Berman Talks New Trek Film

[Jem'hadar]

FYI,

Berman Talks New Trek Film
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-m.../21/13.00.film

Enterprise Spoilers Revealed
Rick Berman, executive producer of UPN's Star Trek: Enterprise, revealed to SCI FI Wire several spoilers for the upcoming fourth season, including the possible casting of original Star Trek star William Shatner (Capt. Kirk) in a familiar role.
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-m...07/21/12.30.tv

[Ergi]

I am only talking about the movie link:

I really like everything Berman said, except for "and it would take place prior to any of the series, including [UPN's Star Trek:] Enterprise.". I wonder what he is planning. They didn't even have phasers before Enterprise. I'd prefer a post-DS9 movie, giving us an idea where the Star Trek universe is going after the DS9/Nemesis.

[Balok]

Events of significance before Enterprise would include World War III, The Eugenics Wars (same thing?), and perhaps the reconstruction of civilization that followed Cochrane's discovery of warp drive. Either of them, properly told, might make an interesting story.

[strict31]

Originally posted by Fesarius
Events of significance before Enterprise would include World War III, The Eugenics Wars (same thing?), and perhaps the reconstruction of civilization that followed Cochrane's discovery of warp drive. Either of them, properly told, might make an interesting story.

Yeah, but would any of those actually be "Star Trek" in anything other than name? I realize that these events are trek history and are, ostensibly, part of the franchise's backstory (...unless somebody changes something...), but it seems rather like naming a movie "Space: the Final Frontier", and then having it be about the old west.

I don't know.

A part of me thinks, "maybe it could work..." There's an idea on the tip of my brain, half-formed, that can see a pre-prequel working.

But another part of me thinks, "what in the hell is so repellant to Berman and Braga about the future of Trek?" Why do they wish to go further and further back into the past? What is wrong with walking forward with a new crew/cast? With new ideas, with a new theme? What's wrong with picking up new characters after the series and movies we've already seen? Has the franchise really grown so old that it cannot bear evolution? Change? Must it look backwards in order to walk forward?


Strictly Speaking

[Tobian]

Well the answer to that is clearly.. because of what they did in Voyager.

By giving the federation technology far in advance of it's development schedule, such as transphasic torpedoes, adaptive ablative armour generators, 37 new varieties of warp drive, including a Borg who has blueprints (7 of 9), isokinetic canons, a functional (klingon) temporal rift drive and a dozen other things, they have created a massive power ballance issue in the show.

Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike Voyager, but the precidents it set makes a Trek series almost impossible to write!

Now with Nemesis, it was only set around the same time as Voyagers return, maybe a year or two after. Ok so that's not unreasonable, the R&D boys will be pulling apart all of Voyagers research, designing ships, and of course BUILDING them.... but what happens now. Yes all of this would be an exciting future for the show, but imediatelly off the block it's all going to look like a fanboy show

The excelsion transwarp Gag was easilly covered up for TNG - can you do the same for 7 series of TNG DS9 and Voayger... nope.

Basically they created the mother of all continuity headaches for themselves! Once Voyager was out of the box and back into the fray it created a monster they didn't think about at the time!

[Ergi]

Damn continuity!
Damn Voyager!
Burn Janeway!

I want my trek timeline continued.

[Tobian]

Ahh wait for season 6 of enterprise

Now that janeway is an admiral, she will have had her evil installed, so it's probably her who started the temporal cold war with all her toys

[Mac417]

I have to say I agree on the side of NOT wanting yet ANOTHER Trek prequel. It's the same feeling I had when I learned that the next three Star Wars films would be prequels.

I know and care little about what happened before... I want to know what happens NEXT.

[strict31]

Originally posted by Tobian
Well the answer to that is clearly.. because of what they did in Voyager.

By giving the federation technology far in advance of it's development schedule, such as transphasic torpedoes, adaptive ablative armour generators, 37 new varieties of warp drive, including a Borg who has blueprints (7 of 9), isokinetic canons, a functional (klingon) temporal rift drive and a dozen other things, they have created a massive power ballance issue in the show.

Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike Voyager, but the precidents it set makes a Trek series almost impossible to write!

Now with Nemesis, it was only set around the same time as Voyagers return, maybe a year or two after. Ok so that's not unreasonable, the R&D boys will be pulling apart all of Voyagers research, designing ships, and of course BUILDING them.... but what happens now. Yes all of this would be an exciting future for the show, but imediatelly off the block it's all going to look like a fanboy show

The excelsion transwarp Gag was easilly covered up for TNG - can you do the same for 7 series of TNG DS9 and Voayger... nope.

Basically they created the mother of all continuity headaches for themselves! Once Voyager was out of the box and back into the fray it created a monster they didn't think about at the time!

I honestly thought you were going to talk about the bland character decree they worked under.

Well, there's two things about the tech Voyager brought back. First of all, it's just a plot device. Like Quantum Torpedoes. The show has always had wildly advanced technology. Q. Torps didn't imbalance things. Multi-vector super-duper Prometheus-class vessels didn't imbalance things. A cloaking device on the Defiant didn't imbalance things, nor did pulsed phaser arrays. You could have Starfleet put these crazy new technologies on all their ships, but presumably, the threat races (and alleged allies) would adapt and catch up, ultimately making such technology no more imbalanced than a phaser array is in TNG.

Second of all, most of this tech was cobbled together in unique ways. It might be impractical to outfit vessels with all of these modifications without extensive research. And, that research could be a background element in the storyline; I can see two officers taking a shuttle ride around their ship in spacedock, and glancing over at another, distant spacedock where a new Prometheus (or whatever)-Class is berthed, and one saying, "What's that ship over there, sir?" "Not much info is known about it, Lieutenant. Rumormill is that it's serving as a testbed for some tech Janeway and her crew picked up in the Delta Quadrant. Experimental stuff that could revolutionize starship systems across the board..." There might even be an episode surrounding espionage attempts to steal the schematics/designs.

Not to mention that the Temporal investigations boys are probably real interested in keeping future Janeway's modifications wrapped up tight. It might be against regulations to outfit ships with paradoxical tech. That could be a storyline too. And Section 31 might also be interested in stealing the designs before the Temporal Investigations team can close off access to it. Another storyline. Both of which do the double duty of answering any audience questions about it while keeping regular Trek tech levels at their current levels.

I don't know, I tend to think that the problem is coming up with good characters and good stories. Everything they've tried since DS9 has stood on the strength of a gimmick. DS9 tried it: "This time, we're on a station instead of a ship!" And they found out that wasn't sufficient; they needed to write good engaging stories too. Voyager tried it: "Well, this time, we're stranded in another distant part of space!" And they found out that wasn't sufficient; they tried adding a sexy blonde. That came close to working (sexy blondes almost always work), but they still needed to write good stories and make good character. Enterprise tried it: "Well, this time, we're in the past, at the birth of the Federation!" The show was plagued by poor writing and thin characterization until this past season, where things started to pick up. Now they're doing it one more time with a new movie pitch. "Maybe we didn't go far enough back in time!"

Well, whatever they do, I hope they remember to just make it good. We're not hard to please. Well, I'm not. Hell, they could call it "Star trek: New Guinea" and have it be about a particularly robust coffee ("to boldly grow where no bean has grown before!!!"), as long as it's well written. It just makes it harder to swallow is all....


Strictly Speaking

[REG]

Personally, I'd like to see NCC-1701-E again, with or without Picard in the Captain's Chair.

[Karg]

I wouldn't so mind a prequel film so long as it delt with the Romulan War

[Tas II]

Enterprise tried it: "Well, this time, we're in the past, at the birth of the Federation!" The show was plagued by poor writing and thin characterization until this past season, where things started to pick up.

Is it just me, or do each of the 'new' Trek series (TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT) seem to have this problem?

Each show was panned to varying degrees at the start, and then proceeded to get better (and in DS9's case ALOT better) as the series progressed. Obviously, people can look back on shows with hindsight and ask "What went wrong/right?" but just for once, even if to be original, cant we have ST where it is written well from the start?
B5 is a good example of this tactic. Sure, there were poor episodes, but, more often than not the writing and characters were generally of a superior quality. I think a defined story arc is really needed these days. We seem to have progressed from the episodic 'alien/techno-thingy' of the week format.

Cheers

Tas

[Mac417]

I read an interview with Brannon Braga on Cinescape.com about two or three months prior to Enterprise debuting that shed a bit of light about the Trek office's recent preference for going backwards.

Basically, he'd said nine-tenths of the reason of doing a prequel series was that he (and Berman and many of the highers-up) felt too confined writing 24th-century characters, with their non-casual, non-vernacular speech, and lack of any attachments to any form of popular culture that made the characters easily identifiable with the viewership.

So, in my understanding, the entire reason for setting Enterprise in the 22nd century is because they felt like they couldn't get the characters' dialogue to sound anything but bland, nigh-Shakespearean, and completely lacking in slang, pop culture references, and profanity beyond the occasional "d***" and "h***."

If I'm reading that how I'm supposed to, that has got to be the biggest bloody cop-out I have ever heard. They blamed the show's timeframe on having to make the characters' dialogue generally uninteresting.

You can write smart, entertaining characters IF YOU WANT TO and HAVE THE GUTS TO DO SO. Just because Picard, Sisko, Janeway, et al, lived in the late 2300's doesn't mean to have to force yourself to write stiff dialogue for them. Look at Enterprise's first couple seasons, for one. Archer's crew was a lot more laid back, some of them were neurotic to a fault, Tucker broke out "son of a b****" every five episodes, etc. Not giving the TNG, DS9, and Voyager characters this level of characterization based solely on when the series is set... it's flippin' laughable. At best.

And I have to admit one of the things that bugged me about the more recent Trek shows is that hardly anyone had an interest in late 20th/early 21st century pop culture, such as music, movies, literature, etc. And when you did, it was always the '30s, or the '50s, or a less "conflicted" era in that timeframe. I mean, when was the last time you saw an Enterprise-D crewmember walk into his quarters after a long shift, plop on the couch, ask the computer to shuffle through the full catalog of Aerosmith or the Eagles (or heck, even Ludacris or Disturbed, to go even further) and pick up a copy of a Tom Clancy "classic" or an unearthed work by John Grisham?

[Lee T]

Originally posted by Mac417
I mean, when was the last time you saw an Enterprise-D crewmember walk into his quarters after a long shift, plop on the couch, ask the computer to shuffle through the full catalog of Aerosmith or the Eagles (or heck, even Ludacris or Disturbed, to go even further) and pick up a copy of a Tom Clancy "classic" or an unearthed work by John Grisham?

I suppose the answer to this problem would be "royalties". It's a lot cheaper to make your character a Mozart/Shakespear fan.

I'm allways fascinated by people like Braga who blames the rule of the genre for their writing problems, if he can't write good Star Trek stuff while staying true to the Star Trek genre what is he still doing here in the first place?

[Balok]

I guess what I have to say to these guys can be summed up thusly: If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. You're being paid a lot of money because you're supposed to be able to do it -- if you can't, step aside and let someone else try.