Star Trek: The Next Generation in HD

I just read that Warner/DC Comics is publishing a Star Trek(original crew)mini-series where their Universe crosses over to the 31st Century DC Universe...and Kirk, Spock and crew meet the Legion Of Super Heroes. Interesting crossover idea, if they can pull it off. Remember, we're talking about comic books here, NOT the movie franchise!!!

 

I think Superman can beat up Spock.

 

I swear, if I see Kirk putting his boots back on next to Saturn Girl...

 

Oh, I dunno: a group of brave crewmembers overcoming impossible odds; a formidable enemy who might even have a good reason to hate them; crewmembers who have to overcome personal issues in order to work together; a pompous leader who somehow has the gravitas to earn the respect of everyone around him and win the fight. (I think I just described about 250 films.)

You forgot the J.J. Abrams Cool Lens Flares®. A few of those I can handle; once they get over a hundred, my eyes glaze over.

I hated the whole "let's change the entire Star Trek universe as we knew it and just kill all the Vulcans." That felt like p!ssing into the punchbowl by the writers.

 

It'd never happen...she's telepathic, remember?

 

The Original Crew also encountered The X-Men. TWO Dr. McCoys.

 

The only thing I didnt really like about the Trek movie was the Romulans. As soon as they and Bana's character came back on screen the movie just went flat. I don't know why. They just didnt seem to work.

 

Wow, my friend you are really giving this latest movie a free pass!!

You were not bothered at "all", by Kirk literally going from a know nothing at all, no experience in space, "Cadet", to an actual ship "Captain" in what amounted to simply a few hours of time?

There were literally dozens of things that not only made no sense, but were strictly written just for the story to move on quickly. And im not even getting into the time travel thing, that at times in trek is hard to fathom in some ways.

Im talking simply bad writing mistakes and plot issues, that they didnt even catch on a huge super budget movie!!

Rewatch the Engine room sequences. They were literally shot in a beer brewing facility, and have no explanation as to why they have tons of cast iron pipes and valves and so on.

WTF was up with that?? A futuristic space going ship, with Tons of pipes and boilers and valves and stuff that are very clearly 20th century beer brewing items

 

Nope not bothered, it's just a movie and it didn't molest me in any way like it appears to have done to you.

As for the pipes and water, well maybe running massive warp engines creates a lot of heat. It's not easy to dissipate heat out into space when you have no atmosphere to help. Yep even though space is very cold its not that good at absorbing heat. So maybe you have to have massive internal water cooling to cope.

There you go I don't have a science degree but that sounds a fairly good reason.

 

That goes against everything ever mentioned about warp drive and impulse engines, but uh it sounds....uh....sorta good.

I was not molested, more like saddened that a "proper" Trek, is probably out of the question now, and all we have to look forward to is Starship Troopers, and Star Wars clones.....oh well.

Trek did have a long good run.

 

It did indeed and brought a lot to the table over the years. Sure there was some bad stuff but generally the quality was pretty good to excellent.

What I always thought would be cool would be to have a Firefly type plot in the Star Trek universe.

A motley group find in deep space an abandoned/lost Constitution class starship (Motion picture style) and then totally modify it to what they need, dual warp cores (never understood why you would only have one if you are so vulnerable without and they are never that large), cloak, grey area weaponry, lot of mass stripped out to make it more agile etc.

Chased after by the Federation and other groups.

Kind of show the more seedy side of the Star Trek universe. It cant all be clean jumpsuits and replicators for everyone?

 

It seems to me that a key element of Star Trek was in (aspiring to, whether or not we agree now if it did) presenting a successful society where people have or endeavor to work out better ways (than we) handling given problems (which reflect current issues). That is something I don't see a new Star Trek aspiring to do.

Not to quite disagree with daglesj, a seedy side might have been interesting but not in harmony with the core focus of Star Trek. Of course there's probably a way. For instance, perhaps there was a terrible war or other wide-scale calamity which leaves people in difficult circumstances; the drama and action might center upon the aspirations to continue and maintain a good society/Federation against the challenges of making do with recycled ships, poorly trained, seedy or eccentric people willing or having to fall in with Starfleet, etc.

 

Location managers are aware of buildings like this, so when they needed a large room with a lot of pipes and valves, they figured, "eh, just shoot it at the Budweiser plant." I believe that's also where they shot some of the open for Laverne & Shirley, so Paramount has a history with that place.

They also shot some exteriors at a big electrical plant in Long Beach. Even with a $140 million movie (like the 2009 Star Trek), it's not an unlimited budget. They can't build every set they want, and I think Abrams' philosophy was to have real sets whenever possible, as opposed to just shooting people in a big green screen stage and compositing in a digital background.

To me, the character and story issues are a lot more troubling than the set. I still enjoyed the movie for the most part, and I thought the casting was very good, but the changes to the Star Trek mythology bothered me on certain levels.

No less than former Trek writer David Gerrold has said a major issue with the Star Trek shows was that Gene Roddenberry refused to allow any crew member to be less than honorable. Famously, Gene claimed for years that Harlan Ellison's original script for "City on the Edge of Forever" had Scotty selling drugs on the Enterprise, which of course was not true. Harlan did have a new crew member we had never seen before giving somebody drugs, but at the time (1967), trust me, soldiers in Vietnam were using drugs on occasion, and Ellison basically saw the Enterprise crews as soldiers -- subject to the same flaws, bad judgement, and mistakes everybody is. They rewrote the show, but the core story was good enough that it's still remembered as the best episode of Star Trek ever filmed -- a judgement Roddenberry also stated on many occasions.

Sometimes, the flaws are what make characters interesting -- not their nobility, their intelligence, or their grace under fire.

 

Deep Space Nine did touch on some of these issues; with the Maquis and the Bajoran/Cardassian conflict (as established in some of the later TNG episodes). "In The Pale Moonlight" was an excellent episode dealing with the potential corruption of Starfleet's core values in the midst of a war.

Keep in mind that this is not just throwing away Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek and starting fresh. Yes, it's a reimagining of Star Trek from a different production team from the Roddenberry/Justman/Coon originators, but a lot of that is also reflected in-universe with the alternate reality nature of the story. Orci/Kurtzman/Lindelof/Abrams worked to include the so-called "Prime Universe", with the inclusion of Spock "Prime" and his backstory (also contained in the "Countdown" comic miniseries, which, in a break from tradition, is considered canonical by the production team).

I will admit this first film did rush to place the characters at status quo, more or less, by the end of the first film, but we'll see just how well this cast and crew have a handle on Star Trek in this second film, free from the expositional and establishing "buddy flick" nature of the first.

 

Yeah and you can also point to all the plot flaws in "Hamlet". Let's look at "North by Northwest". Dumb plot points, silly action scenes but it WORKS.

This guy seems to feel that a story needs to reflect "real life" in terms of logic and how the storytelling is done. Many films use storytelling conceits to set up the story and conflict.

Many of his points by the way can be answered simply but it's a movie and designed to just be plausible enough to entertain the audience.

 

Trek fans do enjoy finding ways to piece together the often wildly divergent films and shows into a coherent timeline; that said, "First Contact" and "Wrath Of Khan" are two of the most successful and best Star Trek films and yet you'll still see Trekkies poking holes in them large enough to fly a shuttlecraft through.

 

Oh, I hate reimagining. Let's face it, it's just p!ssing in the punchbowl. "How much can I change a classic movie or TV show, and add a buncha stuff just to show people how creative I am?"

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman joked for years about all the stuff in North by Northwest that made no sense. Why kill a guy from a biplane in the middle of a Kansas cornfield? Why not just drive by and shoot him in the head? Why kill a guy by forcing him to drink a bottle of Scotch? Why not just shoot him in the head? Why chase a guy around Mount Rushmore? Why not just shoot him in the head? A lot like that goes on in this film.

But I agree, a classic like this works fine. As Hitchcock has said, "well, by the time the audience realizes it makes no sense, they'll be leaving the theater at the end of the picture, and we'll already have their money."

The problem is when you remake somebody else's idea, and then throw stuff in that seems arbitrary and silly. Spock and Uhura are fooling around? The planet Vulcan has blown up? You have old Spock meet young Spock, and young Spock is about a foot taller? Come on.

In the case of Next Generation, I think they tried some interesting ideas, they spent an awful lot of money (the biggest-budgeted syndicated show ever, up to that time), and had some brilliant actors like Patrick Stewart, and it worked very well. I never got into the show very much, but I recognized it was generally well-liked and very successful, and I don't have a problem with that. At least it tried to go in a slightly-different direction from the old show, without slavishly imitating it, and I think that worked pretty well.

 

Never even paid any attention to it. You must be more of a Trekkie than you let on.

 

You didn't see the final 10 minutes of the J.J. Abrams film?



I think Zachary Quinto is well over 6 feet, but Leonard Nimoy is considerably shorter.

 

Saw it twice in the theater, where I probably should have noticed such things.

 

I have met both Nimoy and Quinto and thought they were pretty close in height so I looked it up on IMDb pro

Leonard Nimoy

Profession: Actor / Director / Miscellaneous Crew Known for: Star Trek / Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home / Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Also Known As: Leonard Nimoy / Leonard Nemoy / Frank Force more » Awards: Nominated for 4 Primetime Emmys. Another 7 wins & 7 nominations more » Salary: $500 (last reported) Born: 26 March 1931, USA (age 80) more » Height: 6' 1" (1.85 m)

Zack Quinto

Profession: Actor/ Producer/ Writer
Known for: Star Trek/ Margin Call/ What's Your Number?
Awards: 4 wins & 12 nominations more »
Born: 2 June 1977, USA (age 34) more »
Height: 6' 1" (1.85 m)


Nimoy is 80 so he probably has shrunk an inch but they are not that different in height. I thought this was by far the best match between the old and the new. Chris Pine certainly is four or five inches taller than Shatner

 

I saw the 2009 Star Trek movie at the theater, all the while trying to keep an open mind (I've been an ST fan since the late 70s), since I knew the two original casts from the 60s and the 90s were um....getting on in years...and the franchise did need some "freshening" to bring in new fans, but left the theater rather disappointed. Disappointed mostly because it didn't contain the aspects you listed in the last paragraph of your post. But never did I think it was badly written, or that the SFX were cheezy or the acting was bad (though I really do not like stories that involve time travel, no matter what franchise it involves - too many paradoxes to deal with!).

But a few weeks ago the movie was playing on FX and I watched it again.....and liked it much more this time (and will be buying on Blu-ray). I supposed that happened because I watched the show simply as something to enjoy and wasn't comparing it to anything else.

I hope the people responsible for the ST franchise used this movie as a way of attracting the attention of newer and especiallly younger potential fans and using it to announce a new direction for ST and will eventually include those elements Kevin listed. Because IMO those elements are what made the all the various preceding ST series so successful and long-lived. If they don't, then it's just another movie series with loud explosions & clever jokes and one I won't be watching.

 

I'm afraid the next film will make "Generations" look like Shakepeare...

 

I've also met and worked with them both, and neither are near their IMDB height. Don't believe everything you read. The biggest surprise for me is Shatner's voice -- he still sounds very good, though he gets out of breath easily. Nimoy has a very hard time getting around these days (understandable -- both are close to 81.) [Heck, I was stunned to find out I was close to Sylvestor Stallone's height, and I'm not a tall guy. Lotta heels and hair going on there.]

I don't think they can get into something that deep and philosophical in a 2-hour mass-market film. The TV shows were able to play out different elements over a long period of time, and that gave the overall stories a lot more weight.

As it was, I think everybody back in 2009 was relieved that the movie wasn't horrible. It could've gone terribly wrong. You ever see Star Trek V: The Final Frontier? Holy mother of god, that's one of the worst movies ever made! Not just the worst Star Trek... one of the worst movies, period. At least the J.J. Abrams films was in the "OK, not great" category.

 

Another complaint about the 2009 movie: there still aren't seat belts on the chairs on the bridge! The inertial dampeners have been known to fail ya know, the result being the captain and his underlings being tossed all over the place during supernova shockwaves and Borg onslaughts. Come on Paramount, let's get this glaring safety issue fixed!