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!
Tags: star trek
Loading ...
565 Comments
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.
Another thing, this is not a simple time travel story. When Nero and Spock go thru the black hole they are shifted into a different dimension as well as time. That is why Spock then becomes Spock prime.
Also there have been some comments on the power of Nero’s ship. I didn’t see it do anything that I would say is odd. For one the ships of the Romulan Empire are very different from all the other ship in the star trek universe. For one they are most likely all armed, that would keep with a militaristic society. They are generally more powerful then federation starships as well as larger due to them being powered by a quantum singularity instead of the matter/anti-matter reaction. I have no doubt that had the enterprise-E came back as well it would have destroyed Nero’s ship without even raising its shields. But those same weapons that would not have even scratched Picard’s ship would be devastating even to the enterprise-A.
Lastly, this movie was perfect to me. The apple in the chair while Kirk took the kobiyashi maru harkened back to when he told David how he beat it. The only plot hole that I have not been able to explain was the transport from that moon to the enterprise. But, trek is known for stuff like that (voyager and the crack in the black holes event horizon) and I will take it and find an explanation for it because that is what a trekkie does.
Thanks for reading.
Hi everyone, thanks for the great discussion here. Never seen such great debate since the likes of Phantom Menace back in the 90s. Just like to let everyone know about the Star Trek Countdown, the prequel comics that may explain a lot about Nero, his motivation, his ship and why his vengeance is focus on Spock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Countdown
“The comic is set eight years after the film Star Trek Nemesis. Federation and Romulan tensions have generally subsided, with Spock the official Federation ambassador to the Romulans. Data is still alive and has become captain of the Enterprise-E after successfully imprinting his memories onto the prototype android B-4. Jean-Luc Picard is now Federation ambassador to Vulcan, Geordi La Forge has retired to develop his own ships, and Worf is a General in the Klingon Empire.
The galaxy is threatened by the Hobus star, which will become a supernova. Spock proposes that the Romulans transport the precious mineral Decalithium to Vulcan, where it can be converted into red matter capable of turning the star into a black hole, therefore ending its threat. The senate opposes Spock, but he finds a comrade in Nero, the leader of the miners. Nero witnessed Hobus consume a planet first-hand and offers to secretly transport Decalithium, noting it would be better than doing nothing and then leaving his wife and unborn son to die. Nero’s ship, the Narada, is attacked by the Remans, but the Enterprise rescues them and escorts them to Vulcan with Decalithium taken from the Reman ships. On Vulcan, the council opposes Romulan use of red matter, infuriating Nero; he vows if Romulus is destroyed, he shall hold them accountable.
Nero returns to Romulus to discover Hobus has gone supernova and destroyed his home world. Driven mad by his loss, he attacks Federation Olympic class hospital ships that have arrived to give aid, believing they have come to claim his people’s territory. He beams aboard surviving senators onto his ship and kills them for not listening to Spock, and then claims the Praetor’s ancient trident, the Debrune Teral’n, which is the greatest symbol of Romulus. He and his crew then shave their heads and apply tattoos to signify their loss. Nero goes to the Vault, a secretive Romulan base, and has the Narada outfitted with Borg technology to begin a rampage against his enemies.
With the supernova expanding, Spock decides to deposit the red matter weapon. He takes the Jellyfish, a ship developed by La Forge that can withstand extreme environmental conditions. The Narada goes about destroying and assimilating Federation, Klingon and Cardassian ships alike, wounding Worf and damaging the Enterprise in the process. When Spock successfully destroys the supernova, the Narada appears to attack when the black hole flings it and the Jellyfish back in time, leaving Picard and the crew of the Enterprise as witnesses to Spock’s sacrifice.”
@maverick
Thanks for that synopsis; it explains a lot. Hopefully they will include this on the DVD.
Are you Bret or Bart? Or are you just a top-notch pilot?
@ Badnewsoit:
Yes, I think you are dead-on about those shields, the difference between TOS and the ST universe of the TNG era (which would include Voyager & DS9), I noticed that as far back as the TOS series. Weapons bursts would appear to strike the Enterprise’s hull, but not do any damage – the shields, it seemed, fit the ship’s hull like a hand in a glove, whereas the Enterprise D seemed to have a 360 degree shell that lit up a little whenever it was assaulted – well away from the hull, in a sort of lozenge or pillow shape. This shield system could also be extended around nearby vessels, I watched Geordi LaForge (and others) do this many times, something well beyond Scotty’s abilities with his ‘poor bairns’!
Also, I agree with your assessment of Romulan technology; the Type II Warbird, the D’deridex class (you remember it, right?) dwarfed the Enterprise D, and even Romulan shuttlecraft were always heavily armed, not to mention the patented Romulan Plasma Bolt weapon (’Ballance of Terror’, TOS) – and you are absolutely right, they used an artificial quantum singularity in their warp cores, not something safe like antimatter, lol!
This may’ve also had some effect on the timewarp when the Narada & Spock’s ‘Jellyfish ship’ were pulled into the collapsar created by Spock’s Red Matter – after all, the singularity onboard the Narada is a space warp device, correct?
Anyway, like you I was pretty impressed with Kirk’s non-chalance during the Kobayashi Maru Scenario, munching his apple and acting oh-so-cool, just like he did years later inside the Regula asteroid. I think that was just a co-incidence, however, just a recalled plot device on Abram’s part – a sure sign he has been paying attention all these years. The scene with the apple made me think of JAG lawyer Danny Caffee’s (Tom Cruise) interview in Demi Moore’s office in the movie ‘A Few Good Men’, when he made the crack about all the cases he’d settled without even having to go to court – “One more and I win a set of steak knives” – remember that great scene?
As for the transprter issue, as I remember it, and in accordance with what others have said on here, as I understand it Scotty was on Punishment Tour at that Federation outpost because he got one of his instructor’s nose out of joint for writing a paper that concerned something called ‘Transwarp Beaming’, a then-theoretical concept of using transwarp conduits (first mentioned in STII/Wrath of Khan as the ‘Great Experiment’ which was the USS Excelsior, on which such great hopes were pinned for a new era in space travel), which if you recall were never successfully used all throughout the entire TNG era (until the alternate timeline in ‘All Good Things’, as in Cap’n Beverly Picard’s medical frigate USS Pasteur – I guess they finally worked it out, lol!), except by the Rogue Borg (led by the Borg Geordi nicknamed ‘Hugh’); the effect was very cool, of a ship simply being swallowed by a light coming out of a rip in the space/time continuum.
I believe Scotty, as early as the Academy days was able to ‘do the math’, and found a way to utilize these Transwarp Conduits to successful effect for a transporter matter stream. This is how he was able (and of course with Spock Prime’s help), to beam himself and Kirk onto the Enterprise at high warp from several lightyears away. It makes sense, and though I have yet to see the film again, I am sure I heard him mention Transwarp Conduits in his explanation to Kirk, but I cant be sure until I see it again.
Anyone else out there planning on giving up another ten bucks, keep your eyes & ears open for that!
Also, someone on here mentioned Kal Penn was on the Enterprise bridge, I gotta watch for that, too.
U know, I just may have to buy this one when it comes out on DVD…
Btw, my DVD of Nemesis was so bad, after the first couple of times I watched it, it de-rezzed! Can you believe that? I couldn’t even raise anything on my PC!
I hope this helped,
JOHN
I’m a longtime fan of the original series but hated “The Next Generation” (PC, sexless, soulless, dramatically inert) and the other TV spawn and was disappointed with all of the films, which became increasingly ridiculous and incestuous. Khan was clearly the best of the bunch but was still highly derivative, just like the first movie–and I was distracted to the point of anger by the inexplicable open white flap on Shatner’s red tunic.
After seeing the Abrams take, I will concede with the critics (and most viewers) that it’s “fresh” and “exciting,” and in most respects a huge improvement on everything since TOS. On a purely visceral and aesthetic level, the “reboot” works–the special effects and production design are first-rate; stuff actually looks and sounds functional, and the attention to detail is obvious. (Though the Romulans weren’t sufficiently menacing in appearance: They looked like a cross between South Sea Islanders and Eastern European drug dealers). The plot, however, is a convoluted mess, and I would have preferred that the filmmakers had gone all the way in their quest to break from the past and just left Nimoy out of it. I understand that the time-travel nonsense was a strategy to enable future films in the franchise to ignore the constraints imposed by old TV episodes, but I found Nimoy’s presence an unwelcome and unnecessary distraction. I would have preferred a straight-up war film, along the lines of “Balance of Terror,” than the largely incoherent contrivances involving “red matter” and black holes necessary to create two Spocks.
I have an old book called “Star Trek Speaks” that compiles the best dialogue from the original series, and in flipping through it last night I was reminded that every episode had a few great quotable lines (the best episodes had many)–sometimes funny, sometimes profound. At its best, TOS was LITERATE. This element is sadly missing from the new film, which has no remarkable dialogue and much that is banal or just silly (sex with farm animals?). Of course, what do you expect from the team responsible for “Transformers”? Abrams has said that he is not a big fan of TOS because it is “too talky,” but unfortunately his film is “no talky.” The cast was OK, particularly Quinto; I didn’t much care for Urban, who, of all the actors, came closest to an impersonation (but without DeForest Kelley’s emotional depth). But, given sufficiently good writing, they can grow on me. I just hope that in the next film the writers are going to come with something original rather than go back to the well once again and rehash old plot elements and characters. But I’m not holding my breath.
@Maverick
Thanks for the great info. That answers a lot of the comments that I and many others have posted.
You would think that the movies producers would have given the comic a-hell-of-a-lot more publicity since they were that important to the plot!
I don’t think many of us would have known they existed if not for Screen Rant!
@ Maverick:
We all here owe you a great deal, now everything is clear!
Abrams should’ve made a 2-parter, like they did with ‘Back TO The Future II & III’; it would’ve been a last hurrah for the TNG crew and it would’ve made things so much easier to understand. Thanks to you, I see how it all fits together now very nicely.
As it is, the only route they have to clear things up is to do another prequel, a’la ‘Godfather II’ the story behind the story, as it were – if it would sell – do you think it would?
Many, many thanks, Kahless is right about you, you ARE a top-notch pilot!
JOHN
@Maverick
Great find! I didn’t think to check Wikipedia for a concise summary of the prequel.
Thanks,
Vic
Just a point of correction.
Transwarp beaming could not have been mentioned in ST2 “Wrath of Khan” because the “Great Experiment” Excelsior was not mentioned until ST3 “Search for Spock” when the Enterprise arrives at Spacedock (and a very cool looking spacedock, btw).
@ Purist:
“Just a point of correction.
Transwarp beaming could not have been mentioned in ST2 “Wrath of Khan” because the “Great Experiment” Excelsior was not mentioned until ST3 “Search for Spock” when the Enterprise arrives at Spacedock (and a very cool looking spacedock, btw).”
You’re absolutely right, Terry, I stand corrected – it WAS STIII/’Search for Spock’, just as you say, I guess they both blended together as one plot, when you think about it, one was the lead-in to the other…Sorry! And thank you for the catch, I appreciate it.
They did mention ‘Transwarp Drive’ in ST-III, and of course no one but the Rogue Borg figured out how to use it until well into the TNG run; the Excelsior was supposed to be the great hope for transwarp, but according to what I have read, that goal was a mission failure and the big ship was slightly redesigned (if you look closely at the original plans, it’s visible) to be merely the newest Heavy Cruiser. By the time Captain Sulu took command, the great single Impulse Deflector Crystal, set into its impulse housing, had been replaced with two smaller ones side by side, and Excelsior was by then only capable of standard high warp velocity; transwarp beaming was apparently a simpler matter, I suppose, although to Scotty it WAS still just a theory, until Spock Prime showed up with the right calculations.
Yeah, I agree, that Ournal Spacedock was cool, wasn’t it? I liked it too.
L8r, JOHN