Regular Screen Rant reader “790″ suggested I set up a discussion post for the Star Trek movie, where people can feel free to talk about all aspects of the film without having to worry about spoiling it for others. I had meant to set one of these up for Wolverine but just never got around to it.
Considering how popular I think Star Trek will be (moreso than Wolvie), I thought it might be a good idea to get this set up ASAP. 
So discuss the film below to your heart’s content!
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Although it wasn’t the greatest movie in the world, I don’t think anybody is expecting it to be. Star Trek was very capable and got the job done. Action-packed and funny when it wanted to be, with only a small amount of hokey dialogue. I liked it, but it’s not going to match up with the other summer blockbusters. Let’s just say that this is the real beginning to the summer movie season, NOT Wolverine.
@Mike
I agree, that’s why I didn’t go higher than 4/5. Also, I think I was a lot pickier than some other reviewers might be due to my being a lifelong Trekkie.
One thing that bugged me was that the romance between Uhura and Spock came across as totally gimmicky. Just kind of a “look, Spock beat out Kirk for a babe he wanted” sort of thing.
I did get a big kick out of the Kobayashi Maru test – the way they played it, it didn’t come across as Kirk really cheating – he was just showing them that he could beat the system.
Things that I get because it’s an alternate timeline but still bothered me: the destruction of Vulcan(!) and the death of Spock’s mother.
Also, the fact that Spock had Kirk beamed to a planet instead of just thrown in the brig, and the MASSIVE coincidence of Kirk running into “old Spock” on that moon.
Vic
Moving this over from other thread:
Saw the movie yesterday.
It was tons of fun and I’d probably give it 4/5 as well.
Some gripes I had, some of which I don’t see people discussing much (and some that made me want to give this a lesser rating):
-Opening combat scene went all Michael Bay. Entire thing was zoomed in, shaky and just full of colours and explosions. There was not one wide shot of the fight between the ships. Complete Waste.
-Lens Flares were absurd and not just on the bridge.
-Random camera angles… I see no reason to start a scene with a camera laying sideways and turn it around. Trying too hard to be unique or something, especially in a movie that involves ships in space…
-Nero goes to Earth anddd…. there’s not one defense satellite, weapon or ship. Weird… there should be hundreds and hundreds. Heck, even today we could fire weapons at it… in 2009. Even Vulcan doesn’t have any ships or defense force…
-There were no shield effects at all, the weapons just made impact all the time and then they claimed the shields were lower.
-They said Kirk’s dad saved 800 people – it looked like that ship carried a hundred or less. From the wide shot at the end, we see like 20 or so shuttles flying away… 40-50 people in each little shuttle? And they all came from that small ship? Someone wasn’t thinking when they wrote that, especially considering crew sizes of all the ships in the different series’ and movies. The Enterprise-D carries 800 people and that’s many times bigger than the Kelvin.
-Romulan ship, apparently a massive mining vessel, was retarded in design. Completely counter-intuitive inside and out, and unlike anything from the Trek universe we’ve seen before.
-Scotty beams Kirk and himself how far? Wasn’t the Enterprise at warp and traveling at that speed for hour(s) by that time? How many solar systems apart would that be? That’s like the longest-distance transport ever!
-The young Kirk driving the car scene was weak, just like we knew from the trailers.
-I do see a lot of people complaining about the Red Matter and lame black hole usage, but I didn’t care too much about that – It’s Trek.
-Most of all, the wasted opportunity of not having the TNG crew have a cameo from the future like in the prequel comic. How could they NOT do that, it would of ended that series nicely and really tied all of this into continuity. I was disappointed by that – would of been the ultimate fanboy moment.
I haven’t seen it yet but I like spoilers so I’ll listen but I have nothing important to add.
I saw the film last night and must say, as a life long Trekker, this movie was simply amazing. I have no problem saying that it was better then The Wrath of Khan, Something that I would have never thought I’d say just 24 hours ago. All this nit-picking i.e. lens flares, the distance that Scotty beams him and Kirk (huh TRANSWARP… did you pay any attention at all to that scene?), the design of the Narada (which was awesome simply because it WAS unique), the lack of Earth defenses (again did you pay attention?)… I’ve seen misconceptions time and again from bitter bitter Trekkers and its sad… this IS Star Trek, and its Star Trek that actually had a cohesive vision for once. Loved it! No problems with it at all. 5/5
I have to agree with Nate. Maybe my sense of humor must be really warped but the Uhura & Spock thing was great…from a female point of view…we don’t always go for the “hero”, but his side kick so it is not out of possibility range. Also it is part of the development of their future friendship. Lots of what I enjoyed was pre-friendship inter-action of characters. We know what they are like “now” This movie let’s us see some of the “dance” of new friendships that last a lifetime. How many friends did you meet in college and at your first job? This really showed where the trust was developed for all the “boldly going” that happened and depended on the blind faith of skills, friendship & loyalty. Also the future Kirk now seems more of a team effort than the Captain Kirk show. Don’t get me wrong I have been a Trekkie since the beginning, we just now have a different view point to see things from.
“All this nit-picking i.e. lens flares, the distance that Scotty beams him and Kirk”
Uh, wait – are getting on Trek fans about arguing technical details? It’s what we DO.
The warp beaming did bug me, I don’t think they could even beam that far in TNG.
The 800 crew capacity was a pretty big oversight – they should have said about half that.
As to the Romulan ship, the prequel comic gives the background on that (granted, you shouldn’t HAVE to read a prequel comic/novel to “get” movie details). I believe it was an amalgam of Romulan and Borg technology, and its size was GREATLY increased via the Borg tech addition (I think it’s Borg tech, I may be mistaken).
If I recall in the film Nero’s ship had the ability to disable power systems, that could explain the lack of defense capability when it arrive at Earth.
The utter and apparently complete uselessness of shields in this movie had me quite confused. I could see that maybe Nero’s advanced tech could get through the TOS era tech, but there wasn’t even an indication of anything breaching any sort of shield at all.
Like I said, nits – I still gave it 4/5 and I need to go see it again.
Vic
I just saw the movie last night and I must say it is simply amazing! I dont really understand these fanboys though….. one thing to consider “ITS A MOVIE!” get over it things happen all the time in movies that we don’t get or understand…. and the whole thing about kirks dad saving 800 people it could have been because of something unknown to us. and the whole spock-uhura thing was to show that she truly cared for him and to give him something to fight for hopefully in the next star trek! All in all I believe it was a great movie. great plot, great storyline, and most of all it was non stop action!
@ Nate,
“bitter bitter Trekkers”? Vic and I gave it 4/5.
You asked twice if I paid attention, heh. I guess the answer would be, yes… I sat and watched it in a theater soo…
Explain why there are around ZERO defenders/defense systems in our solar system and around Vulcan (other than the tiny Federation Armada that was sent).
As for the warp thing and speaking of paying attention, that distance outweighs the limits we see in TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager and all the other movies from what I remember.
I’m glad you thought it was perfect, but there’s no good reason for fans to ignore and not discuss the little issues. Details do matter in good movies, and this is a good movie.
Like Vic, I’m seeing it again tomorrow night.
My biggest annoyance was actually the casting of Spock’s mother. Is there some flashback scenes that were cut that required a younger actress? Overall, I thought the movie was great.
I agree with Vic. I hated that they destroy Vulcan and Spock’s mother. Destroying Vulcan would be cool in a story that takes place way later in the Star Trek timeline, but not at this point, even if its an altered timeline.
I think the altered timeline was a huge cop out. It gave the writers way too much leeway in making a ‘prequel’ without it actually having to setup things to come in later Star Trek stories. Isn’t setting things up what makes prequels cool?
That said, I think it was a great science fiction movie. Possibly the best space battle sequences ever. I loved that ships and planets weren’t always the exact same orientation to each other like in other Star Trek shows/movies.
The casting was excellent too.
Great movie… just not a great Star Trek movie.
Saw it today and I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I liked it a whole lot! It actually surprised me since I was only expecting an “origin” type of movie but what I got was a sort of retcon story that didn’t actually re-write the established “Trek universe” of the TV series and the films. Heck, my wife liked it too and she’s not even a Star Trek fan! I might have to include this in my list of favorite Trek films.
Anyway, I just want to give my opinion on some issues on some details of the story. First, Rob Keyes’ post above regarding the lack of defenses in Vulcan and Earth did make me think about those aspects in the film and he may have a point there. But then, I remembered the scene where Nero was interrogating Capt. Pyke about the defense codes of Earth (which Nero was able to extract forcefully). That may explain why Earth’s defenses were “non-existent” when Nero attacked because he has already neutralized them somehow with the information he got from Pyke. This is perhaps the same situation with Vulcan because we have to keep in mind, Nero was able to catch the old Spock and Nero might have extracted the defense codes of Vulcan from him as well, though it wasn’t shown anymore.
Second, Rob also commented about Nero’s ship being “retarded” in desing…well, I may have to agree with that. It looked more like a ship design from the Babylon 5 universe. It may have been better if Nero’s ship was based a little bit on the Cymatar (did I spell it right?), that big “bad-arsed” ship that almost totally destroyed Enterprise-E in “Star Trek Nemesis” to make it more “attuned” to the Trek universe.
Third, I read in another thread asking why Nero’s ship have weapons when it was supposed to be “merely” a mining ship. Well, I can just deduce that Nero may have retrofitted it with weapons and since he’s from the future, even “simple” weapons from his timeline will be quite devastating to the timeline of the young Kirk and company. Or another explanation could be that mining ships in Nero’s time might have been favorite targets of either pirates or enemies of the Romulan empire hence, their mining ships must be armed to defenend themselves. Well, these are just my opinion, and these are made without the benefit of reading the prequel comics to this film. Sure hope I can find those in my favorite bookstore.
Fourth, those lens glares? Yeah, I was quite bothered by them too. And the romance angle with Uhura and the young Spock was…well, I didn’t even know that existed. I read somewhere that this was hinted in the original TV series. Unfortunately, that was before my time, and I wasn’t able to watch the entire reruns of the original TV series so I must have missed that.
Well, in spite of those “details” or “nit picks” stated earlier, I say again, I liked this movie and I wish sequels will be made in the future.
I couldn’t put my finger on why I was disappointed leaving the theater. After all, I’d just watched a very fun movie, funny characters, pristine special effects, fun action (when it wasn’t overly gratuitous)… and someone relaunched Star Trek, after all! But then it hit me.
The writers destroyed a universe with 40 years of fictional continuity… for this? To reboot the franchise and what? Squeeze out 2 or 3 more movies? It seems like a big gamble to me.
Still, in the end I did enjoy watching the movie and will probably go to see it again in the next couple weeks. It wasn’t a great movie like ST2 or ST8, nor was it an important or emotionally involving movie like ST3, ST4, ST6, but on the other hand it wasn’t total crap like ST5 and ST10. I’d place it as the 6th best Star Trek movie. It’s an odd numbered one which means, well you know what that means, but it’s one of the better ones.
My local theater was able to secure permission to show the movie pretty early on the 7th, and when I found that out I went and parked myself in line. Saw the show on the DLP projector too.
Overall I enjoyed it very much. I have technical nitpicks, in the time honored tradition of Trek, but beyond that I really enjoyed the story and how things were laid out.
IMO the “40 years of continuity” are what’s been killing Trek. There’s nowhere left to go. There have been so many galaxy-wide threats in Trek there’s no room for them to coexist anymore without seeming even more absurd than they are.
In my “yay” category I really got behind the humor in this outing.
The phasers weren’t god-machines (Ron Moore is right, why trade fire when you can vaporize your foe and the 16-cubic meters of rock around him?).
The ships were massive but were also agile and beautiful. I had great doubts about the new Enterprise, but in motion she’s a beauty.
Lastly, technobabble nearly gone! Thank the maker!
Yeah, Nero’s ship made no damn sense, a point they made when Spock and Kirk beamed over. That was awesome!
In my “boo hiss” category…
What’s with Scotty’s sidekick? Please, we don’t need any frrpin ewoks…
And with that I’m running out of time to post at work… damn.
I think I went in with higher expectations than was needed. I’m not, by any means a Star Trek fan, but the involvement of Abrams along with the trailers and so on made me really excited to see this. Now, it’s not a bad movie by any stretch. Hell, after seeing Wolverine last week, this just reminded me what good film making was all about.
Even still, I came out thinking “You know what, I’m yet to see the best summer action film this year has to offer (and at the same time, won’t put my hopes entirely on Transformers 2 or Terminator 4, but am willing to be pleasantly surprised)”.
I did love Star Trek, it’s a good well made movie, with possibly a slight pacing issue (I feel there was too little build up to the climax, and I thought it’d be nice to see the first few days of Kirk in the academy instead of jumping ahead 3 years), but otherwise, the actors were all amazing, the story was pretty fresh, and action fairly good (the space battles had too many jarring cuts, it was difficult to make out what was happening, I felt Kirk running away from the ice spider thing was more intense, but otherwise they managed to have it not look like a Star Wars new trilogy space battle, which is good). I didn’t notice the music too much, but mostly I remember it was very well done.
Overall, I’d agree with the 4/5 but personally, I went in expecting a 5/5 which is why I came out slightly disappointed.
rob keyes-
re: earth defenses- nero shoved that creature up pike’s mouth to get the security clearance codes. i’ll assume he did the same to carry out his vulcan attack.
re: warping- old spock gave scotty the formula that allowed them to be beamed to the enterprise. perhaps scotty devised the formula in a time frame that takes place after all the tv shows you’ve mentioned.
Bad Robot Strikes again! JJ Abrams is freaking brilliant! As a mature Trek fan back from the orginal days, this I feel could not have been done any better. Sure there is this and that, really though…..did you leave the Cinema with a big grin on your mug? I know I did and am going back to IMAX on Monday. And take it from me, an old broken down lighting designer….the lens flares were AWESOME and truley brought the REALITY of the Star Trek Universe to life. (and the reference to Slusho at the beginning brought a cheer form alot of us) Plus I had my Slusho shirt on. This has set the bar just like “Iron Man” did last Summer. It’s gonna be hard to beat folks.
ok, now i have some questions.
it was stated that chekov, an officer already on the enterprise was only 17.
earlier in the film, pike told kirk to enlist in starfleet and that he could be an officer after four years at the academy.
does that mean that chekov enlisted at 13 years old ?
second question- nero stated that he had been waiting for 25 years for spock to show up- in the mean time, he was blowing up federation ships- the federation couldn’t team up and destroy him in that 25 yr span??
When I walked out of this movie I did feel a bit disappointed. I thought the special effects were really good but the discontinuity of this movie compared with all the other movies and series really got on my nerves. I can understand Paramount wanting to grab a larger audience but don’t sell out 30 years of history and fans.
Opening scene was good. The ship definitely was not large enough to hold 800 people. I think the Enterprise D only held about 800 people and that was galaxy class.
The fact that the whole Federation fleet was away on some mission so a bunch of kids had to fly the brand new flag ship into battle just stunk..
Where were all the orbital defences?
There was one part where Chekcov was running through the enterprise and it looked like he ran into some kind of neon lit hairdressers. Engineering looked about as futuristic as a steel works. Come on this is meant to be 200 years in the future not yesterday!!!
What happened to the shields. Did someone forget to turn them on!!!
How did Nero get such a powerful ship?
Why did Spock fire Kirk out of an escape pod instead of putting him in the brig. That was really logical!!!
Its a bit coincidental that kirk lands not far from a cave that has the future Spock resting in it. Why is Spock chilling out in the cave when he knows there is a Federation outpost nearby.
How come Scotty takes over as the Enterprise chief engineer as soon as he steps on board? Please get rid of his pet chipmunk..
The part with Scotty and Kirk being transported what must have been half way across the galaxy was just a load of cr*p. He manages to get them all the way to ship, light years away, travelling at Warp drive but not to a safe place. The fact that Scotty ended up in a large water pipe and got sucked around it stunk of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Lucky for him it had a convenient escape hatch.
It had a lot of potential but I feel let down..
rob keyes,
i thought the romulan ship looked terrible- though felt better when i read the prequel and they showed the ship as just a mining vessel, and then encased it with Borg technology.
the next generation crew (some of them) were in the prequel and i agree, they should’ve had a cameo. i think it would’ve worked in the mind meld scene and for those who read the prequel, that probably makes sense.
BUT, as someone else said- you shouldn’t have to read a prequel to a movie to understand it. funny how there was a prequel to the prequel. the comic prequel would not have been a bad movie- and would’ve bridged everything together nicely.
@vic
lots of people would say that your review has spoilers… but i read it anyways… mainly because i did not like star trek to begin with. I just saw the movie… and i’ve got to say that if all the episodes were like this… i’d be a trekkie myself. The movie was awesome… your review and several other options i had before me helped me understand it a bit more. There were some “phrases” that i already knew about by various spoofs and word of mouth. It was nice to hear some of them….“I’m giving it all we got captain”.I know a couple of more but i don’t know them word by word and wouldn’t want to offend anyone by not writing them according to the source. Either way mainly what i wanted to say is that i’m usually against reviews because i feel that no matter what its still your opinion of the movie but like i said before being that i know pretty much nothing about star trek… it was a “Dummies intro to Trek” sort of thing for me so thanks.
I could pile on but as I read through the comments most of the “WTF” moments I saw were noted. As a 40 something fan I am pleased at the reboot of the franchise and irked at the obvious goofs. I can only assume that JJ and company simply didn’t care enough to fix those moments and they concentrated on the task of reinventing the franchise for a new generation. Making sure to add as much testosterone per minute as possible. I did like the movie and hope that future installments have a few less things blowing up for no reason and a bit more care in the character development plasuabilty department. 3.5 out of 4 for me.
Oh’ I forgot one thing with Nero’s ship being pulled into the singularity why waste time firing at it? In the theater I was thinking stop flapping yer gums and get the frack out of there before you are pulled in also. Biggest WTF moment in the movie.
dave,
i don’t have answers for all your questions, but here’s some…
spock ejected kirk from the ship because he feared kirk was too resourceful and would escape- ultimatly causing more problems for him.
spock wasn’t hanging out in the cave very long. i think he had just gotten there himself. i believe he was sent not long before vulcan was destroyed so that “he could see it” as nero mentioned.
nero’s ship was so powerful because it was from the future and because it was fitted with Borg technology.
i believe scotty became chief engineer because he was a starfleet officer (even though he was sent on a remote assignment). perhaps he outranked and/or was more experienced than whoever was there before he arrived.
i explained the orbital defenses in an earlier post.(nero got the info from pike thanks to the creature he shoved into pike’s brain…
It is amazing. Much better than the Star Wars prequels
docktorwu ,
they had to DESTROY the ship, even though it was being sucked in by the black hole.
the black hole would’ve just acted like a time warp and transported the ship to another time. (that’s how and spock he got to them in the first place-via the black hole/time warp). it seems that it would destroy a planet only if the red matter was injected into the center of the planet (hence the drilling).
i only know this because i read the prequel, so it probably should’ve been explained better.
@Rob
I also agree with the first action scene with the USS Kelvin, it was sometimes way too hard to see what the heck was going on. But to make it worse, the dialogue between Kirk’s father and the mother in his last moments was soooo cornball. I mean, the “I love you” stuff is fine, I expect that when someone’s about to die, but it’s the whole him actually explaining to her why he’s staying, I think we could have figured out why he stayed from seeing him shooting down the missiles going toward the escape pods. Him saying it out loud seemed like they were TRYING to make him seem heroic instead of him just being heroic.
But anyway, the lens flare I’ve said was just crazy, but another thing I didn’t really understand is the Romulan ship. He said it was a mining vessel, yet it was armed to the teeth. Someone on the other thread said there was a prequel book or something talking about how it was modified, but that really doesn’t explain it according to the timeline given by Spock. I don’t deny he could have retrofitted weapons on there, but according to the timeline, there was no time for that. The Romulan planet was in danger, Spock promised to save it, he tries but was too late, Nero sees Romulus get destroyed, Spock launches the red matter into the supernova, it creates a black hole, Nero attacks Spock, they both get pulled into the black hole, Nero emerges and see’s the USS Kelvin, and destroys it.
So if this timeline is accurate, then Nero must have put the weapons on the mining ship BEFORE he had any kind of vengeance in mind, because it’s not like he had time after seeing Romulus destroyed to go “oh, I want to kill Spock and the rest of the Federation, let me outfit my mining vessel to be able to fight them.”
But according to Nero, before he watched his planet die, he was just trying to make a living as a miner in his mining ship. So I don’t get it, why was a mining ship more heavily armed and defended than even Federation ships??
And Rob brought up a few good points I didn’t really think of while watching it, namely why none of the planets had any kind of defensive systems and why there was no shield effects on the ships.
I hope they’re not trying to say that we’ve become so complacent in the future that we simply rely on the UN-like “Federation” for everything and nobody bothers to try to protect themselves…
I mean, if we as a country had that attitude today, we would have been taken over already…
@mike w
They didn’t need to destroy the ship, that was just icing on the cake. They said it before, the event horizon of the black hole was being formed from within the ship, so it would have torn the ship apart. The difference between that and before was that before the black hole was formed and THEN the ships went into it. This time the violence of the creation of the black hole was right where the ship is. So if they didn’t destroy it, it would have just imploded onto itself like it does at the end anyway. Only difference being it would implode on itself while it was still in tact rather than it imploding into itself in pieces like it did since they blew the crap out of it, lol.
Also, the red matter doesn’t necessarily NEED to be in the core of the planet, it’s just that the planet core is hot enough to “activate” the red matter I guess. It needs to be burned or blown up or something to kind of start the reaction I guess.
I’m gonna add my few cents as well.
I saw the movie and i was relieved that the reboot was better then i thought it would. I had a blast when i saw the CGI and how the cast played those iconic roles so well (Bones was amazing played).
But the flaws are there and even tho i didn’t hate anything in the movie…there is much i missed or that plain didn’t make much sence to me.
How is there no defence forces around Vulcan and Earth (i know they could have been destroyed….but even then, why didn’t they evacuate vulcan after they noticed the federation fleet just got annihilated? But nooo… elders go underground (maybe a good idea) where u can’t reach em with communicators and transporter beams (bad idea). Without any security even close…so much for vulcan logic: let’s hide in a cave!
The shacky and sometimes blurry camera as well as the lens flares were ok at first but then annoying after a while.
The Way Nero introduced himself and talked sometimes was very much unromulan. He said: “Hi, Christoper. My name is Nero!” (that may have something to do with a bad synchro…i didn’t have a chance to watch it in english yet). I just didn’t like the “HI”- Part. Everything else was very good…even tho the character could have used a bit more screentime.
The Score: even tho i loved it and accepted it as a good Star Trek sound, somehow i missed a clear highlight in there… something that should give me goose bumps.
How fast was the supernova that destroyed Romulus? I mean really now =/ ….such a big empire: They had enough time to bring Spock make him a Ship but no time to start evacuating everyone? But ok i may missed something here…have to watch it again in english this time just to make sure.
No Shields….they mention how they drop (so they exist) but the cgi makes em not visible at all.
The transwarp beam formula was from waht time? clearly after nemesis. Never saw anything like that before in trek. But makes kinda sence if you think about tng and that Scotty is very much alive in that time. Still funny that the Ship was not out of range by then ^^
Engineering: that deck was waaaay out of ship-design. Waht the heck was wrong with the designs they developed during tng and the movies? Nope…we need to see a oil refinery with shiny consoles here and there.
Nero’s Mining Ship was a bit over the top. Not as much on the outside as on the inside. The interior didn’t make sence to me as someone who knows Trek and the usual Romulan Designs. The Outside …never saw a Romulan or Reman Mining Ship. Ok wahtever: creative freedome…ship has to look barabaric and dangerous.
Delta Vega was that close to Vulcan? Damn, last time i heard that name it was close to the galactic barrier and no ice planet (TOS: “Where No Man Has Gone Before”).
But correct me please if im wrong.
Surprisingly Uhura and Spock’s relationship didnt bother me much =D
All in all i loved that movie. so waht Rank?
I was never able to compare classic and next gen movies with each other (I loved both crews so much), so this one is the best of it’s generation so far