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Beyond is a film without a script where they made it up as they went along, and you can feel it. It has all the right elements at play (wonder, exploration, crew chemistry, lots and lots of heart) but it's sub-first draft writing, a movie penciled onto the back of a napkin. Nothing connects, there's no thematic throughlines, it has a bizarro structure and pacing, it unnecessarily splits characters up for a huge part of the film, and (unsurprisingly for Trek) the villain doesn't make a goddamn lick of sense. It doesn't so much feel like a film as it feels like a group of fans lovingly doing Trek improv or a tabletop RPG or whatever—some fun in the Trek universe, but a very poor story. Still better than at least half of the other Trek movies, though. feedmyleg fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 15:06
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 04:07 |
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So how exactly did TMP go so vastly over budget? I mean, watching it you see the dollars on screen when it comes to effects, and when it comes to Trumbull's work Wikipedia gets pretty detailed. But what work exactly had Abel and Associates pitched for, why couldn't they complete it, and why did the film change so much in production to require so many new shots to deliver?
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Aug 4, 2020 16:37
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That's honestly where I thought it was going and was very disappointed when it turned out not to be the case.
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Aug 4, 2020 16:44
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In all "fairness" the character that Cumberbatch was playing changed several time after he was cast. It's not an excuse, but you can see how the filmmakers got there without actively setting out to whitewash the character. But then, you know, don't decide to make it Kahn at some point during shooting.
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Aug 5, 2020 20:31
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You know, I was going to push back on that saying that I heard it from someone in the position to know, but in retrospect I realize they were probably just lied to during production for secrecy purposes.
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Aug 5, 2020 20:57
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Sounds awful. The entire universe continuing to revolve around Kirk and Spock and the Enterprise is so loving lame. Despite my problems with Beyond, at least it just let the crew deal with a planetary-scale problem rather than a universe-scale problem. Also, mods, can we get the thread's name changed to Stars Treks: The Motion Pictures?
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Aug 7, 2020 15:31
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Upon recent rewatch '09 still works for me, but just barely. It's a collection of terrific moments thrown at you so breathlessly and with so much charm that it almost tricks you into not realizing that nothing makes sense or connects or is earned. Everything is a contrived screenwriting shortcut just getting from moment to moment. It's a Very Stupid Movie that has moments of brilliance but is extremely difficult to defend objectively.
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Aug 8, 2020 02:25
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 04:07 |
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Detective No. 27 posted:The biggest problem with modern Star Trek TV is that I think there are too many factors at play to point a finger at any single one, but ultimately they add up to the differences between highly-episodic and highly-serialized TV. So much of 90s Trek was able to be character-centric slice-of-life stuff because that's how episodic TV works—it's more "what are these characters up to this week?" than making sure that Everything Matters. Serialized TV, though, is crafted in such a way that everything is meant to point directly toward a specific end-goal (unless you're making it up on the fly like Picard). Because of this every moment on screen has to be moving toward a larger plot point and you don't have the time or space for any of that slice-of-life stuff, unless you have to write a bottle episode for budgetary reasons. And this is actually where I feel like a lot of the Trek movies fail, too. Everything has to be Important and Weighty in the films because, well, someone spent a lot of money to get it on screen. There are moments in some Trek films that strike a remarkably good balance (like much of Voyage Home) but on the whole the films can't tap into what makes TV Trek great because so much of what we love about TV trek comes down to the strengths of episodic TV.
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Aug 8, 2020 19:01
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