Watch the new Star Trek Beyond trailer!

moar lens flare!
also, blowed up real good

2 Likes

stay pure and unsoiled

1 Like

Can you summarize this? I’m fairly certain actually watching it would make me punch my monitor in fury, and I can’t afford to buy a new one.

1 Like

The Beastie Boys and things exploding.

The best part was deleted:

1 Like

Trust me…watch it.

OMG best movie discussion ever! Why do I have to be out of likes now?

2 Likes

I can perfectly imagine JJ Abrams saying those things with a straight face.

2 Likes

Wait, are the Narn from Babylon 5 the new bad guys now?

11 Likes

9 Likes

He blow’d up real good.

3 Likes

Trust me…watch it…it’s too funny.

1 Like

Having watched Fast & Furious 7 (I’m a fan of dump action every since the 1980s) I was thinking, “How do they top that without having the Krew go in to space?” It appears I wasn’t far off. If only Vin Diesel played Captain Kirk with Jason Statham as Spock and Bruce Willis as Bones.

Bones, “Yipee-ki-yay! Its the Romulans!”

Spock, “Fackin’ nonces!”

Kirk, “mumblegrumblerumblefamily.”

5 Likes

They kind of pulled that already with Star Trek: Nemesis.

Apparently Patrick Stewart had long dreamed of being a race car driver, so they wrote in that ridiculous dune buggy scene mostly just to keep him happy. Not only does the vehicle seem out of place in a 24th Century setting but you can clearly see that Stewart wasn’t even trying to stay in character.

9 Likes

wasn’t there something in adam yauch’s will about beasite boys music being prohibited for commercial use?

4 Likes

Someone watched Mr. Plinkett’s Star Trek reviews too.

3 Likes

I dunno - I think they might be Trekkies, it might be free.

“Your knees start shakin’ and your fingers pop
Like a pinch on the neck from Mr. Spock” - Intergalactic

“Go by the name of the King Adrock (rock)
Super educated, I’m smarter than Spock (Spock)” - Sneakin’ Out the Hospital

Then again, it isn’t like they haven’t been super contrary in the past. From writing stuff like, “High Plains Drifter” and “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” and then later “Right Right Now Now”.

Or then going back and forth with Misogyny.

3 Likes

Oh Mr Plinkett. You savager of terrible movies you. The world is overdue a good ol’ review.

I know the red letter media guys do their other videos pretty often but the Plinkett stuff is merciless and very funny.

2 Likes

The shame of it is that they have a great cast for the Enterprise crew. It’s the shit writing that photon torpedoes the reboot. And yeah, the first reboot movie gave me hope. Sure it was far more action than idea, but it showed real potential. Into Darkness mostly squandered that, and props to the actors for still giving top-notch performances. But without a thought-provoking script, it just isn’t Star Trek.

I’m willing to believe that the writers are basicallly competent. I don’t know enough about Hollywood to know if the core plot is down to staff writers or script writers. But unless someone steers the franchise back to where action is secondary to it being a mirror to the human condition, I hold no hope for the upcoming series. And just so I’m clear, I have no patience for fanboi fervor that nothing much ever change. I’m glad when sci-fi permutates into something new. But when, as Star Trek has done, it loses its defining characteristic as thinking person’s fiction, then no thank you.

4 Likes

I wrote a review for ST: ITD:

It has spoilers part way through which I warn about.

What to read it? Here you go:

Hey. I saw a movie. It was called Star Trek: The Smaug of Khan’s Darkness. Or something like that. I thought I wrote a review of the first one, but I can’t find it, so I guess I just complained to myself, although overall I liked the first movie more or less. I thought rereading that would be a good jumping point to compare and contrast.

So this is the second movie by JJ Abrams of the Star Trek Universe reboot. For those who don’t know, the old Star Trek we grew up with is Universe A. In the first reboot of the franchise, Spock went through a worm hole or something and came out into Universe B. Universe B is similar to the one we are familiar with, but they are like 50 years in the past. So while Kirk and Spock exist, they are their younger selves, just starting their careers.

I really don’t mind the reboot. I kinda like it that they did it this way rather than just “ta da” new Star Trek with new actors etc. In this movie we sorta remake Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, only the plot is more or less different with the Khan being the only thing really carried over.

The acting was decent, the effects were good, although I found it annoying how the ship behaved in space when hit with phasers. But that is nit picking. Again everything is shiny with lots of bright lights and lens flares. I found this distracting in the first film, but they toned it down in this one, keeping the look with out making it overly obvious. They also did a lot of pan and zoom effects, which I think worked well. Everyone’s favorite Benedict Cumberbatch plays Khan and he does a good job. Although he kinda just plays “Evil Sherlock in Space”, that’s ok because it was still brilliant. In fact I think a problem was there wasn’t more of him. They didn’t develop the character nearly as well as they did in the ST:II. His story is one we could empathize with and possibly feel sorry for if we knew more about him, but they play him pretty one dimensionally as the bad guy.

I did like how they made an attempt to resurrect the classic Trek feel. Most Star Trek movies have moved into the vein of being action movies, though the original Trek series was way more than that. Because of this you had things like Picard doing a lot of un-Picard like things for the sake of the action (taking matters into his own hand, revenge as a motivation, ignoring his morals and values he stuck to in the series, etc). While this movie I would definitely classify as an action film, they did make an effort to make Kirk a “thinking” hero. He was conflicted and more than once did what he thought was “right”, even if that was against orders or took a less single minded approach of “kill the bad guy”.

I did end up having some problems wrapping my head around some of the plot elements. Once again it as full of contrived events that seemed far fetched, and people doing things that made little sense.

If you want to stop now, I will give it 2.5 out of 5 Dilithium crystals. For plot bitching with spoilers, continue:

**** Spoilers Warning ****

One of the big plot devices for this film is 72 “Quantum” Photon Torpedoes the Admiral gives Kirk to use against Khan. At first these seem to just to be special weaponry, but in a fact the house Khan’s fellow soldiers. See, we find out khan and his group are a bunch of genetic super soldiers from 300 years ago that were in cryogenic sleep. The Admiral thawed out Khan and used him and his ruthless genius to prepare Star Fleet for the seemingly inevitable war with the Klingons. Only at some point Khan resents being used and hides his fellow soldiers still in cryo-sleep in these special torpedoes he was developing.

This makes no fucking sense.

First off I doubt these cryo-sleep soldiers were just stuck in a broom closet (they still have brooms in the future, right?). How would someone who is undoubtedly bring watched closely going to manage to design and somehow sneak in 72 sure to be heavily guarded bodies into torpedoes? Second there is the fact that these torpedoes are not much bigger than the cryotubes. Where the hell is there going to be room for, you know, the things that make it a torpedo, like guidance systems, propulsion systems and fuel (never mind sticking an actual warhead on the thing, which we see they in fact did do).

So these torpedoes end up as a plot device. First Khan surrenders when he realizes Kirk unwittingly has all 72 of them and is prepared to fire on him with them. Then later in the film, Khan forces Spock to give them to him - only unknown to him the cryo-tubes have been removed. Of course wouldn’t something like that show up in the teleport signatures? How in the blue hell did Bones get the cryo-tubes out of the torpedoes? Surely there would have been some elaborate process. Even if it was just straight forward and took only a minute to do, it would have taken over an hour to remove everyone. The fuuuu?

Once again poor Scotty is used not as a character but as a walking Deus Ex Machina. I HATED how he was introduced in the first film. This brilliant man with the exact bit of advanced technology we need just happens to be on some desolate shit hole. Well early on the film he quits the show. Yeah the fancy quantum I guess are “shielded” and he won’t let them on board because he can’t tell what kind of “fuel” they use? o_0

Ugh. Where to start. Ok, I get that they are “shielded” so you can’t just scan them and find out they have more people than Soylent Green. Never mind that Scotty is some brilliant madman that should have been able to scan anything he damn well wants to, but his beef was the unknown, “classified” fuel type. Jeeze, just tell him the fuel type. “Space Fuel”? Hell, just lie to him, show him fake specs that show it using what ever the hell typical torpedoes use. Well they don’t. Kirk forces Scotty to take them on board anyway, and Scotty is like “nuh uh, I quit”.

Then they replace him with Chekov. Because I guess between his bridge duties he has been “shadowing” Scotty. What? You’re telling me that within the full compliment of crew, your second most senior engineer is a bridge helmsman who is “familiar with the engine systems”.

o_0 My face is going to stick this way if you keep this shit up, JJ.

The whole point of getting Scotty off the ship is two fold. First Khan gives them coordinates where Star Fleet is building a black-ops warship (USS Vengeance) near Jupiter and Kirk sends Scotty to check it out. Scotty does discover the base and the ship, but that point is moot because he doesn’t get to tell Kirk about it.

No, the whole point is that some how NO ONE notices an out of place shuttle at some super secret, black ops, clandestine ship building facility and Scotty sneaks on board so that later he can basically play Gandalf and save the Enterprise by shutting down the Vengence’s weapons. That’s it! The whole torpedo, I quit baloney is so we can have this lazy, contrived rescue later in the film. Oh and then later he opens the door so Kirk and Khan can get aboard. He’s not a character, he’s a prop.

And finally we have the over reaching conspiracy/plot of the film. It turns out the Admiral set Kirk up the whole time. He wanted Kirk to kill Khan with the torpedoes (though I doubt he would have used all 72 for one person), then sabotaged the ship so it would break down near (in?) the Neutral Zone, sparking a war with the Klingons. When things don’t go as planned the Admiral sets out to destroy Khan and the Enterprise. 0_o

First off the whole “send the Enterprise into Klingon space” is ridiculous. It IS one person and Kirk should have been smarter than that. Starting an war because a terrorist is hiding out in an abandoned part of the Klingon home world is a hell of a risk. If Star Fleet was serious about it, they should have sent a small special forces team in a small, hard to detect ship. I mean they DID have this black ops ship no one knows about, why not just send that yourself. Then you don’t run the risk of anyone learning about the thing with Khan being used by Star Fleet. Kirk had the right idea to at least try to make it look like a clandestine operation, even though he should have loaded that ship up with no one but red shirts.

Ugh - it just seems way too convoluted and unlikely. Then when it starts to fall apart the Admiral doubles down and tries to kill off everyone on the Enterprise. When did he become so bad at decision making? I guess everyone on his team was down with murdering this whole crew? Let’s say it did work, would it really have started a war? I mean wouldn’t the fact that the Admiral sent Kirk leak out? If not, and they spin it that Kirk acted alone, wouldn’t the Admiral get in trouble for putting Kirk back in charge in the first place? Brilliant plan, genius.

There were a few other more minor gripes.

At one point I guess “gravity systems are failing” and people are sliding around and falling to their deaths. Just turn the damn thing off. It’s space. You can just float around.

There are two other aliens we see on the bridge, and both of them have this unexplainable vocoder/autotune something done with their voices so they sound more like robots. o_0

As a twist, instead of Spock dying from a massive dose of radiation, it is Kirk. Only Bones figures out that maybe he can use Khan’s super regenerative blood to heal him. This begins the chase to take Khan alive. Um, he has 72 other super soldiers with presumably the same powers setting in his med bay. Use their blood. Also you don’t need Khan alive to get his blood - just mostly intact.

8 Likes

One step…

er… Star Trek BEYOND!

6 Likes