Agreed! I think what they miss is that what makes Trek is, as you say, Trek. It's the people, the relationships, and the plots that make it good. It's how some of my fav eps have little straight out scifi action. It's why shows and movies that are really heavy on action and FX can actually leave you cold. I liken it to Mission: Impossible. Everyone hails all the action brought to the franchise by Cruise but they fail to recognize that *wasn't* the essence of the series. The series was about subterfuge, espionage, and clever pretensions pulled off by a team working together, with no one more important than the others. The movies are like the series in name only, with Cruise playing the hero, the team concept all but gone. Frankly I wish they'd have just changed the name of the movies. ----- Original Message ----- From: wlro...@aol.com To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 6:28:07 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Just for Martin: An Interview with "Star Trek" Writers
It appears to me that if they wanted to make Star Trek more in the lines of Star Wars then perhaps they should have done a remake of Star Wars instead and just let Star Trek die a slow death. I mean I love Star Trek, I love all of the series. But the thing is that in order to draw in the new crowd then they need to make sure that they keep the core crowd. We are the ones that goes to the conventions. We are the ones that spend the money on props and other things over the years. Not the ones that they are trying to draw in. It is the plot, not the action as much that brings or makes Star Trek--Star Trek. I may gripe, but the bottom line is that I hope that they do this franchise justice. --Lavender From: Keith Johnson Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 11:40 PM To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com Subject: [scifinoir2] Just for Martin: An Interview with "Star Trek" Writers I'm going to see the movie. That's a fact. But I still like to talk and discuss it ahead of time for fun. I cut only an excerpt from this interview below. There's a link included, but I understand the rest of it has spoilers, which I'm trying to avoid. One thing that I didn't like is the comment below that you can't expect a twelve-year-old boy to sit through the "slow", "naval" battles of Trek, which is why they've juiced up the franchise with some Star Wars flavor. Guess that explains the bright shiny white interiour of Enterprise, and the Luke Skywalker-like theme, young boy yearns for adventure in faraway lands (as evidenced by young Kirk staring at the ship in the damn corn field). I groaned with pain when they say Trek had to be updated to share the playing field with the new Transformers movie. And Martin, peep the last thing, their explanation for why Enterprise is built on the ground, instead of in space. Man is that replete with lack of both scientific and Trek knowledge! I keep telling myself, "Nimoy says it's good...Nimoy says it's good" ********************************************** http://scifiwire.com/2009/03/orci-kurtzman-why-they-do.php ... One interesting thing I think that J.J. has said in the past is that he was initially more of a Star Wars fan than a Star Trek fan. And there was some suggestion that he was trying to bring some elements of that into the Star Trek film. Which raises the question: What's the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek in your mind, and how do you use the one to inform the other? What elements of Star Wars do you see are appropriate to bring into Star Trek ? Orci : Well, my short quick answer on that up front is Star Wars had a little bit more of an archetypal, mythological structure. That differentiated it from Star Trek to a certain degree in that Star Trek was a little bit more classical science fiction. Star Wars is fantasy, really. So, as a result of it being fantasy, the story, I think, was a little bit more mythologically drawn. Kurtzman : I think what we know is that ... Star Trek is about naval battles, and, at its best, is always about out-thinking your opponent. ... But there's a reality to the way that people watch movies today. ... Which is that you cannot honestly expect ... a 12-year-old boy to walk into a theater and to go sit through two hours of very slow naval battle. It's just not going to work. Especially in the summer, where Transformers [ Revenge of the Fallen ] is coming out a month later. There has to be an updating there. And yet you have to stay entirely true to the spirit of Trek . So the challenge then becomes "How do you marry those two things?" And ... the way that we put it is that there's plenty of naval battles in a way that's familiar and a way that seems very Trek . But ... the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars is that Star Wars has always been about speed. ... It's dogfights versus slow ship fights. Submarine battles. Kurtzman : Exactly. So our goal was to try to marry the two in a way that it didn't actually feel like it was violating Trek and also didn't feel like we were somehow pandering to the Star Wars crowd. It's just "How do you make it, again, feel organic?" And Star Wars , the originals, originally were somehow more accessible, I think, the result of an entry point of a farmboy. You know, it doesn't matter where he is, it's an extremely relatable kind of entry point that I don't think Star Trek always had. And so that definitely was applicable in terms of how you are going to see elements of Kirk and Spock's childhood and how they ended up where they ended up. ... You start with them very much from an accessible place before they go off on their adventure. So ... it was important for all these things. There are a couple of points that fans seem to have seized upon. One is: The Enterprise is supposed to be built in space, not on the ground. What do you say to that? Orci : Things are built in space when expense in getting it to space is difficult. But when you have a ship that can literally cross the galaxy faster than light, getting it up 100 miles above the atmosphere is not particularly expensive. Number two, ... one of the reasons to build things in space is things don't ever have to enter a gravity, because they're going to be flimsy, like satellites are fine to build in space because they don't ever need to be in a gravity well. But because we all know warp speed itself is the warping of ... space, which equals gravitation, then you want to make sure the Enterprise can actually sustain [that]. ... It's not a flimsy pleasure-cruise [ship]...
