The problem with the Kelvin movies is they are all pale imitations of Wrath of Khan. Dude has a problem with Starfleat. Dude enacts revenge. Wrath was a shiny red button you press once. They’ve pressed it four times now and each iteration keeps on getting shittier. As much as I love Star Trek, it’s time to take it off life support. At this point it’s more Weekend at Bernie’s than Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.
It’s difficult to have that conversation without making assumptions about… Things.
But for what it’s worth, ST is still somewhat popcorn in its subject matter.
i have been enjoying SNW. it was a good jumping off point for the larger universe. we finished a season and my wife asked to watch TNG, with the sole prompting of “what do you want to watch next”, so on that basis alone it is a good show
I’m assuming you’re a Trekkie and your wife is the newbie in this situation?
Picking the entry point of a franchise is a huge consideration undertaking. Lots of possibilities.
🌽 Cornrect🌽 . The best type of correct. We’re both in our 40s and her family is a star wars family. I’m a “scifi is cool” person, during the console wars I thought both Sonic and Mario were cool, yknow?
I think so. In that era, I was PC and just knew Microsoft was a bag of dicks.
It’s certainly many times better than Discovery.
i found it too philosophical for me
yea thats why ds9 is the best one
punches omnipotent being in the face
Which quite possibly kicked the idiot bandwagon in Hollywood/StreamingLand of hiring people who do not like the IP into overgear. “It made money one time, so we should do it forever” - High Level Business Executive Thinking. So many promising projects ruined.
David Lynch didn’t read Dune until his movie version of the novel was already in production.
That doesn’t seem possible at face value given that he was also the writer and the majority of the film is faithful to the book, sometimes word for word. Also, [searching] https://www.reddit.com/r/dune/comments/pc5g58/jodorowsky_and_lynch_both_read_dune/
Didn’t Herbert pen the script?
Just read your link, I suppose I’m a victim of Lynch’s poor wording. Or retconning!
I will give JJ Abrahams one genuine heartfelt compliment about his Star Trek movies: they delivered on the sense of scale.
Particularly the opening scene in the first film, the cinematography (sans overused lens flares) and sound design was excellent and showed both the awesome spectacle of the sheer size of the ships and the awful danger of space combat.
That’s something there wasn’t the budget or technological capability to show until Abrahams-Trek and then Discovery and Strange New Worlds.
hinged rant incoming (this one actually makes sense). not very good (it makes sense), lots of bile and, uh, bile
oh your god don’t get me started on sound design. sound design should be like IT. the only time we should notice it is when it’s AMAZING. like, Baby Driver had amazing sound design. every step lined up with a beat in the music. that kind of amazing. lately you NEED subtitles or you’re going to miss half the dialog. WHAT THE FUCK FILM INDUSTRY?
bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile bile
Particularly the opening scene in the first film, the cinematography (sans overused lens flares) and sound design was excellent and showed both the awesome spectacle of the sheer size of the ships and the awful danger of space combat.
For their flaws, the Abrams films delivered in visual spectacle.
The intro in the second film, where the Enterprise rises out of the oceans, to the awe of all below, is pretty much one of a very small handful of times where the Enterprise is shown to be quite impressive. It’s a really good show of how a religion could form around it if someone is just a little careless with the prime directive. For its weaknesses, it’s still a cutting-edge Federation starship, with advanced technology beyond our ken.
The first film had the fast-paced nature of Star Trek combat, but it fell into the trap of doing things like Star Wars, by having only warp engines be fast, and keeping a small distance between the ships. Impulse engines can trivially reach a decent fraction of the speed of light (full impulse can go to the moon and back in minutes). They should be no less agile at typical engagement distances.
Have you seen the Expanse? They had to come with narrative excuses to make combat interesting, otherwise it was just lobbing volleys of missiles from thousands of miles away.
The books were so good, they did such a good job with all of the space stuff.
My favorite depiction of the Enterprise is in a fan edit of the Undiscovered Country.
The Constitution class ship isn’t actually that large. It’s 11 decks high, she’s perhaps the size of a naval cruiser. It’s Picard’s Galaxy class ship that’s stupidly huge in size. But they’re both STUPID FUCKING POWERFUL
Roddenberry-era Trek likes to depict starships as moving like seagoing ships. They slowly and ponderously hove around through no apparent means of propulsion. In Star Trek II, Saavik pilot’s the ship out of space dock under 1/4 impulse power, and the ship trundles forward at a good 10 knots or so like a navy ship leaving the wharf.
In the original cut of Undiscovered Country, Kirk orders 1/4 impulse power, and Lt. Valeris quotes regulation at him about thrusters only. II think it’s a holdover from an earlier draft of the script when it was supposed to be Saavik, it might have been an interesting character moment between the two as Saavik had a habit of quoting regulations to Kirk, which he was more willing to tolerate during the training mission depicted in Wrath of Kahn than he is here. But Robin Curtis declined to reprise the role so we get suspiciously similar new chick and it comes off as a boomerific power play between the older Kirk and the younger Valeris.
In this fan cut, the Enterprise HURLS herself through the doors and out of Earth orbit at truly science fiction amounts of speed. Because of course that’s what would happen under 1/4 impulse, those engines can fly the ship at half the speed of light. It makes Kirk look impatient and petulant, like a teenager burning rubber out of the garage because he’s pissed his parents are making him pick up his little brother from choir practice instead of visiting his girlfriend. And Valeris comes off as genuinely concerned for how reckless it is to blast through that small doorway under that amount of power, if filtered through typical Vulcan aloofness.
And it gives you a sense of how sci-fi powerful the Enterprise is, that this relatively small machine packs an amount of power we just don’t have now, that the barest tap on the throttle will huck the damn thing to Pluto, and those are the slow engines!
Abrams*
Abrahamlincolns*
Arby’sms*
J. J. Abrams is a hack and I hate that he keeps getting work
Eh, he’s done some decent work he just isn’t always the right fit for the properties he’s given.
Sorry I can’t read your comment. The 20 lens flares he put on screen still have me blinded
Edit: to be clear. I don’t think his movies are bad per say. They’re just painfully mediocre.
The JJ lens flare then made it into DISCO although I think they toned it down a bit for SNW. I checked out of SFA after 3 episodes so I don’t know if they continued to be flare happy there.
DISCO? SNW? SFA? I guess with concerted effort I can use context clues to figure it out but like, how often are you typing these things?
We’re in a Star Trek community. I think most people are going to understand those without an issue.
Most /= all but thanks for sharing
Not all people speak English. What’s your point?
For better and worse, Discovery took a lot of cues from the Abrams films, being more action focused, with flashier effects and cinematography, for example.
It got toned down as time went on, but there were parts here and there in Discovery where you can tell they were trying to replicate the films.
Yeah, the Disco premiere was very action-oriented, very JJ coded. I was like, ok, they’re trying to draw in viewers with a flashy beginning, but hopefully they’ll start being a proper Star Trek show soon. Oh, well. Happily, some people liked the show, but it wasn’t my cup of tea.
JJ, when the lens flared.
SeductiveTortoise, his fists clenched.What director is that supposed to represent? JJ flares are horizontal, sometimes have multiple occurrences in a single frame, and often are accompanied by a briefly blown out image in case the viewer doesn’t notice the insane distraction.
Michael Bay
He’s always the wrong choice for anything that calls for the bare minimum planning and substance, but that’s what they keep giving him. He has good instincts for cinematography but shouldn’t be trusted with anything that requires an actual plot.
Now I kinda want to see him make an Avatar movie.
(Blue skinned aliens, not ATLA. Although his ATLA would probably be better than what we got.)
He would probably announce a trilogy, spend the first movie setting up some mystery in Pandora’s core and then would never follow up.
spoiler
And somehow Quaritch would return, but Cameron has that covered already.
what is this decent work you speak of? did he make a never published short or something?
I thought Super 8 was pretty good.
You can be a hack and still do great work, look at Ridley Scott.
Relatable
As long as you don’t let him anywhere near the plot.
Like Chris Nolan. Has his name attached to a couple good things and now he’s treated like King Midas
People are taking this interview out of context.
He said, as a kid, he never liked Star Trek. But as an adult, after rewatching TOS to prepare for the 2009 film, he grew to appreciate Star Trek.
In the text here yes he does say as a kid he didn’t like it. He also describes later how he was in a mix of people, some writers who loved it, one who never saw it, and him, who “was not a fan.”
That’s at the time they were making the movie. The “as a kid” part was just a lame ass excuse for an opinion he seemed to know on some level shouldn’t be uttered without one.
So yeah, no. He said he didn’t like Star Trek, AND moreover that he thinks that was an important opinion to have in the room while making a Star Trek movie!!!
Fuck this guy!!!
Nicholas Meyer had never seen Star Trek before he did Wrath of Khan.
People are just crybabies.
…but he clearly came to understand it, and coaxed great performances from the stars. WoK is one of the best films.
Eeh. Most of the complaints I see in this thread about Trek 2009 would apply as well to TWoK if people were being even handed. It’s a pew pew action film. There are no deep philosophical questions being tackled. It’s not utopian – Starfleet is portrayed as a straight forward space navy that works with real scientists only begrudgingly.
There’s kick ass high drama and a decent character study of an ageing Kirk, but the character work on Kirk and Spock in 2009 wasn’t all that bad, either.
He wrote a two part blog about how he was recruited to direct and working with Ricardo. He did his research and found his “in” for the movie which Rodenburry approved of which iirc was Hornblower in space.
kinda doesn’t count, he accepted the job, and was given the job, despite not liking the source material,
him doing basic research later and changing his mind is irrelevant.
Why accept a job making media you don’t care about. besides the money
First, you’re assuming you have to love the story or the universe to make a good movie set in that universe.
Second, if you could get paid several tens of millions of dollars to make a movie I’m pretty sure you would, and you’d probably do a hell of a good job catching yourself up.
I’m not sure why you’d say it “doesn’t count”.
I also assuming that there are countless talented people who love the source material, and better to give them a chance than giving it to someone who just makes content.
I am not going with “hire fans” bullshit, just that there are so many actual directors in the industry who already have a passion for it, so it is just a marketing choice to hire someone for the name.
Art is art, not content, when it is turned to content we get slop like those movies.
i mean, i’m a musician. there’s music i love and music i hate. from my perspective, about a quarter of the music i make, i don’t really like that much. but you know, i get to make music with people i love, and that is the real point from my perspective. and in my region, there are maybe three or four musicians who can match me technically and none who can match the mental work i put into it. so like, they want me to play even if i dislike the music. and i want to play even if i dislike the music, because i’m still making art.
does hearing the mental process from another field about similar decisions help explain it?
Are you saying he’s not an actual director? What makes someone an “actual director”?
Why do you think it was a marketing choice to pick him? He wasn’t exactly a major director at the time. He was far from unknown but he didn’t have a lot of movies.Which Star Trek to you is art and not content? I assume you mean made as a passion and not for commercial purposes?
I feel like that’s just ignorant of how movies are actually made.Is it content because it’s popular and you don’t like it?
Meant directors who actually like the subject.
The Abraham Star Trek movies were just forgettable. he tried to turn star trek into star wars. They are content made in meeting rooms by executives, not really creative decisions or story telling.
To a lesser degree that happens to every major movie,
You had a director who actually liked the subject. It’s right there in the interview. Wasn’t a fan as a child, liked it as an adult.
It sounds like you didn’t like the movie, so you’re saying it was because the director lacked something or the writers lacked something relating to “art”, instead of just saying you didn’t like the movie.
All but the most niche movies are about making money. That’s what they are. People can make good movies, but they’re all still fundamentally about money. The entire star trek franchise exists to make money.
The early movies were made as a cash grab to chase after Star wars money. You’ve got the movie director saying the series is boring and being selected because he can make it for cheaper.It’s fine to not like the movie, but acting like the movie can’t be good because those making it have financial incentives? C’mon.
Because its his job.
With art it is a bit more complex than that. Think of a photographer. Many people love photography, not all people love wedding photography, for example. It is not a great idea to have someone who loathes wedding photography as the photographer at your wedding. But, there’s no shortage of photographers who don’t like weddings working it because it is the most predictable and lucrative income source for a professional photographer. The results will depend on the level of professionalism of the party involved, sure they are doing it for money. But it is not hard to imagine that a photographer who actively enjoys the subject matter will turn out a more satisfying result than someone who, however professional, is only going through the motions. This is how many a couple end up with boring cookie cutter photos of the most important ceremony of their romantic relationship and quickly end up burying it in a basement or closet somewhere, never to be seen again.
You wouldn’t guess that from the movies.
But as an adult, after rewatching TOS to prepare for the 2009 film, he grew to appreciate Star Trek.
Right, so he should not have been hired to do the job. He didn’t rewatch it until money, and he likes money. He liked it because of money.
There is a weird thing that i think was hinted upon in a ds9 interview that for some reason “they” do not like to have star trek fans working on the set and those that where where supposed to act low profile about it.
I can kinda see how it can be both distracting to get work done and irritating or to have crew argue canon all the time (Henry Cavill in the wincher)
But i also can’t not see how political this might all be.
the wincher
Henry Cavill plays a tow truck driver who repossesses the realms most powerful monsters cars.
I’d watch that.
i mean just for our boy Hank. But also because i gotta sing
When a humble bard graced a ride along
With Hank of Newark, along came this song
Oh god, Gravity Falls Spinoff…
I think arguing canon on set is one thing, I think enjoying the work and understanding it from the start is another.
He wasn’t into Star Trek, he said he was after being paid to be into it. Thats it - and honestly I don’t believe he liked it in his rewatch either - and that is the issue. He wasn’t interested in making a Star Trek movie. He got brought on because “BIG NAME MEAN BIG $$$” and not because it would be good for Star Trek. imo of course.
I don’t think it’s inherently bad for Abrams himself to not have seen the show until asked to do it, but there’s absolutely a good question of why the people that commissioned Abrams chose him, when he had no familiarity with Star Trek beforehand.
Thats my main point - Abrams was the wrong choice from the start imo.
Indeed. Nicolas Meyer was the same, and most fans seem to love his contributions to the franchise. Being a newcomer isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes a fresh perspective can be a great thing.
Not to say I love Abrams’ work, but in the end he did more harm to Star Wars than to Trek, and by all accounts he’s a life long Star Wars fan.
he grew to appreciate the money he was going to make from Star Trek.
Fixed.
I did not like it as a kid either. My most used to watch Voyager when I was a wee lad
And what did your most think of it?
That Janeway has a bloodlust that can never be sated.
That’s because you forgot the coffee. Mix blood into coffee at a 2:1 ratio and you’re good.
Burton’s Batman films are top tier, though. If I get a great director with a solid vision for the character/story, I don’t care at all if they were a fan before hand or not.
The first one was a great reintroduction to batman given the campiness of the 60’s show it was trying to shake off.
Yeah it really got the Batman atmosphere well. I wonder if it’s because Batman was such a cultural icon that even if you “didn’t read comics” you till knew who Batman was and what he was about?
Possibly. Most people’s first thought when they heard “Batman” at the time was probably still the '60s series, but Dark Knight Returns had gotten a bit of press already pushing back on that. But really, Burton’s sensibilities just work with the character. Maybe it’s whoever convinced him to give the job a chance we have to thank.
I would so watch a Star Trek parody made by Kevin Smith.
Spock has to fight a giant spider in the third act
This feels like it plausibly could have been done in TAS already
FWIW, Star Trek isn’t the only sci-fi franchise he manages to drive against the wall.
The other big one is known more for action than philosophical discussion. You’d think he’d have been a better fit!
Yeah, you would. He’s just that talented a director.
“I didn’t really have a plan for a trilogy” 🤦🤦🤦
We noticed!
He was right. My GF never liked Star Trek but went “holy fuck!” to the opening of the 2009 movie.
“We don’t like or know the IP and we wrote a script until everyone liked it instead of saying anything because I don’t like philosophy.”
We, the communities, need to start buying IPs of the shit we like before it becomes a target for the mainstream to steal and destroy.
It’s the circle of life and happens with everything.
Either your favorite thing stays niche and withers slowly, never achieving it’s full potential; or becomes successful and becomes an increasingly derivative cash cow for whatever production company throws the most money at it.
Thankfully there are exceptions.
Ok, hear me out: First, fuck IP. Second, AI is pretty lackluster atm, but a lot of people are experimenting. It can reach an amazing high visual fidelity and FX already, and lackluster things like acting and errors or fight scenes could improve in the coming years.
It could be cool to see sort of like “councils” for various franchises pop up and approve / produce different AI fan projects and crowd sourced directors that tell or retell the story of our franchises.
Like imagine a dozen different fan writers and directors creating different seasons 8, 9 and 10 of game of thrones. Much will be shit, but as technology advances it might be possible to even merge or “remix” the scripts of different productions together to come to an “ultimate edition”.
Similar to how Hamlet or other classic theater stories are remixed.
Mainstream success is not potential fulfillment, it’s cultural appropriation and butchery. Subcultures can and do very comfortably thrive for decades, gratifying their communities, without the need for the attention of the majority.
Counterpoint Tony Gilroy who doesn’t like star wars made the best Star wars. So I can’t fully endorse this POV
Jonathan Frakes never watched Star Trek as a kid either. He preferred Bonanza.
He wasn’t directing the show.
He directed 8 episodes of TNG, as well as First Contact and Insurrection and some of the newer stuff too, in fact he said that when they brought Riker back for Picard, he was terrified of screwing up, because he hadn’t acted for years, and had only been directing.
He’s directed something like 30+ episodes throughout the franchise. Most recently an episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy this year. He’s contributed a lot to Trek,
Obviously his most important contribution to modern cinema is his voice work as lead protagonist Goliath in Disneys Gargoyles, but the Trek stuff is ok too.
Obviously his most important contribution to modern cinema is his voice work as lead protagonist Goliath in Disneys Gargoyles, but the Trek stuff is ok too.
respectfully disagreed. also have you ever seen a really big dog?
We all agree his work on Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction was a great contribution to society, but I disagree with your disagreement.
Sometimes he was, though.
now working for the white house
Sheldon or the executive branch of the federal government?
(Made sense before they changed “whitehouse” to “white house”)
The only thing good about JJ touching Star Trek was the trailer for it, which is 10/10. The movies were all a big let down in comparison. But the trailer is amazing, in no small part due to the music from Two Steps From Hell.
I actually liked Beyond. I even bought it on blu-ray. It is, of course, the only one without Abrams as a director, and with minimal involvement by Abrams in general.
The top YT comment on the trailer for the Force Awakens used to be “This is like watching the wedding video after the divorce.”
Wow, longtime trekkie here since original run of TOS. To me the first Kelvin movie was like a birthday present. PERFECT casting for one thing - it felt like watching my old friends’ home movies from before I knew them. What didn’t you like?
I was introduced to Trek as a kid starting with Wrath of Khan and the rest of the films, then TNG which I couldn’t get enough of as a teen. Trek to me was always about philosophical exploration of ideas and moral quandaries, with some action added in for spice. I will admit I probably was skewed in my perception of the original characters because I was introduced to them in feature films where they were already heavily developed and where the characters were midlife and getting older.
I felt like the Kelvin movies went all in on the action and completely abandoned the philosophical core that made Trek special compared to any other space shoot-em-up.
I also felt like the dialogue and script writing was just impossibly bad. The worst example of this was when the commanding officers die and there is this scene where McCoy says something like “We’ve got no captain and no first officer.” And then Kirk just says “Yeah we do” and sits in the chair. I was screaming at my tv in that moment. It was like the writers had no clue what a chain of command was in any sort of military organization or even a civilian vessel. It’s not like the Johnny come lately just says oh man Captain’s dead I guess I’m captain now. Uhh didn’t Spock train him, and therefore probably outranked him at this point? Anyway it just seemed so poorly written and contrived that it completely broke immersion for me when I was already struggling with the plot.
Now that I’ve gotten all of that off my chest, I am glad that as an OG Trekkie you enjoyed it. I’ve noticed in clips I’ve seen from TOS that the show often had a much lighter, whimsical feel compared to the later films and I didn’t really absorb that because I didn’t watch the show, just the films. Maybe the writing and characters matched TOS better than I realized but I was coming at it with a skewed perspective because of what I had / had not watched.
I do agree the casting was pretty good though.
Edit to add: I think what bothered me most was I really like to see character growth and development and the trailer really billed the first movie as Kirk’s growth arc from irresponsible youth to captain. In the actual movie it was like here’s a random circumstance where you can sit in the chair with no substantial growth and now do action-y stuff. I was really hoping it would be more about the character change. I’ll stop now as this has become War and Peace.
At the time, liked it out of pure desperation for good sci-fi to exist again. As a whole, just a mediocre money-grab with the classic attempt to “appease all audiences” while abandoning the franchise with a parallel universe loophole.
