Trek Trailer Thoughts
Nov. 19th, 2008 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenSo, the new Star Trek trailer’s online now, comments and thoughts follow:
- Alright, so young Kirk is driving a vintage car… off a cliff… for no apparent reason? Huh. Well, sure, maybe in the film there’s a reason given, and that would be good – but then that’d mean there’d have to be a decent sized chunk of the film that focuses on kid Kirk. That’s bad.
- Cops in the Federation are robots? Might just be a helmet, but it looks like the cop is wearing a helmet on top of the mechanical-looking face. Trivial detail, but I don’t like it – the Federation’s always been shown as a place where AIs are pretty rare… that’s why Data’s a big deal, after all.
- Slightly older Kirk has apparently destroyed all his vintage cars and is now heading out on a hoverbike to check out the Enterprise, which is apparently under construction in a field in the middle of nowhere.
Hey, visually it’s more interesting than an orbital shipyard, and lets you get a regular human into the shot directly, rather than just watching it from a shuttle or something – though personally, I think it looks kind of ridiculous. I’ve always liked how the Enterprise is clearly a modular design, and doesn’t look like anything designed for an atmosphere. How’s launching the thing from a ground-based shipyard going to work?
- Is that whirly thing around Spock the new transporter effect? It’s a little… busy for my tastes. It looks more like something happening around the transported person, not something happening to them.
- So there’s apparently some scenes with young Spock on Vulcan. Are they planning on maintaining continuity with the Animated Star Trek? *grin*. Is that the new Sarek with the ‘child of two worlds’ voice over? Sounds good; I actually think Sarek’s one of the hardest original Trek characters to recast…
- So they’re keeping the original uniforms, while making the Enterprise interiors all bright and shiny and ultra-modern. That may be too much bright colours and lighting for one film to handle.
- No comments on the various things exploding; looks like a starship with shuttles attacking… some sort of space station thing.
- Spock and some people in civilian dress, apparently being shot at in a desert. So I guess the bad guys are attacking Vulcan, or possibly that bit of desert and rocks outside of LA where about 90% of the original series was set.
- Eric Bana’s staff has a button that makes pointy bits spring out of it. Glad to see they’re continuing Star Trek’s tradition of ridiculous weapons – my favourite’s always been the d’k’tahg, a Klingon dagger that comes with tiny spring loaded blades at the top of the main blade, in case you need that tiny extra bit of stabbyness after you’ve already impaled your enemy up to the hilt of your dagger.
- And about this point, any hopes of discerning any coherent meaning out of the trailer fades as we get a random mix of things going fast, things exploding, breasts, and generic action one liners. I realise the traditional trailer voice-over has been parodied so much that it’s unsalvageable, but I’d really appreciate a return to the days of the clichéd “In a world…” narrator to provide a little structure to the montage of three second long highlights of the movie…
- Is the “Space is disease and danger” guy the new McCoy? Sounds in-character enough; personally, I always wondered why a guy who apparently despises alien cultures and dislikes all modern technology signed on for a deep-space exploratory mission in the first place…
- Eric Bana’s character will no doubt strike fear into his enemies with his “bald hobo” style. Sure, maybe he’s meant to be a renegade Romulan, cut off from his homeworld – but surely he can afford a better shirt than that?
- “The wait is over.” Yeah, it’s been quite a wait – why, when the film comes out, it will have been almost four whole years since the last Star Trek tv series went off the air! Four years!
Final thoughts? I’m still not sold on the project. Granted, it’s still six months before the movie comes out, so this is basically just another teaser trailer – but there’s still nothing really in it that makes me thing “Wow, I can’t wait to see that!”
- Alright, so young Kirk is driving a vintage car… off a cliff… for no apparent reason? Huh. Well, sure, maybe in the film there’s a reason given, and that would be good – but then that’d mean there’d have to be a decent sized chunk of the film that focuses on kid Kirk. That’s bad.
- Cops in the Federation are robots? Might just be a helmet, but it looks like the cop is wearing a helmet on top of the mechanical-looking face. Trivial detail, but I don’t like it – the Federation’s always been shown as a place where AIs are pretty rare… that’s why Data’s a big deal, after all.
- Slightly older Kirk has apparently destroyed all his vintage cars and is now heading out on a hoverbike to check out the Enterprise, which is apparently under construction in a field in the middle of nowhere.
Hey, visually it’s more interesting than an orbital shipyard, and lets you get a regular human into the shot directly, rather than just watching it from a shuttle or something – though personally, I think it looks kind of ridiculous. I’ve always liked how the Enterprise is clearly a modular design, and doesn’t look like anything designed for an atmosphere. How’s launching the thing from a ground-based shipyard going to work?
- Is that whirly thing around Spock the new transporter effect? It’s a little… busy for my tastes. It looks more like something happening around the transported person, not something happening to them.
- So there’s apparently some scenes with young Spock on Vulcan. Are they planning on maintaining continuity with the Animated Star Trek? *grin*. Is that the new Sarek with the ‘child of two worlds’ voice over? Sounds good; I actually think Sarek’s one of the hardest original Trek characters to recast…
- So they’re keeping the original uniforms, while making the Enterprise interiors all bright and shiny and ultra-modern. That may be too much bright colours and lighting for one film to handle.
- No comments on the various things exploding; looks like a starship with shuttles attacking… some sort of space station thing.
- Spock and some people in civilian dress, apparently being shot at in a desert. So I guess the bad guys are attacking Vulcan, or possibly that bit of desert and rocks outside of LA where about 90% of the original series was set.
- Eric Bana’s staff has a button that makes pointy bits spring out of it. Glad to see they’re continuing Star Trek’s tradition of ridiculous weapons – my favourite’s always been the d’k’tahg, a Klingon dagger that comes with tiny spring loaded blades at the top of the main blade, in case you need that tiny extra bit of stabbyness after you’ve already impaled your enemy up to the hilt of your dagger.
- And about this point, any hopes of discerning any coherent meaning out of the trailer fades as we get a random mix of things going fast, things exploding, breasts, and generic action one liners. I realise the traditional trailer voice-over has been parodied so much that it’s unsalvageable, but I’d really appreciate a return to the days of the clichéd “In a world…” narrator to provide a little structure to the montage of three second long highlights of the movie…
- Is the “Space is disease and danger” guy the new McCoy? Sounds in-character enough; personally, I always wondered why a guy who apparently despises alien cultures and dislikes all modern technology signed on for a deep-space exploratory mission in the first place…
- Eric Bana’s character will no doubt strike fear into his enemies with his “bald hobo” style. Sure, maybe he’s meant to be a renegade Romulan, cut off from his homeworld – but surely he can afford a better shirt than that?
- “The wait is over.” Yeah, it’s been quite a wait – why, when the film comes out, it will have been almost four whole years since the last Star Trek tv series went off the air! Four years!
Final thoughts? I’m still not sold on the project. Granted, it’s still six months before the movie comes out, so this is basically just another teaser trailer – but there’s still nothing really in it that makes me thing “Wow, I can’t wait to see that!”
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no subject
on 2008-11-19 10:40 am (UTC)I have to admit to some guarded interest re: the new movie if it's going back to the original characters. I just hope along with the tech, they're going to update some of the sentiments of the show... please tell me there were no miniskirts!
no subject
on 2008-11-19 11:03 am (UTC)I'm afraid it looks like the miniskirt is back - though they do look a little longer than I remember the original Trek skirts being... Why they decided to keep the uniforms identical while changing the visual look of everything else, I couldn't tell you...
no subject
on 2008-11-19 11:11 am (UTC)bwah
on 2008-11-19 06:31 pm (UTC)ISTR that, and that being the cool, fan-exciting thing a while back. This...is just a mess. (And I saw someone pointing out Uncanon, too - TOS Kirk being unfamiliar with 20th-c. cars!)
I used to joke that what with all the trailers that had all the "good parts" making the movie redundant and disappointing, the next Big Thing in H'wood would be the "Ten-Minute-Movie", (why stretch out all the sfx and explosions with fill by people who can't act?) but I didn't anticipate the dismal reality: the rise of the Bad Music Video Trailer...
Re: bwah
on 2008-11-20 04:46 am (UTC)I can only assume that they felt the need to add kid Kirk bellowing his name to the trailer after realising the rest of the thing is too incoherent to even communicate what the film it's promoting is...
Huh....
on 2008-11-20 01:17 pm (UTC)That's a strategy I hadn't contemplated, but it does make a kind of perverse sense. Kind of the way that spoilers don't always ruin an ending because it's how you get there that's crucial - the anagnorisis which is *actually* the important part, not who killed whom or what blowed up good...
after realising the rest of the thing is too incoherent to even communicate what the film it's promoting is...
What, oversaturated strobe-lit flash-cuts of unrecognizable people doing reaction shots to incomprehensible things, that sorta look like the outtakes from the opening credits to a trippy late-Sixties film don't say "The Original Original Star Trek!" to you? YMMV I guess ;D
no subject
on 2008-11-19 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-11-20 04:57 am (UTC)It almost makes you long for the more dignified costumes of the original Trek's scantily clad women, doesn't it?
Horrifying thought--
on 2008-11-20 01:20 pm (UTC)Re: Horrifying thought--
on 2008-11-21 02:21 pm (UTC)I mean, sure, a few inseparable childhood friends is one thing, but one's entire social network remaining unchanged since infantcy? That doesn't strike me as a sign of well-adjusted people...
(Which brings me back to a concern I have about the new Trek movie - there shouldn't *be* an epic origin story of how the Enterprise crew met and became a team. They're not mythic heroes tied together by fate - they're a bunch of people who ended up assigned to the same ship...)
Wull, yah--
on 2008-11-21 03:51 pm (UTC)It's preposterous, and it also wrecks the adult dynamics of the original, supposedly-inspirational materials - leave aside the "canon" issue, the gimmick is "hur hur, it's so FUNNEEE to see Widdul!Spock and Widdul!McCoy acting JUST like they do as grownups!" only of course their adult interactions are shaped by their disparate paths through life, and, well, if they'd all gone to the same preschool/kindergarten/high school/college together then they wouldn't BE the different sorts of people they are in the "now" story about them, they just *couldn't* be--!
It becomes insanely head-asplodey if you think about it for longer than a millisecond - and gets worse if you try to figure out how to reconcile it with the prior timelines.
They're not mythic heroes tied together by fate - they're a bunch of people who ended up assigned to the same ship...)
[nod] Because part of the charm of the "adult" series is watching all these different people *create* a rapport, watching various frictions and tensions develop and be overcome, and if everyone has the *exact same* shared backstory then that becomes impossible, so it turns into an AU which overwrites the original timeline like an ouroboros...
(It gets even stupider when part of the canon is identity reveal/powers developing - oh argh, now I'm having nightmarish ideas for a "Camelot Babeez" storyline, quick, somebody hit me with a fish--)