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Star Trek- New movie and various series discussion

Smues

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I like the 2009 Star Trek less everytime I watch it. Did not have that problem with this one, fuck is it good.

In regards to our favorite plot hole
I just don't fucking know. Like I assumed the writers at least had an explanation in their heads that made sense to them as to why it had to be KHANNNNNNNNNN's blood, but I have no clue what it is. When they pull the first cryo guy out McCoy says he couldn't remove him without the problem sequence so I thought ah-ha that must be the flimsy reasoning. But then he pulls one of them out to put Kirk in his tube so I don't fucking know.
 

bps21

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I'll just move on and accept it as
Khan is the only one they tested the blood with so even though logically they should all work...they didn't have proof.
Movie is too entertaining to let it annoy me. ...but it did annoy me.
 

DrVenkman PhD

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Robocop was great in this. Also kind of neat to have two people who have voiced Batman in one film.

As for the above, that was the first thing my friend said and I just joked (but perhaps was serious!) that it needed to be fresh, not frozen.
 

2GOLD

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Crazy Smues in Space said:
Esurance has been running a contest to win free tickets. Everyday for the last month or so they give away 500 pairs of tickets, and they're giving away I think 15,000 pairs in total. You enter on Facebook every day and it tells you rightaway if you won. I entered almost everyday for the last month and never won, so we paid and went and saw it yesterday. Today the contest thing popped up on facebook again so I figured why not and entered. I won. I'm not going to complain about free tickets, but really? Ahh life. So we're seeing this again tonight. Hooray free stuff.

Thanks to Smues, the lady won. Saved me 24 dollars tomorrow!
 

2GOLD

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Take away the last 10 minutes and this was a great movie and I would have been fine with the ending.
With the ending, still a good movie but just left a sour taste in my mouth. Didn't hate it, won't be buying it.
 

Jingus

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Remember that great film blogger whom I shill on occasion? (And now that poor Ebert is finally dead, Tim Brayton is pretty much my favorite living critic.) Guess which movie franchise he just started a retrospective on. He's already done The Motion Picture and the two new remakes, and will be progressing through the rest over the next couple of weeks. He's also in the midst of a Ray Harryhausen retrospective and is about to start a summer-long marathon of obscure Canadian horror flicks, if you're into that sort of thing.
 

Edwin

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So, this was a movie.

It was okay. However, it pretty heavily chunked the wonderful wide open possibilities created by the 2009 movie for, yep, you guessed it, Khan. For a while in the middle there, I actually thought this movie was going to be something pretty great--if Khan hadn't been planning to kill everybody anyway, it would have been a lot more interesting, they could have worked the "preventing Starfleet from moving towards militarism" angle more, and you could have ended the whole thing with Kirk letting Khan and his crew settle far, far away on Ceti Alpha 5. That would have been enough fan service and taken the whole story in a different direction. Or, the Klingons. They certainly were way flatter than they should have been in their introduction to this series.

The terribly silly spin on the classic radiation scene from Wrath of Khan--and, of course, Quinto's ridiculous eye-rolling Khaaaaaaaaaaaaan--was pretty bad. The reason people love Khan and his story so much is that Nicholas Meyer built a great character. Woulda been nice for Abrams to try that himself rather than make it clear he's going "greatest hits" from here on out. Magic blood, by the way, is terrible.

Oh, and this was easily the gayest Star Trek movie. Had Kirk/Spock not been a slashfic pairing since the 70s, this definitely would have done it.
 

Laz

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Wait, you mean Abrams/Lindelof team is disappointing as storytellers? You don't say...
 

bps21

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ha...I picture Laz waiting patiently for someone to say something negative so he could post that.
 

Edwin

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I didn't even know Lindelof was involved in this one until the credits, but I should have guessed. Gross.

Oh, and that was maybe the most gratuitously framed chick in her underwear scene of the decade. Needed some male gaze to counteract all the MALE GAYZE
 

Laz

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More like "festering in a pile of Lindelof hatred," actually.
 

vivisectvi

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I didn't hate the movie, nor did I love it. It was just.. There. Something to watch. I will say that watching the Space Seed episode and then WOK right after is infinitely more entertaining.
 

bps21

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I watched both of those after as well. Wrath of khan is a goddamned masterpiece.
 

Edwin

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I slot this one right in the middle of the pack with Search for Spock and the Motion Picture. It's not 2/4/6/8/2009 good, but it's wayyy better than the terrible tier of Final Frontier and all the other TNG movies.
 

Jingus

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Why don't people count Search for Spock as one of the "good" ones? Yeah, it was probably the weakest entry in the mini-trilogy that 2, 3, and 4 make; but I'd still argue that it's a hell of a lot better than 1, 5, and maybe all of TNG's movies. (I like First Contact, but always thought it was a wee bit overrated.) And while Nemesis can go fuck itself in hell forever, I don't think Generations and Insurrection were so awful that they deserve comparison with the nothing-happening "funny" misery that is part 5.
 

2GOLD

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Yeah, that underwear scene made sense if it had been a quick glance shot. But holding the shot forever, they might as well started flashing the words SET PHASERS TO EJACULATE NOW on the screen.

This is one of those films that COULD and SHOULD have been great if they had not gotten so stupid and lazy with the ending.
 

Jingus

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Edwin said:
I didn't even know Lindelof was involved in this one until the credits, but I should have guessed.
You mean the guys who wrote a bizarre story (utilizing divergent timelines) which awkwardly tries to please the fanboys yet provides a dismally disappointing ending while derailing characters left and right while throwing in a ton of gratuitous action scenes and several tons of plot holes just MIGHT be the same team who wrote Lost? The hell you say, sir!


Finally saw this sucker. Found it pretty meh, didn't even like it as much as the 2009 movie. There will be SPOILERS ahead, the movie's been out for a month already. Various thoughts:

-Why the hell wouldn't the camera ever stand still? It was ALWAYS jumping, to the point where it looked like Michael Bay was in the director's chair. Too many of the fight scenes were damn near impossible to see.

-I dunno who these people named "Kirk", "Uhura", "Carol Marcus", and "Khan" are, but they sure as hell ain't the characters I know by those names. They weren't even trying to match how the originals looked, talked, acted, moved, anything. Ditto with these things they claim are "phasers", which suddenly turn into machine-laser-guns from the frigging Star Wars prequels; where are the damn vaporizations? Even the Enterprise was way too New & Improved for me, way too much of it was way too different from the classic model. And why do the Klingons suddenly look all different as well?

-Did the movie literally forget about the giant starship that crashed into downtown San Francisco? That was like a dozen 9/11's at once, but after it happens it's never even referenced again. And why bother inventing some new fancy warship when they could have easily just made it the Excelsior instead?

-Could they not think of anything for Chekov and Sulu to do?

-Some of you guys mentioned a couple of plot points that also bugged me. You're right, Kirk's Yo-Yo Promotions made no damn sense. And I was terribly disappointed when the movie decided to absolutely abandon any hint of moral complexity when both Buckaroo Banzai and Sherlock Holmes were all like "heel turn, I'mma kill you all!"

-The new transporter effect is way too gaudy and show-offy. They should've gone with something much more subtle.

-Kirk's death scene was a pathetic, pale imitation of Spock's death in Wrath of Khan. If they're gonna so blatantly rip off an original scene, they should at least try to match the original scene's quality. They did not. At all. Hammier acting, less elegant writing, and even shittier blocking on an inferior set. And it was totally sabotaged by how obvious they made it that Kirk wasn't really Dead-dead. Plus: the original worked so well because we knew the characters so well. This version of Spock and Kirk are barely even friends, let alone having the decades-long relationship which is needed to make the scene work.

-Can we have a single freakin' Trek movie without the Enterprise getting at least halfway destroyed? I'm kinda tired of watching phaser shots punch throw the saucer over and over again. And when the crewmen were all dying, how come the screams were mostly from crewwomen? It didn't seem like there were many chicks on this ship in the first place, but at least two out of three screams were definitely female.

-Hey writers, wasn't it a major plot point in Star Trek VI that Uhura CAN'T speak a word of Klingon? And seriously, end the fucking Uhura/Spock shipping already, it feels fake as hell and completely out of character for both people.

-Way too many close-ups. The whole thing was composed more like a TV show than a movie. Back the fucking camera up! And put it on a damn tripod while you're at it.

-Thinking back: why did anyone go to Cronos in the first place? What the hell was Khan trying to achieve there?

-If they fought in TOS, Spock would break Khan over his knee in about five seconds. The filmmakers apparently forgot that Vulcans are a LOT stronger than humans, no matter how genetically-modified they are. Speaking of which: how does "genetically engineered" somehow equal to "I've got the same kind of magic healing blood as the vampires in True Blood"?

-Why is the Enterprise always breaking down so badly? In the movies, it always takes one phaser hit to knock out the weapons, shields, engines, power, everything. And since when is the bridge's viewscreen actually a window?

-I am incredibly sick and tired of having the old "brilliant villain intentionally gets himself captured in order to destroy things from the inside" cliche trotted out in every single action movie nowadays. Joker, Bane, Loki, that guy in Skyfall, and now Khan have all done the EXACT same thing. Quit it.

-Since when is the Federation all like "we don't give a shit if every sentient being on that world died in horrible screaming lava-coated agony, you shouldn't have broken the Prime Directive! You're blocking their natural development if you don't let them go extinct!"

-The underwear shot was SO gratuitous that the filmmakers actually apologized for it.

-IMDB claims that Heather Langenkamp played some tiny nothing role and Bill Hader provided "additional voices". I find both of those very unlikely, albeit for different reasons.

-and finally: LEEEEEEEEEENS FLAAAAAAAAAAAAARES~!


Okay, that's a lot of bitching, now for the good parts. Lots of the acting was pretty damn awesome, especially Cumberbatch; he sure as hell wasn't playing the real Khan Noonian Singh, but this new stranger was a fairly intense villain himself. Karl Urban's impression of Deforest Kelley is still downright uncanny. The ensemble is more comfortable with their characters, and the chemistry and humor between them is pretty good. The new Warp Drive special effect is a thing of beauty. I liked some of the more subtle shoutouts to Harry Mudd, tribbles, Nurse Chapel, having James Doohan's son playing the transporter operator, and so on. I didn't hate it... but I certainly didn't love it either. If I wanna watch Wrath of Khan then I'll watch Wrath of Khan and not this johnny-come-lately pretender.
 

bps21

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Someone just quote that and put it in the books are out thread.
 

Precious Roy

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I'm almost done with season 4 of DS9 and there are some major badass episodes back to back late in the season. For the Cause and To the Death were like woah
 

Kageho

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You are making me want to watch DS9 again. Sadly, I don't own it and Netflix doesn't have it (WTF?!). Guess I'll need to do it that way.

Also, is it just me, or are the characters in DS9 more memorable? Just thinking about it, I can remember a lot more characters from DS9 than I do other Treks.
 

Precious Roy

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DS9 is my GOAT right now. I enjoyed watching TNG, but this show is next level.

I'll probably watch Voyager when I eventually run through all of DS9, but I can't imagine it being this good. Then again, that was my attitude going into DS9 so maybe I'll be surprised
 

Youth N Asia

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I liked the movie well enough. I'm not a Star Trek fan at all. So I don't have much nitpicking.

My only complaint about the movie was the media leading up to it.

So the bad guy in this movie, we can't say his name though, because it's a huge surprise and we can't give it away. Even though by saying this we are giving it away.

...you're basically saying it Khan then?
 

vivisectvi

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I don't even remember this underwear scene everyone is talking about..
 

Youth N Asia

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Tiger Style said:
I don't even remember this underwear scene everyone is talking about..

It wasn't that bad. The chick is in bra and panties for a second. She looked great, but when the scene moved I remember thinking "that's what the fuss was about?"

star-trek-lg.jpg
 

vivisectvi

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Ahh, okay. The part where she tells him to turn around but he doesn't. Yeah, it was inconsequential enough for me to completely forget about it, so I don't see the big fuss.
 

Edwin

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DS9 is so good. I'm finally working through it for the first time and am nearing the end of season 3. Way more consistent than even TNG, and only the Dax episodes ever really fall flat (and even some of those are good! But let us never speak of the phase-shifting planet of love again). It's a great ensemble and feels way more modern than any of the other Treks. You can really see Ron Moore getting himself geared up for what he really blew open with BSG when you get gritty, subtle stuff like Improbable Cause/The Die is Cast.

Also, I always thought Andrew Robinson was a pretty lousy actor, based on Hellraiser and Dirty Harry, but slap some Cardassian makeup on him and he's tremendous. Garak for president.
 

Precious Roy

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Quark does kind of a subtle heel turn in season 4. They start writing him less as charmingly unlikeable and more like "wow, this guy really is an asshole" , though he still has his moments of sympathy. The payoff to the Quark story p much needs to be him doing something insanely heroic and sacrificing himself for his friends. Hopefully that happens.
 

Jingus

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Jingus said:
Why don't people count Search for Spock as one of the "good" ones? Yeah, it was probably the weakest entry in the mini-trilogy that 2, 3, and 4 make; but I'd still argue that it's a hell of a lot better than 1, 5, and maybe all of TNG's movies.
I take it back. Upon a rewatch, The Search for Spock is worse than it should've been. There's a lot of high points, especially McCoy possessed by Spock, but the movie drags horribly in the middle. Way too much time is killed just wandering around Genesis and watching the completely uninteresting young mindless Spock growing. Even Christopher Lloyd's badassness as the villain (he was the first man to ever speak Klingon!) is dimmed when you realize that parts 2 and 6 did very similar villains and got much more out of them. Chekov and Uhura get fuck-all to do, and I'd add Sulu onto that list too if not for the fun "don't call me tiny" moment. The special effects also looked shabbier than in the other Trek films, like they had less money than usual.
 

vivisectvi

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-hqvzolm7zc
 
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