Star Trek into Darkness - Synopsis

[Batman]

Personally I thought the design of the E-Nil was about the only thing the reboot movie managed to get right.

[Admiral Drason]

You know what to hell with it I don't give a shit if the plot is going to be tight. Star Trek 11 didn't have a great plot but it was fun enough and wasn't more of the same shit that Trek had become. I'm going to go see the movie and if the plot is so shitty then so be it but I'm going to reserve judgment for the movie until after I see it. Its kind of exhausting getting my panties in a twist over movies until I've actually seen them or at least had a trusted critical review.

[Prometheus Unbound]

You know what to hell with it I don't give a shit if the plot is going to be tight. Star Trek 11 didn't have a great plot but it was fun enough and wasn't more of the same shit that Trek had become. I'm going to go see the movie and if the plot is so shitty then so be it but I'm going to reserve judgment for the movie until after I see it. Its kind of exhausting getting my panties in a twist over movies until I've actually seen them or at least had a trusted critical review.

This, tbh.

I came out of the last film feeling better that I'd watched it than before I went in at all. It wasn't the greatest movie ever, it wasn't trying to be. I enjoyed it. Plot holes and stupidity? Sure, lots. But outside of stuff like The Shining or The Godfather, there's not many films that are "perfect". Trek isn't and didn't want to be. It was still fun, like Airforce One or Independence Day. Would I watch Airforce Two or Independence Week Later ? Probably :p

Does the plot sound dumb? Well, meh. I'll wait and see - they have some good actors in this. Just learn to divorce this from STWOK and you'll be fine, I think.

[Batman]

They're doing a Star Trek movie. Which means they're trying to cash in on the Star Trek legacy. Which means I'll hold them to the standard of that legacy. And that's TWOK and TUC. And the reboot Trek movie completely failed to do that and the sequel doesn't look much better so far.

[Stark]

What kind of standard is 'one movie possibly good out of four in the last twenty years' anyway? I think they're already ahead of that 'standard'.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

You know I think it's fair to subscribe to 'as long as it succeeds at entertaining who cares' as a judgement metric, but I really do think it's kind of sad when a franchise which, even when it failed really often, was still ideally guided by a certain philosophy, and tried to tinge adventure with moral complexity and humanism, ends up as something so clearly crass and purely commercial driven by brand recognition and standard tentpole action four-quadrant formula writing as opposed to any real ideas in the writers' or film-makers' heads at all.

[Stark]

You could hold out hope that the leaked plot isn't the real one, I guess.

[tim31]

I bet it is, though.

[Stark]

Where do people like you get off being so cynical?

[Batman]

I wish he were being cynical. I'm afraid what he actually is being is realistic.
And yes, Stark, that's a pretty stupid standard to use, so why do you do so? My standard is the two best Star Trek movies ever made, and the reboot one fell so short of that it made The Motionless Picture look brilliant by comparison.

[Stark]

Sorry, all I heard was a bleating fanboy. Could you express your confused desire to compare a movie to 20% of a franchise and not the rest of it (which sucked) and somehow relate this back to rehashing a previous movie being a good idea?

I'll even help you,

If they rehash a previous movie in such a clumsy and terrible way, it might actually be better than the original because it will contain ACTORS. So despite being unimaginative and arguably lazy it might STILL be better than the previous franchise (which sucked).

[Batman]

To conclude-Stark is too bloody stupid to understand that when you talk about the standard you hold something to, you're talking about the best they did. And why the hell is the timeframe relevant?
And I'm very much afraid it's still the same franchise. In fact, I'd bet they're counting on franchise recognition to make them them some more money. Yes, I think if you're still calling it Stark Trek, use the same characters, the same ship, the same tech terminology, it's still the same franchise.
And TWOK and TUC kicked nuTrek's ass so badly it probably ended up in the void between galaxies.

[Stark]

I guess you've just missed how repeatedly I've expressed that by this 'standard' the vast majority of the movie franchise sucks. Not a real useful standard for anything but bleating 'but but TWOK and TUC'. It's almost like you're just repeating your own preference and trying to buttress it as valid - who could have known?

And man, nST had problems (largely due to their desire to accommodate the mentally incapable like you) but you've got pretty huge nostalgia goggles going on there. Too bad this thought isn't as UNASSAILABLE as you repeating TWOK AND TUC endlessly I guess! Just from the trailer I'm pretty confident the performances in this movie will be better than in the original (which was a hair away from actual pantomime) and it'll certainly look a trillion times better, so like I said despite being unimaginative and lazy it can still be better than your nerd totems - just probably not better than an actual original movie with new ideas and new direction for the franchise.

[biostem]

The last movie had the Enterprise going up against a larger, more powerful ship. I'm glad that said movie wasn't so heavy on the technobabel, but at the same time I like it where the technological aspects of the setting play a slightly bigger role.

Anyway, it looks interesting at the very least, but doesn't seem that it'll capture the charm that ST4:TVH had, or the more personal story that ST2 or ST:FC had, (both were established earlier in the regular series, which the reboot movie lacks).

I do, at the very least, hope that this movie involves the rebuilding of the Vulcans, (a new planet and so forth), and develops the antagonist more than just some throw-away flashbacks.

[Batman]

Yep-Stark unquestionably doesn't.

[Stark]

Doesn't what, fuckwit? Stringing a sentence together too hard for the perl script you call a brain? Wait - time to role play a comic book character and go vulture noobs! Last 20 years of ST movies sucking = BUHHH BUT TEH TWOKZZZZ

And man if the daft script is real then this villain has significantly more backstory than the original, with relevant ambiguity and shit. But then I'm not judging the 'charm' of a movie about space terrorism from a trailer, so I should go back to SDN Makes Up A Movie class.

[Batman]

I'm sorry, is Stark really too stupid to understand that 'holding a franchise to a standard' refers to the best they did rather than the average, after having that explicitly pointed out to him?

[Stark]

I think you left out words like 'arbitrary' and 'personal' in that sentence. Even if one accepts that TWOK and TUC were high points (which I don't) the quality has been trending down and there has been only one possibly good (depending on taste) movie in TWENTY YEARS. That's two decades, or twice as long as you've displayed your emotional problems in public for attention.

Holy shit, it's TWENTY TWO YEARS! TUC suffers pretty bad from being topical (which this film may well do also, seeming quite the war on terror film) and it's more like thirty since ST4.

So sorry yeah? Your personal nerd totem doesn't change where the ST franchise stock was at (ps it was at Nemesis) and how the superior performance of nST would have been perceived by licence holders.

Let me just add your response here for you - I'll save you some time.

BAAAAA. BAAAAA. BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

PS What don't I buddy? Gonna back that throwaway +1 post up, or did your cowardice flare up again?

[Flagg]

Batman, are you illiterate, trolling, or both? Because Stark is clearly saying that by your own standards the movies largely sucked. And he's right.

[Stark]

Don't help him! He needs to work this out by himself. If you just say something like 'do you mean a massive upturn in quality above that seen for decades is bad' he'll run away.

[Skylon]

To jump on the "higher standard" comment, I did. My standard was - I wanted a good Star Trek film and that standard had probably hit rock bottom by 2009. I suffered through the spiral downhill that was Voyager. Could not stand Enterprise, but respected in the last season Manny Coto at least tried to make it entertaining. And my final Trek movie experience was Nemesis, which was utterly painful.

Abrams-Trek was not perfect. But I was able to take a date to it (yes, a date to a Star Trek film, she had zero experience with Trek and was in no way a Trekkie), and she liked it, and I enjoyed it too. It had a dose of camp, technobabble was kept to a minimum, the characters were there, the action pieces were good and as someone else stated, I came out feeling like I had watched a fun movie. The high point for me was the interplay between Pine and Quinto. At the end of the day TOS was the bro-adventures of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. While it lacked in the McCoy department (sadly because Karl Urban was good in the part), it succeeded in making the journey of Kirk and Spock coming together, an entertaining one.

It captured the spirit of TOS, and that was enough for me. It was comfort food. Since the end of DS9 (which wasn't exactly a stellar final season), after consuming utter shit for ten years from the franchise, I was okay with comfort food. And honestly, Star Trek has become such a brand-name, I have no illusions about it being anything else.

Its main flaws were the wacky "red matter" crap, Chris Pine's Kirk was maybe a little too much of a dick to make the leap to Captain (a fact that looks like it will get addressed in the sequel) and that it made me remember just how good the TOS characters were, that I wished Shatner, Kelley, Doohan and company were on screen playing the characters again.

Edit: Oh, and the galactic threatening "super nova" made me cringe.

[Stark]

Man, the plumbing scene, what was even going on there?

But yeah not actually amazingly dogshit like Nemesis or Insurrection or whatever was a big improvement, and the change in style was clearly advantageous because non-nerds went to see it. It wasn't the Avengers, but it wasn't Generations either.

Actually, when Generations came out Star Trek must have had a waaaaaay higher profile. Crazy how expectations change.

[Jon]

New clip, Kirk confronts Harrison

[Prometheus Unbound]

New clip, Kirk confronts Harrison

weren't there 72 survivors in Space Seed?

[Stark]

You mean that episode from a series unrelated to this show?