Axlotl
Master Member
1. I really do NOT think it's suited to feature films.
I think it could be, but Hollywood assumes we're all drooling idiots, and if it's not a "Save The World!" summer blockbuster, we won't go to the movies.
1. I really do NOT think it's suited to feature films.
That was how Roddenberry pitched it to the networks -- "Wagon Train to the stars" -- and it's still handy shorthand. Western were all the rage with the networks in the early '60s, and Wagon Train (the show, not the real-world settlement tactic) was the closest parallel he could draw for them. The most effective way, then and now, to get a network to go for the new thing one is hoping to have picked up is to liken it to something else successful already on the air. "Like _____, but _____."Dan, Roddenberry did indeed call Trek a wagon train to the stairs
I still remain stunned, that all that cool Sci Fi, that makes you think in a different way for a little bit but STILL enjoying all the drama and entertaining stuff, is just clearly a nuisance to them apparently. Was it all just saucer sections, vector insignias, pointed ears and zap zap bang to them? :angry
I believe it was Chris Pine who, during the release of Beyond, said that you can’t make a cerebral Star Trek nowadays as it just wouldn’t work in today’s marketplace. This despite the fact that Interstellar made almost 700 million two years before.
Ok I'll say it. I thoroughly enjoy the new JJ Trek, I never could get into the old with the exception of TWOK.
Pine embodies a young Kirk perfectly IMO. Impossible to replace. The studio will fork out the cash to make it happen.
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.
Here is an article detailing Roddenberry's original vision.
https://www.newsweek.com/wagon-train-stars-410030
In it, the phrase is mentioned as Star Trek's original high concept:
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...and regarding the "empty calories" of the new films...I enjoyed the new JJTrek movies as well. While I have seen ALL of Star Trek...and definitely have my favourite things among the classics, nevertheless i quite like the new ones as well.
According to whom?
I enjoyed the new JJTrek movies as well. While I have seen ALL of Star Trek...and definitely have my favourite things among the classics, nevertheless i quite like the new ones as well.
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According to whom?
Hemsworth was in the first jar jar abrams one in 2009 for like 5 minutes. Cheesy acting and just embarrasing all round.
If they want to bring anyone back from that movie, it should be Captain Robau, at least he was believable as a captain unlike Hemsworth.
If i was paramount, i would recast. I mean, both of these actors, Pine and hemsworth are hardly box office A listers, the only movies they are in that make money are the generic disney blockbusters or other similar stuff.
They don't have the charisma or star power of say a Tom Cruise to warrant such high salaries.
Was it not obvious?
...and regarding the "empty calories" of the new films...
TOS -- except for a couple episodes -- didn't require you turn your brain off to enjoy them. Even "Spock's Brain" isn't that bad. The ones that stand out the most for me as "skippable" from TOS are "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", only because of the uninspired costumes and obvious facepaint of the aliens -- the message was good; "Day of the Dove", only because the writer of the episode had no idea what was where on the Enterprise -- Main Engineering is in the secondary hull, but everyone was supposed to be sealed in the saucer; and "The Way to Eden"... the Space Hippy episode... That one does bug me. The Federation -- and especially the core worlds -- of Star Trek have eliminated hunger and want. Anyone who wants to can make something of themselves, and those who don't aren't stigmatized for not (but most people do). I can't say more without invoking politics. And there's always the "opt-out", for those who want to try it the old-fashioned way, out on the frontier, braving the unknown, proving that they can*. So why the heck were Doc Severin and his followers trying to find someplace better than the pretty limitless options open to them?
[*Gene himself mused that Starfleet was a great mechanism for isolating the more "primitive" types in the otherwise utopian society who would chafe under such lack of challenge, and putting them to useful purpose -- both keeping them happy and keeping them from causing problems on the ground.]
The first two of those I still watch, even if I more listen to than watch "Battlefield". "Eden" I just can't stand. It hurts. In a way no other third-season episode does.
Next Generation started out a bit clunky, but by the end of the first season and through the second, that was some of the best Star Trek I've seen. Third season on, after Maurice Hurley left, it got dull. I'll still watch them if they're playing, but they don't really grip me the way season 2 does. They got better uniforms and higher production values, and there are good scripts in there, well-acted, but... *shrug* It's missing something for me. All the way through to the end of DS9's season 2. Then that show started dealing with hard concepts again, and I adore it.
Voyager and Enterprise were flawed from original premise and, while they have good stories, they still require the viewer to not think too hard. With ever more options one can pursue in life, the notion by the time of Voyager that anyone would get into Starfleet without really wanting to doesn't work. I'm not talking about B'Elanna or Wesley, who quit while at the Academy, only to come back after they'd grown up a bit. I'm not talking about Chakotay, who chose his family and home over his Starfleet oath. I'm not talking about the Maquis, who never signed on for the mission, but weren't given much in the way of options. I'm talking about the Starfleet crew who whinged about being out where no one had ever been before. The first couple seasons being "Gilligan's Island" in space, where the newest shortcut home ended up not working, got old fast. And even though DS9 (and Babylon 5 before that, and a dozen other shows all the way back to the '70s and further) had proved audiences will follow longform stories and that you don't need to preserve the status quo from episode to episode, things remained far too static on that ship over its run. And Enterprise was just schizophrenic about what era it was in. But I've argued that point before.
Even the movies weren't mindless entertainment. TMP (and here I mean the Director's Cut, after Bob Wise got to go back and properly finish what had pretty much been released as a rough cut due to being waaaaay over-schedule and having the studio committed to an opening day etched in stone and delivered from on high) was pure Star Trek, with a couple minor missteps (the uniforms, Gene forgetting the Lt., j.g., and Commodore ranks existed, the uniforms, the protocol of a flag officer in command of the mission while the Captain retains command of the ship, the uniforms...). I take Star Trek II and III together with an intermission, as "The Genesis Incident", doing my best to pretend Robin Curtis is Kirstie Alley. The two together are a terrific story, also not mindless. TVH is a time-travel story, which I hate, since no one ever does it right, but it's a good one, for all that. TFF had studio problems that saw its budget cut, then cut again, then cut again, so the entire last act was done on hope and a shoestring compared to what Shatner originally scripted. I feel it has some of the best character moments out of the films, and the story is, again, pure Star Trek -- actually lifted from the first draft of what would eventually become TMP. TUC was a good first draft, but needed someone looking over Nick's shoulder during the writing and set design to nudge him in the right direction. And I love the first act of Generations -- especially helped by the novelization and the subsequent book "The Captain's Daughter" (focusing on Hikaru and Demora Sulu, with strong presences from the Excelsior and Enterprise-B).
From the first teaser for Trek09, I was hopeful but worried. If they were building the TOS Enterprise, some of the details were off. And... were they building it in shirtsleeves? Okay, the saucer was built on the ground, in graving docks in San Francisco, then boosted up to be mated to the stardrive section that had been assembled in the synchronously-orbiting dockyards. The finished ship wasn't meant to enter atmophere or land except in emergencies (that would likely render the spaceframe unusable after). But those were the warp engines seen peeking up from behind the saucer. Maybe it's in a space station...?
But then we saw. No, it was being built on the ground, in its entirety. A ship the size of the Enterprise-D. Under full Earth gravity. And in Riverside, Iowa, no less. For no reason anyone can determine apart from getting it on ne'er-do-well Jim Kirk's radar. Then we see the guy who was originally conceived of and shown as Horatio Hornblower in space, the perfect Starfleet officer, driven and competant and dedicated to his calling... blowing off his studies, cheating, sleeping around, getting put on academic probation, stowing away, being put off the ship, and then because he saved the day, this Starfleet cadet on suspension was rewarded by being promoted directly to Captain and given the newest and best ship in the 'fleet... instead of working his way up to it in his 30s, through years of hard work and no dates.
Never mind the worse-than-bad science. A supernova that will destry the entire galaxy? Really? And whose blastwave propagates faster than light? A pea of this "Red Matter" will snuff so massive a sun, so why does the Vulcan Science Academy have a huge beach ball of the stuff that they send out in this ship? If it'll snuff out a supermassive sun if thrown at it, why does Nero need to drill down to a tiny little planet's core to drop it? And if he's at synchronous orbital altitude, how will dropping the mining laser a mile or so closer to the planet help? And what happened to the Romulans' bumpy foreheads between Nemesis and whenever Spock left? Considering we never found out how they got them in the half-century between TUC and TNG...
And that isn't even getting into the warp beaming, interstellar beaming, complete could-not-be-more-wrong misunderstanding of what "cold fusion" means, and so on and so on... Story implausibilities, ignoring canon (I mean universal things, like Vulcan having no moon, but an equally hot but smaller trojan planet, and Delta Vega being on the edge of Federation space -- those don't change just because of altered timeline), and so on. No, it's not an objective metric of "badness", but within a certain standard of what Star Trek should be, those three movies fail more than they succeed. Plus JJ's damn Mystery Box again. We shoudln't have to read the tie-in comics to know those are ritual Romulan mourning glyphs, and Nero and his crew tattooed them on, as an indicator their grieving will be unending; that they augmented their mining ship with Borg weapons to go after Spock; that they realized they'd overshot and Nero calculated when and where Spock would be coming through, and made sure he was there; that Admiral Marcus surgically altered Khan's appearance so no one would recognize him; etc.
It would be ironic if JJ Kirk fans got upset at JJ Kirk being recast.