[kevin]

I have to be a bit less precise and say that I like an open ending and a closed ending as long as they suit whatever has preceded it. And at times I feel a film gives you an open ending to try and be smart and fails. The horror genre does this more I feel.

TWOK seems to indeed have an ending whereby if another film had never been made then you feel still a sense of resolution, whilst knowing their lives will go on. I suppose you can say the same for TSFS and TVH. And those endings are all fine. But I think that as Sam noted it's the difference between thematic sense and logical sense at times.

Star Trek is a lot of the time less about logical sense and more the former, because it's dealing with a 'family' and families don't always make sense!

Regarding Nemesis, as far as I always knew it was supposed to have been the last. But I still think they were intentionally leaving crumbs for another film (just in case). In that respect I would differ from Sam and have to imagine that 'if' Nemesis had made $100 million and then another TNG film had been made probably things like B4 would have been morphed into 'he's now settled with Data's memories and since he had no personality of his own before, he's essentially Data again'.

But we'll never really know.

[samwiseb]

Maybe the possibility of things having gone that direction is just too disappointing for me to contemplate. With enough blame to go around for what happened to ST, I'd just rather hope the people involved would have known better next time. It's hard to picture Nem making $100 mil though; if I recall most of the speculative talk was doom and gloom throughout the film's development. Although we probably expected it to still perform 'somewhat' better than it ultimately did.

It seems to me Countdown did exactly what you described with B4/Data, right to the T. I call foul. From the movie itself, I read it as B4 being Data's autistic older brother who was never designed to be more than an unsophisticated prototype, getting a chance to be reprogrammed instead into Data's son. Somewhat akin to the 'remember' bit from TWOK, implying that not 'all' of Data had been passed away. Though admittedly too much of the film was derivative of TWOK anyway. Even the way I read it, actually following through with B4/Data in another 'strait' TNG film regardless of how Nem did I think would have been a serious mistake.

[horatio]

Originally Posted by martok2112

I will agree. Nemesis was TOO open-ended for a "sendoff" movie. It was like: "If the movie fails, it's a sendoff...if it succeeds, it's an open check for the next movie."

Indeed. My impression is that during the last one or two decades a lot of Hollywood movies work like this. It is perfectly fine and understandable that you wanna maintain your options, you want your movie to have an end as well as a potentially new beginning.
But recently is often not done fluently and seamlessly, instead of being a natural part of the story which you hardly notice the "we wanna keep our options open" rationale kinda sticks out too much. Let's take e.g. "Star Wars", while the opening crawl reveals that this is just one chapter of a story it has a clear ending; there are no forced "we gotta hedge our bets concerning a potential follow-up movie" vibes in it.
That's not at least why I always say that paradoxically you can only make a truly great movie and thus a lot of $$$ if you are not mainly motivated by money. Or as Yoda would say, let go of everything you fear to lose.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Countdown was kind of fanwanky if you ask me.

[samwiseb]

In that "Hey, let's connect as many dots as we can conceive of connecting" sort of way? Yes, I can see that.

[omegaman]

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Who's viewing?

…intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regard this thread with envious eyes…

[kevin]

Originally Posted by Captain Tom Coughlin

Countdown was kind of fanwanky if you ask me.

Originally Posted by samwiseb

In that "Hey, let's connect as many dots as we can conceive of connecting" sort of way? Yes, I can see that.

I suppose I really should second that overall. It kinda is, but then I haven't even read it in a long time.

[samwiseb]

Originally Posted by kevin

I suppose I really should second that overall. It kinda is, but then I haven't even read it in a long time.

I only read it once, but I seem to remember the whole TNG family being worked into the story in various parts. And then the Remans showed up. (Maybe that last isn't so contrived, given this is a Romulan story, however we had previously gotten through 35 years of story -including DS9- without ever learning they existed.)

Thing is, if Countdown is 'fanwankish' that would seem to imply fans actually wanted B4 to turn into Data. In spite of all the flack the movie still gets (from fans) for merely suggesting something that might be (and unfortunately was) interpreted as such.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

Originally Posted by samwiseb

I only read it once, but I seem to remember the whole TNG family being worked into the story in various parts. And then the Remans showed up. (Maybe that last isn't so contrived, given this is a Romulan story, however we had previously gotten through 35 years of story -including DS9- without ever learning they existed.)

Thing is, if Countdown is 'fanwankish' that would seem to imply fans actually wanted B4 to turn into Data. In spite of all the flack the movie still gets (from fans) for merely suggesting something that might be (and unfortunately was) interpreted as such.

Yeah, it's like in a galaxy of untold trillions, you keep running into the same seven people. That's the kind of thing that happens when fans write stories. Federation ship, it's the Enterprise! Look out, here comes a Klingon, it's Worf! Hey that Federation Ambassodor? It's Picard! It's just silly.

[horatio]

I disagree. Orci and Kurtzman went easier on the fanwank in ST09 than in Countdown and NEM, another movie written by a fan, is not fanwankish at all. I don't see how one could generalize about scriptwriters who are fans based on that.

Countdown shows, among many other things, that ST09 is a semi-reboot, far more timid than TWOK or TNG.
As much as I like to see the classical characters again, the future of Trek lies in another "next generation". Otherwise all this inbreeding will make Trek slowly decay.