalists", sounds like somebody has been picking up a lot of political jargon off the news, but yet fails to understand what any of it means. I guess I get what you are trying to say, but barely with what a dizzying and contradictory way in which you said it. 

I don't give a damn if most of the Trekkers don't like the new Star Trek. Go watch your TNG, you who were in your twenties and thirties when TNG came on. Give those of us who grew up with Star Trek from a young age something cool again.

That is all.

Lost you at the "you who were in your twenties and thirties". Which Trek were you at a young age when it came out? Star Trek came out long before I was born, let alone before I was at a young age. I was at a young age when TNG came out, and I thought it was pretty cool, not so much when I was at a young age, I didn't really understand it, but when I got older I began to appreciate it. I liked the preachiness of it, I always found it amusing (for very much the same reason John Lennon's Imagine is one of my all time favorite songs, it is so idealistic and idiotic that I cannot help but love the hell out of it).

---------------------------------------

Star Trek is the hippies wildest dreams come true. Hippies have beautiful dreams, but unfortunately dreaming is the only damn thing they do. If hippies really got their way, we would be far from having the ability to explore space in the futuristic equivalent of a luxery liner. Earth would be a stupid insignificant planet that the prime directives of other alien races would forbid them of screwing around with. It would be a planet with no infatructure, just a bunch of people living around the globe in tents, getting high and getting laid while enjoying endless Woodstock style concerts and dying of starvation and diseases transmitted through sex and needles, all the while wishing they had something to go and protest. Food replicators would be their welfare, keeping them alive to continue living their pointless lives until the inevitable day they ODed and died. Woooooooohoooooo, the final frontier man! These are the voyages! Boldly going where almost every other man in this room has gone at least a couple of times this evening already. Live long and prosper! And pass me the bong! Woooohooooo!

Star Trek without hippies and liberal messages is like a balloon without helium, sure you can blow it up with just air (or explosions and endless action scenes), but it just doesn't float.

Count Dushku said:

I don't give a damn if most of the Trekkers don't like the new Star Trek. Go watch your TNG, you who were in your twenties and thirties when TNG came on. Give those of us who grew up with Star Trek from a young age something cool again.

Grew up with Star Trek?  It ran for a total of 3 seasons.  Unless you were 10 when it aired, you didn't grow up with Star Trek.

I was 14 or 15 when TNG came out.  That was after no Star Trek for many years.  But even I saw and enjoyed TOS.  Many of us don't need flashy effects and huge explosions to enjoy Star Trek.  The dream of traveling to far away places in deep space was enough to get some of us totally hooked.

All Good Things certainly seemed to have a moral message to me.  That message was "be careful what you wish for".  Isn't that the one where Picard had wished that he hadn't gotten involved with that fight?  And by not getting involved with that fight, he ended up in Engineering instead of becoming captain of a starship.  He took the "safe" route, so he was never considered for any positions that would involve taking risks.  Maybe it wasn't a "save the whales" message like Star Trek IV, but it certainly had a message to it.

GREAT, NOW WE HAVE TO BRING POLITICS INTO THIS?  DUDES, IT'S STAR TREK!  IT'S SOMETHING THAT WAS CREATED TO ENTERTAIN.  HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

Hunter6 said:

Count Dushku said:

I need to make a comment before I log back out for a real long time.

The reason why Star Trek began to suck began with TNG. Some hack job liberal writers got together and began to spew their evangelical message with all the fervor of fundamentalists. Sure, Rick Berman has his share of the blame, but the writers were the ones who ultimately burned the ship. It got to be too preachy.

Rick Berman is not a liberal nor were the later-on writers like Brannon Braga.

Both Rick Berman and Brannon Braga are now working on 24 which is a republican show.

Brannon Braga was the worst thing to star trek and I see it as Brannon Braga as the real killer of star trek, not Rick Berman.

The reason why Star Trek began to suck began with TNG is because the real liberal view point which Gene started on the show, died with him.

Gene didn't die until after Season 5 of TNG.  There's a noticeable difference between seasons 1-5 and anything after.  It's quite obvious the changes came about due to Roddenberry's death.  To me, TNG really started to suck after Season 5.  Sure, there were occasional good episodes, but for the most part it was all downhill after Roddenberry's death.

Sorry about the politics Dayv.

@Ash, Hunter is talking about the difference between Classical Liberalism, and Rousseauian Liberalism. Some of the things he said are kind of weird and confusing, but he is on his mark when saying that John F. Kennedy with his "ask not what your country can do for you..." is much closer to the original liberalism than people like Clinton and Obama with their, "ask not what you can do for your country..." way of thinking. 

@Hunter, is 24 a "republican show"? I have never watched it, what makes it that way? I have always seen shows reflect the views of their writers, but I have never thought of a show as "Republican" or "Democrat" in itself.

You are right enough in saying that the original series was not as "fake liberal" as TNG and the following series were. But I think the films, TNG, and the following shows all plastered on a very thick layer of modern liberalism (what you call false liberalism), and it stuck. From Star Trek IV with "save the whales!" as its central message, and the very first to the very last episode of Star Trek: TNG, the modern liberalism was still there. I know Roddenberry was alive for Trek IV and for the first little while of TNG, but not sure how involved with either of them he was. I don't know who to place blame on, or what political views any of the writers, producers, actors, etc., hold. All I know is that it has been there for a very long time, and as silly and futile as I believe modern liberalism is, I have always really liked that aspect of the show. Can't really explain it.

C3PX said:

Okay, so this is what happens when I make assumptions without knowing that much about the backstory.... I shall back out of this thread now. *leaves*

 

No big deal, you don't have to know everything to qualify for discussion in this thread. I really don't know that much about ST myself, I guess I have seen about every episode of TOS and TNG, and all the films, but not so much of any of the other shows or the deeper lore, I find myself pretty lost and uninterested in ST fandom and nerdy details about it all.

*returns* Ah well that's good to know. I kind of felt I overstepped some boundaries or, something. Seeing as 70% of my TOS knowledge comes from that Tribbles episode... Mabye if I hadn't seen that TOS episode Naked Time on YT I'de be more receptive to the idea of Spock beating on Kirk. As it is, it(the episode) showed Kirk hitting Spock over and, over again and, Spock just taking it. This without inhibitions Spock just taking a hit after hit and, only throwing one punch. Yet, in the trailer Spock is just hitting Kirk and, choking him... Kind of a disconnect to me... I mean if thier friendship starts with choking why wouldn't Spock just choke Kirk after the first slap? To me the Spock fight Kirk thing is just a way to bring in the Heroes fans and, the sight of Sylar on the big screen... Hell, it might just be a dream sequence of Kirk's or, Spock's....

Count Dushku said:

I need to make a comment before I log back out for a real long time.

The reason why Star Trek began to suck began with TNG. Some hack job liberal writers got together and began to spew their evangelical message with all the fervor of fundamentalists. Sure, Rick Berman has his share of the blame, but the writers were the ones who ultimately burned the ship. It got to be too preachy.

If you look back at the list of fan favorite episodes, none of them had a moral message. Best of Both Worlds? All Good Things? Those were when Star Trek was fun. DS9 understood this, as did the last season of ENT. Voyager never did, and certainly the latter half of TNG didn't.

JJ Abrams understands this and has always understanded this in his other work.

I don't give a damn if most of the Trekkers don't like the new Star Trek. Go watch your TNG, you who were in your twenties and thirties when TNG came on. Give those of us who grew up with Star Trek from a young age something cool again.

That is all.

Concerning Voyager, it's about as happy go lucky fun as you can get when you're stranded 70,000 lightyears from home. Seriously, no real worry about loosing many a shuttlecraft, no lasting injury on the ship, whole bunch of food from the replicators, go to the holodeck whenever you're bored, and the majority of the established crew beyond the pilot stayed alive. The happy lives of the Voyager crew become more apparent in Equinox. Ransom(?Not sure that's the name)'s ship also got taken by the caretaker and, thier ship was crap. No replicators, no holodeck, hardly anyone of the crew left alive. Yet, Voyager crew's so happy that assimilation is easy stuff to get over for Janeway, Torres, and Tuvok. Voyager is also hardly preachy. Twice captian Janeway okayed the extinction of two species and, the assimilation of another one. Doesn't sound preachy to me... Then again the big world flood thingy is part of the bible that killed almost everyone on the planet so, mabye I'm wrong about that...

It has been reported that JJ Abrams is going to bring fun back to Star Trek.  As it has been a long time since it was fun.

Hopefully he gets the film somewhere between the more cerebral Trek like the Cage and The motion Picture, and the action romps like Star Trek II and First Contact.

I just hope the trailer is a way to put people off and not how the movie actually is.

I have read a run down of 20-40 minutes of footage on a site based off of what abrams is toring with.  And the context of certain things in the trailer make better sense.  I might not like the whole time travel angle and the kinda funny way that is being used to explain away design changes.  But this is a film for 2009 and not a tv show airing in 1969.   The scene with Leonard Nimoy described as being Pivotal to the entire  plot of the film should move fans of tos.  If this movie is a Spock Centric film and not Kirk Centric then that explains William Shatners absense.  The only real question to me is why is not Nimoy directing the movie, he understands the character of spock better than anyone living does.

It it turns out to be just another enjoyable sci fi popcorn flick with eye popping effects and a non existant plot then it will not satisfy longtime fans.  The fact that they claim they are sticking to the human elements of the story and making good drama fit also with action in the picture sounds awesome but can they pull it off?

They have a lot to prove since these guys wrote the awful script for Transformers. Bayformers as it is now called by its haters.  That was a good popcorn flick but raped its source material i hope the same is not done here.

I know those rocks! :O.  I've been there before, quite a few tiems actually.

skyjedi2005 said:

They have a lot to prove since these guys wrote the awful script for Transformers. Bayformers as it is now called by its haters.  That was a good popcorn flick but raped its source material i hope the same is not done here.

I grew up with and loved Transformers myself, but I gotta call this into question, sky.  I admit I haven't seen the whole of the new movie, but I have seen parts of it.  And I have heard quite a bit of people saying it didn't respect the source material.  But that's never really bothered me too much.  Because, honestly, how much serious respect can you give the original cartoon knowing that it only existed to promote a line of action figures?

Gaffer Tape said:

skyjedi2005 said:

They have a lot to prove since these guys wrote the awful script for Transformers. Bayformers as it is now called by its haters.  That was a good popcorn flick but raped its source material i hope the same is not done here.

I grew up with and loved Transformers myself, but I gotta call this into question, sky.  I admit I haven't seen the whole of the new movie, but I have seen parts of it.  And I have heard quite a bit of people saying it didn't respect the source material.  But that's never really bothered me too much.  Because, honestly, how much serious respect can you give the original cartoon knowing that it only existed to promote a line of action figures?

Some friends and I just tried watching Transformers on Blu-ray this past weekend.  At first we started it and let it play.  Then we started skipping to the action scenes.  Then we just flat out turned it off.  Every couple of minutes, even during the action scenes, we found ourselves saying how lame it was.  From the Autobots transforming into cars on the guys lawn to the 10 min travel time from LA to Vegas, it's just aweful.

The first time through the movie was just alright.  It has some good action scenes in the beginning, but even there we had to look past that lame things (like the unauthorized vehicle actually landing at a military base in a war zone).  Each subsequent viewing gets worse.

I'm Keeping my fingers crossed that this movie will not be as bad as Indiana Jones IV and ruin the earlier films it is based on.  Funny thing is they have an excuse, or escape if this rapes ( i know extreme fan hyperbole but i just could not resist ) 40 years of trek history as it is a prequel/reboot.

Its like there were enjoyable bits and pieces of Indiana Jones IV and the star wars prequels but overall they were mediocre and did not meet expectations, and as a whole sucked.

The thing is when you are an adult and have a hyper critical mind you can pick things out of pretty good films that you hate or are not perfect.  Suspension of Disbelief is often up to the movie makers, but sometimes it is the audiences fault.  With the prequels it was not so much suspension of disbelief as i am quoting tolkien here "it had to be hung, drawn and quartered"lol.

Referring to twister's earlier comment, I happened to be thinking about that as I glanced at my Trek calendar.  This month is Spock from Amok Time, and it gave me an idea.  Maybe Spock is beating the crap out of Kirk in the trailer because he's pon farr-ing!  He certainly had no trouble beating up Kirk in the series because of that.  Granted, that would totally ruin continuity as well, but before I got pissed off because of it, I would certainly laugh heartily at the thought that Spock was choking Kirk on the bridge because Spock wasn't gettin' any!

No!! Spock is choking the evil twin Kirk!

Ooh, they should have ISS Spock in this movie!  Bring back the goatee!

Gaffer Tape said:

Referring to twister's earlier comment, I happened to be thinking about that as I glanced at my Trek calendar.  This month is Spock from Amok Time, and it gave me an idea.  Maybe Spock is beating the crap out of Kirk in the trailer because he's pon farr-ing!  He certainly had no trouble beating up Kirk in the series because of that.  Granted, that would totally ruin continuity as well, but before I got pissed off because of it, I would certainly laugh heartily at the thought that Spock was choking Kirk on the bridge because Spock wasn't gettin' any!

Really now? Spock beat on Kirk becuase of Pon Farr? Heh, I agree with you that would be funny if that's the reason in the film. Why would it ruin continuity though if that's the reason?

Two notes:

1) What with all the comments of Star Trek 90210 someone's actually combined them into an intro. Star Trek 90210 Youtube style!

2[completely off-topic so you can ignore this if you want.]) Apparently my cool smiley was used in spam mail and, now urlcut won't link to it... Strange. Anywho, I forgot the original url for it. So I re-uploaded and, use tinyurl now. Premiering the tinyurl link to it in this post.

Actually, to be more specific, Spock almost killed Kirk because of pon farr.  But I digress...

To answer your question, it would be against continuity because of this:  Vulcan males are supposed to go through pon farr every seventh year of their adult life, beginning in puberty.  In the aforementioned "Amok Time," Spock tells Kirk that he had hoped his human blood would keep him from having to go through it, implying that it had never happened before.  Maybe his human blood did delay it until well into adulthood.  But if the 2nd season was his first time, it sure couldn't happen in a movie that's supposed to take place before that.