Star Trek Beyond *SPOILERS*

[FaxModem1]

Just got back from seeing the movie. I enjoyed it.It was fun, each member of the crew got a moment to shine. And, we had interesting additional characters.

In retrospect the reboot Trek films seem to have a theme going on:

Nero, Marcus, Khan and Krall are all throwbacks of previous eras or ways of thinking in which being mightier is better, and using violence to pursue your aims
Not sure if this is on purpose, or if this is an unintentional theme of the reboots.

Nero was so obsessed with what happened to his world in the Prime universe, that he couldn't be reasoned with or talked down, wanting to destroy everyone.

Admiral Marcus thought that the best way to deal with the Klingons was via a preemptive strike, subterfuge, and killing of innocent lives.

Khan is a conqueror from the 20th century, bent on conquest, revenge, and saving his people.

And now, Krall, someone from a place that knows strife and violence, and thinks the Federation is wrong for trying to have peace and unity, because:
Spoiler

he's actually a former MACO from the Enterprise era, who disagreed with the idea of the Federation and was totally wrecked from the conflict with the Xindi and the Romulan war, to the point that he wants to reshape the Federation into aggressive people.

[darth_timon]

There's a certain poetic nature to this. My personal journey toward Star Trek Beyond began with Star Wars: The Force Awakens some seven months ago, and on the day that I saw Beyond, it was announced filming has wrapped on Episode VIII. The circle continues.

This is also a film tinged with sadness. It's the first Star Trek film since the passing of Leonard Nimoy in 2015, and the last time we'll see Anton Yelchin as Chekov, as he was taken from us far too early in a tragic accident.

Does the film pay due deference and respect to the Star Trek saga, in a fashion that does all involved and those lost credit? With 2016 marking the 50th anniversary of this adventure, can Beyond, as part of a reboot maligned in some quarters, do justice to the Star Trek legacy?

In my humble opinion, it succeeds. We are given a story that manages to be both sweeping and intimate at the same time. It offers links to other elements of Star Trek in subtle ways, and gives us little insights into the hearts and minds of these characters. It is difficult to do so properly in a two hour movie, but we experience the weariness of a crew that has spent three years in deep space, and when their backs are against the wall, we see what the characters are made of. We see how a crew is defined not by the ship, but by each other. Their faith in one another, and their willingness to sacrifice for each other, is what makes a crew a family, and every character is prepared to make that sacrifice.

It's also a voyage of rediscovery. Kirk and Spock in particular have their reasons for feeling tired and jaded, but they find their passion for what they rekindled by their experiences of the film.

I'm sure not everyone will like it, and I might even attract criticism for daring to say this, but Star Trek Beyond is a better film than The Force Awakens, and I dare say is one of the best Star Trek films. I rate it 9/10.

[PREDATOR490]

Watched it - Was entertained.

Successful film I suppose but in typical Trek fashion the entire plot was pretty much telegraphed from the beginning and that is not even including the growing trend of trailers giving away all of the story before you even see the fucking movie.

The film is rather morbid with the death of Old Spock being a plot point while Anton Yelchin is running around on screen.


Plot - Saw it coming a mile away before the Enterprise even left the space station - "A new spaceship that is even better than the Enterprise is being constructed" - Yup, the Enterprise is going to get wrecked. In fairness, the movie is fairly decent but with the new franchise it is all action and heavy on special effects. I am getting rather bored with the new franchise playing around with artificial gravity and lots of spectacular visual amounts of damage being thrown around. It is nice to see them playing with a bigger budget and flashy effects but I would be happy with less shots of things getting ruthlessly wrecked.

Special weapon - I was largely unimpressed with this thing and the contrived nature of the villain having to find a tiny cog to make it work a bit silly.

Points of interest -

Xindi mentioned
Romulans mentioned
MACO mentioned
The Franklin seems to be an evolution of the Enterprise NX-01

With all of that, it would appear the movies are attempting to portray that the Enterprise series elements happened.
Since I really do not like the Enterprise series - This is not appealing.

However, I suppose it allows them to draw on the Enterprise series for future content depending on how much they intend to pull from it.
In theory, if Enterprise is canon for the new franchise then the Ferengi, Temporal War and possibly Androids / Soong is in the realms of viability.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Does the film pay due deference and respect to the <em>Star Trek</em> saga, in a fashion that does all involved and those lost credit? With 2016 marking the 50th anniversary of this adventure, can <em>Beyond, </em>as part of a reboot maligned in some quarters, do justice to the <em>Star Trek </em>legacy?

yup

[Simon_Jester]

To be honest...

Wrecking the ship and having mass destruction in every movie basically... loses its appeal at a certain point. Once was dramatic, two or three times is just excessive. And to a large extent the new movies are taking advantage of the enormous mass of worldbuilding done by the Star Trek TV series, only to tear it all down because they don't have time to build anything new due to the desire to have short films that are full of destruction.

[Adam Reynolds]

To be honest...

Wrecking the ship and having mass destruction in every movie basically... loses its appeal at a certain point. Once was dramatic, two or three times is just excessive. And to a large extent the new movies are taking advantage of the enormous mass of worldbuilding done by the Star Trek TV series, only to tear it all down because they don't have time to build anything new due to the desire to have short films that are full of destruction.

What bothers me about this is that Star Trek isn't supposed to be an action movie. The whole point is that the heroes solve their problems through means other than violence most of the time. They seem to have forgotten this with the remake films.

Frankly I think the problem is that Star Trek works better as a TV series than as a film series, because the budget constraints in TV work in favor of rather than against this message.

Nero, Marcus, Khan and Krall are all throwbacks of previous eras or ways of thinking in which being mightier is better, and using violence to pursue your aims
Not sure if this is on purpose, or if this is an unintentional theme of the reboots.

The fact that this is true while still having the heroes defeat them through violence is problematic. What happened to being smarter?

[Enigma]

<snip>
The fact that this is true while still having the heroes defeat them through violence is problematic. What happened to being smarter?

There was an interview with Chris Pine that basically mentioned that noone wanted a cerebral Star Trek. They wanted a lot of action and kabooms.

Trekmovie.com.

[The Romulan Republic]

To be honest...

Wrecking the ship and having mass destruction in every movie basically... loses its appeal at a certain point. Once was dramatic, two or three times is just excessive. And to a large extent the new movies are taking advantage of the enormous mass of worldbuilding done by the Star Trek TV series, only to tear it all down because they don't have time to build anything new due to the desire to have short films that are full of destruction.

What bothers me about this is that Star Trek isn't supposed to be an action movie. The whole point is that the heroes solve their problems through means other than violence most of the time. They seem to have forgotten this with the remake films.

Frankly I think the problem is that Star Trek works better as a TV series than as a film series, because the budget constraints in TV work in favor of rather than against this message.

You're being somewhat one-sided in how you describe classic Trek:

Balance of Terror.
The Doomsday Machine.
The entire Dominion War.

Just to take some of the most obvious examples.

Note that I picked examples that were not from the films, which have always tended to have a high action quotient.

The fact that this is true while still having the heroes defeat them through violence is problematic. What happened to being smarter?

Although I prefer non-violent solutions, I must note that use of violence does not preclude out-thinking your opponent. Kirk outthought as well as outfought his foe in both Balance of Terror and Wrath of Kahn, to take two obvious examples.

[Batman]

The only Trek movies with a nonviolent solution were TMP and TVH. All the others involved violence, though most included using smarts to make the violence more effective.

[Simon_Jester]

Thing is, I honestly am not so sure this is true, that "you can't do cerebral," that there has to be mass destruction all the time.

I mean, Star Trek succeeded for decades on that format and the TV series all still have serious fans despite having aired one, two, or even five decades ago. That's a broad enough base of support that I don't see any reason that this winning formula should have ceased to work. The modern era isn't actually more violent than, say, the 60s (with Vietnam and race riots and basically everyone over thirty-five remembering people who never came home from World War Two).

The only problem I perceive is that people crave spectacle on the big screen, and no one seems to have a firm grip on how to do spectacle without violence. Which is a pity, in that it wastes a lot of the potential of CGI and such technology.

I mean, we've seen with Avatar how CGI can be used to create wonderfully immersive alien environments. And looking at a plot like Avatar, there really didn't need to be a massive climactic battle. It would still have been a good movie with less death and fewer crashing dragons and gunships, with a more tense and personal ending in which more of the antagonists (and protagonists) get away alive.

It would still have been a magnificent film.

There's no reason you can't do something like that, and Star Trek is literally the ideal franchise for it, because it's all about strange new worlds and exploration.

I'm not saying that they have to make it a totally pacifist story, mind you. But there's a huge difference between telling a story of exploration (with violence) and telling a story of violence (that is committed while exploring).

[Guardsman Bass]

That was a good movie. I thought it dragged in parts, but overall it was really good.

Aside from some pacing issues, I think Krall was the only weak point in that film. To me, he didn't feel like a concrete villain so much as a plot device who does whatever the film needs him to do when it needs villainous behavior. Khan felt more like villain with motivations in Into Darkness.

[amigocabal]

More thougths on Krall.
Spoiler

-He spent a about a decade in the United Earth MACO, fighting against the xindi during Season 3 of enterprise and then during the Earth-Romulan War, becoming a highly decorated war hero. He was likely proud of being a MACO, and was under the impression that the Federation would be an instrument of human power, and the United Earth MACO would be the premier ground force for the Federation, ensuring human dominance over a quarter of the galaxy. The United Earth instead decided to disband MACO. It must have been an insult to him, and to those soldiers he knew who were killed either by the Xindi or the Romulans.

- What happened to Prime timeline Krall? Did Prime Kirk deal with him more or less the same as in Star Trek Beyond? Was Yorktown Base either built somewhere else, or not at all, meaning that Krall never found the weapon before he died? Or maybe even his life in the 22nd century was different from the film series version of Krall, due to some Temporal Prime directive violations by Prime Kirk (which either happened differently or not at all in the timeline of the film series)?

[FedRebel]

With all of that, it would appear the movies are attempting to portray that the Enterprise series elements happened.
Since I really do not like the Enterprise series - This is not appealing.

ENT has always been reboot canon, the Kelvin Incident took place after Archer mucked around.

[ray245]

This is the first Trek film that actually made me care about the crew as a whole.

[Skylon]

I enjoyed it a lot - probably the best of the Kelvin-verse films. Idris Elba was a bit under-utilized in my book, but the Enterprise crew really all had moments to shine. They felt like a unit that reminded me of the best TOS movies. I did feel a bit off-putting to see the Enterprise wrecked - again - especially in the context of the reboot universe (it doesn't even get to finish its first five year mission - why the heck does it get to even become a "legacy" ship with the "A" painted on it?) That said, I loved how we saw the crew (and implicitly, the ship itself) do everything to save it as it was methodically torn apart. It was rather meta to see all the snide comments over years of internet debate just happen on screen.

Also, I've just come to terms with the fact that Star Trek, in film-form, works best as an action franchise. TMP tried to be more and it bored us to tears. The Voyage Home was more of adventure-comedy, which worked because it was different than the first three films, but it can't become the go-to. The "thinking person's" Trek I'm resigned to being on TV. I'm okay with action for the films.

[Admiral Drason]

I think this is the best of the Kelvinverse movies. I rather liked the characterizations of the crew compared to the previous installments. I also thought the inside jokes were pretty brilliant. We even got one about sneezing on the warp core. The only thing that bugs me is that they killed the Enterprise but it didn't really effect Kirk in the same way it did in TSFS. I guess we can dismiss it for Kirk not being in command of this Enterprise as long as Prime Kirk was.

[DarthPooky]

I enjoyed the film and its the best of the new Kelvin universe movies. I think it showed how you can have a star trek movie with lots of action and a thought provoking and sophisticated story. the one pet pev I have is when Scotty said star fleet is not a military organisation witch as we all know is absurd. I was hoping it would be a little more self aware in that regard but that point is rather miner and is still a great film.

[DarthPooky]

oh crap I got the threads mixed up

[DarthPooky]

Ok lets try again in the right thread.

I enjoyed the film and its the best of the new Kelvin universe movies. I think it showed how you can have a star trek movie with lots of action and a thought provoking and sophisticated story. the one pet pev I have is when Scotty said star fleet is not a military organisation witch as we all know is absurd. I was hoping it would be a little more self aware in that regard but that point is rather miner and is still a great film.

[Mange]

the one pet pev I have is when Scotty said star fleet is not a military organisation

Well, it's implied two times in Star Trek: Into Darkness that Starfleet isn't a military organization: Once by Scotty when he refuses to load the new torpedoes and once by Khan when he explains Admiral Marcus's vision (a militarized Starfleet).

[amigocabal]

the one pet pev I have is when Scotty said star fleet is not a military organisation

Well, it's implied two times in Star Trek: Into Darkness that Starfleet isn't a military organization: Once by Scotty when he refuses to load the new torpedoes and once by Khan when he explains Admiral Marcus's vision (a militarized Starfleet).

So basically, it is like an aerospace version of the U.S. Coast Guard or the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

(I am wondering why United Earth disbanded the MACO'S. Maybe the Federation decided to rely on Vulcans for ground troops.)

[SpottedKitty]

the one pet pev I have is when Scotty said star fleet is not a military organisation witch as we all know is absurd.

They've got "nize hats" you could land a militarised shuttlecraft on — they've got to be a military organisation.

[Mange]

the one pet pev I have is when Scotty said star fleet is not a military organisation

Well, it's implied two times in Star Trek: Into Darkness that Starfleet isn't a military organization: Once by Scotty when he refuses to load the new torpedoes and once by Khan when he explains Admiral Marcus's vision (a militarized Starfleet).

So basically, it is like an aerospace version of the U.S. Coast Guard or the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

To expand a little: According to the TOS Writer's Guide, the Enterprise is 'semi-military in practice' without the "categories" of officers and enlisted and no saluting. Apparently, according to the TNG Writer's Guide, it's stated directly that 'Starfleet is not a military organization' but a 'scientific research and diplomatic body'.

What we see in practice though is that Starfleet does have a military structure and conducts military operations.

[ray245]

To expand a little: According to the TOS Writer's Guide, the Enterprise is 'semi-military in practice' without the "categories" of officers and enlisted and no saluting. Apparently, according to the TNG Writer's Guide, it's stated directly that 'Starfleet is not a military organization' but a 'scientific research and diplomatic body'.

What we see in practice though is that Starfleet does have a military structure and conducts military operations.

It's an organisation that could be militarised, in times of war. Given that Starfleet managed to win a number of wars by adopting this approach, and any of their scientific vessels is armed to the teeth and capable of going up against any other warships in the region.

It's probably a useful approach to reduce the influence of those who wish the federation to be more aggressive. Harder to conduct a war of aggression when your fleet is only militarised after the enemy declared war.

[NecronLord]

Well, it's implied two times in Star Trek: Into Darkness that Starfleet isn't a military organization: Once by Scotty when he refuses to load the new torpedoes and once by Khan when he explains Admiral Marcus's vision (a militarized Starfleet).

So basically, it is like an aerospace version of the U.S. Coast Guard or the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

To expand a little: According to the TOS Writer's Guide, the Enterprise is 'semi-military in practice' without the "categories" of officers and enlisted and no saluting. Apparently, according to the TNG Writer's Guide, it's stated directly that 'Starfleet is not a military organization' but a 'scientific research and diplomatic body'.

What we see in practice though is that Starfleet does have a military structure and conducts military operations.

Or you know. It's like the JSDF.

Like so.

Something that looks-like-a-navy that is deliberately said not to be for diplomatic reasons happens in real life. Almost certainly as you read this somewhere in the world a Number-One-Person is saluting a Number Three Company Person on board a Defensive Escort Vessel. Get over it.