What Did You Think Of Star Trek? (Spoiler Discussion)
May 8, 2009 by Vic HoltremanNeed a place to talk about the Star Trek movie, including spoilers? Come on in…
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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@ Purist
I admit, improbable, but consider: he and his cadet crew had just saved Earth (and who knows how many other planets) from getting destroyed. You’d have to imagine the popular acclaim would be pretty hefty. I mean, think if some senior Navy cadet saved the Whole Friggin USA from getting reduced to rubble by taking command of the Navy’s “best” ship. I’d imagine that cadet would get at least several medals. And if public sentiment were strong enough, promotion to captain & command of some vessel. Probably not a prize aircraft carrier, but probably not a patrol boat either…. So…it’s a stretch to get the flagship, but not so much of one to get the promotion and *a* command.
Hey readers,
This red matter question has been bugging all of us and I just happened to run across a Star Trek review at NewScientist.com. The article stated that red matter closely parallel’s a substance called “red mercury”. It’s not yet been proven but some scientists believe it has already been made and that a baseball sized chunk of the stuff would make a NEUTRON bomb and kill everyone within 600 meters. That’s some pretty nasty cherry cool aid!
Here’s a copy of the link to the article about the “red mercury”. Let me know if it works.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619750.300-cherry-red-and-very-dangerous.html
They mention a lot of the scientific mistakes that were made.
@ Purist
Captain Pike convinced young Kirk to enlist in Starfleet because he saw in the barroom brawl the character his father had shown in saving the lives of the crew of the Kelvin.
Before getting into the shuttle to negotiate with Nero, he made Kirk Spock’s First Officer for the very same reason, and the fact that he was the man who highlighted the trap they were about to fall into.
When Spock relieved himself of command, Kirk, as First Officer, was therefore the only choice to take command.
I also tend to think that saving the Earth from destruction might just be worth a medal…
I’d also like to point out Sulu’s little hiccup before going to warp, but not because it’s not likely to happen. Because of his rookie mistake, the Enterprise arrived at Vulcan as the only remaining Starfleet craft? They went into warp about 20 seconds after the rest, which, assuming they were all traveling at the same speed, means that Nero managed to destoy the entire fleet in 20 seconds? Please feel free to correct me.
In fact, why am I here? I’m not a nitpicking trekkie. I just absorb myself in the stories and leave my reality at the door for later collection. I loved the film and will buy the DVD.
@eyrieowl
Yah, I just realized it wasn’t a matching black hole in the past, just a “thunderstorm in space” as they described it. That was my mistake. I’m pretty sure the makers of the movie were thinking about the blackhole causing a wormhole and that would allow for the time travel. They wouldn’t be the first to think that it would, Steven Hawkins have been promoting that theory for decades…
Oh, while I’m at it, if setting the inertial dampers is a prerequisite to “Punch It” (love that line) why isn’t it a subroutine of the punch it button. You can’t tell me that programming methodology hasn’t progressed in 400 years.
The only reason you would have to enable this setting manually prior to warp was if the Enterprise was running Microsoft Windows for Starships(tm)!
Damn it, I’ve turned into a nitpicking trekkie!
fij, in almost every Star Trek episode or movie, there’s always some crazy problem that can lead to the destruction of the crew or prevent them rescueing someone or something, and there are always things they can change with the controls, (divert powers from _____ to _____ and then revert _____) that will magically solve the problem.
I’ve always wondered, if their technology is so advanced, how come the ship didn’t realize that all it needed to do was those things and automatically do them when the problem arises?
If they actually had to change something in the hardware of the ship, I understand that it can’t do that by itself, but it’s almost always something in the “software” of the ship that can be changed that will fix it…
It’s hard to explain, I hope you understand where I’m getting at, but it’s kind of like what you’re wondering.
powers = power, lol didn’t mean it to sound like magic or something…
I had a number of problems with the film, not the least of which is Kirk’s skipping of at least four ranks to go from cadet to captain of the Federation’s flag ship. Did he deserve a medal, probably. But captain? Come on…! I personally would have like to see him rise through the ranks. At least a couple of minutes anyway…
There are also huge holes in the plot.
Most of the actors were acceptable. Uhura was great. Scotty was terrible!
The effects were straight out of Star Wars.
I tried to just sit back and enjoy it for what it was. Still not there yet…
I just saw the movie yesterday night and so can finally read thise who0le thread without spoiling my experience. Wow that was alot of reading.
The movie was great, i was entertained the whole time. The opening sequence was very emotional and gripping. I’m a big TOS fan but don’t consider myself a Trekkie.
I see where some are coming from with some of the knit-picking, but none of it really bothered my enough. I saw it in IMAX and not sure what everyone is saying about the lens flares. I guess the IMAX experience was a little different in regards to that or I just didn;t notice it.
The Spock Uhura and Spocks’s mom’s death were big shockers , but i accepted them. As for those saying that there was a hint of something between Spock/Uhura in TOS, I never saw it, but I do remember there being feeling between Spock and Bones’ head Nurse in TOS.
I loved all the little homages/references thoughout the movie. After reading all the posts I noticed that nobody mentioned the Homage about Sulu.
Kirk – “What kind of (Martial/Hand-to-hand) training do you have?
Sulu – Fencing.
LOL, remember that episode where Sulu has the sword and is acting like a swashbuckler… HAHA
There should be a thread just listing all the Homages. That would be cool to see.
Would have been great to see a Galaxy Quest reference too HAHAHA. I loved that movie.
I though Pine was a brilliant Kirk. and the rest of the cast were great.Chekov’s accent didn’t bother me much either.
I can’t wait for the sequels
I just saw the movie again last night and discovered a few things that I think answer some of the questions that have been flying around this board.
1) What was Nero doing for 25 years?
I think it’s clear Nero spent most of that time in a Klingon prison. We know a scene about that was cut, but actually, there is a scene still in the movie that references that. During Spock’s mind meld with Kirk, he talks about Nero. And we see a scene in which Nero looks like he is doing hard labor. I believe this was from the prison scene that was cut.
Now why was Nero in a prison? Because after watching it a second time, I realized that his ship was HEAVILY damaged after the Kelvin rammed into it. I mean, there was a massive amount of debris just streaming off the ship. Nero had to find a way to do repairs, and with his limited crew, it would no doubt take years. I believe during this time, Nero gets caught and imprisoned by the Klingons.
Sometime right before the 25 years are up, Nero manages to escape (or maybe his crew comes and rescues him, finally having repaired the ship.) The other clue that supports this is the Uhura intercepts a message that 47 Klingon warbirds were wiped out in an attack. I believe this was Nero exacting revenge upon the Klingons for having imprisoned him. It certainly makes sense. Fearing that he would miss his rendezvous with Spock, Nero rushes back to that region of space, not taking time to make contact with the Romulan empire. So I think that satisfies my question about what he did for 25 years in a reasonable way.
On second viewing, there were two plot problems that did crop up, however.
1) The supernova that “threatens the galaxy” wasn’t the Romulan sun. If so, even if a star close to Romulas went supernova, the light and blast from that would take YEARS to reach Romulus. Even then, unless the star was just a few light years away, there’s no way the blast could have scorched Romulus the way it did.
The writers should have made the threat a Gamma Ray Burst:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/05/08/ba-review-star-trek/
Now a Gamma Ray Burst would have threatened life in a galaxy. These phenomena are so powerful (think all the energy of a supernova channeled into two beams that emanate from the pole of an exploding star) that if Earth happened to be in the path of a beam, even from millions of lights years away, the energy would be so powerful it would strip our atmosphere away. So the supernova plot point actually made the movie a lot weaker. Shoulda been a gamma ray burst.
2) Kirk, when he first tries to warn Pike the Enterprise is warping into a trap, says that “the Kelvin disappeared and was never heard from again.” A big WTF?! Everyone KNOWS what happened to the Kelvin because 800 people survived to tell about it, i.e. the Kelvin was attacked by a ship of unknown origin, crewed by Romulans. So I don’t know where that line came from. Definitely didn’t make any sense, and it was a major logic fail that I only noticed on the second viewing.
Still, I found I enjoyed the movie just as much the second time around, and can’t wait to see what the writer cook up for the next one.
@ Ken J
re changing the hardware v software. what, you think the dilithium matrix just realigns itself? pah! what you fail to understand is how advantageous it is to have a dilithium matrix which is suboptimally aligned as a matter of course so that you can always get out of any difficulty by tweaking it….
ship about to get toasted? realign the matrix! late for an appointment? realign the matrix! peace negotiations getting nowhere? realign the matrix!
@vitaboy,
re: “the Kelvin disappeared and was never heard from again.” well, that is an accurate statement.
the ship did disappear (after ramming into the narada, there was not much left .)
and after ramming into the narada, it was in fact never heard from again.
only a select few of the crew might have known that Mr. Kirk was going to set the controls to auto pilot and ram the narada , but the system failed requiring him to manually pilot it into the narada preventing him from escaping. don’t think anyone else but mr. kirk knew the auto pilot malfunctioned- he was the only one left on the ship. he was buying the survivors time. not sure how many of the crew members witnessed the actual ramming for they were gettin the hell out of there pretty quickly in their 20 or so escape pods.
no one except Mr. Kirk knew that the auto pilot malfunctioned. i’m thinking the suriving crew members were not 100 % sure of the kelvin’s fate except that it never escaped the attack of the narada. they never heard from it again. one second it was there, then it wasn’t. it seemed to have disappeared.
***also***
at the time of the Kelvin, was starfleet even aware of romulans? since the narada was from the future and covered in borg technology, it would not have been recognized as a romulan ship . and also, since the romulans shaved their heads and tatooed their faces out of mourning, they may not have been recognized as romulans.
LMAO @ eyrieowl
Hungry and no time for a real lunch? lol, you finish that for me…
@ Ken J:
“Yeah, I just realized it wasn’t a matching black hole in the past, just a “thunderstorm in space” as they described it. That was my mistake. I’m pretty sure the makers of the movie were thinking about the blackhole causing a wormhole and that would allow for the time travel. They wouldn’t be the first to think that it would, Steven Hawkins have been promoting that theory for decades…”
You are SOOOOO right! The advantage of having ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Syndrome), you can only use your mind, ’cause nothing else works…Hey, maybe HE should write Star Trek scripts from now on, hahaha!
But you should get his name right, Ken, not to embarrass you, pal, but it’s bad enough the poor man cannot speak for himself:
His name is Stephen Hawking, not Steven Hawkins…I don’t know who the hell Steven Hawkins is, probably a letter carrier in Peoria or some place. No offense to anyone -
Stephen Hawking.
JOHN
@mike w
I would accept this argument except that it was quite clear the Kelvin headed straight into the bowels of this thing and there was a great explosion. Anyone looking out the windows of the shuttlecraft would have seen that, and I’m sure all the shuttles have video recorders that are constantly on.
In addition, all the survivors would know that the Narada didn’t give chase and hunt them down, which any sensible person would have credited to the actions taken by George Kirk on the Kelvin.
Furthemore, the Kelvin incident was a well-studied event by inference: Captain Pike wrote an entire dissertation on it and you don’t write a dissertation unless there’s a lot of data to study. The fact that Pike says, “Your father was captain of a starship for 12 minutes and saved 800 lives” implies that Kirk was dead after 12 minutes, not MIA.
In fact, we know it’s common knowledge that the Kelvin was destroyed because Spock taunts Kirk during the Starfleet hearing that “A captain cannot cheat death – something you should know very well,” a clear indication that it was accepted as fact that George Kirk died saving the Kelvin. You wouldn’t assume that if the Kelvin had simply “disappeared.” Heck, we still have GIs from the Korean War still listed as MIA even though chances are they are all dead of old age, simply because there was no body recovered. Kirk’s body was never recovered yet he was considered KIA, so that means logically, the destruction of the Kelvin was not only accepted, but common knowledge..
We don’t need to do the old logic-defying canon routine here. The line was simply a bad choice of words by the writers, a mistake. No need to try to cover for it.
I think there’s an easier explanation – our friend above heard the line incorrectly.
I remember Kirk saying that the Romulan ship disapeared and was not heard from for 25 years – not the Kelvin.
I just looked up the comic in wikipedia. Seems pretty cool and I’d like to read it. Maybe if it was incorporated into the movie then trekkies wouldn’t feel the movie was so blasphemous… Or then again maybe they would cuz then it would seem like it was purposely trying to wipe out the established timeline instead of creating an alternate time line to keep th eoriginal one intact.
I still have to watch the movie again… I just prefer to look at the movie as in a bubble, helps me not feel as irritated with it following alternate versions of the characters hehe
Just because the guy is disabled now misspelling his name is somehow worse than misspelling someone else’s name… Equal rights man, lol. I don’t discriminate in my name misspellings…
After watching the movie again I noticed in the scene where Kirk was getting his groove on with the Orion cadet Uhura walks in and says while was monitering planet and celestial bodies she intercepted a transmission from a Klingon prison planet stating that 47 Klingon warships had just been destroyed in orbit.
Could this Nero’s crew rescuing him from the prison planet that previews had been showing?
I might be crazy but in the scene where they have just reached Vulcan and Pike and Nero are talking. The camera goes from Kirk, then Spock, then to two other crewmen and the one on the right has to be Kal Penn. I may be wrong but i’m betting i’m not on this one.
Someone asked a similar question earlier and I wanted to help them out.
If someone can see if that’s him. It was only a quick screenshot so I really want to know if that’s him or i’m way out in left field.
Thanks.
A lot of writer’s cop-outs in this movie. No excuse for that. Too much silly stuff. But the cool stuff makes this movie a good one overall, in my opinion. The crew of the Kelvin, for one example, was JUST the way Trek should have always been.
One thing I’ve seen nobody mention anywhere is the new phasers. The new pistols actually physically flip their “barrels” around when going from stun to kill and back. That wasn’t bad, I thought. Kinda cool, kinda silly.
What does bother me about that is that each mode has a different color emitter. So one of the coolest things about Trek phasers is changed (ruined?) now. In the older Trek, you never knew if the phaser pointing at you is set to kill or stun which made having one pointed at you always scary.
To Vic, this is my 3rd post on Screen Rant in the last 25 hours but I’ve been reading SR articles for a long time, several times a day. You should be proud of this site. Really. I was especially impressed when you posted, bravely, that this site is going to be conservative-leaning. Common sense and conservatism is a rare thing on the Internet, especially a movie site.
Just wanted to let you know that I’m a longtime fan and former Lurker. Would’ve told you this some time ago, but I can’t stand coming off as a kiss-up. Well-done to the other writers as well.
@Cookie – Yes, I’m sure that’s correct.
@Sharpe – Thanks, it’s much appreciated!
Vic
@Fury2701
much easier explanation indeed- thanks!!
So that was Kal Penn.
Thanks Vic, I was starting to worry that I needed medication! LOL!
Maybe this new Star Trek movie is actually “Ultimate Star Trek”
works for me
@Sharpe
In TOS, I remember an episode when Scotty looked at a phaser someone was pointing at him and said, “That phaser is set to kill”.
I have seen a lot of complaints about the lack of shield effects in the new movie. Now I could be wrong but I believe that the shield effects started in TNG. They were never used in any of the TOS movies. In the undiscovered country when Chang was attacking not even the Excelsior had shield effects. I believe the reason for this was the fact that in TOS timeframe the shield hugged the out line of the ship this can be seen on any eng. display that shows shield status. On the enterprise-D those same screens circle the ship as does the shield which is where the shield effect comes from.