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Sash! posted:I watched First Contact the other day for the first time in a long while. I know lots of people have problems with the basic concept of the Borg Queen and the pretty goofy Last Temptation of Data stuff, which I share so I won't rehash those. You're completely correct and it's the unfortunate consequence of trying to do a series like star trek when you're steeped in American ideology. Gotta have that great individual! The individual is everything! Thomas Edison don't you know! I mean look of Cochrane. He's an alcoholic, he's working class in a time period where there's not a chance in hell he'd have gotten a chance at higher education, and it's compounded by his anti-social hostile attitude. He's at the fringes of society, a step up from a crazy homeless person. By all rights he wouldn't have the money or the knowledge to pull this off. But those facts only make it more believable to a certain kind of person, because not bathing and waking up at 2pm hungover everyday makes him a rebel, and rebels can do what they want 'cause 'merica or whatever. Building an antimatter reactor and a FTL starship is just like lifting a truck and going mudding, yee haw boy, freedom, i tell you what. It's the exact kind of stupid bullshit that gets us captain picard shooting machine guns and going on car chases. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Sep 2, 2019 |
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Sep 2, 2019 15:27
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It's almost as if First Contact isn't a very good movie #generationsisthebesttngmovieanditsdownhillfromthere.
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Sep 2, 2019 15:48
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Drone posted:IMO the main human characters all remain pretty lackluster at best though, but the ambassadors and their staff are where the acting/writing really, really shine. 
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Sep 2, 2019 16:24
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HorseLord posted:I mean look of Cochrane. He's an alcoholic, he's working class in a time period where there's not a chance in hell he'd have gotten a chance at higher education, and it's compounded by his anti-social hostile attitude. He's at the fringes of society, a step up from a crazy homeless person. By all rights he wouldn't have the money or the knowledge to pull this off. I mean, I always got the impression that Cochrane got the education before the war, and a lot of the alcoholism and the attitude is because he was traumatized by the war.
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Sep 2, 2019 16:38
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I'm pretty sure they call him Doctor Cochrane in FC and he doesn't correct them And he would
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Sep 2, 2019 16:45
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Epicurius posted:I mean, I always got the impression that Cochrane got the education before the war, and a lot of the alcoholism and the attitude is because he was traumatized by the war. I don't see it in the character as portrayed in the film. His morals and values don't even remotely align with what you see in a big professional theoretical physics doctorate haver, even one that's lived through a world war. He says he built the phoenix to get rich and then spend it on whiskey and whores, that's not an attitude to life you get if you lose status and wind up in a trailer park. That's an attitude to life you get if you grew up in one. I've known a few Cochranes, I grew up around them, and there's very little sadder.
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Sep 2, 2019 17:38
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Cochrane is a metaphor for Gene Roddenberry and the movie would have made the correct capstone to the Star Trek franchise because of that
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Sep 2, 2019 18:41
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HorseLord posted:He says he built the phoenix to get rich and then spend it on whiskey and whores, that's not an attitude to life you get if you lose status and wind up in a trailer park. That's an attitude to life you get if you grew up in one. I took that comment as more self doubt / self sabotage rather than literally. Cochrane was flustured by the pressure of all these future people revering him as a god that all of humanities hopes rest on, when inside he thinks himself as a drunk piece of poo poo. As an aside I love James Cromwell's performance in that movie. He plays a great adage to never meeting your heroes.
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Sep 2, 2019 20:28
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Episode 11:59 is one of the worst episodes of Voyager so far. Almost done with season 5 though.
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Sep 2, 2019 20:30
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Isometric Bacon posted:I took that comment as more self doubt / self sabotage rather than literally. Cochrane was flustured by the pressure of all these future people revering him as a god that all of humanities hopes rest on, when inside he thinks himself as a drunk piece of poo poo. Regardless of how well or how badly the Borg stuff may have been done, the Earth scenes are all gold and Cromwell does a fantastic job. Making him a Gene analogue is a little too self-congratulatory for the franchise but it definitely works within the movie.
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Sep 2, 2019 20:34
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And like the real Gene, someone else had to have built the shipIsometric Bacon posted:I took that comment as more self doubt / self sabotage rather than literally. Cochrane was flustured by the pressure of all these future people revering him as a god that all of humanities hopes rest on, when inside he thinks himself as a drunk piece of poo poo. I can only take it completely literally. If he was full of self doubt he'd simply say it wasn't going to work, not to categorically deny the motives that they're assigning to him. Getting money to gently caress more faster is entirely fitting with the values and lifestyle he lives by when they meet him. He likes acid rock, strong liquor and cheap women. I'm noticing a tendency in this thread for people to interpret deeper meanings into movie scenes than were really there. A few pages ago someone said that Kirk put his glasses on to look weak to khan, when really he just literally has lovely eyesight and couldn't read the controls he was leaning over, the beginning of the film said so explicitly, and Khan couldn't even see him do that anyway because he was facing the other direction. Action movies don't have secret meanings you can only find using a decoder ring. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Sep 2, 2019 |
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Sep 2, 2019 21:05
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True. The CGI in B5 picks up noticeably in season two, and then in season three they're playing more with composition and setting up cool long shots.
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Sep 2, 2019 22:22
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HorseLord posted:You're completely correct and it's the unfortunate consequence of trying to do a series like star trek when you're steeped in American ideology. Gotta have that great individual! The individual is everything! Thomas Edison don't you know! I get it's totally cool to hate America and meritocracy and individualism nowadays, but it wasn't Cochrane and 2 other guys, the entire settlement/town/village there was dedicated to his project. And he was educated before the war. The war only took place a few years before the movie--he wasn't living in a post apoc hellhole since the 2020s or anything. Just because the Lone Genius archetype is Unfair to those who can only achieve on teams, doesn't mean those people don't actually exist. They aren't the only ones who change history or develop science, but they aren't some myth either. It's sort of a plot point of the movie. If Earth's first contact were the result of a team of 500 scientists, mathematicians, engineers, technicians, manufacturers, and janitors on a massive project at some NASA installation, the Borg wouldn't have been able to surgically change history--imagine trying to kill one guy to stop the US from developing the atomic bomb or the Russians from putting a man in space. It would have just happened anyway. It was because Cochrane was so instrumental in driving this project with a theory he invented that the Borg could do what they tried to do.
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Sep 2, 2019 22:39
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I said come in! posted:Episode 11:59 is one of the worst episodes of Voyager so far. Almost done with season 5 though. yeah I think that's about when I was almost done too
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Sep 2, 2019 23:01
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Astroman posted:
That's true but you've framed your post as though the plot of a Star Trek movie proves irl the myth of the Great Man which I'm going to assume was not your intention
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Sep 2, 2019 23:06
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Any argument that says "Cochrane doesn't behave the way a brilliant physicist would behave" ignores the fact that Stephen Hawking liked to party with prostitutes on zero-G planes.
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Sep 2, 2019 23:10
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Or like, anything at all about Feynman’s personal life
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Sep 2, 2019 23:30
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I don't even think it is an American ideology thing. There's plenty of emphasis on the team effort in everything from the Founding Fathers to Apollo 13. But, in Star Trek, you get exactly one genius per project every time, often laboring in obscurity held down by The Man.
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Sep 2, 2019 23:53
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I said come in! posted:Episode 11:59 is one of the worst episodes of Voyager so far. Almost done with season 5 though. It's also one of the best examples of Trek making dubious short-term predictions about the future that absolutely won't date the show at all.
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Sep 3, 2019 00:51
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Yeah 11.59 is incredibly boring, even by Voyager standards.
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Sep 3, 2019 01:31
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i actually rather like that episode despite hating most of voyager for being butt trash from an rear end bin
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Sep 3, 2019 02:21
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It's a bit slow but it's meant to be. It's a domestic episode with low stakes. I enjoyed it but I also like Voyager, so I'm not the best judge I guess.
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Sep 3, 2019 02:34
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marktheando posted:Yeah 11.59 is incredibly boring, even by Voyager standards.
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Sep 3, 2019 03:09
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curiousTerminal posted:It's a bit slow but it's meant to be. It's a domestic episode with low stakes. I enjoyed it but I also like Voyager, so I'm not the best judge I guess. That reminds me of the time my great great great great great great great great grandmother went to some little village in Europe and met a guy who didn't want to move his cobbler shop when they wanted to expand the town square. You see, she was-- * drones on for an hour *
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Sep 3, 2019 03:27
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Sash! posted:I don't even think it is an American ideology thing. There's plenty of emphasis on the team effort in everything from the Founding Fathers to Apollo 13. Yeah, I think it's more a Star Trek Thing than some argument why Star Trek is "horrible" American Propaganda. Like the Three Examples of Anything ie "great composers like Mozart, Sondheim, and T'wfzdek of Grebloo II" or "history's greatest poets--Frost, Keats, and Zendar" See also: --Single society planets --Alien races with one main personality trait and/or job function --Putting an alien planet name in front of a foodstuff, drink, animal or plant to make it alien: Rigellian Coffee, Denobulan Whiskey, Andorian Bears, Vulcan Pine Trees.
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Sep 3, 2019 05:03
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Ugh, Terran plomeek soup is vile. They put pepper in it! why
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Sep 3, 2019 05:09
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Pascallion posted:Nah, first season B5 CGI is even more dodgy than the rest of the show. Yeah the CG gets way better. It's never modern quality of course, and it looks real rough in the HD versions floating around, but by the big sequences in season 3/4 it looks perfectly good.
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Sep 3, 2019 05:11
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Astroman posted:... We do that poo poo with Earth stuff all the time, like Corinthian leather, Turkish coffee, Australian rules football...
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Sep 3, 2019 05:12
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Sash! posted:Not from high orbit and only with a specially equipped vehicle. Nothing about the Phoenix really says "this vehicle can withstand atmospheric entry." The Phoenix is 50 years in the future and has a magical warp drive, I can buy it. Also, anything can survive re-entry if it's going slow enough. I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Grand Fromage posted:Yeah the CG gets way better. It's never modern quality of course, and it looks real rough in the HD versions floating around, but by the big sequences in season 3/4 it looks perfectly good. IMO the real strength of B5 CGI, as rough as it looks, is the scene composition and choreography. Even these days I don't think a lot of productions have matched it. Too often modern CG action sequences are just visual overload and it's hard to tell what's actually going on. 1000 Brown M and Ms fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Sep 3, 2019 |
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Sep 3, 2019 05:13
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:IMO the real strength of B5 CGI, as rough as it looks, is the scene composition and choreography. Even these days I don't think a lot of productions have matched it. Too often modern CG action sequences are just visual overload and it's hard to tell what's actually going on. Yeah, and it makes good use of color. It's very well done, it only looks rough from 2019 because the technology was so much more primitive. Not much you can do about that. Nobody's going to pay to re-do all the CG from scratch, as much as I'd like to see that.
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Sep 3, 2019 05:36
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Keep in mind that Foundation Imaging (Seasons 1-3 of B5) went on to do CGI for Voyager (Season 2 onward) and supplemented Digital Muse on DS9 in the later seasons.
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Sep 3, 2019 05:45
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They really do get their money's worth out of things, even though the technology shows its age. They pull all sorts of things that would be literally impossible with models, or at least cost a billion dollars, from ships and space stations that use centrifugal force to big huge fleet actions and swarms of fighters just dancing around. They even sometimes fall into slowly drifting apart chunks after an explosion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSa6Zl8fcyo I also watched a documentary on the making of Star Wars ship models, and now I understand why Star Trek really tried to stretch out its models. Those things are big and have all kinds of junk inside them, from the structural supports to fiber optic cables going out to every little window spot to make it light up, to cooling engines to cool down the thing making all that light, and I assume that Star Trek's ships are similar on the inside, seeing as how the enterprise is spotted all over with little rectangles of light. And god almighty, they're not going to actually physically blow up a model on a TV budget. And the use of full CGI for all space shots in Babylon 5 sure seemed like it worked out to have a good enough budget for interior sets with practical effects. Astroman posted:--Single society planets A lot of that's because of the big scope. If you jump out to a big interstellar galactic scale, writers aren't going to have the patience for figuring out multi-state planets or diversity within species. "Smaller" scale stories that take place all over a single planet have more freedom to branch out into more realistically sized states, but for some reason when writers have the freedom to jump between planets, they just can't stop. It makes sense for places that are just a single outpost on a planet, but not for a supposedly globe-spanning society. Alien adjective + terrestrial noun is just one of those quick bits of shorthand, which is fine initially, but weird things happen like the insular, serious Romulan Empire somehow making the galaxy's most prized booze for some reason. And yet I don't think there's ever been a sloshed Romulan.
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Sep 3, 2019 06:32
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What if every Romulan we ever see is just fuckin trashed, though? Like off-camera Tomalak or whoever just pounding back a tall bottle of ale, and when the scene ends, he falls on his rear end and giggles before puking all over the floor.
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Sep 3, 2019 06:37
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Vulcans get very crafty and paranoid when drunk; Romulans are just Vulcans drunk 24/7. The head ridges are a sign of alcoholism in the species. That big empty space inside the Bird of Prey was a drunk engineer trying to solve a material shortage. It explains why they're always threatening the Federation but never do anything.
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Sep 3, 2019 07:34
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Turns out Surak discoverd the Universal Principles of AA, and all the high functioning alcoholic Vulcans left over that.
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Sep 3, 2019 11:14
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I like to think of "andorian hawks" etc as just being a universal translator thing. If you have thousands of languages in your federation, it's unrealistic to think people would actually add all those loanwords to their lexicon. When someone tells you they have a pet trawlax you learn nothing, but if the UT says "I have a pet Flaxian Tyrannosaurus" you know this person is a lunatic. Of course the real reason is avoiding filling the script with nonsense.
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Sep 3, 2019 12:44
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Does Klingonese break the UT then since a lot of it goes untranslated most of the time?
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Sep 3, 2019 13:12
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I'd like Klingons have set their translators not to translate their own language, and to interfere with others.
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Sep 3, 2019 13:14
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So I have recently finished all of TNG after not having watched in in something like...15 years? More? I was surprised how many episodes I remembered and would get partway through before recalling how it concluded. I didn't think I'd watched each episode more than once or twice so it's interesting that it left such an impression on me that I recall storylines nearly two decades later. I've now moved onto watching DS9 and have slogged my way through the first season and I'm into season 2, episode 4, currently. Someone was mentioning earlier that they like to hear people's reactions of watching the show? I've also not watched DS9 since I was a teen and I don't think I followed it as closely as TNG so I don't recall anywhere near as much. It's interesting to watch it again now years removed and with fresh eyes.
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Sep 3, 2019 13:34
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Astroman posted:--Single society planets True but this is also nearly all sci-fi and to some extent fantasy. Turns out it's really hard to write an entire species of intelligent life who aren't humans, and a believably diverse planet that isn't Earth. You'd either have to have God levels of intelligence or just be like, extremely bored, I guess. But inevitably you wind up with A) humans with weird foreheads, B) "racial traits" such as being "the crafty species" or "the angry species", C) animal-like creatures. Option A is the most boring but also the least prone to problematic implications.
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Sep 3, 2019 13:37
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