Star Trek 4

[Dynaman]

1 hour ago, Mommar said:

No, that was a ruse.  The explosion from the Cube almost masked their escape except for the Ent-E.

Looked like an escape pod to me.  

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Mommar said:

No, that was a ruse.  The explosion from the Cube almost masked their escape except for the Ent-E.

53 minutes ago, Sildani said:

Where was it explained whether it was a ruse or not?

Ruse or not, it's still a massive plot problem caused by trying to write a Star Trek action story.  The more action-ized Star Trek gets, the bigger and more glaring the plot holes become.  That's why news of a fourth J.J.-Trek movie is so disappointing... they embody that very problem.  The more action-ized Star Trek tries to be, the more they end up sacrificing its soul and its quality.

Like the last few episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, it was such a mess that the relaunch novels could only shake their heads and take cheap shots at it for the entertainment of fans.  The Borg apparently didn't assimilate their time travel tech, it was given to them by a faction in the Temporal Cold War, and was apparently confiscated after they failed given that the Borg never used it again and had never used it before that point.

Edited November 26, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[Mommar]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So, I did some checking into this as well and while I distinctly remember hearing the Akira-class was designed to fight the Borg, I'd never heard it of any of the other original designs used in the film (e.g. the Sovereign-class, Steamrunner-class, Saber-class, and Norway-class).  I wasn't able to turn up any statements to the effect that any of them had been built to be "Borg killers" in official material.  Most of them lack any kind of official development history, but the ones that do have one mentioned in expanded universe material are weirdly consistent in being said to have been on the drawing board before Wolf 359, several (e.g. the Steamrunner, Saber, Akira) are implied or outright stated to have been developed as a response to the Federation's border conflict with the Cardassian Union as upgunned patrol and utility ships to police the Cardassian border.  The closest I was able to find to a ship designed to fight the Borg (besides the Defiant) was a mention that the Sovereign-class was reworked while still on the drawing board to increase its combat performance after the Battle of Wolf 359 (but not specifically to make it an anti-Borg warship).

 

 

TL;DR, the Defiant is basically the one and only time Starfleet set out to build a dedicated warship... their fleet is made up almost exclusively of (well-armed) exploration, patrol, and utility ships.

The key word being "redesigned" in my statement.  None were outright designed to fight the Borg originally except the Defiant, and those systems were integrated into the Sovereign still under development.  So technically two built from relatively the ground up to handle Borg threats.  But the rest were all upgraded to fill that role when other ships, like the Intrepid, filled roles originally intended for classes like the Steamrunner, etc.  The Saber was originally for a sort of police force for the Federation and many were upgraded with systems developed for the Defiant to fight the Borg after Wolf 357.

Edited November 26, 2019 by Mommar

[Seto Kaiba]

3 minutes ago, Mommar said:

The key word being "redesigned" in my statement.  None were outright designed to fight the Borg originally except the Defiant, and those systems were integrated into the Sovereign still under development..  But the rest were all upgraded to fill that role when other ships, like the Intrepid, filled roles originally intended for the Steamrunner, etc.  The Saber was originally for a sort of police force for the Federation and many were upgraded with systems developed for the Defiant to fight the Borg after Wolf 357.

I'm not sure where you're getting that, to be honest.

Of the five new Starfleet starship designs that debuted in Star Trek: First Contact, the Sovereign-class is the only one described as having been redesigned in any way in response to the ongoing Borg threat after the Battle of Wolf 359.  Even then, there's no description of the design changes being specifically anti-Borg countermeasures.  It's just described as a general expansion of the ship's offensive and defensive systems.  None of them were developed as warships, but rather as multi-mission explorers (Sovereign-class, Akira-class), utility transport ships (Saber-class), and border patrol ships (Akira-class, Norway-class, Steamrunner-class).  None of them, save the multi-mission explorers, overlapped roles with other new classes like the Intrepid-class long-range exploration/survey ships.  They were, instead, replacements for older models of ship used for border patrols and general duty like the Constellation-class, the Miranda-class, and Excelsior-class.

They weren't built to fight the Borg or even redesigned to fight the Borg specifically.  They were just shootier than previous generations of Starfleet ships because the Federation had more belligerent neighbors in the second half of the 24th century than it was used to having.

Starfleet, as so many episodes and movies insist, are not soldiers (most of the time).  They're explorers.  Their ships are built to explore, for science and for diplomacy.  That they're so heavily armed is just an acknowledgement of the reality that not everybody they meet is friendly (and that the Federation's philosophy of mutual cooperation is vastly superior to the Federation's rivals policies of conquest).

That's why J.J.-Trek is such an affront to the Star Trek name.  He tried to reinvent Star Trek to make Starfleet into the Federation Army so he could focus on ray gun battles, explosions, and lensflares... because diplomacy doesn't make for exciting action sequences full of special effects the way fights do.

[azrael]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

...  They were, instead, replacements for older models of ship used for border patrols and general duty like the Constellation-class, the Miranda-class, and Excelsior-class.

I think people forget that by the time of the Dominion War, Mirandas, Excelsiors and their offshots were already pushing 100 years old and you can only push refits so far before you run up to the limitations of the original design. These designs were based around environments in the Alpha & Beta quadrants and threats like Klingons & Romulans. And by the end of the 24th century, the Federation had already grown beyond those threats.

[Seto Kaiba]

One of the bigger, more problematic plot holes in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek bastardization that will only get worse as time goes on is that Starfleet crossed the Godzilla Threshold more or less right off the bat for reasons unclear in Star Trek '09.

Even the USS Kelvin, a ship constructed before the timeline diverged from the main Star Trek timeline, is absolutely colossal by the standards of the period.  The Constitution-class was Starfleet's biggest, fastest, most advanced, most powerful starship class for almost half a century until the Excelsior-class was introduced in the 2280s.  The USS Kelvin, according to the special features on the Star Trek '09 Blu-ray, is almost 60% larger than the Constitution-class and has not quite twice the crew of the USS Enterprise... and she's supposed to just be one of Starfleet's scoutships.  The Kelvin is dwarfed in turn by the alternate universe Constitution-class, which is larger than a prime timeline Sovereign-class ship and is armed to a similarly heavy extent.  

Unless I missed something, it's only the Federation who benefitted from detailed scans of the 24th century Romulan mining ship (with Borg technology).  That'd make the Enterprise a proper bloody dreadnought by the standards of the day.  What possible threat can the other major powers in that part of the galaxy possibly pose when the Federation's rocking that future tech that puts them half a century or more ahead of the hostile powers in their neck of the woods?  The Romulan ship from "Balance of Terror" wouldn't be much of a threat to the Enterprise-E.  The only way to credibly threaten the Enterprise was to bring a ship from the late 24th century, then an even bigger and more advanced version of itself, and then an entire functioning armada of ships from a much more advanced (but extinct) civilization.  You can't have every movie feature a new apocalyptic threat to the entire Federation, it loses most of its sting in consecutive uses like that.  Who's left who can threaten them, unless they steal a plot from the Star Trek relaunch and have the Federation's enemies team up and form their space Warsaw Pact (the Typhon Pact) a century and a half early.

 

3 hours ago, azrael said:

I think people forget that by the time of the Dominion War, Mirandas, Excelsiors and their offshots were already pushing 100 years old and you can only push refits so far before you run up to the limitations of the original design. These designs were based around environments in the Alpha & Beta quadrants and threats like Klingons & Romulans. And by the end of the 24th century, the Federation had already grown beyond those threats.

Depending on which version of its development history you ascribe to, the Miranda-class is potentially over 130 years old... 

[Sildani]

Well, the Narada and her crew had been Klingon prisoners for the time between the Kelvin events and Kirk being in Starfleet Academy, so about 20ish years. You can see Nero’s flashbacks to this time. Then they escape somehow - those are the Klingon reports Uhura was talking to her roommate about - and go to Vulcan to do their dastardly deeds. 
 

If the Klingons hadn’t done any analysis and made any insights into the Borg tech in those 20 years, they’re too dumb to exist. I might argue they did, though, looking at the JJ-verse D-7. It’s spikier and more... involved looking than usual. 

[azrael]

2 hours ago, Sildani said:

Well, the Narada and her crew had been Klingon prisoners for the time between the Kelvin events and Kirk being in Starfleet Academy, so about 20ish years. You can see Nero’s flashbacks to this time. Then they escape somehow - ...

I will still never understand the rationale behind removing those scenes. 

[Dynaman]

Latest news today is Trek 4 is back on.  I'll believe it when I see it.  

[Seto Kaiba]

4 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Latest news today is Trek 4 is back on.  I'll believe it when I see it.  

Eech... I hope not.  If it didn't work the first three times, why would the fourth time be the charm?

[derex3592]

Someone needs to tell them to just STOP. Seriously.  

[Keith]

I don't know what ya'll talkin' 'bout, I love all 3 Kelvin timeline movies.

[505thAirborne]

54 minutes ago, Keith said:

I don't know what ya'll talkin' 'bout, I love all 3 Kelvin timeline movies.

[JB0]

I thought the first one was pretty okay. There were problems, but not dealbreakers.

The second was godawful terrible and I didn't see 3 because 2 was so bad.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, derex3592 said:

Someone needs to tell them to just STOP. Seriously.  

General audiences and their investors kind of already did.

Into Darkness struggled to break even and Beyond finished deep enough in the red to obliterate the modest profits from Into Darkness too.  That was what motivated the investors to tell Paramount to stick part 4 in their ear.

[tekering]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

If it didn't work the first three times, why would the fourth time be the charm?

2 minutes ago, JB0 said:

The second was godawful terrible and I didn't see 3 because 2 was so bad.

Regardless of whether they satisfied your expectations, entertained you, or represent what you think Star Trek should be, the "Kelvin" films have proven financially successful, particularly Star Trek Into Darkness.  While Wrath of Khan remains the perennial favorite among fans, it's important to acknowledge that Into Darkness made nearly FIVE TIMES more money, and that's ultimately what decides whether further films get produced.

In fact, if you add the combined worldwide gross of all six original Trek films, AND add the combined worldwide gross of all four Next Generation films, the total still amounts to less than what the three Bad Robot films have earned.

[Seto Kaiba]

57 minutes ago, tekering said:

Regardless of whether they satisfied your expectations, entertained you, or represent what you think Star Trek should be, the "Kelvin" films have proven financially successful, particularly Star Trek Into Darkness.  While Wrath of Khan remains the perennial favorite among fans, it's important to acknowledge that Into Darkness made nearly FIVE TIMES more money, and that's ultimately what decides whether further films get produced.

In fact, if you add the combined worldwide gross of all six original Trek films, AND add the combined worldwide gross of all four Next Generation films, the total still amounts to less than what the three Bad Robot films have earned.

Well, yeah... if you're only looking at the raw box office gross and literally nothing else.

The problem with that view is that it's so badly out-of-context that it's a meaningless factoid.

Yeah, the new movies brought in more dollars in absolute and unqualified terms... but that ignores literal decades of inflation, the increase in ticket prices over that period, the simply gargantuan literal order of magnitude difference in product costs, etc.

Unadjusted for inflation, Star Trek: Into Darkness had a worldwide box office gross five times the size of Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan's... but it cost 15.5x as much to make.  Adjusted for inflation, Into Darkness cost 6.5x as much to make and only earned about twice as much.  So the ratio of box office gross to budget actually massively favors Wrath of Khan (2.5x vs 8.1x).

Even that is a pretty significant distortion, however, because it doesn't account for advertising spending.

The global advertising blitz that accompanied Into Darkness is estimated to have left only about $30M of the film's  $467.4M box office take as actual profit.  Adjusted for inflation, if Wrath of Khan made $12.5M or more in profit in 1982, it outperformed Into Darkness.  If only the international box office take was profit, Wrath of Khan blew Into Darkness into the weeds.

 

(If you look at the cost performance of Trek movies in terms of spend vs. box office gross as a percentage, Into Darkness is outperformed by every single pre-Abrams movie except Insurrection and Nemesis, two films virtually all Trekkies agree were stinkers.  In those terms, Into Darkness is the franchise's third-worst performer overall, slightly behind Final Frontier, and Beyond is the second-worst, with Nemesis taking the all time turdburger prize it so richly deserves.)

[pengbuzz]

Also, one major problem: Chekov's dead, Jim.

[JB0]

23 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Also, one major problem: Chekov's dead, Jim.

An unfortunate reminder to use your parking brake.

[Keith]

24 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Also, one major problem: Chekov's dead, Jim.

Yeah, but we have John Cho, who needs Chekov?

[Seto Kaiba]

23 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Also, one major problem: Chekov's dead, Jim.

I'm not sure that's actually an obstacle.

I'm kind of hesitant to just say it in plain language out of respect for the late Mr. Yelchin... but I don't think audiences are really all that attached to, or invested in, the Abrams Star Trek cast.  The Abrams movies were stand-alone, and even their positive reviews tend to mention how forgettable the films are.  The Abrams cast isn't immediately recognizable and associated with the characters the way the TOS and TNG casts were/are because they haven't been around long enough to build up the necessary familiarity.  So they could probably recast Chekhov (and any number of other characters) without anyone really noticing or caring.

[tekering]

9 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So they could probably recast Chekhov (and any number of other characters) without anyone really noticing or caring.

Or even (as the Trek films are wont to do) simply transfer Chekov to another starship.

[kalvasflam]

4 minutes ago, tekering said:

Or even (as the Trek films are wont to do) simply transfer Chekov to another starship.

How about Star Trek 4; Multi-versal cross over, that seems to be all the rage these days.  We can have ST:P Picard meet Shatner Kirk meet Pines Kirk; it would be frigging epic.  Oh, and throw in Q, cause you can never get enough Q.

[Bolt]

Kelvin Trek 4. Is this real ? Interesting.

[Podtastic]

On 11/26/2019 at 6:17 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

The stupidly fanfic-y USS Vengeance wasn't a warship per se, she was an instrument of genocide... meant to launch a preemptive decapitation strike against the Klingon Empire using advanced weapons that could engage from beyond the range of any Klingon retaliation.  It's basically Admiral Marcus's My First Death Star.

A remarkably interesting thing for the Federation to do. Isn't their normal strategy to bore everyone to death with peaceful diplomatic away missions to wrinkled nose alien eunuch cultures? Or to flap on in tedious technobabble about space anomalies as if anyone gives a a damn about these things?

I vote we replace the Federation with Species 8472 as they were in "Scorpion".😁

 

 

 

Edited February 16, 2022 by Podtastic

[Dynaman]

3 hours ago, Bolt said:

Kelvin Trek 4. Is this real ? Interesting.

For now.  It has a LONG way to go to become an actual movie.

[Mommar]

17 hours ago, Podtastic said:

A remarkably interesting thing for the Federation to do. Isn't their normal strategy to bore everyone to death with peaceful diplomatic away missions to wrinkled nose alien eunuch cultures? Or to flap on in tedious technobabble about space anomalies as if anyone gives a a damn about these things?

I vote we replace the Federation with Species 8472 as they were in "Scorpion".😁

 

 

 

That's not how Wolf 359 went down...

[Seto Kaiba]

19 hours ago, Podtastic said:

A remarkably interesting thing for the Federation to do. Isn't their normal strategy to bore everyone to death with peaceful diplomatic away missions to wrinkled nose alien eunuch cultures? Or to flap on in tedious technobabble about space anomalies as if anyone gives a a damn about these things?

As ever, it's weirdly impressive how completely you miss the point of any story that isn't about endless pointless warfare.  It's enough to make me rather worried about you, TBH.

Star Trek has always been high-concept sci-fi about allegorically examining the human condition and the promise of a better, brighter future where the better angels of human nature have prevailed.  It's never exactly been super subtle with its allegory either.  It's what separates it from the thousands of generic sci-fi or sci-fa titles that are just weak excuses for a bunch of ray gun battle action scenes.

The questionable writing inherent in terrible fanfic-tier ideas like the uber-powerful black starship with the edgy name aside, that Admiral Marcus had colluded with an unsanctioned rogue intelligence agency to launch a genocidal preemptive strike against the Klingons was the giveaway that he was The Bad Guy... because that's massively counter to Federation ideals on top of being shady AF and a great way to start an unnecessary war for no reason.

It's a great example of the kind of dodgy, ill-conceived writing that we've come to expect from the so-called "Kelvin timeline".  It's not really Star Trek, it's a generic sci-fi action movie thinly disguised as Star Trek... like a mockbuster, but higher budget.

[Big s]

Honestly, I didn’t like most of the original timeline movies that much. The first two were good from what I remember, but I really didn’t like the rest much if at all. The first reboot wasn’t bad but they definitely went downhill from there.

 As far as how much the second movies of both timelines made, as said earlier there definitely inflation to think about. If  it’s only five times more than a movie from the 80’s, it was only a couple bucks for a movie ticket back then. The prices have gone up more than five times that much since then especially if you count some of those tickets were premium 3D and imax purchases. I’m not trying to be harsh on the theater since I know they are trying hard to stay profitable in competition  with the streaming options 

[Podtastic]

5 hours ago, Mommar said:

That's not how Wolf 359 went down...

The Battle of Wolf 359 isnt your usual Star Trek episode.

Sadly neither was Scorpion, Flesh and Blood, Sacrifice of Angels etc.

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, Big s said:

Honestly, I didn’t like most of the original timeline movies that much. The first two were good from what I remember, but I really didn’t like the rest much if at all. The first reboot wasn’t bad but they definitely went downhill from there.

Yeah, even the most devoted Star Trek fans will generally admit Trek movies in general are VERY hit-and-miss.  

Usually, you'll hear that the even-numbered movies (Wrath of Khan, Voyage Home, Undiscovered Country, First Contact) are the good ones and the odd-numbered movies (The Motion Picture, Search for Spock, Final Frontier, Generations, Insurrection) range from "less good" to "just plain bad".  It wasn't until Nemesis - the 10th and final Trek movie - that the pattern finally broke with a lamentably bad even-numbered movie.

The Abrams movies... the first one wasn't bad, but it wasn't in any way memorable either.  The second was a real stinker, and the third bombed badly enough that it killed the series and lost enough money to leave the whole affair a wash if not a loss.  Not a lot of enthusiasm among fans for Kelvin Trek 4.  The reactions I've seen have been more like a wary sort of "I wonder how they'll screw THIS up".

[DewPoint]

Many SciFi fans are big fans of space combat scenes. I myself do like them, but I am more character and story driven.

 

As far as Star Trek goes, the writing took a noticable turn following Roddenberry's passing. The stories got darker and moved away from having a his signature moral aspect to the stories. While I was never a big fan of DS9, that show in particular, showed the biggest change on direction. The story concept was initially way too restrictive. Everything was to happen on the station or with runabouts. That show eventually turned into a shooting war. The show seemed to hit its peek of popularity at that point.

 

So yeah, people love seeing shooting wars. It sells tickets. Will it keep a lasting fan base? Who knows.

Edited February 17, 2022 by DewPoint

[Keith]

4 hours ago, DewPoint said:

Many SciFi fans are big fans of space combat scenes. I myself do like them, but I am more character and story driven.

 

As far as Star Trek goes, the writing took a noticable turn following Roddenberry's passing. The stories got darker and moved away from having a his signature moral aspect to the stories. While I was never a big fan of DS9, that show in particular, showed the biggest change on direction. The story concept was initially way too restrictive. Everything was to happen on the station or with runabouts. That show eventually turned into a shooting war. The show seemed to hit its peek of popularity at that point.

 

So yeah, people love seeing shooting wars. It sells tickets. Will it keep a lasting fan base? Who knows.

On the flipside, it took Roddenbery dying to finally get the TNG crew out of their pajama's and into decent uniforms.

[Thom]

And I liked Nemesis. The only parts I didn't like were the empath-stuff, the world-ending stuff and the one-on-one with Riker and the gargoyle-guy.

I thought the stuff with Shinzon and Picard were great, as well as the overthrow of Romulus. If they had left it at that, it would have been great. Oh, and have the Scimitar be just a more suped up version of the Valdore-class - without the super weapon that takes ten minutes to charge up...

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, DewPoint said:

Many SciFi fans are big fans of space combat scenes. I myself do like them, but I am more character and story driven.

When they fit with the story, sure.

Being a more cerebral sort of sci-fi, Star Trek doesn't offer quite as many opportunities to work that kind of thing into the story and when they become a bit too frequent it starts to feel out of character for the series and the franchise.  Deep Space Nine balanced it with a lot of character-heavy breather episodes in the Dominion War story arc, though Voyager's story got criticized a lot more heavily for its increased emphasis on action in later seasons and Enterprise really felt the impact of (relative) darkness-induced audience apathy as the Temporal Cold War story arc dragged on.

The space battles and other action sequences were a lot easier to justify when it was the TOS crew under Jim Kirk, since they were always more a "cowboy cop" outfit.  When the movies turned to the TNG cast under Jean-Luc Picard it got a lot harder to take seriously.  Picard was a consummate diplomat who always had a vocal disdain for violence, so to many fans it felt like a bad fit when Insurrection and Nemesis tried to turn him into an action hero.  (After all, he had Riker for when things needed to get physical...)

 

5 hours ago, DewPoint said:

As far as Star Trek goes, the writing took a noticable turn following Roddenberry's passing. The stories got darker and moved away from having a his signature moral aspect to the stories. While I was never a big fan of DS9, that show in particular, showed the biggest change on direction. The story concept was initially way too restrictive. Everything was to happen on the station or with runabouts. That show eventually turned into a shooting war. The show seemed to hit its peek of popularity at that point.

It's more a bell curve sort of situation, really.  The producers and writers had Roddenberry on a short leash because he, like George Lucas, was a good idea man but a desperately awful writer.  TOS was a lot of allegorical morality tales, but it was tempered by the staff reining in Roddenberry's excesses.  When he slipped the leash and secured full control of TNG in its development the staff really struggled under his rather dictatorial edicts as he took the utopian concept to its illogical extreme by mandating that the crew were all just such consummate professionals that interpersonal conflicts weren't a thing anymore.  Everyone had to be a Saint, and that made the series boring.  After he was ousted, the new showrunners reversed course back towards the more nuanced and tempered version of that utopian vision that'd been used in TOS.  DS9 was itself an act of rebellion against his crazy edicts, and spent a lot of time exploring the logical implications of that kind of setting without actually compromising the core of that vision of a more enlightened future.  Sisko's "Saints in Paradise" speech is basically a distillation of what DS9's showrunners thought of the unchecked Gene Roddenberry's creative edicts.

 

5 hours ago, DewPoint said:

So yeah, people love seeing shooting wars. It sells tickets. Will it keep a lasting fan base? Who knows.

Whether or not it goes over well is all about managing audience expectations.

People expect to see amazing space battle action sequences in, say, Star Wars... it's right in the title.

It's not something people usually come to Star Trek for... which was part of why the action-centric Abrams movies didn't test well.