Then this happened...

LeHah said:
I've never understood why people say the Abrams films are "too much like Star Wars", as if Star Wars is some sort of insult? (Well, maybe Episode VII)
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They're fundamentally different franchises. Despite my long standing obsession with Doctor Who if I'd been claiming that the films had been "too much like Doctor Who" - that would be a complaint because just because I enjoy one particular style doesn't mean I want it taking over all my potential viewing options. The clue is in the names, Star Wars - emphasis on the battles and the conflict, Star Trek - emphasis on exploration, new ideas and discovery.

The Abrams movies always felt to me like the work of someone who never really enjoyed Star Trek and so tried to turn it into something that he did like.

I don't mind the Star Trek movies existing - but I don't want the franchise going down that route permanently, especially when we look to be getting out fill of Star Wars for at least the next decade.
 
Whiplash said:
Now I love both dearly and appreciate them for what they are, but many hard-core Trekkies view SW as being inferior, shallow, mass-market fare
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Sounds to me like the people who are creating that colloquialism are the people who are perpetuating that.

I despise Abrams in a form and fashion that might be bad for my health and don't like his films - but the idea that we must throw Successful Franchise A under the bus to save Successful Franchise B is specious at best.
 
LeHah said:
Sounds to me like the people who are creating that colloquialism are the people who are perpetuating that.

I despise Abrams in a form and fashion that might be bad for my health and don't like his films - but the idea that we must throw Successful Franchise A under the bus to save Successful Franchise B is specious at best.
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I don't think anyone in the Trek camp wants Star Wars thrown under a bus; they would just prefer that Trek stays true to its origins instead of being unduly influenced by Star Wars tropes.

There is precedent for this. It's a well-documented story that Paramount made the first Trek movie as a direct response to the success of Star Wars in '77. They wanted to cash in on the sudden sci-fi hype, and the result was a pretty terrible movie.

The anti-Star Wars sentiment among some Trekkies faaaaaar predates anything JJ has ever done, by the way. His Trek films just reinforced it for some.
 
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I can't tell how much was Abrams and how much was Orci. Either way, the movies seemed to miss the themes of Trek in total. Both of the Abramsverse movies are fatalistic to a fault, which is diametrically opposed to the vision Rodenberry had when he created the series. Credit where credit is due though, as with all Abrams movies, I can't fault the casting, the guy has an eye for talent.

As for the Star Wars comments: those are reinforced by Abrams himself when he admitted he was a Star Wars fan and not much of a Trek guy.
 
It seems to me that Abrams treated Star Wars with a lot more respect than he treated Star Trek. His overall approach to Star Wars, employing practical effects and taking a much more grounded approach to force powers and light saber battles than Lucas did in the prequels, served the film well. He absolutely nailed the look and feel of the universe. There were (many) flaws in the storytelling, but the result was an enjoyable movie that gives you enough substance to (mostly) ignore the plot holes.

My beef with his Star Trek movies is not that they're too much like Star Wars. My beef is that he and the writers showed absolutely none of the respect for the franchise that he exhibited in Star Wars.
 
Whiplash said:
It's also closer to proper sci-fi and likes to have a sound scientific footing.
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False. :p

I know there's been attempts to to make Trek seem harder over the years (phasers are actually particle beams! Impulse drives are nuclear rockets!) but I'm not convinced they make all that much sense, or actually add to the shows.
 
Dyret said:
False. :p
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I have a borrowed behind-the-scenes technical manual on the Enterprise-D written by Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda that says otherwise.

How much time do they spend at any point in Star Wars trying to explain how anything works? They don't; you just accept that it does. Trek on the other hand is famous for techno-babble, a good deal of which has at least some base in real science. They even created guides such as this manual I referred to, to help the writers keep some form of consistency when it came to the technical stuff.

Of course there's a lot of made-up stuff in there, it's still fiction after all. Point is, Star Wars wastes no time on the science because it isn't relevant to the story. Trek makes an effort to at least get some of it right. Different strokes and all that.
 
Sadly. I think the reason they went for a more action battle style Trek movie reboot was the lack of sales in the last 3 or 4 Berman Trek movies. They flopped pretty bad. So I bet they figured they would take the name and make it more like Star Wars just for the cash in. Thats how I felt the second I left the theater from the first Trek reboot. I didn't know at the time but I was willing to bet Rick Berman had nothing to do with it as there was zero exploration or actual Trekking going on. Just a buildup to a big battle then that big battle. I am just hoping that Worf tv show idea Dorn has been pitching happens someday. Enough with the Trek movies, I eant my show back.
 
Afrim Kosovrasti said:
Sadly. I think the reason they went for a more action battle style Trek movie reboot was the lack of sales in the last 3 or 4 Berman Trek movies.
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There was only four movies produced by Berman - Generations through Nemesis. So if you're going to throw First Contact under that banner, you're horribly wrong in your statement either way. FC did very well in theaters, fiscally and with critics.
 
LeHah said:
There was only four movies produced by Berman - Generations through Nemesis. So if you're going to throw First Contact under that banner, you're horribly wrong in your statement either way. FC did very well in theaters, fiscally and with critics.
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Yeah. The first two(generations and first contact) did well. But insurrection and nemesis bombed terribly in the box office. Though i really enjoyed insurrection. Gotta say though, I really miss Berman right about now. Even though they didn't do too well in the box office I loved every next generation movie.
 
Whiplash said:
True that.. :D

I think Palpatine being Anakin's daddy would have made for a much better plot twist.
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In the now-no-longer-canon Expanded Universe novels, Anakin was supposedly created by The Force as a reaction against Palpatine and his master trying to pervert it.
 
LeHah said:
There was only four movies produced by Berman - Generations through Nemesis. So if you're going to throw First Contact under that banner, you're horribly wrong in your statement either way. FC did very well in theaters, fiscally and with critics.
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First Contact is my personal favourite Trek film. I also dearly love Insurrection, despite what the critics said. It plays like a very long TNG episode, which suits me just fine.
 
Whiplash said:
First Contact is my personal favourite Trek film. I also dearly love Insurrection, despite what the critics said. It plays like a very long TNG episode, which suits me just fine.
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Ditto on all of this. But you can see why Insurrection didn't do well at the box office. First Contact walked that line beautifully.
 
Pedro said:
Ditto on all of this. But you can see why Insurrection didn't do well at the box office. First Contact walked that line beautifully.
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First Contact had all the right ingedients, sure. My view its that it was more successful because it had enough action to satisfy more casual movie-goers that weren't as invested in the franchise. They could get away with making more of an action-oriented film and yet keeping to the core of the series, because by this time we'd all known and cared about these characters for almost a decade.
 
Insurrection was really a treat for us fans. I really love that movie. Totally a long episode but that's what i wanted.
 
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