[horatio]

Sybok curing people (I don't want my pain taken away, I need my pain!) and the ending with the pseudo-God (What does God need with a starship?) and the Klingons (Please captain, not in front of the Klingons.) are also good.
It is basically a clusterf**k with some gems in it.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Not in front of the Klingons was a great line!

[martok2112]

Yes, I will agree. "Not in front of the Klingons" was a genuine, good-natured-laugh-worthy line.

[Saquist]

I didn't like the camp scene. I found it rather reaching. Why would Spock bother Kirk while trying to climb amount and even point out how much concentration it takes to scale a shear cliff...then cause him to fall. It was forced.

And while the camp fire scene was slightly amusing, I didn't find it memorable enough to look at fondly because like it and the rest of the better dialogue it was surrounded by a bunch of....crap.

I've never wanted to pick an M&M out of piece of crap just because the M&M is savory. NO, it's all gets flushed...

[omegaman]

Originally Posted by Saquist

I didn't like the camp scene. I found it rather reaching. Why would Spock bother Kirk while trying to climb amount and even point out how much concentration it takes to scale a shear cliff...then cause him to fall. It was forced.

And while the camp fire scene was slightly amusing, I didn't find it memorable enough to look at fondly because like it and the rest of the better dialogue it was surrounded by a bunch of....crap.

I've never wanted to pick an M&M out of piece of crap just because the M&M is savory. NO, it's all gets flushed...

Yeah, its kind of hard to figure why Spock would want to join Kirk and McCoy anyway. And Sulu and Chekov getting lost, that was more silliness.

[Saquist]

Exactly...
This is all from the mind of William Shatner who got some perverse pleasure from humiliating the people he had worked with for so long. It was every where in the film. Sulu, and Checkov, Uhura...dances...Scotty slamming his head and all in rather lame or just plain corny dialogue to point out the irony.

[kevin]

I actually agree in part with Saquist - I think one of the basic problems is indeed that Shatner writes everyone else down in such a way everyone else on the ship looks like a buffoon next to Kirk that there's a big distraction at play trying to get into the film. Tonally I think Shatner tried to make a TOS film in the more direct way as if he wanted to write something that could have been written during the series run. But for him, it didn't work out.

I'm all for some humour and sense of fun in the adventures (notwithstanding everyone's sense of humour is different) but there's a difference between that and what Shatner does. He doesn't go for the fun, he goes for the silly (the 'navigator' who gets lost, the 'engineer' who doesn't see the bulkhead - although Uhura singing and dancing I actually buy because at least in TOS we saw her sing and usually people into singing are also into dance to some degree) while making Kirk super duper.

But I like the campfire scene in isolation.

[samwiseb]

But who would change out of uniform after landing in hostile desert terrain in order to pull a dance number as part of a diversionary tactic? For me it was one of the most insane parts of the movie.

Unfortunately I'm not big on the campfire scene either. Even before they try to sing (shudder) the dialogue just feels too much on-the-nose for me. For that matter, the dialogue in general is I think the single the weakest element of STV.

[martok2112]

Originally Posted by Saquist

I've never wanted to pick an M&M out of piece of crap just because the M&M is savory. NO, it's all gets flushed...

So THAT's why Van Halen says: "No brown M&M's" in their contract riders.

[martok2112]

Originally Posted by Saquist

Scotty slamming his head and all in rather lame or just plain corny dialogue to point out the irony.

James Doohan sorely berated Shatner for that scene too. He felt it was completely out of character for Scotty...even if the engineering section was of a different design. He said this at a convention just shortly before Star Trek VI came out. He was really pissed at Der Shat.