The end of JJTrek, finally?

Not that I want to derail further, but The Black Hole was rated PG.

I was going to say...had to be PG. PG-13 didn't exist and my parents took us to see it when it opened along with my younger brother and sister. They barely let me got to R movies when i was 16, let alone 10.
 
I think i am a lucky man. I can enjoy jj trek movies. I also quite like st nemesis. As authist i might should hate them since the storylines mess eachother up. I learned to ignore things like that, made me to mad in me head.

I do hate political correctness with a pashion though.

Excample thought might be far catched. I didnt mind the new BSG, but i hated the fact starbuck was a woman.
 
I think i am a lucky man. I can enjoy jj trek movies. I also quite like st nemesis. As authist i might should hate them since the storylines mess eachother up. I learned to ignore things like that, made me to mad in me head.

Never mind each other, the storylines don't make sense in themselves. So Picard was cloned by the Romulans while they were still in seclusion, and he was the lowly, unremarked Captain of the Stargazer? And so on from there, one thing after another that doesn't make sense, or work within what's already been established. One has to ignore so much of the films from Generations on that it's insulting to the audience. Internal consistency shouldn't be optional, but the bare minimum for a functional story.

I do hate political correctness with a pashion though.

Excample thought might be far catched. I didnt mind the new BSG, but i hated the fact starbuck was a woman.

See, now, that I don't have a problem with. Of all the things wrong with that show, moving gender-equity up from the 1970s wasn't a bad move...

...Calling it Battlestar Galactica, now... ;)
 
Never mind each other, the storylines don't make sense in themselves. So Picard was cloned by the Romulans while they were still in seclusion, and he was the lowly, unremarked Captain of the Stargazer?

To be fair, there is a plausible in-universe/canon explanation for the Romulans wanting to keep tabs on Picard even prior to him being captain of the Enterprise... Tasha Yar.

From her (or more likely her daughter) the Romulan High Command would be aware that at least in some alternate timeline/future, a Starfleet officer named Picard would come to be captain of the Federation flag ship.
 
Back to the topic at hand, to further explain my position that Trek works better as a TV show, I recently read an article in the New Yorker about the film industry, its priorities, and how those have shifted over time. Blockbusters are basically how Hollywood funds itself anymore. And blockbusters require certain boxes being checked. Stuff like big explosions, flashy F/X, and wall-to-wall action. Movie audiences expect a large-scale sci-fi film to be a blockbuster, and Trek is no exception.

The thing is, it's actually really hard to make a blockbuster that's also a good story. I don't mean that it's hard to make an entertaining blockbuster. I mean, it can be, but it's easier than making a good story that's also a blockbuster. That's largely because the things you need to do to create a blockbuster are at least always in tension with the things you need to do to tell a good story. Character development, pauses in the action to allow for build-up, exposition, etc. all of that is necessary for a good story, but is at odds with the stuff you do in your average blockbuster which is more about wowing an audience through spectacle.

Trek, at its core, is about more than just ships with saucer-sections and warp nacelles, technobabble, and primary-colored uniforms. It's about interesting stories. It's old-school sci-fi that asks you to contemplate an idea through the filter of a fantastical future, and to actually care about what's happening. Over time, it became about the characters, too, but I think that's largely a result of the longer-running TV shows than it is about the films. More on that in a minute.

Basically, a blockbuster isn't interested in that stuff. Or at least, it's far less concerned with exploring the interesting ideas and characters, and far more interested in exploring the whiz-bang effects. You do get rare successes that stand alone, of course, but part of why Marvel's "shared universe" concept has (in my opinion) worked is because it functions almost like a TV show. By virtue of introducing characters in other films before they appear in their own, or by seeding ideas and continuing characters across multiple films, you get to know them all and begin to care about them more. Marvel seems to also understand that caring about the characters (which requires you to actually develop them instead of using stock characters) makes you invested in the events that happen to them, which in turn makes you care about the whiz-bang effects beyond just "Wow! That looked cool!" When XYZ character is disintegrated by Thanos, you care because you've gotten to know them over the span of many films.

But most franchises can't do that because they don't have an infinite supply of interconnected properties from which to draw. That includes Trek. The strength of the Trek movies was always that they were piggybacking on the TV shows. You knew the characters already from the shows. You cared about what happened to them as a result of that. Try to imagine walking into a theater cold and watching TMP. *****, that would be a terrible experience. But because you know these characters already, it allows you to invest in their actions more, and care about the results. I don't really care when Ilea and Lieutenant Blonde Guy get taken away by V'Ger. I care when Spock comes back to the Enterprise, though. I'm willing to sit through the slower pace of the film because I already care about the characters.

The other tension between Trek and blockbusters is a question of scale. Blockbusters generally require that events be suitably "big" or at least packed full of "big" effects even if the story isn't necessarily a matter of galactic life or death. But consider a story like that of Insurrection or even TMP. I've always maintained that those two movies felt more like two-part episodes of their respective shows, just with bigger budgets and fewer network constraints. They didn't feel...hmm...worthy of being on the big screen, though. It's not as if you needed a cinematic budget to tell those stories; they'd have worked just as well -- maybe better -- as two-part TV episodes. Wrath of Khan, on the other hand (the gold standard for Trek films) needs a cinematic budget. But not every Trek film can or should be Wrath of Khan. The other part of Wrath of Khan that worked was that you cared about the characters. Spock's death matters, as does Kirk's confrontation with his own mortality, because you've seen these characters grow old. You remember them when they were younger. You know how close they are as friends.

The new Trek films...can't really do that. Mostly because they deliberately jettisoned the backstory of the old material, and didn't effectively spend time building up those connections in the new ones. Instead, they hew to broad caricatures of the old characters and justify the differences from the original source material with a timeline reboot. Their action is also big enough to need a cinematic budget, but it's ultimately hollow because you don't care about the people involved. It's still entertaining as generic space adventure stuff, but it's not really compelling and when it is, it's usually as a result of either calling back to the old material deliberately (in spite of trying to distance itself from the same material...) or it's relying on tropes and caricatures to do the heavy lifting. You care about George Kirk dying more because you recognize that it's sad to have a father sacrifice himself to save his wife and infant son, and because the music is effective at setting the mood. But that's more like "tricking" your brain into caring via association; the movie hasn't done most of the work to build up the character and make you care otherwise. It doesn't really "earn" its emotional payoff (which is a criticism I have about a lot of JJ's films, actually, TFA included).

On TV, this is far less of a problem. The longer form for storytelling lets you gradually build characters. Thus, a character who might just appear as a kind of stock character in the first two episodes is gradually fleshed out over the course of the show, to the point where you care a lot more about what happens to them than to Generic Stock Action Character in a blockbuster. In addition, the smaller scale of TV allows you to tackle smaller-scale stories that (A) can be just as interesting -- in some cases even more interesting -- than the kind of big-scale stories you're likely to see in a blockbuster, (B) can let you really explore a concept in depth instead of having to gloss over it, and (C) allow for more character moments in ways you wouldn't normally have in a film. For all of these reasons, I just think Trek works better at being Trek when it's not trying to do double-duty as a Trek blockbuster, and when it isn't trying to manufacture "high stakes" stories when it should be focused on smaller stuff as well.
 
I just hated everything about the show. :)

So did I, if I thought of it as BSG. It wasn't bad at all as something unrelated, so I tried to view it that way. But I'm too attached to ST to do that with Jar Jar Drek/STD etc. And even if I could it wouldn't help the crap stories any.
 
So did I, if I thought of it as BSG. It wasn't bad at all as something unrelated, so I tried to view it that way. But I'm too attached to ST to do that with Jar Jar Drek/STD etc. And even if I could it wouldn't help the crap stories any.

No, it was just bad. And I don't care what they slap the Star Trek label on these days, as far as I'm concerned, Star Trek ended, at least on TV, in 1969 and Star Wars ended in 1983. Everything done since is just bad fanfic. I'm not concerned about it, it's only good for pointing at and laughing.
 
Are you perhaps confusing the original Battlestar Galactica -- which creator Glen A. Larson literally described as "A wagon train in space" -- with Star Trek TOS? Because TOS has squat to do with wagon trains, spacebound or otherwise.

I'm not a hardcore Trekkie, but I know enough to recognize that your description of the old series has sod all to do with reality.

I get what you're saying; the old stuff is always loved by someone who hates the next new thing, and then someone who loves the new thing will hate the newer thing after that and blah blah blah. But your description of the original series is just...nothing to do with the actual show.
Find and read the original pitch document that Roddenberry wrote. It’s online as a scanned PDF somewhere.

You’re in for a surprise. ;)
 
The biggest problem with ALL of the aftermarket Trek productions was they tried to also be hip to the era in which they were made. ESPECIALLY the TV shows. TNG is unwatchable for the 1990's fashions, current events etc. DS9 - same. Voyager, more of the same. Enterprise - BARF!! Tired of fixing everything with a tachion field, or time travel. Thats why I switched to Babylon 5. Nobody is quite who they appear to be.
 
The biggest problem with ALL of the aftermarket Trek productions was they tried to also be hip to the era in which they were made. ESPECIALLY the TV shows. TNG is unwatchable for the 1990's fashions, current events etc. DS9 - same. Voyager, more of the same. Enterprise - BARF!! Tired of fixing everything with a tachion field, or time travel. Thats why I switched to Babylon 5. Nobody is quite who they appear to be.

I really dissagree with you. Yeah, you can tell the time period a TV show was made by the style, but you can same the same thing about ANY show, past or present. So what?

Really, you've actually made the point that many of us espouse; if you think a show is just about superficial sh-t like fashions, hairstyles and special effects....then you don't get the actual points being made about Trek....that it WASN'T about that crap. It was about something that was much more interesting about the human condition and how we interact with technology, scientific discoveries and other beings. That is something JJTrek lovers just don't get. It's sad and dissappointing that they can't see past the showmanship aspect of storytelling.
 
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It WAS included, and they did not have the discipline to keep the story as more important that the hip. later Trek was never just about story, but the hip to attract the less interested.
 
:lol. Nonsense! :lol

Bab-5’s CGI is so dated it looks like it was made with a souped up etch a sketch!

All shows are reflective of the time they were Produced.

It is the nature of the beast


The biggest problem with ALL of the aftermarket Trek productions was they tried to also be hip to the era in which they were made. ESPECIALLY the TV shows. TNG is unwatchable for the 1990's fashions, current events etc. DS9 - same. Voyager, more of the same. Enterprise - BARF!! Tired of fixing everything with a tachion field, or time travel. Thats why I switched to Babylon 5. Nobody is quite who they appear to be.
 
Even if you despise ST 2009, it's really not fair to put that all on JJ. Paramount wanted JJ to do ST, even despite his initial reluctance, because of Paramount's mandate to change ST. Believe it or not, that decision wasn't simply about about pandering to the masses. It's actually more complicated than that.

(Sorry to folks who already know this part)
Prior to 2005 CBS and Paramount were a part of the conglomerate, Viacom. In December 2005 Viacom split where CBS Corporation became separate from Paramount which was now a part of "new" Viacom. While Paramount retained ownership of all the Star Trek films up to Nemesis, CBS Corporation retained rights for new films as well as the series. Paramount was able to strike a deal with CBS where an alternate copyright could be issued to Paramount to make films provided they were set in an alternate timeline - the stipulation from CBS was that they needed to be visually and tonally dissimilar from earlier Star Trek presumably so as not to create conflict and confusion should CBS decide to do something with the original timelines.

ST 2009 was thematically altered by grand design.

It's not about JJ going rogue with his misplaced interpretation of ST. The change in the look and feel of ST was by design and a decision made at a higher level than the director. If they hadn't hired JJ then it would have been someone else also instructed to make an action blockbuster-type series of movies. On the whole, given the constraints, ST 2009 turned out pretty good, IMO.
 
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^^This also ties into what I'd stated elsewhere: that if we do indeed get a new series with Picard, nevertheless we will still have to deal with the split IP rights issue, and it's likely not going to be the Trek that many want because of that.
 
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