Photoshop CS4 is better than plastic surgery… cheaper, less painful and doesn’t make someone’s face look like stretched elastic.

#40

There’s also this new thing called the internet…

Perhaps you could try putting them on one of these new-fangled aeroplanes? I believe they take only a couple of hours to get from the USA to London. Amazing, this modern technology!

The goal was to please as many people as possible. Considering the fact that is extraordinarily difficult to succeed in getting two Star Trek fans to agree upon anything other than the fact that each enjoys Star Trek in one incarnation or another, and ST09 is now the most attended film in the Star Trek film series—-they have to feel pretty good about it.

Well, my expectations of enjoyment (i.e. the film itself) never revolved around Nero, but a good villain definitely fleshes out the narrative and sets the stakes. Unfortunately, I didn’t like Kirk and Spock in this film either, so it just all fell apart for me.

Nor did they have to. Nero explains himself to Pike within the dialogue of the film, and those circumstances are expanded upon in Spock Prime’s meld (in which Spock, too, professes a feeling of responsibility) with the young Kirk.

“Coming from a person who once lost a few family members (within two days), I didn’t lose my mind and start going after other people.”

I would hope not. But then again, you’re a human being—not a Romulan. You also did not experience the loss of your planet and its entire culture.

“To say that “his planet was destroyed!” can only lead to empty, speculative debates because no one on earth has been in that position and it would be silly to try to empathize with a fictional character who just lost his home planet. ”

I disagree. My ethnicity has never experienced a real attempted genocide either, nor am I old enough to have been alive during the Second World War. However, even when viewing a fictional account of a Holocaust experience, I am not incapable of empathy.

But the bottom line is really this. ST09 is not a villain-centric film. Nero is a peripheral character, who just so happens to be the catalyst for the events which alter the timeline and allow this origin tale to be told.

And he is not worthy of empathy. The moment he chooses vengeance over justice/positive action (which is before the audience even learns of the causes for his pain), he has surrendered any moral ground he might have otherwise held. Nero is not a sympathetic character simply because he wasn’t always a bad guy. There is a clear difference between reason and actual justification for his actions. Although he has the former (albeit irrationally arrived at), he does not possess the latter.

” In my own opinion, Orci and Kurtzman wrote a poor villain, simple as that.”

Why? Is he as colorful as Khan? No. But he isn’t supposed to be. Real villains rarely are. Like most villains, Nero is just an a$$hole who thinks that he has been wronged and wishes everyone else to pay for it.

The story isn’t about Nero. He shouldn’t have been expected to steal the show. It is about Kirk and Spock. Why would a peripheral character whose motivations (compared to his actions) hardly even matter result in you being “completely turned off”?

33: Oh believe you me, it’s not over yet! Issue 20 contains our JJ interview and an interview with makeup supremo Mindy Hall. Issue 21 will have Roger Guyett from ILM, and Ben Burtt and others are still waiting in the wings.

And for those interested in the earlier movies, we’ll also have a major interview with Star Trek II, IV and VI’s Nicholas Meyer coming in the next few weeks as well.