TVSquad

Omega, please chill out.What would be the point of making everything look and sound exaclty like the old series did? Even if they did I'm sure some fungus-covered fanboys who never see the light of day would demand they use old scripts as well.

I'm willing to give the new filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. I've seen pictures that on their own look pretty nice. No, it's not the original Enterprise bridge, with knobs and buttons made from whatever debris they found on the Paramount lot covered with metallic spray paint. And yes, the bridge looks like it was designed by Apple. (I half expect to see Wall-E's girlfriend Eve float through a corridor at some point.)

But you know what? The sets in the 60's looked like how they thought the future would look at the time. Now we get to see what today's creators think the future will look like. And you know what, in another forty years, when they reboot the franchise yet again, they'll look back at the 2009 Trek movie and decide it looks too quaint and dated. Then they'll proceed to design another bridge that looks like the people of 2049 believe it will look like.

Great post Elf. Summed up a lot of my thoughts. The thing about sci-fi is that it is the only forward-looking genre, hence its form will always be changing. Our expectations and knowledge about the future will change, but the the fact the we look to the future remains constant. Hence you could argue that JJ Abram's film is closer in line with TOS than the other Trek films, which were more attempts to re-capture instead of re-imagine.

Also, if they gave me a boring, boxy, and bland film version of TOS, instead of the sleek, sexy, fun-looking one in the trailer, there's no question about where I wouldn't spend my money.

I couldn't disagree more with everything you said after the word "Cool." I sometimes wonder if you are really this passionate about Star Trek, or just wants attention...

Haven't you heard of IDIC? Star Trek has changed the timeline dozens of times and showed us so many times different pasts and futures... sometimes they time-travelled back and didn't even returned to the same timeline as the one they left at the beginning of the episode and the show went on! The "prime" timeline has been lost a long time ago... we're just following one, the post-Nemesis one, so what if it brings us to an earlier time in the past where we see that some events has changed? It's still all definitely very "star trekky" and according to an interview I just read by Roberto Orci, it's basically mostly all explainable by quantum mechanics :)

Was I really that unclear? I don't have a problem with what they are changing about Star Trek. My problem is everything it appears they are keeping the same. Everything I have seen so far has done nothing to convince me that they have learned from the mistakes of the last several Trek incarnations. What makes Trek great is the story, the characters, the acting. Basically, it is what makes any piece of drama great. Nemesis and Enterprise failed on every level, but that had nothing to do with breaking Star Trek canon, or whatever you think my problem is. The writing was horrible, the characters were not true to themselves, and the acting was execrable. Insurrection was better, but you could see many of the same problems.

I have seen no evidence so far that they have learned from those mistakes. The casting, the writers, and the trailers that we have seen so far (other than that original teaser trailer, which didn't tell us anything, but made me hope) have all completely ignored what is essential for this movie to be a success, the story. Yes, you can't show much of that in a trailer, but you can do more than they've done so far.

I know enough of the story to think it's a very solid one (but... do I remember right that you've been careful not to read spoilers? Anyway I won't spoil anything here)

Are you talking about the little scene snippets that were described in various venues at around the same time that the most recent trailer came out? Those fall into the category, at least for me, of "Completely unreassuring and scarily stupid". I haven't actually seen the scenes myself, so maybe they were just bad descriptions, but they don't even make sense. It sounds like a bad Enterprise episode, not like a movie that is supposed to reboot the franchise and convince us that Paramount knows how to produce quality Star Trek products.

Well yes, I'm talking about these scenes, and also of various interviews and spoilers that I've read in the past weeks...

Anyway I'm sure people had the same feelings as you are having when ST: The Motion Picture, TNG's "Encounter at Farpoint", DS9's "Emissary", ST: Generations, Voyager's "Caretaker" and Enterprise's "Broken Bow" came out.

Hopefully, your constant negativism won't put off anyone from giving this movie a try. :) As far as I'm concerned, the better the movie is received, the best the future of Star Trek as a whole will be! I'm not saying I'll be blind to it's flaws, but I'm staying positive (more so since the movie Is receiving great reviews from people that has seen it, in parts or as a whole.)

Maybe you could point out some of those "great" reviews. The descriptions of the scenes I have seen so far make them sound like an SNL sketch making fun of Star Trek. Again, maybe the people describing the scenes were doing a bad job. Some links to some "great" reviews would be nice.

I don't know, can we link to outside websites, here?

There's no Ben Affleck.

Also, there's a lot of different ways that JJ could have gone to revive the Star Trek franchise in movies, and seeing that he kept the costumes, characters and their mannerisms, ship, terminology (aka treknology), chronology, etc (while of course updating it all a bit), and also made sure to make several nods to the past Star Trek stuff (for example Rura Penthe, Old Spock and his references to previous TOS shows' events, the computer voice, the USS Kelvin's phaser turrets, Christopher Pike and even a tribute to Arex, with the addition of Alnschloss K'Bentayr (ok, maybe not a tribute, but close enough! Can't wait to see he/she/it in action...) )

There's a ton of stuff in that line of thought I'm missing, but I'm not only excited to see this movie, as a Trekker myself (heck, I'm glad that Star Trek will receive this kind of boost! It's been slow for Trekkers, beside the novels (which are really good by the way) since Star Trek: Enterprise), I'm also confident that it is in very good, capable hands and that if you're not specifically thrilled by JJ's involvement, know that he has made sure that he is backed up by Trekkers that knows their stuff. That much is obvious!

May 09 can't come soon enough for me! (well, of course, I'll be buying movie stuff before that date... like the comic book prequel, for example :) Ah, it's good to be a Trekker! (or Trekkie, whichever you prefer))

Yes, there were plenty of episodes in TOS where the computer spoke in a female voice.

And there was 2 episodes in "Star Trek: Enterprise" where Captain Archer and/or his crew came into contact somehow with future Federation ships, and she did the voices for these ships (the USS Defiant and USS Enterprise-D, respectively). So that's why it can be said she did the computer voice in that series as well, even though the NX-01 itself doesn't speak.