New Star Trek movies

[Student of Trinity]

Uncharacteristically, I've recently seen some movies. In particular the two newer Star Trek films. Also uncharacteristically, I've seen most of the older Star Trek films and series. I was never a serious Trekker, but I kind of liked the series.

 

I quite liked these new films. The funny thing is, they gave me a new respect for poor old William Shatner as an actor. Precisely because my first reaction was, Hey, it's neat to see these silly old characters played by real actors for a change. But the thing was this: I was in large part impressed by the new Kirk because, despite seeming a lot more lively and believable, he was recognizably Kirk. So then it occurred to me that for James T. Kirk to be a character you could recognize, even when played by someone else, William Shatner can't actually have done such a bad job.

[A less presumptuous name.]

You also... must remember... that William. Shatner. Reinvented. The ways... in which we stress... our syllables.

[Randomizer]

Watch Jason Alexander imitate William Shatner's slow delivery.

[Dintiradan]

[Goldengirl]

I'll preface this by saying that I haven't seen the latest Star Trek movie yet. However, I have to say that I was really quite impressed with the last one and how it was able to bring a new feel to such an old and entrenched story. After Star Trek: Enterprise went under, I thought that the series was belly up forever. With these new movies, though, you have new fans of an old show coming in. I still hold out hope that they're enough to kickstart a new series eventually, as well.

 

Even my older brother, the biggest Trekkie I know, supports the new movies. The alternate reality, parallel universe due to the time traveling was a really great touch, in his opinion, to allow revitalization of the older material.

[Alorael at Large]

I've seen absolutely none of the old Star Trek movies or shows. Not a single episode. The only thing I have seen is the first of the reboot movies, and I was underwhelmed. Star Trek has percolated enough into general cultural awareness that I could catch some of the jokes and references, but I could also tell a lot was going right over my head. It was a decent sci-fi movie but not an amazing one. Without the weight of its franchise behind it I think I would have dismissed its hackneyed time travel plot device and never thought of it again.

 

—Alorael, who oddly also hopes for great success for this franchise reboot. Star Trek has been important enough to nerds and geeks of all stripes for long enough that he'd like to see it keep thriving and bringing happiness to future Trekkies. He's just not sure he'll be among their number.

[Ohsky]

Not a trekkie at all, but always liked the concept since i was a child.

 

Watched only the first remake and was mildly bored by it. Personally, i think the old movies are much better. My fav series, are Tng and the last one with Jonathan Archer. TNG with Picard is just too good.

 

The excuse to make alternate timeline prequels was silly, poor, and unoriginal, besides being just a money making mentality, nothing serious to be considered. "Create something new like TNG, don´t go back to those oldies". TNG last movies were full of fail, so something new should be created. Not a recreation. Yet, the industry is the industry, copying and beating dead horses is what is used to make a sure amount of bucks due to hype.

[Cairo Jim]

I'm a bit of a sci fi fan myself, so whenever there's a new Star Trek movie out, I tend to like it. That being said I've watched Next Gen in it's entirety as well as a couple ST movies. Did I mention Stargate?

[Kelandon]

At one point, I decided to watch all of Star Trek, so I watched all the episodes of The Original Series, Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager (plus the movies) in chronological order. I didn't watch Enterprise partly because I heard it was bad and partly because I just was done at the end of Voyager. They were surprisingly good when strung together like that. Well, to be fair, I expected most of TNG and DS9 to be pretty bad, and they weren't, so "surprisingly good" may have had more to do with my expectations than anything else.

 

Anyway, I saw the reboots and, while I liked them both, I was pretty surprised by what the second one did.

I was expecting a new movie, not a remake of/tribute to/new spin on Star Trek 2, which is basically what it was. There was enough new stuff in it that it wasn't quite a remake, but when Spock screams, "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAANN!" you know the only reason he does that is that that's itself a really famous meme from the earlier version, and there were plenty of moments like that.

 

It was good, but I was expecting... well, not that, anyway.

[Enraged Slith]

I heard the latest one is just a lazy rehash of Star Trek 2. I'm not sure why the producers chose to make a movie that way when they were clearly trying to reach out to millions of people who don't know enough about Star Trek to understand those references.

[Cairo Jim]

I heard the latest one is just a lazy rehash of Star Trek 2.

 

Lazy rehash with plenty of screen effects, surround sound and what have you.

[Juan Carlo]

I can't get into episodic drama, which is maybe why I've never liked Star Trek. Any drama that resets from zero every episode bores me (I absolutely loathe procedurals like "Law and Order" and "CSI" as well). Plus, the federation is just so goody-goody and squeaky clean, even when I was younger I always found myself wishing they'd fail just to break the tedium of the formula.

 

I did like the later seasons of Deep Space 9 just because it was slightly darker and less episodic, but otherwise I'll take the BSG reboot over Star Trek any day.

 

I liked the new movies fine as mindless action films, but they really aren't Star Trek anyway. They are more just mindless summer action films done up in Star Trek drag.

[Catoblepas]

I was completely unimpressed with the new one, even less so than the last one. It Just seemed like one big collage of pop culture trek references strung together by action scenes. It relied way too much on the crutches of nonstop action and fanservice, without really ever trying to set itself out as its own thing-attempting to ride on the shoudlers of iconic trek movies that came before (most notably ST II). By the end it was really starting to feel like a slog to get through.

 

Watching these JJ movies makes me wonder what it would have been like to see a movie set in the old continuity with that level of funding. The old Trek movies often had problems getting the money to fund even basic stuff-reusing stock footage of bird of preys blowing up, reusing TNG sets, not having enough funds to even give everyone the right uniforms.

 

People say that JJ's trek 'revitalized' trek, but I'm not so convinced. I think that all the funding they gave JJ to make his trillogy had a big part to do with why it was so successful-special effects and marketing that many of the old Trek's jst did not have access to.

[Rowen]

A friend asked me what I thought of JJ Abrams Star Trek In To Darkness and I told him it was like Transformers, lots of action trying to block out the fact that little was done to make me feel attached and care for the characters in the movie.

[Ohsky]

Yeah: too much action, too much special effects, too much of nothing, no indepth story, engagin enough, just DOOOOOM everywhere. Is like they try to impress you enough to keep yourself at your seat without much sucess as this kind of movies are produced like donuts, serially. It´s a bet on something that had sucess in the past that guarantees buck due to hype, i repeat. Even being polemical, due to people disliking it, or it having silly nudes, and sex scenes everywhere to little or no context to support it in the way old movies dealt with the issue. So im going to take a look at the new movie but i bet it doesn´t feel Star Trek at all like the previous one, it would probabbly feel like the hulk, avengers, ironmans and such eye candies.

[Lilith]

whatever you think of it, you can count on it getting another sequel. if they wanted it to be the last movie in the series they would have called it End Rek

[Alorael at Large]

I'm actually surprised I haven't encountered fans decrying the art wreck, but now this has become too punny.

 

—Alorael, who holds onto the hope that if the movie is a remake of some kind that they took their rebooted timeline for all it's worth. Making villains heroes and heroes villains and using what's already known to pull unexpected twists would be the better direction to take this in. Having old events of significance lose their importance and become minor background might be interesting as well. Rehashing tired old territory is a misuse of the material.

[Ohsky]

whatever you think of it, you can count on it getting another sequel. if they wanted it to be the last movie in the series they would have called it End Rek

 

The annoying, at times, fad of getting things released in packs of three, even if they end up being six or seven; what´s up with it, does it have any occult meaning im missing, beyond overexpanding movies?. The industry is the industry. It´s not about being creative as the first priority, they sign contracts years bfore the last one gets done. "you have to do that on schedule", you will wonder how much that has to do with creating art at all. You create hamburgers, fast food of entertainment.

 

And this kind of blast over a franchise is going to be repeated on the Star Wars one. By the same perpetrator , expect seven new "trilogies" over the next 50 or 60 years.

[Randomizer]

Of course there will be a sequel since movie studios prefer to take fewer risks than making an unknown story. Some of the reasons they went with a new cast were the originals were too old to be believable in an action movie and actors' salaries are much less.

 

Now that Disney controls the Star Wars franchise they'll be making a movie every 2 or 3 years. If they don't do live action it'll be animated.

[Alorael at Large]

Trilogies began their (modern) life in literature, and I suspect they owe a large debt to Lord of the Rings, which isn't really a trilogy. But some hugely influential fantasy novels came in three volumes, so three books gained cachet, and thus we see more of it. Now it also has an established form as well. The first entry sets up the story and has a minor resolution. The second (often the weakest) picks up the story and sets up a climax. The third actually carries out the climax and resolves everything. Three is a number with plenty of cultural and superstitious resonance, but I think it was mostly settled on as a convenient size for works too long to be a single volume/film/whatever.

 

Don't confuse it with sprawling, many-works series. Those also have a long history, but there's a recent fad for them, particularly in the doorstopper fantasy variety. I think that may be mostly driven by The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire (not so many volumes yet, but they're massive, slow to come, and without an end in sight) and more recently by the Malazan books.

 

And sequelitis is yet another problem. Sometimes creators milk a successful franchise for money. It's most visible in films and games, of course; the more corporate forms of art have more bottom-line-driven motives. But there are plenty of authors who have been accused of just churning out cash cows.

 

—Alorael, who will also note that the standard trilogy format has to do with marketability. If you have a failure, resolving something in the first entry means you can abort it. Once you've gotten enough of a market foothold for a second you can usually push through a third, but more than that might be too ambitious. Thus the trilogy.

[Tyranicus]

and more recently by the Malazan books.

I've heard good things about that series but have yet to read it. Did you enjoy it?

[Lilith]

Trilogies began their (modern) life in literature, and I suspect they owe a large debt to Lord of the Rings, which isn't really a trilogy. But some hugely influential fantasy novels came in three volumes, so three books gained cachet, and thus we see more of it. Now it also has an established form as well. The first entry sets up the story and has a minor resolution. The second (often the weakest) picks up the story and sets up a climax. The third actually carries out the climax and resolves everything. Three is a number with plenty of cultural and superstitious resonance, but I think it was mostly settled on as a convenient size for works too long to be a single volume/film/whatever.

 

ultimately they probably trace their history partly back to the three-act play, which is structured similarly: it's the same pattern on a different scale

[Ohsky]

I was joking when i asked what was the occult meaning of trilogies.

 

There are legitimate ones, as you described, and milked cow ones, sprawling like mushrooms in the last decade. That was the irony i asked myself about in the post. Trilogies done, for the sake of being one, not just respecting the core structure that creates them properly. It´s just the mind trick used "you have to see the rest to reach a climax".

[Student of Trinity]

Three-volume novels were big in the 19th century, long before Tolkien. They weren't trilogies; just big fat books, of around 200,000 words, sold in three separate packages. There wasn't any plot resolution at the ends of the first two volumes; if anything, I expect they tended to end with cliffhangers, to encourage purchase of subsequent parts. The format was so standard, it became a convention just to refer to the convention.

 

Why three was the standard, and not two or four, I'm not sure. We know from the Book of Armaments that Five is Right Out, but other than that, I'm guessing. The size of each volume was probably fixed by physical convenience. With legible type and decent paper, 300 pages made a convenient lump of paper to carry around, or something. I'm guessing then that three volumes was roughly fixed by the fact that 200,000 words is about as long as you can easily stretch a story. It's about twice what is reckoned a typical length for a modern mainstream novel. I conjecture that there's a sort of phase transition involved: you can pad a single story up to 200,000 words, but to go much beyond that, you somehow need to tell multiple stories, either in sequence or in parallel. So I'm thinking that the average Victorian novelist could consistently milk a story for three volumes, but four would have been pushing. Then, given those basic (conjectured) limits, simple forces of practical economics imposed a stricter standardization. Apparently there were standard book contracts stipulating fairly precise lengths, so that prices could be standard.

 

It's hard not to consider that some of the same issues are still involved in trilogies today. I have a feeling that individual volumes have gotten a little longer. I expect the average total length of a modern trilogy is over 300,000 words, but with some amount of resolution in the two intermissions, books may still be a little leaner now.

 

I'm actually wondering about this myself at the moment. My novel has reached nearly 120,000 words, and could conceivably end there; but I've only told about two thirds of the story I originally had in mind. I think my plan will be to write the remaining third, and see whether it really ends off in 60,000 words, or shows signs of running on towards 100K. In the former case, I guess I'll try for my original plan of a fat trilogy. In the latter, I'll have to look at something more like a pentalogy of slimmer volumes. I haven't really thought about the large story arc in that way. Trilogies are simpler, somehow. Which just brings me back to the question. I don't really know why.

[Juan Carlo]

I've heard good things about that series but have yet to read it. Did you enjoy it?

 

I'm wondering this too as this is the second time I've heard about the Malazan series in as many days.

[Alorael at Large]

I actually haven't read any Malazan, although the books are on my shelf, but they come highly recommended with comparisons to The Black Company. I have no coherent plot description in even the vaguest terms and the lifetimes of individuals, let alone the length of history, seems ludicrously inflated (hundreds of thousands of years to the mere millenia of standard fantasy) but I'll give it a shot sometime.

 

—Alorael, who notes the irony of the trilogy is that LotR, as seminal trilogy, isn't. It was printed in three volumes, but it's six books internally and really only one story. Feasibility of lugging volumes around and binding them has played a role and continues to do so; serialization is a big part of where books come from.

[Ohsky]

Just watched Into Darkness, i´ll give it a 5.5 out of 10. Mildly entertaining. Pine imitates well Kirk´s gestures, but hasn´t got even 20% of the charisma Shatner had.

[Actaeon]

I have very little experience with Star Trek (aside from occasionally being compared to Data or Spock), so my strongest reaction to the most recent film was to initially want to root for Mickey and Sherlock.

[nikki.]

I have very little experience with Star Trek (aside from occasionally being compared to Data or Spock), so my strongest reaction to the most recent film was to initially want to root for Mickey and Sherlock.

 

I was surprised that Mickey had done so well for himself, personally. Though, I suppose he had long enough to work at it.

[Ohsky]

The actor who incarnates Khan did a well job of interpretation. Besides everything else. Where else did you saw him?.

 

Hilarious, how "Murphy" ended.

[Andraste]

How are Tyannicus and I the only Trekkies? I'm dissapointed.

[Randomizer]

I haven't seen all the movies, but I did watch the TV series.

 

The term is Trekkers.

[nikki.]

How are Tyannicus and I the only Trekkies? I'm dissapointed.

 

I've watched all the movies, and watched all the TV shows growing up (only saw series 1 of Enterprise though). I think I can probably count myself as a trekkie

[Kelandon]

ITT: Andraste ignores me.

[Actaeon]

The actor who incarnates Khan did a well job of interpretation. Besides everything else. Where else did you saw him?.

 

He plays a modernized Sherlock Holmes in the BBC series "Sherlock".

He'll also be playing Smaug opposite Martin Freeman (Bilbo), who plays Watson.

[A less presumptuous name.]

How are Tyannicus and I the only Trekkies? I'm dissapointed.

 

I'm a bit young to be a Trekkie, but I've seen all 12 movies at this point. I've also recently decided to watch the shows. I'm on season 2 of TOS currently. Ahh, 60's scifi.

[Prince of Kitties]

I stopped liking Trek a long time ago, and suspect the trend will continue apace.

 

Re Malazan. It's got world building, sorcery, and antiheroes aplenty. It's also got plot sprawl and power inflation on an astonishing scale. It would be very good if it were shorter; more so if it weren't written as if to make every other fantasy universe look puny and realistic by comparison.

 

Also, it has an Orc Lich Jaghut Tyrant ramming a fireball down a dragon's throat. As said dragon breaths. In the first book. Take that as you will.

[Death Knight]

The new ones and old ones were both good. I thought they had a lot of action for movies most of my friends hated. This is one of the reasons why I stopped taking advice for movies-the advice being given can be horrible or extremely bias. The latter in this case.