movie Monday: more Star Trek!

Yesterday I planned a Star Trek movie marathon of the three TNG movies (Nemesis doesn’t count, I’m ignoring it forever). I only made it through Generations and First Contact before I started dozing off, which I guess means I’m now officially a grown up.

Here’s my question: seat belts. The reboot/Kelvin timeline is all about seat belts. TNG doesn’t even have chairs that stay bolted to the floor when they crash the ship into a planet.* (Who designed that?!)

So what gives? Is this a social/cultural shift, that now seat belts are considered more standard and so it makes sense that movies made today would include them? Is it a deliberate in-universe callout to the differences in how Starfleet views spaceflight in the Kelvin timeline? Is it just because they came up with a neat special effect and wanted to use it?

[*I had my movies all confused, and I thought Insurrection was the one where they crashed the ship into the planet, and then I figured I should probably just go watch them all.]

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.