Fanatic or not, the phrase is over a hundred years old and meanings change. When I think "fan", I never think of frothing-at-the-mouth idiots who explode at a franchise for stepping a millimeter outside a rigid notion of what the franchise is "supposed" to be. If somebody tells me they're a fan of Taylor Swift, I expect somebody who likes a lot of her music and not necessarily all of it, not somebody who is wildly, emotionally invested in this album being a gift to humanity and that album being the work of Lucifer and vocalizes the latter extensively.
Something like Discovery is overdramatic junk to me, but I just... don't watch it. Thinking about it doesn't provoke a negative emotional response because I am a fan of Star Trek, not somebody obsessed with a narrow view of Star Trek.
I genuinely tried to give discovery a shot and I just cant. Its not for me. So far most of new trek has been though so I'm sitting pretty
King Riptor on
I have a podcast now. It's about video games and anime!Find it here.
Fanatic or not, the phrase is over a hundred years old and meanings change. When I think "fan", I never think of frothing-at-the-mouth idiots who explode at a franchise for stepping a millimeter outside a rigid notion of what the franchise is "supposed" to be. If somebody tells me they're a fan of Taylor Swift, I expect somebody who likes a lot of her music and not necessarily all of it, not somebody who is wildly, emotionally invested in this album being a gift to humanity and that album being the work of Lucifer and vocalizes the latter extensively.
Something like Discovery is overdramatic junk to me, but I just... don't watch it. Thinking about it doesn't provoke a negative emotional response because I am a fan of Star Trek, not somebody obsessed with a narrow view of Star Trek.
Wild, someone in the Trek thread arguing about the definition of fan so they don't get tarred by association with those who argue about Star Trek shows.
Would you say you're a "Trekkie" or a "Trekker"?
Yes.
Anyway, hey Cambiata , how do you figure being a SNW fan translates to TOS? I'm trying to figure this because I watched a lot of TOS when the boy was born a few years ago, in 3AM binges, and largely found it...fine. But it would be a lot less fine if I wasn't already a Trek fan (ha.). But I really enjoy SNW, as does my spouse, who can't tolerate TOS.
Is it a form/structure thing you're thinking, or....?
Ninja Snarl P gave the best answer, but I'll add also that SNW does little "morality plays" like TOS did. And I mean that in the sense of a type of genre that was popular on TV in the 60s, the teleplay. If you think of the anthology series of the period, like Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, those were often set up to be little morality teleplays, too. It's a very retro sensibility and SNW does keep with that vibe. Not 100%, but close enough for a modern audience.
I also don't know how much people care about Spock as a character if they weren't fans of anything in TOS (which includes Wrath of Khan), and SNW obviously centers Spock a lot (as they should!)
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
Fanatic or not, the phrase is over a hundred years old and meanings change. When I think "fan", I never think of frothing-at-the-mouth idiots who explode at a franchise for stepping a millimeter outside a rigid notion of what the franchise is "supposed" to be. If somebody tells me they're a fan of Taylor Swift, I expect somebody who likes a lot of her music and not necessarily all of it, not somebody who is wildly, emotionally invested in this album being a gift to humanity and that album being the work of Lucifer and vocalizes the latter extensively.
Something like Discovery is overdramatic junk to me, but I just... don't watch it. Thinking about it doesn't provoke a negative emotional response because I am a fan of Star Trek, not somebody obsessed with a narrow view of Star Trek.
Wild, someone in the Trek thread arguing about the definition of fan so they don't get tarred by association with those who argue about Star Trek shows.
Would you say you're a "Trekkie" or a "Trekker"?
Yes.
Anyway, hey @Cambiata , how do you figure being a SNW fan translates to TOS? I'm trying to figure this because I watched a lot of TOS when the boy was born a few years ago, in 3AM binges, and largely found it...fine. But it would be a lot less fine if I wasn't already a Trek fan (ha.). But I really enjoy SNW, as does my spouse, who can't tolerate TOS.
Is it a form/structure thing you're thinking, or....?
This is really interesting to me considering the bulk of SNW episodes could be directly ported to TOS with only very minor dialog changes.
Like you could plop Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach into the middle of TOS season 2 and nobody would bat an eye.
Obviously the show *looks* a lot better though, which is something to consider.
one of the little things i like about SNW is that its lighting is bright. I can see what's going on in the whole scene.
See, that's because it's a prequel. As time passes, it's only natural that light would get dimmer as it ages. Honestly we're lucky that we can see anything in Discovery at all.
So I hope you guys value the suffering I undergo to make these reviews, because now we have come to Star Trek 09 aka how to succeed in Starfleet without really trying. I will not go into detail about my near psychotic hatred of JJ Abrams use of lense flare, but I can't promise anymore.
Plot is this: Far in the future, but actually far in the past of Star Trek. The USS Kelvin spots a weird space anomaly, which is weird because judging from previous star treks space should be 80% Space anomalies by volume. I mean if there are more anomalies than regular space wouldn't regular space be the anomaly? Out of said anomaly pops a weird pointy space ship that is definitely 99% pointy bits. Like somebody asked JJ how pointy and he answered Yes. It immediately starts firing on the Kelvin with super-advanced weapons that are super-advanced for even Kelvin's timeline(eh, eh see what I did there?). The Kelvin is crippled before the alien ship asks the Kelvin's captain to come aboard to discuss terms. The Kelvin's captain agrees order to give time evacuate the Kelvin and promotes his first officer Kirk to the captains chairs. Now this is one of the first big Hollywood movies that Chris did, but he does a good job as Kirk here. He isn't of course Chris Pine or even James T. Kirk, but Chris Hemsworth and George Kirk, Jim's Father. Jim is busy being born as the ship is being evacuated and is born right before his father has to ram the Kelvin into the pointy ship in order to cover the crews escape.
Fast forward at least 25 years(with interludes to Jim and Spock as kids) and Kirk is that weird townie that hits on College girls at the local college hangouts. Which makes it weird that the college girl is a Starfleet cadet named Uhura. Weirder still is that said local college hangout is still in Iowa, since Starfleet has started digging huge canyons to use as drydocks to build ships in. We see the Enterprise(Kelvin) or Ent(k) being half built. Why you would want to turn Iowa into a place of heavy industry and ruin its valuable farm land is beyond me, but JJ's got to JJ. Kirk gets into a fight with a bunch of Starfleet cadets when Captain Pike shows up to save his ass from a beating. He tells Kirk that he could have a bright future in Starfleet if he just applied himself. A quick interlude where Kirk sees the Ent(K) being built(told you JJ's going to JJ) he enlists. So much for all the entrance exams Wesley and Nog had to go through(he probably had to go through them later, but still...). On the Shuttle he meets a doctor doing the same: Leonard Mccoy played by the always game Karl Urban. They become best friends because they sit together on the shuttle ride to Starfleet academy.
Cue 3 years later. Kirk is a cadet getting it on with a Orion babe who happens to be Uhura's room mate. Cue Zoe Saldana undressing into bra and panties before she notices that her Orion roommate has guest over. She kicks him out and tells him he will fail the Kobayashi Maru test tomorrow. She also mentions that a single Romulan vessel has destroyed 47 Klingon vessels in the Neutral zone(foreshadowing). The Next Day Kirk beats the Kobayashi Maru in the most boring way possible: He hacks the computer so that the Klingon ships don't have any shields. For this he is put up for academic review by the designer of the scenario: Spock played by the Zachary Quinto. Spock and Kirk really don't like each other and Spock tries to have Kirk kicked out for cheating(a big deal in a service academy). Before they can do that however there is a distress call from Vulcan requiring all hands on deck. All the cadets are assigned ships in the rescue fleet, except Kirk who has to have McCoy pretend he is sick to get him onboard the Ent(k). Uhura was supposed to go to the Farragut, but finagles her boyfriend Spock for a berth on the Ent(k).
As they travel, Kirk realizes that this is the same ship that attacked the Kelvin. He convinces Pike to let him help out against this mysterious ship. Pike is forced to go onboard the Pointy ship and leaves Spock and Kirk in command with Spock as the captain and Kirk as First officer.... The rest you can watch yourself.
So... where to begin... Lets start with the fact that JJ Abrams would probably had a better career as an Ad Exec. He can pitch things well, but he can't tell a story worth a damn. He has no sense of scale, time or distance. He has no sense of character or of character arcs. His camera work is shoddy. Most of his success comes from hyping up his projects and then copying other directors to deliver the finished result. It works too. I mean the hype campaign for Cloverfield was top notch, but the movie was essentially Blair Witch with a Kaiju(in NYC). End result wasn't that bad, but nothing truly standout or great. The big shot was the statue of liberty shoot and that was in the trailers. Abrams has always struck me as a director that could copy films, but never really understood why those films where as they where. This means he can make great scenes, but also that he can copy shit and think its acceptable.
This movie shows traces of that. The pitch Kirk and Spock in Starfleet academy days is a good pitch, but the movie is Khan with the genesis device blowing up planets. The camera work will be familiar to anyone that saw BSG(only worse). The set design is ripped directly from an Apple Store(literally)+ a brewery. If the movie has a saving grace is that its cast is very good. Its no surprise that most of them have had pretty good career since(with one sad exception RIP). They carry this movie on their back when everything else says it should fail. Its like the universe is trying to right what is wrong.
For instance, Kirk's character arc as it where, from juvenile delinquent to star fleet captain don't even make sense in story. He is a third year cadet according to the text on the screen. He is outranked by Everybody on the ship right down to Chekov, who may only be 17 here(rip Anton Yelchin), but is already an Ensign aka a commissioned officer. Kirk is at least a year behind Uhura. Yet because we the audience knows that Kirk is the Captain of the Enterprise for pop culture, Kirk ends up in charge. This despite as I said being that weirdo townie and an all around asshole. In fact Kirk never shows a smidge of the leadership potential or gravitas. Everybody acts like he does, because the movie tells them too. Chris Pine is a fine actor and I suspect would make a fine Kirk, but this is not the movie where he shows that.
Everybody else is better, but that is because they are already the crew of the Ent(k and TOS), they just don't know it yet. They are mostly in their recognizable form from the start. Exception is Uhura and I suspect I will talk about her in the next movie, so I will leave it there. Quinto's Spock is very good and honestly a version where he stayed captain of the Ent(k) would have been fun. Unlike Kirk he had earned it. His scene at the end where he talks to his counterpart is the best scene in the movie, but then his counterpart is the best thing in this movie by a country mile. The less said about the Humor the better.
As for SFX and camera work... I won't go into lense flares, I promised, but shaky cam is just as bad. Especially if its done to hide the fact that nothing really exciting is happening or worse to pad time. Moving the camera as a replacement to moving the plot forward. (A shot of Kirk falling down a cliffside keeps going on forever, then he gets up and runs without ill effects). Its also weird that Kirk keeps ending up in cliffhangers aka he hangs from the side of a cliff no less then four times in this movie. Like Four nickles weird. The Shaky cam may have been the cool things in Action movies at the time, but Abrams seems to be unaware that was mostly used to hide the fact that the Liam Neesons and the like couldn't really do action. There was no need for it in the space action sequences. There was barely any need for it in regular action sequences. Chris Pine was young and fit when this movie came out. The Shaky Cam makes him look less able than Shatner in ST6.
Best guest character is Bruce Greenwood as Captain Pike. You see Anson Mounts Captain Pike in him. He has few but good scenes. The counterpart is a balm when he is on screen, but he is not a guest character in these movies.
Kipling217 on
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
That's JJ for you. All style and no substance. The perfect vehicle to deliver whatever executive brainrot is the order of the day. I know that people get really mad about him, and I'm unqualified to comment on the artistry of the thing, but don't see the point to hate a guy that directs movies like a slightly more coherent version of ChatGPT.
Shaky cam was a style to make things seem more "real" throughout the 00's and the first few times, it was kinda neat, (ironically, BSG was one of the cases where it sorta worked, because it hadn't been done a million times by then). ST09 is... ok. Since it first aired, I always call it the Saturday Morning Cartoons version of Trek, where it's all about the characters, which they nailed. ST09 is dumb, but I'll rewatch it. I can't say that much for STID. Also, and I think this bears noting, ST09 probably did more to revive the Star Trek universe than anything else, and it deserves credit for that.
Shaky cam was a style to make things seem more "real" throughout the 00's and the first few times, it was kinda neat, (ironically, BSG was one of the cases where it sorta worked, because it hadn't been done a million times by then). ST09 is... ok. Since it first aired, I always call it the Saturday Morning Cartoons version of Trek, where it's all about the characters, which they nailed. ST09 is dumb, but I'll rewatch it. I can't say that much for STID. Also, and I think this bears noting, ST09 probably did more to revive the Star Trek universe than anything else, and it deserves credit for that.
He did worse to Star Wars because they let him get the last word after bringing in a repair team*. Star Trek closed the trilogy with the repair job and at least went out on a note of improvement.
*-I have long maintained that the thing most truly wrong with The Last Jedi is The Rise of Skywalker betraying everything that it did. Empire Strikes Back had the same problem - it had a weak initial reception, it's lifted to the heights it's now held at by the fullness of the trilogy. If Return of the Jedi had trashed everything it did then neither film would be worth a shit.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Well, they’re making Episode X now with a new director, so at least he’s not getting the last laugh
Well, they’re making Episode X now with a new director, so at least he’s not getting the last laugh
Wait until he gets called in to 'fix' Episode X with Episode XI. Somehow, Palpatine returned again.
Again again.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Abrams can't do quiet. TMP and Whales both had The Earth is at STEAK, but the threat was established early on and then went into the background while the crew went through space clouds or did time shenanigans. TNG movies had First Contact and Nemesis as existential threats to Earth, but they still managed (or tried to manage) to have the threat tie into some Trek style character stuff. Picard's PTSD and his ruminations about things turning out differently for him (if he'd been cloned and then enslaved for decades, but still, they tried).
Trek 09 starts off with killing Kirk Sr, and the back half is destroying Vulcan and threatening to destroy Earth, and not in a slow paced sort of thing to be thwarted somehow, just straight up shooting and punching.
Also, '09 gives Kirk and Romulan guy the same motive, revenge, and then does basically nothing interesting with that. Plus Romulan guy manages to go back in time with a super-duper-fancypants ship and all he can think to do with it is super murdery revenge. He doesn't even try to become God-Emperor of the Romulans or anything.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Not excusing JJ because it's a known habit of his to make up something cool without thinking about how it works, but he's far from the first person to not know how space or distance works.
Parsecs in Star Wars, Black Holes in Trek (even before '09. I think Voyager got stuck in one and didn't even notice for ages), etc.
They come up with something and then look for a cool word to describe it. "Let's say they hit a Quantum... Filament? Nice, let's go." "But what does it do?" "It fucks up the ship, that's what it does." "How?" "Did you even hear the word Quantum?"
There's also great examples of medical non-advice, like Dr Crusher telling Geordie to take a deep breath before they get exposed to vacuum, you know, so the pressure difference will help their lungs to explode.
Nobody remembers the singer. The song remains.
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
They made a graphic novel to explain what happened in that time span... Problem is it's out of print and while it's not exactly rare, it would be like making Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King and telling people to go and read The Two Towers if they want to understand why everyone's all over the fucking place at the start of the second movie.
Star Trek's various TV series used to have a science consultant so they didn't talk absolute bollocks. However I expect this was cut later into the run. But being able to see planets in other star systems explode is mind bogglingly stupid because you can walk outside at night and see you can't see planets in other systems! You are a human being yes JJ? You have experienced night time right?
The supernova eating the entire Romulan Empire is ridiculous. However on my rewatch of the very cool Season 1 TNG, I note the T'kon Empire was destroyed by a supernova. So they made the mistake all the way back in the 80s...and OH MY GOD HE JUST WATCHED THE FIRST FEW EPISODES OF TNG DIDN'T HE!? Anyway, the T'kon was implausibly destroyed by a supernova and these guys could move stars! It's such a ridiculous idea that star makers/movers couldn't move the supernova or do something about it or at least predict it several thousand years in advance.
So I guess JJ isn't the first to make dumb cosmic science.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Not excusing JJ because it's a known habit of his to make up something cool without thinking about how it works, but he's far from the first person to not know how space or distance works.
Parsecs in Star Wars, Black Holes in Trek (even before '09. I think Voyager got stuck in one and didn't even notice for ages), etc.
They come up with something and then look for a cool word to describe it. "Let's say they hit a Quantum... Filament? Nice, let's go." "But what does it do?" "It fucks up the ship, that's what it does." "How?" "Did you even hear the word Quantum?"
There's also great examples of medical non-advice, like Dr Crusher telling Geordie to take a deep breath before they get exposed to vacuum, you know, so the pressure difference will help their lungs to explode.
The problem with Abrams stuff is that his stuff actually has an impact on the feel of the setting. Travel time in both settings used to be a thing. Trek had established (vaguely, sorta) travel times and you couldn't just use a transporter to get from Earth to the Klingon homeworld instantly, and travel via ship took longer than the freaking five minutes it did in Into Darkness. Same with Star Wars, there weren't established travel times, but OT and PT were slower paced and often cut to other scenes when one group of characters was flying around or going to hyperspace. It gave the sense that space was big and travelling through it was... actually a thing you had to do or something. Abrams (and Johnson) just have the characters bloop from one place to another with almost no time passing.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
There's a difference between the minor slip up of, to scale it down to Earth, having a city be a bit closer to another than it is in real life and having your characters walk from England to Zimbabwe in 5 minutes, or see a nuclear weapon go off in Cairo from San Francisco. In general the errors in sci-fi tend to fall into the former, they might not get exactly how big space is, but they at least get that it's really big. For JJ in Star Trek and Wars, everywhere in the universe is at most a few minutes away, and in line of sight. Speaking of Into Darkness, I remember noticing when rewatching it a few years back, the Enterprise drops out of warp near the Moon, about one light second from Earth, without engine power, a key plot point of the scene. less than 2 minutes later they hit the Earth's atmosphere and only restore power to engines to begin slowing down after they sink below the cloud layer. So the mile long JJ-prise dumped enough delta-v into the Earth's atmosphere right over San Francisco to come to a complete stop from travelling at about 1% of the speed of light in the distance between the clouds and the ground. Thank god space and time don't mean anything in that movie or there wouldn't have been a San Francisco left for the Vengeance to crash into.
I think the hyperspace skipping in Rise of Skywalker might have been the worst example of his failure to grasp the scale of the universe, just throttle up and down your spaceship without bothering to plot a course and blink instantly into the atmosphere of one world then the next. It kept up the action centric pace they were going for, but even though ships in Star Wars tend to be a bit faster than Star Trek, travel between star systems is still normally an hours to days affair, and you need accurate plotting to even get near to the planet you want to travel to, making it possible to instantly blink between a half dozen worlds in half as many minutes really makes you wonder how you could possibly write a story where the threat is help being too far away ever again. Then again they also had Lando rally the whole galaxy and get them to jump to the world you need a unique Sith artefact to even reach within about 20 minutes real time from when he started gathering people together. This might be a daring take, so brace yourselves, but I don't think Rise of Skywalker was a very well written movie you guys.
This might be a daring take, so brace yourselves, but I don't think Rise of Skywalker was a very well written movie you guys.
Pistols at dawn, sir!
Using the rules of engagement set down by Mr Abrams, we shall each stand 10 light years from the equator, turn and fire. We should have it resolved in a few minutes.
They made a graphic novel to explain what happened in that time span... Problem is it's out of print and while it's not exactly rare, it would be like making Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King and telling people to go and read The Two Towers if they want to understand why everyone's all over the fucking place at the start of the second movie.
The Irony is that jumping straight from Fellowship and Return of the King is possible with a bit of editing. I mean Somehow Gandalf Returned would be a thing and you would have to explain why Gollum is suddenly traveling with Frodo, but it can be done.
I mean Rohan is a sidequest in the large scheme of things. Its important in that it fills the world and give everybody that isn't Frodo and Sam a chance to shine and have action filled adventures, but the main quest is Frodo.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
Not excusing JJ because it's a known habit of his to make up something cool without thinking about how it works, but he's far from the first person to not know how space or distance works.
Parsecs in Star Wars, Black Holes in Trek (even before '09. I think Voyager got stuck in one and didn't even notice for ages), etc.
They come up with something and then look for a cool word to describe it. "Let's say they hit a Quantum... Filament? Nice, let's go." "But what does it do?" "It fucks up the ship, that's what it does." "How?" "Did you even hear the word Quantum?"
There's also great examples of medical non-advice, like Dr Crusher telling Geordie to take a deep breath before they get exposed to vacuum, you know, so the pressure difference will help their lungs to explode.
The problem with Abrams stuff is that his stuff actually has an impact on the feel of the setting. Travel time in both settings used to be a thing. Trek had established (vaguely, sorta) travel times and you couldn't just use a transporter to get from Earth to the Klingon homeworld instantly, and travel via ship took longer than the freaking five minutes it did in Into Darkness. Same with Star Wars, there weren't established travel times, but OT and PT were slower paced and often cut to other scenes when one group of characters was flying around or going to hyperspace. It gave the sense that space was big and travelling through it was... actually a thing you had to do or something. Abrams (and Johnson) just have the characters bloop from one place to another with almost no time passing.
I remember seeing a comic that had Starfleet turn from explorational service into a retirement home, because.. well you can beam across lightyears so there is no need for starships and the magic macguffin of Into Darkness made death obsolete. So all the starship pilots and engineers are retrained as nurses to care for the increasing number of elderly that won't die. Kirk screams at the idea of a lifetime spent emptying bedpans.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
Remake Wrath of Khan if you absolutely have to (even though your first film literally takes elements of Wrath - Nero is feckin' Khan you idiot!!) but how about not including magical galaxy transporters or super blood that makes death irrelevant.
It's like a child wrote the script. And no Mr Abrams that's not 'so cool'.
I don't like ST09 but compared to Into Darkness it's goddaamn Shakespeare. ID is sexist AND racist - amazingly well done JJ. Who the fuck white washes Khan!? (and yes I get the irony of a Mexican actor to play an Indian one but at least they were trying in the 60s!)
He was acting angry about everything the whole time, but I'd have liked it if they'd had Cumberbatch a bit more obviously furious that he'd been whitewashed. Have Admiral Robocop have done it against his will before waking him up, and you've got a whole new reason for Khan to be Wrathful.
I will never not be angry that Into Darkness didn't use Garth - which would have made so much more sense! After all his pathetic 'it's not Khan and we're not doing Wrath (again)" comments and then *sigh* it's Khan. And it doesn't bloody make sense!! Khan snarling "My name is KHAN!" only works on the audience (if nerds), in context Kirk has no idea who he is or have any beef with him.
I'll partly blame that on the fans, as people were openly speculating whether or not we'd get a Wrath of Khan remake right after 09 released.
This is why you shouldn't always listen to the fans when they tell you what they want.
Nobody remembers the singer. The song remains.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
I'll partly blame that on the fans, as people were openly speculating whether or not we'd get a Wrath of Khan remake right after 09 released.
This is why you shouldn't always listen to the fans when they tell you what they want.
I'm not going to really blame the fans. It's a prequel setting, Khan is out there, it's not the absolute worst idea in the world to have a story that includes him. Just a full on ripping off of the best moments of WoK without any of the stuff that made it work is the problem.
Imagine the beginning of ID up to the point where they have the emergency post-explosion meeting that Khan attacks, except when everyone gets there the Badmiral introduces Khan as a special security consultant or something. Rip off Homefront/Paradise Lost, have the Badmiral using Khan to put the Federation on a war footing, but Khan is playing the Badmiral in order to pull a Palpatine (or Lex Luthor) and be put in charge of the Federation. It's still not great, but it'd be a lot more interesting that what Abrams did.
Plus I'm pretty sure that the whole 'cold fusion' bomb at the beginning was just trolling. Trek technobabble is usually a lot better.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
I'll partly blame that on the fans, as people were openly speculating whether or not we'd get a Wrath of Khan remake right after 09 released.
This is why you shouldn't always listen to the fans when they tell you what they want.
If you were a newcomer to the franchise and want told who Khan is it made even less sense.
"I'm not Bill, I'm Bob!" *dramatic music *
Ok... and? Who are any of these people and why should anyone care?
Plus I'm pretty sure that the whole 'cold fusion' bomb at the beginning was just trolling. Trek technobabble is usually a lot better.
I like to think this is what you'd get if Tom Clancy wrote Star Trek.
Romulan extremists have stolen a cold fusion bomb from a poorly secured Cardassian black site and they're going to use it to blow up Starfleet HQ. Only Section 31 operative Jack Ryan can stop them...this summer in Star Trek: Fusion Ops.
Plus I'm pretty sure that the whole 'cold fusion' bomb at the beginning was just trolling. Trek technobabble is usually a lot better.
I like to think this is what you'd get if Tom Clancy wrote Star Trek.
Romulan extremists have stolen a cold fusion bomb from a poorly secured Cardassian black site and they're going to use it to blow up Starfleet HQ. Only Section 31 operative Jack Ryan can stop them...this summer in Star Trek: Fusion Ops.
I want to see the one where Sean Connery plays a Romulan defector.
I'm usually on team "nobody cares" for stuff like this. Say what you will about Abrams (and I do), he made an incredible revival of the Trek franchise in '09, with a blockbuster sci-fi action movie, with characters that had chemistry and came alive, after years of drag-ass snooze-fests that not even a die hard fan could love. It made a huge amount of money, and if bits of it didn't make sense, most people didn't care, because it hid the nonsense behind kabooms, banter, compelling characterisation and some tight pacing.
What baffles me is that ID, a film that I struggle to enjoy, and which I know plays fast and loose with the setting *and* feels less fun, somehow made even more money (against a bigger budget, but it came out ahead on percentages too). Apparently people liked it!
Not excusing JJ because it's a known habit of his to make up something cool without thinking about how it works, but he's far from the first person to not know how space or distance works.
Parsecs in Star Wars, Black Holes in Trek (even before '09. I think Voyager got stuck in one and didn't even notice for ages), etc.
They come up with something and then look for a cool word to describe it. "Let's say they hit a Quantum... Filament? Nice, let's go." "But what does it do?" "It fucks up the ship, that's what it does." "How?" "Did you even hear the word Quantum?"
There's also great examples of medical non-advice, like Dr Crusher telling Geordie to take a deep breath before they get exposed to vacuum, you know, so the pressure difference will help their lungs to explode.
The problem with Abrams stuff is that his stuff actually has an impact on the feel of the setting. Travel time in both settings used to be a thing. Trek had established (vaguely, sorta) travel times and you couldn't just use a transporter to get from Earth to the Klingon homeworld instantly, and travel via ship took longer than the freaking five minutes it did in Into Darkness. Same with Star Wars, there weren't established travel times, but OT and PT were slower paced and often cut to other scenes when one group of characters was flying around or going to hyperspace. It gave the sense that space was big and travelling through it was... actually a thing you had to do or something. Abrams (and Johnson) just have the characters bloop from one place to another with almost no time passing.
I remember seeing a comic that had Starfleet turn from explorational service into a retirement home, because.. well you can beam across lightyears so there is no need for starships and the magic macguffin of Into Darkness made death obsolete. So all the starship pilots and engineers are retrained as nurses to care for the increasing number of elderly that won't die. Kirk screams at the idea of a lifetime spent emptying bedpans.
That was "How it Should have Ended".
They also did a bit where Cumberbatch does his "My name is Khan" bit, to be met by Pine looking confused saying "ok, well... I'm Kirk, this is Spock." Which makes way more sense than what happened in the movie.
I still think the twist should have been that Kahn wasn't the bad guy this time. Would have been far more interesting.
But Abrams is a hack and his Star Trek films lean heavily on "remember this?" to the point of the scripts only making sense if you remember the TV shows/movies it's rebooting.
Not excusing JJ because it's a known habit of his to make up something cool without thinking about how it works, but he's far from the first person to not know how space or distance works.
Parsecs in Star Wars, Black Holes in Trek (even before '09. I think Voyager got stuck in one and didn't even notice for ages), etc.
They come up with something and then look for a cool word to describe it. "Let's say they hit a Quantum... Filament? Nice, let's go." "But what does it do?" "It fucks up the ship, that's what it does." "How?" "Did you even hear the word Quantum?"
There's also great examples of medical non-advice, like Dr Crusher telling Geordie to take a deep breath before they get exposed to vacuum, you know, so the pressure difference will help their lungs to explode.
The problem with Abrams stuff is that his stuff actually has an impact on the feel of the setting. Travel time in both settings used to be a thing. Trek had established (vaguely, sorta) travel times and you couldn't just use a transporter to get from Earth to the Klingon homeworld instantly, and travel via ship took longer than the freaking five minutes it did in Into Darkness. Same with Star Wars, there weren't established travel times, but OT and PT were slower paced and often cut to other scenes when one group of characters was flying around or going to hyperspace. It gave the sense that space was big and travelling through it was... actually a thing you had to do or something. Abrams (and Johnson) just have the characters bloop from one place to another with almost no time passing.
Yeah, JJ is one of those "don't think about it, feel it" kind of guys when it comes to the setting or script. The problem is he leans way too hard on that and frequently it doesn't just not make sense if you think about it, but it doesn't make sense if you don't think about it too. It doesn't feel right.
The best example of this for me is The Force Awakens and it's explosions in the sky. Everyone I went to see that film with left the theatre just confused about what had happened. It broke basic movie feel.
Should Kirk have not known the name? I thought Khan was already Trek's Future Hitler, even before Kirk found him. SNW makes a big deal about how La'an's had to deal with having that surname, even though he hasn't shown up again yet.
Yes alternate history and all, but Khan should already be infamous for the oh-god-why-did-we-have-to-say-these-happened-in-our-lifetime Eugenics Wars.
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I genuinely tried to give discovery a shot and I just cant. Its not for me. So far most of new trek has been though so I'm sitting pretty
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Ninja Snarl P gave the best answer, but I'll add also that SNW does little "morality plays" like TOS did. And I mean that in the sense of a type of genre that was popular on TV in the 60s, the teleplay. If you think of the anthology series of the period, like Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, those were often set up to be little morality teleplays, too. It's a very retro sensibility and SNW does keep with that vibe. Not 100%, but close enough for a modern audience.
I also don't know how much people care about Spock as a character if they weren't fans of anything in TOS (which includes Wrath of Khan), and SNW obviously centers Spock a lot (as they should!)
This is really interesting to me considering the bulk of SNW episodes could be directly ported to TOS with only very minor dialog changes.
Like you could plop Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach into the middle of TOS season 2 and nobody would bat an eye.
Obviously the show *looks* a lot better though, which is something to consider.
See, that's because it's a prequel. As time passes, it's only natural that light would get dimmer as it ages. Honestly we're lucky that we can see anything in Discovery at all.
Plot is this: Far in the future, but actually far in the past of Star Trek. The USS Kelvin spots a weird space anomaly, which is weird because judging from previous star treks space should be 80% Space anomalies by volume. I mean if there are more anomalies than regular space wouldn't regular space be the anomaly? Out of said anomaly pops a weird pointy space ship that is definitely 99% pointy bits. Like somebody asked JJ how pointy and he answered Yes. It immediately starts firing on the Kelvin with super-advanced weapons that are super-advanced for even Kelvin's timeline(eh, eh see what I did there?). The Kelvin is crippled before the alien ship asks the Kelvin's captain to come aboard to discuss terms. The Kelvin's captain agrees order to give time evacuate the Kelvin and promotes his first officer Kirk to the captains chairs. Now this is one of the first big Hollywood movies that Chris did, but he does a good job as Kirk here. He isn't of course Chris Pine or even James T. Kirk, but Chris Hemsworth and George Kirk, Jim's Father. Jim is busy being born as the ship is being evacuated and is born right before his father has to ram the Kelvin into the pointy ship in order to cover the crews escape.
Fast forward at least 25 years(with interludes to Jim and Spock as kids) and Kirk is that weird townie that hits on College girls at the local college hangouts. Which makes it weird that the college girl is a Starfleet cadet named Uhura. Weirder still is that said local college hangout is still in Iowa, since Starfleet has started digging huge canyons to use as drydocks to build ships in. We see the Enterprise(Kelvin) or Ent(k) being half built. Why you would want to turn Iowa into a place of heavy industry and ruin its valuable farm land is beyond me, but JJ's got to JJ. Kirk gets into a fight with a bunch of Starfleet cadets when Captain Pike shows up to save his ass from a beating. He tells Kirk that he could have a bright future in Starfleet if he just applied himself. A quick interlude where Kirk sees the Ent(K) being built(told you JJ's going to JJ) he enlists. So much for all the entrance exams Wesley and Nog had to go through(he probably had to go through them later, but still...). On the Shuttle he meets a doctor doing the same: Leonard Mccoy played by the always game Karl Urban. They become best friends because they sit together on the shuttle ride to Starfleet academy.
Cue 3 years later. Kirk is a cadet getting it on with a Orion babe who happens to be Uhura's room mate. Cue Zoe Saldana undressing into bra and panties before she notices that her Orion roommate has guest over. She kicks him out and tells him he will fail the Kobayashi Maru test tomorrow. She also mentions that a single Romulan vessel has destroyed 47 Klingon vessels in the Neutral zone(foreshadowing). The Next Day Kirk beats the Kobayashi Maru in the most boring way possible: He hacks the computer so that the Klingon ships don't have any shields. For this he is put up for academic review by the designer of the scenario: Spock played by the Zachary Quinto. Spock and Kirk really don't like each other and Spock tries to have Kirk kicked out for cheating(a big deal in a service academy). Before they can do that however there is a distress call from Vulcan requiring all hands on deck. All the cadets are assigned ships in the rescue fleet, except Kirk who has to have McCoy pretend he is sick to get him onboard the Ent(k). Uhura was supposed to go to the Farragut, but finagles her boyfriend Spock for a berth on the Ent(k).
As they travel, Kirk realizes that this is the same ship that attacked the Kelvin. He convinces Pike to let him help out against this mysterious ship. Pike is forced to go onboard the Pointy ship and leaves Spock and Kirk in command with Spock as the captain and Kirk as First officer.... The rest you can watch yourself.
So... where to begin... Lets start with the fact that JJ Abrams would probably had a better career as an Ad Exec. He can pitch things well, but he can't tell a story worth a damn. He has no sense of scale, time or distance. He has no sense of character or of character arcs. His camera work is shoddy. Most of his success comes from hyping up his projects and then copying other directors to deliver the finished result. It works too. I mean the hype campaign for Cloverfield was top notch, but the movie was essentially Blair Witch with a Kaiju(in NYC). End result wasn't that bad, but nothing truly standout or great. The big shot was the statue of liberty shoot and that was in the trailers. Abrams has always struck me as a director that could copy films, but never really understood why those films where as they where. This means he can make great scenes, but also that he can copy shit and think its acceptable.
This movie shows traces of that. The pitch Kirk and Spock in Starfleet academy days is a good pitch, but the movie is Khan with the genesis device blowing up planets. The camera work will be familiar to anyone that saw BSG(only worse). The set design is ripped directly from an Apple Store(literally)+ a brewery. If the movie has a saving grace is that its cast is very good. Its no surprise that most of them have had pretty good career since(with one sad exception RIP). They carry this movie on their back when everything else says it should fail. Its like the universe is trying to right what is wrong.
For instance, Kirk's character arc as it where, from juvenile delinquent to star fleet captain don't even make sense in story. He is a third year cadet according to the text on the screen. He is outranked by Everybody on the ship right down to Chekov, who may only be 17 here(rip Anton Yelchin), but is already an Ensign aka a commissioned officer. Kirk is at least a year behind Uhura. Yet because we the audience knows that Kirk is the Captain of the Enterprise for pop culture, Kirk ends up in charge. This despite as I said being that weirdo townie and an all around asshole. In fact Kirk never shows a smidge of the leadership potential or gravitas. Everybody acts like he does, because the movie tells them too. Chris Pine is a fine actor and I suspect would make a fine Kirk, but this is not the movie where he shows that.
Everybody else is better, but that is because they are already the crew of the Ent(k and TOS), they just don't know it yet. They are mostly in their recognizable form from the start. Exception is Uhura and I suspect I will talk about her in the next movie, so I will leave it there. Quinto's Spock is very good and honestly a version where he stayed captain of the Ent(k) would have been fun. Unlike Kirk he had earned it. His scene at the end where he talks to his counterpart is the best scene in the movie, but then his counterpart is the best thing in this movie by a country mile. The less said about the Humor the better.
As for SFX and camera work... I won't go into lense flares, I promised, but shaky cam is just as bad. Especially if its done to hide the fact that nothing really exciting is happening or worse to pad time. Moving the camera as a replacement to moving the plot forward. (A shot of Kirk falling down a cliffside keeps going on forever, then he gets up and runs without ill effects). Its also weird that Kirk keeps ending up in cliffhangers aka he hangs from the side of a cliff no less then four times in this movie. Like Four nickles weird. The Shaky cam may have been the cool things in Action movies at the time, but Abrams seems to be unaware that was mostly used to hide the fact that the Liam Neesons and the like couldn't really do action. There was no need for it in the space action sequences. There was barely any need for it in regular action sequences. Chris Pine was young and fit when this movie came out. The Shaky Cam makes him look less able than Shatner in ST6.
Best guest character is Bruce Greenwood as Captain Pike. You see Anson Mounts Captain Pike in him. He has few but good scenes. The counterpart is a balm when he is on screen, but he is not a guest character in these movies.
The first ten minutes are absolutely incredible.
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Goddamn that movie has a great cast. And looks fantastic. Too bad about the script.
*-I have long maintained that the thing most truly wrong with The Last Jedi is The Rise of Skywalker betraying everything that it did. Empire Strikes Back had the same problem - it had a weak initial reception, it's lifted to the heights it's now held at by the fullness of the trilogy. If Return of the Jedi had trashed everything it did then neither film would be worth a shit.
Somehow, Palpatine returned again.
Again again.
Trek 09 starts off with killing Kirk Sr, and the back half is destroying Vulcan and threatening to destroy Earth, and not in a slow paced sort of thing to be thwarted somehow, just straight up shooting and punching.
Also, '09 gives Kirk and Romulan guy the same motive, revenge, and then does basically nothing interesting with that. Plus Romulan guy manages to go back in time with a super-duper-fancypants ship and all he can think to do with it is super murdery revenge. He doesn't even try to become God-Emperor of the Romulans or anything.
Parsecs in Star Wars, Black Holes in Trek (even before '09. I think Voyager got stuck in one and didn't even notice for ages), etc.
They come up with something and then look for a cool word to describe it. "Let's say they hit a Quantum... Filament? Nice, let's go." "But what does it do?" "It fucks up the ship, that's what it does." "How?" "Did you even hear the word Quantum?"
There's also great examples of medical non-advice, like Dr Crusher telling Geordie to take a deep breath before they get exposed to vacuum, you know, so the pressure difference will help their lungs to explode.
They made a graphic novel to explain what happened in that time span... Problem is it's out of print and while it's not exactly rare, it would be like making Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King and telling people to go and read The Two Towers if they want to understand why everyone's all over the fucking place at the start of the second movie.
The supernova eating the entire Romulan Empire is ridiculous. However on my rewatch of the very cool Season 1 TNG, I note the T'kon Empire was destroyed by a supernova. So they made the mistake all the way back in the 80s...and OH MY GOD HE JUST WATCHED THE FIRST FEW EPISODES OF TNG DIDN'T HE!? Anyway, the T'kon was implausibly destroyed by a supernova and these guys could move stars! It's such a ridiculous idea that star makers/movers couldn't move the supernova or do something about it or at least predict it several thousand years in advance.
So I guess JJ isn't the first to make dumb cosmic science.
The problem with Abrams stuff is that his stuff actually has an impact on the feel of the setting. Travel time in both settings used to be a thing. Trek had established (vaguely, sorta) travel times and you couldn't just use a transporter to get from Earth to the Klingon homeworld instantly, and travel via ship took longer than the freaking five minutes it did in Into Darkness. Same with Star Wars, there weren't established travel times, but OT and PT were slower paced and often cut to other scenes when one group of characters was flying around or going to hyperspace. It gave the sense that space was big and travelling through it was... actually a thing you had to do or something. Abrams (and Johnson) just have the characters bloop from one place to another with almost no time passing.
I think the hyperspace skipping in Rise of Skywalker might have been the worst example of his failure to grasp the scale of the universe, just throttle up and down your spaceship without bothering to plot a course and blink instantly into the atmosphere of one world then the next. It kept up the action centric pace they were going for, but even though ships in Star Wars tend to be a bit faster than Star Trek, travel between star systems is still normally an hours to days affair, and you need accurate plotting to even get near to the planet you want to travel to, making it possible to instantly blink between a half dozen worlds in half as many minutes really makes you wonder how you could possibly write a story where the threat is help being too far away ever again. Then again they also had Lando rally the whole galaxy and get them to jump to the world you need a unique Sith artefact to even reach within about 20 minutes real time from when he started gathering people together. This might be a daring take, so brace yourselves, but I don't think Rise of Skywalker was a very well written movie you guys.
Using the rules of engagement set down by Mr Abrams, we shall each stand 10 light years from the equator, turn and fire. We should have it resolved in a few minutes.
The Irony is that jumping straight from Fellowship and Return of the King is possible with a bit of editing. I mean Somehow Gandalf Returned would be a thing and you would have to explain why Gollum is suddenly traveling with Frodo, but it can be done.
I mean Rohan is a sidequest in the large scheme of things. Its important in that it fills the world and give everybody that isn't Frodo and Sam a chance to shine and have action filled adventures, but the main quest is Frodo.
I remember seeing a comic that had Starfleet turn from explorational service into a retirement home, because.. well you can beam across lightyears so there is no need for starships and the magic macguffin of Into Darkness made death obsolete. So all the starship pilots and engineers are retrained as nurses to care for the increasing number of elderly that won't die. Kirk screams at the idea of a lifetime spent emptying bedpans.
It's like a child wrote the script. And no Mr Abrams that's not 'so cool'.
I don't like ST09 but compared to Into Darkness it's goddaamn Shakespeare. ID is sexist AND racist - amazingly well done JJ. Who the fuck white washes Khan!? (and yes I get the irony of a Mexican actor to play an Indian one but at least they were trying in the 60s!)
This is why you shouldn't always listen to the fans when they tell you what they want.
I'm not going to really blame the fans. It's a prequel setting, Khan is out there, it's not the absolute worst idea in the world to have a story that includes him. Just a full on ripping off of the best moments of WoK without any of the stuff that made it work is the problem.
Imagine the beginning of ID up to the point where they have the emergency post-explosion meeting that Khan attacks, except when everyone gets there the Badmiral introduces Khan as a special security consultant or something. Rip off Homefront/Paradise Lost, have the Badmiral using Khan to put the Federation on a war footing, but Khan is playing the Badmiral in order to pull a Palpatine (or Lex Luthor) and be put in charge of the Federation. It's still not great, but it'd be a lot more interesting that what Abrams did.
Plus I'm pretty sure that the whole 'cold fusion' bomb at the beginning was just trolling. Trek technobabble is usually a lot better.
"I'm not Bill, I'm Bob!" *dramatic music *
Ok... and? Who are any of these people and why should anyone care?
I like to think this is what you'd get if Tom Clancy wrote Star Trek.
Romulan extremists have stolen a cold fusion bomb from a poorly secured Cardassian black site and they're going to use it to blow up Starfleet HQ. Only Section 31 operative Jack Ryan can stop them...this summer in Star Trek: Fusion Ops.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
I want to see the one where Sean Connery plays a Romulan defector.
What baffles me is that ID, a film that I struggle to enjoy, and which I know plays fast and loose with the setting *and* feels less fun, somehow made even more money (against a bigger budget, but it came out ahead on percentages too). Apparently people liked it!
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That was "How it Should have Ended".
They also did a bit where Cumberbatch does his "My name is Khan" bit, to be met by Pine looking confused saying "ok, well... I'm Kirk, this is Spock." Which makes way more sense than what happened in the movie.
But Abrams is a hack and his Star Trek films lean heavily on "remember this?" to the point of the scripts only making sense if you remember the TV shows/movies it's rebooting.
Yeah, JJ is one of those "don't think about it, feel it" kind of guys when it comes to the setting or script. The problem is he leans way too hard on that and frequently it doesn't just not make sense if you think about it, but it doesn't make sense if you don't think about it too. It doesn't feel right.
The best example of this for me is The Force Awakens and it's explosions in the sky. Everyone I went to see that film with left the theatre just confused about what had happened. It broke basic movie feel.
Yes alternate history and all, but Khan should already be infamous for the oh-god-why-did-we-have-to-say-these-happened-in-our-lifetime Eugenics Wars.