re: Star Trek: Into Darkness ranked worst Trek movie of all time...

quote:

---

I also find the acting to be stale and cheesy in TOS, so we're probably not gonna have much to talk about.

---

There was incredibly good acting in TOS - especially when you consider the time, contraints and the fact that good actors, by and large, weren't doing television.

Jimmy Doohan basically made up the character of Scotty - that was nearly 100% him, merely assisted by the writers. Almost true of Nimoy and Spock - (which is why his books "I am not Spock" and "I am Spock" are so revealing and illuminating), De Kelley was incredible as Dr. McCoy.

They were all so good in their roles they were typecast, certainly when the movies came out - only Shatner ever got any other work, at least significantly.

And the guest stars - sure there was a little cheese, but compare it to other stuff on the tube - the great actors of today embrace cable dramas. That was not true in the 60s and TOS nabbed a bunch of them - including many, many wonderful guest performances.

Shatner was cheesy - occasionally a guest star would get a little cheesy, but, for the most part, that was the quality of acting you'd see in a good live play at the time. But that was his schtick and he made it work. Just watch Plato's Stepchildren - where, particularly Shatner is under control of the head dude. Nimoy (IMHO a much better actor) was relatively unconvincing and at the edge of the frame. Shatner, overacting and all, was completely believable as a man who could not control his own actions and was fighting it.

He also had this intensity he could bring up that was particularly good - in Court Martial, where he becomes 100% badass and says:

quote:

---

Given the same circumstances I would do the same thing without hesitation, because the steps I took in the order I took them were absolutely necessary if I were to save my ship. And nothing is more important than my ship.

---

So I reject all the shots at the acting. The acting and stories MADE TOS, despite their limitations in the delivery of special effects. And often, it wasn't so much the effects were terrible (at least for the time - remember 2001 hadn't even been made yet, much less Silent Running or Star Wars) - the costumes could be bad at times (Galileo Seven - even The Cage/Menagerie) as were many of the exteriors and matted "exterior" shots, but they were also innovative with the transporter sequences, the space combat scenes (again, at the time) and the ship interior sets had a living, breathing organic quality to them that was not really seen much before.

I don't want to slam the acting, too badly, in ST09 because I have given credit. Apparently you and I differ on Quinto, as I give him credit for trying, as well as Urban's effort to play McCoy. But the rest of them, chief among them Pine, just really failed to connect with me. I don't like a single character in ST09, with the possible exception of McCoy.