Star Trek: The Minority Opinion
May. 16th, 2009 08:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6So, yeah, I saw it.
And, on some levels, it was okay. It was a mildly fun popcorn movie with some nice moments and a decent idea or two in it, but some serious flaws. But the more I think about it, and perhaps especially the more I see the love thrown around about it in other reviews, the more I see the flaws, and that the good things were almost incidental. It also contains liberal appearances of my old nemesis. So, I have to do a rant on all the ways it failed, I'm afraid.
Major spoilers, of course.
I'll start off with my own Trek history and feelings about the movie, pre-movie. I believe I've watched every episode of the original Trek, some several times, but and all the movies, but it was only TNG where I really became a fan, and DS9 was my favorite of the series (Voyager and Enterprise being the worst). TOS I thought fondly of as having started it all, and it was a bit cheesy, but I liked it for that. It just didn't interest me as much as the others.
That said, I had no fundamental problem with the idea of either a 'telling of the first mission' story, a 'reboot', or even a full 'reimagininig'. The fact that it was set in TOS didn't interest me all that much, but I wasn't outraged about it, and when some of the first casting came in, it actually interested me. Then some of the later casting seemed so off and I kind of lost interest again, and never really picked it up again (although one or two of those I wasn't sure about turned out pretty well). The previews and such didn't help, not so much because they seemed like they were violating Trek canon (I'd heard for a while there was an explanation for it), but the ways they did so seemed so inferior. But I was willing to go into it with an open mind. Then I saw it.
Let's begin with what the movie did well, to start on a positive note. As I said, it made a reasonably fun action movie, with some nice effects, well paced. Most of the performances were either really well done, or 'decent enough'. Standouts of course were Quinto and Urban, the latter being one of the ones I was most unsure of.
I think the cast and the pace are the main reasons for the popularity. And not just the cast, the characters. Because every way I think about this, if this was NOT a Star Trek movie, if it was a generic action movie, with most of the same plot points and maybe even actors, but either the world had never heard of Star Trek and have this collective, even unconscious love and familiarity with them, or if it used different characters in the same roles, this would have been a cheesy lame SF action that was a complete failure.
So, let's move on to the failures:
Casting Failure:
There's only one of these. Well, one and a half. Simon Pegg as Scotty... well, I love Simon Pegg, but he never seemed either to make Scotty truly his own, _or_ to capture the essence of the original. But I give him points for trying.
No, the failure lies at the head. I did not buy Chris Pine as Kirk. At all. And it's not because he didn't imitate Shatner. It's because he never projected leadershipness that Kirk possesses, didn't have the swagger. This may in part be a writing/directing problem - this is a younger Kirk and so naturally he might not have been at his best, but given all that he was supposed to be doing in the movie, he had to sell it. As I said, if this _wasn't_ a Star Trek movie, for him to be in the Captain role, he would have come off as a stereotypical troubled (but smart), punk kid who somehow got assigned Captain of a starship. People follow him because the plot says so, people like him and stand up for him because the plot says so, and he seemed full of unearned arrogance and smugness. And original Kirk was certainly an arrogant, smug bastard. But Shatner made it work. You couldn't help but smile. When Pine tries it, he becomes the type of person I just want to punch in the face. The Kobyashi Maru scenario (I'll get to that again later), was the most egregious example of it. The guy playing Kirk Sr. would have done a better job.
Eric Bana as Nero also didn't really do much for me.
Continuity Failure:
Not as much of this as you might think. After all, it involves Time Travel, so most of the presumable outright 'errors' are explainable either as direct or indirect, butterfly-effect level consequences of Nero's ship arriving the moment of Kirk's birth.
There is some screwups with time travel itself (There's a whole timeline, in the future of TNG and whatever time Spock came from, in which the Romulans apparently didn't have their sun go supernova, and if it was a natural event, then, well, that shouldn't be), but I guess you could posit some time travel shenanigans neither we nor Spock saw.
Then there is the subtler screwups that wind up more tightly with plot failure, things like, if I'm not mistaken, there being no warp-capable shuttlecraft in Nero's time and so even with Kirk Sr.'s sacrifice, had he wanted to destroy the survivors (which he might, because otherwise, hey, wouldn't Starfleet want to come and INVESTIGATE THAT HUGE ANOMALY NERO WAS WAITING BY FOR 25 YEARS, WHERE HE HAD JUST DESTROYED A SHIP?) a ship from 130 years in the future would have found it easy to pick them off. And, for example, McCoy being part of Kirk's Kobyashi Maru test.
He's a doctor, not a command level officer. He should be in medical training. There's no reason for him to be on a test of command level decisions, friend of the guy taking it or not. Starfleet is set up in different divisions for a reason. There are a few more like this, but I'll go into more in the Plot Problems section. One I do have to get into is the Transporter-at-Warp-Speed-Distance. Even with Scotty having defined the right equations, the rest of the ST Universe has it that transporters are NOT interplanetary-capable. I believe at the time of TNG, transporter malfunctions aside, the limit was about 40,000 km. Not even Scotty could transport from one planet in the same system to another.
The Enterprise must have been travelling really, really, really, really, REALLY slowly for it to have been in range to transport there while it was at Warp.
The Not Actually Continuity Failure but I don't Like It Failure:
I freely admit this is sort of whining about them changing things that I liked, some
of which weren't even in actual continuity.
But, I'm ranting anyway, so I might as well indulge myself.
The Kobyashi Maru: Shouldn't have been invented by spock, that strikes me as the same lousy writing that leads to young Anakin Skywalker building C3P0, (and what's more,
that a character who strives towards rationality and lack of emotions would design a test supposedly designed to make the people taking it experience fear. It's a character test, but not one to make you experience fear, because a) it's a simulation and everybody knows it, so the biggest fear is fear of failing a grade, and b) if that _was_ the point, there wouldn't be much point in letting people take it more than once) but whatever, I can roll with it.
No, my problem was with the _way_ he cheated. It was so boring, so inelegant. He makes the ships not have shields. And, what's more, he tried to swagger it up, acting like a jackass who wasn't taking it seriously at all and pretty well telling people that he was either blowing it on purpose or had something outrageous planned. He acts, not like a Captain who's pretending he he doesn't know what's coming, but like a guy who knows he's going to win from the moment he fires. Young Shatner might have pulled off that swagger, but as I mentioned earlier, Pine does not. But let's get back to the Way. There was a novel called Kobyashi Maru, which dealt with the TOS crew's varying response to the tests (and a few other academy simulations... the best part of Sulu's story wasn't the KM test, but a game of 'Galactic Diplomacy', and Chekov had an awesome 'you're all stranded on this decommissioend starbase and one of you is an assassin. deal with it before he kills you' scenario). Anyway, in that scenario the way Kirk cheated was that when he hailed the Klingons to try to request their help, and he said he was "Captain James T. Kirk", the Klingon captain responded with, "Captain Kirk... _The_ Captain Kirk?!" (which made the bridge crew burst out laughing), and basically Kirk's reputation convinced the Klingons to help, offering aid in the rescue rather than attacking. Part of his justification (in addition to the 'I don't believe in the no-win scenario') was "By the time I'm Captain, I assume I _will_ have that reputation."
Star Trek: The Unbelievable Coincidence
Big change in timeline. And yet everybody in the series coincidentally winds up on the same ship, in the same position, on the first mission, even when it requires Chekov to be a 17 year old Starfleet officer, just in completely different ways than the original timeline.
Yeah. When one person gets their supposed, fated position through a sudden death in the line of duty, it can be cool. When everybody does? It's silly.
Edit: I think my biggest problem about it is that it's all so cheaply simplified. Before, Kirk was a dedicated officer, having served on several other ships before and made a name for himself, rising to become the youngest starship captain in Starfleet history. After? He's a hotshot who snuck aboard the Enterprise while he was suspended from the ACADEMY, got promoted in the thick of a crisis, due to the idiocy of its Captain, and wound up in charge, and, because he didn't entirely screw it up and managed to save Earth (but failed to save Vulcan), they let him keep the job. And worst? The stuff that _he_ actually did to Captain the Enterprise, as opposed to stuff he might have been ordered to do as a good officer, (like go on a rescue mission for Captain Pike and to disable Nero's ship from the inside), consisted pretty well of _one_ command-level decision: going to Earth and chasing Nero instead of following the fleet.
Likewise, instead of being a crew of mixed levels of experience, who wound up serving together on the Enterprise and becoming like a family... nope, that takes too long, and we can't have hot young actors. Let's make them all start out together and make the Enterprise their first ship! That's much easier. And, alas, more simplistic.
Lines of Dialogue That Sounded Cool But Failed
"How the hell did that kid beat your test?"
"I do not know."
Well, given how, above, he was pretty much telegraphing that he was cheating and wasn't worried about the enemy, and the computer glitched for a second and then all the enemy ships defenses were down, I'm going to say... HE CHEATED.
"Coming back in time... changing history, you know, that's cheating."
"I trick I learned from an old friend."
... uhm, SPOCK DIDN'T DECIDE HE WAS GOING TO COME BACK IN TIME AND ALTER HISTORY. He accidentally came back in time and made the best of the crappy situation.
"Now we've got no Captain and no First Officer"
That's why there's a chain of command, dummy. If both are gone, someone else takes over, highest ranking line officer. Even if you were going the "Pike assigned me as First Officer" loophole, it's still a stupid line.
Science Failures:
Trek has more than its share of wacky science, but _usually_ they got the basic science right, and their problems were more in making up magic particiles or radiation types that does whatever the plot required. This has that problem (see Red Matter), but doesn't even get basic science right.
SUPERNOVAS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. They do not threaten the galaxy. Unless it's the Romulan sun going Nova, it might have been _some_ threat to Romulus if it happened to be nearby, but it SHOULD NOT HAVE SNUCK UP ON SPOCK, or torn the planet apart. Light travels at a particular speed, and they should have had years of time to prepare. Now, if it was a surprise supernova of Romulus' sun (where they had some idea it was coming but not when), that _might_ work, but then you're left with the problem. Supernovas are Star Deaths. So, with Spock's solution of a black hole to divert the energy would have not only left Romulus with a black hole in its system, but also with a star that's pretty much dead. The planet might not have been destroyed, but it would probably need to be evacuated. And _whatever_ the case, unless he opened a black hole right at the star itself, the _most_ you could do is clear off a small section of the blast wave, the one that was going to hit a particular planet. If a black hole could absorb the energy from a star that has already exploded and threaten the galaxy? Then its attractive force must be enough to suck in the energy from all of its directions, and so threaten as much of the galaxy as the magic, sneaky supernova.
BLACK HOLES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY EITHER. Old Trek made enough errors on this account, so I'll grant this a pass. But it's modern, they really should be doing better.
SPACE DISTANCE DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY:
They showed Spock witnessing the destruction of his planet... IN THE SKY OF ANOTHER PLANET FAR AWAY. And it was HUGE. I mean, it was an effects problem (though there is a broader plot problem), but still, bad, BAD science. Scott's exile planet is both far enough away from Vulcan and Starfleet to be completely unsupplied by Starfleet and be virtually starving, but close enough that you can witness a planet being swallowed by a black hole.
Plot Failures:
Here's the big one. It contains liberal elements of my old nemesis, "Just So Writing". Where the _only_ reason things happen, against all rationality, is _JUST SO_ they get the results the writer wants. Damn sense making.
Say What? Magic Lightning? But that wasn't there: The big emergency at Vulcan, Kirk intuits it _must_ be the same thing that killed his parents, is based on the same description of a lightning storm in space. Except, that only happened because Nero's ship was coming back in time. After that, the only lightning storm in space might have been when Spock came back in time, and that would have been nowhere near Vulcan.
Pike's A Bad Captain: I mean seriously. Kirk is a Starfleet Cadet. On academic suspension. He has one good idea, that the same force is behind the current threat and the one that killed his dad. He has good grades and Pike liked his Dad. So, naturally, Pike must want to piss off his crew because of all the qualified people, he makes THAT guy the acting first officer, and Spock the acting Captain. I mean, if Pike survived and remained Captain, if I was a member of that crew, I would never want to serve with him again. That's a big Eff-You to the entire crew. He clearly thinks a cadet who's likely going to be thrown out is more qualified for that position than everybody else on that ship. Why does he do this? Well, of course. Just So Kirk can be in place to be Captain.
Why Are We Drilling Again, Instead of Dropping a Black Hole on them from orbit? Oh yeah, because it's Cooler!: I don't think I need to explain past the title. You've got a magic material that makes Black Holes. Now, I understand how this gives you an unfair advantage, so I guess you must want to compensate, and give everybody a chance to fight you off and destroy you while you throw a black hole in the middle of the planet, when it would do just as much damage (if not more) if you left it on the surface. But, you're pretty stupid.
I Know I Have A Disruptor, But I Really Felt Like Melee Today: By that same token, the mining crew are pretty stupid for climbing out of their interior and fighting hand-to-hand instead of shooting the boarders with their guns. Just So we can have a nice swordfight.
Ridiculously Over-Equipped with WMDs for the job: One drop of red matter creates a black hole capable of swallowing up a planet worth of matter. So, naturally they equipt Spock's ship with several gallons of the stuff. And although the ship must respond to a specific voice, the WMDs are completely unsecured. Just in case it falls into the wrong hands. Or rather, Just So Nero can be a threat.
Spock's a Bad Captain Too: First, if he didn't believe Kirk was a good first officer, since he's the Captain now, the first thing he should have done is promote somebodyelse to acting First Officer. Secondly, Kirk challenges him. So, naturally, the logical thing to do is not send him to the Brig, or confine him to quarters, but THROW HIM OFF THE SHIP ON ANOTHER PLANET. And not even 'at the nearest Starfleet Base'. But in the middle of a frozen wasteland where he might get killed, 14km away from the nearest base. Why? No good reason. Just So Kirk can meet Old Spock. It's not even a "I'm so upset my planet's been destroyed" kind of explainable reaction (I might have given it a pass if Kirk used that argument to prove Spock was being emotional). And, of course, on a planet of indeterminate size, coincidence of all coincidences he runs into the other person stranded there.
Oh yeah, Nero's a Bad Captain as well, and Bad At Revenge:
You want to make Old Spock suffer, want to make him watch the destruction of his home. So, naturally, the thing you want to do, once you capture him, is, not lock him up in front of a viewscreen, give him a nice, close-up view of the destruction. Not cripple him like you did Pike so he has no way of stopping it. No, you want to leave him on another planet, a planet with A STARFLEET BASE, a base he might use to get help or warn somebody what you're up to, while you go off and destroy the planet, which he _might_ see evidence of (assuming the planet is in the same star system, but Scotty's lack of awareness of anything else going on makes that seem unlikely), some years later. Why does Nero take this plan? No reason. Just So, again, Old Spock and Kirk can meet.
I mean, come on, writers, give me _something_. Say Spock managed to escape and beam down to the planet, and hide in some transporter-shielded caves, so Nero just said screw it, and leave him there.
By that same token, Nero sits and waits for 25 years for Spock, without being detected. Instead of doing something to, say, build up Romulus, give them some of your advanced technology.
They're VERY SLOWLY GETTING AWAY: Nero's got a ship from 130 years in the future. Chekov computes his course from his direction, enough to find a place to get a drop on him, and so he's clearly going in a straight line with no side trips. Despite all the advancements in Warp Technology (whereby they had to recompute the whole scale because otherwise they'd be travelling at ridiculous numbers like Warp 31), despite Spock going the _wrong way_, to meet up with the fleet for a while, and Kirk needing enough time to reach the Starbase on the planet with Old Spock, the Enterprise can still reach Saturn _before_ Nero's ship, _just_ by travelling at Warp 4. A leisurely walk. Just So the Enterprise can win. And of course, Spock must not have been travelling very fast in the Enterprise to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet either, because Kirk and Scotty could beam there easily. So Nero must have been going REALLY slowly. Great plan to make the Romulan empire the number one empire. Your heart really isn't in this plan, is it?
There are probably more, but those are the big ones.
Overall:
I really can't see the love people have, unless they're blinded by their love for the characters and seeing them portrayed well. Which I can completely understand, but it's not enough. Like I said, I don't think this movie would have done nearly as well if it was just Star Voyage, because without that connection to the characters (even for people who claim to not be Trek fans, it's permeated so much of our popular culture), the movie just falls apart (or of course those for whom any kind of zooming phasers and explosions is enough for enjoyment).
But, meh, people seem to like it. I can't. I also don't really get all the claims that this 'reinvigorated' the franchise. Oh, sure, it did phenomenally well. I'm sure they'll get at least 3 good, blockbuster movies out of it. Hopefully they'll be written a little better. And maybe that's all people want from 'reinvigorating the franchise'. But I still don't see how it helps long term. This relied on characters we know to succeed. Once the movie series is gone, we're left with either creating a new series that is unconnected to them, in which case you're up to the mercy of the same company that thought Enterprise was a good idea in terms of creating new characters to love and good, engaging stories. And, now that you have this altered continuity, you have a few different avenues to go, I suppose, but mostly you're going to be running the risk of retreading old ground. Kind of like the Ultimate Universe, particularly Ultimate X-Men where eventually they started doing their own take on different big stories, instead of going somewhere new.
I actually think, from an artistic and long-term-reinvigoration standpoint, instead of this alternate-timeline thing, a full, BSG-style reimagining might have been a better option. That way you could keep the core of it, don't have to worry about continuity problems, can recast various alien races with different looks or as metaphors for different ideas than they were in the past (maybe making Vulcans into some kind of benevolent cyborg race, having deliberately purged emotions, and the Borg as a future possible outcome of them?) and make things that are truly surprising.
I know some people feel that this would be disrespecting the old school fans, but I think there's a way to do it, to say, "You know, the original was great, and if we went back to it and did it completely faithfully, all we'd be doing is aping, poorly, the original (which is what this did), so we're going to go another way, explore it from a new angle, I hope you come along." In fact, although I'm not emotionally invested enough to really be bothered, if I was, I'd actually take the way it was done as a big Eff-You to the fans. You know all the stories you loved? Wiped out! Can't happen now! Now, I don't think that was the intent or the tone, and I actually think, as ways to alter the timeline and distinguish the movie from the original, the destruction of Vulcan was a good one and a clever idea, one of the few in the movie, but everything else was handled poorly that I can't even appreciate that. But just on a pure 'which is more disrespectful to the fans' level, I personally think explicitly wiping away all the stories (except, perversely, Enterprise, one of the worst of them) is more disrespectful than a reboot. It's kind of like, for comic fans, Brand New Day, which completely erased Peter Parker's marriage to Mary-Jane from continuity, vs. Ultimate Spider-Man, a reboot. The former says, "The stories you liked don't matter any more. They're no good for us, they were holding us back, forget about them, enjoy them and remember them fondly if you must, but as far as they're going to affect where we go from here, they no longer exist, and that's it." The latter says, "Those old stories? We loved them as much as you. They were great, weren't they? Here's my take on them, a little different at times, but I hope you enjoy them."
And say what you like about 'oh it still exists in an alternate timeline'. There's a reason why, when history is altered in Star Trek, the characters try to _right_ it, instead of assuming, "Oh well, different timeline, who cares.". Hell, sometimes they're in the present, something happens that lets them _notice_ history has been changed, and so they deliberately go BACK IN TIME to fix it. They don't say, "Oh, somehow I got stuck here, but oh well, my history exists in another timeline.". It matters. But granted Trek itself has been inconsistent on this front.
Like I said, I'm not especially worked up about it, I just think we would have gotten more new material, more room to expand, from a reimagining, and it could have been just as much a blockbuster.
In other news, I've got a cousin's wedding to go to today. Wish me luck. Well, not that I really need luck, but wish me luck in it not being a boring, awkward experience. I'm happy for my cousin, and at least there'll be food, but weddings are not my thing.
And, on some levels, it was okay. It was a mildly fun popcorn movie with some nice moments and a decent idea or two in it, but some serious flaws. But the more I think about it, and perhaps especially the more I see the love thrown around about it in other reviews, the more I see the flaws, and that the good things were almost incidental. It also contains liberal appearances of my old nemesis. So, I have to do a rant on all the ways it failed, I'm afraid.
Major spoilers, of course.
I'll start off with my own Trek history and feelings about the movie, pre-movie. I believe I've watched every episode of the original Trek, some several times, but and all the movies, but it was only TNG where I really became a fan, and DS9 was my favorite of the series (Voyager and Enterprise being the worst). TOS I thought fondly of as having started it all, and it was a bit cheesy, but I liked it for that. It just didn't interest me as much as the others.
That said, I had no fundamental problem with the idea of either a 'telling of the first mission' story, a 'reboot', or even a full 'reimagininig'. The fact that it was set in TOS didn't interest me all that much, but I wasn't outraged about it, and when some of the first casting came in, it actually interested me. Then some of the later casting seemed so off and I kind of lost interest again, and never really picked it up again (although one or two of those I wasn't sure about turned out pretty well). The previews and such didn't help, not so much because they seemed like they were violating Trek canon (I'd heard for a while there was an explanation for it), but the ways they did so seemed so inferior. But I was willing to go into it with an open mind. Then I saw it.
Let's begin with what the movie did well, to start on a positive note. As I said, it made a reasonably fun action movie, with some nice effects, well paced. Most of the performances were either really well done, or 'decent enough'. Standouts of course were Quinto and Urban, the latter being one of the ones I was most unsure of.
I think the cast and the pace are the main reasons for the popularity. And not just the cast, the characters. Because every way I think about this, if this was NOT a Star Trek movie, if it was a generic action movie, with most of the same plot points and maybe even actors, but either the world had never heard of Star Trek and have this collective, even unconscious love and familiarity with them, or if it used different characters in the same roles, this would have been a cheesy lame SF action that was a complete failure.
So, let's move on to the failures:
Casting Failure:
There's only one of these. Well, one and a half. Simon Pegg as Scotty... well, I love Simon Pegg, but he never seemed either to make Scotty truly his own, _or_ to capture the essence of the original. But I give him points for trying.
No, the failure lies at the head. I did not buy Chris Pine as Kirk. At all. And it's not because he didn't imitate Shatner. It's because he never projected leadershipness that Kirk possesses, didn't have the swagger. This may in part be a writing/directing problem - this is a younger Kirk and so naturally he might not have been at his best, but given all that he was supposed to be doing in the movie, he had to sell it. As I said, if this _wasn't_ a Star Trek movie, for him to be in the Captain role, he would have come off as a stereotypical troubled (but smart), punk kid who somehow got assigned Captain of a starship. People follow him because the plot says so, people like him and stand up for him because the plot says so, and he seemed full of unearned arrogance and smugness. And original Kirk was certainly an arrogant, smug bastard. But Shatner made it work. You couldn't help but smile. When Pine tries it, he becomes the type of person I just want to punch in the face. The Kobyashi Maru scenario (I'll get to that again later), was the most egregious example of it. The guy playing Kirk Sr. would have done a better job.
Eric Bana as Nero also didn't really do much for me.
Continuity Failure:
Not as much of this as you might think. After all, it involves Time Travel, so most of the presumable outright 'errors' are explainable either as direct or indirect, butterfly-effect level consequences of Nero's ship arriving the moment of Kirk's birth.
There is some screwups with time travel itself (There's a whole timeline, in the future of TNG and whatever time Spock came from, in which the Romulans apparently didn't have their sun go supernova, and if it was a natural event, then, well, that shouldn't be), but I guess you could posit some time travel shenanigans neither we nor Spock saw.
Then there is the subtler screwups that wind up more tightly with plot failure, things like, if I'm not mistaken, there being no warp-capable shuttlecraft in Nero's time and so even with Kirk Sr.'s sacrifice, had he wanted to destroy the survivors (which he might, because otherwise, hey, wouldn't Starfleet want to come and INVESTIGATE THAT HUGE ANOMALY NERO WAS WAITING BY FOR 25 YEARS, WHERE HE HAD JUST DESTROYED A SHIP?) a ship from 130 years in the future would have found it easy to pick them off. And, for example, McCoy being part of Kirk's Kobyashi Maru test.
He's a doctor, not a command level officer. He should be in medical training. There's no reason for him to be on a test of command level decisions, friend of the guy taking it or not. Starfleet is set up in different divisions for a reason. There are a few more like this, but I'll go into more in the Plot Problems section. One I do have to get into is the Transporter-at-Warp-Speed-Distance. Even with Scotty having defined the right equations, the rest of the ST Universe has it that transporters are NOT interplanetary-capable. I believe at the time of TNG, transporter malfunctions aside, the limit was about 40,000 km. Not even Scotty could transport from one planet in the same system to another.
The Enterprise must have been travelling really, really, really, really, REALLY slowly for it to have been in range to transport there while it was at Warp.
The Not Actually Continuity Failure but I don't Like It Failure:
I freely admit this is sort of whining about them changing things that I liked, some
of which weren't even in actual continuity.
But, I'm ranting anyway, so I might as well indulge myself.
The Kobyashi Maru: Shouldn't have been invented by spock, that strikes me as the same lousy writing that leads to young Anakin Skywalker building C3P0, (and what's more,
that a character who strives towards rationality and lack of emotions would design a test supposedly designed to make the people taking it experience fear. It's a character test, but not one to make you experience fear, because a) it's a simulation and everybody knows it, so the biggest fear is fear of failing a grade, and b) if that _was_ the point, there wouldn't be much point in letting people take it more than once) but whatever, I can roll with it.
No, my problem was with the _way_ he cheated. It was so boring, so inelegant. He makes the ships not have shields. And, what's more, he tried to swagger it up, acting like a jackass who wasn't taking it seriously at all and pretty well telling people that he was either blowing it on purpose or had something outrageous planned. He acts, not like a Captain who's pretending he he doesn't know what's coming, but like a guy who knows he's going to win from the moment he fires. Young Shatner might have pulled off that swagger, but as I mentioned earlier, Pine does not. But let's get back to the Way. There was a novel called Kobyashi Maru, which dealt with the TOS crew's varying response to the tests (and a few other academy simulations... the best part of Sulu's story wasn't the KM test, but a game of 'Galactic Diplomacy', and Chekov had an awesome 'you're all stranded on this decommissioend starbase and one of you is an assassin. deal with it before he kills you' scenario). Anyway, in that scenario the way Kirk cheated was that when he hailed the Klingons to try to request their help, and he said he was "Captain James T. Kirk", the Klingon captain responded with, "Captain Kirk... _The_ Captain Kirk?!" (which made the bridge crew burst out laughing), and basically Kirk's reputation convinced the Klingons to help, offering aid in the rescue rather than attacking. Part of his justification (in addition to the 'I don't believe in the no-win scenario') was "By the time I'm Captain, I assume I _will_ have that reputation."
Star Trek: The Unbelievable Coincidence
Big change in timeline. And yet everybody in the series coincidentally winds up on the same ship, in the same position, on the first mission, even when it requires Chekov to be a 17 year old Starfleet officer, just in completely different ways than the original timeline.
Yeah. When one person gets their supposed, fated position through a sudden death in the line of duty, it can be cool. When everybody does? It's silly.
Edit: I think my biggest problem about it is that it's all so cheaply simplified. Before, Kirk was a dedicated officer, having served on several other ships before and made a name for himself, rising to become the youngest starship captain in Starfleet history. After? He's a hotshot who snuck aboard the Enterprise while he was suspended from the ACADEMY, got promoted in the thick of a crisis, due to the idiocy of its Captain, and wound up in charge, and, because he didn't entirely screw it up and managed to save Earth (but failed to save Vulcan), they let him keep the job. And worst? The stuff that _he_ actually did to Captain the Enterprise, as opposed to stuff he might have been ordered to do as a good officer, (like go on a rescue mission for Captain Pike and to disable Nero's ship from the inside), consisted pretty well of _one_ command-level decision: going to Earth and chasing Nero instead of following the fleet.
Likewise, instead of being a crew of mixed levels of experience, who wound up serving together on the Enterprise and becoming like a family... nope, that takes too long, and we can't have hot young actors. Let's make them all start out together and make the Enterprise their first ship! That's much easier. And, alas, more simplistic.
Lines of Dialogue That Sounded Cool But Failed
"How the hell did that kid beat your test?"
"I do not know."
Well, given how, above, he was pretty much telegraphing that he was cheating and wasn't worried about the enemy, and the computer glitched for a second and then all the enemy ships defenses were down, I'm going to say... HE CHEATED.
"Coming back in time... changing history, you know, that's cheating."
"I trick I learned from an old friend."
... uhm, SPOCK DIDN'T DECIDE HE WAS GOING TO COME BACK IN TIME AND ALTER HISTORY. He accidentally came back in time and made the best of the crappy situation.
"Now we've got no Captain and no First Officer"
That's why there's a chain of command, dummy. If both are gone, someone else takes over, highest ranking line officer. Even if you were going the "Pike assigned me as First Officer" loophole, it's still a stupid line.
Science Failures:
Trek has more than its share of wacky science, but _usually_ they got the basic science right, and their problems were more in making up magic particiles or radiation types that does whatever the plot required. This has that problem (see Red Matter), but doesn't even get basic science right.
SUPERNOVAS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. They do not threaten the galaxy. Unless it's the Romulan sun going Nova, it might have been _some_ threat to Romulus if it happened to be nearby, but it SHOULD NOT HAVE SNUCK UP ON SPOCK, or torn the planet apart. Light travels at a particular speed, and they should have had years of time to prepare. Now, if it was a surprise supernova of Romulus' sun (where they had some idea it was coming but not when), that _might_ work, but then you're left with the problem. Supernovas are Star Deaths. So, with Spock's solution of a black hole to divert the energy would have not only left Romulus with a black hole in its system, but also with a star that's pretty much dead. The planet might not have been destroyed, but it would probably need to be evacuated. And _whatever_ the case, unless he opened a black hole right at the star itself, the _most_ you could do is clear off a small section of the blast wave, the one that was going to hit a particular planet. If a black hole could absorb the energy from a star that has already exploded and threaten the galaxy? Then its attractive force must be enough to suck in the energy from all of its directions, and so threaten as much of the galaxy as the magic, sneaky supernova.
BLACK HOLES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY EITHER. Old Trek made enough errors on this account, so I'll grant this a pass. But it's modern, they really should be doing better.
SPACE DISTANCE DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY:
They showed Spock witnessing the destruction of his planet... IN THE SKY OF ANOTHER PLANET FAR AWAY. And it was HUGE. I mean, it was an effects problem (though there is a broader plot problem), but still, bad, BAD science. Scott's exile planet is both far enough away from Vulcan and Starfleet to be completely unsupplied by Starfleet and be virtually starving, but close enough that you can witness a planet being swallowed by a black hole.
Plot Failures:
Here's the big one. It contains liberal elements of my old nemesis, "Just So Writing". Where the _only_ reason things happen, against all rationality, is _JUST SO_ they get the results the writer wants. Damn sense making.
Say What? Magic Lightning? But that wasn't there: The big emergency at Vulcan, Kirk intuits it _must_ be the same thing that killed his parents, is based on the same description of a lightning storm in space. Except, that only happened because Nero's ship was coming back in time. After that, the only lightning storm in space might have been when Spock came back in time, and that would have been nowhere near Vulcan.
Pike's A Bad Captain: I mean seriously. Kirk is a Starfleet Cadet. On academic suspension. He has one good idea, that the same force is behind the current threat and the one that killed his dad. He has good grades and Pike liked his Dad. So, naturally, Pike must want to piss off his crew because of all the qualified people, he makes THAT guy the acting first officer, and Spock the acting Captain. I mean, if Pike survived and remained Captain, if I was a member of that crew, I would never want to serve with him again. That's a big Eff-You to the entire crew. He clearly thinks a cadet who's likely going to be thrown out is more qualified for that position than everybody else on that ship. Why does he do this? Well, of course. Just So Kirk can be in place to be Captain.
Why Are We Drilling Again, Instead of Dropping a Black Hole on them from orbit? Oh yeah, because it's Cooler!: I don't think I need to explain past the title. You've got a magic material that makes Black Holes. Now, I understand how this gives you an unfair advantage, so I guess you must want to compensate, and give everybody a chance to fight you off and destroy you while you throw a black hole in the middle of the planet, when it would do just as much damage (if not more) if you left it on the surface. But, you're pretty stupid.
I Know I Have A Disruptor, But I Really Felt Like Melee Today: By that same token, the mining crew are pretty stupid for climbing out of their interior and fighting hand-to-hand instead of shooting the boarders with their guns. Just So we can have a nice swordfight.
Ridiculously Over-Equipped with WMDs for the job: One drop of red matter creates a black hole capable of swallowing up a planet worth of matter. So, naturally they equipt Spock's ship with several gallons of the stuff. And although the ship must respond to a specific voice, the WMDs are completely unsecured. Just in case it falls into the wrong hands. Or rather, Just So Nero can be a threat.
Spock's a Bad Captain Too: First, if he didn't believe Kirk was a good first officer, since he's the Captain now, the first thing he should have done is promote somebodyelse to acting First Officer. Secondly, Kirk challenges him. So, naturally, the logical thing to do is not send him to the Brig, or confine him to quarters, but THROW HIM OFF THE SHIP ON ANOTHER PLANET. And not even 'at the nearest Starfleet Base'. But in the middle of a frozen wasteland where he might get killed, 14km away from the nearest base. Why? No good reason. Just So Kirk can meet Old Spock. It's not even a "I'm so upset my planet's been destroyed" kind of explainable reaction (I might have given it a pass if Kirk used that argument to prove Spock was being emotional). And, of course, on a planet of indeterminate size, coincidence of all coincidences he runs into the other person stranded there.
Oh yeah, Nero's a Bad Captain as well, and Bad At Revenge:
You want to make Old Spock suffer, want to make him watch the destruction of his home. So, naturally, the thing you want to do, once you capture him, is, not lock him up in front of a viewscreen, give him a nice, close-up view of the destruction. Not cripple him like you did Pike so he has no way of stopping it. No, you want to leave him on another planet, a planet with A STARFLEET BASE, a base he might use to get help or warn somebody what you're up to, while you go off and destroy the planet, which he _might_ see evidence of (assuming the planet is in the same star system, but Scotty's lack of awareness of anything else going on makes that seem unlikely), some years later. Why does Nero take this plan? No reason. Just So, again, Old Spock and Kirk can meet.
I mean, come on, writers, give me _something_. Say Spock managed to escape and beam down to the planet, and hide in some transporter-shielded caves, so Nero just said screw it, and leave him there.
By that same token, Nero sits and waits for 25 years for Spock, without being detected. Instead of doing something to, say, build up Romulus, give them some of your advanced technology.
They're VERY SLOWLY GETTING AWAY: Nero's got a ship from 130 years in the future. Chekov computes his course from his direction, enough to find a place to get a drop on him, and so he's clearly going in a straight line with no side trips. Despite all the advancements in Warp Technology (whereby they had to recompute the whole scale because otherwise they'd be travelling at ridiculous numbers like Warp 31), despite Spock going the _wrong way_, to meet up with the fleet for a while, and Kirk needing enough time to reach the Starbase on the planet with Old Spock, the Enterprise can still reach Saturn _before_ Nero's ship, _just_ by travelling at Warp 4. A leisurely walk. Just So the Enterprise can win. And of course, Spock must not have been travelling very fast in the Enterprise to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet either, because Kirk and Scotty could beam there easily. So Nero must have been going REALLY slowly. Great plan to make the Romulan empire the number one empire. Your heart really isn't in this plan, is it?
There are probably more, but those are the big ones.
Overall:
I really can't see the love people have, unless they're blinded by their love for the characters and seeing them portrayed well. Which I can completely understand, but it's not enough. Like I said, I don't think this movie would have done nearly as well if it was just Star Voyage, because without that connection to the characters (even for people who claim to not be Trek fans, it's permeated so much of our popular culture), the movie just falls apart (or of course those for whom any kind of zooming phasers and explosions is enough for enjoyment).
But, meh, people seem to like it. I can't. I also don't really get all the claims that this 'reinvigorated' the franchise. Oh, sure, it did phenomenally well. I'm sure they'll get at least 3 good, blockbuster movies out of it. Hopefully they'll be written a little better. And maybe that's all people want from 'reinvigorating the franchise'. But I still don't see how it helps long term. This relied on characters we know to succeed. Once the movie series is gone, we're left with either creating a new series that is unconnected to them, in which case you're up to the mercy of the same company that thought Enterprise was a good idea in terms of creating new characters to love and good, engaging stories. And, now that you have this altered continuity, you have a few different avenues to go, I suppose, but mostly you're going to be running the risk of retreading old ground. Kind of like the Ultimate Universe, particularly Ultimate X-Men where eventually they started doing their own take on different big stories, instead of going somewhere new.
I actually think, from an artistic and long-term-reinvigoration standpoint, instead of this alternate-timeline thing, a full, BSG-style reimagining might have been a better option. That way you could keep the core of it, don't have to worry about continuity problems, can recast various alien races with different looks or as metaphors for different ideas than they were in the past (maybe making Vulcans into some kind of benevolent cyborg race, having deliberately purged emotions, and the Borg as a future possible outcome of them?) and make things that are truly surprising.
I know some people feel that this would be disrespecting the old school fans, but I think there's a way to do it, to say, "You know, the original was great, and if we went back to it and did it completely faithfully, all we'd be doing is aping, poorly, the original (which is what this did), so we're going to go another way, explore it from a new angle, I hope you come along." In fact, although I'm not emotionally invested enough to really be bothered, if I was, I'd actually take the way it was done as a big Eff-You to the fans. You know all the stories you loved? Wiped out! Can't happen now! Now, I don't think that was the intent or the tone, and I actually think, as ways to alter the timeline and distinguish the movie from the original, the destruction of Vulcan was a good one and a clever idea, one of the few in the movie, but everything else was handled poorly that I can't even appreciate that. But just on a pure 'which is more disrespectful to the fans' level, I personally think explicitly wiping away all the stories (except, perversely, Enterprise, one of the worst of them) is more disrespectful than a reboot. It's kind of like, for comic fans, Brand New Day, which completely erased Peter Parker's marriage to Mary-Jane from continuity, vs. Ultimate Spider-Man, a reboot. The former says, "The stories you liked don't matter any more. They're no good for us, they were holding us back, forget about them, enjoy them and remember them fondly if you must, but as far as they're going to affect where we go from here, they no longer exist, and that's it." The latter says, "Those old stories? We loved them as much as you. They were great, weren't they? Here's my take on them, a little different at times, but I hope you enjoy them."
And say what you like about 'oh it still exists in an alternate timeline'. There's a reason why, when history is altered in Star Trek, the characters try to _right_ it, instead of assuming, "Oh well, different timeline, who cares.". Hell, sometimes they're in the present, something happens that lets them _notice_ history has been changed, and so they deliberately go BACK IN TIME to fix it. They don't say, "Oh, somehow I got stuck here, but oh well, my history exists in another timeline.". It matters. But granted Trek itself has been inconsistent on this front.
Like I said, I'm not especially worked up about it, I just think we would have gotten more new material, more room to expand, from a reimagining, and it could have been just as much a blockbuster.
In other news, I've got a cousin's wedding to go to today. Wish me luck. Well, not that I really need luck, but wish me luck in it not being a boring, awkward experience. I'm happy for my cousin, and at least there'll be food, but weddings are not my thing.
