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So, having read the thread now, I guess I wanted to contribute why I decided not to watch Star Trek: Into Darkness. A contrast from the usual "my reaction" posts. To be clear, I made this decision before reading the thread, and only started because I heard that there was controversy and wanted to see what it was. I like Star Trek '09, but something about this one rubbed me off from the beginning. The title bothered me to start with. Star Trek '09 was already pretty drat gloomy. Two entire homeworlds, and billions of people are killed in important plot points. Main characters watch their parents die brutally right in front of them. A guy's tortured into paralysis. The spaceship that looks like it came straight from our collective nightmares. The constant fear and anger that overwhelms every character's emotions, even Spock's. That wasn't dark enough? We need to go more dark than this? Really? The next bit that didn't impressed me was the poster. I'd post one, but really, looking through Google image search they're all basically the same thing. Mean-looking guy with a trenchcoat wades through random debris and destruction. So, everything just really dark and depressing looking. I'm not even complaining about this "not being real Trek". I see movies like Star Trek for escapism, and everything I see about this movie just screams "grimdark misery". I can get that without a 190 million budget and the Star Trek logo thank you very much. Then I read the Current Releases review, and, well, that was just it for me. I immediately guessed from the review's writing that the pasty white trenchcoat dude in the poster had to be Khan, because it was the most pointlessly stupid revelation I could think of that could only possibly serve to placate long-term Trek fans. I wasn't thinking "gently caress racebending" at the time (though having read the thread the argument fits), I was thinking- this guy doesn't look like Khan. He looks like one of those nerds that wears a fedora. And besides that Khan was very goal-oriented. He didn't flap his longcoat around stuff he just destroyed because he was a total evil badass. He only did anything because it had some specific purpose. Now, this was all just guesswork on my part, since I hadn't actually seen the movie, but from what I've read in this thread I'd say my guess was right. (whoever said that Khan was a noble savage is an idiot, by the way. Running an empire that spans a quarter of the world is the opposite of savagery. Learn what words mean.) As a final note, I really like this sentence from the Wikipedia plot summary: quote:McCoy's experiment on a Tribble reveals that Khan's blood contains regenerative properties that may save Kirk. Read that. Read that sentence. If I had shown that to you a year ago, would you have thought I was describing this movie, or a really bad piece of Star Trek fanfiction? Everything I learn about this movie just makes me more disappointed. So, that's why I'm not seeing this movie. Still looks really fun to discuss, I must admit, but a movie's in a pretty bad place if I want to talk about it more than I actually want to see it.
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May 28, 2013 02:04
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 09:53 |
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mr. stefan posted:Speaking as someone who thought STID was a pretty average film at best with a lot of problems, I don't really understood the criticism of how the Enterprise is always the only ship in the sector. I mean, this isn't TNG where they have magic factory boxes that can poo poo out fully built spaceships with the press of a button, interstellar starships are probably a pretty big investment of time and resources best used for, you know, interstellar exploration rather than chilling in orbit around Earth waiting for some invasion fleet or giant black space dildo or unsubtle communist metaphor to roll in. Usually "the sector" is just some random place in the middle of the nowhere. I tend to think of it as akin to how it's easy to call for backup in New York City, but if you're facing down gangster buffalo in Wyoming, yeah, you're probably on your own. I didn't think this was much of an issue in '09, since the implication seemed to be that Nero had already destroyed every ship within spitting distance of Earth save for the Enterprise during the fight near Vulcan. When Nemesis did the same thing, I had the exact same complaint that the posters here are expressing about Into Darkness.
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May 30, 2013 07:12
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Jefferoo posted:
That's really what the new Khan looks like? It's just so...well, "white" comes to mind, but the word I'm really going for is overcompensating. The whole point of Khan was that he didn't need to compensate for anything. He had the biggest dick in the room, he knew it, everyone in the room knew it. He didn't need weapons, and when he did they didn't even need to be good weapons. This is actually part of his comeuppance in Space Seed when he thinks he can just smack Kirk around with his fists, then Kirk blindsides him with a giant metal pipe. This image is so...utterly divorced from that notion of Khan's character I'm just increasingly puzzled why they felt the need to make this guy Khan at all. This would be like the new Star Wars movie making Han Solo dress in all leather and constantly talk about how many boobs he touches (there's probably a fanfic where he does this).
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Sep 2, 2013 10:20
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Lord Krangdar posted:A lot of these are only problems if you expect Star Trek to be totally serious, consistent, and realistic. Star Trek has never been totally serious, consistent, or realistic. True, but good Star Trek tended to be silly inconsistent and fantastical in the pursuance of interesting ideas, not action movie stuff. quote:Starfleet scientists didn't have as much experience making weapons because the Federation was ostensibly a peaceful organization. Does everyone in the Federation really have that little imagination? If I had to choose between the entire modern population of Iceland or Napoleon Bonaparte for someone to build super drones, I'd pick the Icelanders.
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Dec 23, 2013 03:50
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Lord Krangdar posted:Even then, taking the repeated criticisms in this thread seriously would mean like 90% of even just the main series (meaning TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise) was a detriment to the all-important canon. EDIT- Didn't see your last reply where you basically said the same thing. You know, honestly, even speaking as a fan of Star Trek I think it would be perfectly fair to say that 90% of all the televised stuff was basically crap that went against the spirit of what made Star Trek good. Half the fun in the franchise is just being able to complain about how bad it is, with the other half being those rare outstanding episodes that actually do a good job raising serious intellectual questions. The reason the franchise got stuck in a rut was because the ratio of bad episodes to good kept increasing with each new series, thanks to the writers deciding to play it safe instead of coming up with genuinely interesting adventures. I think maybe why an apparent failure from Abrams stings more is because he promised he was going to clean up ship and get rid of those attitudes...and now they're just regular action movies with random Star Trek references. This isn't a bad thing by any means. It's just weird to hear it heralded as a triumphant return to Star Trek form when really the franchise was only transformed into something that has to be evaluated on a completely different scale.
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Dec 24, 2013 09:30
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PeterWeller posted:Spock is emotionally stunted. One of the nicer points of Abrams' films is that that they show how being raised Vulcan has done a total number on Spock. I can't help but wonder what any of that is supposed to mean to someone who has no idea what Vulcans are. Do the (new) movies ever actually address that? I remember one scene from the first one where little Spock freaks out at the principal's office or something, but if I didn't already know the Star Trek mythos that scene would have just said "Spock has anger issues". Not exactly the kind of deep characterization worth hanging multiple climaxes on. Space Hamlet posted:when odo shapeshifts into his uniform is he also making his comm badge out of himself? does that mean he can create other types of sophisticated machinery? could he become a working photon torpedo? a warp core? a starship? a borg, complete with nanomachines? Somehow this line of thought bothers me less than wondering why Starfleet put Napoleon in charge of the drone program.
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Apr 8, 2014 20:25
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Does anyone else think the Star Trek reboot has put way too much effort into establishing that Kirk is a total horndog? I watched the entire original series as a kid but "Kirk bones everything" was not something I picked up on until I started seeing pop culture references about it. On balance I'd say Kirk had about as many love interests as Spock did. But then I'm probably blocking out the terrible episodes I don't want to remember. For the sake of characterization sure it's all right. But when the movie goes out of its way to rewrite canon so that Kirk was banging TOS characters? I mean come on.
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May 21, 2014 02:33
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