Star Trek Renegades

[Looney]

So I decided to give this movie a thread. I know there was a discussion happening in a different thread, but now that you can see the entire movie I thought it should have its own thread in the Off-Topic Discussion area.

Full Movie on Renegades YouTube Channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE2Wgop9VLM

I watched the entire film last night. I have to say that it was a completely mixed bag for me. I never try to give up much about a plot because I think people should watch and judge for themselves, but what I will say is this film is full of many high highs and many very, very low lows.

I guess I'll start with some lows, the plot. Overall this is not the worst concept, but it is far from the best. In my opinion the road they chose to go down is far too much of a cliche.

[Looney]

Well this is crazy, but it absolutely refuses to post the rest of what I want to say about this movie. I've tried editing, going back, doing this second post, and trying to break up everything into two paragraph segments over multiple posts, but it refuses to cooperate. I guess I'll just give you the long story in short.

Loved Koenig!
Knowing the nature of this project I was completely blown away by the visual effects. Watch it just for the visuals. (Makeup was actually pretty bad at times though.)

Really didn't enjoy the premise all that much and in the end I was disappointed with the outcome. Lots of really good and really, really bad ideas at play here.

[Jan]

Hope the glitch isn't getting worse. The times I've had it refuse, it was always punctuation/symbol triggered.

May give the movie a try over the weekend.

Jan

[Ubik]

Don't know if it helps, but you can do this to get around the forum being wacky:

-check where your post cut off.
-Press back on your browser to get to your original post.
-Copy the text to the clipboard.
-Now go back and edit your original truncated post
-re-paste your original post, now go look for the past where it cut off, this is usually an apostrophe or other punctuation mark. Delete that punctuation, and re-type or amend it.

Re-post. Now it should work!

[Looney]

(Yeah I have tried that, but Jan gave me the answer. I think putting the accent on "cliche" is what did it. This is where it cut off.)

It has been done far too often, though not much in the Trek Universe that I know of. I should point out that my knowledge of the Trek Universe is limited to the entire original series, the movies, and scattered episodes from other series. If you are going to do something you want to seem original you shouldn't choose a premise that is popular among other SciFi franchises. This is just my opinion. Other viewers might love this setup.

The next low for me has to be the Trek Tech. Often tech in Trek causes me to totally and completely lose interest. This movie goes down that road once again. Too many attempts to do things that are just being done because it is SciFi. Too many poorly conceived devices used as cheap plot escapes.

Now I'll move into the real mixed bag - the cast. I don't want to say that anyone in the cast was a poor choice, but I will say that some of the character choices were very poor, namely the heroine. She is a terrible cliche, as is basically the whole concept of her crew and everything around her. This character, not the actress, and the plot surrounding her ruined much of the movie for me. A good portion of my problem with this movie is that it becomes very obvious that they are trying to borrow formulas from other successful franchises, which makes sense because I think they intend this to be a pilot for a series. I see no chance of that happening.

Enough of the negative mixed, onto the positive mixed - the cast. While a few of the characters were big negatives for me, others were huge positives, likely due to the casting. Koenig stole the show. Corin Nemec was an excellent choice. Picardo wasn't in it enough. This was some of the best work I've seen from Sean Young in a while, which really isn't saying much if you've seen her in anything in the past five years. And a down side is that everyone else didn't really have much to work with or much to do that would make them shine.

The GOOD STUFF, Koenig was good as was most of the story surrounding his character. I also really enjoyed them tying other Trek characters I know into what was happening. I'm not really sure if it all fits into the old Trek Universe timeline, but I think it does because they seemed to be trying for that.

The real star of this movie is the visual effects. BLOWN AWAY doesn't even begin to describe it. I can't even measure how impressed I was with this. It was incredible, for what it is. I am not saying they are the best effects ever, but knowing the independent nature of this project my jaw was on the floor. Seeing what they did with this gives me incredible hope for what we might see in JMS Babylon 5 project or a Babylon 5 project of this nature. I am not kidding. Watch this entire movie just to see what they were able to accomplish. You will not be disappointed, until the characters start to talk again.

I almost forgot the best part - NO TIME TRAVEL!

So in the end I am disappointed with the overall outcome of Star Trek Renegades. There are parts, like the visual effects and Koenig, that made me want to love it, but there were far too many other parts I didn’t like and flat out annoyed me. You can buy this on DVD or Blu-Ray from Renegade for a donation of $50 or $60 respectively. I am so glad it was free on their YouTube channel because I almost spent $60 on this project. I would pay $10 or $20 just for the visual effects and the spirit of the thing, but $60 would have made me kick myself – as has happened in the past with other projects of this nature.

P.S. Does anyone know what happened to that other Trek project Prelude To Axanar?

[Ubik]

P.S. Does anyone know what happened to that other Trek project Prelude To Axanar?

Still in the works i think!

Cheers for the review of Renegades. I probably won't watch it. Too much other stuff I still need to catch up on before I watch fan projects, but the visual side of it looked very well done!

[Looney]

You should definitely give the first 15mins a watch just to get a glimpse of the visuals. Very well worth it.

And I meant to say Ubik and Jan were both right about the punctuation on "cliche"

[cornholio1980]

Haven't watched it yet myself, but ->

P.S. Does anyone know what happened to that other Trek project Prelude To Axanar?

AFAIK, Prelude was finished. They're now working on the full movie "Axanar". The Indiegogo-campaign for the first part was finished successfully a couple of weeks back. Here's the official homepage -> http://www.axanarproductions.com/
(If you were already blown away by the effects in Renegades, wait 'til you see that!)

And yeah, I stumbled upon that cliche-error too, when posting my Sense8-reviews.