10 Ways that JJ Abrams Ruined Star Trek

[Mike OTDP]

My point is that science fiction demands internal consistency. TOS had it in spades. One trick Roddenberry used was transposition...would the action make sense today?

For example...the Enterprise is about to get rammed by a Klingon warship. The script has Kirk get up and hug a terrified (and pretty) yeoman as they face certain death. Move the action to the present: USS Little Crappy Ship is about to get rammed by an Iranian speedboat on a suicide mission with a ton of TNT. The CO leaps to his feet...does he hug a pretty yeoman? Hell, no! He fights his ship, pitifully armed as it is, the best he can.

And the script gets rewritten.

[Yogimus]

Science fiction =/= science fantasy.

The new abrams movies are fantasy. You may object to that, and that is a valid complaint, but you can't hold them to science fiction standards.

[Kommander]

Science fiction =/= science fantasy.

The new abrams movies are fantasy. You may object to that, and that is a valid complaint, but you can't hold them to science fiction standards.

I like how you have worded this. At a certain point these "science" stories are no more science based than Lord Of The Rings, but at least the fantasy guys are honest about it.

[Yogimus]

Not my phrasing.

http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star ... r-trek-09/

[Jericho941]

I love a good action movie.

The Star Trek reboot wasn't a good action movie. It wasn't even really an action movie. It was more like being forced to watch someone's 2002 cellphone video of a rave where nothing happened for two hours. It's clear they don't care if you know what's going on, there's a lot of flashing lights, everyone you can see is some kind of asshole, and afterward you're left wondering why the hell you agreed to put up with this nonsense.

I never bothered with the second one, but every time I see someone complaining about it, I'm left wondering what they expected. They saw the first one, didn't they? Everything they hate about the second was in the first.

[Aesop]

It was a good movie and a good reboot, but it was far more loud drama and lens flares than actual action.
But it wasn't Rodenberry's Star Trek, which for the hardcore came as a rude shock as it was the entire point of a reboot rather than chapter 11 of a dead letter. Nimoy and Paramount killed off everyone else forever, not least of which because they all want too damn much money, which (obviously solely from Paramount's perspective) cuts into the studio's rampant profiteering without gambling on or investing in actual fresh creative output.

Let's all recall that George Lucas' entire film career has been to direct exactly four feature movies (the last one three times in a row). Nonetheless, he sold the farm and is now a retired billionaire.

Paramount wasn't making Star Trek by the 12th outing the way Roddenberry imagined it 50 years ago, and more than MGM/UA are making Bond movies the way Ian Fleming imagined him 60 years ago. Nor should they.
I daresay my Big Mac is a little different than the burgers Ray Kroc was selling for the McDonald Bros. in 1960.

[Jericho941]

Yes, Star Trek was well past "stale" by the time they decided to reboot it. By making Star Trek Wars. That's fine. The problem is that they rebooted it with a plot that made zero sense, no likable characters, or for that matter, a single character who could consistently pass the Turing test; the action was almost as shakeycam'd to nonsense as the Transformers movies, only with the added bonus of lens flare.

It was loud, obnoxious garbage, and I really wonder why people weren't expecting more of that with the second one.

[Aesop]

Once is a data point, twice is a trend.

Abrams' flaw seems to have been alienating audiences from the character everyone liked or rooted for (Kirk), and making this all about the overarching obnoxious aspects of the character they tolerated (Spock) - while simultaneously eliminating every bit of charater, or any purpose on having them, from every other member of the crew, and destroying any complementary aspects of Kirk and Spock. Even Roddenberry figured out in the very first film that Spock as the eternal emotionless stick-up-his-ass pointy-eared computer with legs wasn't going to fly any more, esp. on the big screen. It didn't even survive half of that very bad movie.

It's like giving people a choice between steak and beer, or finishing all your vegetables and brushing your teeth. And no dessert.

At the end of the reboot, Kirk came out of top, so they forgave all the prior nonsense, and wrote them off as youthful flaws overcome by the end of the movie.

With Into Darkness, it's like nothing in the reboot ever happened, and Kirk spends most of the movie taking it in the pants every way but literally.
It's like the Nightly News with Al Gore and John Kerry forever, explaining to you all the ways you suck, and they hate you.
On top of that they spend the entire movie undermining the entire idea of Starfleet and the Federation, and making you root for the villain Khan.
At least in Skyfall, you understood that the villain was doing what he was doing because he was batshit crazy, not a righteously avenging angel.

This would be like Disney coming out in Star Wars VII and making the Jedi a bunch of religious fanatic galactic Taliban, and showing us the Sith were really the freedom fighters all along, and give us back Emperor Palpatine!
If they tried to pull that, the studios would be firebombed opening week.

Paramount evidently couldn't see past the dollar signs to notice how much Abrams' success with the reboot was failing in saga 2.0 (and how could that happen, because Sequelmania!)

[dfwmtx]

Well, there was that one point in "The Last Temptation of Anakin Skywalker" that Yoda proved his true calling was Jedi master and not grief counselor, and basically said Annakin should be happy about the impending death of [strike]Padamomy Pandabear[/strike] Padme because she'd return to being a bunch of Force mitichlorians which are at one with the universe in their proto-consciousness of something. It made Palpatine's offer of possible immortality understandable. But I doubt most noticed or cared. Nope, Lucas started screwing that pooch by insisting the Force has scientific base instead of being a hokey religion.

But no one screws the pooch enough on remakes to turn the fans away. It's like the reaction is "It was fucking HORRIBLE! But don't take my word for it; go pay and see how horrible it is for yourself."

[Kommander]

This thread that I read somewhere that the Star Wars sequels need to be either awesome or awful. If they are awesome then we will all have an awesome movie to enjoy. If it's awful then that's three more movies geeks can get their hate on about, Red Letter Media can deconstruct, and Rifftrax can riff. If they are just ok then the whole thing will be kinda boring.

Since good movies are hard to make I vote for the latter option.I want 9 hours of Gunguans, Ewocks, whining, and sand. I want the expanded universe thrown under a bus, rebuilt with cybernetic limbs, and then thrown under the bus again. I want the protagonists to be a romantically entangled Jedi Hutt and one of those flying space Jews. I want Boba Fett to kick EVERYBODYS ass.