Whoosh?

Just as an exercise, imagine the original star wars movies without the spaceships and you'll know what i mean.

Do you mean this?

A lot of people say that having seen the movies as an adult they don't hold up as well as when they saw them as kids. Does "Star Wars" affect me the same as an adult as it did when I was 12? No, but I still think it's a fine movie. However, my opinion of "Empire" has increased significantly since I first saw it with my Dad in the theater.

Lucas is a visionary. He sucks at the details. He set out to recreate the Saturday morning serials with "Star Wars" and was very successful in setting a new bar in special effects. His vision for the scope and scale of the movie, the simplicity of the characters, being mythical archetypes, perfectly fit what he was shooting for, and made for a fun and exciting movie. But he can't write dialog to save his life. Even the dialog in "Star Wars" wasn't great, and in the sequels, it was awful. He also cannot direct people, because everyone in the prequels looked like awful actors, even though they aren't.

But he's got the vision, an eye for the kind of spectacle that makes great movies, and should be recognized as such. The problem was when he was allowed to also do those things he was really awful at.

I rewatched the original trilogy as an adult (I was a teenager when they came out) and still felt the first and third were pretty good, and yes, nostalgia plays a part of that, but my opinion of "The Empire Strikes Back" improved significantly. I like it much more now than when I first saw it.

I thought JJTrek was almost, but not quite as bad as Bayformers. There were fewer grotesque continuity errors and no (as far as I can remember) testicle jokes, and the action wasn't so much of a confusing mess, but the Trek reboot movies were just as stupid and incoherent.

But in the case of Android, I don't believe that is primarily Google's fault, short of requiring OEMs to provide an upgrade path, and I think the logistics of that would be difficult... how many upgrades? how long to support? Yes, some OEMs are idiots, but that's nothing new.

Windows RT was solely Microsoft's bad idea.

You're right, except for the fact that no one (outside of Microsoft anyway) ever expected RT to succeed in the first place. The wisdom of the masses can often be wrong, but this one was a gimmee. It's the same thing with Metro on the desktop. No one liked it. It was almost universally panned from the first moment people got a chance to see what it was, but MS doubled down on the bad idea. Now they are backpedalling on it in Windows 9^h 10 (but of course, not eliminating the need for it on the desktop which would be the proper solution).

Of course there's no utopian society, and I don't believe there ever will be. But that doesn't mean it isn't interesting to consider what one might look like, how it would work and what challenges it would face. If you're trying to argue Star Trek wasn't perfect, well of course it wasn't. But it was a worthwhile example of speculative fiction that raised and considered interesting questions. Besides, the Federation is supposed to be the utopia, but that doesn't mean all races in the galaxy are. I think the development and fleshing out of the Klingons as a realistic society over the course of TNG was one of the best parts of Star Trek.

Also, if you're not "supposed" to know, then why did you comment like you did know? I bet you're a hoot to talk politics with.

Wait do they have balls?

If Michael Bay had done the Star Wars prequels...

Congratulations, you've captured everything about JJTrek. You win an internet. Have a nice day.

Yeah, the "twist" was that the story didn't make any sense and turned the most memorable Star Trek villain ever into a boring, forgettable cardboard cutout.

Look who's blind. The Klingons weren't the blacks. That's laughable. The Klingons were the commies, particularly the Chinese.

I discovered Simon Pegg when I watched "Spaced" a few years ago, and really like him. With that kind of geek cred, I'm surprised they would let him anywhere near the writers' room, but from what you are saying I'm interested to see what he is able to do.

And for all that, Star Trek was still pretty much "science fiction lite"... it didn't tackle some of the really wild concepts that you see in SF books, where the authors are not limited to practical budget considerations or keeping it simple enough that new viewers can pick up partway through a season. I haven't seen "Interstellar" but from what I've heard it's a great movie that actually holds up as real science fiction. Most so-called SF movies these days are really just action movies or horror movies in a science fiction setting (including JJTrek and JJTrek 2). That's not necessarily a bad thing. I thought "Pacific Rim" was great. But the thing is, audiences are more sophisticated than they were almost 50 years ago when the original series aired. We've seen "Blade Runner", "The Matrix", "Contact", "Fringe" and whole host of other movies and TV shows that expanded the popular consciousness of SF tropes. There's room to tackle all the heady and serious subjects that were tackled in the original series and the newer series, plus there's a whole lot of science fiction concepts that people take for granted today that would have been incomprehensible or at least confusing to most audiences from decades ago.

Sure, you need to have wide appeal, and you can pretty much get that for free with good SFX, but is there no room for something other than fluff? Is Michael Bay the template from which the Star Trek reboot needs to be cut? Is the audience really that dumb? (Note I just described above that the audience isn't. I think there is a wider demographic to which a "real" Star Trek movie could appeal to now than there ever was). Besides, Star Trek II, widely considered the best one (by me as well) wasn't deep or complex, it was just a really good story that utilized the SF setting and Star Trek canon well). "Star Trek IV" had even wider appeal could almost be considered a comedy and yet most people also consider it excellent, and it was still very true to the spirit of the TV series. I know a lot of people liked JJTrek, and there were elements of the production design that I really liked, as well as some of the actors (particularly Karl Urban, Simon Pegg (despite his overuse as comedy relief) and Zoe Seldana, all of whom captured their respective roles with heart), but I thought the movies overall were awful... a Bay-Transformers level of awful.

The problem with the Star Trek movies is that they always lacked the primary advantage of the TV show, the ability to address a topic in detail, to be thoughtful and detailed, and sometimes slow and talky, which is usually the best way to express and explore these ideas. The movies never did could really do this (with the exception of the "The Motion Picture", which I always really liked as well... it was the most true to the original series, whatever its flaws were), even the good ones, because there is a built-in requirement for action and spectacle. What we are seeing now, however, is all action and spectacle and absolutely none of the issues and concepts that are the heart of Trek (and of any good fiction) or even a decent story. The new movies are just mindless eye candy.