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Star Trek: 2 Trek 2 Furious
Harry Dresden
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JJ Abrams is leaving Trek. With two movies under his belt, Star Trek and Into Darkness, the franchise was rebooted (kind of) with a new universe where Kirk is young, Spock is dating Uhura and Robocop is a Starfleet admiral. Abrams is a polarizing figure to Trek fans that haven't liked what he's done and many who do. Where does Trek go from here? Roberto Orci. You may have heard his name, he's written movies with his partner Alex Kurtzman. They wrote Abrams Trek's, Amazing Spider-man 2 and Michael Bay's Transformers trilogy. Now he's in the director's chair and Trek fandom is turning its attention to him, waiting to see what he'll do with the franchise now Abrams has moved onto Star Wars: Episode VII.
http://variety.com/2014/film/news/roberto-orci-to-direct-star-trek-3-1201180140/
After weeks of rumblings that Roberto Orci was the frontrunner, sources have told Variety that Skydance and Paramount have indeed tapped Orci to direct Paramount and Skydance’s “Star Trek 3.”
Orci is currently writing the story with J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay and had been campaigning to replace J.J. Abrams as director for some time. Abrams is busy with directing the next installment of the “Star Wars” franchise and will only be producing this pic.
Par, Skydance and his reps had no comment.
Plot details are unknown, but cast members including Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are expected to return. Abrams will produce along with his producing partner Bryan Burke and Skydance’s David Ellison.
The news comes after Orci and longtime writing partner Alex Kurtzman decided to go their separate ways on future filmmaking endeavors (although their TV production company is staying intact). Sources had told Variety that both were looking to direct more pics and that going solo would be in the best interest of both parties.
Orci is repped by CAA.
Being a director on such a popular franchise means the Trek fandom are going to be relentless in what they think about his decisions. The job requires a thick skin. We'll learn sooner or later whether he's grown from his previous clashes with fandom. He's going to need all the luck he can get right now.
http://www.slashfilm.com/roberto-orci-fires-back-at-star-trek-into-darkness-haters-fck-off/
Despite a robust Rotten Tomatoes score of 87%, Star Trek Into Darkness found quite a few detractors when it hit screens. Worse, many of them were longtime Star Trek fans who hated it enough to rank it the worst Star Trek movie of all time in a poll at a recent convention.
That negative reaction got Trek lover Joseph Dickerson thinking, and he penned a long essay calling the franchise “broken” and offering ideas on how to fix it. Where things got really interesting, though, was when Star Trek Into Darkness writer Roberto Orci personally got involved in the comments suggestion. Eventually, he served up a suggestion of his own for his critics: “Fuck off!” Hit the jump to read what happened.
Orci’s first response to Dickerson’s post on StarTrek.com (via Daily Dot) was, simply, “Fascinating.” But as he got deeper into the conversation, he started to get cranky.
I think the article above is akin to a child acting out against his parents. Makes it tough for some to listen, but since I am a loving parent, I read these comments without anger or resentment, no matter how misguided.
Having said that, two biggest Star Treks in a row with best reviews is hardly a description of “broken.” And frankly, your tone and attidude make it hard for me to listen to what might otherwise be decent notions to pursue in the future. As I love to say, there is a reason why I get to write the movies, and you don’t.
Respect all opinions, always, nonetheless.
I don’t even think Dickerson’s “tone” was all that nasty, but Orci clearly wasn’t in the mood. He later challenged a fan to “Pitch me Into Darkness. Pitch me the plot, and let’s comapre [sic, here and elsewhere] it to other pitches. Go ahead.” Then, when that commenter responded by comparing Into Darkness unfavorably to Indiana Jones, Orci blew up.
Shitty Dodge. STID has infinetly more social commentary than Raiders in every Universe, and I say that with Harrison Ford being a friend. You lose credibility big time when you don’t honestly engage with the FUCKING WRITER OF THE MOVIE ASKING YOU AN HONEST QUESTION. You prove the cliche of shitty fans. And rude in the process. So, as Simon Pegg would say: FUCK OFF!
(And yes, that is something Pegg has said before, as in this Huffington Post interview. Well, technically, he said “fuck you” there, but you know, same spirit.)
Eventually, Orci cooled down enough to offer a more diplomatic response.
don’ take me too seriously. if you’ve been on this board for the lar 5 years (as I have beeb) you know that twice a year I explode at the morons. today, there seemed to be a congregation, so it seemed like a good time.
you are the most listened to fans ever. That doesn’t mean you will get is to do what you want. just means what I said: I listened. Then we decided, having heard as many opinions as possible. To paraphrase of one of my great and beloved heroes, George W. Bush, “we’re the deciders….
He sounded apologetic on Twitter as well.
It can’t be fun for Orci to read people rip apart something he worked hard on, so it’s understandable if he feels a little miffed. But yelling at fans surely isn’t the way to win them back, or to convince them that Star Trek 3 won’t just be another massive disappointment.
As Orci himself pointed out in the beginning, it’s his job to write the movie. It’s implied that part of that job is to write a movie that will please the existing fanbase, since they buy a lot of the tickets and merchandise and encourage their friends to do the same. Throwing a hissy fit in the StarTrek.com comments section doesn’t seem like the best convince disillusioned fans that they are “the most listened to fans ever.”
What Orci doesn’t seem to get is that it isn’t the fans’ job to love the franchise unconditionally. He called commenter Ahmed a “shitty” fan in part because Ahmed had the nerve to suggest Indiana Jones was better. It’s true that fanbases as devoted as Star Trek‘s can be hard to please, and that they can be very vocal when they’re unhappy. But Orci knew that when he signed on.
At the end of the day, this kerfuffle doesn’t have any big immediate impact on the series. Star Trek Into Darkness has already made tons of money, and a third Star Trek is a matter of when, not if. However, Dickerson’s essay indicates that the Star Trek franchise is moving further away from what fans want, and Orci’s prickly response suggests that the filmmakers don’t really care to change course.
Well, either that, or it just reveals that Orci is terrible at online impulse control. If there’s one crystal-clear lesson to be learned, it’s that folks with tempers should really think twice before responding to Internet haters. Few people come out looking good afterward, and that goes double if the teller-offer is the rich, famous writer behind a billion-dollar franchise and the “haters” are just normal moviegoers who didn’t care for a particular film.
Discuss Trek's movies, tv shows, cartoons, EU - anything pertaining to Trek's wonderful universe. If you feel the need to kill Neelix do it in the Holodeck - that's Tuvok approved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbfeDc4MfsIedit: Title change to reflect Justin Lin becoming Trek 3's director.
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When the fans list Into Darkness as the "worst" Trek movie in a world where the original motion picture, Nemesis, and Insurrection exist, I'm probably going to consider their opinions firmly in the "not useful" camp.
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I want the next movie to feature either a God-Like Entity or an Evil Computer That Kirk Talks To Death.
I don't fault them for not liking Into Darkness, but yeah, there are much worse and nonsensical Trek films.
I just hope after the last film they do a non-terrible tv show. BBC America is only able to quench my thirst for more good Trek with TNG reruns for so long.
Not all homicidal robots in Trek need to be V'Ger rip-offs. TOS tv show didn't do that.
Then he convinces Starfleet Officer Daddy to become a suicide bomber in exchange for healing his daughter with his magic blood and instead of, y'know, demonstrating that his blood is magic by using it on... anything else, he cures the kid first. Officer Daddy is apparently just too damn honorable to renege on the deal, so he blows up himself and a shitload of other people - and this guy is on staff at super-secret Section 31, whose job it is to search out and eliminate threats to the Federation. This is like convincing an FBI agent to blow up his own office after curing his kid's cancer.
Then after shooting up a room full of Starfleet brass, Khan escapes by transporting directly from Earth to the Klingon homeworld (that super beaming deus ex machina was stupid in the first nuTrek and it's still stupid here). So Admiral Robocop sends Kirk off with a ship full of super-torpedos to assassinate Khan. The torpedos that can't be scanned. And have had their fuel/engines removed and replaced with frozen super-soldiers. And Admiral Robocop knew about this because when Kirk told him he discovered the cryo pods, he wasn't even the littlest bit surprised. I mean, how could he be? He loaded the Enterprise with exactly the number of torpedos as Khan had crewmen. And they were built at his super-secret base so how could he not know what was inside?
I'd also probably complain about Kirk's mission being to stand off in the Neutral Zone and fire the torpedos at the Klingon homeworld deep within their empire, so clearly they must have warp engines? But they're barely larger than a man. Doesn't matter since space in nuTrek is both unbelievably small and unbelievably empty. Remember how in nuTrek 1 they flew from Earth to Vulcan in like five minutes? Well Klingon homeworld to Earth is thirty-five seconds at warp. And how the shit is Kirk able to call Scotty on Earth from Klingon space exactly?
There are no other ships to be seen anywhere, except the three Klingon ones they run into on "the deserted area" of their own homeworld -- aren't Klingons an aggressive, militaristic warrior culture? Why is their homeworld effectively unguarded? For that matter, why is Earth unguarded too? Didn't it very nearly get destroyed in the last movie, prompting the militarization-of-starfleet plot in this one? Even for space, everything seems to happen in a total vacuum, like it's a puppet show and there's only so much room in the box.
Why is Spock bitching about the Prime Directive so much at the beginning when their entire mission on that planet was in violation of it? Why the fuck was the Enterprise underwater? Why does Kirk get stripped of his command and kicked back to the Academy, only to have that punishment rescinded in literally the next scene and instead demoted to first officer? Which never goes into effect anyway, because Kirk is immediately re-promoted to Captain after Khan's attack. So what the hell was the point of all that?
Why do they even have transporters when they never fucking work? You could take a shot every time somebody comes up with an excuse for why the transporter doesn't work and be hammered by halftime. I'm pretty sure they only actually work four times over the course of the entire movie, and three of those are when the bad guys are using them.
Why does the guard Scotty runs into on Admiral Robocop's ship not recognize a standard issue communicator? He seriously has no fucking clue where those voices are coming from or what that thing is on the floor. Did he just get thawed out after 300 years?
Why the fuck does Khan have magic healing blood?? Oh, that's right, because we're going to kill Kirk the same way Spock died in Wrath of Khan and we can't have a downer ending so he needs to be magicked back to life. So why were they worried about Spock killing Khan at the end? His own blood is inside him already, he obviously can't ever die.
Fuck, just, fuck. I really have to stop watching anything with an Orci, Kurtzman and/or Lindelof writing credit because these fucking guys are just brain poison.
The last thread is over 100 pages. It isn't long for this world.
Also the other thread was over 100 pages.
He mustn't have paid attention when Karen Traviss did that on TheForce.net.
Get me a cryo-pod, stat!
Nothing I've seen says he's ever directed anything before.
And let's face it, we already know he's not that great a writer and Abrahms was half of what these movies had going for them. (the other half being the cast)
There's little reason to be hopeful.
He hasn't. Welp.
See, none of this is an actual argument for what you think it is. You are confusing "Is the logic of this plot air-tight" (it's not) with "Are the motivations of the characters clear" (they are).
Like, you can imagine a movie about a guy who hates the US government for killing his family in a drone strike and wants to get back at them. And that movie can have the most convoluted plot for how he does that, involving ridiculous coincidences, baffling "I'm a TV genius" levels of predicting outcomes and absurdly complicated plots for no reason. But none of that means the motivations of the guy aren't clear. It just probably means your movie has a bad plot.
Basically all of your statements here can be summarized as "Why is BadGuy doing X to accomplish his goal instead of Y?", when the statement I made was that he's got a clear goal. You've gotten truly badly sidetracked here. This is a long list of nitpicks with the plotting of the movie and not an argument for unclear motivations.
For more of this, again see here:
Like, this is completely missing the point being made. Like, I have no idea why you think Memento is at all relevant here since that's got nothing to do with what I said. The only thing I can figure is you seem to not understand criticisms that extend beyond the overall plotting of the movie. You can't seem to think of the movie in other terms. No one has claimed STID is anything but a standard linearly structure film and that's not what's ever been argued. No matter what point you are arguing against, everything you say always comes immediately back to nitpicking plot inconsistencies, while apparently not realising there's alot more to any film then that.
The movie works because each individual small conflict in the chain of conflicts that make up the plot is well realised. Each action or dramatic situation is clear and well paced and well made. The movie moves almost crazily fast from one of these to the next with a little time for character beats interwoven in between. That these individual pieces don't all mesh together completely logically is not as important as you think. Because the audience is not worried about how this fits with that thing before because they are instead worried about how the thing that is happening right now is going down and they gave you a quick explanation for why it all fits together that will only fall apart if you think about it alot which you aren't at the time.
And you can keep saying "No one watches films that way" but all the information available about the critical and commercial success of the film suggests otherwise. If you can't appreciate the film on that level, no one is forcing you to. But, by every metric we have available, the majority of people can.
The thing I'm talking about above is a legitimately important part of filmmaking. Like, a REALLY REALLY important part of it. Important enough that it can somewhat stand on it's own even if the macro-level plotting isn't all there. Although obviously we'd rather it didn't have to. And that's what STID does well and why it reviewed well.
And whenever you try and talk about this you immediately skip past this point to talk about the overall plot and don't actually engage the argument being made at all. There are other things to a film then what you keep going on about.
PS - As a random addendum to this, I thought Film Crit Hulk did a decent job of talking somewhat obliquely about what I'm referring to here:
Unfortunately his Trek movies are marred by awful screenplays by Orci and Kurtzman. Being a good director can't save a poor script from being noticed as being poor. Which happens five minutes after the movie ends when people think about exactly what was going on. Still, he's miles better with screenplays than the Oblivion guy.
Not enough, by all the evidence, to make most people dislike the movie though.
His Trek movies are certainly undermined by some bad plotting but not enough, imo, to make them not still enjoyable.
In happier news I've been watching Deep Space 9 start to finish and god damn this show is fantastic. Even the weakest filler episodes are still pretty damn solid though within the context of the show as a whole they definitely tend to stand out. Especially when going from a huge Dominion War arc to a more "situation of the week" style episode. I'm midway through season six currently and greatly enjoying "kicks ass and takes names" Worf.
-They're the reason Carol Marcus forges her way onto the Enterprise (to learn what's inside)
-They're the reason Scotty leaves the Enterprise (because no one will tell him what's inside)
-They're the reason Khan surrenders to Kirk
-They're half the reason Kirk gets resurrected (because the cryo pod preserves his brain functions)
-They're the thing the destroys the big bad evil black ship
And yet
Khan builds the super-missiles for Admiral Robocop. After he refuses to thaw out Khan's crew (which is actually a very pragmatic decision), instead of waking them himself Khan rips out the fuel systems in the 72 missiles and inserts the cryo pods of his 72 crew. (Apparently) nobody notices that those pods are missing, and nobody gives a second thought that the missiles are impervious to scanners and either booby-trapped or built so volatile that opening one sets off the warhead. Way to strap your family to a bunch of fucking high explosives, Khan! He then escapes and plans his revenge in a way that implies he thinks Admiral Robocop killed his crew. (Why not break them out of secret Jupiter Base or wherever, they obviously have no security since Scotty was able to waltz right in the front door.)
Did he escape to Kronos specifically in the hopes that Robocop would fire those special long range missiles at him? If so: congratulations, the missiles won't actually fire because you took out their fucking fuel. And they might just explode in the tubes because you built them so god damn twitchy. Also his surrender being contingent on learning that the Enterprise has all 72 missiles implies he didn't know they were deployed against him until Sulu announced it. And the fact that every single missile had a cryo-pod in it means that either a) Khan built precisely 72 missiles, the exact number of his crew, and Robocop didn't notice,* or 2) they built more than 72 and by some coincidence only the ones with frozen dudes instead of fuel were loaded onto the Enterprise.
*Except Robocop obviously did notice, because when Kirk tells Robocop about the cryo-pods he is not surprised at all. He just ignores that rather crucial plot twist and barrels on with his evil villain speech. Which makes him sending Kirk off to start a war with non-functional missiles even dumber.
2. Make the Klingons more important. I really feel like the Star Trek thing to do would be to turn Admiral Robocop over to the Klingons to prevent galactic war. Like, since they just showed up on the Klingon homeworld, shot the place up and just left, galactic war is now a certainty, yes? Kirk and company are going to be responcible for more deaths than Kahn by a country mile once that war kicks off. Jesus, people!
Other than those few things though, it is still a well paced and exciting film. Granted my cut, which I will humbly call the "makes sense edition" would probably cut out a few fight scenes, but it would add in several scene with stronger dramatic acting potential, so...even steven?
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Whose minutes are we talking about here? Because Into Darkness' "3 minutes to weapons restored" includes five minutes of exposition and a ten minute action scene. It was like DBZ level time distortion.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Who'd have thought that a fluff character like that would end up being such a god damn cool recurring character?
nobody outside the internet cares if something is a ripoff if its any good
into darkness wasnt bad because it was a ripoff, it was bad because it was bad
"I don't want the world, I just want your half"
I liked Vic but the way he was used was pretty hit or miss. I especially hated how Vic almost became a replacement for Quark. Heck, the party they had in the last episode took place in Vic's holodsuite rather than Quark's bar, that was just wrong.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Nog's PTSD episode was good, but even then Vic was mostly incidental to the central issue of Nog hiding in a fictional world.
It's what you get when you apply a cynical, too-cool-for-school approach to filmmaking to a 50-year-old franchise. The writers don't really have any respect for the source material, they're just scouring the existing stories for things that seemed popular or iconic and cramming them haphazardly into a narrative that's held together by chewing gum and explosions. It only "works" if you're too dazzled by the spectacle to realize that what's happening on screen now doesn't match up with what was happening ten minutes ago.
Contrast to, say, everything Marvel Studios is putting out. For whatever faults their individual films might have, they don't have problems like this because there is a genuine respect for the source material and treat those legacy stories and characters as more than just elements that are thawed out solely to elicit an emotional response or just straight-up fanservice.
It feels like they almost had a good movie but then had to rework it to make it fit a list of check boxes