Paramount Star Trek 3 Expectations
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There is still speculation about why Roberto Orci left Star Trek 3.
Rumor mill has it that it was for one of two reasons.
The first story is that Orci quit because “Paramount’s notes on his script were untenable.”
Another story claims that Paramount “shut the picture down a month ago and spent the time talking to other filmmakers before officially taking Orci off the project,” with Edgar Wright being offered the director’s chair.
Paramount would like Star Trek 3 to be “huge,” said Badass Digest, and more like Guardians of the Galaxy.
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No Guardians of the Galaxy retype. Go with Star Trek heritage, ideals. It will be successful.
Star Trek meets The Transformers might be good. Have Howard The Duck make a cameo. And Yoda. That would be cool.
Garbage of the Galaxy? Really? Lemme guess, he wanted a talking raccoon…
Paramount has never really understood Star Trek, which is a real shame. If someone who GOT it were in charge, that would be really wonderful.
“Paramount would like Star Trek 3 to be “huge,” said Badass Digest, and more like Guardians of the Galaxy.” Which, of course, is exactly what Star Trek *isn’t*. How about amazing us with a movie in which nobody actually fires a weapon? Star Trek is about more than shoot ’em up. Take away the fighting from Star Wars and you don’t have much. Take away the fighting from Star Trek and you have I, Mudd, This Side of Paradise, Amok Time, The Immunity Syndrome, For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky, The Trouble with Tribbles, City on the Edge of Forever…
star trek is dead long live star wars and the empire forever!!!!!!!!!!!
If Paramount wants Star Trek 3 to be a Marvel movie then they don’t want me.
I was going to say “Cue bitching about Guardians of the Galaxy”, but I was too late. (Is there such a thing as a retroactive prediction?)
“Keenser” is bad enough already.
Frakes gets it, IMHO.
Which is why so many fans wish he’d be appointed director. 🙂 But even the director doesn’t get to set the budget and the scale or scope of the film. To get thoughtful science fiction instead of an action-movie extravaganza, we need someone who really understands Trek to be involved a lot earlier in the process, which means someone at Paramount.
I loved GotG, but it’s not Star Trek.
Biggest problem is that the JJ movies reinforced the studios idea of what Trek is – mindless action adventure with just a shell of a story. Look at the 2009 film – what is the point? Revenge is bad? Friendship? And any point they are trying to make gets washed away in the actions of the characters. Right at the end Kirk says it is important to show compassion yet when Nero rejects his offer for help, he opens fire. How does that make sense? Yet the movie was successful and people talked about how smart and fresh it was. If you were a studio, what would you think? Despite being around for 50 years and making billions of dollars, Hollywood still doesn’t actually understand why Trek is popular so they try and jump onto whatever is current and successful and make a Trek film like that.
The question is, do they want someone who “gets” it. So far, they preferred a director who not only doesn’t get it, as openly stated by himself, but probably even resents it. I’m not saying a trek movie should necessarily be done by a “trek fan”, but I do think it should be done by someone who understands it, who respects it, and maybe even loves it. In any case, it should be someone who knows how to make good, even great science fiction, which Trek should be. But I’m afraid the studio isn’t interested in that. Frakes, for example, was inspired by the movie Alien when he was making First Contact, and that turned out fine. I think Frakes understands both Star Trek (especially now that he’s had that experience) and science fiction. That’s something Abrams and those BR people lack. They simply don’t have it in them. At least that’s what I think. The box office success may say one thing, but the quality of their filmmaking, sci-fi-wise and trek-wise, is an entirely different story. I wouldn’t let those guys make any sci-fi movie, let alone Star Trek.
I like Frakes a lot, but personally, I thought First Contact was a mess of plot holes and broken continuity. The film can’t even keep continuity with ITSELF. How many decks does the Enterprise-E have? Picard says 24, but later in the film, they mention Deck 26. Nitpicking, I know, and none of this is Frakes’ fault. What was my point again…?
We (me and the missus) love Insurrection (thoughtful science fiction, IMHO), so we are probably in the minority as viewers who don’t need constant action/battles, but Ins. and First Contact make it pretty clear that yes, JF gets ST (at least, the TNG incarnation). We both had to struggle to not get up and walk out of Nemesis (along with several other people in the theater. In reality, I don’t care what happens with the next ST movie, because the only thing worse than Nemesis is another ST09 or STID. If Frakes is involved, however, I’ll give the next one half a chance…if “Keenser” is gone along with half the regular cast and the painfully amateurish shakycam and lens flares.
Most Trek films can be reduced to a silly-sounding byline. Save the whales, anyone? But I agree about the killing of Nero – definitely the wrong choices made there. Equivalent in STID is Spock beating up Khan (and Kirk attempting to). It made these “heroes” far from admirable. It’s not even as though these choices were commercially necessary – it’s just an adolescent idea of what makes a character “tough”. ST3 has to avoid this problem, whatever else it does.
No, there is a world of difference and no comparison between the juvenile and pointless ST09 – which had no plot of any substance, no meaning, and no point – and the elegant STIV, whose plot despite the surface humour was coherent and engaging: an entertaining piece of environmental sci fi right in the Trek tradition of ‘new life’ and ‘strange new worlds’. In this case it was about Cetacean intelligent life, a critique of the human belief that the only sentient life on Earth is human, a critique of human greed and arrogance. There was no villain, but it was clear what the film was about and why it was there, and the main themes were threaded through quite patently. ST09 had a tattooed Romulan Darth Maul wanting to blow everything up. He was like Shinzon without the half interesting clone angle.
I cannot agree more.
I’m not sure Frakes is a great idea. He directed First Contact fantastically, but ideally – and bear in mind I think the next Abrams flick should be as bad as possible, to torpedo the entire mess – we should get a fresh face directing Star Trek.
Um…lessee…Michael Bay? Brett Ratner? M. Night Shyamalan? Tommy Wiseau? Ewe Boll? The Farrelly brothers? 😉
While I agree with most of the good points about IV that you mentioned, the film was so poorly executed (lousy score, effects, design, photography, and *ugh* John Schuck as a Klingon!?) that I consider it the worst of the TOS movies.
If we’re going for a new-to-Trek director, I vote for Stephen Soderbergh.
Obviously the list in my above post was facetious, but Soderbergh would be an interesting choice!
Technically the Enterprise never fired a shot in STID. lol
When movie execs start getting involved they typically ruin a movie. Big bucks and unnecessary explosions and CGI is all they know, the plot gets lost. Of course Star Trek Into Darkness wasnt great and Orci and gang were involved. I wish Star Trek would return to television.
All of those are among my favorite episodes. But I seriously doubt the average moviegoer would even consider paying to see anything like those episodes on the big screen. I’m pretty sure I’d be watching that stuff in a half-empty theater.
Interstellar… Gravity…???
Both were marketed as high-concept, realistic looks at what could actually happen. Gravity, in the present, Interstellar in the near future. And neither was saddled with the title “Star Trek.” If it had been “Star Trek: Gravity,” and Clooney were playing a Klingon, I doubt it would’ve pulled in the same audience.
Having finally seen GotG, I agree that it’s Garbage of the Galaxy. Double dumbass on those who made that unfortunate mess.
New director is Justin Lin. I’m no fan of Orci but this makes me think the disagreements had more to do with tone than anything else. Paramount sees this as their Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy when it should be seeing it as their Star Trek.
Orci, co writer of ASM2 and STID Orci who swears at and tries to belittle disgruntled fans, is not the person to be trusted with pushing for trek to be more sci fi. At destination Star Trek in London Jeri Ryan had the biggest line because guys fancied her, in 1979 Star Trek TMP launched the Happy Meal at McDonalds. Star Trek as a popular franchise has always been a reality and the best ‘product’ is born when there is true tension between the studio and the creative team, IE TWOK. unfortunately paramount seem to have outsourced TREK to bad robot where there is no tension, no critical appraisal and the output is both literally and figuratively a poor mans TWOK. Hopefully Lin represents paramount asserting themselves in this franchise again after all Id say their hit rate with Trek is better than Bad Robot’s.
And that is why Star Trek makes generally bad movies and video games and why Star Wars would make bad TV. The Clone Wars and now Rebels cartoons work well in half hour format and are character studies, which the movies are not.
Justin Lin is a good action director, but so was Abrams. If the script sucks the script sucks, and Bad Robot is still right there in the thick of it. Between having them in the mix, a Star Wars sensibility ingrained from here on in and the TV and movie rights split ever since the Viacom/CBS spinoff, Trek is kind of an incoherent mess now.
Orci is horrendous. I’m so happy his first feature as a director won’t be spent defiling Star Trek.
Why? Star Trek is one of the best known science fiction franchises. Are you telling me that new, unknown IP like Interstellar is easier to sell than something with Star Trek on the poster? Because that is ridiculous.
It’s not the title – it’s writers with no imagination that have saddled “Star Trek”.
I just think based on track record id take paramount over Orci every day of the week. In fact based on STID and ASM2 id take ANYONE over Orci. I also think that Trek is a franchise and that trek has made ‘franchise’ decisions like 7 of 9 which have gone down well with fans (not me i’ll add) or TWOK which despite an action adventure post star wars vibe was a great movie. So it can work. At the moment regardless of Lin’s pedigree he is a movie director, before we had a writer of derivative nonsense – yay for us…
Its a fun couple of hours but its marvels 4th movie in 6 about a magic rock that can do whatever the story requires, which is flippin lazy!
Especially if yoda is doing cg backflips and not any of those beautiful life affirming speeches, just winch the x wing out if the swamp already!
No, it’s the plain, hard truth. There are a lot of people who won’t consider seeing anything that has “Star Trek” in the title, because they already know they don’t LIKE Star Trek. Don’t pretend that’s not the case. I think we’ve all had the experience of trying to get someone to go with us to a Trek movie, or trying to get someone to watch Trek on TV and that person refusing because they already have preconceived notions about it.
Kind of like red matter, transwarp beaming, and magic blood.
True, but i dont think STID is a fun couple of hours. As much as the harry potter tech in STID irks me its the story and script that really kill it off. At least i understand why rocket and drax are doing what they are doing, kirk, khan and spock… Not so much
Agreed. I enjoyed GotG much more than either of the reboot movies but I knew going in that GotG is pure space fantasy as is Star Wars. Star Trek at its best has been a mix of scifi action/adventure and interesting character dynamics. Its sad to see a classic character like Spock ending up as Uhura’s angsty hen-pecked boyfriend and Kirk portrayed as an overgrown fratboy.
GotG wasn’t much fun at all for me; I was done after 15 minutes, but sat through it last week after I bought the flipping Blu-ray on the enthusiastic advice of a few friends. So it hits the re-gifting pile. On second thought, maybe those “friends” knew I’d not like or want to keep it and might pass it along to them. Just for that, off it goes to Goodwill. 😛
I’m happy his first feature as a director won’t be spent *further* defiling Star Trek. He’s already effed it up enough. 😉