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It's been a while, but I think Pine said that he read somewhere that anyone eating an apple looks more confident whilst doing so. A non-JJTrek-But-Trek-Movie-Based Question: I don't get Khan's motivation and rationale in Wrath Of Khan. Here's a fiercely independent guy who was once a ruler of a chunk of Earth. Had nothing go wrong on Ceti Alpha V, Kahn would have been offended if Kirk had 'checked up' on him and his people. So why does he blame Kirk when a loving planet explodes, rendering his world a desert? I can explain being pissed in general, but not at Kirk specifically. It seems like the whole plot would make more sense if Khan just wanted a ship to escape the planet, and Kirk was getting in his way. MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Mar 12, 2013 |
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Mar 12, 2013 08:10
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I can somewhat accept that, but I have some trouble accepting that a Genetic Superman, who is regularly said to be extremely intelligent, would blame a fellow human for a planet exploding. There's round-the-bend, and there's genetically-augmented-pants-on-head.
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Mar 12, 2013 08:54
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jeeves posted:The blinged-out nacelles version of the Enterprise was "Starfleet's newest flagship" right from the launch of the ship... not due to numerous 5-year missions of awesomeness. I can't remember where I read it, but I think JJ said that there was originally a line where Spock Prime speaks about the coincidences and illogical situations going on. He posits that universe itself is doing its best to get the Enterprise Crew on the Enterprise.
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Apr 20, 2013 21:40
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The problem really wasn't in making the Klingons allies, but in how they did it. You can see Gene's finger-prints on the decision: See? The Federation is so noble and wise and perfect that they've even managed to get the Klingons (you know, those evil guys!) to become allies with them!
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Apr 24, 2013 07:07
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Not going to spoil this entire post (since I feel it defeats the purpose), but it's about the topic at hand: I'm not seeing the onus or obligation to cast a character from a specific race or ethnicity, especially when the character we're discussing's race or ethnicity was never even a facet of the character's... well, character.
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Apr 30, 2013 09:00
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The comic book nerd in me can buy into the earlier stuff about rejecting gritty stuff. You've got a comic book character. Then the 90s hits, and that comic book character now has to be a grimdark angsty anti-hero, because that's what's expected. Time passes and eventually people wake up from that Grim Bender. Writers start returning that comic book character to its original, proper form. But what if you were a fan of that 90s-era comic book character? A restoration is objectively a rejection of what you liked. DS9 is far grittier than the rest of Trek, so any rejection of its contribution to the franchise is seen as a form of betrayal to its fans. But in a broad sense, the amount of people who feel betrayed are dwarfed by the amount of people that feel better about the franchise because the Unwanted Difference is being removed or reduced in weight.
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May 10, 2013 03:59
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This is almost a question for the other thread, but couldn't a case be made that since since TOS, TNG and VOY were comparatively non-grim, DS9 being much more gritty would inherently be seen as being different for difference's sake, rather than something actively clamored for?
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May 10, 2013 04:35
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jivjov posted:I think Vulcan is supposed to be a slightly higher gravity world (I wanna say 1.4 earth g) but I don't have memory alpha on hand to fact-check that. That explains Vulcan strength being a bit higher than human norm. That, and part of the story of race we're discussing is that the rest of the galaxy should be thanking their lucky stars that they adopted a philosophy that curtailed their violent impulses.
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May 10, 2013 20:08
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I would argue that it's not "obliviously dismissing" whitewashing, but acknowledging a fundamental point. I'll spoiler it, just in the event that it leads to unwanted revelations: Khan was never about his race or nationality. He was named after a friend of Roddenberry's that he was trying to catch up with. His nationality made so little impact that he was played by person of a completely different nationality. And above all that, we're talking about a guy whose whole shtick is that he's genetically engineered. The issue at hand has the weight and impact of "Starbuck can't be a female, because... um...". EDIT: Just realized something cool: Khan tells Spock he can't break a rule, much less break a bone. During their fight, Spock loving breaks Khan's arm. Oh, and something else I kind of liked: Khan ends the film in cyro, smiling. Why? Because he's found that his family isn't dead, and being in cyro with them is better than being alone and awake. 
MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 08:40 on May 16, 2013 |
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May 16, 2013 08:36
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Dan Didio posted:An actor that doesn't fit the character's race or ethnicity or any other similar criteria. Isn't casting the most engaging, compelling actor for an antagonist isn't the primary criteria? There is no obligation to cast a character a certain way because of what take the earlier incarnation chose. For me, Cumberbatch out-Khaned Ricardo Montalban.
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May 16, 2013 08:58
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Dan Didio posted:I think that's a pretty different argument. Casting the best actor for the role is compelling reasoning, but the point that most detractors of that way of thinking would, I think quite fairly, make is that the best actor might not be getting the opportunity for resons that have nothing to do with acting ability. From what I understand, there was another guy cast in the role that was of the authentic race. He backed out, so the studio went searching for someone else. Cumberbatch got the role from talking to someone on the phone, I think.
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May 16, 2013 09:02
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Wouldn't it be more awkward to have a Brown Skinned Actor being the one who crashes a ship into a major city?McSpanky posted:Whitewashing isn't about acting ability anymore than affirmative action is about testing/job ability, knock this poo poo off. "This poo poo" is the core of the issue, though. If the directors find that {Actor X} plays {Character X} amazingly, what obligations are they to cast the role differently? No, previous incarnations of the character aren't to be cited. You're right, whitewashing isn't about acting ability. BC's acting ability is amazing. Therefore, the decision was not whitewashing, but about acting ability. Related: Poor Mickey. The Doctor would be very upset. 
MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 09:22 on May 16, 2013 |
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May 16, 2013 09:16
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MikeJF posted:He's not a previous incarnation, though, he's the same incarnation recast. But under that logic, you must cast the character from a race other than the one verbally expressed, because that's how it's gone before. The character we're discussing has never had a congruence between the spoken ethnicity and the actor playing him. More to the point, it's almost as if making the actor and the spoken ethnicity congruent is against earlier depictions. Besides, while you can  for hours about divergence points and the like, ultimately it's a New Khan in a New Trek Universe. Think "Oh, this is this universe's Khan", less "Hey Khan didn't look like that!"
MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 09:37 on May 16, 2013 |
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May 16, 2013 09:33
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McSpanky posted:Haha, the hell they aren't to be cited. When one chooses to use preexisting roles/characters of color but then changes their races/ethnicities, that act reduces the number of opportunities people of color have to practice their craft in an already notoriously prejudiced entertainment industry, and that is when whitewashing occurs. You can't not cite the very heart of the issue. So you are saying that it is more important to hire a lesser-talented actor of the 'correct' race (despite the character having a history of being very confused, ethnically) than to hire someone who is better at the task at hand. In this case, portraying a compelling, engaging antagonist. Not buying it for a second. Cumberbatch played an outstanding incarnation of this character (superior, I feel, in fact), and I strongly argue that replacing him for something as trivial as "He's not the race they said he was... even if he was played by a different ethnicity than that last time!" is foolish. McSpanky posted:If the the right thing had been done in the first place, the white actor would never have been in consideration for the role in the first place. His performance, no matter how incredible it may be, is fruit of the poisonous tree for the purposes of determining social responsibility for the act of whitewashing. The injustice was committed before a single second of his performance was put to film. Only his performance matters, though. I'd be more likely to agree with your argument if Cumberbatch wasn't amazing at the role. He is, though. The only obligation movie-makers have is to put the highest quality product on the screen for the audience. MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 10:02 on May 16, 2013 |
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May 16, 2013 10:00
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McSpanky posted:you seem as dead-set on focusing on it as you are on ignoring the concept of social responsibility. You keep bringing up the phrase 'social responsibility', as if this means anything. A movie-maker's primary responsibility is to the audience they seek to entertain, and casting is a large part of that responsibility. Movie makers are under no obligation to cast a character the same way they did previously.
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May 16, 2013 10:32
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McSpanky posted:Human beings are under a primary responsibility to treat each other with as much respect as they can afford in their circumstances. Yes, I suppose that's true in some high-concept way, but in a realistic, practical way? The makers of the film's responsibility was to get butts in the seats, and have them leave happy. BC's superior performance of the role made the latter possible, and (if memory serves) the first one as well.
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May 16, 2013 16:45
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Unrelated: I was surprised by how strongly I reacted to the scene where the aliens casually drop their Sacred Scroll to draw the Enterprise. The Prime Directive has always felt like a narrative hurdle at best, but that scene really explained why it exists. Everything they believed in, over the course of their development, something they stopped chasing our heroes to pray to, dropped like trash.. Very powerful.
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May 16, 2013 18:18
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I know it's a bit silly, but I'm already super excited for the Into Darkness Rifftrax. Saw the movie today for a second time, and I could almost hear the trio making jokes in certain scenes. (Spock preparing himself to die in the volcano) Come at me, bro! Admiral Robocop, no! I guess Mickey and Martha didn't work out.
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May 18, 2013 05:57
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Am I the only one thinking that Khan only started tearing the Enterprise a new one after getting his Superfriends back because Kirk had ordered Scotty to stun him?
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May 18, 2013 06:33
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I figure naming the ship Vengeance, in-universe, made sense. Say Admiral Robocop gets his war. He gets to tell everyone that the Enterprise, filled with the bright up-and-commers in Starfleet, was brutally destroyed by the Klingons. Fortunately, there was this prototype warship Starfleet was making. It was going to be called Justice or or something, but in honor of the Enterprise crew, we're going to call it Vengeance. Vengeance against the Klingons! Vengeance for the Enterprise crew!
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May 19, 2013 09:15
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bullet3 posted:Hopefully paramount takes it away from Abrams and gives it to someone who'll do a more cerebral take on the material. It probably wouldn't hurt to do it on a lower budget anyway, as this weekend shows, there's only so much money Star Trek is capable of bringing in anyway. Hasn't the last two ST films made a pretty clear framework for how to make a lot of money on Star Trek, by getting a lot of butts in the seats that wouldn't otherwise bother? mr. stefan posted:It also probably isn't a good idea to bring up DS9 as a point of comparison, since it literally did almost everything STID was trying to do far better, in the 90's, on a lower budget. I think it's interesting that while DS9 invented Section 31 to add to its Darker and Edgier portfolio, the new film treats them as an enemy whose removal allows a purer, truer nature of Trek to exist.
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May 20, 2013 05:10
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Gio posted:That's pretty much how DS9 treated them. My DS9 viewing is spotty, but didn't they go the "You need S31 because the Federation can't exist without us!" route?
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May 20, 2013 05:13
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I know the cliche of it, but was there this much canonolgical (I think there's a real word for this but damned if I know it) bickering over Starbuck being cast as a woman? I think I might be the only one that figured that the arrival of the Narada mucked with events before its chronological arrival in subtle ways, on account of it being a big fuckoff ship entering the past through an uncontrollable time tear. Events that happened in the distant past might be different than what we've seen. Sure, it makes no logical sense from a lineal chronological perspective, but I've watched enough Doctor Who to tolerate a bit of "Time Travel Screws Up Time".
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May 26, 2013 01:54
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I think it reveals just how much WoK feeds what people think of Khan over Space Seed. SS had the "No, seriously, this guy is an Indian! line, the picture of Khan in a turban, and a reasonably tan RM. WoK had a pale/white Khan who had no ethnic affectations (and by that I mean anything to give evidence of his ethnicity) to promote his supposedly-Indian origins. Ultimately, I think the cornerstone of this issue is how much Khan's stated-but-not-well-influenced ethnicity ties into your perceived view of the character.
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May 26, 2013 03:13
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Phylodox posted:All of which is irrelevant, anyways. Khan was Indian. Space Seed established that. Cast an Indian to play him. Period. Space Seed established that genetically engineered superhumans of the Eugenics Wars can be played by pretty much anyone.
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May 26, 2013 03:35
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The Warszawa posted:Racism requires neither intent nor malice, though. What are the criteria in which a creator is allowed to alter the race of a specific character, without it being racist? From your posts, all I can glean is that the answer is "Never."
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May 26, 2013 04:12
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Nessus posted:I'd say the problem here is that 'a character's race' is taken as being a variance from the default of 'white', which is the big complaint. The problem is when you have characters who are black/Hispanic/Asian/etc. who then snap back to 'the default' - and why is 'a white guy' the default? But Khan inherently lacks any sort of solid, meaningful centerpoint. Without a defined centerpoint, defining variation is impossible. He's played by a Mexican. The first time he's featured, there's two lines that say he's Indian. The second time he's featured, he visually doesn't look Mexican nor Indian. If you're forgive the analogy, there's not enough handholds for me to reasonably climb a wall that says "If you have Khan, he's an Indian", as if its an inherent and immutable facet of the character. Nessus posted:This is particularly notable because a lot of what made Star Trek special for a lot of people is that it was originally cast with this topic in mind, making it particularly galling to see. Gene Roddenberry fought for blacks, Asians and even Godless Communists to be on the bridge of the best starship of the future, and so 'whoops well we cast Britishus Cumwhitehonkey for the non-white romantic villain' stings. Gene had Khan named the way he was because because he was trying to get in touch with an old war buddy. Without that, we would have had a nordic character named Harold Erricsen, John Ericssen, or Ragnar Thorwald. Wasn't McGiver's line about him being a Sikh a voiceover line?
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May 26, 2013 04:44
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Forum Actuary posted:While it's not really relevent to the racism discussion, I was a little dissapointed they had Khan just go crazy at the end. I liked the idea that given different circumstances, Kirk and Khan could work together to beat down someone who'd screwed them both. Unlike Khan's insanity in WoK, here it made sense to me. He learned his crew (which he considered family) weren't killed, manages to get them returned to him, then is forced a second time to cope with their apparent loss. Not only that, this time he gets to watch his people dying, as far as he knows.
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May 26, 2013 06:19
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The Warszawa posted:This isn't to say that what MisterBims (I think) was saying was coming from a desire to paper-bag test, but s/he is working off a media depiction of "what a Mexican looks like" that is cultivated and promulgated by white-dominated structures without regard to reality. Yeah, no. That's pretty silly. The point I was trying to assert was that Khan's character, and how that character is presented to the audience in WoK, is one of ethnic neutrality, for lack of a better term. There's nothing in the movie that informs or asserts ethnicity, one way or another. It is that ambiguity that informs so strongly. STID's Khan is an entirely different beast of a man. A cold, calculating shell covering a brutal, almost bestial inner core. Cumberbatch fits that role perfectly. My experiences mirror the one in this post. Why does it upset you to understand that what you consider a strong underpinning to be merely an afterthought for others?
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May 26, 2013 09:41
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Riso posted:Except WOK is neither the first nor the only appearance of the character. WoK is, however, far more influential when it comes to depicting the character. How many people in the other Trek thread have said that they've watched a lot of Trek, but never watched TOS?
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May 26, 2013 17:15
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Timby posted:Marcus' role in Into Darkness is kind of like a better version of Admiral Tolwyn suddenly going all crazy and trying to manufacture a war by way of secret programs (because he felt mankind was never better than when it was facing extinction by the Kilrathi) in Wing Commander IV. That's a great analogy, but I think the difference between the two characters is their that Marcus wants a war for a practical reason. He's playing a game of Civilization, sees the enemy faction nearby, and knows 100 turns ahead they'll be at war by virtue of their respective territories butting against each other. Tolwyn's desire for war is more philosophical: he doesn't care who the enemy is, or why the enemy is the enemy, as long as there is war. Hbomberguy posted:This movie certainly highlighted for me how easy it is to manufacture a war, even in an organisation of apparent peacekeepers and explorers. You can see why they don't want to play god with the Prime Directive, they know on some level they'd probably gently caress it up. This is more for the non-movie Trek thread, but that's supposedly the basis for the PD. No matter how good your intentions, no matter how willing the underlings are, eventually you're going to get really comfortable with telling the lesser guys what to do.
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Sep 24, 2013 07:34
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Hbomberguy posted:Into Darkness picked basically the best counterpoint to the prime directive possible, saving someone from a volcano that would kill them otherwise is basically never a bad thing, but when it comes to playing god, the lines blur a bit. I can't agree with this. The scene where the aliens at the beginning unceremoniously dropping their Ancient Texts to draw the Enterprise was incredibly powerful to watch. Because they couldn't save the aliens without exposing themselves, they've significantly and irreparably changed how those aliens are going to develop.
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Sep 24, 2013 08:40
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BiggestOrangeTree posted:I loved Star Trek 2009, STID just plain sucked in my opinion. A thing I am still not sure about is: Where there any explosives on the torpedoes to start with? It looked like the cryo tubes would take up all the space inside. I think Photon Torpedo are basically matter/anti-matter explosions; I figured it just used the people in the cryotubes for the matter. BiggestOrangeTree posted:Oh also, what is the neutral zone? The orders were to not go to Kronos and instead go to the border of the neutral zone and fire these new long range torpedoes, yes? The Enterprise was on its way there when the warp core gave out and they were stranded. Right above Kronos. How does this work? The neutral zone is basically a space between the two powers where nobobdy is supposed to go. The point was that the Super Torpedoes were super-long range and undetectable, so you could sit on your side, fire the torpedoes, and everything would be fine. They weren't really right above Kronos, but when it comes to most science-fiction stories, everything gets compressed so that audiences can actually see the planet and the ship.
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Sep 25, 2013 18:28
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computer parts posted:When he's talking to his dad after he beat up those kids I think the dad said something about how they conceal their emotions but they're more powerful than other species'. Sorry for bringing this thread back (I've had it in my bookmarks; not sure how far back it is), but I legitimately like this aspect of the Vulcans that hasn't entirely been touched on. The new movies have done quite a bit of work on that: any time Spock decides he needs to punch something, holy poo poo pray you aren't the thing he wants to punch. There's a scene in Enterprise (I think) there one of the Vulcan secondary characters basically says that the Vulcans are loving terrified of humans because they remember how balls-to-the-wall psychopathic they were, and they see way too much that in Enterprise-era humanity. They weren't scared of the Klingons, they were scared of us.
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Apr 25, 2014 05:52
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Hbomberguy posted:Khan fucken killed him. You know a conspiracy's bad when the villain is enacting justice. I think it's less Justice and more "You forced me to do poo poo with a gun pointed at my family's head, made me think you killed them, and gently caress you."
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Jun 1, 2014 05:54
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Snak posted:Del Toro's Khan would have been so much scarier than Cumberbatches. As mentioned elsewhere (and here, I think) having a PoC taking a giant spaceship and intentionally crashing it into a major city would have been... awkward as hell. The thing I took most from Cumberbatch's performance of Khan is that he's normally cool and in control, but the minute he isn't, he's rabid. Walking down the halls, calm. Fighting some folks who came out from the sites? Brutal. Getting his crew back? Calm. Thinking his crew has been exploded? 
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Jun 22, 2014 23:22
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Prime Directive Talk: I always figured the PD came from the position that no matter how pure your motivations are, stepping into another people's poo poo because you have a Better Idea is just setting the stage for you lording over the other people. Over time, you're just going to be a micromanager at best. Hell, one of the best bits of Enterprise was a Vulcan saying "We found you folks after a world war half a decade ago, and guess what? We're still here."
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Aug 16, 2015 05:44
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