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Comment by dvtrn | Hacker News Reader

This sums up some of my problems with the JJ Abrams take on/Kelvin-verse Star Trek, existing character traits seemed to consume the characters entire presences instead of being elements in parts that made up the whole.

Kirk getting the worst of it, the risk taking, jovial and daring Starfleet officer who sometimes clashes with his superiors? Let’s just turn him into a total renegade who disregards authority and gets into bar fights while jamming to 20th century hip hop and end the trilogy with Kirk on a motorcycle...while jamming to 20th century hip hop.

And I know: the movies were trying to give us younger versions of the crew but sheesh..

About the only character who seemed like someone who could even remotely come close to growing into the character of old was McCoy, and that’s probably just due to Karl Urban absolutely crushing the role—-even though I thought the scripts gave him almost nothing to do until the third movie.

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JJ Abrams is a terrible storyteller who really only knows how to do nostalgia and mystery boxes.

Everything he does is basically "remember this? Remember this thing you liked? Here it is again but I made it bigger and faster!"

His "mystery boxes" shtick has gotten so old. It sort of made things interesting in Lost, but it seems like he keeps doing it, over and over again, in each of his films.

Lost's final episodes were more like, "Box? What box? I don't see any box here. Who said anything about a box? What are you talking about?"

"it was a character study all along"

no it bloody wasn't

The Leftovers (which also has Lindelof on the writing board) did the Lost formula quite a bit better, IMO.

The beatings will continue until the box office declines.

Lost. No pay offs. Mystery boxes without resolution. Such a waste of time.

Goes for most mystery unfortunately, especially episodic formats where its possible to release content before the creators know how things end.

Agreed. I think he’s an excellent filmmaker but a pretty meh movie writer.

This is so true! I never was as big a Trekkie as I was a Star Wars fan, so I didn't really see it with JJ's Star Trek. I actually liked his first movie.

And then came Star Wars. I kind of could accept his remake of Episode 4, but after that, man they made me like the prequels so much more. Not that the movies itself were bad, they just totally ignored the fact that 6 other movies already existed, not even speaking about all the legends stuff. He could have easily used ships, characters and locations from Legends, all the designs were there. Using them would have had the same effect on new viewers while eing great for oldtimers like myself. He didn't, everything had to be his, and bigger and faster and with more bang.

That it can be done differently was shown by Feloni.

> remember this? Remember this thing you liked? Here it is again but I made it bigger and faster!

This seems to be the general direction many of the new sequels go. See also: Picard.

Agreeing though that JJ Abrams did it in a particular ham-fisted way, like in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Why do they have to keep messing with the way Klingons look.

As a long-time Trek fan, I couldn't care less about that. What I want to know is why they keep hiring terrible writers.

Don't forget somehow Kirk manages to go up 6 ranks overnight, from an Cadet at the Academy (about to get drummed out!), all the way to Captain. Including jumping over a number of people on the way, such as Spock.

And I do realize the commanding officer of a ship is called Captain regardless of rank, the previous Captain was promoted to Admiral, implying that he held the rank of Captin.

That film series hardly felt as if he were a captain in command of a ship as much as if he were, barely, the alpha among a pack of secondary schooler friends.

Far too much Kirk Drift.

Also the premise, plot and set were dire too.

I think the only bit that made any sense was the section 31 stuff in the later film.

Section 31 has been completely modified throughout the years in Star Trek.

When it was first introduced in Deep Space Nine, it was an extremist rogue branch of Starfleet. It did not officially exist; was technically illegal; and many members of Starfleet attempted to capture it's members — but it was nevertheless protected by various powerful figures in the U.F.P. who felt it's continued existence was necessary.

Enterprise changed nothing about this and indeed Archer had never heard of it's existence and Section 31 sabotaged his ship and Reed was court-martialed for being a member.

Then in Into Darkness, it became a secret branch of Starfleet that was nevertheless completely legal, but most officers were not aware of it's existence.

And finally in Discovery, it was a known, fully legal branch. That Discovery also took place before D.S.9. made it all the more bizarre that most Starfleet officers in D.S.9. had never heard of the existence of an organization which was publicly known a century prior.

Thanks for taking the time to write that up - genuinely appreciated. Some good points. I've watched Discovery, Enterprise all the way through but not DS9 so that covers some gaps.

DS9 is peak Star Trek for me. It took what I loved about TNG and gave it the "Babylon 5" Arc treatment with a bit more darkness to it. I would highly recommend watching the whole series. It's available now on just about every streaming service.

On it :)

I've watched the first three since I posted that.

Are you mixing together original universe and Kelvin universe?

> And finally in Discovery, it was a known, fully legal branch. That Discovery also took place before D.S.9. made it all the more bizarre that most Starfleet officers in D.S.9. had never heard of the existence of an organization which was publicly known a century prior.

Discovery was a deeply classified ship that was further reclassified under Klingon War Intelligence, Prime Directive, the unspoken Mirror Universe Prime Directive, and Temporal Prime Directive due to various actions Discovery has taken part of over the course of its deployment.

Supposedly no one on DS9 ever heard of Discovery (or should have heard of Discovery) either.

So it's not entirely unfair for Discovery to have a lot of deep, direct knowledge of Section 31, more than most ships and crews would have, given their existing high classification level likely meant they had high clearance in return. In addition Season 2 offers some evidence for why Section 31 was nearly destroyed and likely went into hibernation through most of the TOS and TNG years, including the death of high ranking officers, a ton of institutional knowledge in the loss of their computer files, and the extra-temporal extrication of the person most groomed to likely take over the organization (Georgiou).

(That said, I still think Section 31 is one of the dumber things added to Star Trek lore, and the DS9 writers can complain all that they want that Section 31 has been almost nothing but misused from their original intentions since they created it, but it is the DS9 writers' own fault for retconning Section 31 into the Federation charter in the first place and not expecting for everyone working elsewhere in the timeline to wonder or be questioned "What would Section 31 be doing right now?")

Star Trek TOS actually had very little action in it, it was mostly talking. The more recent movies were all explosions and action, not characters.

> Kirk getting the worst of it, the risk taking, jovial and daring Starfleet officer who sometimes clashes with his superiors? Let’s just turn him into a total renegade who disregards authority and gets into bar fights while jamming to 20th century hip hop and end the trilogy with Kirk on a motorcycle...while jamming to 20th century hip hop.

And I know: the movies were trying to give us younger versions of the crew but sheesh..

Agreeing with your general point, but I found this depiction actually believable for Kirk in his 20s.

Take a look at real-life celebrities in their 30s/40s who have an "edgy" reputation. They often were a lot more extreme in their youth.

Seems to me they wanted to portrait Kirk as a bored rich kid who doesn't really know yet what direction to take in his life. That's not that unusual, even for persons who later found a very strong direction.

Even Obama writes about such a phase in his bio.

I'm just hoping that somehow someday someone will produce a mix of Nordic noir with dead-pan humour and right amount of special effects in a proper sci-fi plot to treat people like the adults they are.

The only way I make sense of the Abramsverse movies is to just headcanon that growing up without a father turns Kirk into a total douchebag.

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