you guys all keep talking like an engineering brewery is a bad thing...

I still have to wonder what happened there. 0 million dollars was spent on state of the art special effects depicting alien worlds, giant monsters, mid-air fights, starship battles, and the implosion of planets into black holes.

But then they made one of only two major sets on the Enterprise an obvious brewery with a slap of paint on it. While the rest of the ship looked like an Apple store.

I liked the design of the Kelvin's bridge better. It was still an overly shiny techno wonder, but it also resembled the TOS Enterprise bridge in some ways. It had more of a military look to it as well.

well, you should watch this then, apparently the kid he passes on the road is his brother, who just got kicked out of the house by their stepfather. The brother is the ne'er-do-well and James is the golden child/star pupil, who's first ever act of rebellion is to steal the car and crash it.

Should they have left it in?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2NTsD1IFyA

Wow, yeah, they should have left that in. That completely changes the point and tone of the chase scene.

Plus the villain, while a masterpiece compared to the extremely similar villain from Nemesis, was a misstep.

His motivation for engaging in galactic genocide with a superweapon (which is apparently supposed to be an ordinary mining vessel), was that Spock did more than anyone to try to save his people, but didn't succeed, so the Federation Spock wasn't even a part of anymore must die. As opposed to him, say, saving his own people by telling them about the upcoming exploding sun and then sharing his advanced technology. Also he takes a 20 year nap in the middle of this, which isn't explained in the movie.

Had they left out the entire explanation and just said he wanted to secure a Romulan dominance by wiping out the Federation, it would have been much less confusing. Or even "On the Enterprise, Spock once killed my dad". Now you've got thematic relevance, and a simply explanation. Rather than wondering why he's gone mad with hatred against people who only tried to help and did no harm.

Nero's ship was retrofitted with Borg technology and stolen from the Romulan military. There was WAY too much backstory in the film that they decided not to include which was, in my opinion, a really, really bad idea.

And he doesn't take a 20 year nap. After Nero's encounter with the ship in the beginning of the movie, his craft takes enough damage that it requires extensive repairs, so they are stranded on the edge of Klingon space. the Klingons investigate, and take the entire crew captive and imprison them. Nero and crew escape the prison 20 years later, take back their now-repaired ship the Klingons were trying to keep secret, and then lay waste to a whole host of ships (which is briefly alluded to in the film) and set off on the rest of their "mission" which they waited 20 years for.

Part of this is in the deleted scenes, but again....the backstory (which was made into a mediocre comic book) was way too integral to the film's plot and should not have been handled that way.

wait what? is this true. ill be back

Like with the engineering brewery, you have to wonder why no one pointed out this obvious and easily fixed problem to the director before it's release.

I get that they couldn't easily cram in all that backstory, but none of it was necessary in the first place. A single line of explanation would have worked, but instead he created a convoluted explanation that doesn't make sense, raises even more questions, and then cuts it from the movie so that characters and events in the movie are inexplicable.

Actually come to think of it, the villain from Nemesis and the reboot are remarkably similar. Both are 'Romulans' who worked as miners before (inexplicably) obtaining a powerful superweapon ship that remotely destroys planets, who then go to destroy Earth even though the humans try to help and the Romulans are to blame.

The main difference is that Nemesis involves a clone of Picard and Data for fairly stupid reasons, while the reboot involves Borgs and a 20 year Klingon internment, also for stupid reasons. But since Nemesis at least put their explanations in the movie rather than outside comics, that means the villain of Nemesis better written than the reboot.

In case it's unclear, I like the movie and think it's miles better than Nemesis. But the villain backstory was the result of pure fuckupery. At least Nemesis has the excuse of laziness and lack of talent.

Re: The brewery. The two biggest "tells" that broke it being able to suspend disbelief were the black curtains instead of background detail (especially on the Kelvin) and the cement floor. Vaulted ceilings on ships are bad enough, but concrete instead of some visually lighter material (even with carpet on) just made me think I could buy a six pack on the way back to the bridge.

It's also weird how the mining ship doesn't have any safety railings anywhere, which means the same contractor that works for the Star Wars universe found work in the Star Trek universe. I also don't get why just about everyone who "goes rogue" immediately starts wearing long trenchcoats.

And yes, this is all technical stuff, and Abrams-Trek is better than Star Trek V, and VIII onwards. However, it's still got some poor decisions going on, and the villain was one of them. I think a Romulan Warbird with some kind of experimental planet-destroyer weapon would have made more sense than the mining ship. Also, for those who missed it, one of the biggest plot holes was Kirk remembering the "thunderstorm in space" from the Kelvin's logs as it applied to Vulcan. The "thunderstorm" was caused by the Romulan ship time traveling, not from it just showing up. There shouldn't have been any storm-like phenomenon reported for Kirk to clue in on.

Sorry, that should be VII onwards.

Star Trek VI did have a lot going for it, though Shatner should really have died saving the president and let it go.

You're complaining about villains in Star Trek? This is a franchise that makes it a point to neuter established villains the second they're a long-term threat and turn them into comic relief or fan service (see Q, see Harry Mudd, see Worf as representative of the Klingons, see Seven of Nine). If they DO insist on keeping a villain around for long, they all look and dress alike so you can't tell them apart from each other, and you wind up with Romulan Of The Week. The only reason we like Khan was that he was actually killed and removed from the continuity.

Star Trek has no real ability to do villains right. This is probably why, as a kid, Star Wars and Flash Gordon were more memorable.

I don't want to hear a gawd damned peep about how awkward talking about video games or old wrestling clips is on POETV after this conversation.

...oh...and stars. I liked First Contact...and vaulted ceilings and cement floors on a star ship are awkward.

@cognitive: It's hard to do ongoing villains right when they get different writers to script each and every damn show. Trek needed a head writer or "continuity arc guy" a LONG time ago, but I'm not holding my breath.

About the long-term villains: the problem with the near-omnipotent ones is, if you can beat them more than once at full power, they're not the near-omnipotent threat they were made out to be. Q was never about displays of power, so much as messing with the Enterprise crew, and even curiosity about Federation ethics. So I'm okay with that one.

The Borg ... well, the Borg shouldn't have returned because there was nowhere left to go with them, but I understand the impulse to bring them back; unfortunately, they became increasingly human over time, which meant they decayed into stock villains. By the end the Borg had a queen who would taunt Janeway, and the Borg wore insignias. What made them work in the first place was that there was no talking, pleading, or negotiating with them; they were simply executing their program. So the writers screwed that up.

As for the Klingons, the point was to strike a metaphor with the wind-down of the Cold War here on earth, where former foes become allies. And side note, the first episode of TNG that showed any glimmer of promise was the one where a few Klingons showed up who couldn't abide the Federation treaty; it was the first episode where a character had a tough decision to make, he made it plausibly, and the Klingons were shown to still be badasses when they want to be.

I'd say Babylon-5 had been doing the "floating chunks including bodies" for a while, but it's not entirely to do with which franchise is more realistic or gritty. For some reason, 'Trek stuck with using models of spaceships for a lot longer than it should have without trying to do more than just have them explode into sparks and then nothing. As soon as most sci-fi TV shows involving space battles use CGI, you get more bits of things getting tossed around after they explode.

Most of the hatred for this movie comes from the same fans that were responsible for trek getting cancelled in the first place. The crowd that constantly feels they know "better" and the moment the show doesn't conform to their view of the ideal trek they walk away.

Really? You think that the fans who stopped watching Voyager and Enterprise or films like Insurrection and Nemesis were just setting their standards too high?

Next Generation and DS9 had some acclaimed writers, some great actors (okay mostly Stewart) and won a ton of Emmys. No ST movie or show they've done since the end of DS9 in 1999 was even nominated for anything significant. They simply pumped out lazy crap for low budgets knowing the die-hard fans would watch anyway, until even they got bored. If anything the franchise died for a while because the fans weren't being discerning enough, too willing to reward mediocrity until there was no incentive to produce good material.

To this day I'll still praise Enterprise for having fantastic set design. It was the only sci-fi prequel I can think of that got the whole "lower tech look with better special effects" thing down exactly right. They managed to make the cheesy sets of the original series seem vastly more advanced.

EVERYTHING else was terrible. I can only remember two sort of neat episodes: a creepy automated repair station and a creepy alien race that announced they were going to kill them using spliced footage of Archer from hidden cameras they put on the ship.

I agree with IrishWhiskey. Stars for him.

They already tried to remake WoK and it was Nemesis. Nemesis was horribad.

Yeah, you've hit the things I disliked most about the movie's plot. The line from cadet to Captain's Chair was quite unsatisfying and made absolutely no sense.

It's like "we know that guy's the Captain because he was the Captain on the TV show and that means he's going to be the Captain no matter what shit he pulls." It was about as well thought-out as Anakin Skywalker becoming Vader in Ep's I-III.

watch it and find out

Maybe I will, fedex.

Maybe I will...

The rest of the movie is better than this. Stroke Guy's review was pretty positive, and we know he isn't one to withhold criticism.