Limited Loyalty
I’ll be seeing JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek (Paramount, 5.8) very soon so Dave Itzkoff‘s N.Y. Times profile of Abrams and his filmmaking partners — Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Bryan Burk — had my attention right off.
Star Trek director JJ Abrams
“Abrams and his partners are guys with mainstream pop-culture aspirations,” Itzkoff writes. “Their forte is taking on genres with finite but dedicated fan bases — science fiction, fantasy and horror — and making them accessible to wider audiences. And what they had in mind for their Star Trek movie is a film that is consistent with 43 years of series history but not beholden to it.
“Despite their collective reverence for Star Trek — and Star Wars and Indiana Jones and X-Men, and other cultural artifacts of their awkward adolescence — none of them are total Trek completists (not even Orci, who once owned a telephone shaped like the Enterprise). They say that makes them the ideal candidates to upgrade Gene Roddenberry‘s creation for 21st-century audiences.
“There’s just too much stuff out there to be loyal to everything,” Lindelof said. “Someone will find 50 ways to tell us we’re idiots, and it wouldn’t be Trek if they didn’t.” At the same time they appreciate the perils of chiseling away at a cultural touchstone whose influence has remained enormous even as its reputation has varied wildly over the years.
“If Star Trek fails, Kurtzman said, ‘it’ll be the biggest personal failure we’ve ever had, because we will have actually violated something that means a lot to us.’”
… single favorite ep of the original series … Mirror, Mirror … followed closely by Assignment: Earth, City on the Edge of Forever, The Trouble with Tribbles …
Oh, I don’t think it’s going to be a failure. What they wanted was someone who could make a cool movie that everyone likes out of an old idea and characters that everyone knows. Looks like they succeeded. They even came up with a way to make it an altered timeline so it doesn’t have to copy everything that the original show did.
I said it before, and I’ll keep saying it until I’m proven wrong: The last time someone paid Orci and Kurtzman to “mainstream” a niche/”nerdcore” franchise, we got “Transformers.”
Based on that and the trailers alone, there is absolutely no reason to go into this expecting anything other than an average movie and even LESS reason to expect a good Star Trek movie.
So his TV shows seem to do great business, though I’ve never really been hooked by Alias or Lost. Mission Impossible 3 was as good as a film co-directed by Tom Cruise could be, though the final scene/shot made me slack jawed with disbelief at how a film could become such a tv show so quickly (It was like chandler and fucking monica got married and were saying goodbye, disgusting). And Cloverfield was fine, over-sized fun. But his face! I just can’t abide by this dudes face. I don’t know what it is, it’s not his expression or any trace of venality or pretension in his eyes, he just looks..annoying. I’m sure he’s a lovely dude, but I just can’t get past it.
But Transformers was pretty thin material — toy commercials disguised as cartoons that couldn’t manage to keep any kind of consistent continuity. Even the animated movie was a cynical ploy to get kids to buy a whole new bunch of main characters after it killed the old ones off.
Trek has a thick history and canon (occasionally contradicts itself, but relatively little), and there’s a lot more that can be done with it.
They made the best movie anyone could ever make about alien robots that transform into vehicles.
I would actually say I am in complete disagreement with Rothchild. I think they made the worst movie anybody could make about alien robots that transform into vehicles. Maybe they made the best movie about alien robots that transform into vehicles that could be made if you limit the screentime of the alien robots that transform into vehicles to about 10 minutes and fill up the rest with Shia LaBeouf but, honestly, even given those limitations, it could’ve been a lot better.
The point isn’t the relative worth of the original material, the point is their approach: The problem with “mainstreaming” Trek and Transformers is basically the same for both: They owe the lifespan thats makes their reboots worth undertaking to relatively small niches of overly-devout scifi fans primarily obsessed with trivia and arcana. The actual MATERIAL in Trek is, of course, vastly more worthwhile, but hit up Wiki and you’ll find Transformers’ backlog is every bit as convoluted and introverted – in fact it’s a bit alarming at times in that regard.
Orci/Kurtzman’s solution was to make the thinest, dumbest version of the story they could and retrofit the whole thing into a pandering paean to the hallowed “Fast & Furious” demographic. Now look at the trailers for this with Kirk as a bar-fighting “troubled teen” with his douchebaggy motorcycle and daddy issues and tell me it doesn’t look like they’re trending the same direction.
I don’t know how anyone could hate Shia and like Tom Hanks or Richard Dreyfuss in their beloved films from the ’80s.
wait till Brett Ratner’s “GoBots” comes next year.
Far as Star Trek goes, Gene’s legend was hiring all his mistresses to get continuing character parts on the show.
I saw it last night. Trust me this movie is going to #1 or 2 box office hit of the year!..
I’m in for Ratner’s GoBots. Chris Tucker as Leader One?
STAR TREK, from the man who brought you REGARDING HENRY and GONE FISHIN’…
“Their forte is taking on genres with finite but dedicated fan bases — science fiction, fantasy and horror…”
This might be one of the dumbest things I have read in the New York Times since last week.
A finite number of fans? Like, what, say, three billion people? I guess that is finite number, but only to Itzkoff.
Folks,
I, too saw STAR TREK. As a life long, card carrying fan of the franchise, I have to say the movie will satisfy the casual moviegoing public who will love the rousing and beautifully realized space opera it delivers. It really is TOP GUN in space. But for anyone looking for something along the lines of “…the needs of the many outweigh the need for the few…or the one…” you’ll have to look elsewhere.
I was hoping for an Obama Presidency Star Trek. Instead, I got the AMERICAN PIE version.
Kirk isn’t even a STARFLEET ACADEMY graduate before he’s granted the Command of the Enterprise.
Beautifully made, great to look at…but monumentally dumb.
“I don’t know how anyone could hate Shia and like Tom Hanks or Richard Dreyfuss in their beloved films from the ’80s.”
I don’t know how it’s hatred of Shia LaBeouf to suggest that ‘Transformers’ spends a lot more time on him than it does on giant alien robots who transform into vehicles. Also, I’m not really sure what Tom Hanks/Richard Dreyfuss movies from the ’80′s you’re comparing to ‘Transformers’ — were they really playing action heroes in huge special effects bonanzas? That’s a weird thing for me to forget. But, then, I also don’t remember what Richard Dreyfuss movies from the ’80′s I’m supposed to love, or even enjoy his performance in. Your whole response is a mystery to me.
But Transformers was pretty thin material — toy commercials disguised as cartoons that couldn’t manage to keep any kind of consistent continuity. Even the animated movie was a cynical ploy to get kids to buy a whole new bunch of main characters after it killed the old ones off.
Trek has a thick history and canon (occasionally contradicts itself, but relatively little), and there’s a lot more that can be done with it.
Bob: I’m kind of betting Abrams is getting a free pass from critics partly because of his work on Alias and Lost. And I personally thought Abrams was just remaking the Star Wars prequels in the Star Trek universe, but I see your point.
LYT: TF was good enough to make a decent animated movie. I don’t see why the hell Bay couldn’t do a decent LA movie. And I don’t really care if the former was an excuse to get me to buy toys. They still made it worth seeing for its own reason; and that was when a lot of cartoon movies were generally just extensions of their shows.
Gordon: I think what really annoys me is that Matrix Revolutions has cooler mechs than TF; yet everyone still trashes it more than TF.
Roth: Don’t remember Dreyfuss in the 80s, but Hanks came off fun in those movies. Shia just acts like an older version of that kid character from Home Alone.
corey: Ratner should remake Mazinger Z. That would be perfect for him. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux3l3TAZVUI
hollyman: It’ll make money, but will it be good? That’s the real issue.
“It’ll make money, but will it be good? That’s the real issue. ”
If you were to think this movie was good, it would be the first movie you ever said on this site you thought was good. So I have a feeling you aren’t going to like it, no matter what.
RMBurnett is quite correct. The film is inane.
Abrams clearly wanted to play Star Wars and has managed to indulge his usual opaque plotting game on an ILM-rendered chess board… with the easy assistance of that monumentally insipid duo, Orci-Kurtzman. Only this time, their hackneyed dialogue is spoken by treasured iconic characters – that have been hijacked. Injected with steriods, resurrected and propped up for mass appeal.
Someday, if a miracle were occur and Star Trek were to actually be successfully – and honorably – revived, I hope that self-appointed ‘Supreme Court’ will do the right thing and have Nero’s ship obliterated before it gets to do what it does in this film, thus tossing this piece of shit film into the dust bin of Trek canon.
Because, as you know: Stonn is Decius. And Decius is Stonn.
bottom line is that it will make a shit-ton of money and please most of the hard-core fans and newbies…it’ll get nit-picked by the usual scolds…fuck ‘em…..
The posts by RMBurnett and Eileen scare the hell out of me. If this is true (and I suspect it is) then it’s worse than I could have possibly believed.
as the rockman said: you see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear….
Folks,
Without SPOILING too much…the film presents a villain who’s motivation comes from losing everything that is dear to him in a cataclysm. He then finds himself 127 years back in time, BEFORE the terrible event.
Yet, instead of say, WARNING his people about the catastrophic events which will occur in the future, he instead spends his time on a dumb quest for revenge against something which has yet to occur and he can now prevent…but doesn’t.
Why? Because he’s CRAZY WITH ANGER AND GRIEF. And really, really, really stupid.
And for those of you who fancy yourselves screenwriters…ask yourselves…from the time the villain Nero and his crew arrive in the past at the beginning of the movie (in the film’s best sequence), to the time they start blasting Vulcan…25 years pass. So…
WHERE THE HELL WERE THEY ALL THIS TIME? Uh…just HANGING OUT in space somewhere? And since it hadn’t happened yet…HOW DID THEY KNOW WHEN SPOCK PRIME would even show up?
For anyone with half a brain, the movie makes no sense at all…but HEY…it’s SCI FI…so it doesn’t have to make sense!
I won’t be surprised if this does well ($200M+).
I won’t be surprised if it looks great.
They’re spending close to $150M to make it. The cast and creators are reasonably talented (Fringe and TFers suck, but who’s counting?).
I will be surprised if the 3rd or 4th entry in the reboot have the same cast and amount of cash being thrown at it.
Paramount is notoriously cheap when it comes to Star Trek.
The lavish attention it’s getting now, won’t be there in a couple of movies.
We can agree to disagree on the relative merits of the TF animated movie…but the reason the robots’ screentime was limited in the live-action movie was budgetary, period. Even as expensive as it was, more robot screen time would have been even more money — Bay admitted that some of the fights are close-up and blurry because they couldn’t afford to render them in better detail.
In a cartoon, you can have all robots on an all-robot planet, and the budget doesn’t change. You can also cheat the transformations — Megatron shrinks into a handgun, Optimus’ trailer shows up out of nowhere, robots transform in ways that couldn’t possibly fit a driver in vehicle mode, yet they do. Bay actually tried to make the transformations ones that could conceivably work without such cheats, which again means more money for rendering the engineering.
It costs no extra money to have additional scenes with Kirk and Spock, however, since both are actors who come cheap. So the screenwriters theoretically have less limitations.
these two reviews dare to tread where the fanboys and industry rag reviews just can’t boldly go…
http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/04/20/movie-review-star-trek/
says ST mostly fails and is “utterly shallow”
http://movies.ign.com/articles/973/973956p1.html
“The film doesn’t work, however, as a pulsating, dramatic summer action movie.” it’s a very forgiving review (be sure to click through to the second page), but clearly states that ST doesn’t approach the best of The Dark Knight or Transformers, even.
I think you forget, Rob, when you say that there’s nothing here that carries the weight of “the needs of the many,” that line came at the culmination of a film that heavily leaned on over twenty years of emotional weight with those characters. Right now, for many audiences, you simply can’t have that kind of moment, because they don’t care about these characters anymore. I know that’s a tough pill for a Trek fan to swallow, but it’s true. It simply doesn’t hold the same space in pop culture that it once did. It could. And I suspect it will again for a while. But in order to get to a moment like “the needs of the many,” you have to lay the groundwork, and that means starting here.
And I think your Nero gripes are not without some merit, but I also think Nero is the least important thing about the film. Nero could be anything, and it would be the same film, and since this is a movie about putting this group of people together, I’m okay with that. He’s a bad guy. He’s got a plan. That plan draws this group together and defines them. Easy enough.
I think it’s going to be huge. And I think Eileen and those reviews above will be in a very, very distinct minority.
The new Trek sounds symptomatic of everything Abrams has ever made. Fun to look at but utterly shallow and falls apart on rewatching.
And this guy is being hailed as “the new Spielberg”. Please.
And then we have the dramatic prose of Kurtzman and Orci.
Has anyone shitting on Kurtzman and Orci watched FRINGE this year? It’s a somewhat silly series, but I’m really enjoying it. It gives me at least some faith in their abilities.
We can agree to disagree on the relative merits of the TF animated movie…but the reason the robots’ screentime was limited in the live-action movie was budgetary, period. Even as expensive as it was, more robot screen time would have been even more money — Bay admitted that some of the fights are close-up and blurry because they couldn’t afford to render them in better detail.
In a cartoon, you can have all robots on an all-robot planet, and the budget doesn’t change. You can also cheat the transformations — Megatron shrinks into a handgun, Optimus’ trailer shows up out of nowhere, robots transform in ways that couldn’t possibly fit a driver in vehicle mode, yet they do. Bay actually tried to make the transformations ones that could conceivably work without such cheats, which again means more money for rendering the engineering.
It costs no extra money to have additional scenes with Kirk and Spock, however, since both are actors who come cheap. So the screenwriters theoretically have less limitations.
Gordon: “If you were to think this movie was good, it would be the first movie you ever said on this site you thought was good. ”
Actually, I’ve mentioned movies I liked before on here.
LYT: “Even as expensive as it was, more robot screen time would have been even more money — Bay admitted that some of the fights are close-up and blurry because they couldn’t afford to render them in better detail.”
Again, Matrix Revolutions had some detailed mech-on-mech action. So let’s face it. Bay just blew his budget on those slow-ass transformation scenes which just have to look like a CG Rubik’s cube, rather than being ergonomic like the show.
The new Trek sounds symptomatic of everything Abrams has ever made. Fun to look at but utterly shallow and falls apart on rewatching.
And this guy is being hailed as “the new Spielberg”. Please.
And then we have the dramatic prose of Kurtzman and Orci.
“”Has anyone shitting on Kurtzman and Orci watched FRINGE this year?”"
Uh, yeah. It sucks.
The show is supposed to be about ‘science,’ or at least offbeat permutations of it.
Which would be cool, if that’s what they kept to.
But we get magic.
I might as well be watching ‘Hogwarts: The Annoying Years.’
So it Ratner’s doing GoBots, does that mean McG is doing Voltron?
McG has signed up for Micronauts
Although what’s going to be great is Wes Anderson’s Webbles.
RM,
Star Trek isn’t Science Fiction. It’s fantasy. Complaining about the science in a Star Trek movie is absurd. Asking what Nero does for 25 years while he waits for Spock to show up is equally absurd. Who knows what he does? Who cares? What does young Spock do when he has to go to the bathroom? Why don’t we see Uhura’s teen years? Why don’t we find out how Kirk learned to drive so young? These are non-sequiturs.
Also, your complaint with the film applies with even more measure to the majority of Trek movies, especially the godawful Next Gen films, all of which are mindless exercises in action and stupidity.
Abrams and Co. have done an exquisite job with Trek. The movie I saw – as an avid and lifelong fan of the show – was a brilliant, exciting and entertaining re-introduction to some of my favorite characters in a way that will be accessible and entertaining to a huge audience.
And let’s all breathe a sigh of relief that Shatner’s bloated, campy visage never makes an appearance.
Sal,
Agreed. Abrams and Co. HAVE done an exquisite job re-introducing favorite characters to a huge audience. Those are easily the best parts of the film. The scene of young Spock taunted at school was one of my favorite parts of the movie.
When sticking with our characters, the film works best.
However, the absurd plotting almost sinks the whole…ah…enterprise. If I have to ask myself as I’m watching a movie WHY or WHERE something is happening or taking place, I don’t think it’s entirely successful.
Science Fiction, Horror or Fantasy has to work doubly hard to set up a set of rules for its storytelling, and then stick to those rules, otherwise the audience is shortchanged.
Nero is a screaming, one-dimensional cardboard villain who never has a great confrontational scene with our heroes. Go back and watch John Colicos in an episode like “Errand of Mercy.” THAT’S a well-rounded classic Trek foil. Dangerous, charming and funny.
STAR TREK is only half a great movie, and that’s too bad.
“Bay admitted that some of the fights are close-up and blurry because they couldn’t afford to render them in better detail.”
So why even bother making the movie in the first place? I mean, seriously…I know the answer ($), but it’s just this kind of filmmaking attitude that has kept me away from Bay’s movies since Armaggedon.
I’m still not exactly sure how he made a picture based on transforming toys that seemed to ignore that very simple concept for nearly 75-80% of its running time. Shocking.
“I’m still not exactly sure how he made a picture based on transforming toys that seemed to ignore that very simple concept for nearly 75-80% of its running time. Shocking.”
Because he doesn’t want to (NEVER wanted to, on record) be making a movie about transforming robots; but this is what was on his plate via Boss Spielberg after The Island tanked. So instead he just focuses on the stuff he prefers to film: Bad comedy and processions of “I’m a bad-ass because Army Guys like me” military hardware.
RM,
“Nero is a screaming, one-dimensional cardboard villain who never has a great confrontational scene with our heroes. Go back and watch John Colicos in an episode like “Errand of Mercy.” THAT’S a well-rounded classic Trek foil. Dangerous, charming and funny.”
Do you hold all the Trek movies to these standards, or just the new one? Because as far as one note Trek villains go, I can’t think of a worse one than Christopher Loyd in Trek 3. Except for maybe all the villains in the forgettable Next Gen movies.
As far as Trek movies go, this new one is easily the best since Khan (which was pretty light on the things that made the show so memorable, too, choosing, instead, to focus entirely on action an characters…. just like this new one.)
No one has mentioned the *absurd* level of “coincidence” that populates this thing.
“A finite number of fans? Like, what, say, three billion people? I guess that is finite number, but only to Itzkoff.”
That word, “finite” — I don’t think it means what you think it does.
Careful with the spoilers, kids.
Love JJ except for his pretentious glasses (which arent nearly as pretentious as Soderbergh’s).
RM: “a brilliant, exciting and entertaining re-introduction to some of my favorite characters in a way that will be accessible and entertaining to a huge audience. ”
When you say accessible to a huge audience I hope you don’t mean dumbed down.
BurmaShave wrote:
STAR TREK, from the man who brought you REGARDING HENRY and GONE FISHIN’…
Also TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS (shot under the title FILOFAX) with the one-off comedy team of Jim Belushi and Charles Grodin.
RM: “a brilliant, exciting and entertaining re-introduction to some of my favorite characters in a way that will be accessible and entertaining to a huge audience. ”
When you say accessible to a huge audience I hope you don’t mean dumbed down.
Super content