Saw Star Trek Last Night (DO NOT READ THIS)

You show me a case where a cadet has been promoted to captain of a flagship, how about just a ship, how about just to the rank of captain!

Just because someone does something amazing does not mean they are qualified for huge responsibilities for the next few decades. It why military heroes are give some nice metals but are not promoted 6-8 ranks for their heroism!

 

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Who knows if Kirk was kept as Captain after this incident, maybe he had to go back to some other position and move up the ranks until he finally got the Enterprise again.

 

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why bother watching movies if you just pick them apart. It makes all the fantasy out of it.

 

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(Insert title here)

Oh, poor you. If you can't take it, then stop trying to deal it. You're the one who chose to introduce side issues.

Then learn to shoot.

No venom? Then why open with stupid, irrelevant complaint that depends on a demonstrably erroneous premise?

As to the usual? Yes, when dealing with consistent pettiness, I will sometimes make a point of that pettiness by turning it around.

And then, as usual, you cry about it.

I'm perfectly happy to set it all aside, but I have no obligation to simply stand by or turn the other cheek when you want to take your swings. So in the end, Counte, it's up to you. If you don't want the fight, don't come looking for it.

It's really not that big a problem in terms of the writing. Jim Kirk is from Iowa. There is no reason to presume that George and Winona Kirk did not make their home in Iowa. Take places like Everett and Bremerton, Washington. Is it unimaginable that a naval officer might make his home in a navy town? Is it unimaginable that one living in Everett (naval port) might travel to Bremerton (naval shipyard), all of forty miles away, for purposes related to the Navy?

In overcoming their own disbelief, writers learn to put aside certain expected criticisms. For instance, this—

In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a [the three nerds chuckle] magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.

(The Simpsons)​

—is the kind of petty cynicism that drives artists crazy. The proper answer to such a question would, in that case, be, "It's a fucking cartoon!"

In the case of writing, one can devote pages of a book, or minutes of a film, to covering the bases against determined cynicism, but it doesn't serve much of a purpose.

Those hoping to find problems to rail against in the Star Trek film have much larger, and far more important targets. Literally, this is minutiae at best.

For instance, how many minutes should they have devoted to Bones' travels, explaining how he ended up in Iowa? How many minutes should they have spent on explaining the history of that particular shipyard? Sure, one could show recruits going through the registration line, getting their physicals, and receiving uniforms before getting on the shuttle. Probably could have been done in thirty seconds to a minute, and even featured some T&A. But that's the sort of thing that gets cut anyway in the interest of managing the film's running time. Even if they wrote and filmed the scene, we would only see it in a director's cut, or in the bonus footage on the DVD.

One might as well film Jesus walking on water and then pause to do a Charlie Epps-style lecture on the physics of this particular magical effect.

Maybe Lucas should have included two or three minutes at some point in the Star Wars films to explain how a lightsaber is built, and how light can both be contained and made solid. And I always thought the bit in Return of the Jedi when Vader examines Luke's light saber was bogus. With that kind of technology and the power of the Force, I would build my light saber so that it only responded to me; that is, nobody else can activate it. (There's even talk in the real world of designing and manufacturing firearms with biometric and other measures to limit the number of people who can discharge a given weapon.) Of course, that would kill the drama of Luke watching Vader activate the light saber, and wreck the scene in the new trilogy when Anakin fought with two light sabers.

There are some things that just aren't that important. This whole Iowa thing is one of them. It can be reasonably-enough accounted for, in the first place, and to the other, as I noted before, it's a Star Trek film.

And maybe he's there to review some aspect of the construction of the ship he's going to captain.

They weren't randomly assigned in Roddenberry's Universe, but I still take your meaning. I think the fatalism is symptomatic of trying to create an entirely new timeline. Reflecting on Jmpet's point, had they played this out over a television season, I think various issues would be handled better. Destiny is one thing, and I do think Abrams came up short here. The elder Spock, had I written the script, would have said something like,

"Because together you stay alive to do all the good work you set out to do, and when you die, that man will chase you to Perdition's Gate. You're young, and when I was your age I had no idea what love could do for people."​

Rather than some form of elitism among the characters and the Federation, this is one thing I would write up to convention and convenience. The whole destiny thing was probably a mistake. But, to take ElectricFetus' point into consideration, Captain Pike had a ship full of cadets. When command devolved onto the First Officer (Spock), a vacuum occurred. Pike didn't have long to decide, as he fully expected to die. Presumably, he has seen Kirk's progress through the Academy. Additionally, understanding what George Kirk did in his twelve minutes as Captain of the U.S.S. Kelvin, and seeing those same attributes in Jim Kirk, he took as best a gamble as he could. The younger Spock obliged the theory that captains should be able to act in the face of fear. The elder Spock came to learn over time that Jim Kirk's response to fear is to cast it aside. How many crazy stunts has Spock witnessed at Kirk's will? How many sailors did Spock see Kirk spend? That was likely what Pike saw in Kirk. He simply doesn't like to lose, and he will always come back for you as long as you're alive to rescue. Even if this merely Pike's expectation of Kirk, what more could he ask? With death looming over him, and only a brief period in which to make his decisions, Pike went with what he had. Any other captain would have done that, going with what they had, and maybe that gamble would pay off. In the case of Jim Kirk, it did.

That one was a bit convenient. The other easily could have said, "cad" or "scumbag" instead of "townie". But T&C rivalries are well familiar to many people.

More broadly, I don't see the point of the fistfight scene in general, except perhaps to offer a baseline for comparison. The antisocial, disaffected adolescent that was Jim Kirk in Iowa melted away once he found where he belonged.

Maybe.

I think he's a bit more talented than the standard, but by no measure is he a genius. I actually had really cynical expectations about this film, so I was pleasantly surprised.

Perhaps. It didn't even register on my scale, though. The fistfight, the car, the green lover ... these I noticed. Rather than developing Kirk into a new myth (and why not, since it's a new myth overall?) Abrams ran with the old, and used those scenes as a contemporary iteration.

Of course, the fistfight might have been part of a three-part comparison, too. Spock's youthful fight and its motivations, Kirk's adolescent fight and its implications, and then Spock and Kirk's passions when they stood off on the bridge of the Enterprise.

Again, that's a maybe.

In truth, that's where I get cynical. I've heard so much about this or that film that's supposed to be so great, and found them disappointing in that context that if I pay attention at all, the enthusiasm wards me away from the film.

Some would say there's only been one truly good Star Trek film (Wrath of Khan).

And so it goes. It is unfortunate when that happens, but there's not much to be done about it. Certainly, nobody can make you like the film.

I adore good films like Empire of the Sun and The Lotus Eaters, but some of my all-time favorites are pretty bad. Like The Lost Boys. Couldn't tell you why I like that film so much. It just strikes the right chord with me.

 

there a certain level of realism expected from fantasy, for example it not expected that adults think like children!

 

I once read a scifi story about a guy who goes back in time (his consciousness goes back to his 15 year old self). He discovers that time has an elasticity to it, it tries to "spring back" to the original timeline by correcting any changes he makes. For instance, he saves someone's life who died the first time around, only to have the person die in some unlikely way a few weeks later. He learns that the bigger the change he makes, the more time pushes back. But if he makes a change and manages to avoid time's attempt to correct itself long enough, it will accept the new reality.

You could interpret the unlikely meeting of young Kirk and old Spock in that light. Time was just seriously bent all out of shape. Kirk and Spock as enemies? Vulcan destroyed? Earth and the entire federation about to be destroyed as well? These are major changes that would alter time so profoundly that that, if time did have any tendency to resist changes, it would resist these.

Anyway, that story came to mind when young Kirk met old Spock.

 

Um, how about the fact that he had just saved the entire federation? Or how about the word of future Spock? Future Spock trusted young Kirk so much that he sent him back with instructions on how to boot young Spock from the captain's chair rather than going back with Kirk and simply telling young Spock what needed to be done.

I'd imagine that being the guy who saved the federation and having the recommendation of both the current captain (Pike) and the man from the future would weigh pretty heavily in his favor.

Plus, were it not for the alteration in the time line, Kirk would have won the academic disciplinary hearing (not to mention he'd have been commended for his indomitable spirit) and ended up as captain anyway! I did enjoy finally getting to see Kirk win the unwinnable scenario.

PS By the way, Pike sure comes out better in this time line. Remember how he ended up before as a head sticking out of a machine only able to communicate with beeps?

 

Anyone else notice ...?

Did you notice the tie-in to the Kobayashi Maru discussion in Wrath of Khan? Kirk won the scenario by doing exactly what he did to Khan and the USS Reliant.

I'm pretty sure that was deliberate. And worthy of applause, even if the whole thing was anticlimactic.

 

Heroism and capability as commanding officer are two very different things.

I doubt old Spock managed to persuade the federation console anymore then future bush could have persuade young bush to not invade Iraq.

Doesn't matter: he is a cadet. It makes no logical sense in military hierarchy to promote an untrained person so many ranks, that what metals are for. In the alternate time line Kirks works his way up to captain the proper way. Kids these days think they should just get everything they want right way with the minimum of labor, this movie epitomizes the 2000's attitude towards work and gratification.

If you notice in the end he is in a wheel chair, besides he ends up in a better place in the alternate time line anyways.

 

Granted, and as I said, it's the spirit of the mistake that gnaws at me: I can look past the Iowa malarkey, it's just that same sort of malarkey lead to bigger, less excusable errors (parachuting from space and drilling unnecessary holes in the ground).

As I've said, everything in this film fits too perfectly together. You have the whole Iowa bit, but then you also have Kirk landing on a planet with Spock. No, strike that, you have Kirk landing on a planet with Spock and landing about 400 meters from him. No strike that, too. You have Kirk landing on a planet with Spock (about 400 meters from him) and Scotty (a couple of miles from him). Seriously, credulity begins to bend and break at this point.

And calling up the whole, "this is Star Trek" argument only goes so far to cover up bad writing. Either Abrams seriously wanted us to view his films in fatalistic terms that approach Greek drama or he's just fucking lazy and thought some of these contrived devices would be "cool." I tend to lean toward the latter.

I've come to feel an overwhelming sense of how the movie really endorsed the whole great men among us bit that Star Wars so often gets attacked for (most famously, perhaps, by David Brin).

It seems in this universe, that nobody but this combination of characters can do the things that need to be done to serve this plot (and those of the sequels that will surely come). And while I am no hater of individual talent and do tend to think that Napoleon probably is Napoleonic in a host of alternate histories, this concept can begin to stick in the craw. My view of Jim Kirk, which is perhaps mistaken, is that he simply was a man uniquely suited to be a starship captain (he was, after all based on C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower). He was, in other words, perfectly placed to achieve his utmost. But a prodigal genius? A prodigal genius destined for greatness? I don't know. It didn't quite come off for me. There was always a sort of ordinary people (granted ordinary people with talents and training) doing extraordinary things part of Star Trek, in my opinion, which Abrams has totally run away from.

A passionate argument, but as others have already noted, the whole cadets on the ship bit seemed contrived by far. I, for one, could not go for it, coming, as it did, on the heels of all these other fatalistic coincidences. And again, it seems something that could have been avoided. They could have all been graduates on different ships who somehow were thrust together, but that wouldn't have been as dramatic, would it?

Someone noted somewhere that this movie was about a Kirk with daddy issues meeting up with a Spock with Mommy issues. Upon reflection, I'm inclined to agree somewhat.

And I would agree, though I and VI are OK. Heck, I even like IV -- for a laugh. Still, something was missing in this one, and I don't quite know what. I will, however, say that the scenes with Leonard Nimoy showed the gulf in class or starpower or something between him and the current brood, who all look like they could be on an MTV Real World show.

Heaven knows, I'm not pining for the old crew to wobble back, but perhaps the Trek magic does depend on the personnel. I know, for example, the shows that I liked required me to like some or most of the cast -- which is why I avoided Voyager and Enterprise like the plague. This is not necessarily the case with something like James Bond, wherein I can find films of all the actors worth watching. What the difference is, I'm not sure.

 

It was a ridiculous mess of plotholes and laughable nonsense. The script writers kept having things happen because they were "supposed to happen," rather than happening for any sort of coherent reason.

Nero goes back in time to 125 years before his planet is destroyed. So why doesn't he go warn them??? Instead he apparently just sits around in space for 25 years doing nothing, then starts imploding planets for no reason. What the hell?

Why didn't old Spock use the 'red matter' in his ship to destroy Nero's ship as he was being captured? There's no way a character like Spock would allow someone like Nero to capture something that potentially dangerous.

During either of the two instances in which Nero demanded that the captain of the Federation ship come over in a shuttle, why didn't they put a bomb on the shuttle?

Kirk randomly lands on a passing planet and it just happens to be the one Spock is marooned on, AND he just happens to put down within walking distance of him?

At the end of the movie when they're able to beam onto Nero's ship, why didn't they just beam over a bomb? Or many many people rather than just two people? What the heck are all those security people for, if not stuff like this?

 

I don't see why Star Trek history had to be altered for the sake of the new movie... The first adventure of Kirk, Spock & McCoy together could easily have written into the established continuity.

Time travel and alternate timelines have been done to excess in recent Trek: who can forget First Contact, and Enterprise with its temporal cold war? What JJ Abrahms did was just a gratuitous shakeup, intended to be a fresh start but - to my mind - no more than literary vandalism.

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Imagine the outcry there would be if somebody remade Lord of the Rings and had Aragorn seize the Ring, overthrow Sauron and become a dark lord himself? Or how about a remake of Titanic in which Cal Hockley, an expert on the steel industry, somehow saves the ship from sinking? He sails into New York a hero, becomes President after a couple of years, and takes the USA into World War I on the German side... So what if all subsequent history has to change?!

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I entirely agree that it is utterly ridiculous for cadet Kirk to become captain after a single mission, no matter how significant that mission was.

Also, why was the starship being constructed on the ground? There were already spacedocks 100 years earlier!

If the Enterprise was brand new, there is no interval for Captain Pike's early voyages with the emotionless Number One (Majel Barrett) and smiling Spock.

The planet where Kirk met old Spock was called Delta Vega. Such a planet featured in the first classic Trek episode - and it was definitely NOT in the same system as Vulcan. For Vulcan to be visible in the Delta Vega sky as a sizeable disk, it would have to be as close to Vulcan as the Moon is to Earth! The clue is in the name; according to Trek canon, Vulcan orbits 40 Eridani A, not Vega...

I can almost accept that an brilliant engineer like Scotty might devise some new transporter formula which allows beaming onto a starship at warp. However: by the time he & Kirk used it, the Enterprise must have been light-years away from Delta Vega. In every other version of Star Trek, transporters simply do not function across such distances. If they did, what need would there be for starships at all? In fact, even transporting from Saturn to Earth was orders of magnitude beyond established transporter range.

The destruction of Romulus would have to be after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis, which was set in 2379. Nero travelled back to the day Kirk was born, in 2233. That's more than 125 years. I assume that you don't need basic arithmetic to be a modern Hollywood script writer..?!

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Presumably that would have happened in the original timeline some time after the date of the events in the movie (while Kirk was working his way up to a Captain rank elsewhere in starfleet). But since all the crap with the romulans disrupted the timeline, now none of that will happen and the stranded crew from the first original series episode will have to be rescued by someone else.

 

That new timeline promises to be so different you might as well not call it Star Trek at all. With one of its founding worlds (the oldest and most advanced member culture) destroyed, the Federation would be so weakened that they probably have little chance against the Klingons and Romulans over the following century. I doubt that anything approximating TNG, DS9 or Voyager can happen in this timeline.

If anything, the outcome might be similar to how the Mirror Universe was depicted in DS9: no Terran Empire, just humans enslaved by the Klingons & Cardassians.

 

1) They will call it star trek no matter what to get the fandom and recognition that name brings.

2) They can and will make up what ever future they want, logic and reasoning be dammed.

 

Odd, I found it refreshing to have Kirk explained as someone totally extraordinary rather than the "American Everyman" who happened to have found the perfect niche. I always thought that his innate ability to outsmart EVERYBODY was too much for someone who was merely "excetptional". Exceptional, IMHO, just isn't enough. Kirk was utterly unbeatable (for the most part), there had to be something more. The Übermensch explanation is more satisfying to me (speculation alert: I'm hoping that we continue to evolve in the next few hundred years, JTK might just be that next stage). Kirk the disillusioned genius fits his later accomplishments far better than the exceptional everyman explanation.

Maybe he's more Horatio Nelson than Horatio Hornblower. It certainly would fit better.

~String

 

Thoughts on thoughts

This is the issue I feel is at the heart of the matter, and in fact, I agree. From there, I would introduce perspective; I wasn't expecting much of this film specifically because of that. Michael Bay ruined Transformers; the Dragonball movie looks like it's going to be a heap of shit; I don't even want to check in on the Cowboy Bebop thing.

It's part of what Hollywood does. (Do you remember the Sprite "Slug" commercial?)

The film surpassed my expectations, so I'm more forgiving of its shortcomings. I think that might be one of the primary differences in how we're regarding the problem.

History itself often comes to hinge on one person. Whether this is the truth of the record or of the telling is a deeper question.

In this context, we might choose to bear in mind that Kirk is flawed; he is perhaps a great man in his depicted heroism, but he is also a deeply-flawed hero. Perhaps it is the heritage of William Shatner's acting, but as I've already recalled the number of lives Jim Kirk spends, I should also note that he's never really shown anguish. Even in vendetta for his son, Kirk displayed a curious, polymer emotionalism that was always easily contained. If he's the right man for the job, so to speak, at least part of it is his emotional dysfunction.

In history, Harriet Tubman was illiterate and brain-damaged. She was also deeply superstitious; there is a story that says when she bought a house, the question arose as to how she was going to pay for it, and she said, "I'm going to go home and ask Jesus for the money." And yet this one person had a tremendous impact on history.

Martin Luther King, Jr. cheated on his wife.

Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and even sexually exploited them.

Thomas Paine was just an asshole.

But all of them have had profound effects on the development of our society. Part of what happens, of course, is that we start to deify these people. They become mythical, larger than life. And this is problematic because it creates unrealistic expectations. People strive to exceed their humanity in ways they cannot possibly achieve. And resentment grows because these avatars of the human endeavor are no longer human.

What is the spillover effect here? Perhaps we are assigning the context because it is our habit or conditioned instinct.

Part of the problem with the idea of great men among us is that we, too, help manufacture it. We, too, expect it.

In 1962, Madeleine L'Engle published A Wrinkle In Time, a book that championed individual initiative and ability over the bland, dehumanizing nightmare imagined of Communism. Thirty-five years later, the book was included on the list of titles most frequently challenged in American libraries. The objections were anti-Christianism (magical aspects of the story), lesbianism (three old women in a nod to Shakespeare), and Communism (the villain's name was "IT", pronounced as a word but read by the objectors as an abbreviation, and therefore an indictment of the American way of life).

Witchcraft? So what? Lesbianism? Surely, they jest. Communism? Now here's the crux of the matter. Just how do we reach that conclusion? (After all, many conservatives—and many of those religious—decry the serialized information technologies to the point that West Virginia issued special driver's licenses for Christians. So even if we accept their transformation of the word "IT" to an abbreviation, it still doesn't necessarily make sense.)

All that for the phrase "matter of perspective".

Roddenberry's Universe is one in which humanity has achieved something of a utopia, and we don't often see much of that society. But some have denounced it, for instance, as socialistic and so on. In that context, instead of an appeal to übermensch, one can assert that the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise represents the triumph of the free human spirit over those blanching outcomes. In that context, it isn't so much this particular crew, but rather, any crew that is (A) technically proficient, and (B) willing to jump off-script whenever they need to. In this sense, the crews of the Enterprise under Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, DS9 under Cmdr./Capt. Sisko, and even the U.S.S. Voyager under Capt. Janeway all demonstrate the necessary qualities.

It is these crews that rise above the performance of the rest of the fleet. How is it that Capt. Terrell could get the U.S.S. Reliant into such trouble? (I mean, how could he be so stupid as to take Cmdr. Chekov to the planet's surface with him, and not bring along one or two redshirts ...?) At the very least, Scotty would have recognized something was wrong when they called for return transport and had security standing by. Well, okay, maybe.

But that's just another way to look at it. Among bland, regulated humanity some people continue to rise to excellence because they simply will not be tamed by the utopiate euphoria.

Except that this seems to be habitual with the Federation. The only other experienced officers I recall aboard the Enterprise at that time was the ship's doctor, who died without ever being seen on screen, and Spock, who was of high enough standing in the Federation to actually write the Kobayashi Maru simulation. I would imagine there was an experienced engineer down there somewhere, but in the Roddenberry Universe (ST2), the Federation sent the Enterprise after a distress call with nothing more than a boatload of recruits aboard.

I think the hard thing to explain here is why the primary corpus of the fleet was tied up in the Laurentian system. I'm curious about what the hell was going on that the Federation left its planets so damnably undefended. Vulcan had nothing. Earth had, what, a bunch of pups on their first real flight?

Could have been very dramatic. But it also would have been a movie unto itself. And it would still tread back to this crew on this ship. Perhaps if the Trek Universe (and the marketplace) were large enough to have stories in which each of the characters emerged from various disasters—Scotty given shit detail on a transport vessel, Uhura one of fifteen survivors from a combat loss, Sulu and Chekov together responsible for saving a lot of people by managing the crash of the USS Whatsitsname on after a catastrophic core breach, &c.) we could have a more plausible route to assembly. Ideally, I would do it that way, but neither the marketplace nor the studio financiers have such patience.

I like the first one, but it's somewhat obscure. That's why Wrath of Khan was so much more adventurous. The fourth, yeah, I liked that one too, but specifically because it's so horrible, and given what happened in the third and fifth chapters, at least they tried. Number six did okay, as well. Not great, but serviceable.

I have no comment about the Next Generation films.

And casting is almost always a problem in projects like this. I'm absolutely sick of the "beautiful people" mode of casting. Looking back to BSG as a comparison, at least Adama, Tigh, and Tyrol broke the mold.

Style over substance, maybe. Aesthetics over reality. I admit I'm pleased with the selection of Daniel Craig as Bond, and even Dame Judi Dench as M. They're both beyond simply competent in their roles, and neither fall into the beautiful people mode of casting. Sure, you couldn't have some toothless Jordy thug as Bond, but Daniel Craig is less pretentious an aesthetic than Pierce Brosnan or Timothy Dalton.

(A View To A Kill has been running on cable a lot in recent months; looking back, I'm still puzzled at what makes Grace Jones seem sexy. And that was my generation's aesthetics, too.)

To the other, aside from his haircut, I can't say Karl Urban (who, at age 36, has nineteen years of acting credits to his name) necessarily fits the mold. He was appropriately ... I don't know if "ugly" is a fair word, but he certainly didn't seem much of a heartthrob.

Maybe it's just that I had such low expectations of the movie. They gave me enough on the positive side—John Cho, Simon Pegg, a decent Enterprise bridge, and a certain dose of cornball among other things, that I'm not especially troubled by the writing conventions, and the cast doesn't especially bother me.

But this is clearly "J. J. Abrams' Star Trek", and has nothing to do with Roddenberry's Universe, except to exploit it.

And here's a pro-con I feel I should mention:

Pro: Villain did not retain hero at site to foil plans—e.g., dropping Spock on a planet.
Con: Exceptionally complicated doomsday device; I'm not sure why the red matter required access to the planetary core, especially given what happened when Spock's ship collided with the Narada.​

And so it goes.

Sorry to be so long with the reply. It's been an interesting few days.

 

More of the same manufactured manure devised by an uninspired and thieving mind: JJ Abrams, the fat ugly freak.

This movie is an action movie, that's all it is. The real Star Trek (or at least what Star Trek is supposed to be) isn't an action genre. It's a venture into philosophy in an optimistic world, a ship-to-ship chess game in space that happens to contain action sequences to further the plot.

This movie did away with all that good stuff and turned into just another Transformers movie, meant to make wads of cash. All flash and no substance. And corny and "pop culture" as hell.

Trash for true, friends.

 

I agree, STTNG was amazingly well done and ran a long time, DS9 was equally great. This movie makes me feel like puking and I will

 

You must be drunk...