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Trek isn't all that married to constant internal consistency of time, space and technology all the time, but the JJTreks come out sort of slapdash and random in that regard. It's an element that's always sort of frustrating to argue because it almost comes off like I'm stubbornly refusing to accept JJTrek's creative decisions to tell a story while I was more accepting of previous Trek films/TV using similar tactics to tell their stories. The plot to STID feels like a series of happy accidents and contrivances, a steady stream of , "It just so happens..." sort of moments all throughout. I know Trek will not be consistent with itself all the time, every time, but the film seems to be more concerned about huge set pieces and the crafting together of a story to make all that work came second. JediTalentAgent fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 08:10
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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. Now this would work fine if they launched them at Kronos because the people inside would still die except for Khan who would probably survive a couple of cryo tubes impacting in some area around him (if they didn't just burn up in the atmosphere but I'm no expert on Trek physics). So when they transport the emptied torpedoes onto Khan's ship at the end did they fill them with explosives that they just had on hand or what? Didn't they take off the warheads to access the cryo tubes? There's still probably a fuel/propulsion issue but ehhhh inertia and momentum make that kind of a non-issue in space.
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Sep 25, 2013 13:43
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JediTalentAgent posted:Trek isn't all that married to constant internal consistency of time, space and technology all the time, but the JJTreks come out sort of slapdash and random in that regard. The original Star Trek was very much in the context of Cold War tension and hysteria, whereas the Abrams films have overtly (and necessarily) been post-9/11 responses. A typical criticism from the Trekkie population is that the newer films lost the submarine-naval battle feel of the older shows.
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Sep 25, 2013 14:21
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Danger posted:A typical criticism from the Trekkie population is that the newer films lost the submarine-naval battle feel of the older shows.
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Sep 25, 2013 14:31
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Cingulate posted:But have they? I don't think I'm a Trekkie, but I loved WoK, which was the submarine-iest of ST movies (together with I guess parts of VI). But both new movies are about as submariney as WoK really. Yes, they tried to give the ship more size, but fundamentally, it looks MORE claustrophobic than it did in WoK, most of which is on the living room - style bridge. I think he means that in the sense of the slow battle sequences that are all about maneuvering one ship to get an advantage over the other. The space battles in the JJ movies have been much more frenetic and less 'tactical'. As for the torpedoes, the cryo tubes replaced the fuel cells.
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Sep 25, 2013 14:53
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Well there aren't any real space battles in Into Darkness, it's just the big ship beating up the little ship, then some talk, then more beating up. It was like that in the last one, too - no real space battles because the evil ship is simply superior. Nero never really fought the Enterprise, it was only ever all or nothing. There's never a battle that could go either way, the only options are: the Enterprise is killed off instantly; the Enterprise survives narrowly. It's never Enterprise wins vs. Evil Ship wins. Khan isn't killed with phasers either. Contrast with the last TNG movie, which had a huge space battle that was slanted, but not one-sided.
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Sep 25, 2013 14:58
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Cingulate posted:Well there aren't any real space battles in Into Darkness, it's just the big ship beating up the little ship, then some talk, then more beating up. It was like that in the last one, too - no real space battles because the evil ship is simply superior. Nero never really fought the Enterprise, it was only ever all or nothing. There's never a battle that could go either way, the only options are: the Enterprise is killed off instantly; the Enterprise survives narrowly. It's never Enterprise wins vs. Evil Ship wins. Khan isn't killed with phasers either. It's almost as if in the modern day there aren't two fairly matched powers declaring war but one with an obvious superiority destroying the inferior one! (see: Iraq, Georgia, etc)
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Sep 25, 2013 15:02
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And Spock kills the Evil Empire megaship using an IED.
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Sep 25, 2013 15:04
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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. Now this would work fine if they launched them at Kronos because the people inside would still die except for Khan who would probably survive a couple of cryo tubes impacting in some area around him (if they didn't just burn up in the atmosphere but I'm no expert on Trek physics). So when they transport the emptied torpedoes onto Khan's ship at the end did they fill them with explosives that they just had on hand or what? They were probably still filled with explosives cause the Admiral guy wanted to start a war with the Klingons.
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Sep 25, 2013 15:14
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Terror Sweat posted:They were probably still filled with explosives cause the Admiral guy wanted to start a war with the Klingons. IN the film they say that the fuel was removed in order to put the cryotubes in. It does prompt the question: if these torpedoes will work totally fine without the fuel, what was it for?
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Sep 25, 2013 15:32
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Snak posted:IN the film they say that the fuel was removed in order to put the cryotubes in. It does prompt the question: if these torpedoes will work totally fine without the fuel, what was it for? They didn't actually fire any of them, right? Maybe they wouldn't work.
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Sep 25, 2013 15:34
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Sir Kodiak posted:They didn't actually fire any of them, right? Maybe they wouldn't work. But then Admiral Robocop's plan is even stupider. Now it only works IF he assumes that Kirk is a good boy and won't shoot the torpedoes before telling Khan he has them. Actually that was the only way it worked ever, so I guess the entire thing is a bluff...
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Sep 25, 2013 15:43
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Snak posted:IN the film they say that the fuel was removed in order to put the cryotubes in. It does prompt the question: if these torpedoes will work totally fine without the fuel, what was it for? Clearly a man unfamiliar with government contracting. computer parts posted:It's almost as if in the modern day there aren't two fairly matched powers declaring war but one with an obvious superiority destroying the inferior one! (see: Iraq, Georgia, etc) Slightly complicated by the obviously superior force being the lone rogue whose super-ship may be their only physical asset, versus the plucky underdog who is merely a temporarily isolated representative of a vast organized semi-military hegemony.
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Sep 25, 2013 16:59
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:
He's not a lone rogue if he's the de jure commander of the armed forces.
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Sep 25, 2013 17:01
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computer parts posted:He's not a lone rogue if he's the de jure commander of the armed forces. There's a reason he's got like half a dozen dudes on his ship, and is absolutely desperate to make sure Kirk doesn't reach anyone else. He's launching a coup with his tiny insider cadre and by the time he breaks out his super-ship that coup is already failing badly. This represents any faction of the War on Terror even less than what I originally said. And there's no question that Nero doesn't represent or command anything greater than his solitary super mining dreadnought, like you could make a case that he's some kind of fantastical nightmare Osama bin Laden as Godzilla but then the analogy you're fishing for is reversed. It's not a War on Terror parallelism (or if it is, it's a pretty bad one) it's underscoring that Abram's Federation is not supposed to be seen as an aggressive fighting force, despite every "science vessel" bristling with banks of lasers and torpedos and poo poo and the military aesthetic and structure inherited from old Trek. It's not about crude and overdone political metaphor for Iraq/Afghanistan, he's dealing in broader notions and idealized forms - the NATO monopole as peaceful arbitrators and benefactors (ignore the nukes), terrorists as avengers of indecipherable wrongs from the unknown beyond that catch everyone unawares and obliterate everything unstoppably, war hawks in office as a palace coup against the peace-loving and stable-but-complacent American normalcy. Sort of like the original Star Trek rarely followed actual Cold War politics, favoring literalizing the mythical narratives about its participants and banging those archetypes together. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 17:06
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I still can't get over the raw stupidity of having Khan be an expert weapon and starship designer. He was like two hundred years old but when they find him Star Fleet just assumes that he will be great at making weapons, which he apparently is. There were a lot of other increidbly stupid sequences in this movie - the part where Scotty sneaks his shuttle craft into the shuttle bay of a heavily guarded ultra secret warship also stands out - but the fact that the script writers were too lazy to think of a better reason for Khan to be there in the first place really says something about the priorities of the writers. Maybe if the movie had a more interesting character development instead of having literally the same emotional plot arc as the first movie (villain seeking revenge for his people, Kirk learning about leadership and maturity, Spock learning the importance of emotions) then it would have been easier to tolerate how blatantly stupid the actual plot was.
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Sep 25, 2013 17:26
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IDK I thought the idea of a totally peaceful culture having to learn how to make war from some soldier from ages they thought they'd left behind was a pretty good one, it just didn't sit well with, again, guns and bombs being loving everywhere in the Federation.
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Sep 25, 2013 17:28
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Snak posted:IN the film they say that the fuel was removed in order to put the cryotubes in. It does prompt the question: if these torpedoes will work totally fine without the fuel, what was it for? Well that sounds like a momentarily stupid design decision for special new long distance torpedoes  then again long distance seems to mean "from orbit" in this movie.e: Helsing posted:There were a lot of other increidbly stupid sequences in this movie - the part where Scotty sneaks his shuttle craft into the shuttle bay of a heavily guarded ultra secret warship also stands out - but the fact that the script writers were too lazy to think of a better reason for Khan to be there in the first place really says something about the priorities of the writers. Oh god this part. You would think that one of those dozen shuttles would have noticed that someone is joining their formation as they approach their secret spaceship factory. Or you know, dozens of IFF checks, automatic scans that would show a suspicious crew of one and nothing on board that they're waiting for... Sir Kodiak posted:I thought Admiral Marcus didn't know the bodies were in the tubes, but it's been a while since I saw it. If I recall correctly he only hoped Kirk wouldn't find out. BiggestOrangeTree fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 17:31
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Snak posted:But then Admiral Robocop's plan is even stupider. Now it only works IF he assumes that Kirk is a good boy and won't shoot the torpedoes before telling Khan he has them. Actually that was the only way it worked ever, so I guess the entire thing is a bluff... I thought Admiral Marcus didn't know the bodies were in the tubes, but it's been a while since I saw it.
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Sep 25, 2013 17:34
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:the military aesthetic and structure inherited from old Trek. There doesn't actually seem to be much military in their aesthetic or structure. Their uniforms make them look more like athletes than naval officers, and the command structure seems incredibly fluid for a military organization. Abrams' Trek has really stepped back from the naval themes of the TOS films after TMP. "Bristling with banks of phasers and torpedoes" isn't a very good description either. It's difficult to see just how many weapons are on the Enterprise, and none of them stick out like, you know, bristles.
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Sep 25, 2013 17:52
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:IDK I thought the idea of a totally peaceful culture having to learn how to make war from some soldier from ages they thought they'd left behind was a pretty good one, it just didn't sit well with, again, guns and bombs being loving everywhere in the Federation. If there had been any attempt to actually portray the Federation as peaceful or utopian then maybe that would have worked. However Abrams has so little respect for his audience's intelligence - or maybe he just doesn't give a poo poo about trying to imagine what the future would look like - so in every particular he seems to try and make the world of the Federation appear almost identical to contemporary earth society. That's actually another of my big complaints. There's no attempt to actually portray the future in these movies. On the rare occasions when we actually see what regular Federation society looks like the film's creators have gone out of their way to make it as familiar and banal as possible. It really just reinforces the fact that this movie is Mission Impossible in space rather than being an actual science fiction film about futuristic technologies or societies. BiggestOrangeTree posted:Oh god this part. You would think that one of those dozen shuttles would have noticed that someone is joining their formation as they approach their secret spaceship factory. Or you know, dozens of IFF checks, automatic scans that would show a suspicious crew of one and nothing on board that they're waiting for... Yeah I'd been getting increasingly irritated at the movie but I think that was the point when I realized I wasn't going to enjoy the film very much. It made it abundantly clear that the script was just a vehicle for getting from one action scene to the next. I suppose you could argue that this movie was supposed to be about character and emotion, but in that case they could have gone outside their comfort zone a bit more and introduced new character arcs for the main cast rather than just recycling the ones from the last movie.
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Sep 25, 2013 18:00
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Helsing posted:That's actually another of my big complaints. There's no attempt to actually portray the future in these movies. On the rare occasions when we actually see what regular Federation society looks like the film's creators have gone out of their way to make it as familiar and banal as possible. It really just reinforces the fact that this movie is Mission Impossible in space rather than being an actual science fiction film about futuristic technologies or societies. These movies aren't actually about the future. Part of the point is for the audience to be able to relate to the society in the film because that society represents our society. It's fair to want a science fiction movie to depict the future and be let down when it doesn't, but that doesn't make it a bad film, and that doesn't mean the filmmaker doesn't respect the audience. It just means the filmmaker had a different purpose in mind.
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Sep 25, 2013 18:06
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Helsing posted:There were a lot of other increidbly stupid sequences in this movie - the part where Scotty sneaks his shuttle craft into the shuttle bay of a heavily guarded ultra secret warship also stands out - but the fact that the script writers were too lazy to think of a better reason for Khan to be there in the first place really says something about the priorities of the writers. Again, this is part of the reason that is so frustrating because I see all these individual plot elements that do go nowhere except to allow them to move from one scene to another as if by magic. Just like the Star Wars prequels, it's a very video game feeling movie where the story is less important than the action. Part of me also wants to tell filmmakers that we can have a our Western Political, Military and Industrial Complex stand-ins NOT be automatically EVIL AND CORRUPT every time we want to tell a story, too. I get it, we live in a crappy modern world full of that stuff and they're trying to make 9/11 analogies all over the place and I know this sounds admittedly naive, but why can't Starfleet be the sort of hopeful, competent and idealistic force for good organization that it was back in the TOS and TNG days, where obviously evil leaders felt far fewer and far between and it seems like they were used for better effect when introduced.
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Sep 25, 2013 18:20
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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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PeterWeller posted:There doesn't actually seem to be much military in their aesthetic or structure. Their uniforms make them look more like athletes than naval officers, and the command structure seems incredibly fluid for a military organization. Abrams' Trek has really stepped back from the naval themes of the TOS films after TMP. Well we know they've got at least seventy-something high-yield missiles on board, replacing its apparently similar but lower-tech normal armament. That's rather significantly more than the real-world standard noncombatant vehicle loadout of "none". Buncha big lasers and stuff too. For all the time the movie spends on discussing how nonaggressive and unprepared for warfare the Federation is, characters inevitably seem to have guns right on hand any time there's anything they may wish to shoot at, which is often. Their command structure may be movie-fluid and kindly to the renegade captain who bucks all the rules, but it's still a uniformed force with explicitly military-derived ranks and language and structure. I'm not sure what your basis of comparison is if you don't find the Federation militaristic, they're more visibly so than some actual first-world armies in peacetime. Picture if, like, the Space Shuttle or any Arctic exploration boat had a battery of missiles capable of taking out a city as a matter of course. If every expedition into the Amazon had a full complement of small arms and a battleship for fire support. Picture if actual geologists and diplomats and poo poo were marching around in uniform with ranks like "Admiral". Would this be a society you'd say is more peaceful than the one you live in? Would you say they need outside help in relearning how to wage war? The movie doesn't really seem to know how to make them visibly more aggressive than the normal Federation baseline either, which is why its whole anti-warmongering theme falls apart into absurd hairsplitting like Scotty freaking out because the new torpedos are dangerous and made for killing, unlike the good old peace torpedos, dammit we're not a warship we're a science vessel! it is a gun control analogy Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 18:42
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JediTalentAgent posted:Again, this is part of the reason that is so frustrating because I see all these individual plot elements that do go nowhere except to allow them to move from one scene to another as if by magic. Just like the Star Wars prequels, it's a very video game feeling movie where the story is less important than the action. Because we live in a time of obviously evil and/or corrupt leaders? Because fiction, especially science fiction is always a product of it environment and is intended to be relate-able. There are a lot of people that would love to portray the western political and military-industrial complex as benevolent and necessary to protect "our freedoms". The short answer is: Because Star Trek isn't about telling stories. It's not about the plot and it's not about technology. It's about ethical dilemmas. More specifically, it's about using science fiction to frame popular ethical dilemmas in settings that make them absurd. This is why subtlety and Star Trek do not mesh, because they are almost antithetical to each-other.
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Sep 25, 2013 18:43
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:Picture if, like, the Space Shuttle or any Arctic exploration boat had a battery of missiles capable of taking out a city as a matter of course. The Space Shuttle isn't a a space exploration vessel, it's a space exploitation vessel, basically a truck into low orbit. We already know what's up there, we can see it from the ground. There is nothing done by the United States, or any country in the 21st century, that is particularly analogous to the non-military functions of Starfleet. Historically, it was common to take military equipment along on the initial explorations into places that might have intelligent (in the real world, human) inhabitants back when there were unexplored inhabitable places. The ships that brought explorers to the Americas had cannons on them. Robert de La Salle explored the Mississippi on what was basically a warship. Lewis and Clark were members of the US Army and traveled with dozens of armed soldiers. That isn't to say that Starfleet, as an agency tasked with exploration, should behave the same way. But if that's the analogy it's more appropriate to talking about the mistakes of the past than of the present. That's how it was treated in TNG: they still had the guns but had a greater tendency to avoid making exploration simultaneously a show of force. To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with your (Tubgirl Cosplay's) basic point, that the Federation is obviously militarized. But so is every modern nation. What I'm not clear on, and this isn't necessarily directed at you, is what exactly Starfleet is supposed to be where it isn't obvious and natural that they'd carry weapons with them? What, specifically, in ST:ID is "too militarized" and needs to be wound back, and what is the purpose of that organization? Because in the United States it's primarily the police and federal law enforcement agencies, who don't have counterparts, as far as I can tell, in ST:ID. Sir Kodiak fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 19:27
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Sir Kodiak posted:Historically, it was common to take military equipment along on the initial explorations into places that might have intelligent (in the real world, human) inhabitants back when there were unexplored inhabitable places. The ships that brought explorers to the Americas had cannons on them. Robert de La Salle explored the Mississippi on what was basically a warship. Lewis and Clark were members of the US Army and traveled with dozens of armed soldiers. Note that these were explicitly missions of imperial conquest, aimed at scouting out the New World in preparation for depopulating it, and they used those guns, which are all things I think we're supposed to take at face value that Starfleet isn't doing. When packing for an expedition, then as now, you don't waste weight on a bunch of weapons unless you're planning to start a fight when you get where you're going. Who knows maybe when the third movie comes out we'll see that the Federation's paved over that one planet with the volcanos and savages, and the whole point of the Prime Directive is really so locals don't get advance warning of the invasion fleet. And I don't think STID has a thing to do with police militarization, you're not exactly using your imagination if you think that's the only aspect of America someone might think is too bellicose. It's addressing pretty plainly the American maintenance of its position through force and military power and how that butts up against the official narrative that it does so through diplomacy and trade, and appears to be incorrectly ascribing the former as some sort of new development that started with Bush. Anyway it's trying to claim that it's some kind of notable reversal in its original pacifistic base nature, when it's plain as day both for Starfleet and America that it's been a military empire was all along, hence the incoherence of the message. The new torpedoes are aggressive and evil because they're not the same torpedoes we always shot at people; the new Enterprise is a sinister and terrifying perversion because it's got all the same warmaking apparatus as the old Enterprise but in greater quantity; vaporizing foreign villages with drones is inhuman when we should be using good old bomber planes and cruise missiles. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 20:01
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:Note that these were explicitly missions of imperial conquest, aimed at scouting out the New World in preparation for depopulating it, and they used those guns, which are all things I think we're supposed to take at face value that Starfleet isn't doing. When packing for an expedition, then as now, you don't waste weight on a bunch of weapons unless you're planning to start a fight when you get where you're going. That presents the Lewis and Clark expedition as being more belligerent than I think is fair. If the goal of that expedition was to make preparations for bringing the area under the control of the US government, we sure took a long time to actually do so. A show of force was part of it (as I mentioned), but does history really support the idea that Thomas Jefferson commissioned the expedition with the plan to eventually exterminate the Native Americans? To turn it around, what historical examples are there of significant government expeditions into unexplored but inhabited lands which weren't seriously armed? There may well be examples, I have a modest depth of knowledge here, but I personally can't think of any. Tubgirl Cosplay posted:And I don't think STID has a thing to do with police militarization, you're not exactly using your imagination if you think that's the only aspect of America someone might think is too bellicose. It doesn't take imagination to see that America is far too bellicose. "Bellicose" is not a synonym for "militarized." A drunk looking for a fight is bellicose, a nation with a massive military purely for self-defense is militarized, and neither is the other. Tubgirl Cosplay posted:It's addressing pretty plainly the American maintenance of its position through force and military power and how that butts up against the official narrative that it does so through diplomacy and trade, and from my reading incorrectly ascribing the former as some sort of new development that started with Bush. Anyway it's trying to claim that it's some kind of drastic reversal in its original pacifistic base nature, when it's plain as day both for Starfleet and America that it's been a military empire was all along, hence the incoherence of the message. The new torpedoes are aggressive and evil because they're not the same torpedoes we always shot at people; the new Enterprise is a sinister and terrifying perversion because it's got all the same warmaking apparatus as the old Enterprise but in greater quantity; vaporizing foreign villages with drones is inhuman when we should be using good old bomber planes and cruise missiles. Yeah, I agree with all of this.
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Sep 25, 2013 20:22
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I'm not trying to paint the Lewis and Clark expedition as moustache-twirlers purposely and primarily bent on genocide (Jefferson, maybe), but in this discussion it's worth noting that they did wind up using all those guns on the locals, and it was in an arms deal gone south. They weren't there just because Meriwether Lewis liked guns and thought his army buddies would make great surveyors. All that Prime Directive poo poo wouldn't have meant much to a Westerner prior to decolonization, and still has never been in danger of being put into practice. So is a nation with a massive military permanently looking for a fight bellicose, or militarized? 
Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 20:37
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:I'm not trying to paint the Lewis and Clark expedition as moustache-twirlers purposely and primarily bent on genocide, but it's worth noting that they did wind up using all those guns on the locals, and it was in an arms deal gone south. That's fair. But I still think it's relevant to ask whether there are any examples of government explorations - something at all analogous to the mission of Starfleet - where there was any chance of running into hostile resistance where the explorers didn't take guns. The answer might be that there isn't because humanity essentially doesn't explore without an eye for expansion, so the lack of an example wouldn't undo your point, but it would be much cleaner if an example existed. We didn't take rocket launcher to the moon because we already knew there were no moon men to use them on (Apollo 18 excepted). Tubgirl Cosplay posted:They weren't there just because Meriwether Lewis liked guns and thought his army buddies would make great surveyors. All that Prime Directive poo poo wouldn't have meant much to a Westerner prior to decolonization, and still nothing like it has ever come close to actually being practiced. Again, fair enough, but I think all this makes Starfleet a really lousy analogy for anything the United States does if we want to interpret it as anything but a military organization. It seems like you basically agree with me, but I'm curious if others who were pushing the "we're too militarized" analogy disagree. Tubgirl Cosplay posted:So is a nation with a massive military permanently looking for a fight bellicose, or militarized? It's both.
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Sep 25, 2013 20:44
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:Well we know they've got at least seventy-something high-yield missiles on board, replacing its apparently similar but lower-tech normal armament. That's rather significantly more than the real-world standard noncombatant vehicle loadout of "none". Buncha big lasers and stuff too. For all the time the movie spends on discussing how nonaggressive and unprepared for warfare the Federation is, characters inevitably seem to have guns right on hand any time there's anything they may wish to shoot at, which is often. Their command structure may be movie-fluid and kindly to the renegade captain who bucks all the rules, but it's still a uniformed force with explicitly military-derived ranks and language and structure. I'm not sure what your basis of comparison is if you don't find the Federation militaristic, they're more visibly so than some actual first-world armies in peacetime. My point regarding your description is that "bristling" is inappropriate not because the Enterprise doesn't pack an arsenal, but that arsenal is hidden and difficult to identify. Really, this supports your point further-- the Enterprise hides its arsenal away behind a peaceful facade. And many expeditions, not just those planned for imperialistic ends, carry small arms along. They're useful for fending off much more than just indignant indigenous peoples. As I said before, I think the JJ films take a big step back from the overt militarism of the TOS films past 1. As for the officer titles, what other titles would a fleet use? Commercial and scientific vessels still have captains, a military title. Why not call the leader of an exploratory fleet an admiral? The leader of our postal service is a loving general.
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Sep 25, 2013 22:05
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Sir Kodiak posted:I thought Admiral Marcus didn't know the bodies were in the tubes, but it's been a while since I saw it. No, that was Marcus' whole plan. He got what he needed out of Khan (the design for the Vengeance, the design of the super-torpedoes), but then when he realized that Khan put his people in his new torpedoes, he knew that Khan intended to one day unfreeze them, and he realized that one Khan was dangerous enough, he didn't need 72 more running around and raising hell. That's why he was so explicit about ordering the Enterprise to just launch at Kronos -- it would kill Khan and his people, and he wouldn't need to worry about them anymore (and he'd get the war he was itching for).
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Sep 25, 2013 23:52
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Timby posted:No, that was Marcus' whole plan. He got what he needed out of Khan (the design for the Vengeance, the design of the super-torpedoes), but then when he realized that Khan put his people in his new torpedoes, he knew that Khan intended to one day unfreeze them, and he realized that one Khan was dangerous enough, he didn't need 72 more running around and raising hell. That's why he was so explicit about ordering the Enterprise to just launch at Kronos -- it would kill Khan and his people, and he wouldn't need to worry about them anymore (and he'd get the war he was itching for). Seriously? Why couldn't he have just had one of his minions kill the 72 unconscious people and used weapons with actual fuel in them to kill Khan? What am I missing here?
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Sep 25, 2013 23:56
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Timby posted:No, that was Marcus' whole plan. He got what he needed out of Khan (the design for the Vengeance, the design of the super-torpedoes), but then when he realized that Khan put his people in his new torpedoes, he knew that Khan intended to one day unfreeze them, and he realized that one Khan was dangerous enough, he didn't need 72 more running around and raising hell. That's why he was so explicit about ordering the Enterprise to just launch at Kronos -- it would kill Khan and his people, and he wouldn't need to worry about them anymore (and he'd get the war he was itching for). How do the torpedoes work without fuel?
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Sep 25, 2013 23:56
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Helsing posted:If there had been any attempt to actually portray the Federation as peaceful or utopian then maybe that would have worked. However Abrams has so little respect for his audience's intelligence - or maybe he just doesn't give a poo poo about trying to imagine what the future would look like - so in every particular he seems to try and make the world of the Federation appear almost identical to contemporary earth society. Neither film is 'really' about the future, but I'd agree that the meaning of Into Darkness is really overdetermined. Earth is America, Khan is Osama Bin laden, Klingon is now The Middle East, etc. The conflict in 2009 was mostly aesthetic: darkness vs light, optimism vs. nihilism, and so forth. There was applicability to current events and cultural trends, but it wasn't a straight-up allegory. The main topic was a gentle satire of life in the information age. Folks quibble over Kirk being promoted real quick, but the idea is that roles and identities shift as quickly and fluidly as the turbolift carries people. There's the stream-of-consciousness of Spock's mind-meld, Scotty trapped in the tube, lots of running, the Web 2.0 look of the bridge with bright lights everywhere and slick camera movement. It's as much baffling and disorienting as it is neato-keen. Aspects of that are still present in this film - what with Chekov getting promoted, Khan zapping across the galaxy effortlessly, interplanetary space cellphones... but the only part that's really 'open' is the goofy space-jesus stuff. Really, the conflict 'should have been' between the DS9 'tactical' Trek aesthetic and the wacky Original Series gangster planets and whatnot. Resurrecting a tribble is an apt and potent metaphor for this, but they could have done more with it. I don't think this means a contempt for the audience though. Into Darkness isn't too futuristic because it's about the systemic problems preventing the utopian future from taking place.
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Sep 26, 2013 00:21
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Again, the Federation has never actually been portrayed as a Utopia (Roddenbury wanted to, but never really did) and is instead a society that is intended to be a utopia. The reason for this is in order to make some things clear. See, you can't talk about how the United States shouldn't be so militarized and be so involved in war, because there are people who will argue that we should. The Federation, it's being argued shouldn't be so militarized, even though it is. The concept of the federation is one of an ideal, which all of the characters are aware of, which is why they begin to question their role in supporting this ideal in STID. They are being patriots, not in the following orders sense, but in the being true to the ideals for which their society is supposed to stand. There are people who would argue that not following orders is unpatriotic, no matter what. STID is saying "no, you need to always stand up for the duties you have sworn to uphold, even when your orders contradict them"
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Sep 26, 2013 00:34
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Snak posted:How do the torpedoes work without fuel? They are powered by their blood. Not only can it heal humans and Tribbles and somehow get radiation out of any body it's put into, but it also functions as space-torpedo fuel. It's just that good. No facetiousness here, I'm not trying to make out there's a plot hole, Khan's dudes are just so amazing you can power a torpedo with them. In fact I'm fairly certain that if they'd fired the torpedoes at Khan, not only would he have survived but his dudes would have too. Also I don't think Marcus knew Khan's guys were in the torpedoes but I could be wrong. Hbomberguy fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 01:01
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It's one thing to bug out about magical sci-fi technology powered by fairy dust in Prometheus, a whole new level to do it about a franchise noted for holograms escaping their emitters and trying to take over the universe. I assumed when watching that the cryogenic tubes were replacing the warheads in the torpedos and that they were supposed to have been secretly inert all along (until Spock took the people out and replaced them with explosives), because the whole betrayal was that Kirk's mission was set up to fail in the first place and we never see them explode until they've been thoroughly tampered with, but it wouldn't be especially jarring or out of line of the way objects are handled in Trek for them to work just fine hollowed out, because technical objects are as big or as small as they need to be just as distances between locations are as either impassable or trivial as the plot demands. Stuff has always had pretty transitory qualities in Star Trek, and really worrying about how the super space rocket really works is never a rewarding or useful way to watch science fiction.
Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 03:16
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Hbomberguy posted:
Kirk: "And what exactly would you like me to do with the rest of his crew, sir? Fire them at the Klingons, end 72 lives, start a war in the process?" Marcus: "He put those people in those torpedoes, and I simply didn't want to burden you with knowing what was inside of them. You saw what this man can do all by himself, can you imagine what would happen if we woke up the rest of his crew?" Sir Kodiak posted:Seriously? Why couldn't he have just had one of his minions kill the 72 unconscious people and used weapons with actual fuel in them to kill Khan? What am I missing here? He could have. Once he realized what a threat Khan could be, Marcus decided to try to kill two birds with one stone. No one ever accused Starfleet admirals of being particularly smart. (In fact, that's kind of a running theme throughout all of Star Trek -- very few admirals are effective or intelligent.) Timby fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 04:22
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