I’m totally in agreement with you that The Cage is definitive Trek. Where we are quibbling is in whether Trek09 has the qualities of pleasing mental stimulation that you attribute to The Cage.

We’re only in disagreement about the popcorn movie aspects, or what I called spectacle. By spectacle, I mean quantities of screen time in which visually impressive, usually very expensive things are happening. Surely, Trek is expected to be spectacular.

I don’t think spectacle — car chases, things blowing up — negates what you deem to be the traditional aspects of Trek, which in your view (post 69) amounts to talkiness.

Talkiness is not the hallmark of intelligent filmmaking: Sex and the City or Mamma Mia! are all talk, and are dopey populism at its dopiest.

What we need and expect from Trek, being the adventures of a group of extremely well-educated people, is good dialogue, not just the purely functional “oh my god look at that!” or “no no no no!” chatter of movies like Transformers.

On that basis, Trek09 is plenty smart enough, with pithy quotable dialogue, true moral dilemnas, and a plot that required the captain(s) to make hard smart choices, e.g. to rendevous with the fleet or to turn and face Nero.

The Cage was an enjoyable show, because of its mind-f-ing aspects (what, hallucinations are realistic?) but ultimately Pike makes no particularly interesting choices. He is in a cage, he breaks out.

The Menagerie is more interesting because he goes back to the cage!!!

I certainly am not advocating spoon feeding the morals to people. Certainly The Omega Glory is all we need mention to quash that kind of thinking. But to my mind, The Cage is more of what Star Trek is about. As for cerebral, there was a LOT more talking in that episode than there was action. The plot literally involved the mind, which the giant heads of the aliens only emphasized. Had Abrams made The Cage instead of Mission-Impossible-III-in-space, I guarantee it would have grossed nowhere near its current box office.

However, to my original point, it would have most likely earned as well as previous installments in the franchise and pleased as many fans and certainly cost a lot less to make. Paramount could have still made a profit and then a sequel, and kept going like that for at least a decade.

But that is not what Paramount wants, nor was that what they wanted in 1979 – they wanted Star Wars! But it’s what they got and by and large they learned to live with Roddenberry’s legacy until the steady, if not huge, money flow ran out. With a chance to reboot it, they can turn Trek into Transformers and GI:Joe – audiences seem to embrace it.

That’s all well and good for Paramount, but I’m not sure it serves Trek the best for the fans who have sustained it for 40 years. I’m not saying Enterprise or TNG movies were the way to go either, but surely there’s some middle ground?

Anyway, what is so cerebral about the Cage? It is only cerebral in comparison to what NBC wanted at the time, which was another Lost In Space.

I think The Cage would be an excellent movie, suitably upgraded with FX.

(Not a plea for a Cage remake, just making a point.)

But (500) Days of Summer is spectacular, or at least gimmicky; it is sprightly and even has a special fx sequence! Also, while it purports not to be a love story, it is a feel-good movie celebrating love (albeit by comically excoriating its deluded protagonist), with a whimsical tone throughout.

My point is that Trek is expected to be fun, big and bold. While I believe that you can do interior drama successfully in Trek (”there…are…FOUR lights!”), these expectations are reasonable. And do not negate the need for intelligent writing.

As for having to look closely at themes, what of it? As a movie critic, I despise movies that cast their themes into bold relief, for the edification of the chillins. It is actually sign of maturity and sophistication that Trek09 avoided the stock wise exposition character, a Dumbledore, overtly telling us the moral of the story. The Big Ideas were instead written directly into the action — we see the destruction of Romulus and therefore implicitly understand why he went insane and needs revenge, which, tragically, he can only take out on the innocent. This is far more motivation than villains normally get, and yet one reads in reviews of the underwritten role. If the FX were less mesmerizing, then the Big Ideas would have stood out more. I’ll take that trade ten times out of ten.

Your statement implies that audiences and/or Trek fans only go to the theatre to witness a spectacle. I do not think you speak for either all theatre going audiences or the majority of Trek fans. The fact that films like “(500) Days of Summer” which is making over half a million dollars a day at only 85 theatres, refutes that. While it is true that spectacles tend to make the most money, my question was merely whether we as fans want a bigger blockbuster success with more spectacle, or a modest box office with more of the traditional aspects of Trek. Many posts on this forum alone have indicated that while this film was well liked, the overall directive has been: let’s get back to Trek’s “cerebral” roots.

Also, I NEVER said Rodenberry was anything of the kind. In fact I used the term psuedo-intellectualism on purpose to describe what goes on in Trek. Just like the psuedo-science which parades for technology. To even suggest I was comparing Roddenberry to a Krzysztof Kieślowski or even Ingmar Bergman, is ridiculous.

#72. Yammer wrote: That said, I think that ST09 was replete with “big idea” themes about destiny, justice, and nature vs. nurture, but told in a kinetic fashion.

No one is denying these things were not present in the film. In fact the exact same argument can be made for Transformer’s 2. And I’m tired of this argument because it misses the point entirely, which is, the ratio in which these topics were given importance on screen was much lower than in “traditional” Trek. The emphasis was given to explosions and “car chases”. When ST09’s intellectual virtues are highlighted, it is often with the admonishment “if you look closely”, to which I say if I have to look closely then those aspects of Trek are not given nearly enough screen time.

All one has to do is look to The Cage to see what Star Trek is all about. Like NBC, the general public would tend to dismiss the story as too cerebral. I think Roddenberry got the mix just about right when he produced WNMHGB and subsequently got his pick-up. While TMP was too much The Cage, TWOK and the best of the rest drew on WNMHGB. While I’m not advocating a return to Roddenberry’s “pure” vision, I am questioning whether the Transformer’s approach serves the franchise best, even at the box office.

It seems more and more likely there will be a new TV series in development within the next 12 months. I just hope if they must do another gimmicky timeframe, they decide to go way back and do something involving the eugenic wars. That would be mostly STINO (Star Trek in name only) but it would still be better than most other crap on television.
The new series would probably not be the Kirk Enterprise crew since they seem to be set up for 3 or 4 more movies.
What are some other possibilities? Gary Seven? Mirror Universe? USS Titan? DS9 ver 2.0?

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No, you inferred that. If I was not clear I apologize but what was intended was this … a comparison between Trek’s second month to Hangover’s second month. May to June and June to July respectively. There were no major films for Trek to run up against in June yet, it lost more theatres than The Hangover has lost in the same time frame, in July, going up against Transformers and Harry Potter. I was addressing specifically #42. mdbchud’s contention that “Trek got pulled out of too many theatres for dreck like Transformers and G-Force”. Yet if that’s the case, why did Hangover not get pulled from theaters to make room for more screens? Because it is performing better. That was my point. As for competition and genre, I saw way too many pre-teens in my Sunday afternoon screening of Hangover (mostly girls at that), which made me more than a little uncomfortable and also explains some of the box office.

Nevertheless it does say something that this “genere” film is doing so much better, opening weekend notwithstanding, when you consider Hangover is not a multiple screening kinda movie. People typically see it once, whereas, every Trek fan has seen Trek twice and a large percentage upwards of 4-8 times, or more. Meaning, Hangover has a much larger audience seeing it.

I personally didn’t think it was a more entertaining movie and I certainly didn’t get the $250M+ hype.