Star Trek Beyond trailer

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

Guys, I'm still mad about the missed opportunities in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

 

TMP was pretty progressive for its day. Sadly it is probably the most dated Star Trek film. Now, it's best used for playing the 10 minute beauty shot of the Enterprise, and pausing as needed, if you are building a model! I wore out my VHS tape doing that, back in the 1980s!

 

[Driver]

Yeah, Trumbull set a bar with the model work in TMP that to this day is still my standard. Shots of Ent-E in Nemesis don't look as good as ones int TMP and TWOK. The Enterprise in the first two Trek films makes that ship seem so REAL. Scale was taken into consideration, interior sets were meticulously planned to know where and how they fit with the external model. It was a level of craftsmanship that has gone unrivaled in my opinion.

[Pong Messiah]

Yeah, Trumbull set a bar with the model work in TMP that to this day is still my standard. Shots of Ent-E in Nemesis don't look as good as ones int TMP and TWOK. The Enterprise in the first two Trek films makes that ship seem so REAL. Scale was taken into consideration, interior sets were meticulously planned to know where and how they fit with the external model. It was a level of craftsmanship that has gone unrivaled in my opinion.

Yes.

 

There are obviously dated effects and costumes (and mustaches) in both movies, but no other films in the franchise come close when it comes to impact, weight, or willingness to combine aesthetic and intellectual considerations.

 

A friend of mine has (had?) some of those limited "Unauthorized Starfleet Blueprints" or whatever they're called that came out in the 1970s and early '80s, and I was always struck by how every square inch (sorry, centimeter) of the ships were mapped out, down to how many average-sized humans could walk abreast down each corridor, water reclamation, etc...

 

The exteriors still look great, but even the newly re-imagined interiors of older ships (e.g. TOS Enterprise) don't show the level of imagination and craftsmanship on the inside (though I will admit the artwork is better).

[Driver]

Mr. Scott's guide to the Enterprise and The Star Trek TNG Tech manual are still on my shelf. Mr. Scott's guide is actually made up of 90% production design documents. TWOK only showed is the bridge, sickbay, torpedo room, engineering, the transporter room and some halls-- but TMP also included the huge rec hall, the VIP conference room (which was a standard set on all later Trek shows), an airlock and the pretty massive cargo deck/hanger bay.

 

The first fly-by in TMP that was recycled for TWOK as so freaking epic and amazing. That ship looks REAL. It has weight and substance and was shot to make sure you realzied it. Sure, CG can give us some cool effects and movement-- but nothing has ever felt as really as the Enterprise refit to me.

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

I have Mr. Scott's Guide packed away somewhere, as well as the TNG one. The level of thought going into designing the ship inside and out was stupendous. For the exterior, I have to say that was Andrew Probert's masterpiece (with the Enterprise-D being the second time lightning struck, but even then, THAT incarnation still doesn't compare to the Enterprise refit/E-A). Both those ships are my top two of all time fictional spacecraft. And there is something to be said about real models, over CGI ones. There are modelers out there that can scratch build models, but the guys who built the first ones were just master builders. I don't know how else to put it. True artists, in the fullest sense. Too bad it is becoming a lost art.

 

And that goes for the interior, too. Every set that was created for TMP, and TWOK, literally was re-used in TNG, as well as Voyager, with slight modifications. Hallways, bridges, conference rooms, transporter rooms. Sure money saving was part of that, but I think that just speaks to the level of craftsmanship in those sets, for those shows to keep using those sets 5, 10,even almost 20 years after TMP.

 

Now I think some of the interiors of the Abramsprise are pretty awesome. The bridge looks great, as well as the hall ways. Engineering...less so. It doesn't just look like a brewery, it literally IS a brewery. The external design really does recycle a lot of styling from the TMP refit, too, at least with the saucer, and parts of the secondary hull. But It just does not have the same majesty of the refit from TMP. I could go on nitpicking things like the warp engines not being spaced far apart, or being too oversized. And don't even get me started on how the scale of the ship is all hosed up. But those are minor details. Overall it looks OK, but just seems to me the Refit version is the gold standard, that few Star Treks ships have been able to even match.

[Driver]

The recycling of the sets was definitely to save money-- but it also allowed them to create a sense of design evolution as the series progressed. Both in universe and out.

 

The engineering set for TMP/TWOK was stripped down and redesigned for TNG, and then recycled for Voyager, and then Enterprise. In fact, the sound stage it was on at Paramount was named the Star Trek stage because from the pilot of TNG until the last episode of ENT (16 years I think) it served as engineering for one ship or another. (Which is why in TUD the warp core looked so much like the E-Ds... cause it was.

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

I didn't realize they used the same sets on Enterprise, as well. I knew they used the same stage location, but not literally the same sets. They must have done a hell of a job redressing the sets, but now I am going to have to re-watch a few Enterprise episodes to see if I can spot it. I wish I could have had the chance to see the Star Trek stage before it was torn down.

 

 

I know the JJverse used entirely new sets, but do you know if they used the same lot location, at least for some of it, like the interior shots?

[Driver]

I think the NX engineering pretty much tore it down to the foundation-- but you can see the same basic shapes in use from TMP/TWOK/TNG and VOY.

 

No idea if there was any sense of continuity in terms of stages with the reboot. Enough time passed that I suspect everything was finally broken down, museum-ed out, or auctioned off.

[R.CAllen]

 

I saw Star Trek Beyond (2016) and I had some semi-sort of "thoughts" but they're going to go behind a spoilerbox because of spoilers and length!

 

 

 

Hoo boy

 

What was good about this movie? Well, it had a pretty good sense of humour, strong character work from its established class of players, its absolute darkest moments are well executed (the Bad Guys’ approach to, attack of, boarding onto, and eventual complete destruction of the Enterprise has all the slow yet paradoxical quickness of a home invasion or act of arson; to steal a phrase from what I thought was Dickens but Google informs me was either John Green or Ernest Hemingway, the whole thing happens “slowly, and then all at once”. It’s very well paced and overall was really well done! And everybody being thrown about from side to side of whatever room they were in during it felt really good, them undergoing the changes in orientation as the ship tumbles end over this time around didn’t feel like a soulless action-movie exploration of a space the way it did in the last one or in, say, something like Inception (2010) but as a modern update of what they were trying to do in the old series every time they’d shake the camera and have everyone fake the effects of space turbulence, it was probably some of the best application of modern techniques to that old grammar that this series has done since Nero fired a hole through the side of the Kelvin and a redshirt was dragged by explosive decompression from the comforting sounds and sights of Starfleet into the silent and empty vacuum of space) and ummm, welll, they decided to forego the striptease scene this time around so that’s a point in its favour.

 

But what was bad about this movie? Oh, no, where to start. On the one hand this film represents a genuine effort to grapple with what Star Trek is, with who these characters are and what they should and can want out of life, with how they deal with their both textual and extra-textual predecessors (I mean, sure, Kirk’s dead dad in this movie is this character’s actual dead dad but in a far more real way Kirk’s dead dad here is William Shatner’s Kirk, the real Kirk, and the real show and the real crew), and in a very true way this is a proper Star Trek story, a tiny little parable about the dangers of fear and mistrust and xenophobia on one level but on the more immediate level much more about Spock and McCoy grousing at each other and with Kirk delivering a little moral at the finish line. When it’s trying to be Star Trek it comes the closest this dumb reboot series has come so far to being about what Star Trek is about but much of the time when it’s trying to be a typical blockbuster action movie it falls flat on its face the same way the first two tries at this dumb thing did. Everything that should be under-explained or subtly explained is over-explained (I’d have to go through the dialogue with a highlighter but basically any time any character talked to any other character about why they should or shouldn’t go somewhere or do something that was explicitly related to the plot, or had to justify after the fact why they did something, well, I noticed it and not in a good way at all, it took me out of the movie, that always takes me out of the movie if it’s done badly and to be fair once or twice when they did this it wasn’t done half-badly, I think the best they got at it was when Spock volunteers McCoy to go with him into the bad guy spaceship to set up the music scheme but even the beginning of that could have done with a re-write) and everything that should remain unexplained or unaddressed isn’t (why do they have the line with Kirk’s boss in their first conference scene where she says the only other ship at the starbase isn’t ready for space yet or something to that effect while also having the final time-lapse of the new Enterprise being constructed? You don’t need both, movie! If you don’t want me to connect the dots beforehand about the final fate of the crew, if you want to dangle the possibility of change for this crew after everything’s resolved here, then you don’t need that line, and if you decide you do need that line because otherwise nerds will be upset that they end up with this new ship out of nowhere then you certainly don’t need that final time-lapse of the ship being built.) and everything that vitally needed to be explained wasn’t properly addressed (how exactly are the bad guys remaining young or healing themselves or whatever it is that they’re doing? Star Trek isn’t magical realism where this explanation can be absent, and it isn’t David Lynch where this explanation can be only merely alluded to or half-hinted at, Star Trek is Star Trek and action movies are action movies and so this needs to be shown to the audience in the exact same way they showed the bio-weapon McGuffin, it’s not enough to show a drained and desiccated crewmember in one scene and in a different scene much later show the bad guy with something spooky in his hand and then soon afterwards show the bad guy suspending two redshirts upside down and absorbing their lifeforce and to have another scene on a screen where the bad guy alludes to the technology they have here for doing this and then show another drained dead corpse and then have our characters say what is happening, I am barely sure I know how it happens and I’m a dumb aspie nerd [basically, I think that Krall has one half of this superweapon created by the Ancient Ones that he found on the planet, he’s got the Gatekeeper and that kills people one or two at a time at close range and transfers something of their natures and selves into the guy who kills them, he lends this out from time to time to his two (or more?) underlings and they use it for the same purpose, but once he gets the Keymaster and plugs it into the Gatekeeper it becomes active as this big bio-weapon, for some reason half of this ancient superweapon is harmless on its own and the half he has had all along is this terrible and awful thing, I don’t know, I am not entirely sure, I’m mostly confused because I think we see the drained redshirt corpse on the Enterprise either before Krall gets onboard and/or I’m not sure that the discovery of the drained redshirt corpse is paired with a change to the monster mask worn by any of the bad guy alien actors, in any case the raison d'être of these new Star Trek bad guys is not as cleanly explained to the audience as I’d like and while the fact that who these guys are and how they came to be is intended as a Shyamalan twist is probably partly to blame for that messiness that’s still no real excuse) and while that’s pretty much my biggest beef with every big dumb action movie out there these days I felt that it was particularly egregious in this case.

 

Like, what was this movie even? If I had to describe it’d probably be something like “Characters, wearied and weighed down by the legacies that lie behind them, struggle to prevent a primordial grotesque version of themselves from destroying the utopian perfected launching pad for what they hope would be their better selves but in the process of triumphing over their adversaries re-discover the value of the very things that wearied and weighed them down in the first place.” It’s, like, hey you guys, what if the real new worlds and new civilizations out there were the friends we made along the way!?!? But that’s only if I’m being super generous because here’s how I would actually describe it : “A guy has to keep a thingamabob away from one space lady, so he hides it in a second space lady, but then a third space lady helps him out, there are two other space mans wandering around in the middle of this, too, oh and sometimes some of these space ladies and space mans fight.” Like, I don’t even know any more, is that a fair way to characterize a movie that had some pretty fair stretches of it that I mostly enjoyed, no, not really, no more than it would be fair to characterize The Avengers (2012) as a movie where a robot and a man dressed up as a flag repair a giant ceiling fan to keep a flying boat aloft, but every half-good movie out there stands right on that line for me where it comes close to being defined in my mind by the parts of it where it’s at it’s worst, where it’s at it’s laziest, where it’s just not very good at all. I don’t even know any more. I haven’t seen the new Captain America, I haven’t seen the Batman v Superman, I haven’t seen the new X-Men, I haven’t seen the Independence Day sequel or the Tarzan, I don’t think I’ve even been to the movies at all since maybe Hail Caesar (which isn’t so out of the ordinary for me, I guess, there was a pretty long stretch of time, nearly a decade, where I could probably count every movie I saw in a theatre on a hand a half’s worth of fingers), I decided to sort of quit with the Nightly in the dumb hope that if I absented this nearly lifelong involvement with this particular corner of the Internet then something new and wholesome and good would emerge into my dumb life out of the gaping chasm but obviously that was dumbly optimistic, obviously if I want something different I have to do something different, just not doing something doesn’t automatically change a person. Like, some dumb part of myself is glad that I’ve only seen the new Star Wars a grand total of one (1) more time since the first time I saw it (which mostly just confirmed a lot of my complaints and problems with it while introducing some whole new ones, I guess it is really hard to do these things, to make these Star Wars and Star Treks, although I did notice that the bad guy planet doesn’t actually explode like Alderaan, it gets ignited into a new sun to replace the one it consumed as fuel, which is an apposite fate for it rather than a poorly chosen one, I was wrong, mea culpa about the bad guy planet) because that’s not a road I want to go down any more. I don’t really know if I’m built for new roads but I hope at the very least I can find some way to, I don’t know, I just want to un-road.

 

Anyway, looking forward to the next one, apparently Chris Hemsworth being a part of it wasn’t just some nerd clickbait thing rumour but was actually true, it’s going to happen, man, what will they think of next, man, I hope it’s not an action movie where nearly all of the action is done in a way that my eyes can’t follow it and they mostly just re-use the music they used the last times around and they give one of the best actors working today literally forty seconds of screen time where he looks and speaks like himself because that’s what they did this time. There were times when the growly obstructioning of his voice really worked, really communicated what he was going through, but often enough I literally didn’t hear what he said, same thing with Jambalaya, there were lines of hers that didn’t register. Maybe it’s me. Maybe the fact that for enough of this movie I really couldn’t see what was going on where or what its meaning was is its real flaw, I mean, I imagine the movie’s audience’s reaction is mostly going to be about whether it was gay enough or too gay (Sulu wasn’t gay enough for me, but both Jambalaya and Idris Elba were just the right amount of gay for me) and about who was dead enough or too dead (pretty sad about Anton and a little less sad about Leonard, but still, sad) and for a certain specific small sub-segment of the audience I assume a whole lot of it is going to just be about how to reconcile some of the discrepancies involved in this new timeline’s version of events before, during, and after the UPN spin-off show Enterprise that was on the air from 2001-2005 (apparently that dumb show really struck a chord with the guys who wrote this because that’s what they chose to draw on here and that just surprises me, I get putting a reference to Section 31 in the last one but what goes on here is some primo completist leave-no-stone-unturned nerd referencing to the least beloved spin-off show, I would have been less surprised to see the Delta Quadrant show up here than what does squirm its way into it, I mean, come on) but for me this was mostly just a dumb movie that made me feel bad after watching it. That might just be on me, though, and maybe I’ll change my mind if I see it again, certainly Karl Urban really gets to shine for once, if you like your Karls Urban you’re gonna love this dumb film, it totally urbanizes every karl

 

P.S. it’s late but I just re-read the above spew and I feel like there’s a whole lot of stuff left over here like I didn’t really address everything that bothered me about this movie and that much of what I remembered of what bugged me about it were some of the least important bits mentioned here, I think maybe my movie complaining muscles have atrophied from lack of use

 

[Iceheart]

So RC wins "most epic comeback post," right?

 

Okay, so, I liked it a lot but didn't super love it. It dragged in the middle. The Sabotage scene was epic. The surprise twist wasn't super shocking, but at least they didn't play it up to unattainable heights like Khanbatch. It was perfectly enjoyable.

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

I will give a more detailed post about what I think of this movie when it has been out for a bit, but here are some thoughts for now.

 

Just saw the movie, and without giving anything away, I have to honestly say it seems to me the writers and producers are really making an effort to please not just the casual movie goer, but the long time fans with this movie. Overall, I would say this movie was a B- movie, bit I think it definitely gets an A+ for effort. I think they are really trying on this one, and for me, at least, that means something.

 

A lot of thing that many of us anti-JJverse Star Trek fans tend to complain about with the last two movies, get addressed, and I think get fixed or at least have steps taken in the right direction. Yes, it is a big, dumb popcorn action flick first, then generic sci fi, and lastly Star Trek (sometimes in name only), but I think this movie more than makes up for STID.

 

Star Trek Beyond is definitely not perfect, and I will always consider TOS, the movie era, and TNG (and lesser extent DS9/VOY/ENT) "true" Star Trek, but I can say I was honestly entertained with Beyond, and mostly happy with it. Basically, if you liked ST 2009, but hated STID (like I did) you will probably like Star Trek Beyond.

[Brett]

It's as close as we'll get to a Mass Effect movie, so I'm happy.

Yeah, definitely my favorite of the new series. I'm still incredibly tired of the villain-of-the-week/revenge in space thing (they desperately need to go in the adventure or inter-civilization-conflict directions, but whatever. They did almost everything else right. It felt like a really, really, really, really, really, really nice quilt made from fabric of all the previous Trek entries. Very beautifully shot, great visual design and effects, the action was almost always coherent, lots of pleasant character interactions and trek-style introspection.

It's almost restored my faith in nu-Trek! I was about to throw in the towel after the god-awful trailers where I assumed they had just completely gone off the rails into stupid/loud popcorn bull**** land. But, fortunately this one very much seems like a labor of love for all involved. Solid B+

[D-Ray Kenobi]

I saw it this weekend, it's the best blockbuster movie of 2016 for me by a long shot. Easily the best Trek movie for me of the three reboots, and maybe even the best Trek movie since Wrath of Khan.

I get the criticism that it's somewhat become just another bloated sci-fi action movie instead of a more thought provoking or cerebral work like Old School Trek, but I didn't personally get that impression at all. I loved the big ideas of mindless conformity clashing against a diverse and eclectic team, and how that can mean a clash between warmongering and pacifism. Simon Pegg doesn't get a lot of credit as a fantastic writer beyond his action comedy, but he seems to have planted a lot of seeds for exactly the kind of ethical discussion that Trek made a name for itself with.

Justin Lin was also a great choice to take over for JJ. His use of the "family" concept from the Fast & Furious movies translates very well to the crew of the Enterprise, you really get a sense that each of the crew members are people you'd love to hang out with. The entire cast has a great charisma that he works really well with. He also apes JJ's free-wheeling cinematography while using a lot of his own signatures as well.

And I am all aboard the Beastie Boys scene. That was one of the coolest movie moments I can remember in recent memory.

[Iceheart]

 

And I am all aboard the Beastie Boys scene. That was one of the coolest movie moments I can remember in recent memory.

YES. I was hesitant when the scene first started, but when it got rolling I had the biggest, goofiest smile on my face. That was fun times right there.

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

Yeah, I have to agree, Star Trek Beyond is the best reboot Trek film by far. It definitely redeems the Abramsverse, and makes up for STID.

 

The only two things I had a real problem with were the Beastie Boys moment, and while not horrible, I could have done without the Krall reveal. Wasn't necessary, just like the John Harrison\Khan reveal before it. Otherwise a very well paced, very Star Trek-feeling Trek movie.

 

Love the USS Franklin, the refit Enterprise with smaller nacelles, and

the Enterprise-A

 

[D-Ray Kenobi]

I liked the Krall reveal. (Potential spoilers ahead, but they've kinda been revealed in the marketing anyways.)

He talks in the early part of the movie about how he came from a war-like planet and how it made him stronger and all that. When you realize that he'd been talking about Earth the whole time, it puts a whole new spin on it.

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

Well, if it weren't for the fact we had a) an admiral gone bad, and b) Johm Harrison\Khan reveal in the last movie, I wouldn't have minded Krall so much. ANd really, it was done well, just I am weary of the whole starfleet officer gone bad trope. We've had that in 4 of the 13 movies, and however many episodes through out all the series.

 

It's like if you are a starfleet officer, you have almost a 30% chance of going evil. I don't think that is what GR had in mind.

[DANA-kin Skywalker]

The Beastie Boy scene was great. It only felt a little awkward at first because Star Trek doesn't typically do that kind of music to compliment a "good guys push back" kind of action scene, but it was done well and adds solidarity to the unique identity of these reboots.

 

I liked STID very much, and didn't felt it needed redemption, although I understand the reasons why some feel that way. I like STID and this one about the same, and slightly more than the first reboot. In order, I guess I'd grade them B+, A-, A-.

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

So, I watched Star Trek Beyond a second time. Actually came out liking it better the second time around. I think I may have to upgrade it to an A-. Easily the best of the 3 reboot films. The Krall reveal didn't bother me this time around, since I was expecting it, and I like the Star Trek Enterprise call backs. As for the Beastie Boys moment, I agree, it was done well. In fact, I like Beastie Boys. And the scene was visually stunning. But the song choice sort of inappropriate for the scene, at the same time. It just seems to take me out of the Star Trek film. The only comparison I can make that might make sense is how BSG interwove All Along The Watchtower. It sort of breaks that 4th wall for me.

 

 

By comparison, I would rate Star Trek 2009 probably a C+ to a B-. That is what I thought of it in 2009, and after re-watching it several weeks ago, I still felt that way.

 

As to STID, if I were to rate it now, I would say a D. It's been a while since I have watched it, so to be fair, I probably should try watching it again, and see if my opinion has changed. The thing is with STID, I had such a negative reaction to seeing it the first time that colors my opinion of it, and then only have been able to watch parts of it since. I've only been able to sit through it all the way through, one other time for a second viewing. There is the potential to fix that film with editing and adding different scenes to make it A LOT better, but there is too much I don't like. I don't think a film I have been looking forward to has let me down more than Star Trek Into Darkness, except for maybe both American Godzilla movies (1998 & 2014)!

[Driver]

I saw the Krall reveal coming from way off-- but that didn't make it not work. In fact, I thought he was one of the better Trek villains we've had. He was no Kang, Kruge, or Kahn-- but he was better than NuKhan, Admiral Robocop, Nero, Shinzon, and Ru'afo rolled into one Volton super villain. He was a little scene-chewy and didn't have a lot to do outside of the usual villain stuff in act 2-- but his set up and pay off were great.

 

Liked:

 

-everyone in the crew had a moment. It wasn't just the Kirk/Spock show; Uhura had more to do in this one movie than Nichelle Nichols did in the entire TOS movie run.

 

-Jayla was great-- awesome character design, great performance; I was worried she just be warrior chick that's too bad ass for her own good-- and she was, but they leavened it with a lot personality and flaws; props to the actress and Lin because the wrong performance would have made the character insufferable

 

-Zach Quinto had a friendship with Leonard Nimoy and he was clearly channeling that for the dead old Spock scenes. It gave them a lot of strength. Also liked seeing the image of the OG crew. I said to myself along the way that young Spock needed to talk to old Spock again to learn a lesson about making a difference with his family/crew... and how were they going to do that without Nimoy? Turns out you just need a Star Trek V cast photo.

 

-gay Sulu. Sorry George Takei, I thought it was great Wasn't over the top, it was just a normal thing and no one cared or made mention of. Plus it gave us a personal attachment to want them to save Yorktown

 

-lots of service paid to continuity-- Pegg and Lin and Trekkies, that's clear. Because of the timeline, again, ENT got the most shout outs, but the Prime TOS got a little love.

 

Was okay:

 

-the humor; people are saying it's a hilarious movie, but I thought it was chuckle-worthy at best. People in my theater were howling with laughter and that made me weep for humanity. People are dumb.

 

-Sabotage-- I'm a BB fanboy, and I felt like it was a little forced-- but it was still fun.

 

Didn't work:

 

-Greg Gruneberg. I know he has to be in everything JJ Abrams is associated with-- but the dude has gained so much weight I can't buy him as a space military officer... (and even less so as an X-Wing pilot.)

 

-this cast just can't cash in on the legacy, that's the point of a reboot, even a soft one. Too have Kirk experiencing an early midlife crisis without seeing Pine in the role for decades on end doesn't work. It worked when Shatner did it because he actually got old. Same for the Enterprise, the sting of losing the ship just wasn't there, especially when they get a new one right away.

 

-Yorktown was too over the top. It just doesn't match up to the tech level we've seen-- be it original TOS or the Kelvin timeline. That thing would take centuries to build! But they blew up a city in the last movie so they had to do something...

 

hated:

 

-Still can't stand the NuEnterprise. They streamlined it a bit, but I still think it's hideous which is just wrong to feel when watching Star Trek. I thought since they blew it up they could use the E-A to improve upon the design. nope.

 

-shakeycam in tight action shots in dark spaces. Couldn't see a damn thing.

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

More or less agree with you on everything you point out, though Yorktown while it is too advanced for the era, still works for me. From a distance, it bears a resemblance to the Doug Drexler rebuild of DS9 (from the novelverse....I didn't read any of those, so don't ask me questions about details). However, the design does work for me, so can overlook the continuity problem somewhat.

 

It was too early for Kirk to start moping about, but I took it more as the movie pointing out that since the last movie, life has been routine, boring, and nothing of significance happened. Plus, now that we know Chris Hemsworth is being asked to come back, they had to set up a storyline for Kirk. I just think 4 movies of Pine-Kirk having daddy issues at the age of 35, is a bit much. It's like Dude, You're dad died a hero, and saved your life in the process. You joined Starfleet, became captain of the federation flagship right out of the academy, and basically saved Earth twice right out of the academy and again a year later. You have nothing to prove. Get over it.

 

Now, the topic I think is the most important: the Enterprise and Enterprise-A.

 

First off, the new Trek movies continue to prove that Andrew Probert still holds the record for designing the two best Enterprises (the TMP refit and the Enterprise-D).

 

I never was in love with the Nu-Enterprise. Never cared for the secondary hull, over sized nacelles, and the spacing of the nacelles. Saucer was OK, because it was basically a variation of the TMP Enterprise saucer. Front view and top view, just never worked for me, side view was OK. The "Beyond refit" worked a lot better for me. Downsizing the nacelles made a world of difference. I like the enlarged impulse engines. My only complaint was the spacing of the nacelles was still too close together. Had they changed the spacing, it would have been fine. Not my favorite version, but I would have liked the ship enough to say I was satisfied.

 

The Nu-Enterprise-A, at first I liked. From the front, the spacing of the nacelles were what I asked for: spacing matches the TMP version. The nacelle design was pretty cool. The saucer almost looks like a throwback to TOS from certain angles, and the TMP version from others. But when I started looking at the scene over and over, as well as pics people have done based on what they saw on the film, from the side, the Enterprise-A looks horrible. the neck goes straight up, and looks terrible. The pylons, I was like WTF is that? And the shuttle bay? What's going on there? Looks like it holds only one shuttle. To sum the Enterprise-A up, it's like they took the first iteration of the NuEnterprise and fixed all the things I had a problem with, then just wrecked everything I liked about the NuEnterprise, when they designed the NuEnterprise-A. Still, I will have to wait until Star Trek 4 when we get a better shot of it, because they may change things yet again, so it may look better.

 

The thing is, I have seen some fan concepts and reinterpretations of the Enterprise. I've seen ships that could be good designs for the Enterprise in the Star Trek online video game. I've even seen modelers build from scratch cool federation models that could be great designs (or at least the basis for them), that would make a great Enterprise. Almost all of them look better than the NuEnterprise, or NuEnterprise-A. So, I have to say, even though I recognize the effort to try to please fans, and at some angles the Enterprise-Refit and Enterprise A work, I remain disappointed, overall. It's because I have 35 years of Star Trek in my head. I know what the Enterprise should look like, or could look like when designed well, and these just aren't it.

 

That all said, I think with all these changes, I think it is fair to say that Paramount and the Lin-Pegg-JJ team are at least making an effort. It seems they are listening to fans more. The first couple movies brought in the new fans they wanted to the point they almost seemed to give the finger to long time fins, but because they have waited 3-4 years between movies, those new fans have moved on, but the long term fans still seem to be around. Seems to me Lin and Pegg realized that they can't do without their Trekkie fan base, after all. So they are listening to the fans more. Beyond seems to show that they are addressing things the fans (not the casual viewer) had issues with. Even the Enterprise\Enterprise -A show that.

[Driver]

I didn't realize the A was different. I was complaining that it wasn't. I didn't see any differences-- which is odd because I could list you all the variations of the Miranda class without even thinking about it. I was a huge Starfeet ship nerd as a kid. I studied all those crazy FASA recognition charts!

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

The Enterprise-A is different, but not so different that it is a different class. It looks like a Variant of the original NuEnterprise. At least what can be seen on film.

 

Here is an artist extrapolation of what it looks like, which looks a lot different, but still can conceivably be the same class:

 

http://imgbox.com/Jw0PbGRs

 

I wonder if the next film does a tip of the cap to FASA, and call it a Constitution MKII or something.

[Driver]

Class variants are canon, the Miranda, Nebula, and Excelsior in particular.

 

But holy god is the NU E-A hideous! It's even worse!!!

[Guest El Chalupacabra]

Class variants are canon, the Miranda, Nebula, and Excelsior in particular.

 

But holy god is the NU E-A hideous! It's even worse!!!

 

You know, when I saw it in the theatre on a quick fly by, I was OK, they fixed some stuff. Looks close to the first one, but not too bad.

 

Then I started rewatching that scene on youtube, over and over, and I started to not like it so much. Something was a little off.

 

Once I saw those pics with clear side, rear, and top shots, I was like WTF is that thing!

 

Most of those shots I could almost live with, if there were some minor retouching. But this one made me want to throw up:

http://imgbox.com/aFZA8MH6

 

One thing to be said, those aren't official pics, at least to my knowledge. I am just hoping that those were something the artist took a little liberty with based on what he\she saw, and that was their interpretation. Not based on actual schematics. If they are, I hope we see yet another refit. Or an Enterprise B!