Star Trek - Into Darkness

It's funny that every other episode of Star Trek has to find some way to limit the transporter somehow (or just conveniently forget its existence) and here they went and made it even more plot-breaking.

I'll try DS9 if I ever get through TNG but Voyager I don't think I can handle. Captain Grandma, Ensign Bigtits, a black Vulcan for some reason, and holy fuck is that an American Indian!? Is this a starship crew or a Village People reunion?

Kreugen_sl said:

It's funny that every other episode of Star Trek has to find some way to limit the transporter somehow (or just conveniently forget its existence) and here they went and made it even more plot-breaking.

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Wait until the main deflector dish starts solving every problem week after week. TNG at least got rid of fucking Wesley early enough to save the show.

The best TNG and DS9 episodes were the more cerebral character driven dramas or the fan servicing starship battle episodes everyone loves. You basically have to totally tune out the absurd technobabble and then you end up with really good television. Definitely better than most of the sitcom slop from the same era. DS9 was especially good at turning the story away from the technobabble on a regular basis.

Voyager did manage to put out a gem or two per season...but that show never really had a chance. The premise of the show was pretty lame and the writing was never really up to spec...DS9 had all of the talent when they were produced simultaneously.

Usually long range teleporter tech has devices at the source and destination, or was configured to go to a set destination (presumably originating there for calibration). That still presents a problem of reaching one endpoint through conventional means.

Future tech beaming just says fuck that, we'll send stuff anywhere in the quadrant. In contrast, it completely negates the Caretaker from Voyager as being well beyond humans, same deal with that species who could go back and forth to any planet in the near galaxy for day trips.

Star Trek writers have acknowledged for years that the transporter technology is a huge plot issue and gives them real problems when writing. It's the ultimate deus ex machina. Some writers break it, some just ignore it. Others have made it the central tech of their premise (for example Diane Duane used it to explain the Enterprise's supply issues). I do feel extending it as this reboot has done is just going to give them even more problems.

I just saw this, really enjoyed it. They did a few clever things like showing the enterprise crashing in the trailer but it's actually the baddie ship, and hiding then reversing KHAAANNNNN!, though the blood thing I guessed as he entered the warp core. My favorite thing was the Klingons, they made them really badass and scary.

Yeah the transporter is a little niggle, just like in the last film. I didn't like original universe Spock showing up, why was that needed? The story moved very, very quickly but I think it worked. Destroying half of San Fransisco was a bit drastic though, things can only get more fucked up?

I'm looking forward to the next one, I hope that it is Klingon centric - maybe stopping them from allying with Cardassia which the Enterprise discovers on the 5 year mission

Movie was entertaining enough, and the throwbacks to Wrath of Khan were cool, but I hate how renegade Kirk is. Yea he was always like that (which itself is ridiculous, but I'll ignore that for now), but in these last two, you might as well just say "ok, what is procedure here? then I'll bet on Kirk doing the opposite." He disregards every warning, protocol, rule, etc from any source every single time. If these movie even had a twinge of realism, in the first 10 minutes someone would say "Captain, if we go into warp right now, there's a 80% chance the core will explode" and Kirk says "thanks for your warning, prepare to warp" and the ship blows up and the movie ends after 10 minutes. I made that one up but that's about the gist of it. He's preposterously reckless almost for the sake of being reckless. The argument is that he has good instincts, but he doesn't show good instincts. He just gets lucky..preposterously lucky. "Oh it'll be fine" but it's not like he planned some elaborate scheme. He doesn't plan at all. He just gets lucky.

It's kind of the same gripe I have with all action movies, hell, all big blockbusters. There is no clever writing where the characters outsmart their enemy, or outplan them. They go into impossible odds, cocky as hell, and succeed based purely on luck. The first 20 minutes of every action movie should be the action star dying. He base jumps because he's a badass and goes through some super small hole and hits his face and it explodes and the movie ends, or he's playing poker in some Chinaman house and hustles them and they try to beat his ass 10 vs 1 and he punches 2 guys then someone shoots him in the face and he dies. Or for real scenarios, at the beginning one of the 284 spears thrown lands and kills both Kirk and McCoy. Or Spock falling from the transporter at the beginning falls into lava because the ground is 95% lava. Or when Kirk and Scotty are in the 10 minute falling-from-a-railing scene and they just die because the 1 in a million scenario of Chekov(sp?) happening by at that particular moment wouldn't happen.

I have some mental illness that I can't enjoy movies like this because I can't turn off that voice in my head that says "oh give me a break" every 12 seconds. It's not like these are necessary parts of action movies. If writers put more thought into them instead of just inserting items in a formula (renegade leader, quarky scientist, cocky-in-the-face-of-danger, rational-guy-getting-made-fun-of-in-favor-of-reckless-idiot, etc), they could be good. I'm not even 30 and every movie I watch is the same thing. These are formulas that writers learn and replicate for the "perfect" movie, hitting all those points. "Oh but just watch it for the visuals and ignore the story" well if I'm gonna do that, I might as well watch fucking Planet Earth. At least there you don't have some seal swimming away from a killer whale and at the last minute a bigger alien fish jumps up and eats the killer whale, saving the seal, but not before that bigger alien fish chases him from 30 feet away and somehow gains that 30 foot distance 12 times over from different camera angles until Spock saves the day with what amounts to a match when considering the alien's size.

Oh and Khan's ship doing a giant 9/11 was pretty hilarious

First off, sorry, I only read the last couple pages.

I enjoyed the first reboot, personally. Plot was mediocre, but the cast was really good and visually it was very good as well. The fan service aspects of it I enjoyed. I watched a lot of TNG growing up, but otherwise I'm not a Trekky at all really. I saw most of the original movies back in the day when I was growing up, but really the only one I remember much about was the one with whales. Which was stupid.

This was a very, very mediocre movie I thought. Most of the plot was total shit. The characters, or at least the actors playing the characters, were good again. The special effects were fucking awesome. But most of the plot was just flat out retarded, as far as I could tell. The fan service stuff in this one was fucking awful. Khan I thought was totally over acted; as someone said, the way he spoke was ridiculous.

On the upside, it was the first movie I've seen in 3D (I see a movie in theaters approximately once every 3-4 years). I really enjoyed the hell out of that aspect, personally. Maybe because it was the first time and there was so much novelty to it for me, but I found it well done, not overly gimmicky, and quite immersing. So I guess that's good.

Overall that Half in the Bag episode pretty much covers all my issues with the movie. It's just a big dumb action movie, which isn't what I watched TNG for every day after school at 4pm growing up.

Oh, also, does anyone think that the guy who plays Kirk looks like how Matt Damon looks in Team America? Dude is just weird looking.

Dabamf_sl said:

It's not like these are necessary parts of action movies. If writers put more thought into them instead of just inserting items in a formula (renegade leader, quarky scientist, cocky-in-the-face-of-danger, rational-guy-getting-made-fun-of-in-favor-of-reckless-idiot, etc), they could be good.

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Exactly. Look at the Bourne movies. Bourne didn't generally get away or kick fucking ass because of dumb luck or deus ex machina. He won fights and the like because he was a fucking badass, planned ahead, and could improvise. Dude has a little hand dagger? Cool, I'll whittle him down with a Bic. Journalist being watched? I'll drop a prepaid phone in his pocket. In three entire movies the writers hardly ever relied on luck, fluke, or God to save the day.

Yeah, the JJ Abrams Trek is really just a summer action movie series set in a familiar universe. I willingly accepted the incoming use of magic and impossible plot lines when Kirk was given command of the heavily armed flagship with nothing but an incomplete education of the Academy. Natural ability and potential my ass...Pike would have had his ass involuntarily retired for even suggesting it. You'd have a diplomatic incident on your hands with the neighboring powers when they found out that unqualified twentysomething bar fighters are given command of enough firepower to destroy most of their home worlds.

The most magical thing in this movie, to me, was that Carol Marcus could assume a fake identity and sneak onto the aforementioned heavily armed flagship without being noticed. Then she was allowed near the experimental doomsday photon torpedoes that no one seemed to be guarding. And that Spock didn't immediately haul her ass off to the brig as soon as he figured it out...I mean, I hate to repeat myself..but heavily armed flagship. Try sneaking onto a U.S. ballistic missile submarine or something, and have one of the officers figure out that you're pretending to be someone who doesn't exist. Herp-a-derp.

Like most things in life it's easier to enjoy an imperfect thing when you accept it for what it is going in.

I think future Spock should have made a complaint to Federation OSHA that there are no radiation suits next to the super important, absolutely critical to the ship, radiation-filled room that requires people to enter to manually fix things in emergencies.

I bet they're allowed to smoke in the engine room too.

MrBelding_sl said:

I think future Spock should have made a complaint to Federation OSHA that there are no radiation suits next to the super important, absolutely critical to the ship, radiation-filled room that requires people to enter to manually fix things in emergencies.

I bet they're allowed to smoke in the engine room too.

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Have some Rad-away at least.

Transporters should always have been much more limited. Require that there be a receiving station on the other end or something, anything to make them not the most obvious solution to every problem.

When they added "site to site" beaming which allowed the transporter to pick you up from anywhere and put you down anywhere that really started to mess with any sort of dramatic moment. Hell screw the turbolift, just have everyone transport around the ship as needed.

yes but what about Enterprise?!

Braen_sl said:

yes but what about Enterprise?!

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Without an acronym, no one cares.

Decontamination chamber. *sproing*