Star Trek

[innerSpaceman]

Why Time Travel - As stated, I found this the best reboot concept of all the many film reboots ever done. Plus, not only is time travel a Star Trek staple, so are Alternate Universes with doppelgangers of the same people (but, ya know, evil and with facial hair). This was brilliant storywise, and Treky up the ying-yang.


The Corvette - Yeah, set-up wasn't needed (though I would have geeked out to a pre-teen Carol Marcus). Any number of similar-results kid-rebel scenes would have worked ... most, I daresay, better than this one. But it was standard and easily accepted by me.


Families on Board - As Alex says, families traveling together is Star Trek canon. Um, and since voyages are so long, coupling and families are gonna happen anyway. I'm not aware of Starfleet ever forbidding it.


25 Year Wait - They should have left this scene in, or some better explanatory dialogue. It's a brilliant solution, that would have needed further tweeking to completely un-stupidify. But having the Romulans "prevented" from doing anything during the 25-year wait is an obvious fix. Though I suppose the more obvious fix is not to have the 25-year wait. Why was it necessary to the story? It could have been 25 days with the same story result.


Coincidence on Hoth - They picked the wrong stupid coincidence. It only got groanific when not one, but TWO Trek characters were on Hoth. Scotty's appearance as a stranded World's Greatest Starfleet Engineer was the more atrocious coindicence.

And yes, Alex, I like the "fate" angle, and that's just what I assumed. Though I put a little more spin to it to "justify" both Nero and new Spock making the boneheaded and nonsensical move of marooning their respective targets on some planet (much less the same one) instead of taking them prisoner and keeping them under their respective control.


Next on Jerry Springer - Yep, Uhura flirts with Spock in the early original series. I liked their new relationship better when, as in the turbolift scene, Uhura seems to be just openly and physically emphathetic to Spock ... but since the reveal of their relationship comes a bit later, I'm even cool with how the movie handled it. Can't wait for Pon Farr.


Green Girll Blues - I agree it played fine without knowing how he cheated. But since we've known he cheated since 1982, it would have been nice to show (not that the contemplated scened did) how he managed to be the only cadet ever to do so.

Yeah, yeah, there's no money and no disease, but don't tell me Trek-era earth students don't cheat!


Spock, Meet Spock - Not only is there no problem with it, I loved, loved, loved that Spock Prime told Spock the whole thing about temporal selves meeting each other resulting in universal armageddon is a stereotypical time travel canard that he Vulcan-lied about to manipulate baby Kirk.


All Blowed Up - the stupid part of the explanation is that the ship is "designed" to go through Black Holes, but the genuine part (and I thought obvious from the movie) is that Kirk had to destroy the ship that has been known to make it through Black Holes without a scratch.

The wiser thing to get around this stupidity would to suggest that ships at warp (such as both the Narada and Spock's ship) could travel through black holes. After all, warp is not simply a "speed." I don't know that it's ever been described in canon, but thinking of warp speed as some kind of generated field that bends space and time would not be too much of a stretch, and from there a field that survives another kind of space-and-time bender like a black hole might be a tad more plausible.


Lens Flares: The Movie - It didn't bother me the second time. I'll pay more attention the third.


Explosion Surfing - This is another standard Trek trope, but I've no problem with that. All sorts of things that wouldn't have any effect in zero-gravity environments somehow work like there's gravity in the Trek universe. The details of a real black-hole and warp core explosion may be even further in reality from TrekWorld norms, but the general concept has been well-established.


* * * * *

Nice of the writers to put this out there, tho. I think the complaints got more vocal once more people realized these were the hacks responsible for the Transfomers movie.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Alex

Explosion Surfing - This is another standard Trek trope, but I've no problem with that. All sorts of things that wouldn't have any effect in zero-gravity environments somehow work like there's gravity in the Trek universe. The details of a real black-hole and warp core explosion may be even further in reality from TrekWorld norms, but the general concept has been well-established.

Tangentially related to this was a welcome break from Trek trope...space was silent in this film! I didn't pay close attention to how consistent they were, but there were at least 2 scenes where they made a point of hitting mute on the sound track as the camera followed a subject from inside a ship to the vacuum of space.

[innerSpaceman]

Best of which was during the opening Kelvin battle where pre-redshirt starfleet girl gets sucked out into Space via a loud explosion, and all goes silent and eerie.

Totally wicked cool.

[mousepod]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

25 Year Wait - They should have left this scene in, or some better explanatory dialogue. It's a brilliant solution, that would have needed further tweeking to completely un-stupidify. But having the Romulans "prevented" from doing anything during the 25-year wait is an obvious fix. Though I suppose the more obvious fix is not to have the 25-year wait. Why was it necessary to the story? It could have been 25 days with the same story result.

It needed to be 25 years, so Kirk's birth could be changed and then he would be grown up enough to see Vulcan destroyed. (And so Muppet Baby Spock wouldn't be killed in the Vulcan implosion.)

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

Coincidence on Hoth - They picked the wrong stupid coincidence. It only got groanific when not one, but TWO Trek characters were on Hoth. Scotty's appearance as a stranded World's Greatest Starfleet Engineer was the more atrocious coindicence.

And yes, Alex, I like the "fate" angle, and that's just what I assumed. Though I put a little more spin to it to "justify" both Nero and new Spock making the boneheaded and nonsensical move of marooning their respective targets on some planet (much less the same one) instead of taking them prisoner and keeping them under their respective control.

The "fate" thing seems close to the "magic" that CP was glad didn't make it into the movie earlier in this thread. Is there a differentiation? If not, is it good that it didn't make it into the theatrical cut?

[Alex]

Families on Board - As Alex says, families traveling together is Star Trek canon. Um, and since voyages are so long, coupling and families are gonna happen anyway. I'm not aware of Starfleet ever forbidding it.

I believe it was established in TNG that Starfleet ships having entire families on board was a relatively new thing and families were never shown on board in TOS. The part I was saying was canon is married couples being allowed to serve together (and in the Star Trek episode not only is the guy serving with his fiance but he's her direct reporting officer).

But I guess we can presume the intent was that Kirk would be taken off ship after being born (and that is why his mom was off-planet when stealing the car and he wasn't with her).

I did like the quiet in space thing. THey weren't super consistent about it but the nod was nice. Though combined with the insta-warp effect it did add a BSG (new one) feeling.

[Jazzman]

Wil Wheaton's hilarious blog about TNG, in case anyone hasn't seen it. Worth a read for any Trek fan.


As per the DS9 vs Voyager question, I agree that DS9 had higher quality acting and deeper characters, but personally I prefer episodic, stand alone Trek as opposed to endless story arcs, and DS9 got so buried under wormhole aliens, religious dogma and the boring Dominion war that I tuned out, much as with Enterprise and the Xindi. Voyager was a little hokier, the characters a little more cardboard and the writing maybe not as profound, but it was fun, imaginative, and dogma-free, which is what I believe makes Trek its best. This is why DS9 and Voyager are largely a tie in my mind; where one succeeds the other fails, so they balance out in the end.


And I wholeheartedly agree about the awesomeness of the silent, 2001-esque outer space. During the first battle when things began as usual (loud and bombastic) I thought, "Well, they didn't fix that. Too bad." Then that crewman got sucked out and it went silent and I was blown away. Totally awesome! Even BSG didn't quite get this right. Hopefully they take this further. I kind of got the feeling that they were trying to make it look like the space sounds we hear are how it sounds inside the ship, but it actually is silent outside. Anybody else get that feeling too?

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by Alex

I believe it was established in TNG that Starfleet ships having entire families on board was a relatively new thing and families were never shown on board in TOS.

So was the TOS couple married by Kirk forbidden to procreate while onboard? And do condoms in that future consist of a force-field barrier, or are they still using latex? If force-field, can it be adjusted for "her pleasure?"

Kids were never shown on the TOS Enterprise, but neither were any but a tiny fraction of those on board. I think the just married couple implies enough to cover the implausibility of George and Winona* conducting their entire pregnancy aboard the Kelvin.

Not I that I didn't groan a bit about his wife giving birth right at that moment, but ultimately it worked as a cornball bit.





* Is that why Winona Ryder was given a part in the movie?

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by Jazzman

I kind of got the feeling that they were trying to make it look like the space sounds we hear are how it sounds inside the ship, but it actually is silent outside. Anybody else get that feeling too?

No.




Though I will always appreciate that, way back when, they originally tried the Star Trek series opening with accurate silence as the Enterprise whooshes past the camera, but found it simply didn't work without the sonic whoosh added.


I won't mind if this new movie series employs a combination of both.

[Jazzman]

I imagine, and may obviously be out in left field, that Starfleet allowed crew members to marry, as it would pretty clearly be a rights violation to tell anyone that they are forbidden to marry, (I'm thinking that Starfleet is evolved enough to not have any stupid Prop 8) yet, if a couple does tie the knot one would have had to be reassigned once the ship returns to spacedock at the end of the tour so as to avoid the "families on board" issues. I remember reading, even, that the backstory of the Enterprise E includes a bit about the experiment with onboard families being largely deemed a failure and the E model reverting to only carrying serving crew. I don't know how canon this was, but I do remember reading it.

[Alex]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

So was the TOS couple married by Kirk forbidden to procreate while onboard?

Never mentioned. I don't know if it was ever explicitly said that there were children on board but I think it is generally accepted that there weren't.

And in Encounter at Farpoint (the first episode of TNG isn't there a scene when Picard is first getting acquainted with Riker where he says he's not confortable with the new policy of allowing children and families on board and that one of Riker's jobs is to make sure he [Picard] doesn't come off as an asshole abou it?

And do condoms in that future consist of a force-field barrier, or are they still using latex? If force-field, can it be adjusted for "her pleasure?"

I'd imagine that chemical birth control is pretty well perfected by then and we know that all but the most exotic of space diseases took exactly 4 seconds to heal so STDs probably aren't a problem.

I think the just married couple implies enough to cover the implausibility of George and Winona* conducting their entire pregnancy aboard the Kelvin.

I agree, but what was not conveyed about that was that the movie did not convey (at least on my first viewing) that she was also a member of the crew and not just a wife brought along for dramatic tension in times of crisis.