Internet How Star Trek [2009] should have ended.

[Zatnikitelman]

Ok, first, if you haven't seen JJ Abrams' Star Trek movie, turn back now, there probably will be spoilers. I'll start the rest of this topic a number of lines down to hopefully save anyone who didn't want to be spoiled.













Ok, first, why am I posting this here? Simply put, I'm not active on any SciFi forums anymore and it's at least related to spaceflight and I just wanted to talk about this, so here we go.

If you're a fan of SFDebris, you probably heard him echo similar thoughts. To be clear, I had thought of this before seeing his review of the movie. The idea is simply this, instead of Kirk being promoted directly to Captain after his 3 years at the academy, we instead see him highly decorated for his actions, and commissioned as an Ensign while one of the characters stands behind him as the room applauds. The reason I put it this way is to imply that one of the major characters has requested he be assigned to their department or vice versa. Then, each promotion would come about a year after the last in a montage.

For this first one, I picked Sulu. When he's decorated and promoted again to Lieutenant Junior Grade, this time Chekov joins Sulu behind Kirk.
Then Uhura joins on promotion to Lieutenant.
Then Scotty joins the group on promotion to Lieutenant Commander.
Then McCoy joins when he's promoted to full Commander.
Then finally, when Kirk is promoted to Captain and takes command of the Enterprise, Spock joins the group as Kirk accepts him to the position of first officer, thus completing the group and beginning their odyssey.

What do y'all think?

 

[jedidia]

I think ilogical promotions are the least problem with that movie :lol:

 

[Urwumpe]

I think ilogical promotions are the least problem with that movie :lol:

I think that "Starship Troopers" has the best solution for illogical promotions. :lol:

 

[RisingFury]

Warp drive, red matter, black holes, space planet drills, time travel and planets exploding... and your problem is illogical promotions?

 

[Kyle]

I actually really liked Star Trek 2009.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Dude, it's Star Trek. ANYTHING's possible.

 

[dbeachy1]

Regarding the ending to Star Trek 2009 my first thought was: "How about leaving the area of the new newly formed red-matter black hole that is currently crushing the Romulan mining ship instead of hovering there and pointlessly firing weapons at it?"

I liked Star Trek 2009, but the ending where Kirk very nearly got the Enterprise destroyed just to pointlessly fire weapons at an already-doomed Romulan ship irked me rather a lot. If Starfleet operated like a real military organization Kirk would have been up on charges for needlessly endangering his ship and crew with that ZOMG LOOK AT MY EPEEN stunt.

The ending would have been much more palatable to me (and dramatic) if Kirk had tried to escape from the black hole's gravity right way and became trapped anyway instead of hovering there throwing rocks at the Romulan ship like a schoolboy and becoming trapped because of that delay.

 

[Izack]

Apparently, in the reboot, the Prime Directive has been replaced with "There's No Kill Like Overkill."

 

[ISProgram]

It was pretty good, in my opinion.

The only part I had a problem with was when that drakoulias thingy tried to eat Kirk on Delta Vega, but that huge hengrauggi-thingy comes out of nowhere (that was especially funny) and kills it. Instead of trying to eat that thing, that hengrauggi decides that it wants to chase down Kirk and eat him instead, and is especially tenacious in that regard, only to be spooked off by an old man with fire.

Now, predators normally try to avoid risk when hunting for prey, so exactly why that hengrauggi kills the more savage drakoulias and decides to go after the still alive Kirk, who is actually smaller than the drakoulias and thus constitutes less energy if he were to be eaten a opposed to the drakoulias.

After a lot of tenacious chasing, some of which could have potentially risked injury to it (including falling down a slope), the hengrauggi finally catches up to Kirk, almost eats him, but then has some fire waved in its face by the old Spock. The fact that the fire was what scared him off was sensible, I mean logical, but that it happened after all that was annoying.

But that was just my thoughts.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

I figured that Kirk was blasting away at the Nerada to destroy it rather than risk it showing up again several movie down the road (I mean really, wasn't once enough?).

I've read about multitudes of brevet promotions in naval/military history, but to jump up 6 notches on the scale is ridiculous. I mean, Chekov has legitimate authority over Cadet Kirk at the start of the movie (and Chekov was a teenager!), then Pike goes and make Kirk acting first officer. Seriously!? Where was the Cheng (Chief Engineer) for all of this?

Still though, I was OK with the movie, it was Trek and I'm a trekker... Even with all the flaws it was miles and miles better than Starship Troopers (if not for the hopes of a wardrobe malfunction involving Denise Richards that entire movie was totally un-watchable). I don't think I've even seen a book so butchered in order to bring it to a big screen.

 

[Andy44]

Star Trek 2009? No such movie exists. It never happened.

Also, Star Wars episodes 1-3 never happened, either.

Neither was there ever a fourth Indiana Jones movie.

 

[Pipcard]

There are also only 151 Pokémon.[/sarcasm]

Purism is one of my pet peeves.

What if I told you, that when I was a Trekkie, I liked both TOS and Abram's Trek, and thought that both versions of the NCC-1701 were cool?

 

[Andy44]

Purism is one of my pet peeves.

What if I told you, that when I was a Trekkie, I liked both TOS and Abram's Trek, and thought that both versions of the NCC-1701 were cool?

People think I hate movies like ST2009 or Armageddon because I'm a Trek purist (I kind of am) or because I believe in real science and like to see it in movies (which I certainly do).

But they're wrong. I hate these movies because they suck for basic movie reasons. The scripts suck. The plot sucks. The pacing sucks. The characterization and acting suck. Even the special effects are awful because they look fake. Really expensive, computer-generated, and fake. Even the music score and the way it's edited into the film is bad. Cinematography, too (lens flare, anyone?)

I hate them because they are just bad movies.

(Okay, because the science is super-unbelievable as well...)

---------- Post added at 11:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:15 PM ----------

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbJ-y6BWfUc"]Star Trek: How It Should Have Ended - YouTube[/ame]

 

[Pipcard]

I'm not a critical movie watcher (I rarely watch movies anyway) so I can't really tell if a script or plot "sucks", unless it's obviously bad. As for the score, this is amazing:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMu5jP2-c5U"]"Star Trek" Soundtrack - Enterprising Young Men by Michael Giacchino - YouTube[/ame]

As to hating CGI because of it being CGI, I've got two words for that: nostalgia filter. All movies are fake anyway; I just turn on my suspension of disbelief.

 

[Izack]

I actually quite liked the CGI scenes. I think they were the saving grace of the movie, since everything else you said was totally true.

 

[Pipcard]

Can you tell me how to tell if a film's "script, plot, pacing, characterization and acting suck"?

 

[Codz]

Such things tend to be highly subjective.

 

[Zatnikitelman]

For me personally, this was nothing more than a generic science fiction flick with Trek-specific names and places. The plot wasn't unique to Trek and can be summed up thusly: bad guy wants revenge, stirs up trouble, good guys pull off a last-second win. There isn't a thing unique to Trek in there especially when they didn't give any in-movie depth to Nero. In fact, one of my major grievances is they ignored much of what makes Trek unique just from the visual perspective. The two things for me were the warp core and phasers. A warp core is supposed to be clean, and orderly looking, not a mess of pipes, the use of the NIF in the second movie was a good step. Phasers are supposed to be beams. At the time, and still to this day, very few SciFi series use beams, that is largely unique to Trek.

 

[fsci123]

Warp drive, red matter, black holes, space planet drills, time travel and planets exploding... and your problem is illogical promotions?

I liked the movie... Of course, I'm just a dumb kid who is easily excited by special effects. But as for the plot. I have to admit that the whole star trek(universe) plot is pretty generic compared to other scifi: there aren't any Dyson spheres, no large scale genetic engineering...The habitats are pretty stale...Nukes have been replaced by handwavium. And computer hacking is non existent...And all the aliens are near humans.

 

[Andy44]

As to hating CGI because of it being CGI, I've got two words for that: nostalgia filter. All movies are fake anyway; I just turn on my suspension of disbelief.

Again, this has nothing to do with me being nostalgic or hating CGI because it's not "old school". I hate bad CGI, because bad CGI is just like any other type of bad special effect.

One of the problems with CGI is that it is a crutch that movie makers lean on to try to make up for shortcomings. Another problem is lack of restraint. Many scenes in the Star Wars prequels were horribly visually busy and confusing, with way too many moving objects for me to pleasently view the scene and comprehend what I'm seeing. Sometimes less is more.

Good CGI is when the effect doesn't distract you from the story.

As for "suspension of disbelief", that has its limits. If what you're seeing is just too rediculous, even within the context of the fantasy setting you're viewing it in, than you're not going to suspend your disbelief.

Star Wars physics are obviously not in line with what we know in real life physics, nor is the magic in Lord of the Rings. But as long as the made-up science or magic is internally consistent to the fantasy setting, then there is nothing jarring you out of your suspension of disbelief.