Star Trek

[Pirate Bill]

What iSm said...except I don't want be Chris Pine's boyfriend. But I would help him out in a bar fight.

[Andrew]

Originally Posted by Alex

When GC sees it (if he hasn't) I am wondering how much the Nokia product placement (can we agree that this was truly unnecessary and really belong?) will annoy him?

I'm not GC, but I appreciated the product placement. Of course.

[JWBear]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

You mean us on this board, and 91% of critics and 96% of all filmgoers everywhere on this planet and the next?

Where are you getting 96% of all film goers? IMDB has it at 8.6 out of 10; and if you read the User Comments, the "bad" and "mediocre" reviews far out number the "good" or "Excellent" ones.

Rotten Tomatoes has a 95% currently, but that is based on the reviews of bloggers and professional critics who are affiliated with RT. If you look at the "RT Community" tab for the reviews of regular people, it's only at 88%.

Then there are the Trek message boards and online communities.... From my informal reading, they are running about 50/50, and the flame wars are getting just nasty.

Regardless... When did "popular" ever equate to "quality" anyway?

[Andrew]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Actually, the whole corvette scene with Sabotage bugged me.

That did bug me a bit - two or three hundred years in the future and the Beastie Boys are still state of the art "angry driving" music?

[JWBear]

Originally Posted by Andrew

That did bug me a bit - two or three hundred years in the future and the Beastie Boys are still state of the art "angry driving" music?

maybe Kirk develoed his taste for antique things at a very early age...

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by JWBear

Where are you getting 96% of all film goers?
Regardless... When did "popular" ever equate to "quality" anyway?

Oh, I made those numbers up. I never said popular equates to quality, I was just impliying with made-up percentages that the onus of what was un-fun about the movie belonged on the small minority that disliked it, rather than on the vast majority who found it fun.

I figured it kinda silly to ennumerate what was fun about it when it was 93% fun, but turns out setting it out in a list was also kinda fun.

The fun just keeps going!


And wow, I can just imagine the flame-wars among the Trekkies. Ugh, I have no desire to watch.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by JWBear

Where are you getting 96% of all film goers? IMDB has it at 8.6 out of 10; and if you read the User Comments, the "bad" and "mediocre" reviews far out number the "good" or "Excellent" ones.

It's the internet, bad reviews almost always outnumber good, especially in early going. People are far more motivated to bitch online than praise. An 8.6 out of 10 at imdb puts it in the top 40 movies of ALL TIME on imdb. The highest rated is a 9.1.

Not that I put much stock in imdb ratings seeing that that 9.1 is Shawshank Redmption (an enjoyable flick, but highest rated movie of all time? Seriously?) But even so, a 96% from the critics and an 88% from the community at RT? iSm's 96% might have been an out of thin air number, but it's not much of an exageration. Hell, Citizen Kane only has 90% from the community at RT. So yeah, I don't think it's much hyperbole to say, "Nearly everyone who's seen this movie has liked it."

[mousepod]

I'll admit that it was a fun movie. With 36 hours behind me, I think it can nail exactly why I had such a visceral reaction to the movie.

As a wanna-be writer, I tend to focus on story-telling. I can forgive gaffes in real-world logic, as long as they follow the internal logic of the movie.

I expected to see a movie about how the officers of the original series originally met up, so when I was presented with a time-travel anomaly, which is a standard sci-fi gimmick, I was waiting for the "fix" that also inevitably occurs when the gimmick is present.

Kirk's dad dead at the beginning... ok... maybe that was a backstory rewrite... that didn't bother me. In fact, it was cool seeing young Luke Kirk driving the speeder convertible across Tatooine Iowa.

But when they blew up Alderaan Vulcan, I knew that there was some serious fixing that needed to happen if this prequel would actually be a prequel.

So I waited for the writers to dig themselves out of a the hole that they had made.

When Kirk finally meets Obi-Wan Spock on Hoth the icy planet, after he saves him from the Sand People some ugly monster, I thought, "Finally. They'll fix the anomaly. Or at least figure out a way to bring back Vulcan."

So for the last half of the movie, I sat there and watched as Earth was threatened by a Romulan with a mining ship. I wasn't as forgiving as I was of the dumb crap during the first half of the movie. I just couldn't believe it. They had created a whole new backstory to Star Trek (which was fine by me), but then threw in a time travel anomaly to explain why it still fit in the canon. And the time travel stuff was poorly done, to boot.

If Earth-2 Spock hadn't come back, and Nero had exacted his revenge on Earth-1 Spock, then I might have let it go... but the showdown wasn't a showdown and the anomaly served only to let Abrams and crew reboot the series.

So I felt manipulated and cheated. And I was mad.

Perhaps when the next movie comes out and I revisit this one, I'll soften and enjoy it more, but for now, I think that above all, this movie was sloppy and pandering from a story-telling perspective. And that's the worst thing you can do in a movie.

[Alex]

I figured, but for purposes of the question imagine it was a bit of Sprint product placement. Or if when boarding the Enterprise they mentioned it was powered by the latest Generation of Ford Elantra V6 Warp Engines (on the assumption at this point that Ford is the only American car that might possibly survive to the Star Trek era).

[Ghoulish Delight]

The Nokia placement, as well as the Budweiser mention, did bug me a bit. Actually, the whole corvette scene with Sabotage bugged me. But, just as I predicted from the trailer, I hated those parts, but they were short-lived and the rest of the movie made up for it, for me.