My own movie thread, w/ spoilers

[Lazar]

Just posting some thoughts here after seeing it; I don't know if multiple threads are fine or if we should post them all in GK's thread. Anyway... I thought the movie was really impressive, although of course there are some nits and some things I have trouble with. I guess I'll start with the positives and then do the negatives.

First of all, I thought it was visually stunning. I liked the way he treated the ships, with ample closeups and detail shots, and really a new vision of space that we haven't seen in Trek before. When you think of TNG with its constant head-on stationary starship encounters, this one really puts it to shame. You're constantly aware of 3d movement; you get to see really cool interactions like when the Enterprise rises out of Saturn's ring (however implausible that scene was); and he handles the warp effect and the weapons systems with a new kind of sophistication. The chaotic movements and the signature camera flares seemed to work well. Of course there was still sound in the space battles (something which I've been learning to accept...), but he did give a good feel for the harsh, silent vacuum of space in the Kelvin crewmember death scene early on and in the orbital drop scene.

The characterizations were top notch, as GK observed. Chris Pine did a good job of showing us Kirk's cockiness and boldness without hamming it up, and there were occasional bits where he especially seemed to be channeling Shatner. As an example, when I heard "Either we're going down, or they are," in one of the TV spots, it seemed like some throwaway action line and I didn't find it appealing; but in the context of the movie, it really worked well because it showed Kirk's bold commitment to the task. Zack Quinto was great as Spock, showing us an endearing emotional side, a strong inner conflict, and the beginnings of a good (but stormy) relationship with Kirk. Urban was magnificent as McCoy, really channeling Kelly and building up some of the doctor's background. Pegg showed suitable feistiness with a decent accent; he played a comic relief role (totally justified when you look at the old Scotty) coupled with some distinctive tastelessness ("I like this ship!") that seemed to work well. Saldana did okay building on a character that really hadn't been developed so much (they were making her a bit more like Hoshi Sato with her language skills, but that makes more sense then having her just sit with a thing in her ear and open hailing frequencies all day); her relationship with Spock was surprising, but better orchestrated than that weird abortive fling with Scotty in STV, and it helps integrate her into the plot. Cho was decent as the young aspiring officer, and Yelchin was okay in somewhat of a more comic, blank slate role. I was glad that they made him a 17 year old whiz kid and didn't try to pretend that he was on an equal footing with the senior bridge crew.

Greenwood played a nice, distinct mentor character, despite the fact that he was basically creating the role from scratch and had nothing substantive in common with Hunter or the original Pike. (How could he, with just one episode to go on?) Nimoy was pure awesome to the extent that they used him, and Bana performed adequately as the villain. He wasn't an annoying twirp like Shinzon, and he didn't overdo the drama or evil. (In fact he was surprisingly informal at times.) He was just a really pissed off working man with a surprising amount of power at his disposal.

Tahir, Hemsworth, Morrison and Ryder were very good in their very small roles; Sarek was meh; Perry (the Academy commandant) and Sheppard (the Vulcan science minister) both seemed a bit off.

The plot was good overall; it showed us some desperately needed backstory for our beloved characters; and it did a good job of differentiating itself from the prime timeline in a bold and epic way. Abrams certainly had the balls to blow up planets and kill characters (well minor ones at least), and he made sure we were all aware of the timeline divergence by having the bridge crew and Spock Prime repeatedly hit us over the head with it. You certainly got the impression that real events of substance can happen out there, and I think Quinto dealt well with the rather unprecedented challenge of how Spock deals with the loss of his homeworld. Abrams did well in showing us how the old Kirk-Spock relationship would fit in in this new timeline.

The score was very good, although it did seem a bit more like "generic 21st century epic action movie" at times, lacking a certain awesome Trek quality that the original 6 scores displayed when they were at their best. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic.

Okay, now the negatives. I really did like the movie, but I'm going to list all the ones I can think of:

I think the story depends too much on plot power. For example, the fact that Kirk can just instantaneously decide to jet off to Starfleet Academy, and the fact that Kirk, McCoy, Uhura and presumably Sulu can all be students together at the same time, even though they're supposed to end up with a range of ranks and seniority and there's no reason why they should all be put at the same starting line like that. Pike seems confident that Kirk can get his own ship in 8 years (is that plausible?), and then the chain of events that brings Kirk to the CO position really seems to be stretching it. I mean, Spock was already a commander while Kirk was just a student, but then he ends up Kirk's first officer?

One of the things that really troubles me, though, is Nero and Vulcan. I understand that Abrams wanted to do something big and bold to restart the franchise, but I think there is a continuum between "stodgy and conservative" and "reckless and oversized", and I can't help but think that he went a bit too far in the other direction. We have the nebulous future plot that Spock Prime layed out; it's possible that a big supernova might threaten a big chunk of known space, and it's possible that the Romulan home star in particular might die; but the way they put it - there's a supernova threatening the whole galaxy and Romulus just happens to get blown in two, seemed a little underdeveloped. So then we have this planet-busting supervillain who comes back to mess up the timeline, and he does succeed in destroying Vulcan. Yes, we need big stuff to happen, but relying on an insanely powerful supervillain seems a bit hackneyed and heavy handed. I mean, how many of these insanely powerful supervillains are there in known space? Most other villains or crisis situations would seem like a bit of a letdown after we've seen what the Narada could do.

As for the destruction of Vulcan, you can view it as an awesome, bold move that revolutionizes the franchise (i.e. it was necessary to bring real, substantive change to Trek), or you can view it as a heavy handed easy way out ("How do we change things? I know, let's blow up a planet! Yeah!"). I mean, Vulcan is probably the most important alien world in Trek, and I would have liked to see the franchise develop that world and civilization, its background, its dynamics, its interactions with Earth, etc, rather than just blowing it to smithereens almost as soon as we see it. Blowing up a whole planet of 6 billion people is a truly gigantic, horrific thing to do, and the implications of it would be so massive that I really think it's impossible to treat properly as it was presented in the movie. Suddenly (by a crude and simplistic equivalence), Nero (despite being a sympathetic, wounded man) is a genocidal villain 200 times worse than Hitler, and the Vulcans are reduced to a nearly extinct race of Holocaust victims struggling to find somewhere to live. Yes, you can do that if you want, but it approaches apocalyptic levels of disaster and tragedy that don't seem warranted in terms of Roddenberry's vision. I'm not some devoted superfan - I became disenchanted with Trek years ago, I find the traditional concept of canon to be stifling and unappealing, and it was this movie in large part that got me interested in it again - but I find the destruction of Vulcan a major turnoff. It makes it very difficult for me to invest myself in this new timeline.

And now for the smaller nits (and I'm really aiming for comprehensivity here, just for the hell of it):

- As we can see in Pike's speech, they make it very nebulous what exactly the Federation is, what Starfleet is, and what Earth is politically. I've wished for a long time that Trek would give us more of a solid understanding of domestic politics.

- All of Starfleet's experience crews are gone on assignment, and they have to send out the whole Academy in (presumably empty) ships to defend the inner planets of the Federation? Also, if all those cadets got killed in the Vulcan battle, then who was left to attend the ceremony at the end of the movie?

- The Klingon ships in the simulation (which look like K'T'Ingas) are referred to as "warbirds". To be honest, maybe this is a good thing, because since STIII we've always had this (lazy?) cross-contamination of Romulan and Klingon culture, so it might make sense to go whole hog and complement a ship called the "bird of prey" with a ship called the "warbird".

- Why is George Kirk's very pregnant wife making a space voyage, and how the hell does the Kelvin have 800 people? It might make sense if developed more - maybe they're evacuating a colony or starbase?

- The space battles are all too cramped. In the case of Vulcan, for example, the destruction of the fleet results in a ridiculously dense debris field (wouldn't the debris radiate out in all directions?), and the Enterprise makes an equally implausible passage through it (couldn't they just go around it?), and then they're surprised when they come across the Narada seemingly a few kilometers away (wouldn't they have noticed that big vessel much, much earlier?)

- The Klingon Empire just has 40-odd ships destroyed by this gigantic renegade Romulan ship, and no one in the Federation really seems to care? Uhura was like, "Oh, yeah, I remember hearing that Klingon message - What, you think it might be important?" It sort of reminds me of how the E-E idiotically stumbled into that nebula fight in Nemesis: "Well, we've plotted a flight course through this big nebula that blocks our shields and communications... Wait, no, it's a trap!" And why is Kirk the person who makes the realization that Nero is involved? Pike is the one who wrote the dissertation on the Kelvin incident, so he more than anyone else should recognize Nero's hallmarks.

- What's up with Delta Vega? I can even accept that they went to another planet in the Vulcan star system (although they should have picked a more sensible name for it), but even in that case, Vulcan would still be a visible only as a small dot, like Mars is to us.

- They seem to be even worse than ENT with warp speeds. The trip to Vulcan seemed to take only minutes.

- No Andorians or Tellarites; they continued the ENT trend of making up new Federation members while leaving out some of the more established ones. These were some of Earth's biggest early allies, and among the founders of the Federation; why has Trek so often displayed this aversion to depicting them? (On a related note, I agree with GK that the Orion girl would have looked much better with black hair.)

- Maybe not so much a nit as a question, but what the hell is the 23rd century Romulan Empire going to think when they find out that Vulcan has been blown up (by a vengeful future Romulan no less)? The twin story of the Vulcans and the Romulans has such potential, but they really neglected to address any of the implications that Nero's actions would have for relations with the Romulans. We don't know whether the Romulans are in a state of isolation like they were in the prime timeline 2250s, or if there have been more contacts and conflicts with them. One clue is that everyone in the movie seemed to be aware that the Romulans were an offshoot of the Vulcans, and yet this came as a surprise to Kirk's crew in "Balance of Terror".

- Why were the Vulcan children learning math with Terran numbers and symbols? This seems to be a continuation of a trend, as we saw Terran numbers on the Son'a array in INS. In any case, I think it's misguided: there's a widespread convention of dramatic translation of speech (i.e. the Vulcans seem to be speaking English even though they're really speaking Vulcan), but I think the case for dramatic translation of writing is much flimsier. Even the nutjob himself, George Lucas, had the good sense to replace Terran lettering with Galactic Basic lettering (in Obi-Wan's tractor control scene) when he rereleased Episode IV. Certainly, the Vulcans would have developed an excellent system of mathematical notation before making contact with Earth.

- I hate to be picky, but Starfleet Academy is located in the Presidio right next to the Golden Gate Bridge, and yet the Transamerica Pyramid (which is nowhere near there in real life) is shown as being right next to the Academy. Maybe they went to the incredible trouble of moving it or building an exact replica of it, but for God's sake why? It just seems like a thoughtless, unnecessary way of saying "Oy! San Francisco!"

[Foxfyre]

Nice bit of reviewing there, I haven't seen the movie yet (waiting for it to make it to the base theater here) but by all accounts looks like I will enjoy it. its about damn time someone had the balls to attempt something a bit new with the francise. I do feel B & B missed an opertunity with ENT in that regards.

[Aaron]

Remember that Pike never says what kind of ship. If the new SF is anything like a RL Navy, Kirk could be commanding a patrol boat or a corvette.

[Lazar]

True, if we consider that Kirk really is supposed to have exceptional abilities, and that Pike might be talking about a smaller ship, it doesn't seem so implausible.

[stitch626]

when the Enterprise rises out of Saturn's ring (however implausible that scene was)

It was actually rising out of Titan's atmosphere.

Other than that, I pretty much agree with most of what has been said.