Star Trek into darknes

[Pawelk198604]

What do you think about this movie, I was on it in the cinema on release.

Recently I decided to re-watch,

What do you think of the main, villain Khan Noonien Singh?

I have to admit that even, sympathy for him, especially after he told to Kirk, "what do you do for you family"?

It seems that he was only about his companions, he cared about

[RogueMason]

Of course it was only his companions he cared about; he killed... let's say about 200 members of Starfleet (give or take) either directly or indirectly; bombing the Kelvin Archives, attacking Daystrom, and crippling the Enterprise. Bombing the Archives was a revenge attack, as was Daystrom, as he thought Marcus had killed his companions upon intercepting the torpedoes. Firing on the Enterprise was simply a display of his ruthless, cunning nature. Sure, Kirk helped him, but Kirk (and the crew of the Enterprise as a result) were just tools to Khan, nothing more.

And obviously, there was his surrender to Kirk and co. upon hearing that 72 torpedoes were loaded in the suddenly many tubes on board Enterprise (I'll never know where all those torpedo tubes came from...).

He's a complex character, that's for sure. The perfect villain, really.

If you haven't seen it, I'd suggest watching The Wrath of Khan. That's a good film, too (yes, I said 'too'; I happen to love the Trek remakes ).

[Raven.]

I remember watching the original six Star Trek movies when I was a kid, including Wrath of Khan in which Khan was played by actor Ricardo Montalban. Now granted, Benedict Comberbatch did an excellent job at playing Khan, but the best Khan rendition is most definitely the one played by Montalban.

Another thing about the newer Star Trek movies is that they miss an important element. In every single original movie, including Wrath of Khan, the Enterprise officers worked as a team in order to solve a problem. The newer Star Treks, their success seems to be based almost purely off of luck. Into Darkness and Wrath of Khan are glaring examples of this, as they contrast in how the good guys approach the villian; in Wrath of Khan they outsmarted Khan, in Into Darkness they beat him off of pure luck.

And obviously, there was his surrender to Kirk and co. upon hearing that 72 torpedoes were loaded in the suddenly many tubes on board Enterprise (I'll never know where all those torpedo tubes came from...).

That was another problem that I had with the movie, was the tampering with the ship design. The original Enterprise was not equipped with torpedoes; it was a gun ship that relied on its phasers. It was not until much after the five year mission that the original Enterprise was outfitted with two forward torpedo tubes just above the reflector dish (during the events of the first ever Star Trek movie). The Enteprise-A and B were the same way, only two forward tubes. The C, who knows, and the D had one rapid fire tube on the front, and then a rear torpedo tube. The Enterprise-E (the first true torpedo boat) was the only one that had enough tubes to fire that many torpedoes at once, and even those gave way to the much newer and much more powerful quantum torpedoes that Captain Picard spammed.

It does sadden me a bit that the Star Trek series is stepping away from its roots. It used to be that attention to detail, such as the torpedo tubes, and keeping to a ship's specification was very important. Now it seems as if they're tampering with the ship designs just so it matches with someone's script.

Edited March 29, 2014 by Raven.

[Pawelk198604]

Of course it was only his companions he cared about; he killed... let's say about 200 members of Starfleet (give or take) either directly or indirectly; bombing the Kelvin Archives, attacking Daystrom, and crippling the Enterprise. Bombing the Archives was a revenge attack, as was Daystrom, as he thought Marcus had killed his companions upon intercepting the torpedoes. Firing on the Enterprise was simply a display of his ruthless, cunning nature. Sure, Kirk helped him, but Kirk (and the crew of the Enterprise as a result) were just tools to Khan, nothing more.

And obviously, there was his surrender to Kirk and co. upon hearing that 72 torpedoes were loaded in the suddenly many tubes on board Enterprise (I'll never know where all those torpedo tubes came from...).

He's a complex character, that's for sure. The perfect villain, really.

If you haven't seen it, I'd suggest watching The Wrath of Khan. That's a good film, too (yes, I said 'too'; I happen to love the Trek remakes ).

I've seen all the movies from the Star Trek universe, the only one which i'm not like is the Star Trek Nemesis, because they kill Commander Data:(

[The Destroyer]

I've seen all the movies from the Star Trek universe, the only one which i'm not like is the Star Trek Nemesis, because they kill Commander Data:(

Dammit I haven't seen it! SPOILERS!

[vger]

Raven, but bugs me most about what is happening to Star Trek (yeah, ties in with your 'abandoning its roots' thing) is the loss of 'humanity.' When I was a kid, life was a war, more or less. The amount of backstabbing that constantly went on throughout my entire school life and on the street. It was insanity. BUT, there was this Star Trek thing, where camaraderie held importance, and instead of fighting for position, everyone worked together to achieve something greater. Star Trek was my only window into how a civilized society SHOULD behave, and it played its part in keeping me sane. Were that the Abrams Star Trek, what would I see? Spock, Trek's classic 'voice of reason' flipping out and beating the crap out of people at every turn.

It's pathetically easy to see why Star Trek got reinvented like this. Hollywood doesn't want to teach lessons anymore. They want us to feel like our CURRENT society is the perfect one, so more and more often, other worlds we see on screen are carbon copies of this one. Even the Smurfs film ended up happening in 'reality' instead of in its fantasy world, because the audience can't relate to it. With the Star Trek reboot... the plan was quite deliberate. In the original timeline, post-WWIII, Cochrin's Warp Ship attracts the Vulcans, and initiates First Contact. The Vulcans, a people who survived their primal era and developed a society that was mostly free of it. Taking humanity by the hand, they help us achieve a (mostly) peaceful space-faring civilization. Take away the Vulcans, and humans are left to evolve (or not, for that matter) with the same wasteful behaviors they've always had, but also in space. The end result is a society just like ours, but with cooler toys. Much more tasteful to the modern audience.

[Pawelk198604]

I do not like Star Trek 2009, because they destroyed Vulcan, hope in next movie Q pop-up from nowhere and fix all that mess, what JJ Abrams, did in first movie

[The Destroyer]

I do not like Star Trek 2009, because they destroyed Vulcan, hope in next movie Q pop-up from nowhere and fix all that mess, what JJ Abrams, did in first movie

At least I knew that one

[FenrirWolf]

Surprised you haven't seen Nemesis yet. I rather dislike the movie but any trekkie oughta see it just to know the story I guess.

[colmo]

Vger makes some excellent points - I was fortunate to be around when Star Trek reached its zenith, in the Next Gen and DS9 era - both tackled all sorts of heavy philosophical issues, often using scifi allegories - slavery, war crimes, sexual orientation, torture, religion, freedom of expression, due diligence in justice, racism....

Then we had the decline with Voyager and Enterprise.

The films have always been patchy, usually good every other one. I enjoyed Patrick Stewart's work, such as the Captain Ahab allegory, with the Borg as Moby Dick.

These films are a bit of fun (shame about the cringeworthy sexism, I refer you to the Honest Trailer by Screenjunkies) but it's tough to have a deep story in an action movie - TV is a superior format in that case. I hope the next one tries something different to get a bit more meat into it.

[Raven.]

Vger makes some excellent points - I was fortunate to be around when Star Trek reached its zenith, in the Next Gen and DS9 era - both tackled all sorts of heavy philosophical issues, often using scifi allegories - slavery, war crimes, sexual orientation, torture, religion, freedom of expression, due diligence in justice, racism....

Then we had the decline with Voyager and Enterprise.

The films have always been patchy, usually good every other one. I enjoyed Patrick Stewart's work, such as the Captain Ahab allegory, with the Borg as Moby Dick.

These films are a bit of fun (shame about the cringeworthy sexism, I refer you to the Honest Trailer by Screenjunkies) but it's tough to have a deep story in an action movie - TV is a superior format in that case. I hope the next one tries something different to get a bit more meat into it.

Well, with that being said, before Star Trek can return to its roots and begin to have a deep story again, it has to return to a TV show format versus making another movie. In fact, I think there's even talk of it among the recording studios. However, I hope that if another TV show is made, that they don't make it into a drama show.

[vger]

If Paramount really wanted to give Star Trek an extra dose of action, all they needed to do was make a TV show that focused on a Klingon ship. That would've allowed for all the primal urges anyone could ask for, without tearing the original CANON to shreds.

[Pawelk198604]

If Paramount really wanted to give Star Trek an extra dose of action, all they needed to do was make a TV show that focused on a Klingon ship. That would've allowed for all the primal urges anyone could ask for, without tearing the original CANON to shreds.

TV series about Klingons that would be something cool , but it's just a dream, which unfortunately never fulfill:(

[LaydeeDem]

If Paramount really wanted to give Star Trek an extra dose of action, all they needed to do was make a TV show that focused on a Klingon ship. That would've allowed for all the primal urges anyone could ask for, without tearing the original CANON to shreds.

The canon is still intact. The Abrams movies are set in an alternate universe.

See this flowchart I made:

And who cares about the canon, JJ Abrams retconned basically every single law of physics in that film.

Edited March 29, 2014 by Nutt007

[dr_jt]

Of course it was only his companions he cared about; he killed... let's say about 200 members of Starfleet .

200 hundred members of Star Fleet? Big deal. What about the thousands if not tens of thousands in the buildings that broke his fall.

[PTNLemay]

[[ Spoilers ]]

Despite the fact that the orbital mechanics of it made no sense, I did really like when the Enterprise lost power and started plumetting down to Earth. I liked it because it illustrated that one oh-so rarely used trope in sci-fi, "in space there is no up or down". When the ship starts tumbling and they lose inertial dampeners we see the crew getting tossed around like beans in a tin can. One moment they're walking along the ceilings, the next the whole hallway becomes a deep pit with people falling down to their deaths. This would have also worked fantastically in a hard-SF story (without inertial dampeners) where the ship might have to jank hard in lots of crazy directions to evade missiles. The crew would be trained in crazy parkour skills just to avoid breaking all their bones as the ship would be forced to pull multiple Gs in random directions.

They pulled a similar golden hard-SF moment in the 2009 film, when a bulkhead gets ripped open during the attack on the USS Kelvin and for one brief shining moment as the crewmen are blasted into space, we hear actual silence in space. SILENCE, in space! In a pop culture hollywood blockbuster. Never would I have dreamed that I would see the day.

Oh, and the warp core was really well done too. http://i.imgur.com/GrrArhU.jpg

Edited March 30, 2014 by PTNLemay

[Dispatcher]

I'm an Abrams TV show fan. No real spoilers follow, but if you think you've spotted one, just skip to the next post. The Star Trek-hurry-it-up-with-that-franchise-continuation-into-the-21st-century movies approach has been rather lackluster to me. Sure, glitzy special effects (and an Enterprise with what looks like a hydroelectric dam's 20th century components in the engineering section) is OK (yeah, that lighting in your face on the bridge regardless of direction you look is special). As others have pointed out, physics got tossed out of the air lock. For me, even the casting of the antagonists was strained, at best. And hey, the difference between aliens and humans is the surface area of their tattoos.

OK, they were fun to watch once, in the theater. But since I also like to buy DVDs, that's just more cash for movies I want to actually keep.

[*Aqua*]

I don't like the Kirk actor. Just five minutes of his 'awesome being' convinced me to never every give him any important job. When he's not smiling like a <insert insult here>, he punches into others faces or freak out, while talking to Spock or just get punched. All the time. Is there a scene except for the first one where he doesn't have bruises all over his face?

Who with a common sense would give this guy a ship and the responsibility for hundreds of men?

The new Star Trek movies were just 'brain off, movie on'. That's not Star Trek.

[vger]

I'm an Abrams TV show fan. No real spoilers follow, but if you think you've spotted one, just skip to the next post. The Star Trek-hurry-it-up-with-that-franchise-continuation-into-the-21st-century movies approach has been rather lackluster to me. Sure, glitzy special effects (and an Enterprise with what looks like a hydroelectric dam's 20th century components in the engineering section) is OK (yeah, that lighting in your face on the bridge regardless of direction you look is special). As others have pointed out, physics got tossed out of the air lock. For me, even the casting of the antagonists was strained, at best. And hey, the difference between aliens and humans is the surface area of their tattoos.

OK, they were fun to watch once, in the theater. But since I also like to buy DVDs, that's just more cash for movies I want to actually keep.

You can make Star Trek realistic. They tried it with ST: The Motion Picture. A LOT of the sluggish nature of that film can be attributed to an attempt to make it feel more like what we knew space travel was really like (which we didn't have much footage of when TOS originally aired). But, the Enterprise in that film looks more impressive than any other. Under impulse it moves like a ship of such size should move. It just feels big. As time went on throughout the film series, it became more and more like jet-fighter combat, with maneuvers that would tear such a massive ship apart.

Abrams more or less tried to turn it into Star Was (which is probably why Disney hired him to make Star Wars).

But couldn't we find a happy medium between the two extremes? Combine Star Trek with, say... Gravity?

[PTNLemay]

But couldn't we find a happy medium between the two extremes? Combine Star Trek with, say... Gravity?

The reason for a long time against making sci-fi too realistic has been budget limitations. Everything, the environments, the movement of the ships, the aliens, the more realistic you make them the more complex they are (and thus more expensive they become). This is becoming less and less true with time, as CGI becomes so much more powerful. Unfortunately a lot of the first attempts at using this CGI-heavy approach at sci-fi story-telling have been... not great. Elysium, After Earth, Stargate Universe as well. They all seem to try and take a hard SF approach but really just fall under bad "gritty realism". Avatar, Moon and District 9 I would say were better and more successful at selling the notion, but again those didn't please everyone.

I would also classify Inception as a good hard SF space film, just because the way those sets were moving would have worked SO WELL in a micro-gravity environment. Having ships tumbling while evading missiles or whatever, it would have looked a lot like the inside of that hotel.

[Raven.]

Ah Inception, now there's a movie worth watching over and over. Too bad we can't get Christopher Nolan to direct a Star Trek movie/show for us .

[pebble_garden]

I do not like Star Trek 2009, because they destroyed Vulcan, hope in next movie Q pop-up from nowhere and fix all that mess, what JJ Abrams, did in first movie

I totally agree. A Trek without Vulcan is like Middle Earth without elves. Pffft. And don't get me started about how Spock sees the destruction of his homeworld from a completely different star system as if it were as near as a moon.

When I saw the 2009 reboot I loved it at the time (with some reservations). But the longer I thought about it, the less I liked it. Mainly because I felt Abrams had less than zero comprehension of the science fiction concepts he was working with. That, and he admitted to hating Trek as a kid, so of course he wasn't coming to the franchise out of a love for the material. It was just a job to him and a chance to mark Roddenberry's territory as his own (in my opinion).

[CaptainKipard]

I'm a huge Star Trek fan. To me TNG is the epitome of what Star Trek should be. I watched both the reboot films, and I don't remember a whole lot about them. They were that memorable. Utter crap. I never watched TOS, so I don't know, but was Kirk really always such a goofy git? Why are reboots often so pathetic?

[vger]

I'm a huge Star Trek fan. To me TNG is the epitome of what Star Trek should be. I watched both the reboot films, and I don't remember a whole lot about them. They were that memorable. Utter crap. I never watched TOS, so I don't know, but was Kirk really always such a goofy git? Why are reboots often so pathetic?

Reboots are often pathetic because niche marketing is no longer common. The most important age demographic has dwindled down to being nothing but teenagers - the age group that is easiest to swindle. If you're not a teenager, you're not the target audience for practically anything. This is the same reason R and NC-17 films have become much more rare, whereas a couple decades ago, they made up the majority of blockbuster films.

Kirk? Depends on your definition of goofy. He was goofy in TOS, but definitely not in the same way. Shatner's melodramatic portrayal of Kirk is quite infamous. TOS also has a lot more light-hearted humor in it though, which explains a lot. If you don't mind that, and get past how much the show has aged, you should be able to enjoy it. For me it's my 2nd favorite, right behind TNG.

[CaptainKipard]

Reboots are often pathetic because niche marketing is no longer common.

OMG, you are so right. It just hit me. The Spiderman franchise has suffered for the same reason. Remember when nerds were the outcasts? Peter Parker appeals to that demographic, but in the latest reboot he's portrayed as a douchey hipster.

Edited March 30, 2014 by Cpt. Kipard