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Dude hasn't even read my past Trek opinions. I consider Star Trek 2009 the proper culmination of an unoffical trilogy started by The Motion Picture and Wrath of Khan. Yes, I think it's better than those - but only marginally. Star Trek 2009 is disrespectful to some Star Trek fans in the sense that it's specifically designed of a condemnation of everything that had happened to the franchise late in its life (like the notion that it must be a franchise), culminating in Nemesis. Its closest equivalent is probably Godzilla 2000, with its specific attacks on the worst Godzilla films and its return to the thematic roots of the series - without pretending that the intervening 50 years hadn't happened. The implicit point, in either case, is that a proper fan has the ability to think critically about these artworks as art, instead of as 'expanded universes', franchises, simulations, or what have you. Star Trek 2009 treats "Star Trek" first and foremost as an aesthetic. That's why it's great.
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May 4, 2012 08:12
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Wandle Cax posted:If anyone can make the slightest amount of sense of this sentence I would love to hear it. What a meaningless puff of a comment. The film expresses the concept of "Star Trek"... in aesthetic terms. I'm opposing this to literal plot content and more abstract things like franchise rights. "Aesthetic" refer to the principles expressed by the visuals. The film emphasizes the speed at which things take place, the brightness, the fluid motion of the camera, the primary colours. The film obviously rejects the dark, asymmetrical, spiky, secondary-coloured ship owned by the villains. You can extrapolate outwards from there into the philosophy of Star Trek, the optimism and the pursuit of knowledge and truth, and the ethical considerations. The destruction of the villain's ship is presented as an ethical statement - 'this thing should not exist.' Everything is depicted as governed by informational patterns, while the film takes the time to look at the mechanisms. This is the point of Scotty stuck in the pipe, an action beat that serves no plot purpose whatsoever but encapsulates the film's themes. It's a reference to Chaplin's Modern Times, except it's not quite the same as Chaplin reduced to a cog in the machine. The fluid motion is what's important - and this is the scene directly after they literally teleport from one place to the other. The point is that people can't be completely reduced to pure information. They still need bodies, to do things like breathe. This is the recurring tension between idealism and reality, summed up with the 'gag' where they acknowledge there's no sound in space but continue to employ it as a stylistic choice nonetheless. When Spock is pushed to snap out of his 'purely rational' mindset, he audibly cracks the glass screen on one of the computer consoles. It's a metaphor. computer parts posted:It's a setting rather than a set continuity. There are Klingons and the Enterprise and a Starfleet but it's not behoven to choices made a few decades earlier. World War II is the setting, but Basterds uses the aesthetics of blaxploitation films, spaghetti westerns (and so-forth) to express things about World War II and how it's perceived as a historical event.
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May 4, 2012 12:03
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That's pretty much the point. Nero is the personification of Nemesis, and when he appears in 'the original series', it's tied into Bones' speech about how space is full of disease and death. Folks looking for rational motivation and such miss the point that he is just crazy and stupid, not really understanding (or caring to understand) the implications of his time-fuckery. He's all avenging people who haven't died yet, and killing people who haven't done anything yet. "I saw it happen! Don't tell me it didn't happen!" The film uses this conceit to depict Nemesis as a disease that the series needs to be cleansed of - the embodiment of Bones' pessimistic, cynical outlook. And that's related to the body-horror-comedy of Kirk with the hosed-up hands, the bleak fuckin' ice planet, and generally how the Kobiyashi-Maru is all about making a person experience hopelessness. That is, until Kirk uses his foreknowledge of the test's outcome to 'go back in time', changing his fate by altering the program. Much like Old Spock does, right? It's a microcosm.
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May 13, 2012 10:59
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"I think people just want to have a scoop. It annoys me – it's beyond the point to just ferret around for spoilers all the time to try to be the first to break them. It just spoils the film. It masquerades as interest in the movie but really it's just nosiness and impatience. You just want to say, 'Oh gently caress off! Wait for the film!'" Yep, Simon Pegg owns.
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May 30, 2012 00:11
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Pastamania posted:JJTrek isn't Star Trek. Star Trek has always been about pulpy, two-fisted space adventures, starring Kirk, where they go around gawking at weird poo poo and occasionally loving or punching it. The utopianism of the original series is overhyped - like they allowed a Ruskie on the crew, and will drop the occasional line about how they eliminated poverty (but not how they eliminated poverty, natch). That's not the focus of the show. The point was really that, while Earth was apparently now a great place, the crew were always flying away from Earth into infested, psychedelic hellholes - and trying their best not to be slain or driven mad by the latest cosmic fucker or apocalyptic murder-computer. Like it or not, there's all manner of weird poo poo in the "J. J. Trek", that does indeed focus on how these characters' personal philosophies allow them to confront a meaningless universe of "disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence." That nihilism is personified by the villain (who, in turn, personifies Star Trek: Nemesis). It approaches this in an aesthetic way - down to the acknowledgement that there's no sound in space, but, god drat it, we're going to do it anyways.
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Dec 8, 2012 23:40
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Jack Gladney posted:The show's actually pretty committed to being politically radical in confronting a lot of '60s culture. It's not just that they had a Russian, but that there was an episode where a black dude disagreed with Spock and was right and everyone respected him just as much as Spock. There's another one where two characters are in danger, a black man and a white woman, and it's the white woman who dies to demonstrate the danger of the situation--after that, the crew work together to sve the black man. It looks hamfisted and stupid to you because you have the benefit of 40 years of hindsight to diagnose colorblind racism as stupid, but the show absolutely has a political agenda more radical than anything you'd see on tv today in terms of challenging America's horrible culture. A big part of that has to do with a strong desire to make peace and establish an equitable solution for everyone, like the episode where they find a rock creature killing miners because the miners are mining its eggs--they negotiate a lasting peace and go out of their way to preserve lives. While that's all true, the focus of the series is on all the rock monsters and sentient nebulae as the new others to be dealt with. The 'colourblind' equality of the federation serves as a pregiven premise/backdrop to the action - which is all about presenting a baseline 'humanity' in conflict with those who would deviate from it. That's why the sexism is not really too surprising. But it's also what makes the series truly interesting. The exploitative treatment of women in the series is part-and-parcel with a pulp/exploitation aesthetic that subsequent works tried to transcend with mixed (mostly inferior) results. It provides some texture to the proceedings, presenting Kirk's sexism upfront and unapologetically. I think a character like Deanna Troi is much more sexist than anything in the Kirk show. And it works because the original series never strove for 'realism' in the sense of accuracy to a canon. It's unabashedly a fantasy of sex and violence. In resembling a pre-prequel Star Wars film, and sharing the same writers as Transformers, Star Trek 2009 totally gets it.
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Dec 9, 2012 04:10
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LividLiquid posted:I like JJTrek a lot, but it isn't without its problems. The entire moral of the story is that if a future version of one of your enemies says to be friends, then I guess you maybe should be or something? That's not the moral; that's the plot. The basic moral was to move on with your life, by building upon the good things that happened and letting go of the bad. That's why the villain is the personification of canonicity ("I saw it happen! Don't tell me it didn't happen!"). It's about not dwelling on poo poo. (At the same time, it's also about not getting so caught up in progress that you lose sight of your values.) SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Feb 16, 2013 |
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Feb 16, 2013 09:41
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Black Bones posted:superior because I prefer aliens that are scary, rather than endearing. No dis on Abrams, but E.T. is way the gently caress scarier than the Super 8. He's downright repulsive.
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Feb 16, 2013 11:34
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Timby posted:"James T. Kirk was considered to be a great man. He went on to captain the USS Enterprise ... but that was another life." You're kinda taking that out of context there. The 'other life' refers to the fact that Shatner's Kirk is dead. Nero mocks Pine's Kirk by declaring him an entirely different person, with no connection to the 'real' timeline. Nero does not consider his own life over because he cannot accept his own unimportance in the grand scheme of things. In the same way, he could not accept that his family dying was a random accident, and so decided that someone (Spock) must have rigged it to happen. He's a space-truther.
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Feb 17, 2013 10:21
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It's far more plausible for an engine room to look almost-exactly like a brewery than for an alien creature to look almost-exactly like a human being. Blammo!
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Feb 17, 2013 23:22
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I like the brewery because it has a low-budget, exploitation aesthetic to it. How many 'bad' sci-fi films take place in a refinery doubling as a space station, or something? Star Trek literally has its sleek, iPod bridge built on top of one of these cheap location shoots. It's the foundation. Other Star Treks lack this contrast between upper and lower, idealism and practicality, brain and guts, and so-on. The brewery is basically the bathroom that has been conspicuously absent from the enterprise for decades. Where did everybody poo poo?
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Feb 18, 2013 10:57
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Karpaw posted:The scene is poo poo because Scotty is supposed to be in mortal danger and it's played for laughs, with Kirk chasing after him like a buffoon. 
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Feb 19, 2013 06:10
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Smekerman posted:They [...] never depict just how truly horrifying it is to die either in a planetary attack or a starship battle. [...] I think the only way to do them justice would be to either depict them in a movie or in some sort of lenient TV series along the lines of HBO or Showtime. In Star Trek 2009, we see people sucked out into the silent void as they suffocate. An entire, populated, Earth-like planet implodes. Kirk is nearly devoured by a screeching abomination, shortly after his hands inflate into fleshy bulbs due to the side effects of futuristic medicine. Meanwhile, back at the start of the series, Star Trek 1979 begins with a transporter accident turning a dude inside out.
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Feb 20, 2013 11:24
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bobkatt013 posted:I thought he wanted to destroy earth because it was also Spock's home. It was also where starfleet was based and they said they would help and failed. Nero also interpreted that failure as deliberate malice. He's a space-truther.
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Apr 22, 2013 04:32
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Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'
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Apr 24, 2013 17:51
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Danger is correct. Star Trek 2009 is technically and conceptually flawless.
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Apr 24, 2013 18:23
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Real trekkers know that Spock is not 'actually' humanoid, and that Nimoy/Quinto (Ninto?) stand in symbolically for the concept 'alien' - a human face over weird green innards. This is why they're down with the planet of 1960s gladiators, and the space-witches. Real trekkers made Galaxy Quest. Star Trek 09's detractors are theorhetically incapable of making a Galaxy Quest. The complaint isn't nerds, but nerds who aren't even good at it.
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Apr 24, 2013 22:03
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Wait - Damon Lindelof wrote Star Trek 2, and that's the source of this rage? Suddenly I'm hard as hell. 
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Apr 26, 2013 10:49
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I'm not going to tag this. It's really weird reading all the complaints about references to Wrath Of Khan, and "why did Khan have to be in it???" when Into Darkness serves as a critique of that specific film and its place in the series. Star Trek 2009 was a bold rejection of Trek at its worst, the villain being a personification of the TNG films' idiocy. While Star Trek 2009 is the stronger film, Into Darkness takes on the more ambitious and nuanced task of criticizing Star Trek at its best - by rejecting attitudes that have been present in Trek from the beginning. It's attacking the dark core of Trek - the (for lack of a better term) 'grittiness' brought to the fore by Wrath Of Khan's naval warfare narrative. Nero was garbage from the prior future, but the Vengeance is garbage from the past. This is the vital importance of the spaceship models on display: the USS Vengeance is shown to be in the direct lineage of First Contact and Enterprise. Into Darkness admits that, despite the reboot, this prequel stuff is still 'canon', and that it sucks. It's the remnants of the old franchise that have yet to be exorcised. And Wrath Of Khan was the turning point that led to these gritty prequels. After Trek 2009 came out, and fans clamoured for a sequel, Abrams announced that they were in the process of choosing which direction to take the series: either a Wrath Of Khan-style conflict or an exploration narrative about sentient gas clouds and whatever. Rather than settling on one or the other, Into Darkness illustrates the process behind the choice. It bids farewell to Wrath Of Khan so that they can stop remaking it with every film. Genetic supermen do not exist. Khan is a metaphorical character. There's a reason he lies dormant, and continues to lie dormant at the end. The warehouse full of frozen dudes is a Indiana Jones reference - to the Lost Ark in its crate. Khan is pretty much the wrath of god, with his fury and savagery. He is (and, by extension, the militarism of Wrath Of Khan is) presented is something latent within the series - and within Kirk himself (hence the hard cut from Khan being knocked unconscious to Kirk waking up). Khan is implicitly analogous to the monster that Kirk unthinkingly shoots in the microcosmic opening sequence. "You just stunned our ride!" Khan is the dangerous animal that Kirk needs to control, rather than simply destroy. And, as a sidenote: the 'primitive natives' are made analogous to the terrified onlookers in San Francisco, which hopefully dispels concerns over racist imagery there. (The Volcano is, of course, the Vengeance's crash). So the 'happy ending' is not tacked on at all. It's a vital part of the story, designed to mirror the opening sequence - showing that the characters have come to peace with Khan and are moving into a future unburdened by the past. Into Darkness says that, unlike First Contact and Enterprise, Wrath is a very good film - but it's one whose impact is too overbearing. In a form-meets-function way, the narrative thread with the space-muslim Klingons is left hanging. How will the characters address the looming conflict? The only hope is that Kirk's got a little Khan in him now. Earlier in the thread, it was noted that the regenerative blood makes Khan into something of an Evil Jesus figure. This is exactly correct: Khan is one of Zizek's 'diabolical' revolutionary figures, who acts to reshape society out of a violent love that cuts across all segments. Khan, in this film, is pretty much the same character as Bane in Dark Knight 3: an inhuman force for good, up to the point that he becomes "human, all too human" and betrays himself. In this film, it happens when Khan is revealed to be fighting for his particular group of individuals and not any universal justice ideal. He specifically fails to make the leap from 'this shouldn't happen to us' to 'this shouldn't happen to anyone,' which is why Kirk must pick up where he left off. I think the film suffers a bit from veering close to the Iron Man series' 'bad egg' brand of anti-capitalism (i.e. blaming Admiral Marcus for widespread systemic problems) but saves itself by making 'Private Security' into the new redshirt. The USS Vengeance was evidently created in secret by private contractors, and Marcus is just a figurehead/patsy. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 09:48 on May 23, 2013 |
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May 23, 2013 09:42
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Danger posted:If Khan is the 'diabolical revolutionary' (which is certainly an apt description, and comparison with Zizek's take on Bane), then the message the film gives us regarding the moral responsibility to seek a purer, cleaner capitalism is more insidious in STID. The whitewashing of Khan (and Bane) specifically inverts the expectation of the revolutionary figure as a nomadic war machine (the dangerous Other to the state), depicting instead an aspect of the liberal state that has been appropriated for its own use. I don't think Khan is easily reducible to 'a British dude'. Cumberbatch plays Khan as a (rather literal) pod person, full of unsettling petit objet a tics and nuances. People have been debating Khan's visible minority status, but racial conflict has always been a disguise for class war. If this Khan is 'white' (debatable, since he is textually a weirdo ethnic alien who can pass for white but is nonetheless denied any rights by the 'progressive' Federation) he is, put crudely, a 'white trash' Tea Party Khan. Into Darkness, as you note, accurately depicts how the state feeds upon that which struggles against it. The war machine does not have real war as its object until it is appropriated by the state: "When the war machine becomes a collaboration machine, it immediately falls into the trap of Enlightenment ideology, imposing a “common ground” upon all differences so that they may centripetally organize themselves toward a common goal." (Rob Marzec, "The War Machine and Capitalism," II:17) This imposition of a 'common ground', a 'filial relation', is the case at the beginning of the film. It is the dark core of Trek - the liberal status quo that I was writing about earlier, and that you're referring to here. However, by the end of Into Darkness, Kirk's goal is to preserve “a framework of alliance” that delays the objective of war from being forced onto the war machine. "In its potential state of “pure Idea,” war is the non-positive ground of the war machine and of nomadic movement, but it is also a positive (in the sense of “productive,” or “liberatory”) function in that it appears in the form of an antagonism directed against all forms of sovereignty." (ibid, II:19) I interpret Khan's refreezing and the Enterprise's severing of all ties with Earth (to wander the stars for five years) as exactly this. The "pure idea" of war is held onto, but only as a potential. Kirk does not excise Khan but, rather, becomes Khan - with the Enterprise serving (for the first time) as his Botany Bay. This is not a return to 'the purity of the original series' but something altogether new, because no prior Trek films or shows are exempt from Into Darkness' criticism. It's basically an anti-Trek film. Or, rather, a sort of Super-Trek - more Trek than Trek itself.
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May 24, 2013 00:35
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Jewel Repetition posted:How are his tics petit objet a? Are you sure you know what that means? "To these two Reals [the imaginary and symbolic Reals], we have to add a third Real, that of a mysterious je ne sais quoi, the unfathomable "something" that makes an ordinary object sublime - what Lacan called l'objet petit a. There is, in science fiction horror movies, a figure of alien opposed to that of the irrepresentable and all-devouring monster of Scott's Alien, a figure immortalized in a whole series of films from the early 1950s whose most famous representative is The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. An ordinary American wanders somewhere in the half-abandoned countryside, when his car breaks down, so he goes for help to the closest small town; soon, however, he notices that something strange is going on in the town - people behave in a strange way, as if they are not fully themselves. It becomes clear to him that the town is already taken over by the aliens who penetrated and colonized human bodies, controlling them from within: although the aliens look and act exactly like humans, there is as a rule a tiny detail which betrays their true nature (a strange glimpse in their eyes; too much skin between their fingers or between their ears and heads). This detail is the Lacanian objet petit a, a tiny feature whose presence magically transubstantiates its bearer into an alien. In contrast to Scott's alien who is totally different from humans, the difference is here minimal, barely perceptible - and are we not dealing with the same in our everyday racism? Although we are ready to accept the Jewish, Arab, Oriental other, there is some detail which bothers us in the West: they way they accentuate a certain word, the way they count money, the way they laugh. This tiny feature renders them aliens, no matter how they try to behave like us." (link)
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May 24, 2013 02:37
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I find this line of discussion uninteresting because it seems like multicultural identity politics without much concern for the broader struggle against oppression. What is the end-goal? Khan has been totally ruined from the beginning, being (in Space Seed) a bizarre clusterfuck of 'oriental' signifiers played by a blatantly not-Indian dude. It was pretty much blackface. Wrath Of Khan subtly (and tastefully, and rightly) retconned this by just having Montalban 'play himself'. Khan became a Latino dude with a unique name - no turbans, no over-application of tan makeup... A large part of this debate seems based on it being Memory Alpha canon that Khan (the objective virtual person within the Star Trek simulation-universe) is "probably a Sikh from the north of India". This overlooks that the scene in the original episode - where they actually stop to explain to the audience what race the character is supposed to be - is a loving embarrassment. Folks are oblivious to Wrath Of Khan's tasteful solution (because Wrath Of Khan doesn't have any clumsy exposition telling us Khan's official, canonical race). It's obvious that Into Darkness is following Wrath Of Khan's retcon of Space Seed, and ignoring the episode almost-entirely. This makes the crucial point that Khan was never actually an Indian character. The canon was based on the blackface. The canon lied. It is unfortunate that they didn't get another Mexican dude for the reboot, but it's very hard for me to get worked up about it when Into Darkness' critique of the series' liberal ideology is so strong. And Cumberbatch gives us a queer Khan, seemingly based on David Bowie's character in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Tony Montana posted:Yeah, me too, man. Except I am quite the Trekkie, but that movie was just.. it just wasn't Trek, it wasn't for me. This is another example of tropes being identified, in place of more nuanced analysis. There is a clear difference between how Kirk treats women in the beginning of the film, and how he treats Carol, who chastises him and demands that he respect women. There's a power dynamic being expressed in that scene, and it's not one that Kirk is on the upper side of. Carol's inclusion as a new part of the crew is the biggest sign that this new 'five year mission' will be very different from the previous one. Imagine the original series with significantly less alien-loving. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 16:32 on May 26, 2013 |
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May 26, 2013 16:28
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Riso posted:Can you really call it a retcon when it was not the intent? Yes, although 'retcon' is not really the best word for it. Meyer's change bypasses issues of canonicity entirely, by simply not giving a poo poo about canon.
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May 26, 2013 17:07
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Tony Montana posted:I pretty much agree with most of what these guys said about it. John Hayward posted:You know what would have convinced me to arm my "explorers" to the teeth, beyond the simple common sense that they need protection against the unknown menaces of deep space? A hyper-advanced Romulan warship popping back from a century in the future and blowing the entire Starfleet to pieces. Did the people who wrote "Into Darkness" not remember the plot of its 2009 predecessor? Why would anyone in the galaxy need further convincing that strong defenses are necessary? (And why doesn't the Earth seem to have any orbital defenses at all, even after the aforementioned time-travelling Romulan ship almost destroyed it a few years previously?) Who needs to provoke a war with the Klingons when you can just point at the big hole Captain Nero blew in the bottom of the San Francisco bay, right next to Starfleet headquarters? This guy doesn't understand that the super-stealth cruise missiles have no use as defensive weapons. Scotty is obviously not objecting to there being weapons on the Enterprise, but to there being volatile experimental superweapons designed to violate international law. He is also, more specifically, objecting to the Enterprise being comandeered by the Federation as a tool for the direct exercise of state power. This guy's logic is seriously "So what if we do develop this Solanite bomb? We'd be even a stronger nation than now." He considers Scotty's conscientious objection to deploying the Solanite bomb a plot hole. At the same time, the dude doesn't seem to get that Marcus' goal is not actually the defense of earth but sparking a culture-war against the space-muslims who resist assimilation into the Federation (which, the film makes clear, is pretty much the 'western' world of today except with flying cars). It's literally a premptive strike doctrine. And then he goes on to say that the film doesn't challenge the Federation's ideology in any way.
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May 26, 2013 18:20
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The Warszawa posted:Pretty much any just system - yes, even glorious socialist utopia or [insert your desired outcome] - is going to have to reckon with structural and cultural marginalization of people of color. This is part of that. I get that identity politics is a dirty phrase to many people, but identities are political and the goal should be to erase differentiated opportunities on the basis of race, not erase racial identities. We're so far off from that that we're still on "let color play color." Don't get me wrong; I'm not talking about that kind of 'post racial' nonsense. In fact, the film specifically attacks the superficial race-neutrality of previous Trek entries (that all races are equal, so long as they join the federation). Mere inclusiveness represents, in the film, the status quo. The Federation here is presented as very similar to the "post-racial, post-feminist" world of Starship Troopers. I totally agree that casting a Mexican dude as Khan would be a good political act, but that politics needs to be linked to the ethical concerns you dismiss as irrelevant. Inclusiveness can open up the space for genuine equality, but it can also just reinforce existing power structures. In this film, Khan is basically a clone whose genetic code, and therefore his body, is treated as intellectual property and therefore owned (by the Federation?). I've already gone over the tics that emphasize his otherness, and his ability to move fluidly between various identities that corresponds with a fundamental ambiguity in the character. The film employs class imagery instead of race imagery (in this specific instance) when it should employ both and link them, but this is way preferable to the opposite tact of being 'multicultural' while discounting questions of class conflict (that is, effectively, tokenism)
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May 26, 2013 20:48
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BIG HEADLINE posted:You seem surprised that a movie review on breitbart.com seems to miss, overlook, crap on, or gloss over anything that might be considered a left-wing ideal. Oh jesus, I didn't even look at the header. Montana, you've got some explaining to do!
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May 26, 2013 23:58
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Nessus posted:I'm curious if you could unpack this a little more. I suppose my distaste for Cumberbatch's particular brand of smouldering thin man look may have interfered with my reading, but it seemed more that he was being portrayed as the mirror of Kirk's obvious immense compassion for his crew - which is certainly a form of love but does not seem to be specifically queer, at least in my understanding of the term. Besides Man Who Fell To Earth, the character gives off definite 'Ash from Alien' vibes to me. It could be the juxtaposition with Montalban's portrayal, but Cumberbatch seems to play Khan as totally asexual. As I wrote earlier, he's all pod-person, even insectoid. His clone Khan is straight-up inhuman (though not, necessarily, in a pejorative sense). In keeping with the diabolical 'evil Jesus'/'Satan' imagery, you can identify Khan's love for his crew as a sort of nonsexual, spiritual love. But it is not Jesus' agape but a corrupted version: "[In Book Five of The Brothers Karamazov,] Ivan tells Alyosha an imagined story about the Grand Inquisitor. Christ comes back to earth in Seville at the time of the Inquisition; after he performs a number of miracles, the people recognize him and adore him, but he is arrested by inquisition and sentenced to be burnt to death the next day. The Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell to tell him that the Church no longer needs him: his return would interfere with the mission of the Church, which is to bring people happiness. Christ has misjudged human nature: the vast majority of humanity cannot handle the freedom which he has given them - in other words, in giving humans freedom to choose, Jesus has excluded the majority of humanity from redemption and doomed it to suffer. In order to bring people happiness, the Inquisitor and the Church thus follow "the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction" - namely, the devil - who alone can provide the tools to end all human suffering and unite under the banner of the Church. The multitude should be guided by the few who are strong enough to take on the burden of freedom - only in this way will all mankind live and die happily in ignorance. These few who are strong enough to assume the burden of freedom are the true self-martyrs, dedicating their lives to keep choice from humanity." (Zizek) This sort of corrupted martyrdom is pretty much exactly what Khan (and Marcus, the Grand Inquisitor in this rough analogy) stand for. Khan doesn't sacrifice himself for everyone, as Kirk does - and Kirk isn't a straight-up Jesus in this movie either, since the healing blood is drawn by Spock and Uhura, and distributed by Bones. As the opening scene spells out, the entire Enterprise is the god that dies and is reborn as a crew/family/community. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 06:01 on May 27, 2013 |
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May 27, 2013 05:57
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He's weilding an anti-aircraft cannon one-handed, and not even bothering with cover because he doesn't give a gently caress.
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May 27, 2013 18:50
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Tony Montana posted:What is your take on the review I've linked? You haven't written anything substantiative.
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May 28, 2013 03:21
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sebmojo posted:But what does the anti-aircraft cannon represent? A phallus, duh!
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May 28, 2013 04:06
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The film is not dumb, as explained in the following 20-minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b_polwFplI
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May 28, 2013 04:29
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monster on a stick posted:- How does fleet disposition make any sense? There aren't any fleets around Earth. There don't even appear to be any ships stationed around Earth, even though we know that the ships must have come there since the various Captains were there when Khan attacked SFHQ. Did these ships leave? If so, where did they go? If they were still around Earth, why didn't they do anything when the Enterprise and the dreadnaught were fighting within spitting distance? This is not a plot hole. The response time of the various ships in the fleet given their relative distance from Earth is not relevant to the plot. They did not show up, therefore they didn't. The film is not an RTS where you control the ships in order to optimize their tactical positioning. However, if you want to be pedantic, the previous film established that Earth is defended by (automatic?) systems that can be bypassed with codes held by high-ranking Starfleet officers.
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May 28, 2013 06:55
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Plot holes list for IMDB to use: -Kirk shot the monster that Mccoy wanted to ride. Who taught Mccoy how to ride monsters? -Scottie should have kept shooting Khan over and over and over, until he was sure Khan was unconscious. Despite this insight, the film did not congratulate me. -Vulcans look like people but they are not people. They are aliens. -What is the black goo?
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May 28, 2013 07:39
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Like the end of the film, the gunfight on Klingon is a repeat of the scenario from the opening sequence: Kirk and company, in disguise, engage in a disorienting conflict on the ground while fire rains down from above. The Klingons are not the true enemy; it's the 'volcano' that threatens everyone. Interpreting the gunfight sequence, and its place in the narrative, depends on comparing and contrasting these two segments. The unspoken implication is that Khan planned to conquer the Klingons, or otherwise gently caress with their society. At the very least, the more level-headed characters like Spock believed this to be the case. Uhura, for example, (though stuck following Kirk's bellicose orders) goes down with the intent of explaining to the Klingons that Khan is a dishonorable criminal threat. This idea that at least some segments of the crew believe they are helping the Klingons explains their going on this sloppy covert mission. This is all, of course, a continuation of Prometheus' subtheme of how to act on incomplete information without being paralyzed by uncertainty. We don't know exactly why the Klingon draws the knife. We only know that he does, and that it's a bad sign. Same with Khan, whose motivations are often unreadable.
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May 28, 2013 19:20
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Midichlorians own.
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May 28, 2013 19:35
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yronic heroism posted:Well, as RLM would say, it shows prioritization of lowest common denominator pablum. Also the screenwriter sounds like a moron or a fidgety child. The lingerie scene shows Kirk being chastised by a woman he cannot seduce. Carol is not embarrassed and trying to cover herself, but blithely indifferent, if slightly annoyed. She thinks Kirk is pathetic, and Kirk both looks pathetic and feels pathetic. Kirk's womanizing is associated with his colonial tendencies. Again, Raiders of the Lost Ark is the film's big reference point, where Star Trek 2009 is modeled after Star Wars.
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May 28, 2013 20:16
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Strange Matter posted:Did you elaborate on this in the thread, because I think I missed that and would like to read it. Besides the obvious callback in the opening sequence, based on Indy's problematic interactions with other cultures, Khan is presented as basically the same as the ark - the embodiment wrath. Freezing the volcano in the opening scene obviously ties in with the re-freezing of Khan later. He's then hidden away in some random warehouse. Plus there's the basic theme of exploration versus militarism ("it belongs in a museum"), playing off the ambiguous gray area between the two (Nazi collaborator Belloq says to Indy: "You and I are very much alike. Archeology is our religion, yet we have both fallen from the pure faith. Our methods have not differed as much as you pretend. I am a shadowy reflection of you. And it would take only a nudge to make you like me, to push you out of the light." He's not wrong.). The shadowy reflection in this film is, of course, between the Enterprise and Marcus' Vengeance. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:38 on May 28, 2013 |
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May 28, 2013 20:34
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The Plinkett reviews succeeded based on their radical ambiguity. They were basically a parody of horrible nerd opinions, with a lot of salient observations mixed in - so that the viewer was obligated to think critically about not just Star Wars, but the ideological baggage they bring to a reading of Star Wars. With Half in the Bag, you just get the horrible nerd opinions delivered straight to your brain.
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May 28, 2013 20:45
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yronic heroism posted:The fictional set-up is what it is. The problem is a real person wrote the script and half-assed it. So they do maneuver to get their airlock aligned and something is keeping them in orbit until the plot dictates they need to almost crash. Did you watch the Room and conclude Tommy Wiseau's character was a really smart guy because some other character said he was? Because I concluded Tommy Wiseau couldn't write a convincing smart character. It's not insightful to point out that the movie is a movie, and that the script was written. Of course it was. You are doing this instead of reading, when no-one cares about your immersion.
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May 28, 2013 21:09
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 01:21 |
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yronic heroism posted:Now sit down and enjoy your Jar Jar because that's the only way they're getting through the planet core! I enjoy Jar Jar, but he is not my Jar Jar. Jar Jar belongs to us all.
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May 28, 2013 21:27
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