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monster on a stick posted:So let me understand: To the first point: there's a specific line that says that Admiral Robocop had people scouring space specifically looking for either threats or hidden weapons and tech. The other things that are "hidden because space is big" weren't actively being looked for. Until Scotty got the coordinates for the dock at Jupiter, nobody was cruising around looking for it. To the second point, Khan says Admiral Robocop was holding his crew hostage. To me, that implies that he didn't have the access to the cryotubes needed to start thawing them out. And when he did have access, it was quicker and more subtle to stash them in torpedoes than to thaw them out. How would he explain trying to walk out of a Section 31 facility with 72 men in tow? He would have gotten gunned down on the spot.
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Jun 3, 2013 16:10
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yronic heroism posted:That's why TNG is the best trek.  It's also TNG.
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Jun 3, 2013 17:00
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The reason Khan was revived was most likely the same situation as in Space Seed. Khan's cryotube was designed to open first and malfunctioned.
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Jun 3, 2013 17:39
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How do coordinates work for revolving objects like planets? Are they fixed points in space or relative? I did have a few technical nitpicks I thought about during my viewing but I still enjoyed it as a film. The characters, the visuals are what makes the movie good. The story was meh but I didn't have to think too much through it and I think that's why it's appealing to a lot of people who never watched trek.
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Jun 3, 2013 18:58
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Jubilee3rd posted:How do coordinates work for revolving objects like planets? Are they fixed points in space or relative?
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Jun 3, 2013 19:04
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Maybe the center of the sun is 0,0,0 and then you add in a time as well?
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Jun 3, 2013 19:12
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Jubilee3rd posted:How do coordinates work for revolving objects like planets? Are they fixed points in space or relative? The short answer to your implicit question is: no, four two-digit numbers won't do it. Nothing is really "fixed" in space. Everything is relative. Even if you choose some arbitrary object and "fix it", you'll find that the rest of the universe is still in motion. In reality, to specify the location of an object in orbit, you first need to know what it's orbiting (I think it's Jupiter in this case) and what that central object's "reference direction" is. The reference direction is probably a standardised thing which you can look up in an almanac. Once you've got that, it takes six parameters to completely specify an orbit, and one additional parameter to specify a position on that orbit. And the numbers are pretty long, too. But it's not so good for the flow of the movie to have a character spend five minutes reading numbers out over the phone. In fact, I wonder why they bothered at all, other than to crowbar a "47" reference in there. qntm fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Jun 3, 2013 |
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Jun 3, 2013 19:23
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jivjov posted:To the first point: there's a specific line that says that Admiral Robocop had people scouring space specifically looking for either threats or hidden weapons and tech. The other things that are "hidden because space is big" weren't actively being looked for. Until Scotty got the coordinates for the dock at Jupiter, nobody was cruising around looking for it. 1) Yes, space is really big. The idea that Admiral Robocop has gone over Federation space - which is very big - with a fine-toothed comb to look for hidden weapons (??) or the Ark of the Covenant is kind of silly. We scan for asteroids now but in a relatively small space. The Federation is what, hundreds of thousands of square light years? The idea that his sensors can pick up something as small as Khan's ship, but other Federation vessels (remember the captains flying in for the meeting? the ones who were not in on the scheme?) didn't pick up on a big shipyard near Jupiter is also silly. At the very least their sensors would have picked up something big and they would have gone to investigate just in case it was an enemy. 2) Why would Khan even have access to his crew? If you are keeping something hostage in order to force someone to perform a job, you generally don't put that "thing" in a place they can access it. Admiral Robocop would have kept them in a different location (say, another planet) that Khan would not have access to, unless he's a drooling idiot.
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Jun 3, 2013 20:27
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monster on a stick posted:1) Yes, space is really big. The idea that Admiral Robocop has gone over Federation space - which is very big - with a fine-toothed comb to look for hidden weapons (??) or the Ark of the Covenant is kind of silly. We scan for asteroids now but in a relatively small space. The Federation is what, hundreds of thousands of square light years? Just stop trying to make logic out of a movie that starts with a spaceship hiding from primitive people by being underwater instead of, I don't loving know... maybe in orbit from SPACE and just magically transporting people to any desired location from said SPACE instead of forcing them to jump off of cliffs?
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Jun 3, 2013 20:56
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Scotty says in the first 5 minutes of the film that the film makes no sense. You should probably believe him.
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Jun 3, 2013 21:06
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It actually kind of makes realworld sense to hide something in Jupiter's orbit, the whole area around Jupiter in real life is choked with massive amounts of radiation that would kill anything without shielding, and presumably impede any sort of crazy space sensors unless they were specifically searching the area.
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Jun 3, 2013 21:16
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monster on a stick posted:1) Yes, space is really big. The idea that Admiral Robocop has gone over Federation space - which is very big - with a fine-toothed comb to look for hidden weapons (??) or the Ark of the Covenant is kind of silly. We scan for asteroids now but in a relatively small space. The Federation is what, hundreds of thousands of square light years?
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Jun 3, 2013 21:23
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monster on a stick posted:Unless you woke up DaVinci (yes I know earlier time), why would you say "hey, you'd be useful for designing our new starship"? Khan was a ruler, not a techie. Khan being intelligent does not mean that he would be useful for weapons design. As a warlord, you might co-opt him for (say) propaganda campaigns to get the Federation to want to declare war on the Klingons without a proper casus belli, or have him be an administrator or something. I mean... he was good at weapons design, though. We see this in the movie. This is like half the plot in the movie, that Khan is really smart at building poo poo. He was asked to help design things by Admiral Marcus because he hoped Khan would be helpful, and he was mostly right. If you were Admiral Marcus then Khan would be used as propaganda, I guess. That's nice to know but isn't a plot hole. Khan most likely could have figured out how to defrost his dudes, I mean it doesn't seem like his plan was to escape with them and then hang around with 72 coffins forever. Presumably Admiral Marcus didn't want him to defrost his dudes since he was using them as collateral. We can surmise that Khan decided smuggling his dudes out and then defrosting them would be easier than defrosting them and then smuggling them out. We know this because in the movie he tries to smuggle his dudes out before defrosting them. monster on a stick posted:1) Yes, space is really big. The idea that Admiral Robocop has gone over Federation space - which is very big - with a fine-toothed comb to look for hidden weapons (??) or the Ark of the Covenant is kind of silly. We scan for asteroids now but in a relatively small space. The Federation is what, hundreds of thousands of square light years? 1) It is pretty unlikely, but it happened. Maybe a ship stumbled across Khan while doing a Reverse Polarity FINETOOTH 3000 Scan for ships within a certain distance of earth. This is like a super scanner or some bullshit that Scotty's assistant invented in a spinoff comic. Also maybe some ship scanned near Jupiter and detected something and reported it up the chain to Admiral Marcus, Head of Starfleet, and he said thanks for the intel. Or maybe he said stay away from there and keep your mouth shut, that's an off limits area because we're doing high clearance stuff there. Don't worry, I'm Admiral Marcus, Head of Starfleet so I have access to info you don't. Alternatively, this is a movie. It depicts extraordinary events that happen because they are interesting. We don't see a movie about the previous 60 years of Admiral Marcus doing stuff because that wasn't a plot for a movie. We don't see the time some dude wanted to build a big secret ship but didn't because he was bad at it. "Unlikely things happened, leading to an extraordinary sequence of events. What's up with that?" isn't valid criticism. 2) In the film we see that Khan is super intelligent and has access to top secret intel and computer systems and he can and will manipulate Starfleet Officers into doing things for him. Draw your own conclusions as to how such a person could do things that Admiral Marcus doesn't want him to do. Tender Bender fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jun 3, 2013 |
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Jun 3, 2013 22:14
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The whole "how did they find Khan?" thing is a very annoying repetition of the "how did they get to the Klingon planet so fast?" thing. Remember, the previous complaint was that the Enterprise, which is moving many times faster than anything will ever be able to move, was moving too fast. It is impossible to go even 101% the speed of light, you accept the Enterprise is moving 10000% the speed of light, but not 100000% the speed of light. The likelihood of finding Khan depends on a long list of factors, NONE of which you have any idea about : - federation sensors - signature of Botany Bay - size of search space - ships active in search space - duration of search - size of the area the Botany Bay was moving through in that time - overlap between federation search space and space Botany Bay was passing through - ... I'm not saying that it is likely they have found Khan. I'm saying, we have absolutely no idea how likely it is for them to have found Khan. None. We don't know any of these. So we most definitely can't even give the roughest of guesses of the likelihood of finding Khan. Furthermore, I do not believe that you saw this movie and throughout, your enjoyment thereof was somehow impeded by the question of how high the chances of them finding Khan were. I just don't believe that. If that annoyed you, why didn't aliens who look like and can have sex with humans annoy you even more? Or anything FTL? Or literal telepathy by touching somebody with your hands? Or the constant violation of Newton's laws? Or sound in space? I'm not saying all complaints about plot holes, or the movie in general, are dumb. Why did Khan go to Kronos of all places? Why was Khan's assassination attempt so dumb? There's probably many meaningful complaints. However, complaints about federation technology being better/worse than you expect it to be, considering everything technological in this movie is flat out impossible, are pointless. This is fascinating. It's like a super-dense flashback to the 60s. How better to learn about a civilization than by its scifi? (What does our ST say about us?) I like how back then, the cultural stereotype was that women have a higher sex drive.
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Jun 3, 2013 22:19
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Cingulate posted:
I never realized that the episode of star trek pitched in Mad Men (where "The Negrons are white!") was based on an actual pitch, titled "Kongo"
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Jun 3, 2013 23:48
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You know one of the best things this movie has given me is the mind blowing idea that you can have round ice cubes that you can pour almost no liqour over. I just spent four bucks to buy a round ice cube tray and hell if it isn't the best thing ever. Its probably in my head.
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Jun 4, 2013 04:40
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A great way to open the next movie is to have Carol Marcus pregnant...after she and Dr. McCoy got happily married. You know the rage would make it all worthwhile.
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Jun 4, 2013 08:26
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Mister Roboto posted:A great way to open the next movie is to have Carol Marcus pregnant...after she and Dr. McCoy got happily married. No, the main villain will have a torpedo that sends out a wave that can wipe out all life on a planet. Marcus will study a captured torpedo and say something like "well with a few modifications you could program this technology to create life instead of destroy it... nah it probably wouldn't be stable".
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Jun 4, 2013 09:45
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I still don't get the thread title.
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Jun 4, 2013 10:02
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7thBatallion posted:I still don't get the thread title. The Star Wars thread is named "pointy spaceships". It's a compare-and-contrast with the general spaceship designs of both series. Star Trek ships, specifically federation ships, have big round saucer sections, whereas a lot of Star Wars ships have pointy bits on the front (Millennium Falcon) or pointy designs in general (like the X-Wings).
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Jun 4, 2013 11:45
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The joke is that Star Trek is now Star Wars and the only difference between them is the shape of the spaceships.
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Jun 4, 2013 12:25
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Alchenar posted:No, the main villain will have a torpedo that sends out a wave that can wipe out all life on a planet. Marcus will study a captured torpedo and say something like "well with a few modifications you could program this technology to create life instead of destroy it... nah it probably wouldn't be stable". Actually, I think you have the seeds of a great idea there: After traveling around for 3 years of their 5-year mission, during which Kirk & Co. have had a few of the adventures in TOS, as well as several completely different ones, they have come across a strange new world with new life and a new civilization (again). The next film will build on Abrams's (or his replacement's) world-building skills to demonstrate why this new life and its civilization is so wondrous and exciting and unique and worth exploring...and preserving. This would be a pre-warp but not "primitive" civilization, perhaps equivalent to 21st century earth but culturally/physiologically very different. Imagine some combination of Nibiru, Pandora (from Avatar) and Blade Runner Los Angeles, to name a few examples of what I think are compelling science fiction settings. Then we learn that they are close to developing a technology which Spock and Dr. Marcus quickly figure out will stand a serious chance of ending all life on this planet. So the Enterprise has to make first contact with this species despite not having originally planned to do so, which means we get another take on the TNG episode "First Contact" (one of my favorites) as well as something like The Day the Earth Stood Still but from the POV of the friendly, advanced aliens (i.e. the Federation). Do we identify more with the Enterprise crew, or with the aliens they are contacting? Or alternatively, the Klingons and/or Romulans have a torpedo that will wipe out all life on the planet and they want to use it to settle this planet to use as a strategic operations base to fight the other power, and in the interests of preserving this (well developed, sympathetic, beautiful) alien civilization, Captain Kirk has to play the Yojimbo/Man With No Name figure and pit both sides against each other without the aliens ever finding out...but they do, and then you get the first contact issues again. You could even have the Enterprise saucer section detach and land on the planet, so the humans become the aliens arriving in their flying saucer...
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Jun 4, 2013 15:04
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Cingulate posted:The whole "how did they find Khan?" thing is a very annoying repetition of the "how did they get to the Klingon planet so fast?" thing. They have a Warp scale in Star Trek. The fact that Warp Speed has limitations was the whole reason why Voyager was going to take 70 years to get from one part of the galaxy to the other. Now, I'm not saying that this movie has to be 100% faithful to the source material but Star Trek is the franchise with the most in-universe tech specs out there. You may not understand this but nerding out about technical details has been a part of Trek since the 60's. The warp scale is an established part of the universe and ignoring that would be like having a TopGun movie where a fighter jet goes from DC to Moscow in 30 seconds because hey we've got a plane that's flying 2x the speed of sound so that's the same as having it fly 2000x the speed of sound, Mach be damned. These in-universe restrictions actually help solve more problems than they create. Back in the day your transporter had a limited range. That helps explain why Kirk wouldn't just ultra distance transport from the Enterprise to the Klingon planet surface, give Kahn a bear-hug and then transport away.
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Jun 4, 2013 19:03
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I liked this movie. The whitewashing does suck, though. As usual, SMG had some great stuff to say in here.
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Jun 4, 2013 19:05
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I find it hard to take them updating Khan's look from Rod Stewart to Morrisey as "whitewashing", since the original depiction and premise of the character is so ludicrous to begin with (despite the iconic depiction by the great Ricardo Montalban).
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Jun 4, 2013 19:09
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edit Nevermind.
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Jun 4, 2013 19:10
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I liked the movie. More than the first one. Also I barely watched any original Star Trek and knew the basic plot of the first one and Wrath of Khan. I only started watching with TNG and then watched DS9. Never went backwards. The whole "how did they not find XYZ in space" makes sense, but I don't really care. I was more baffled at Nero spending 25 years in the same spot with his crew waiting for Spock. If I were in his crew I would've mutinied lonnnnnng before that. And second I was surprised that Khan with his superior brain couldn't figure out that they MIGHT arm the torpedoes.
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Jun 4, 2013 19:14
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Na'at posted:They have a Warp scale in Star Trek. The fact that Warp Speed has limitations was the whole reason why Voyager was going to take 70 years to get from one part of the galaxy to the other. Now, I'm not saying that this movie has to be 100% faithful to the source material but Star Trek is the franchise with the most in-universe tech specs out there. You may not understand this but nerding out about technical details has been a part of Trek since the 60's. The warp scale is an established part of the universe and ignoring that would be like having a TopGun movie where a fighter jet goes from DC to Moscow in 30 seconds because hey we've got a plane that's flying 2x the speed of sound so that's the same as having it fly 2000x the speed of sound, Mach be damned. It's just problematic in general to try to go for the 'wagon train to the stars' feel when you also establish that it takes literally seconds to get anywhere. All sense of space is lost and you can't really bring it back.
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Jun 4, 2013 19:16
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Na'at posted:They have a Warp scale in Star Trek. The fact that Warp Speed has limitations was the whole reason why Voyager was going to take 70 years to get from one part of the galaxy to the other. Now, I'm not saying that this movie has to be 100% faithful to the source material but Star Trek is the franchise with the most in-universe tech specs out there. You may not understand this but nerding out about technical details has been a part of Trek since the 60's. The warp scale is an established part of the universe and ignoring that would be like having a TopGun movie where a fighter jet goes from DC to Moscow in 30 seconds because hey we've got a plane that's flying 2x the speed of sound so that's the same as having it fly 2000x the speed of sound, Mach be damned. I mean in the movie we saw though Warp doesn't work that way. "Nerding out over technical details" and connecting stardates and warp core readings between episodes or entire series has been a pasttime of the fans that is based on nothing concrete. The technology on the show has always been a product of what props or plot developments the writers needed and they often wrote "Insert technobabble here" into scenes. This is a franchise that wanted to do a gangster episode so they wrote a planet that had read a book about earth mobsters and then modeled their entire society to be an exact replica of 1920's Chicago. This is a series that says we all have a literal beard-wearing evil twin. The biggest quibble about techno stuff in the movie is the apparently fast trip from the Klingon world to Earth, which is a problem not because it defies Trek conventions but because it doesn't really make sense within the context of the movie itself (why all the fuss if the planet is five minutes away?) It's ultimately irrelevant to the movie because there is absolutely no narrative difference between the Enterprise being attacked in warp or the Enterprise showing up at Earth to find Marcus had beat them to it and had been waiting for hours or something.
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Jun 4, 2013 19:35
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I find it hard to take them updating Khan's look from Rod Stewart to Morrisey as "whitewashing", since the original depiction and premise of the character is so ludicrous to begin with (despite the iconic depiction by the great Ricardo Montalban). I mean, it still is, and I'm not sure why you wouldn't think so just because a person of color could conceivably pass or "looks white," but it's neither here nor there.
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Jun 4, 2013 19:44
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What I'm saying is that a guy like Ricardo Montalban playing a guy named Khan is already iffy - I'm referring to a Mexican "passing" for someone who is presumably a Sikh, or something? I don't see how either is more or less objectionable than the other.
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Jun 4, 2013 19:50
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:What I'm saying is that a guy like Ricardo Montalban playing a guy named Khan is already iffy - I'm referring to a Mexican "passing" for someone who is presumably a Sikh, or something? I don't see how either is more or less objectionable than the other. I always thought he was just white with a tan + body oil.
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Jun 4, 2013 20:07
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PaganGoatPants posted:I always thought he was just white with a tan + body oil. Nothing about the character makes any particular sense so it's not a fight I really want to pick with NuTrek2.
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Jun 4, 2013 21:00
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:What I'm saying is that a guy like Ricardo Montalban playing a guy named Khan is already iffy - I'm referring to a Mexican "passing" for someone who is presumably a Sikh, or something? I don't see how either is more or less objectionable than the other. It's been gone over before, but cross-casting another person of color is less bad (but still not good) than casting white.
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Jun 4, 2013 21:01
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The Warszawa posted:It's been gone over before, but cross-casting another person of color is less bad (but still not good) than casting white. No, it's exactly as stupid.
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Jun 4, 2013 21:02
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For me it's literally just that I'd rather have seen someone with an ethnicity other than "white" since Khan was originally a person of color (as Cho put it). It doesn't ruin the movie. There are reasons it sort of works better that he is white (which I don't think work as an excuse, but it softens the blow). Star Trek is incredibly inconsistent anyway. It's a minor quibble for me, but it's there. I really, really loved the movie overall, though. I realize that Star Trek is one of those places where I can't get enough distance from it to really analyze it the way I would if it were a generic sci-fi movie. I have a long-standing and deep-abiding love of Star Trek and I can't be as critical as I would be if it weren't a kind of older brother to me.
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Jun 4, 2013 21:05
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Honestly, in my view it's at least as bad because it's literally lumping everyone who is not white into a "non-white" group, further perpetuating the false and racist "white/nonwhite" dichotomy. Now I realize that such a dichotomy is very real in many places (USA, France) but there is no reason a movie, whose world a good director/writer/producer/cinematographer/casting director/etc. should be able to control completely, needs to reflect the harsh realities of modern society, ESPECIALLY when it is a science fiction film. Brecht said that art is not a mirror to reflect society, but rather a hammer with which to shape it--cross-casting a brown person as another kind of brown person is an instance of beating society further into the ground, not building it up.
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Jun 4, 2013 21:12
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:No, it's exactly as stupid. Answer me this, what purpose was served by casting Cumberbatch, one of the whitest actors around, as a character who is textually Sikh instead of an actor who can at least look the part, if not match the characters ethnicity? "Strength of performance" is not a valid answer.
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Jun 4, 2013 21:29
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What purpose is served by naming the character Khan?
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Jun 4, 2013 21:32
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(edit: RE Mr. Stefan) Ticket sales. Cumberbatch is very popular with fans of Sherlock, who are also fans of Doctor Who, who are also fans of Firefly, etc--and many of whom did NOT like ST09. Getting him in the movie attracted a lot of people who may otherwise have refused to see the movie. Of course, casting Shahrukh Khan, or Aamir Khan, or Salman Khan would have done a lot MORE to increase ticket sales in several other markets.
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Jun 4, 2013 21:34
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