Mixed Feelings

[Lighthawk]

Well I finally got around to seeing the new trek movie, and came out of the theater feeling mixed about it.

The Good

The special effects: A truly beautiful movie, especially on the big screen. The visuals were incredible, and the variations of effects they went with (phasers firing in pulses instead of beams, the new look for the federation ships, the new transporter effect, and the rapid warp jump) looked good and were a welcome change to me. It felt like trek, but a new trek

Phaser pistols: Loved the look, and the flip around barrel for stun and kill setting was pretty cool.

The new Ent: Looked great, even if the positioning of the nacells did make them seem to be riding the saucer's ass from a few angles.

The characters: While I've never been a big watcher of TOS, I felt they did a very nice job of casting for the new versions of the old crew.

The Kelvin: I loved this ship, odd looking though it was, it was a baddass vessel.

Phaser turrets: I liked the weapons actually being turret mounted, sticking up on the hull instead of being burried inside.




The Bad

The blackhole: This is my biggest issue with the movie, the use of blackholes. It's just so...clitched. And absurd in the way they used it. I really wish they would have gone with a subspace anomoly, or tear in reality, or anything else really. The problem is, while we don't know everything about blackholes, we do know a fair deal, all things considering. I really wish scifi writers would not use real science phenominon unless they are prepared to protray them as accurately as possible, which they did not do in the movie. My points of annoyance with the black hole are:

1) It's use as a time machine: I just can't buy this. Yes, the intense gravity of a black hole does fuck with time, but as far as I understand it, it merely slows time down, not reverses it. If you were to fall into a black hole...well first of all you'd die. You'd be crushed small enough to fit in a thimbel or worse. Also, black holes aren't doubled ended objects, those are wormholes. A black hole is the universal equivelent of a big hole in the ground. You fall in, and you can't get out. There isn't a door at the bottom you can get out by if you live, you are stuck in there unless you can climb out the way you came in. When the romulan ship and spock's little vulcan craft fell in, they should have been stuck, the end.

2) Why did they have to drill a hole to the core of Vulcan before creating the black hole to destroy the planet? I fail to see how that really made it any more effective. Just dump it on the surface of the planet, I assure you it would have swallowed up the whole world just the same. The drilling sequence was just an excuse to give the heroes time to try and stop them. If they really wanted such a sequence in the movie, then they should have gone with a alternate doomsday weapon, something that would have made sense to need to set in the core of the planet.

3) The fact that nothing happened to earth even though a black hole opened up in the sol system. Tossing that kind of gravity into the middle of a solar system would be like a 300 lb man jumping on a trampoline full of kittens, it's going to send everything flying. The blackhole might not destroy the planets outright like with vulcan, but the influence of that strong a gravitational body with the system would have severly fucked up the planetary orbits. Unless they pulled the entire starfleet fleet in and pulled off some kind of planet wrangling stunt with hundreds of ships tractoring worlds back into their proper orbits, earth still would have been screwed.

The romulan weapons: This might just be me, but I found it very odd that a mining vessel would be armed with, and only with, torpedos. I know they're romulan, and I realize the ship might have been off on it's own in the course of it's duty and needed to defend itself, but why torpedos? Would a few banks of disruptors have not made more sense? A ship that size with a couple disruptors should be more than capable of defending itself from bandits or pirates. It should never be in a position to have to defend itself from enemy warships. And the torpedos it did carry were unlike anything else we've seen, huge with multivector warheads. Those are some very serious weapons that ship was toting around.

The drill: It seems like a very odd feature, in fact I'd even call it a design flaw, for a drill to knock out communitcations and transporter function. That would be a real pain in the ass, having to stop drilling, on a mining ship, anytime you needed to use the transporter or send a message.

Starfleet's promotional ladder: Let me see if I have this one right...Kirk goes from being a fresh academy graduate, to a full captain, in 2 days? What? I get that he did a great job, saved the earth and all. Fantastic work, above and beyond the call of duty several times...but captain? Give him an ass load of medals and maybe a few promotions for all he did, but come on. It's just absurd. Starfleet captains have to shoulder a huge resposiblity, they are given a great deal of authority to speak for and on behalf of the federation, to make important, even vital choices for the federation. And they're going to hand that kind of authority and responsibility to someone who hasn't even been out of the academy a whole week yet? And lets not forget, he was still on trial for cheating, he disobeyed orders to sneak onto the Ent, he showed nothing but complete insabordination for the acting captain, and assualted a pair of security officers in the course of their duty. Now yes, given the circumstances and the way things turned out, I can understand the upper command of starfleet deciding to overlook these serious and potentially career sinking actions and not press formal charges, but to just ignore them? Nothing I saw in the movie would lead me to believe Kirk is at all mature enough or level headed enough to captain a ship. Lead in a dangerous, high risk situation, sure, but most of being a captain does not involve those kind of situations.

The destruction of Romulous: Unless the star that went supernova was Romulous's own, I don't see how the planet could have been destroyed like it was. Yes, supernovas are huge, but the distances between stars are measured in lightyears. We're talking unimaginablely vast distances here. I could accept some kind of radiation wave that might have fried the people, and burnt out their equipment, but a solid wall of flame engulfing the planet? And how the hell could Spock have been too late? Again, we're talking about lightyears of distance, so unless that supernova somehow created a warp field, the results of that blast should have taken years to arrive, more than enough time to detect and prepare for it.


The Ugly

The romulans. I really disliked the look they gave them. Nothing about them, save the ears, looked romulan. They looked like a bunch of space biker skin heads, not romulans. They didn't even look alien really, even on the rare occassion you could actually see they had pointy ears. They sure didn't act very romulan. And their ship...that's suppose to be a romulan design? It looks more like something the Shadows from Babylon 5 would have used. Not that it didn't look cool, but nothing about it, inside or out, looked anything like any romulan vessel we've seen.

Vulcan bullies: This I just found absurd. Vulcan kids, acting all emotionless and logical, yet bullying Spock. What? This just does not make any sense to me at all. I can understand them not agreeing with the choices of Spock's father, of finding a mixed child of such a union unappealing, but that they have been taunting and insulting him some 30 something times in order to try and provoke an emotional responce? It doesn't fit, not to me. Offering off hand insults like the councle member did, maybe, but actively seeking him out and trying to push his buttons? No...




I want to like this movie, I do. I enjoyed it greatly, but...I'm not really sure I liked it, if that makes any sense.

[Lazar]

The romulan weapons: This might just be me, but I found it very odd that a mining vessel would be armed with, and only with, torpedos. I know they're romulan, and I realize the ship might have been off on it's own in the course of it's duty and needed to defend itself, but why torpedos? Would a few banks of disruptors have not made more sense? A ship that size with a couple disruptors should be more than capable of defending itself from bandits or pirates. It should never be in a position to have to defend itself from enemy warships. And the torpedos it did carry were unlike anything else we've seen, huge with multivector warheads. Those are some very serious weapons that ship was toting around.

Part of the backstory (seen in the Countdown comics, although they're not canon) was that Nero had upgraded the ship with Borg technology, which was why it looked so freaky.

The drill: It seems like a very odd feature, in fact I'd even call it a design flaw, for a drill to knock out communitcations and transporter function. That would be a real pain in the ass, having to stop drilling, on a mining ship, anytime you needed to use the transporter or send a message.

Was that an unavoidable result of the drilling, or a separate thing that Nero was doing?

The destruction of Romulous: Unless the star that went supernova was Romulous's own, I don't see how the planet could have been destroyed like it was. Yes, supernovas are huge, but the distances between stars are measured in lightyears. We're talking unimaginablely vast distances here. I could accept some kind of radiation wave that might have fried the people, and burnt out their equipment, but a solid wall of flame engulfing the planet? And how the hell could Spock have been too late? Again, we're talking about lightyears of distance, so unless that supernova somehow created a warp field, the results of that blast should have taken years to arrive, more than enough time to detect and prepare for it.

Again, the Countdown comics help explain this a bit (GK has made some posts on the topic). Apparently it's some expanding subspace thingy. Still crazy, but the comics at least make some nominal effort to make it sound conceivable.

The romulans. I really disliked the look they gave them. Nothing about them, save the ears, looked romulan. They looked like a bunch of space biker skin heads, not romulans. They didn't even look alien really, even on the rare occassion you could actually see they had pointy ears. They sure didn't act very romulan.

Well, they were a bunch of hard-working miners, and they had shaved their heads and tattooed themselves in mourning for their planet. Remember that up till now, for the most part, we've only seen a small segment of Romulan society, basically fleet officers and politicians.

And their ship...that's suppose to be a romulan design? It looks more like something the Shadows from Babylon 5 would have used. Not that it didn't look cool, but nothing about it, inside or out, looked anything like any romulan vessel we've seen.

Again, that's the Borgification. GK posted a frame from the comics that shows the ship in its original shape, and it just looks like a boring blob, quite conceivable as a mining ship. (In fact, it hardly looks anything like what appears in the movie, which might raise another question of plausibility.)

Vulcan bullies: This I just found absurd. Vulcan kids, acting all emotionless and logical, yet bullying Spock. What? This just does not make any sense to me at all. I can understand them not agreeing with the choices of Spock's father, of finding a mixed child of such a union unappealing, but that they have been taunting and insulting him some 30 something times in order to try and provoke an emotional responce? It doesn't fit, not to me. Offering off hand insults like the councle member did, maybe, but actively seeking him out and trying to push his buttons? No...

Some people have complained about that, but I didn't find it problematic at all. The Vulcans are by nature a very emotional and violent race, and they need to be trained to be logical. It makes sense to me that the children would have outbursts and bully kids that didn't fit in. My really nitpicky thing with that scene was the use of Terran mathematical symbols in the training stations.

But you're right that there are a lot of implausibilities, with some heavy use of handwavium. One thing is that it's pretty firmly established now that the new Enterprise is over 700 meters long, which raises a lot of troublesome questions of scale, and which I think is rather hard to deal with IU. But TBH my main gripe with the movie was the destruction of Vulcan, which I think was very heavy handed and makes it difficult for me to invest myself in the new timeline. (But I found the movie entertaining as hell and look forward to the sequel.)

[Tsukiyumi]

Well, I'm glad you liked the movie. Or didn't.

I'll let others debate your other points, but this one, I'll do myself:

...Vulcan bullies: This I just found absurd. Vulcan kids, acting all emotionless and logical, yet bullying Spock. What? This just does not make any sense to me at all. I can understand them not agreeing with the choices of Spock's father, of finding a mixed child of such a union unappealing, but that they have been taunting and insulting him some 30 something times in order to try and provoke an emotional responce? It doesn't fit, not to me. Offering off hand insults like the councle member did, maybe, but actively seeking him out and trying to push his buttons? No...

Did you ever watch DS9? There was an episode named "Take Me Out To The Holosuite" where a Vulcan captain named Solok comes to DS9 with his all-Vulcan Nebula-class ship. At the Academy, Solok had literally provoked Sisko into attacking him, then beat the sh*t out of him (breaking several ribs, IIRC). Then he wrote his Academy dissertation on why Vulcans are superior to humans, using Sisko as his subject (kinda racist, there. You'd think he would've been drummed out of the Academy for that).

So, this racist assh*le shows up at DS9, and decides he wasn't finished f*cking with Sisko after all. Now, he and his all-Vulcan *cough*racist*cough* crew challenge Sisko and co. to a baseball game, just to spite Sisko and beat him at a sport he loves (and to prove, yet again, that Vulcans are superior). In the end, Sisko and our heroes only score one run vs ten for the Vulcans (IIRC), but they celebrate anyways, and this clearly irks Solok severely. The DS9 crew laugh at him for displaying emotion, and that pisses him off even more. We all have a laugh at his expense, the end.

The lesson there, and in other episodes? That Vulcans are smug assh*les with a major superiority complex, and they like to bully the pitiful humans every chance they get.

The other kids bullying Spock makes perfect sense: he's half-human, and they're a bunch of racist f*cks.

I really wished Sisko would've beaten Solok's ass down in that ep (after all the fighting he's done at that point, I doubt Solok would have stood a chance), but hey, they're both Starfleet officers.

[Teaos]

Vulcans dont have no emotions, they just supress them and try not to act on them.

[Sionnach Glic]

The romulan weapons: This might just be me, but I found it very odd that a mining vessel would be armed with, and only with, torpedos. I know they're romulan, and I realize the ship might have been off on it's own in the course of it's duty and needed to defend itself, but why torpedos? Would a few banks of disruptors have not made more sense? A ship that size with a couple disruptors should be more than capable of defending itself from bandits or pirates. It should never be in a position to have to defend itself from enemy warships. And the torpedos it did carry were unlike anything else we've seen, huge with multivector warheads. Those are some very serious weapons that ship was toting around.

Graham suggested that they may be modified mining charges, which I consider a fairly reasonable explaination.
The Countdown comic said that Nero upgraded his ship with Borg tech, but I dislike that idea and the whole thing is non-canon anyway.

The drill: It seems like a very odd feature, in fact I'd even call it a design flaw, for a drill to knock out communitcations and transporter function. That would be a real pain in the ass, having to stop drilling, on a mining ship, anytime you needed to use the transporter or send a message.

I actualy got the impression that Nero added something or tweaked the drill to cause that effect. Hence why comms and transporters didn't shut down when Nero was drilling over Earth - they'd destroyed a seperate device mounted on the drill platform to help defend it.

Starfleet's promotional ladder:

Aye, that was a bit out of it.

The destruction of Romulous: Unless the star that went supernova was Romulous's own, I don't see how the planet could have been destroyed like it was. Yes, supernovas are huge, but the distances between stars are measured in lightyears. We're talking unimaginablely vast distances here. I could accept some kind of radiation wave that might have fried the people, and burnt out their equipment, but a solid wall of flame engulfing the planet? And how the hell could Spock have been too late? Again, we're talking about lightyears of distance, so unless that supernova somehow created a warp field, the results of that blast should have taken years to arrive, more than enough time to detect and prepare for it.

Again, that was fairly screwy as well. I figure it as being some sort of weird technobabble effect that was simply ignited by the initial supernova.

The romulans. I really disliked the look they gave them. Nothing about them, save the ears, looked romulan. They looked like a bunch of space biker skin heads, not romulans. They didn't even look alien really, even on the rare occassion you could actually see they had pointy ears. They sure didn't act very romulan.

So all members of an alien race must look and act the same?

Vulcan bullies: This I just found absurd. Vulcan kids, acting all emotionless and logical, yet bullying Spock. What? This just does not make any sense to me at all. I can understand them not agreeing with the choices of Spock's father, of finding a mixed child of such a union unappealing, but that they have been taunting and insulting him some 30 something times in order to try and provoke an emotional responce? It doesn't fit, not to me. Offering off hand insults like the councle member did, maybe, but actively seeking him out and trying to push his buttons? No...

I don't mind that too much. Vulcans are supposed to be very emotional naturaly. So I don't find it surprising that children, who would be just learning to surpress their emotions, might try to find an outlet for their pent up frustration and anger.
Also, the Vulcans in ENT insulted and derided humans on a daily basis. So it's hardly without precedent.

[IanKennedy]

The Bad

The blackhole: This is my biggest issue with the movie, the use of blackholes. It's just so...clitched. And absurd in the way they used it. I really wish they would have gone with a subspace anomoly, or tear in reality, or anything else really. The problem is, while we don't know everything about blackholes, we do know a fair deal, all things considering. I really wish scifi writers would not use real science phenominon unless they are prepared to protray them as accurately as possible, which they did not do in the movie. My points of annoyance with the black hole are:

1) It's use as a time machine: I just can't buy this. Yes, the intense gravity of a black hole does f**k with time, but as far as I understand it, it merely slows time down, not reverses it. If you were to fall into a black hole...well first of all you'd die. You'd be crushed small enough to fit in a thimbel or worse. Also, black holes aren't doubled ended objects, those are wormholes. A black hole is the universal equivelent of a big hole in the ground. You fall in, and you can't get out. There isn't a door at the bottom you can get out by if you live, you are stuck in there unless you can climb out the way you came in. When the romulan ship and spock's little vulcan craft fell in, they should have been stuck, the end.

We have no idea of the physics of what happens beyond the event horizon of a black hole. This film is not the first thing to theorize that a black hole can cause a wormhole in space allowing time travel.

3) The fact that nothing happened to earth even though a black hole opened up in the sol system. Tossing that kind of gravity into the middle of a solar system would be like a 300 lb man jumping on a trampoline full of kittens, it's going to send everything flying. The blackhole might not destroy the planets outright like with vulcan, but the influence of that strong a gravitational body with the system would have severly f***ed up the planetary orbits. Unless they pulled the entire starfleet fleet in and pulled off some kind of planet wrangling stunt with hundreds of ships tractoring worlds back into their proper orbits, earth still would have been screwed.

No black hole was ever opened up inside the sol system. If you are referring to the one at the end of the film that was opened elsewhere. Once the drill is destroyed the jellyfish goes to warp and the Narada follows it. This takes them out of the Sol system to somewhere safe to open the black hole. Having seen the film 10 times I can assure you of this.

I want to like this movie, I do. I enjoyed it greatly, but...I'm not really sure I liked it, if that makes any sense.

See it again, you will like it a lot more. I wasn't sure the first time I saw it.

[Tyyr]

The other detail, the blackhole's mass is only equal to what it swallows. For instance the blackhole that ate Vulcan only has a mass equal to that of Vulcan. As such it won't disrupt the system at all because the masses involved haven't changed at all. What could actually perturb things is that a planet sized blackhole is incredibly unstable. It'll dissipate quickly and then things go wonky as the planetary mass is suddenly not there any more.

[Aaron]

The Bad

The blackhole: This is my biggest issue with the movie, the use of blackholes. It's just so...clitched. And absurd in the way they used it. I really wish they would have gone with a subspace anomoly, or tear in reality, or anything else really. The problem is, while we don't know everything about blackholes, we do know a fair deal, all things considering. I really wish scifi writers would not use real science phenominon unless they are prepared to protray them as accurately as possible, which they did not do in the movie. My points of annoyance with the black hole are:

1) It's use as a time machine: I just can't buy this. Yes, the intense gravity of a black hole does f**k with time, but as far as I understand it, it merely slows time down, not reverses it. If you were to fall into a black hole...well first of all you'd die. You'd be crushed small enough to fit in a thimbel or worse. Also, black holes aren't doubled ended objects, those are wormholes. A black hole is the universal equivelent of a big hole in the ground. You fall in, and you can't get out. There isn't a door at the bottom you can get out by if you live, you are stuck in there unless you can climb out the way you came in. When the romulan ship and spock's little vulcan craft fell in, they should have been stuck, the end.

2) Why did they have to drill a hole to the core of Vulcan before creating the black hole to destroy the planet? I fail to see how that really made it any more effective. Just dump it on the surface of the planet, I assure you it would have swallowed up the whole world just the same. The drilling sequence was just an excuse to give the heroes time to try and stop them. If they really wanted such a sequence in the movie, then they should have gone with a alternate doomsday weapon, something that would have made sense to need to set in the core of the planet.

3) The fact that nothing happened to earth even though a black hole opened up in the sol system. Tossing that kind of gravity into the middle of a solar system would be like a 300 lb man jumping on a trampoline full of kittens, it's going to send everything flying. The blackhole might not destroy the planets outright like with vulcan, but the influence of that strong a gravitational body with the system would have severly f***ed up the planetary orbits. Unless they pulled the entire starfleet fleet in and pulled off some kind of planet wrangling stunt with hundreds of ships tractoring worlds back into their proper orbits, earth still would have been screwed.

Change the name to Time Hole, it's just a case of erroneous naming.

The romulan weapons: This might just be me, but I found it very odd that a mining vessel would be armed with, and only with, torpedos. I know they're romulan, and I realize the ship might have been off on it's own in the course of it's duty and needed to defend itself, but why torpedos? Would a few banks of disruptors have not made more sense? A ship that size with a couple disruptors should be more than capable of defending itself from bandits or pirates. It should never be in a position to have to defend itself from enemy warships. And the torpedos it did carry were unlike anything else we've seen, huge with multivector warheads. Those are some very serious weapons that ship was toting around.

I can't take credit for this idea, a friend came up with it; but what if she was a merchant cruiser? Essentially she acts as a mining vessel/transport/whatever and during time of war she's called up to provide escort.

Starfleet's promotional ladder: Let me see if I have this one right...Kirk goes from being a fresh academy graduate, to a full captain, in 2 days? What? I get that he did a great job, saved the earth and all. Fantastic work, above and beyond the call of duty several times...but captain? Give him an ass load of medals and maybe a few promotions for all he did, but come on. It's just absurd. Starfleet captains have to shoulder a huge resposiblity, they are given a great deal of authority to speak for and on behalf of the federation, to make important, even vital choices for the federation. And they're going to hand that kind of authority and responsibility to someone who hasn't even been out of the academy a whole week yet? And lets not forget, he was still on trial for cheating, he disobeyed orders to sneak onto the Ent, he showed nothing but complete insabordination for the acting captain, and assualted a pair of security officers in the course of their duty. Now yes, given the circumstances and the way things turned out, I can understand the upper command of starfleet deciding to overlook these serious and potentially career sinking actions and not press formal charges, but to just ignore them? Nothing I saw in the movie would lead me to believe Kirk is at all mature enough or level headed enough to captain a ship. Lead in a dangerous, high risk situation, sure, but most of being a captain does not involve those kind of situations.

This is my biggest beef in the entire movie, he demonstrated that he is basically a complete and total irresponsible jackass and they...make him Captain. Not just the Captain of a vessel but a Post Captain! I can see promoting him to Lt/Lt. Cmdr, pin a medal on him and then send him on an endless press junket but a full Cpt? Congrats, you've just pissed off your entire officer corps.

The destruction of Romulous: Unless the star that went supernova was Romulous's own, I don't see how the planet could have been destroyed like it was. Yes, supernovas are huge, but the distances between stars are measured in lightyears. We're talking unimaginablely vast distances here. I could accept some kind of radiation wave that might have fried the people, and burnt out their equipment, but a solid wall of flame engulfing the planet? And how the hell could Spock have been too late? Again, we're talking about lightyears of distance, so unless that supernova somehow created a warp field, the results of that blast should have taken years to arrive, more than enough time to detect and prepare for it.

Obviously it isn't a supernova then. If you take a cruise and see ice flows, polar bears and seals but the staff says your in Mexico, do you believe them?

The Ugly
Vulcan bullies: This I just found absurd. Vulcan kids, acting all emotionless and logical, yet bullying Spock. What? This just does not make any sense to me at all. I can understand them not agreeing with the choices of Spock's father, of finding a mixed child of such a union unappealing, but that they have been taunting and insulting him some 30 something times in order to try and provoke an emotional responce? It doesn't fit, not to me. Offering off hand insults like the councle member did, maybe, but actively seeking him out and trying to push his buttons? No...

Vulcan's suppress their emotions, they are not emotionless. Vulcan's being pricks goes all the way back to TOS!

I want to like this movie, I do. I enjoyed it greatly, but...I'm not really sure I liked it, if that makes any sense.

Well, I'm waiting for Blu-Ray or the bargain bin. That might tell you something...

[Captain Picard's Hair]

As to why Earth wasn't affected by the black hole - I assume it's because they had already warped sufficiently far from Sol to get Earth out of harm's way by the time the Vulcan ship rammed the Narada and created the black hole (remember that Spock warped from Earth to avoid the initial torpedo barrage and the Narada chased her down before unleashing the second barrage, which was what the Enterprise destroyed with her phaser fire to clear a path).

I'll agree that the haphazard and illogical use of rank in the film is one thing that irked me, but all the same my general impression of your review is that the nits were a bit too... nitty. By that I mean that they're sort of minor details to be focused on (even if legitimate quirks) in the face of a movie which first and foremost is meant to entertain. I loved the movie simply because it was engaging, told a good story, and was FUN!!! To repeat my "official" review on the main page, there are without a doubt many, many nits you could pick in this film, but I forgive them all on the fact that this movie is good enough that I felt it wasn't worth it to get hung up on such details.

As to Vulcan bullies, remember that these were young kids! You don't think they just pop of Vulcan mothers' wombs with their logic already set now, do you? In fact, from Vulcan history we KNOW they don't and that the logic is learned (Surak...). That, then, is your answer: these Vulcan children hadn't fully matured in their logic. In any case, how are we to know that Vulcan children don't innately have a maturation curve like ours do? Actually, now that you mention it, I'm starting to like the idea of Vulcan youths as bullies. It makes the species a bit more rounded

[Tsukiyumi]

... Actually, now that you mention it, I'm starting to like the idea of Vulcan youths as bullies. It makes the species a bit more rounded

Like I pointed out, even some of the Vulcan adults were bullies.

[Lighthawk]

Part of the backstory (seen in the Countdown comics, although they're not canon) was that Nero had upgraded the ship with Borg technology, which was why it looked so freaky.

...what? What what what? Okay...and just how does the captain of a mining vessel get his hands on Borg tech? And that sure didn't look like Borg parts, like I said before, it looked like the bio tech of the Shadows from B5. Then again, we haven't seen the Borg in this reality, so who's to say what they may look like.

Was that an unavoidable result of the drilling, or a separate thing that Nero was doing?

It seemed to be a result of the drilling, because once Kirk and Sulu broke the drill, the interference stopped.

Again, the Countdown comics help explain this a bit (GK has made some posts on the topic). Apparently it's some expanding subspace thingy. Still crazy, but the comics at least make some nominal effort to make it sound conceivable.

Ok, so there's a technobabble explination. A little weak, but I can accept that...or could if they would have at least bothered to include it in the movie. They didn't have the time or budget to include the handful of lines to explain that bit?

Well, they were a bunch of hard-working miners, and they had shaved their heads and tattooed themselves in mourning for their planet. Remember that up till now, for the most part, we've only seen a small segment of Romulan society, basically fleet officers and politicians.

Fair point, but still, I would have liked to see something, aside from the ears, to suggest that these are actual Romulans. I guess this one I have to put down as a personal preferrence, but I feel that if you've constantly shown a given race in a certain way, you should stick at least marginally with that portrayal of them. I'm not saying all Romulans need to look and act within a small, narrow range of acceptance, but the nearly complete overhaul they gave them in the movie seemed too much to me. They might as well have just used another alien race at that point.

Again, that's the Borgification. GK posted a frame from the comics that shows the ship in its original shape, and it just looks like a boring blob, quite conceivable as a mining ship. (In fact, it hardly looks anything like what appears in the movie, which might raise another question of plausibility.)

Hell yeah that raises a question of plausibility.

Some people have complained about that, but I didn't find it problematic at all. The Vulcans are by nature a very emotional and violent race, and they need to be trained to be logical. It makes sense to me that the children would have outbursts and bully kids that didn't fit in. My really nitpicky thing with that scene was the use of Terran mathematical symbols in the training stations.

I could accept the kids BEING bullies, but I found their methods and attitude absurd. First off, what was it spock said, that they had been trying to get to him some 30 something times? That's a lot of freaking effort, especially out of a bully. I know it's probably not accurate to compare human bullies to vulcan, but that's all I've got to work with, so here goes: Bullies tend to go after easy marks. They don't want to deal with people who fight back, or who they can't antagonize. After a dozen or so failed efforts to get an emotional responce out of spock, I find it hard to believe they would keep trying. ( I also find it amazing it took them so long to try insulting his mama, clearly they could use some pointers from human bullies.)

Second, and what I think might be what bugs me so much about it, is how hypocrital the scene is. The bullies are acting on their emotions, their feelings of predujice/disgust/ect towards spock for his mixed heritage, and the way they act on these feelings are to try and make spock show emotion? I think I would have accepted it much better if A) the bullies showed a bit of emotion, showed that they were kids who didn't have perfect control of their feelings and that was what was leading them to torment spock and B) harrassed him for some reason other than trying to make his emotional control break.

But you're right that there are a lot of implausibilities, with some heavy use of handwavium. One thing is that it's pretty firmly established now that the new Enterprise is over 700 meters long, which raises a lot of troublesome questions of scale, and which I think is rather hard to deal with IU. But TBH my main gripe with the movie was the destruction of Vulcan, which I think was very heavy handed and makes it difficult for me to invest myself in the new timeline. (But I found the movie entertaining as hell and look forward to the sequel.)

I don't know enough about the scaling issues at this point to comment.
I'm not sure what you mean by heavy handed. What is it about this that bugs you?
And I do look forward to the sequel. I just hope I find less to gripe about in it

Well, I'm glad you liked the movie. Or didn't.

Oh I did, I just want to...like it more.

Did you ever watch DS9? There was an episode named "Take Me Out To The Holosuite" where a Vulcan captain named Solok comes to DS9 with his all-Vulcan Nebula-class ship. At the Academy, Solok had literally provoked Sisko into attacking him, then beat the sh*t out of him (breaking several ribs, IIRC). Then he wrote his Academy dissertation on why Vulcans are superior to humans, using Sisko as his subject (kinda racist, there. You'd think he would've been drummed out of the Academy for that).

I do remember that episode. From what I remember, it wasn't that one sided of a thing. If I recall, Sisko admitted that he was drunk and trying to argue logic with Solok, and when he couldn't get through to the vulcan, challenged him to a wrestling match. Solok shouldn't have accepted under the circumstances, but Sisko was rather asking for it. As for the paper, well yeah that's being an ass, but I don't think the academy could kick him for expressing his personal view points, that would probably be seen as being oppressive.

The lesson there, and in other episodes? That Vulcans are smug assh*les with a major superiority complex, and they like to bully the pitiful humans every chance they get.

I have to disagree there. I do think Vulcans tend to be very arogent and think overly highly of themselves and the "perfection" of their logic, but I've never seen them as bullying. More socially inept and prone to voicing their opinions at bad times and in bad ways.

Vulcans dont have no emotions, they just supress them and try not to act on them.

Which the bullies were failing at, as they were trying to make Spock fail at it. Bunch of hypocrits.

Graham suggested that they may be modified mining charges, which I consider a fairly reasonable explaination.
The Countdown comic said that Nero upgraded his ship with Borg tech, but I dislike that idea and the whole thing is non-canon anyway.

That would be a hell of a modification. He'd have had to modifiy just about every aspect of the system, the launcher, the warheads, the targeting system...

I actualy got the impression that Nero added something or tweaked the drill to cause that effect. Hence why comms and transporters didn't shut down when Nero was drilling over Earth - they'd destroyed a seperate device mounted on the drill platform to help defend it.

Possible, but then, why mount it on the drill? Why put such a useful and valueable device on a platform that's going to be hanging right out in the open, with so little protection that hand held weapons can destroy it? Wouldn't such a jamming device be better placed within the ship so it is protected?

Again, that was fairly screwy as well. I figure it as being some sort of weird technobabble effect that was simply ignited by the initial supernova.

Then they should have said so. It's not like it's THAT much faster and easier to say " it was a supernova" than " A supernova explosion caused yadda yadda yadda to happen"

So all members of an alien race must look and act the same?

No, but I expect them to at least look something like what we've seen before. I don't care if they look different, but these were completely different and had nothing about them that said "Romulan" to me. It'd be like having a bunch of guys running around in black leather and boots and ripped jeans, and saying they were Amish. Could it happen, sure, but that would not be the first thing you would think of, and the complete lack of anything to suggest what they actually were would probably make you curious as to why they were so different.

I don't mind that too much. Vulcans are supposed to be very emotional naturaly. So I don't find it surprising that children, who would be just learning to surpress their emotions, might try to find an outlet for their pent up frustration and anger.Also, the Vulcans in ENT insulted and derided humans on a daily basis. So it's hardly without precedent.

Along with everything else I've said on this, I think there is a subtle but important difference between being a casual asshole, and actively seeking to hurt someone's feelings. Vulcans can be real bastards and tend to be very tactless and just speak whatever pops into their head, they have no filter between brain and mouth. But to make an actual effort, to seek out a single person and actively try and insult, there is a difference.

We have no idea of the physics of what happens beyond the event horizon of a black hole. This film is not the first thing to theorize that a black hole can cause a wormhole in space allowing time travel.

We have no PROOF of what happens beyond the event horizon of a black hole. We have lots of theories though, most of which suggest a rather bad ending for anything that falls in there. The time travel thing is probably the least likely result of falling into a blackhole. I know we can't say 100% that you absolutely could not end up traveling through time if you fell into a blackhole (assume you somehow survive the gravity), but the odds against it just seem so stacked, especially for it to occure twice.

No black hole was ever opened up inside the sol system. If you are referring to the one at the end of the film that was opened elsewhere. Once the drill is destroyed the jellyfish goes to warp and the Narada follows it. This takes them out of the Sol system to somewhere safe to open the black hole. Having seen the film 10 times I can assure you of this.

Well, having seen the film only once and being no longer certain where they were, I will bow to you on that, they were out of the system. Still, they weren't at warp very long, and I still think the gravity could have caused some harm, but that's purely personal opinion.

See it again, you will like it a lot more. I wasn't sure the first time I saw it.

I'll be sure to Netfilx it when it comes out.

The other detail, the blackhole's mass is only equal to what it swallows. For instance the blackhole that ate Vulcan only has a mass equal to that of Vulcan. As such it won't disrupt the system at all because the masses involved haven't changed at all. What could actually perturb things is that a planet sized blackhole is incredibly unstable. It'll dissipate quickly and then things go wonky as the planetary mass is suddenly not there any more.

The only problem with this is that if that were the case, then the black hole shouldn't have had the gravity to swallow vulcan in the first place. Something about the red matter has to change something in the way the blackhole's gravity works, or all we would have had when they shot the stuff into vulcan would have been a tiny point of extremely dense matter floating around inside the core. Super heavy for it's size, sure, but hardly a source of an intense gravity field.

I can't take credit for this idea, a friend came up with it; but what if she was a merchant cruiser? Essentially she acts as a mining vessel/transport/whatever and during time of war she's called up to provide escort.

Hmm, not a bad idea really. Still, no disruptors? I don't care that the ship had torpedos, I'm just amazed that it seems that was ALL it had.

This is my biggest beef in the entire movie, he demonstrated that he is basically a complete and total irresponsible jackass and they...make him Captain. Not just the Captain of a vessel but a Post Captain! I can see promoting him to Lt/Lt. Cmdr, pin a medal on him and then send him on an endless press junket but a full Cpt? Congrats, you've just pissed off your entire officer corps.

Exactly, everyone who's spent years working their way up just watched a fresh from the academy cadet get his own ship, and not just any ship, a DAMN nice one. Starfleet command had better get ready to get swamped with indignant complaints from their officers.

Obviously it isn't a supernova then. If you take a cruise and see ice flows, polar bears and seals but the staff says your in Mexico, do you believe them?

Not in the slightest.

Vulcan's suppress their emotions, they are not emotionless. Vulcan's being pricks goes all the way back to TOS!

I think I've covered all my views on this above.

Well, I'm waiting for Blu-Ray or the bargain bin. That might tell you something

I think I liked it better than that...

As to why Earth wasn't affected by the black hole - I assume it's because they had already warped sufficiently far from Sol to get Earth out of harm's way by the time the Vulcan ship rammed the Narada and created the black hole (remember that Spock warped from Earth to avoid the initial torpedo barrage and the Narada chased her down before unleashing the second barrage, which was what the Enterprise destroyed with her phaser fire to clear a path).

I didn't think they were at warp all that long. Unfortunately, at this point I can't recall the details well enough to say exactly where they were, only that for whatever reason, I thought they were still in system at the time. I could of course, be very wrong on that point. I'll have to let this point go for the moment.

I'll agree that the haphazard and illogical use of rank in the film is one thing that irked me, but all the same my general impression of your review is that the nits were a bit too... nitty. By that I mean that they're sort of minor details to be focused on (even if legitimate quirks) in the face of a movie which first and foremost is meant to entertain. I loved the movie simply because it was engaging, told a good story, and was FUN!!! To repeat my "official" review on the main page, there are without a doubt many, many nits you could pick in this film, but I forgive them all on the fact that this movie is good enough that I felt it wasn't worth it to get hung up on such details.

I try not to let nits get in the way of my enjoyment of a movie, and in fact they really didn't. I liked the movie, I just feel there were far too many points at which I had to go " Well that doesn't make sense." Those moments, regardless of how much I might wish otherwise, do effect my over all enjoyment. Especially as so many of them seemed to me to be needless, a bit of tweaking could have fixed many of them. It seemed lazy to me, and I high disapprove of laziness in writing.

As to Vulcan bullies, remember that these were young kids! You don't think they just pop of Vulcan mothers' wombs with their logic already set now, do you? In fact, from Vulcan history we KNOW they don't and that the logic is learned (Surak...). That, then, is your answer: these Vulcan children hadn't fully matured in their logic. In any case, how are we to know that Vulcan children don't innately have a maturation curve like ours do? Actually, now that you mention it, I'm starting to like the idea of Vulcan youths as bullies. It makes the species a bit more rounded

As I said above, it was more the way it was done. I can accept vulcan bullies, having given it some thought, but I still hate the protrayal of it shown in the film.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Vulcan youths bullying Spock was established in 'Unification'. It's been canon for a while, actually.

[Aaron]

Hmm, not a bad idea really. Still, no disruptors? I don't care that the ship had torpedos, I'm just amazed that it seems that was ALL it had.

Well if it's just a "part time" warship then perhaps the torpedo's can use existing kit to launch, pack more punch then disruptors or don't require as much energy from the launch vessel as energy weapons.

Not in the slightest.

Unfortunately sci-fi is often bad with abusing terminology.

[Lighthawk]

Vulcan youths bullying Spock was established in 'Unification'. It's been canon for a while, actually.

Neelix is canon too, doesn't make him right.

[Lighthawk]

Well if it's just a "part time" warship then perhaps the torpedo's can use existing kit to launch, pack more punch then disruptors or don't require as much energy from the launch vessel as energy weapons.

Yeah but, look at the size of that thing! I can only imagine the power plant needed to run a vessel that size, surely they could afford to power a few disruptors. Hell, if it's going to be a part time warship, and use a kit in order to mount and launch torpedos, then why not a disruptor kit?

Unfortunately sci-fi is often bad with abusing terminology.

Which it doesn't have to be. Can't these movie guys hire a few nerds to look over the science?