Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" on Paramount Plus....

[hunter]

10. I've never seen Discovery and it was fine.

There was a reference to Discovery but it wasn't essential.

The reboots and alternate timelines of recent Star Trek movies and series simply didn't appeal to me. I haven't looked at Discovery or Picard.

I enjoyed the first episode of Strange New Worlds, but I thought the sets were too busy and distracted from the story. The sets of the original series were too simplistic for budgetary and technical reasons -- in the 'sixties you couldn't cover everything with LEDs and it all had to be made out of plywood and Bondo. But those simple sets shifted the focus to the actual story telling. It was almost like stage acting.

I think the softer look and flat lighting of the Next Generation would have been less distracting. It would also make sense for the bridge of a starship that frequently got into rough situations like natural space disasters or battles, would have minimal distractions and no hard edges to bang one's head on. The hard edges of the original series were an artifact of the small budget, not a hard and fast stylistic theme of the Federation.

I think this visual complexity is a problem with a lot of today's movies. Just because you can do so many flashy things with LEDs, modern fabrication techniques, and CGI doesn't mean you should. It's the story that's important.