Star Trek: No Subtitle

[Zeke]

It's finally arrived. I'm not really an opening night guy, so I'm gonna see it on Tuesday (tickets are cheaper). But despite my overall lack of enthusiasm for the project, I look forward to seeing it. I don't think going back to TOS and recasting it was necessary, and I'm still bitter about ENT being cancelled, but that doesn't mean I won't give the new movie a chance.

I'm betting several of you guys did go on opening night. What did you think?

(Please put anything spoilery in spoiler tags. If you're not sure if something's spoilery, it is.)

[Nate the Great]

Well, in reading and watching reviews from various sources, including the Angry Video Game Nerd, I get the impression that it's okay as long as you're not a rabid Trekkie. And of course I am, so of course I hate the very idea. I'll probably wait for a movie rental, or watch it for free on campus.

And I will always call it Star Trek 11. No matter how much Paramount hates the idea, they really don't have a leg to stand on. "Star Trek" is the name of a franchise, not any one film or series anymore.

Oh, and I recommend Confused Matthew's video review of the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsdmB...e=channel_page

Also his written review of the movie: http://www.confusedmatthew.com/Star-Trek.php

[Sa'ar Chasm]

And I will always call it Star Trek 11

It's nae use, Cap'n, I cannae reach the controls!

[Derek]

I went. I saw. I conquered?

Yes, this is like watching the LotR movies. So much of it is "but no, that's not right, because in the original it was like this" that I can't quite enjoy it. Not that I think bad of it, but I need to see it again now that I know what to expect. Then I will be able to fully enjoy it.

Zeke, there's a good ENT reference in the new movie. It's a Porthos joke. Not quite chili-level, but close.

I'd offer a spoiler comment, but [spoiler] doesn't seem to work and I don't feel like trying to find another way.

[Chancellor Valium]

Originally Posted by Sa'ar Chasm

It's nae use, Cap'n, I cannae reach the controls!

The ship is... cold... and drafty. I complain, but... nobody listens.

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by Derek

I'd offer a spoiler comment, but [spoiler] doesn't seem to work and I don't feel like trying to find another way.

I'll be damned -- spoiler tags aren't native in vBulletin. I've found a mod and set it up.

Spoiler: Let's see if it works... 

Yep.

[ijdgaf]

The acting impressed me, the plot did not.

[Derek]

Yeah, gotta say, the guy who did McCoy was awesome. Good accent, good everything. I especially liked his response to Kirk's "who does this guy think he is?" (about Spock), which was "I don't know. But I think I like him."

The movie was rather Star Wars-esque, from the floating drills to the bottomless ships to the ice planets with weird creatures. There's even a self-extending sword. It was probably a better Star Wars movie than the last two actual ones. Oh wait, the villain's ship looked like a Shadow vessel from B5. So I guess we borrow from everyone.

[ijdgaf]

By far the most Star Warsish thing in the movie was the Don't click or hover over this link if you want to avoid spoilers thing. And that's the part that pissed me off the most. Way to frak everything up, JJ.

That, and while they did invoke that famous narration at the end, it didn't match the tone of the new movie at all. You make a brainless action flick and you stick an optimistic exploration of the cosmos message at the end? I call bullshit.

[Nate the Great]

How do we do spoiler tags anyway? I can't find it in the FAQs.

[Zeke]

Click on the "BB Code" link at the bottom. You'll find a new one that I've added. It's not my favourite style of spoiler tag, but it'll do till I can improve it.

[Nate the Great]

Spoiler: Don't click unless you really mean it. 

1. I have yet to watch, but I have read/watched ConfusedMatthew, The Spoony One, and a few others. I respect these guys and take their opinions seriously.
2. So Nero going back in time has created an alternate timeline. PNQs...
2a. Why is an alternate timeline necessary? I have two theories: The creators assume that the people are so indoctrinated in Star Trek=Kirk and Spock that having Kirk automatically equals more viewers, and if they attempted Kirk and Spock in the regular universe and made the slightest mistake, hordes of fans would swoop down on them (correct assumption) and nitpick to death.
2b. Why couldn't they have advertised FROM THE START that this was basically Star Trek's version of Ultimate Marvel? I have no problem with Ultimate Marvel because they don't pretend to be Marvel 616. Likewise, had they said FROM THE START, years ago, that they were going to split off an alternate timeline, there would've been a lot less bashing. But no, they said over and over that they were gonna be loyal to canon. But the first thing Nero does upon arrival is kill Kirk's dad? Suuuurrrrrrreeeee, THAT'S loyal to canon.
3. Vulcan is now gone? This is somehow okay? We're going to continue a timeline where Vulcan no longer exists?
4. The Magnificent Seven are NOT the same age! In the first season of TOS, Kirk is 35, Spock is 37, and McCoy is 39. Sulu and Uhura are late twenties, Chekov is early twenties. Rewind everybody ten years and they would have no reason to be in the same place at the same time.
5. You do NOT redesign the Enterprise! Whatever that ship in the movie is, it is not Constitution-class. And we are supposed to believe that this is the NCC-1701 (no bloody A, B, C, or D). I know the NCC-1701, the NCC-1701 is a good friend of mine, and you are not the NCC-1701. And don't say that the altered timeline altered the ship. The Enterprise existed in it's original form for almost twenty years before Kirk took command. A five-year mission with April, and two missions with Pike, with internal refits in between.

[KillerGodMan]

Spoiler: Nate, Nate, Nate... *sigh*. 

1. Don't base anything on the reviews of others
2. grah
2a. That' actually probably why they did the alternate timeline thing, this movie is basically a reboot
2b. The DID advertise from the start that it was going to be an alternate timeline! The first tagline was "this isn't your parent's Star Trek"
3. ALTERNATE. TIMELINE!
4. Watch the movie. Kirk's in his mid 20's when he joins, and near 30s by the time he's on the Enterprise. Spock is much older, and a teacher at the Academy, Uhura and Sulu are mid 20s, McCoy is in his late 30s, and Chekov is 17, Not too sure about Scotty, but the movie says he's been in Starfleet for awhile.
5. It IS SO a Constitution Class! Sure, it looks newer, but it's escentially a CGI version of THE ORIGINAL FREAKING MODEL!

[Nate the Great]

Don't base "anything" on the opinions of others? Awfully drastic, wouldn't you say? So I have to touch a hot stove with my own hands to learn that it hurts? So I have to run with scissors to learn that it's a bad idea? Sheesh.

Yes, don't base everything on the opinions of everybody. But base some things on those whose opinions you respect. And I respect Matthew, Spoony, SF Debris, and all of their colleagues.

I didn't mean we're supposed to be okay with a destroyed Vulcan in terms of disrupting canon. New timeline, new rules. I meant we're supposed to be FURIOUS that they BLEW UP VULCAN! I'm angry on a personal level, not a logical level. Now Tuvok will never be born under the same circumstances. Saavik may never be rescued from the Romulans. On and on...

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Nate, you're giving us obsessive, nitpicky, unpleasable fans a bad name.

Also, ALTERNATE TIMELINE, Earth 2, Ultimate Marvel, What-If world, out-of-canon romp. Just chill out and watch the damn thing first.

(I know it's weird that I of all people should be saying that, but I watched a whole three episodes of Enterprise before I decided it was crap).

I agree with Derek about the guy playing McCoy. I could almost hear De Kelly at times. I also liked all the little references and in-jokes (figures) they threw in.

Spoiler: spoilage may occur without refrigeration 

Spock's ship hurt my head, though. It looks really hard to steer whirling about like that. Still, if a Vulcan is flying it. It's also hard to take seriously a world-destroying MacGuffin that looks like a huge ball of Edam cheese. Also also, would Vulcan children really be taking their lessons in English, using Leibniz notation and IUPAC chemical symbols? I note that they're not learning stereochemistry.

Apart from those nitpicks, I was quite impressed with it. Scotty sounded more like Dr. Beckett, but that's OK.

[Nate the Great]

I just now read about the circumstances of James' birth. Freaky to say the least. Yet another thing dissuading me from watching the movie. Was that really necessary?

[Nate the Great]

http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/blog/14313

Here we go again. An analysis of Star Trek 11.

Is this stuff true? Do the nacelles create exhaust? Do they really rotate the barrel of the phasers? Did they change the photon torpedo sound?

Why change this stuff? Did these changes really make the material more accessible to a wider audience? Really?

[Wowbagger]

(1) No, I'm pretty sure that was an optical illusion created by lens flare. Definitely intended to create that impression (because it was a cool impression) but very deliberately not violating canon -- and going to some lengths to do that.

(2) Umm... why should we care about the rotation of phaser barrels? IIRC, we never saw the phaser emitters on the TOS model.

(3) Yes, but not significantly. It was basically uppitched and time-compressed -- clearly based on the original, much more closely than TNG torps were based on TOS ones.

Regarding canon... I still don't see how the destruction of Vulcan in 2258 violates TOS canon. At least, not anymore than the destruction of Qo'nos's entire biosphere in 2293 violates TNG+ canon. They relocated and rebuilt on a new world with the same name. Not really all that difficult.

Actually, I've thought about it long and hard, and I don't see how any of the events in this movie violated canon. I don't see the need to posit an alternate timeline. This could easily co-exist with the original 'verse with a minimum of imagination and traditional strict constructionist interpretations of existing canon.

EDIT: Heck, long as I'm at it, let's go through all of Nate's objections, now that spoiler season has long past. I do this not out of a personal hate for Nate, but simply because I have five minutes to kill and nothing better to do than argue canon, which is one of my favorite bits of life.

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

1. I have yet to watch, but I have read/watched ConfusedMatthew, The Spoony One, and a few others. I respect these guys and take their opinions seriously.
2. So Nero going back in time has created an alternate timeline. PNQs...
2a. Why is an alternate timeline necessary? I have two theories: The creators assume that the people are so indoctrinated in Star Trek=Kirk and Spock that having Kirk automatically equals more viewers, and if they attempted Kirk and Spock in the regular universe and made the slightest mistake, hordes of fans would swoop down on them (correct assumption) and nitpick to death.
2b. Why couldn't they have advertised FROM THE START that this was basically Star Trek's version of Ultimate Marvel? I have no problem with Ultimate Marvel because they don't pretend to be Marvel 616. Likewise, had they said FROM THE START, years ago, that they were going to split off an alternate timeline, there would've been a lot less bashing. But no, they said over and over that they were gonna be loyal to canon. But the first thing Nero does upon arrival is kill Kirk's dad? Suuuurrrrrrreeeee, THAT'S loyal to canon.
3. Vulcan is now gone? This is somehow okay? We're going to continue a timeline where Vulcan no longer exists?
4. The Magnificent Seven are NOT the same age! In the first season of TOS, Kirk is 35, Spock is 37, and McCoy is 39. Sulu and Uhura are late twenties, Chekov is early twenties. Rewind everybody ten years and they would have no reason to be in the same place at the same time.
5. You do NOT redesign the Enterprise! Whatever that ship in the movie is, it is not Constitution-class. And we are supposed to believe that this is the NCC-1701 (no bloody A, B, C, or D). I know the NCC-1701, the NCC-1701 is a good friend of mine, and you are not the NCC-1701. And don't say that the altered timeline altered the ship. The Enterprise existed in it's original form for almost twenty years before Kirk took command. A five-year mission with April, and two missions with Pike, with internal refits in between.

1. I do watch them but don't respect them very much, but to each his own. My favorite review: W. Joseph Thomas

2a. I think the box office returns on Star Trek prove that, in the popular imagination, Star Trek in fact still does = Kirk + Spock, or at most Picard + Data. On this count, they were right. Plus, great excuse to see the characters again. The reason for the alternate timeline was, indeed, to avoid nitpicking.

2b. I think you weren't reading the pre-movie discussions very closely, since Orci came out about six months before the movie arrived and said, straight-up, to the fandom: "So, we're solving the potential continuity problems using an alternate timeline. Here's my take on the Many Worlds Interpretation, which is the basis for the entire movie. Discuss. And then we did, for six months. No one (except apparently you) went into this expecting anything but an alternate timeline of some kind. As mentioned above, I question the existence of said alternate timeline, but I wasn't surprised by it.

Also, what on Earth is wrong with Kirk's dad being killed at his birth? We never heard anything about Kirk's dad in canon until this movie. For all we know, he always died aboard the Kelvin at Kirk's birth. So that's just a weird objection.

3. Yep. If you'll check your DVD's, however, you'll find that it has not been erased from them.

4. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and... well, actually, you're right about Chekov. He's too old. Kirk was always canonically born in 2233, so he's exactly the right age here. No one else's age was given in the new movie, so it can't contradict previous canon. More importantly, several of their ages were never given in previous canon (often showing up in online articles as a result of speculation by the Chronology rather than hard canon), so it would quite impossible to contradict the old canon. (And, in fact, Memory Alpha is assuming that the new timeline characters have the same D-O-B as the old timeline characters unless explicitly contradicted.) Chekov is the exception: he's 17 in new movie's 2358 and 22 in prime timeline's 2257. It's an alteration, but certainly one of the least important ones in the history of Trek. I mean, somebody's gone and contradicted "Who Mourns For Adonias?" It's not like they're changing the dates of the Eugenics Wars or the "supply problem" that was supposed to be a fundamental part of the series premise of Voyager or any crazily unacceptable thing like that.

As for them not having a reason to be together... I can't imagine why not. They're all Starfleet officers responding to a serious crisis, and all end up on the Enterprise, whether posted there or begging to get on there or kidnapped there or smuggling themselves there. The only meeting in the movie that doesn't add up is the one between Kirk and Spock Prime, which a deleted scene apparently attributed to "fate," which is a stretch at best.

5. Alright, no Enterprise redesigns. A shame. I thought the first four Star Trek movies were pretty good. Particularly TWOK. But they redesigned the Enterprise (with Gene Roddenberry's express encouragement), so to the scrap heap with them!

The alternate timeline explanation actually makes fine sense here. The timeline supposedly diverged in 2233. The Enterprise under April launched in the original timeline sometime in the mid-2240's. That means that the Enterprise construction was definitely during the affected area of timeline alteration.

Moreover, this isn't the first time a film creator changed the Enterprise's launch date -- and the last time they did it, they did it with far less excuse and for far more pointless reasons. That would be when Leonard Nimoy and Harve Bennett arbitrarily changed the launch date from the 2240's to 2265 in Star Trek III for the sole purpose of selling more 20th Anniversary merchandise.

However, I would agree that the Ryan Church redesign is ugly. I don't like it. But canon-wise and production-decision-wise, I have no objections. I wouldn't have a leg to stand on if I did.

That was fun.

[Nate the Great]

Maybe I went overboard with "alternate timeline=BAD", but I think what I really meant was "rewriting history=BAD." Had they just started out with a fresh reboot, not pretending to be the original universe at all, and both realities coexisting, I think I would've been okay with that, like Ultimate Marvel.

But they use time travel to undo everything I think of as Trek, with very few examples. And I still feel that the "We can do a better job of telling the life stories of Kirk and company than Gene Roddenberry did in the original show" sentiment of the creators is absolutely repugnant.

I wasn't referring to Vulcan's destruction being against canon. This is a new timeline, anything can happen. I meant that destroying Vulcan TICKS ME OFF! Just my personal opinion, but destroying Vulcan just seems drastic. And for what? Cheap drama? Is that all Vulcan has become in the eyes of the creators? Just another chess piece on the cosmic board to be kept or tossed aside on a whim?

[Wowbagger]

That's fairer. I had the same objection when the news first broke about the alternate timeline. It was, like, "Yeah, the old timeline is still there... but this new fork is going off into its own territory, and we might never see the Prime Universe again!" And that bummed me out, because so much time and treasure is invested in the Prime 'verse.

However, I do think you're suffering from a misconception. Nero's incursion into the past did not, according to producers, alter the original timeline. Instead, it created a completely new timeline which forked away from the original. Orci took the idea from "Parallels," the TNG episode where we saw hundreds of different Enterprises from hundreds of different timelines -- all of which forked off from one another because different people made different decisions at different points, but all of which co-existed with one another.

According to the producers of the new movie, that's what happened here -- the new timeline is a fork off of the old one, not a rewrite of the original universe. Both universes co-exist simultaneously. In fact, Paramount is relying on this: they're continuing to market new material written for the "Prime" universe, including the upcoming Star Trek Online, which is based in the Prime timeline's twenty-fifth century, about fifteen years after the destruction of Romulus.

HELPFUL INFOGRAPHIC:



This realization helped ease my pain a great deal. Everything we've seen is still there, and we can still revisit it whenever we want; the new movie did not "rewrite" one word of old canon. And the new movie went to such extraordinary lengths to pull that off, with the inclusion of Spock Prime and everything for the sole reason of making this movie fit into continuity without destroying it.

Not that I'm comfortable with everything -- I agree that the destruction of Vulcan was, in the final analysis, not treated as well as it could have been and probably should not have been done at all -- but I do think the filmmakers deserve a lot of credit for the insane amount of work they put into making the new movie tie into the old timeline without damaging it. And they should -- Orci is one of us. He's seen every episode, I believe, and he quotes the Tech Manuals, the series, and the novels with astonishing fluidity in online chats with the fans... especially when some of the fans start to argue with him. It's really quite impressive.

Final note: you'll notice that, if you go back and rewatch TOS, TAS, and everything Gene Roddenberry and the original creators ever did, you'll find that they didn't give us an origin story for the characters or the crew. Not once. Ever. So I don't think they're stepping on anyone's toes here by telling us that story. I certainly couldn't get up the bile to call it repugnant even if I hadn't loved the movie. I mean... the origin story was untold. It was fair game for a movie no matter how you sliced it, as long as you didn't break canon.

And the impressive thing is that, even in the alternate timeline, nothing from Kirk or Spock's backstory is changed. Kirk still grows up in Iowa, still goes to Tarsus, still cheats on the Maru test; Spock still takes his kahs-won early, still falls out with Sarek over the decision to go to Starfleet Academy, and still ends up as Captain Pike's X.O. for a little while. So, what was already there in the Gene Roddenberry backstory for these characters (which was, let's admit it, very sketchy anyways) has not been contradicted by the new film. I mean, wow.

So, I hear you to a degree, but I just don't think you're giving the filmmakers a fair shake here. It's a solid film. Better than TMP, TSFS, TVH, TFF, GEN, and FC, in my opinion. Worse than the others, but hey, fifth place out of eleven ain't half bad, is it?