Star Trek: Beyond

I'm...I think I'm Ok with it honestly. I wish there was a bit more glimpses into the story and thematic content, but it does look like fun.

Best part of the trailer is McCoy just being annoyed that he will die alone.

I mean the trailer at least makes it seem like most of the movie will take place away from earth which is good!

I feel like his Scotty is indistinguishable from 'Simon Pegg in an action movie' - he's exactly the same character as he is in the Mission Impossible films.

Yes, exactly. There's nothing unique or interesting enough about it to justify the size of his role beyond "It's NERD HERO Simon Pegg!". It especially bugged me in Into Darkness where, again, his role in the plot felt like McCoy's traditional role and Karl Urban is just sitting there with almost nothing to do.

As someone who has no attachment to the Star Trek franchise, I think 2 Star 2 Trek looks like a decent amount of fun.

It looks like Justin Lin is gonna blow a lot of shit up really good.

I'm expecting better than the last two (really, the last four), since they purged Orkurtelof, but that's not setting all that high a bar.

Yes, some of the sound editing is choppy, and yes, the aspect ratio's a bit wonky, and yes, whoever made this had too much free time, and yes, that person was me. Luckily I have a captive audience.

I'm deeply conflicted and confused by this trailer and have no opinion yet. :/

Random thought time. On the one hand:

- The trailer’s use of the Beastie Boys is jarring, to say the least.
- The Enterprise has *barely* had anything to do in the last two movies, except get its ass kicked - it’s barely been given any heroic moments. And now, it looks like, it’s getting completely destroyed. It just seems hollow to me. When the Enterprise gets destroyed in The Search for Spock, it has impact because we’ve spent decades with it, and watched it serve as home for our characters and get them to safety time and time again. Here, it just feels unearned. I don’t even particularly like the Abramsprise design, but still.
- It seems odd to get an actor as capable and charismatic as Idris Elba and then bury him under a complete and total prosthetic mask (I’m assuming Generic Purple-Faced Alien Guy is Elba, which is implied via the voiceover and such).
- Motorcycle? The hell?
- The weird new, for lack of a better term, field uniform sported by Kirk (especially when combined with the goggles) feels like they’re trying way too hard for a Star Lord vibe.
- Come to think of it, everything about this trailer feels like somebody at Paramount got Justin Lin, Simon Pegg, and Doug Jung in a room before writing and production began, and told them “Remember how much money Guardians of the Galaxy made? Well, make that movie, except put some Star Trek things in it, OK?”
- Adding to the “generic sci-fi action” feel is the near total lack of any recognizable Star Trek aliens across these reboot movies. There’s Vulcans, and Romulans showed up in the ‘09 movie, and we saw the (weirdly redesigned) Klingons briefly in the shitshow that was Into Darkness, and there was the one Orion girl in the ‘09 film, but otherwise, every species is new and previously unseen. I appreciate taking advantage of your budget, but it’d help make things feel a bit more Trek-y to also see some Andorians, Tellarites, Denobulans, Bolians, etc. in these things.
- ACTION ACTION ACTION SPLOSIONS ACTION WHEEEEEEEE
- Do we think John Cho will get more to do with his fantastic portrayal of Sulu, or will he just be a background character as before?
- Is Uhura going to get to do more than fret about her boyfriend? It has bothered the hell out of me that, as the maturity of the new crew has severely degraded in the new movies, Uhura has gone from being a grown-up, professional Starfleet officer (if admittedly underused in the original series and films) to basically spending 80% of the film talking about her and Spock’s relationship, even in the middle of missions. It’s a weird character choice, and both Uhura and Zoe Saldana deserve a lot better. (I’ve read quotes from somebody who talked with Justin Lin and Simon Pegg, who apparently said the Uhura/Spock thing isn’t really a thing anymore in this movie, so we’ll see.)

On the other hand:

- The scene with McCoy and Spock was pretty great. One of the biggest shames in the last two movies is how little Karl Urban gets to do as McCoy, especially considering he’s supposed to be a key character in the series. He’s easily my favorite actor in the new films.
- At least we’re out somewhere in space, not stuck around Earth as in the past two movies. That counts for something.
- Maybe the destruction of the Abramsprise will give Lin, Pegg, and Jung an excuse to replace it with something that actually looks like it came from the TOS era (hey, a guy can dream, can’t he? And this *is* the big 50th Anniversary movie, so maybe that's in the cards...a stretch, I know, but I'd love to see a proper Enterprise back on the screen.)
- The basic gist of the plot we’re seeing here - crew is trapped on an alien planet far from core of the Federation, has to work together to find a way out - is definitely reminiscent of TOS, even if it’s buried under hyperactive editing and motorcycle jumps.
- No more Roberto Orci! (Yeah, he still gets a writing credit, but the general word is that the script is pretty much entirely Pegg/Jung, from what I understand.) No more ridiculously overpowered transporters, no more magic blood, etc. (Saw a thing from Deven Faraci that says Lin, Pegg, etc. are basically pretending none of those things happened.)
- Hey, I mean, like, it can’t be any worse than Into Darkness, right? I mean, it can’t. That was the nadir. Right?

I didn’t hate the 2009 reboot. I thought it was pretty dumb, but it sort of had the spirit of things correct, the cast was great, and while it was sort of nonsensical it at least set the stage for going somewhere cool in the series. And then, well, Into Darkness took all that goodwill and utterly wiped it out, so at this point, I have no idea what to think anymore.

At first I liked the 2009 film, because what if a bunch of famous fans got together and made a fan film with a budget? Then I started viewing it as a Star Trek movie and liked it less and less. I felt no need to see Into Darkness by the time it rolled around, despite (or perhaps because of) seeing every other Trek movie in the theater or a million times n video as a kid. This trailer isn't changing my mind.

Saw the trailer before The Force Awakens yesterday. In context of all the superhero movie trailers it was actually a real breath of fresh air—the only one without a grimdark aesthetic. NicoNicoRose captured a lot of my initial reactions pretty much to the letter, and I’ll just highlight a couple of thoughts I had yesterday:





I was honestly kind of dragged to The Force Awakens because I’ve neither liked Abrams I’ve seen (mainly his Trek films) nor the last Star Wars movie I saw in the theaters (Revenge of the Sith), but ended up really enjoying it. It really captured a lot of the feel of the old films, both in terms of the spirit of the storyline and the production design, while keeping things modern. It also made me pretty damn jealous that they couldn’t do this with Trek. I don’t think “classic Trek movie” and “large-scale action movie” are as far apart as most people claim—Trek could do great action without feeling un-Trek like: I’m thinking of DS9’s “To the Death” in particular, and while there’s been some online blowback against First Contact I definitely still think it holds up as a fun nineties action film and as Trek, not to mention Captain America: The One with Robert Redford felt a lot like The Undiscovered Country to me. A Trek film doesn’t have to be consciously dumbed-down (I feel like Trek’s reputation as being more intellectual than it usually was is playing against it), and you can maintain a lot of distinctly Trekian stuff without confusing audiences.

And that does extend to production design. Trek has had a few very distinctive and coherent visual languages, and that’s something that the recent films haven’t really built on at all. Again, building on and updating that design heritage—sets, ships (I also hate the proportions of the new Enterprise), and aliens—is something that would not alienate anyone because it would go over most people’s heads, while at the same time would do a lot to make the films feel more like they’re actually set in a universe rather than just being another disposable summer blockbuster. That’s the sort of thing that brings people in for the long haul, and that extra attention to making the ship seem “real” in the original series was one of the things that brought people in (not not recognizing the Enterprise is a character is part-and-parcel of this).



I think the big paradox with Abrams Trek is that, while it’s made a lot of money, it’s been terrible for brand-building (Tyrannorabbit at the Dissolve liked to bring up how his nephew had no clue what a Klingon was, whereas that was common knowledge when he was a kid). At the AVC, at least, Trek 09 is only brought up in the context of “I enjoyed it, shut up nerd.” It inspires no passion independent of its relationship to past Trek, and “I liked it when I saw it a few years ago” is not exactly the sort of sentiment that leads to strong brand-building, and when I look at fandom, even younger fandom, it’s still overwhelmingly oriented towards older Trek. Part of that may be because there’s just more of it (so readily, legally available in so many streaming places, and at high-def if we’re talking about the original and TNG), but I think it also just because that universe has a lot more character and a feeling of “reality” that makes it more conducive to fandom that’s more intensive than a movie ticket every three years.

Trek will probably not be as big as Marvel again—though who knows, given TNG’s ratings and pop-culture penetration in the nineties (which I think people really miss—people my age, i.e. under thirty, and probably people under forty too, tend to associate Trek more with Picard than Kirk)—so I guess Paramount (and CBS’s) choice is whether to make something that will chase trends, likely with diminishing returns in each installment, until petering out again or a more sustained, but possibly more niche, route. Obviously the latter’s more suited to TV/streaming, especially since the medium-low budget film market (between TMP and Trek 09 they were all essentially theatrically-released TV films) seems to have been hollowed out.

Oh Jesus the TOS-only people—the end of regular new Trek production, online at least, really led to a winnowing of people who were more than casual fans but less than people who were really intense, and often these really intense people had gotten into Trek back in the day, as they say. I remember going to a Trek tech forum sometime to look for something back during the AVC Classic reviews and was shocked to find it was all people quoting the 1970s tech manual and disparaging anything from later.

FWIW my biggest gripe with nuTrek is that they’re generic, mediocre blockbusters, and their mediocrity is excused largely because it’s “only Star Trek,” which pisses me off as someone who likes good films and wants good Trek; the related version (common on the AVC), “It’s Star Trek for people who aren’t obnoxious people,” also gets to me and I think is responsible for why the films seem to almost make a point of being a bit dumb (if they were dumb incidentally it wouldn’t bother me so much, but there’s almost an added wink). The stuff I put above plays into the generic bits—I don’t think one should have to be a fan to enjoy Trek and I certainly don’t think it’s necessary to make Trek. I turned off the above video when the narrator was whining about how the first run of Trek “didn’t even acknowledge the Original Series” while showing a scene from TWOK—if anyone’s an example for why the fans shouldn’t control Trek it’s Nick Meyer. There should still be an understanding as to why it became a popular, distinctive thing in the first place, though.

That's actually a pretty good summation of what's gone wrong with nuTrek, it's a reboot of the hit-and-miss film franchise, not the legendary pop culture property.

Jean-Luc Lemur I suppose in one way; Into Darkness' development process of 'let's come up with an idea for an movie without Khan and then have Khan' mirrors how Nicholas Meyer made a cocktail out of the various stabs at a script to the second Star Trek film.

But that's about it. I feel like the problem between Khan and the last three villains of Star Trek films - all of whom have been compared to TWOK's Khan to some degree - is that Khan's need for revenge encompassing Kirk makes sense; there was actually a choice that Kirk made that brought him personal tragedy, however unintentionally on Kirk's part.