lazypadawan | Aw geez, not this @#$@ again

Oh please. I will never understand this urge, apparently inbred exclusively in fanboys (never in my life have I seen the fangirl nation involved in a franchise war).

I'm gonna watch and probably really enjoy the new Trek, but every time I hear someone call it "what the prequels should have been" I am just gonna continue laughing my arse off, cos J.J. Abrams expressly stated that he was trying to inject the Trek franchise with SW's energy and more universal appeal. Why? Because Star Wars has what other space operas are missing.

Fangirls would rather fight over who's going to marry Robert Pattinson and whether Harry should have ended up with Ginny or Cho.

Pegg can just STFD already. Trek has maintained its integrity to its original spirit? I call bullshit with one word: Nemesis. A splosiony-shoot-em-up with little to no heart and all the character development ending up on the cutting-room-floor, which is what I fear this new film will also be, based on JJ Abrams' interviews where he also made more or less the same sort of backhands at the PT. How on earth did Nemesis uphold Trek's core ideal of humanity constantly striving to better itself? (People knock the previous film, Insurrection, but at the very least it was at its heart about upholding that ideal.) The one part of Nem that could possibly have upheld that wound up being an undercut, watered-down knock off of Spock's sacrifice in Wrath of Khan.

I love how GL is somehow both a tyrant who lets no one else have input and that's why the PT sucks - and also a person with no original thought who just caved to his fans, and that's why the PT sucks. Make up your minds.

I saw Nemesis on a plane. I was okay with the film until they killed off Data and rolled in a replacement. Then I was annoyed.

Trek V though is still my least favorite of the bunch.

I'm a fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek and I'm looking forward to the film. But Star Wars won the war because they are the most popular film franchise of all time.

As if I didn't loathe Pegg enough already.

No integrity? WTF is he talking about? One of the main bitchings from the stupid bashers was that Lucas "made the movies he wanted to make, not caring that the fans wanted to see Anakin at 17 in Episode 1 and for the Clone Wars to be the background for all three movies and for Anakin to be as pure as the new driven snow, but also dark and angry and practically Vader from the outset, and for the movies to be about Obi Wan and Anakin's adventures, blah blah blah."

In a truly bizarre article about the release of "Return of the King"

*waits for choirs of heavenly angels to die down at the mention of the Holiest of Holies*

*waits*

*waits*

*16 hours later* Oh to heck with it.

In a "New York Times" article about the premiere of the Third Movie in the Most Perfect, Holy, Life-Changing, Edifyingly Sublime Trilogy Ever Made, they quoted some woman in the audience who put down the LOTR book she was reading and started talking about...George Lucas?!? She said that while Lucas "just sits in front of a computer all day long, Peter Jackson..."

*shoos away choirs of heavenly angels; I'm sick of them appearing when His Holy Name is mentioned and having to wait 16 hours for them to shut up*

"...understands how to make these movies because he's a fan of the story and he cares about what fans think."

Recently, there was a letter in TV Guide in response to a CW article in which it said something akin to, "George is making these stories for himself." The letter sneered, "No wonder he hasn't put out anything decent since 1980."

Simon Pegg can go f**k himself. And I wish LFL would quit kissing his stupid ass.

She said that while Lucas "just sits in front of a computer all day long, Peter Jackson..."

Made sure that each and every effects shot in LOTR was completely practical, as Saint Peter would have nothing to do with the "laziness" of CGI. This principle also applies to his King Kong remake.

"Star Trek, in the end, seems to have won the war, because it maintained its integrity, and now the effects are catching up as well"

Remember kids, CGI in the SW Prequels = lazy filmmaking with no integrity
CGI in everything else = OMG SO F**KING AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, and Mr. Pegg? Go ahead and keep pissing on modern SW; I'm sure you'll get that job writing for the T.V. series. And another thing - why oh why do so many hardcore bashers have such a martyr complex? "Well, I know people will HATE and ATTACK me for saying this, but my opinion simply MUST be heard, as unpopular as I know it will be..." Of course, these are the same people who will claim that everyone hates the prequels, and only a "small, cult audience" actually considers them good movies....

You nailed it on the martyr complex. Those poor persecuted bashers.

I like Star Trek but its so...cold. It just doesn't have the "magic" that Star Wars does. Maybe its because its a rather materialistic view of the universe rather than a spiritual or theistic one. At least that's my opinion.
I don't think you can really compare the two. They are so different.

Trek and SW are about different sets of ideas. Roddenberry wanted to present a largely optimistic future where material problems are solvable, while SW is more about personal and internal struggle.

Some days I feel the only person who likes Star Trek, Star wars, AND Lord of the Rings... all pretty much equally. You just have to remember All true Star Wars fans hate Star Wars (http://www.jivemagazine.com/column.php?pid=3381).

Well, there is somebody else who posted who likes all of those things...

*Yawn* Yes, and guess what idiot the FX on Trek would look like they did in the predecessors had Lucas NOT made the prequels.

Don't let it rile you up - once the Live Action SW comes to TV the FX on it will blow anything that Abrams does out of the water.

Let's just hope Lucas doesn't put the live action show on Fox. It seems to be cemetery for sf shows.

JJ has got to be pulling his hair out after reading that. Comments like that don't help at all.

I'm not so sure - from some of the interviews I've read, JJA seems to have similar views on the PT.

Ugh. I like Star Trek. Not the same way I love Star Wars, of course not. But I don't see why there has to be a conflict between the two. I recall there was a chapter in Leonard Nimoy's autobiography titled something like "Thank you, George Lucas" because he proved that large-scale, blockbuster space films were possible, and thus paved the way for Star Trek movies. I'd like to see more of that friendliness.

(I am, however, very leery of this new Star Trek film. I fear that it's missing the real point of it in favor of noisy explosions. People may say it's Star Trek with a kind of Star Wars influence, but I fear it's influenced more by, say, Independence Day or other such loud films without great substance. Just my impressions from the trailers, of course. :)

Ditto. Trek, in many ways, has been as much a part of my growing up as SW.

I didn't know that about Nimoy. That's really cool. :)

The autobiography ("I Am Spock") is a really fun read. It's full of monologues/dialogues between Nimoy and his Vulcan alter-ego. ;)

I also got an ID4 vibe from the ads.

Please tell me again why do people at Lucasfilm suck up to this guy?

Prolly because Shaun of the Dead is hi-larious.

Pegg needs to stop being so loud about this shit because his movie still hasn't been released. It'd be a shame if JJ mucks it up. I have no faith in the guy.

Star Trek has maintained its integrity while Star Wars has lost its integrity? What the hell is he on about?

I've seen a couple of the TV adverts for the new Star Trek film, and I get the impression that with this new film Abrams is aping Star Wars. The brief shots in the adverts look more like something from Star Wars than Star Trek. It's as if Abrams wants to make a Star Wars film, but as he knows he can't make a genuine Star Wars film he decides to make a Star Trek film that merely apes Star Wars. I may be completely wrong about this but that's the impression of the film I get. An impression that is strengthened by the fact that the actor playing the new Kirk supposedly claims that he based his portrayal of Kirk on Han Solo.

I grew up watching the original Star Trek on TV over and over again. I've been a fan of the original Kirk and Spock for about as long as I've been a Star Wars fan (about 30 years). But I have no intention of seeing Abrams's new film. There are several reasons for this. One is Simon Pegg. Another is that the filmmakers seem to have contradicted a lot of the already established backstory of Kirk, Spock and co (if what I've heard about the film is true). And one major reason is that I feel that Kirk and Spock are such iconic characters that recasting the roles is wrong. Hell, can you imagine Luke, Han and Leia being recast and having the original Star Wars trilogy remade? I feel it's a bit like that.

Anyway, rant over. Sorry about that.

I also get the impression this is a SW fan's idea of what Trek should be like, although some of the ads remind me of Independence Day too (itself a SW knockoff).

As for casting, I see your point, which is why this movie doesn't seem like a prequel in the same sense as TPM but a reboot with a hip young cast. In other words, it is closer to recasting ANH with Zac Efron as Luke, Hugh Jackman as Han, and Anne Hathaway as Princess Leia than to having Ewan McGregor play a significantly younger Obi-Wan Kenobi. The interesting thing will be to see how Chris Pine plays Kirk. Shatner owns that role and you can't convey Shatnerness without descending into parody. But if it doesn't feel anything like the Shat, it won't be Kirk.

I like Star Wars. Lord of the Rings AND Star Trek. I don't see why people have to pit one against the other.
I may watch the new Star Trek film because I like John Cho. I'm not as big a Star Trek fan as I am of star Wars and I've been watching both since in the 1970s!

The media and fanboys love to play up this sort of thing, unfortunately. Once I went to a birthday party for a guy I knew from volunteering at the Magic of Myth exhibit. He was a big Trekkie as were all of his buddies. I think they were more afraid of me giving them a hard time than the other way around but everything went fine. I also watched the old Trek reruns in the '70s, seen all of the Trek flicks, watched Next Gen with my fellow dorm rats in college, and for a couple of years there stuck it out with DS9 and Voyager. My older fan friends were all Trek fans, so I went with them to a lot of the cons during the '90s. I don't consider myself a huuuuge fan but I like Trek overall. The franchise has had tough times over the past few years and it's nice to see it poised for a bit of a comeback. But I just cringe at how everything needs to be at SW's expense.

I've read about one particular event in the new Star Trek film which seems to provide further evidence that Abrams is aping Star Wars. I won't mention what that event is as it would spoil it for anyone reading this who intends to see the film.

I hope it's not Kirk blowing up the Klingon Star ;).

I have to say up front, I'm a big fan of Simon Pegg. I have been for years now. I remember when he was on Big Train and Brass Eye (the Paedophile sketch in particular was cutting and hilarious), I loved Spaced which he co-wrote and co-starred in with the wonderful Jessica Stevenson (now Hynes - and something of a *soft* prequels defender - which is to say she's admitted to liking them), I enjoyed his appearance on Doctor Who, own both Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead on DVD, and am very much looking forward to his next flick.

That being said every statement he makes about Star Wars, including the one above, is crap. He's little more than a bitter fanboy when it comes to this particular topic. He didn't like episode's I-III, thats fine, but there seems to be a real sourness to him in relation to this, and as a fan of his it really disappoints me. In fairness, he isn't blind to it, he did take the piss out of himself in the second season of Spaced for it. But not without getting a few licks in against Lucas. So we needn't be too fair.

As for the new Star Trek. I haven't seen it yet. I'm a huge fan of Trek (and I mean a proper book buying, list making, OCD fighting FAN) and when I was offered tickets to a preview a couple of weeks ago, my reaction was - and I hate this term, so forgive me but - *meh*.

Now in the intervening weeks I've come round. It actually looks like a good fun, action, adventure flick. I still hold reservations: Kirk's character seems drawn from the consensus caricature, rebel-without-a-cause misconception of who Kirk is, rather than the man William Shatner actually played. Young Kirk was always described as bookish, academic, and ambitious; not reckless, callous, and (at least to begin with) directionless, as he seems to be in this movie. In fact the Kirk I'm seeing in these trailers seems more akin to how Jean-Luc Picard was supposed to have been in his youth.

One old friend of Kirk's actually described him as being "a stack of books with legs" while at the academy.

Should this matter? Not really. No. Its been a bit of a pet peeve of mine that the character has been consistently misread over the years, and I do find the original version more interesting, but this shouldn't affect the quality of the movie.

The other thing though, is the tone I'm picking up off the trailers. This feels - dare I say it - like Star Wars in Star Trek's clothing. For all the nonsense rivalry between the two franchises they are, but for having Star in their titles and being set in space, completely different. I got the impression that Abrams (who I like) is making the Star Wars picture he's always wanted to make, but calling it Trek.

Star Trek always had that Cowboys & Indians flavour to it, that was part of its appeal. But it was always more sedate, cerebral (Star Wars goes more for the heart, the blood, at least up front), and majesterial. This film seems not to get that. Of course you need the sturm and drang to get the joe soapers interested. I just hope there's a bit more substance in there when all's said and done.

My favourite thing about Star Trek is the sense of exploration. If humankind ever does it; launches massive, three and four hundred staffed starships into the depths of unknown space, just to see what's out there, it will be the best thing we ever do. That feeling, that sense of seizing the future, of 'boldly going where no one has gone before', that is what Star Trek is about. Explosions, and outer space battles... these things are nice, but not really part of the program.

In the end Lucas's saga might aim to get the blood pumping, but it's not only concerned with that. There are deeper themes at work. I hope that Abrams, in trying to map some Wars onto Trek, remembered that at least.

I agree with you completely (except for being a Pegg fan).

Granted, since this is a "reboot," I know certain specifics aren't going to be the same as the original canon, even in characterizations. Though, as the Batman reboot proved, you don't have to reboot the essence of the main character, which it does appear they're doing with Kirk - who I agree seems more like what we know of young JLP, not young James T. Add in that Pine is modeling his performance off of Han... I really don't know. He does seem to at least recognize his limits, that he can't duplicate Shatner, but in lieu of that I'm not certain Han was the best template to work from.

But even with that, so long as the original's spirit - the core themes of exploration and humanity striving to better itself - are basically intact, then the rest is basically gravy. But I'm not sure JJ is even going for that. He himself said he thought TOS was too much on the "talk" and not enough on the "action" - which (aside from being a criticism I would have more expected to be leveled at TNG) more or less proved to me that he just really doesn't get it.

I've seen it now. Annnd... I'm disappointed.

It's a bloody good movie, and I defy anyone to not have a good time with it. But - and this I know is a somewhat sweeping statement - it's not Star Trek.

Without going into a full bore analysis, my only real issues with the flick (Kirk is something of a cartoon its true, with little approaching an actual character arc, but he's likable and Pine does well with it so that part's okay) boils down to two things. Roddenberry's socialist utopia is nowhere to be found, which would be okay if they'd at least gotten Starfleet right.

The primary function of Starfleet is - all together now - exploration! "To boldly go where no one has gone before." Here its remit is one of "peacekeeping and defense". And thats a quote, Captain Christopher Pike lays it out for us. Now Starfleet always had a military angle to it, it acted in defense of the Federation, but that was always its secondary purpose (one I used to like to imagine arose following the Romulan war. But that's just idle speculation), in fact Roddenberry had originally imagined it as a civilian organization, evolving say out of NASA. In Abrams movie though, Starfleet is wholly military, with any mandate toward space exploration seemingly absent. So when Leonard Nimoy speaks that famous phrase ("... to boldly go...") at the end (and it really should be Pine's speech, but no matter) it seems incongruous with the film we just watched, and one wonders if those words haven't now become little more than familiar phonetics, something that must be there even while their meaning has been ignored or not understood.

And this matters, because if we're rebooting Trek (and thats what this is. don't listen to any waffle about altered timelines, this is a new universe. Vulcan's blue-not-orange sky and money being used in the Federation is testament to that.) then it's important that we recognize what the thing is at its core.

Random example: When Brian Michael Bendis started Ultimate Spider-Man, essentially a reboot of the Marvel comic book, he made sure that at its centre was a bookish, neurotic teenager that is granted amazing powers which only serve to make his life more difficult. After that everything else is up for grabs.

Rebooting Trek requires that you do the same. Give me a group of scientists, artists, explorers, and yes... fighters, stuff them into a giant state-of-the-art star ship, and blast them into the unknown. After that everything else is up for grabs. Other Star Trek movies have been about battle and spectacle (though none quite as hysterically as this one) but have managed it without rejecting the core idea of exploration.

To be fair maybe the exploratory aspect hasn't been rejected, they do use the 'boldly go' bit at the end, however incongruously. Maybe they needed the empty sturm and drang to entice back the masses, but exploration is what Star Trek is all about, it should have been front and centre in what is essentially supposed to be a re-introduction to the franchise. Who knows though, maybe next time Star Trek will show up.

Your comment lays out almost exactly my concerns about what this movie would be - that it may be a good movie, but not really Trek.

Retconning the entire purpose of the Federation/Starfleet? That pisses me off. (And making superfluous changes to things like Vulcan - what's the point?)

More and more it does indeed seem like this is JJA trying to live out his wanna-make-a-SW-movie fantasy, but I'll still see it at least once, to give it as fair a shake as I can.

Edited 2009-05-09 19:03 (UTC)

I actually liked how Vulcan was handled. The skies should have been orange, but thats a nit-pick. The way they handle the teasing - okay outright verbal abuse - that young Spock is subjected to is particularly clever. I've always had difficulty making the emotionless, stringently logical Vulcan discipline parse with the idea that Spock was jeered and bullied in school for being different. Abrams and Co. find a way to do it and have it make sense. This was probably my favorite moment in the whole flick.

But thats what's frustrating. The moments where they get it right. It's in those moments that I see a Star Trek reboot (something I've been a vocal, and my friends will say tedious, advocate of for years now) that I might have loved. I so wanted Star Trek back. After suffering through Voyager and Enterprise (apologies to any who like those shows) it would have been nice to find Trek that I could get excited about again. It looks now like I never will. But there's always hope I suppose...

So the film is indeed a reboot then, right? It exists in a different reality/universe/continuity from Shatner and Nimoy's Kirk and Spock?

(Critics and journalists seem to be confused over whether the film is a prequel or a reboot. I've even come across an item in which a journalist describes the film as both a prequel AND a reboot. Well, it can be either a prequel or reboot. It can't be both.)

The skies should have been orange, but thats a nit-pick.

Yes, that's what I was referring to - while a seemingly minor thing, yes, what was the point of such a change? How hard would it be in this day and age to make an orange/red sky?

I can't really comment on the rest, as I still haven't seen the movie yet.

After suffering through Voyager and Enterprise (apologies to any who like those shows) it would have been nice to find Trek that I could get excited about again.

I liked the first few seasons of Voyager okay enough - it had a good premise, truly "where no man has gone before" - but grew annoyed with their falling back on the Borg so much, and I never got into Enterprise. (Seeing one of the actors viciously bash AOTC at a con didn't encourage me to, either.) I know what you mean, though - I think the last time I was really "excited" for new Trek was First Contact. Which was... 13 years ago? Part of why I really, really want to like this movie.

*So the film is indeed a reboot then, right? It exists in a different reality/universe/continuity from Shatner and Nimoy's Kirk and Spock? (Critics and journalists seem to be confused over whether the film is a prequel or a reboot. I've even come across an item in which a journalist describes the film as both a prequel AND a reboot. Well, it can be either a prequel or reboot. It can't be both.)*

It is, in my opinion, definitely a reboot. There are enough differences between this version and the original that it can only be read that way for me. I think the intention of the filmmakers was to re-write Trek history, mapping this new version onto the old, thus supplanting it. In that they have, mercifully, failed. You can set your old Trek DVD’s on the shelf, that universe is done, this is another place.

It is also however, a prequel. Because it is set in these characters early years, showing how they progress ( with baffling speed) from cadets to officers and star ship crew, it can be read as a sort of Star Trek begins as well.

*What was the point of such a change? How hard would it be in this day and age to make an orange/red sky?*

I don't think it was a conscious change. To be fair, I don’t think anyone stood up and said; “I don’t like this orange sky hooey. I want it blue. BLUE! Damn it to hell…” I think they just got it wrong.

*... I really, really want to like this movie.*

I hope that you do. Genuinely!

I do intend seeing it again. I want to try and find a way to get past some of the things that really do bother me, get over myself, and try and develop an appreciation for whats been done here. Because it is a good movie. The cast are uniformly good, to great. The script is, honestly, a little ropey in places, and wouldn’t really hold up to stress testing, but Abrams direction smooths over most of it and keeps the whole thing screaming along with lots of pace and energy. If I wasn’t such a fan of Star Trek, and so trenchent in what I think it is, and how it should be assembled, I would probably have loved it. As it is it waddles and quacks, but for me it just doesn’t have the duck’s soul.

Aw geez, not this @#$@ again

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