I was really psyched for the new CBS All Access show, Star Trek: Picard. Its predecessor show on All Access, Star Trek: Discovery, has been very hit or miss (mostly miss) but this just looked great. After the first episode, I rated it as excellent.
So now that the last episode of Season 1 is up and the season is over, what did I think?
SPOILERS BELOW
To the positive, I like the cast and the setting was pretty evocative of post-Next Generation Star Trek. I thought they did a nice job with that, making it more advanced but not too much. I liked that they followed up with the destruction of Romulus from JJ Abrams new-Trek (the Kelvinverse) and I LOVED the two Romulans who were living at Picard's Chateau. I liked the slow roll of the story over the first few episodes and the occasional reference to events from TNG.
What didn't I like? Almost everything else. The slow roll of the story became a chaotic, confused mess with multiple dangling plotlines, repeated plot points, nonsensical sub-plots, bad character motivations, and ham-handed foreshadowing. The series was often graphically violent (hey, we're not on a TV network!) with a particular focus on eye injuries, and needlessly profane (hey, we're REALLY not on a TV network!). I have never watched a Star Trek movie or episode and said afterwards, "You know what that really needed? More F* bombs." (Note: I'm not being a prude here. I don't mind F* bombs, but they added NOTHING to this show and were tonally inconsistent with every Trek that came before.)
The sub-plot of the group rescuing Borg individuals on a deactivated cube was a really cool idea, which in the end meant absolutely nothing. The Romulan plot was stupid, hackneyed and a disservice to what was a sophisticated cultural representation in the TNG and DS9 days. And what I thought started out as a pretty decent critique of America's reaction post-9/11, turned into a simplistically solved, underdeveloped mess.
One of the things the current Star Trek production teams at CBS don't seem to understand is that more is not always better. The final episode included a ludicrous ship confrontation involving hundreds of ships which looked like the SFX people just copied and pasted the same couple of ships all over the screen. There was no sense of scale or movement or grandeur, ruining what should have been a great moment. You know what would have worked a lot better? Limiting the confrontation to a couple of dozen ships.
THIS is how you do a stirring, thrilling fleet reveal in one of my favorite moments in all of Trek:
Akiva Goldsman and Alex Kurtzman are responsible for all the CBS All Access Star Trek series and I really think that like JJ Abrams, they -- just -- don't -- get -- Trek.
Let's hope they figure it out before season two.
4 comments:
Even though it was actually made 38 years ago in 1982 the space battles in 'Return of the Jedi' still represent (for me anyway) perhaps the greatest and most perfect example of "How to do a great space battle sequence in a movie", what Ken Ralston and Richard Edlund achieved there was quite breathtaking, and all done with real model spaceships as opposed to CGI bull-shit ! ! !.
Yes, having to use practical effects made them really think through the logistics of the battle rather than cutting and pasting.
The DS9 clip above was made just at the time when CGI was taking over for models. It works because they didn't have the processing power to go nuts. They were really just substituting CGI for models, so they were using the same principles.
I hadn`t seen that specific bit of CGI before, it did look quite good. BTW, although the space battle scenes were incredible my absolute favourite bit from 'Jedi' is the reactor chamber sequence towards the end of the movie where the Millenium Falcon and some X-wings and Ti-fighters fly through all the tunnels in the death star and then out into the open expanse of the reactor chamber itself, they then blow it up in a way that allows them to fly around and escape the blast by being kind of catapulted out of the same entrance that they came in by from the force of the megalithic nuclear explosion behind them, i know they only spend about 20 or 25 seconds in the reactor chamber but even 38 years on that sequence still seems to have a mind-blowing visual grandeur and astounding cinematic magnificence to it that i`ve rarely seen in any other movies before or since (and i consider myself quite a connoisseur of classic science fiction movies), the chamber itself really did look as if it was miles across and was pure breathtaking film-making genius of the highest order, and then, like i said, the giant yellow explosion in the background as they flew out of the chamber was like the ultimate celluloid definition of words like "Awesome" and "Stunning". With your obvious knowledge of special effects film-making in general (and after what you said about the space battles) i just wondered if you had any interesting reminisenses or recollections about how they achieved that truly amazing sequence.
I know I've seen video of the model work in action, but the video below only has a quick shot of the practical model of the reactor chamber. It was built so that the "ball" would drop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijYShIetolQ
Go to 8:20.
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