Then this happened...

How much time do they spend at any point in Star Wars trying to explain how anything works? They don't; you just accept that it does.

The films don't, except for the whole 'the force is made of little dudes living inside you' thing, but the EU seems to have picked up the slack. There's great walls of text out there about lasers really being particle beams and ion engines with 3000 G's worth of acceleration for anyone who cares. Back on topic I do agree Star Trek's attention to detail and internal consistency very cool.
 
The films don't, except for the whole 'the force is made of little dudes living inside you' thing, but the EU seems to have picked up the slack. There's great walls of text out there about lasers really being particle beams and ion engines with 3000 G's worth of acceleration for anyone who cares. Back on topic I do agree Star Trek's attention to detail and internal consistency very cool.

Indeed, there's been plenty of additional material, including official behind-the-scenes books or technical manuals, that do a great job of adding to the depth of the Star Wars universe. Credit where it's due; old George created a very compelling and believable world, without really stopping to explain much of the detail on the way. The films just don't have time for that. Numerous other people have stepped in to flesh it out though, which is great.
 
Yeah. The first two(generations and first contact) did well. But insurrection and nemesis bombed terribly in the box office. Though i really enjoyed insurrection. Gotta say though, I really miss Berman right about now. Even though they didn't do too well in the box office I loved every next generation movie.

Generations did alright. It did about as well fiscally and critically as Insurrection (though Gene Siskle said that Insurrection was his favorite of the franchise). Nemesis was the biggest bomb of the lot.

I never cared for First Contact: theres no moral or allegory, its just "Captain Picard in Die Hard" which isn't at all Trek to me.
 
Generations did alright. It did about as well fiscally and critically as Insurrection (though Gene Siskle said that Insurrection was his favorite of the franchise). Nemesis was the biggest bomb of the lot.

I never cared for First Contact: theres no moral or allegory, its just "Captain Picard in Die Hard" which isn't at all Trek to me.

I honestly agree with this word for word. First Contact blew it for me when they revealed the female borg who wants to bone Data and we find out she and Picard......did stuff while he was Locutus. Also the whole Die Hard element. I liked Generations and Insurrection. And I'm really sad they never made another one after Nemesis. The characters were still great and I really wanted more stories that don't involve an hour of ship ramming.
 
I like Insurrection a lot despite its short-comings. It has my favorite music and theres a good moral quandary made (though perhaps casting Anthony Zerbe as the bad guy Admiral is too on-the-nose, especially since he died the same way in License To Kill!)

Generations could've been a truly terrific film had it been given another few months to develop the script - its an inverse of Its A Wonderful Life - but for what it is, and made by a TV director at that, its solid.

First Contact is very well directed and I always love James Cromwell, but the plot isn't much of anything.

Nemesis is exactly the mess that Die Another Day was (and I think they were released the same year).
 
Nemesis was a sad sack of a Star Trek II clone, though honestly it was a damn sight better at copying it than Into Darkness was. It was really too bad too since it was lacking as a swan song for the TNG cast, unlike Star Trek VI, which was a basic murder mystery, but it was a good love letter to the original cast and tied up that generation with a nice bow. TNG deserved a better sign off than that IMO.

I personally wish Generations never happened, or happened differently. TNG had a few really nice cross-overs, but a movie didn't need to focus on one. Though the stuff that was cut did add some nice flavor to the film overall.
 
though perhaps casting Anthony Zerbe as the bad guy Admiral is too on-the-nose

Oh come on, the "Mad Admiral" is a staple of Starfleet. Evidently you can't reach the admiralty without developing either megalomania, or sociopathy, or both! Although occasionally, its not really your fault, you get inhabited by a parasitic organism that makes you really strong but forces you to eat worms...
 
Nemesis was a sad sack of a Star Trek II clone, though honestly it was a damn sight better at copying it than Into Darkness was. It was really too bad too since it was lacking as a swan song for the TNG cast, unlike Star Trek VI, which was a basic murder mystery, but it was a good love letter to the original cast and tied up that generation with a nice bow. TNG deserved a better sign off than that IMO.

I personally wish Generations never happened, or happened differently. TNG had a few really nice cross-overs, but a movie didn't need to focus on one. Though the stuff that was cut did add some nice flavor to the film overall.

The problem with Nemesis isn't *just* that it was a ST2 knock-off but that it also tried to be too many things. It was nothing but an homage to the franchise's history - mentions, in-jokes, a dramatic sacrifice, personal stakes, etc - which is the same reason Die Another Day was crap.

I love the aesthetic of STVI - I don't think any other bridge looked quite as good as it did in that film - but the whole thing is a damn Scooby Doo episode.

As to Generations, I had actually picked up the third season TNG bluray set and listened to the commentary track for Yesterday's Enterprise. Ron Moore - who wrote Generations - said that Yesterday's Enterprise should've been Generations. Just replace the Enterprise C with the original cast/ship and there you go! (How this never occurred to me before, I cannot say)

Oh come on, the "Mad Admiral" is a staple of Starfleet. Evidently you can't reach the admiralty without developing either megalomania, or sociopathy, or both! Although occasionally, its not really your fault, you get inhabited by a parasitic organism that makes you really strong but forces you to eat worms...

The problem is that Anthony Zerbe has played that role his entire career. He's sort of like seeing Malcolm McDowell on screen. "Oh, its THAT guy. He must be the antagonist..."
 
Because the tone and style of SW and Trek have always been fundamentally different. SW is fantasy in space and puts a high priority on action sequences. Classic Trek is story-driven first and foremost, and in episodic format is much slower paced than SW. It's also closer to proper sci-fi and likes to have a sound scientific footing.

Now I love both dearly and appreciate them for what they are, but many hard-core Trekkies view SW as being inferior, shallow, mass-market fare, and don't want any Wars in their Trek, as it were. The opinion among some Trek fans is that JJ tried to cash in on the SW elements of style over substance (matter of opinion here) in order to cater to the masses, and in doing so sacrificed the essentials ingredients of a proper Trek story.

Make of that what you will. I've no beef with the Abrams Trek stories per se, but I still prefer classic Trek, and would rather re-watch TNG Remastered than any of the new films.

I like both Star Trek and Star Wars but I don't like when one becomes more like the other then itself. (It has happened a few times in the novels and comics of both franchises and now again in the Abrams Trek films)

Also I don't like how Abrams Kirk takes the Mass Effect Command style and leaves the bridge at every convenient opportunity in any crisis we've seen on screen so far. At least in Mass Effect Shepherd has the excuse that he was trained as a marine.

I think they are going absurdly overboard with the Kirk scores with alien chicks routine as well.

And I hate the Abrams Trek Space battles. Seriously outside the simulator I think every onscreen space battle has involved some form of kamikaze run, boarding party or both and usually the good ship involved is crippled in a few seconds.Are the writers so incompetent that they are incapable of writing a capital ship battle where all of the ships use their onboard weapons to fight rather then send boarding parties or make suicide runs? I don't think Enterprise even fired a single shot in Into Darkness.

Please don't get me going on the Khan's blood absurdity.
 
Not to mention the complete and total lack of shields. I mean each shot rends huge holes in the hull, WTF, the only thing the shields appear to be good for is to keep transporters from working...
 
Also I don't like how Abrams Kirk takes the Mass Effect Command style and leaves the bridge at every convenient opportunity in any crisis we've seen on screen so far. At least in Mass Effect Shepherd has the excuse that he was trained as a marine.

Its a long form joke: Shatner's Kirk was guilty of it almost 50 years before Mass Effect, not to mention the fact they expressly mentioned "Captains shouldn't lead away missions" on TNG.

I do not care for the films either (putting it mildly) but I do like Chris Pine in the role. I just wish they gave him better material (and this third film looks... obnoxious)
 
Not to mention the complete and total lack of shields. I mean each shot rends huge holes in the hull, WTF, the only thing the shields appear to be good for is to keep transporters from working...
Star wars is guilty of the no shields fail as well. Always has been. I know Tie Fighters dont have shields so they are easy to kill but an XWing and a YWing and even Vaders Tie Defender definitely have shield that are never seen in the movies. Xwings are NOT supposed to be one shot kills. Not unless u shot a missle up its ass and shields were already low.
 
Oh come on, the "Mad Admiral" is a staple of Starfleet. Evidently you can't reach the admiralty without developing either megalomania, or sociopathy, or both! Although occasionally, its not really your fault, you get inhabited by a parasitic organism that makes you really strong but forces you to eat worms...

Maybe that’s why Picard kept turning down promotions.
 
There's certainly been more than a few mad admirals not only in Star Trek, but in American sci-fi more broadly. I get the impression that it stems from the broad "ideals" underlying space-oriented sci-fi from the 1960s onwards. Star Trek obviously is one of the most important examples of this - there may be weapons in Star Trek, but ultimately it's all about peaceful exploration, utopian ideas of a galaxy-spanning federation, et cetera. Battles, yes, but only defensive. In short: it's a deeply anti-militaristic setting. I've certainly encountered the same kind of attitudes in a number of sci-fi books from the 1960s onwards. And this filters into even more pro-military settings, like Wing Commander - these things have become standard plot options, to the point where you can easily be 100% pro-military, but you'll still employ this kind of plot because it's a typical sci-fi thing that people are used to.

The mad admiral, I think, stems originally from a mistrust towards career military men, linked to the broader anti-military ideals we see in Star Trek and elsewhere. You can have (you kind of have to) lower-level officers who are great heroes and all that - but hey, they don't issue the broad strategic orders, right? But admirals, who make the big decisions, and are by definition career military officers, are always implicitly mistrusted. They're potentially warmongers, right? Needless to say, even the most anti-militaristic of writers (who are probably a rarity) are not going to paint all admirals with the same brush. Having mad admirals - you know the kind, "deranged by war", ready to "unleash vengeance upon a helpless people" and all that - allows for a story that, while filled with futuristic space battles, will remain at its heart anti-militaristic.

That's how it seems to me, at least. If you think about the ideals behind the first Star Trek series, I'd say there's definitely something to it.
 
I think it's also tied to the old "power corrupts" axiom coupled with a healthy does of "ends justify the means" (which is antithetical to Star Trek).
 
is it really a star trek trailer when it starts out with a 'warp' into hyperspace and batman-esque music plays in the backdrop?
 
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