Ben wrote:
If you can't see that, and just enjoy the modern but retro Trek (unique in itself), then you have my pity in return.
I'm gonna call B.S. here...
A movie has several things it needs -- a) memorable characters; b) direction; c) script; and d) a logic to its universe.
I'm sorry, but this film is very lacking in the last three. It's questionable whether there's anything with much lasting impact or memorable beyond the death of a mentor.
That's sad because I felt something even from the worst Trek films with the original and TNG casts. No question those casts BOTH had charm, charisma, and their characters were together as a crew because they were genuine family. Not feeling it in 2013. This new film is made so utterly indifferent and with perfunctoriness that again I ask -- WHERE was all that production money spent???!??!??! Even with inflation figured in, Trek II was made for less than HALF This debacle and has at least 5 times the heart of this shipwreck. I doubt Trek II will dethroned as the height of the Star Trek series anytime; it's just as unlikely as the next Star Wars film being far superior to The Empire Strikes Back.
The attempt to redo the death scene from Star Trek II was a joke... The remade, requoted scene just lacked the urgency and real danger the classic film had. It's just a slavishly lazy and utterly deferrent to its alter-/REAL universe Star Trek predecessor. (Has NOBODY learned anything from Superman Returns????) That's one on the screenwriters, the actors who couldn't pull off an admittedly hackneyed script that would have been a challenge to Olivier(!), and JJ Abrams' style that seems to throw $h^t at the wall to see what sticks.
Nothing new to see here, folks. Just a lazy, inferior rehash of a far superior film. Again, see Bryan Singer's Superman Returns to figure out what you SHOULDN'T do with a relaunched film series.
Even before that, there's the lack of logic in the technology... Since when did the Enterprise become a submarine????!?!?!?!?
And why oh why do the nerds directing films today think that bigger automatically equals better?!??!?!? The size of the revamped Enterprise was ridiculous enough -- too wit on top of bouncing into the sky and screaming away like a English Electric Lightning(!) in half a second from the water -- but then there's another ship TWICE as big as this Enterprise built in secret????? You know I could tell you physically WHY half-mile long ship is a BAD idea and impractical but mile-long is even dumber! I normally avoid thinking about physics issues in science fiction movies but this just strains credibility way past the breaking point... It's just utterly dumb and thrown in because someone thought it "looked cool."
You know, I've learned in the past decade or so that even art done by the seat-of-the-pants has to have a certain logic to it and even that artwork follows some fundamental rules of color and composition. You don't just throw things in because "they look cool". It has to add something to the whole; there IS logic even in areas that seem utterly subjective. Again, not seeing that in this film...
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This is the worst scripting for a major film that I've witnessed in a LONG time... and this is not a particularly great era of writing in film, PERIOD. The guys who wrote the classics in the 1970s and 1980s have been put out to pasture or forced to retire, and even the writers of the best films in the 1990s and past decade are having a harder time. I can't believe that the likes of Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, and Akiva Goldsman are getting hired for such high level writing jobs on classic film and TV properties. Does nobody in management or production actually WATCH anything that these guys have written? A Beautiful Mind aside -- and Oscars get bought all the time; sorry, but that's real life, kiddies and the Oscars are just a multi-million dollar popularity contest like high school --, Goldsman has pretty much been toxic with every script he's done for genre film (the last two 1990s Batman live-action films, Lost in Space, and many others) and the other three guys aren't known for being anything but passable, either. I guess Hollywood's definition of quality is being on-time all the time regardless of the level of mediocrity of script and screenwriter. Nobody who actually has a clue how to tell an engaging story and WRITE memorable characters need apply!
I'd have to go back to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to find another genre film that's as remotely poorly written as this Trek film was. (Battlefield Earth????) At last that screenwriter had the excuse that he was also the director and that it was his first feature coming off of short films or music videos!
(Ed Wood is standing up in his grave and beginning to jump up and down with joy. He's no longer the worst screenwriter and Plan 9 From Outer Space officially has more screen logic than the best-known science fiction series in the US does now!)
I hate to think that this same crew of writers will be recruited by Abrams to write Star Wars Episode VII. The lens flares are already on the walls!
