Speed_Gibson

Good for an yet altnernate universe story, but I was far from impressed and was hoping (but not expecting much) for a story that would actually fill in details from the TOS characters backstory and fit nicely with the series. I would give it 1.5/2 out of 5 mainly for visuals and excellent character portrayals.

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ratbastid

Karl Urban fucking channeled DeForest Kelly. Zachary Quinto didn't once make me expect he was going to saw anyone's head open with his finger (though his vulcan salute needs work--evidently they superglued his hand into position for that shot). Simon Pegg is my fucking hero.

A few technical things:

Spoiler: First: You don't build a starship on the FUCKING GROUND. You build a starship in orbit. The first Enterprise was built at San Fransisco Shipyards, in earth orbit. Most other ships (including all of the major ones from the Next Generation-era shows) were built at Utopia Planitia, which orbits Mars. I know this reboot doesn't necessarily hold to "canon", but just logistically, how the hell are you going to build this thing on the FUCKING GROUND?? Gravity just makes it that much harder. You really want to do the work to heave the damn warp nacelles up in the air to attach them? I don't think so.

Second: You go through a black hole once, you time travel. You go through a second time and you're destroyed. N-kay.

A matter/antimatter explosion will NOT squirt a starship out like a watermelon seed. Sorry.

Willravel

Spoiler: The ship on the ground being built in Iowa as Kirk stares longingly wasn't necessarily the Enterprise. IIRC, they build the prototype of each class of ship on Earth because it's not simply an assembly line type of operation. It could have been the USS Constitution, which was launched in 2244, a year before the Enterprise was built in orbit at the SF Fleet Yards. Kirk was in Starfleet for 3 years.

The black hole essentially negated warp drive as it was warping space the same way a warp drive might, so they needed a more traditional method of propulsion. Also, if you remember from Star Trek Insurrection, ejecting the core and detonating it is the ultimate dues ex machina in the Trek Universe. It can literally do anything you need it to do.

dohrk

Spoiler: I took it that the attacks from Spock's ship and the Enterprise really messed up the Narada, but the red matter made the Narada into the black hole, consuming the ship in much the same way Vulcan was consumed. Being destroyed by the singularity rather than flying through it.

But that's just my take.

ratbastid

Spoiler: I still take issue with it. No starship builder in their right mind would even assemble a prototype at the bottom of a gravity well. It just makes no sense--in earth gravity, you've got to build a structure to withstand gravity. You're not building a ship, you're building a building.

Deus ex machina irritates me even when the ancient Greeks do it. Spoiler: Never mind that you can't fly through a singularity and survive. It's Trek-consistent, but it's bad science. There's no "flying through". Whatever passes the event horizon is consumed and never heard from again. Even information can't escape.

Oh also: Spoiler: I wanted the Spock/Uhura romance explained by a change in the timeline too. I liked it, but it's a pretty significant alteration of events, and I would have liked some sort of hint of how that happened, when there wasn't even a whiff of it in the "original" timeline.

Don't get me wrong, I really REALLY enjoyed it. And on some level it wouldn't be Star Trek without technical quibbles about the science of the thing.

Wrexify

Having never seen ANY Star Trek films before this one, I thought it was really good! I've always been a Simon Pegg fan and I thought he was great. How did his Scotty hold up for you die hards?

Looking forward to the next one...

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ratbastid

Very VERY well. He didn't mimic Jimmy Doohan the way Karl Urban did DeForest Kelley, rather he made Scotty his own, and imbued him with a youthful energy and exuberance that was just excellent. You can totally see the older-and-mellower Scotty from the series evolving out of Pegg's character. Scotty was one of the highlights of the film.

Willravel

Spoiler: Voyager landed on a planet several times. I'm not saying that a Constellation class of ship would regularly be landing, as they have transporters and shuttles, but in an emergency it makes sense to have that basic ability. Sure, we're talking about a few million metric tons of pressure on the bottom of the ship (presumably), but it's the future, damn it!
Spoiler: Well the black that Spock and the Narada went through wasn't simply your run of the mill singularity, it was a singularity that was also gobbling up some special kind of supernova. The normal physical laws may not have applied under the special circumstances.
Spoiler: It's entirely possible that Spock and Uhuru did have a relationship before the original events of TOS, but because Spock ended up choosing his Vulcan side eventually they broke it off some time before the 5 year mission. They may have been on track to break it off in this alternate reality, but the destruction of Vulcan and the introduction of old Spock lead Spock v2.0 to embrace his human side more may lead him to embrace a relationship with a human, not to mention the heart to heart he had with Sarek about Sarek's love for Spock's mother may have lead him to understand that one may supplement a life without emotion with a deep love for a hot human woman. I myself plan on bagging myself a hot human woman in the future.

ratbastid

I'm ditching some spoiler tags on things that aren't actually spoilers.

The only time the Enterprise was on a planet that I can think of was the saucer section crash landing in Generations. Voyager is a much different class of ship--my assumption is that Enterprise was never built for landing.

Spoiler: Not if you ask a physicist. I mean, yeah, you can do the Trek sciency handwaving thing, but... I get tetchy about any scifi that has anybody "fly through" a black hole. You're stretched infinitely thin along the axis that runs toward and away from the singularity quite a while before you actually hit the event horizon, for one thing. And I don't mean space-time bends with you in it: you're PHYSICALLY squeezed and stretched. Unsurvivably so.

Spoiler: Well, sure, something like that. I'm just wishing the movie had given us that, rather than us having to make something up. It's the only character-based loose end they left loose.

I didn't realize until the ending credits that Damon Lindelof produced on this show. JJ brought a bunch of LOSTies over, didn't he? I recognized the score as Michael Giacchino, who Abrams uses on everything. I wish there had been a little more nodding to the original soundtrack and sfx. The few times they did that were great.

Willravel

I dunno. If I were building a space-ship, I'd design it to land in an emergency, but that's just me. And the ship is friggin huge, which would make landing it very difficult even with super propulsion.
Spoiler: If I'm remembering the comic correctly, the real noddle-scratcher is the exponential supernova that destroys Romulus. The Hobus star went nova, but when it came into contact with other matter, such as asteroids, planets and other stars, it somehow converted their matter to energy. Which is insane. That's not how science works at all. Basically, all I'm saying is that until we understand what the heck was going on with the Hobus star, we can't speculate to the physical forces involved in the Narada and the Jellyfish time traveling.
Agreed.
I almost hate to say this, but the soundtrack was really poor. I adored Giacchino's score to Alias, and his scoring for The Incredibles demonstrated that he was ready for full movie scoring, but Star Trek was really, really bad. It was distracting. I know that not one person alive today could really reproduce the level of quality that Goldsmith brought to the franchise, but Dennis McCarthy would have been just fine. I know JJ Abrams likes to carry around his posse with him, but he shouldn't assign his people rolls they're not able to fill.

YaWhateva

I like Neil Tyson's explanation that the gravitational forces at your feet is a lot stronger than the forces at your head and those tidal forces pretty much bisect you over and over again until you are basically a stream of atoms heading towards the singularity. that would suck...haha

Maybe that loose end will be tied up in future movies?

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Lucifer

Didn't Nurse Chapel always have the hots for Spock in TOS?

and while I love a good geek out on your sci-fi theory as much as the next nerd, I think you guys are going a little overboard on the whole "black hole as time travel" phenomenon. Especially when you consider that Warp drive is a theoretical impossibility according to Einstein.

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Willravel

Yep. I wonder if we'll get to see a new incarnation of Nurse Chapel in the next Star Trek film.

SirLance

I enjoyed the hell out of it. You always had a sense that Scotty had some rough edges, and this let them come out. Made much more of his personality than previous editions.

Star Trek has always been about the story, and this was a fun story, and well told.

---------- Post added at 04:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:26 PM ----------

If I'm not mistaken, Majel Barrett did the voice of the computer in the new film, just before her death.

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Willravel

I mean a gorgeous, blonde haired, fair eyed, lieutenant junior grade nurse that develops a deep infatuation for Mr. Spock (and friendship with Uhura... that'd be interesting in this incarnation) but moreover really adds a different dimension to the cast.

dohrk

If my inner geekslopedia remembers correctly, the whole reason Roddenberry had a transporter was planet landings would be too expensive to film.

Lucifer

yeah, but that was in the days before CGI when everything was held up on wires

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fresnelly

I liked that it was a surprise without much explaining. The audience is supposed to be in Kirk's shoes here and we have to accept it just like Kirk did in that little scene in the Transporter room.

Moreover, I think it was a tonge-in-cheek salute to all the trek "Slash" fan fiction that's out there.

You know what small detail I really liked? The sound the ships made when they hit warp speed: BOOM!

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Lucifer

I liked that the ship had an actual throttle to go to warp! Gives new meaning to putting the hammer down!

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Frosstbyte

I was very pleasantly surprised. Excellent job casting, a good story, well acted. I'm not an enormous ST nerd, so I can't say much for authenticity or where this will put them going forward, but my wife and I would definitely see more voyages of this starship, Enterprise.

Vaultboy

I tohught it was a better watch than Wolverine, and an acceptable refhreshing of the Franchise. The cast was ok, and Karl Urban was excellent. I rate him as the best thing about the reboot.

Things that bugged me:

Spoiler:
1. The time-travel storyline. Ever since Brannon Braga started Star Trek down this road , the Franchise lost its appeal for me. If you want to do an alternate universe plot, why not just do one? Why feign continuity whilst at the same time erasing it?

2. THe "ship in a lightning storm" effect. Ok, nevermind the whole black hole becoming a wormhole thing, I felt as if this was purely a vehicle for making the Narada more impressive. Also just to serve as a hook so that Kirk could "save the day" by making the "ship in a lightning storm" link to the destruction USS Kelvin when the description came in of the threat to Vulcan.

3. On the above note, why would the ship appear to be a lighning storm a second time? It didn't exit the singularity again. And why didn't Spock's ship have the same effect when it emerged? Again, I felt that this was just to make the Narada more impressive.

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ratbastid

Woah. Right.

Willravel

Spoiler: The original universe still exists, it wasn't erased. The comic shows the Enterprise E still in space after the Narada and Jellyfish were pulled into the past.
Okay, you've totally nailed this one on the head. Massive, massive plot hole. The only possible way this works is if Spoiler: the Narada was pulled back into the singularity while fighting the Kelvin, and it was the same singularity that happened to pop up at Vulcan, essentially exchanging one massive plot hole for another.

Vaultboy

THat's too much of a stretch, Willravel. Its just poor writing. What makes it worse is that its only purpose (as I see it) was to make the Narada more impressive, and to give Kirk a "hook" to show some leadership.

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Lucifer

didn't spock pop out of the wormhole at Vulcan?

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Vaultboy

Spoiler: Spock emerged the second time yes, but it was not at Vulcan. It has to have happened a bit before, as there was enough time to capture, interrogate and offload him before the attack began. But on that point: His ship was not engulfed in lightning: he just popped out of the wormhole. This is in any case no reason for the Narada to be engulfed again.

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Charlatan

Spoiler: The lightning could be explained in that it has something to do with the ship itself and nothing to do with the singularity. Nero modified the ship Borg technology and went around killing and assimilating other ships before confronting Spock and getting sucked into the black hole.

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skyfire

Spoiler: When theyre flying off from the shipyard it pans under the nacelle and you can see the registry of 1701.

Willravel

Oh. I missed that. Welp, can't fill that plot hole.

skyfire

I will say that I was very pleasantly surprised. I thought they did a really good job with the movie. I just wish the musical score was better.

Willravel

Amen to that. Did you like the score to Star Trek Generations?

skyfire

It was definitely better than this movie's.

PulpMind

Just saw this... great movie! Not sure about how I feel about it as part of the Star Trek universe, what with all the massive plot holes... but damn it's a fun movie!
Could of used about 10,000 less lens flares. I liked the camera shake, but some of my friends were annoyed by it...
Also, could have used a little more explenation as to how the time-travel paradox in the plot was possible. I think if any viewer's understanding of time travel was limited to Back To The Future they probably could have used a little more info on multiple universe theory...

CinnamonGirl

So...I'm a Star Wars girl. I've seen a handful of episodes (TOS and TNG mostly), but never really got into Star Trek.


Saw the movie tonight... and wow. Granted, I know minimal backstory, but I thought it was pretty amazing. I think we have a new convert over here

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Vaultboy

That's clutching at straws, i reckon.

Spoiler:
1. He didn't confront Spock. Spock was late in arriving to neutralise the Supernova. Nero admitted that his ship was just a mining vessel prior to his mission of vengeance. Therefore there was no "pimp my ride" mission prior to the singularity that was triggered when Spock neutralised the Supernova.

2. If you are alleging that he went on a pimp my ride mission during the 25 years he waited for Spock to emerge, then is in itself inconsistent. It could explain the second lightning storm, but not the first.

3. Admittedly, in the beginning of the movie we are led to believe that the storm is an effect generated by the ship, but this is later explained away. I.e. poor writing.

---------- Post added at 05:06 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:55 PM ----------

Despite my gripes, I wholeheartedly endorse this as the second best trekkie film ever made. Patrick Stewart agrees, and even gives some advice from the future on tackling the Narada:

[COLOR="DarkSlateGray"]

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Willravel

No, the ship was outfitted before the events of the movie.

m0rpheus

Personally I'd say third best. Nothing beats Khan and I really love First Contact (sadly the only good Next Gen movie).

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Charlatan

The comic book series that sets up this film shows how Nero upgrades his mining vessel into a war vessel. He uses Borg tech to start and then whatever he can salvage from the ships he defeats.

I think it's quite plausible that the weirdness of his tech causes the lightening storm effect.

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Willravel

I don't know how I missed it the first time; Montgomery Scott killed Porthos trying to demonstrate transwarp transporters. Fucker.

Lucifer

No, he lost Porthos demonstrating long-range transporters. He didn't kill him, Porthos just hasn't rematerialized anywhere.
Pussy.

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