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This is sure to cause some debate.

Zor

Appreciate the dedication to GR.

Indeed. I'm surprised that the "neither good nor bad" setup led to the score he gave. It was a tad higher than I expected... but then again the real stinkers in the movie series bump the average a bit I imagine.

Steve wrote:Indeed. I'm surprised that the "neither good nor bad" setup led to the score he gave.

I didn't see the review as "neither good nor" so much as "with a few relatively minor tweaks this could have been brilliant". His comment that, had the stuff from Countdown been included, Nero could have been as good or better than Khan, stands out in particular, as does how to handle putting Kirk in the Captain's chair for the final scene.

the real stinkers in the movie series bump the average a bit I imagine.

There weren't that many real stinkers. Even V and Insurrection had a couple of good bits.

Captain Seafort wrote:Even V and Insurrection had a couple of good bits.

I've actually gotten to like Insurrection more now than I did back in 1998. It's flawed and a weak follow-up to FC, but fun and good in its own right. I certainly like it more than GEN.

JME2 wrote:I've actually gotten to like Insurrection more now than I did back in 1998. It's flawed and a weak follow-up to FC, but fun and good in its own right. I certainly like it more than GEN.

Aye, and the scene with Geordi watching his first "proper" sunrise is one of, if not the best scene in any of the TNG movies.

Captain Seafort wrote:

JME2 wrote:I've actually gotten to like Insurrection more now than I did back in 1998. It's flawed and a weak follow-up to FC, but fun and good in its own right. I certainly like it more than GEN.

Aye, and the scene with Geordi watching his first "proper" sunrise is one of, if not the best scene in any of the TNG movies.

My favorite scene too -- with the handshake between Cochrane and the Vulcan captain in a close second.

Insurrection, while absolutely being a weaker movie than First Contact overall, in my opinion was the better TNG movie. FC felt like a random SciFi action flick that happened to take place in the Star Trek universe. Insurrection was a big-budget two-parter. Yeah, stupid beyond belief, but it was the TNG kind of stupid.
And frankly, useless as The Motionless Picture and TFF are, they still have their moments. So does Generations-except all of them are in the TOS part of the movie. Well I guess the 'remove the plank' sequence was kinda funny but after that the movie just blew.

Batman wrote:Insurrection, while absolutely being a weaker movie than First Contact overall, in my opinion was the better TNG movie. FC felt like a random SciFi action flick that happened to take place in the Star Trek universe. Insurrection was a big-budget two-parter. Yeah, stupid beyond belief, but it was the TNG kind of stupid.

I can see where you're coming from, but I disagree - FC also had the fact that it was TNG's TWoK going for it (albeit reversed) in that it drew on the relationship between Picard and the Borg. In some ways it was "I Borg" writ large.

So does Generations-except all of them are in the TOS part of the movie. Well I guess the 'remove the plank' sequence was kinda funny but after that the movie just blew.

That and one-shot-Will continuing his established reaction to being attacked by a BoP.

Steve wrote:Indeed. I'm surprised that the "neither good nor bad" setup led to the score he gave. It was a tad higher than I expected... but then again the real stinkers in the movie series bump the average a bit I imagine.

I enjoy these reviews but I never understood why if he wants to encourage discussion and thinking that he feels the need to end his reviews with a simple number. Especially how he seems to stress over these ratings. He's not a video game critic :v

Now I don't frequent the more hardcore enclaves of fans so I don't really see his opinion on the movie being just okay as being that controversial. Most people seemed to agree it was a fun ride with a weak plot and even weaker villain. They took a big risk with the new movie and it paid off in the box office even if the film won't hold up to repeat viewings.

At least we can all express our collective mancrushes on the new McCoy <3

such a scene stealer

VF5SS wrote:At least we can all express our collective mancrushes on the new McCoy <3

such a scene stealer

Heh, to me he'll always be Eomer of Rohan.

My thoughts about the 2009 movie were: that it was a fun movie with a good cast and the classic characters more or less in the forms we know them in, and that's why it's succeeding. But it's also horribly flawed and I'm not talking about the goofy "science" (which is de-rigeur for Trek) but the awful clumsiness of the plot and how whole situations have to be kludged together, how Starfleet essentially have to be incompetent to the point that the captains can't tie their own shoes without help in order to allow Nero to get as far as he does, and how Nero has to be incompetent to the point where he can't tie his own shoes without help in order to allow the Enterprise crew to succeed in thwarting his Diabolical Plan™. The movie also really fails to take full advantage of the Greek Tragedy aspect of time travel which could have been so effectively utilised if anybody involved with the production had bothered to think a few things through for just a few minutes before one frame of film had been shot.

Why posit a bullshit galaxy-threatening-supernova™ endangering Romulus when it could have simply been Romulus' own sun which had "unexpectedly destabilised" and was about to go supernova? Ambassador Spock proposes the red-matter charge to cancel out the destabilisation reaction, flies off to Vulcan to get some of the stuff, but returns too late due to a miscalculation caused by a then-unknown factor in operation which triggers the supernova earlier than expected. Romulus gets consumed in the event that opens the black hole time-gateway through which the Narada and the Jellyfish both fall into the past. Movie unfolds as it does (or hopefully a bit more sensibly in other areas), we get to the climax and discover the unknown factor —the initiation/collapse of the red-matter in the Jellyfish which consumes the Narada: dooming Nero and crew, and, in the future, Romulus, due to the two black hole time-gateways somehow interacting with one another in ways nobody predicted.

In this way, Nero has every reason to believe that Ambassador Spock and the Vulcans betrayed him and the Romulan people and just let them be destroyed after seemingly offering them false hope, which drives him insane and sets him off on his revenge quest. He has no way of knowing that his own actions in the subjective past/his subjective future resulted in younger Spock having to use the red-matter to destroy the Narada to stop Nero. Likewise, Spock actually is partially responsible for the destruction of Romulus when his younger self undertakes that action, though he has no way of knowing what the result will be from his vantage point and is an event that would never have happened but for Nero's revenge quest. Nero and Spock are trapped in a hideous predestination paradox that results in the deaths of billions on two worlds and totally reshapes the fabric of the Star Trek universe as a result. Which makes the plot a classic Greek tragedy.

And as for James T. Kirk... One way to fix his character, instead of having him as the asshole-punk "smartest multiple-offender in Iowa", make him an instructor at the Academy, same as Mr. Spock. The writers could have posited a backstory by which Lt. Kirk had already gone through "the Farragut disaster" (which can be left unspecified) several years earlier and is still trying to live down that trauma. He decides to take on the Kobayashi Maru test for a third time to demonstrate to Spock why the test is flawed. But instead of doing something illegal, suppose he studies the programme itself and finds a glitch he can exploit without having to actually hack into the computer to reprogramme the simulation? Using that knowledge, he unsets the scenario and wins the simulation. At the resulting hearing, Kirk points this out to a Spock who is ironically behaving just as rigidly as those racist assholes on Vulcan who caused him to reject their offer to join the Vulcan Science Academy. When Spock insists that Kirk missed the whole point of the test —to "know fear"— Kirk would rebut that no simulation could possibly create a believable death-fear situation, that this is something that can only be discovered in the real world "as I've already been through on the Farragut". And when he argues to the trial board that a good starship captain wins by arranging the conditions of victory as much as possible in advance, and seeks out the flaw in an enemy's strategy to do so, that's when he wins a clearance on a charge of academic cheating and gets that commendation for original thinking. In this way, Kirk emerges as a far stronger character, a match for Mr. Spock, and who had beat Spock with logic. Spock might not have particularly liked it, but he would have had a grudging respect for James Kirk and thus a far more solid basis for their future friendship is forged.

The whole plot contrivance with Kirk ending up on Delta Vega can also be better solved by having Kirk, trapped on the Narada trying to rescue Capt. Pike, taking a pod on Pike's orders to escape and warn Starfleet Command. The pod ends up on a random trajectory that puts it down on Delta Vega, and thus that part of the movie story unfolds. When Kirk gets his mindmeld infodump from Ambassador Spock and returns to the Enterprise via Scotty's super-transporter, he pulls the emotional compromise argument on Spock to convince him to relinquish command. Again, Kirk outmanoeuvers Spock with logic.

Later, when the Enterprise is racing back towards Earth, Spock confronts Kirk on the issue of emotional compromise, citing Kirk's admitted lingering trauma over the incident on the Farragut. To which Kirk replies that this past trauma is motivating him, as Spock suggests, but in a different way: "I let down one crew because I froze for just a second or two, and I'm not going to let down a whole world now. Especially not that it's Earth that will live or die depending on what I do on the bridge." At this point, Spock would concede the point to Kirk: "It is, perhaps, not logical. But it is understandable." Had the movie taken this direction, Kirk would have emerged as a much stronger character, with a story arc matching Spock's, and would have created a far more believable friendship between the two. The movie could have ended in the Enterprise recreation lounge with the two sitting down for their first game of chess. Fade to the ship warping off into deep space and the future, with Leonard Nimoy's voiceover reciting the traditional Star Trek prologue.

All these points and fixes I've suggested are things that could have easily been thought through at the keyboard, had the writers and the producers actually cared about doing something more than a fun popcorn movie. The Star Trek movie franchise could have been relaunched with a truly epic story with characters coming into their future epic dimensions. Instead, we got the movie Paramount decided to settle with, perhaps believing that anything with the Star Trek brand on it would automatically sell. It was a lot more fun than the past three TNG snooze-fest films, but it could have been much more.

To be perfectly honest, I find ST5 and Insurrection to be the best "series" movies.

ST5 was exactly like TOS - hamming it up from Kirk, a Spock-Bones-Kirk relationship - there is a sense of friendship there. The Enterprise goes to a new region of the galaxy, they meet a god-like being that's not really what it seems... defeat it... have a run in with the klingons.... a few bad jokes, terrible SFX, a "relationship" between a black and a white person (Uhura and Scotty)... everyone learns a lesson and it ends. ST5 is literally a TOS episode with a bigger budget.

Insurrection was just like a TNG episode - Contrived moral dilema, Picard does a speech, everyone's politically correct, the bad guys are defeated and/or shown the error of their ways... everyone learns a lesson and it ends.



Those ARE how the episodes more or less played out. ST5 was camp as fuck but so was TOS. Anyone remember the Squire of Gothos or that episode with the giant cat and the Enterprise in the candle?

STI was MORALITY PLAY shoved down our throats but then so was the one with Worf's brother and those villagers or Who Watches the Watchers.


I seriously think those two films were the closest the movies ever got to their respective TV series. Critically panned and seen as the "weakest" of the lot? Perhaps the shows don't translate well to films


Except Khan, that was kind of like Balance of Terror, I guess. All the other "good" movies - ST4, STFC - they weren't like any episode previous.

Patrick Degan wrote:At the resulting hearing, Kirk points this out to a Spock who is ironically behaving just as rigidly as those racist assholes on Vulcan who caused him to reject their offer to join the Vulcan Science Academy. When Spock insists that Kirk missed the whole point of the test —to "know fear"— Kirk would rebut that no simulation could possibly create a believable death-fear situation, that this is something that can only be discovered in the real world "as I've already been through on the Farragut"

That could work - and could also use the argument that since Spock tries to repress his emotions, he doesn't truly understand "fear" - that they have a Vulcan designing a test that's meant to appeal to emotions is... illogical.

Captain Seafort wrote:...as does how to handle putting Kirk in the Captain's chair for the final scene.

I don't really agree with that part, not if they wanted sequels, anyway. As a standalone movie, that "montage through the years" thing would have been fine, but not as the start of a series.

James Kirk needs to get in the Captain's Chair, otherwise he really has no place. Spock was already a CDR, so his First Officer billet is secure. McCoy could easily remain CMO, as he was a doctor previously; they simply don't have to replace the former CMO who was killed because 'battlefield promotion' and all that. Similar to Uhura, being the best candidate for the job and proving herself as a Comm Officer...which doesn't really require some kind of specific rank anyway. Scotty was also in Starfleet already and could have rank to be the Chief Engineer already, having replaced Olsen. Chekov is just an Ensign anyway so can easily remain at the helm, and for all we know Sulu was already in Starfleet rather than a promoted cadet.

So basically all the billets are filled except Captain. Now, Pike gets rescued so maybe keep him there? But where does that leave Kirk? Alternately you can promote Spock to Captain and have Kirk as First Officer in a bit of a twist...though really, Cadet to Commander and XO of the Flagship isn't much better than Cadet to Captain of the Flagship, is it?

So yeah, as the start of a series and going the way they did, getting Kirk in The Chair was going to require an asspull...or leave him in the awkward position of no real billet to fill, without bumping out one of the other main cast. You'd have to pretty much redo the entire movie to sidestep that.

Then they should have done a better job setting that up? Instead of Kirk being a chronic criminal offender and bar-brawler who becomes a cadet, they could have had him join Starfleet. If they wanted to make him different from Shatner Kirk, just have it where one of the Butterflies is he wasn't on the Farragut. He hadn't yet gone through that lesson, but a further consequence is that his career has not been as stellar. Instead of Pike being the one to talk him into joining Starfleet Academy, have Pike become the new commanding officer of a raw, untested, hard-to-control barely-graduated-the-Academy Lt. Kirk (or even Ensign) and spend three years grooming Kirk for higher command. Have the Kobayashi Maru be Kirk's test as a commissioned officer in command school (just like it was implied that Lieutenant Saavik was already a graduate and commissioned officer) and have him pull something really clever instead of "hacks the simulation and turns on God mode". (I really like how the Trek novel Kobayashi Maru portrayed Kirk's cheat). He can still wind up in the argument with Spock, and his "dead daddy" issues being brought up, and you can still have the conflict the rest of the movie showed, and as Kirk is already a Lt. with command school education his being bumped straight to Captain as a "thank you" for saving Earth wouldn't bee as much as a stretch as it going to a third year cadet.

I'm willing to cut them some slack on the Cadet to Captain thing because its already established by Pike that young people can get promoted to high positions, because Starfleet just took a lot of casualties and is probably short on troops (they probably were at the start of the film if they were crewing their rescue fleet with cadets), because he saved the Earth, and he also had a friend in a high position in Starfleet as well as Ambassador Spock from the future to tell everyone how great he was.

That said, Kirk was indeed one of the weak links in the film. He lacked the dignity or charisma of the original Kirk. I hope we see a more impressive Kirk next time around.

The review made a good point about destroying Vulcan. It was a good move.

Though I probably wouldn't be so hard on Nero. He wasn't a great villain, no. But he had an understandable reason for his actions, and he was a threatening enemy.

Nero had an understandable reasoning if you go outside the film. Just based on what was in the film, his motivation boils down to:

The federation in general and vulcan in particular must die because Spock tried and failed to save my world when we had jack shit for a plan in the face of the kind of disaster an interstellar civilization should have no problem dealing with. We chose to sit on our asses and thus I blame Spock for not saving my family whom I never thought to evacuate with my space ship.

Yeah, I agree with this review and the final score of 7/10: significantly better than warmed over drivel like Nemesis or Insurrection (or Generations for that matter), but then that's not hard to do. Chris Pine's Kirk showed potential for heroism, but breezed through events and Starfleet like magic, with Zachary Quinto's Spock done more justice. The effects are overly flashy, but one aspect of the CGI that's genuinely impressive is the CGI buildings and spaceships that can now pass off as physical models.

RogueIce wrote:

Captain Seafort wrote:...as does how to handle putting Kirk in the Captain's chair for the final scene.

I don't really agree with that part, not if they wanted sequels, anyway. As a standalone movie, that "montage through the years" thing would have been fine, but not as the start of a series.

James Kirk needs to get in the Captain's Chair, otherwise he really has no place. Spock was already a CDR, so his First Officer billet is secure. McCoy could easily remain CMO, as he was a doctor previously; they simply don't have to replace the former CMO who was killed because 'battlefield promotion' and all that. Similar to Uhura, being the best candidate for the job and proving herself as a Comm Officer...which doesn't really require some kind of specific rank anyway. Scotty was also in Starfleet already and could have rank to be the Chief Engineer already, having replaced Olsen. Chekov is just an Ensign anyway so can easily remain at the helm, and for all we know Sulu was already in Starfleet rather than a promoted cadet.

So basically all the billets are filled except Captain. Now, Pike gets rescued so maybe keep him there? But where does that leave Kirk? Alternately you can promote Spock to Captain and have Kirk as First Officer in a bit of a twist...though really, Cadet to Commander and XO of the Flagship isn't much better than Cadet to Captain of the Flagship, is it?

So yeah, as the start of a series and going the way they did, getting Kirk in The Chair was going to require an asspull...or leave him in the awkward position of no real billet to fill, without bumping out one of the other main cast. You'd have to pretty much redo the entire movie to sidestep that.

Immediately after the 09 movie came out, I had an idea that never quite gelled-It was basically, to insert a time skip and to divide the crew up to do their own things while the Enterprise got fixed up from the major pounding she took in this film. And Kirk would need to do a lot of stuff during that timeskip in order to justify his getting the nod for that seat. But as I said, it never gelled, never quite came together, and remains just a bunch of disconnected scenes, not even a fanfic.