DFu4ever posted:

Supercar Gautier posted:

Supercar Gautier posted:

Both are treated at key moments as helpless victims denied agency by male characters (Black Widow being menaced by the Hulk, Marcus being dominated via transporter by her father), and both have scenes in which the camera/audience is invited to appreciate their body while a male character is berated/attacked for doing the same.

Supercar Gautier posted:

And yet for all her skivvy-clad "defiance", Marcus' final scenes in the film utterly deny her any agency. She is teleported against her will, injured by Khan, and then screams helplessly as Khan destroys the Admiral. And then she disappears from the movie.

The notion that the underwear scene presents her as "strong" is superficial and unsubstantiated by the rest of the film. It's a tactic so transparent I'm astonished that anyone fell for it; it's designed to create the illusion of a credibly-written woman ("this ain't your grandpappy's docile movie woman, no siree") while still letting the audience leer and generally maintaining the status quo.

Alchenar posted:

"There is sexuality throughout the movie. Chris (Pine) comes in in a very skin-tight suit and you… can see him. He has his top off at the beginning. Benedict (Cumberbatch) did a shower scene that wasn’t in the movie. I think that to ignore an element of sexuality is to ignore an element of humanity."

I can't help but notice that she studiously avoids answering the actual question there.

Hbomberguy posted:

Something really irks me about the way STID pays lip service to so many aspects of Star Trek without really doing anything with them. The Prime Directive is referenced and established and then not much is really done with it again and everyone appears to ignore it, Tribbles are there because people know what Tribbles are, that sort of thing. Maybe I'm missing some deep and intricate sociological study where the point is everyone's ignoring the prime directive, but in a movie so on-the-nose with the rest of its plot I'd rather have seen the idea of the Prime Directive go somewhere rather than form the basis for the opening and then never get used again.

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.

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.

Snak posted:

No, he specifically said that torpedoes won't work without fuel, and he can't determine what these torpedoes used for fuel.

Helsing posted:

I think its just a poorly written script that was created to strip the franchise down to its most profitable elements. Terrorist conspiracies, revenge stories and exploding cities are popular right now so those elements got thrown in. Khan was shoehorned in because of nostalgia and also because they thought he'd give the plot a bit more gravity than it'd otherwise have. Alice Eve was there for T and A. The rest of the script was basically just an engine to get from one action scene to the next. Kirk and Spock are enemies when the script needs an intense scene, they are friends when the script needs an emotional scene, Spock is a psychopathic punching machine when the script needs an action scene, etc.

There are movies out there where it makes sense to dig into the subtext of the character's actions in the way that some goons in this thread are doing. But this movie aint one of those movies. It was an incredibly dumb summer blockbuster film, and the one thing they didn't really bother to include when putting together this movie was a script that was in any way original or had even an even passingly good story.

JediTalentAgent posted:

Khan's inclusion to the film, including his entire reveal, just felt like a smug wink. I still think replacing Khan with a young Chang would have worked better too and been a bit more of a 'whoa' moment for people in the long run.

One of the reasons I'm sort of in love with that idea is that he's a character that was pretty interesting in Undiscovered Country and Cumberbatch could probably play him as a cosmetically altered human version of the character pretty easily. Add into that we've already established humans are 'weaker' in general than some other alien species so Harrison appearing somewhat superhuman is just him being more a fit Klingon.

Again, I sort of like the idea that while Marcus is trying to run a secret plot to start a war with the Klingons, his operation's already been infiltrated and sabotaged by the Klingons. He's unknowingly going to be handing the Klingons a victory with his efforts.

lizardman posted:

If the problem with Star Trek was that it got too dark and lost its optimism for the future, where is the rebuttal in making dark movies that only pay lip-service to the 'optimistic future' Star Trek represented? The world of Abrams' Treks often looks cold and industrial, far from any kind of paradise (and before anyone mentions the timeline being corrupted, the Kelvin interiors already looked like something out of the Alien universe at the beginning of Abrams' first movie). Even the super-bright Enterprise interiors feel rather sterile.

lizardman posted:

Nemesis used the "big black terrible spiky ship of doom" as a representation of a corrupt ideology and technology just as Abrams' Trek '09 did - the deadly radiation that is Shinzon's superweapon also apparently ran the whole ship, so it stands to reason the technology could be harnessed for good in someone else's hands - and Shinzon himself is literally Picard if he didn't have his optimistic ideals and aspirations, and the film puts Shinzon in his big black spiky ship shrouded in greenish darkness and friends that look like Nosferatu to contrast with the Enterprise and its relative coziness and lightness to illustrate that nihilism & cynicism = bad and optimism & faith = good.

Subyng posted:

SuperMechagodzilla you're over-analyzing things waaaaay too much. Sure, your analysis seems logically consistent but it's highly unlikely that it was the intent of the films to portray what you're saying.

DFu4ever posted:

What if the criticism stems from the critic completely missing the point the author was trying to get across?

I know this forum loving despises authorial intent, but it sure as poo poo has a place in any film discussion, especially if the discussion involves attacking the creator due to an interpretation that is completely different than what was actually intended. Ignoring authorial intent is easymode criticism for people who like to start circlejerks over their particular interpretations.

Subyng posted:

I'm not making any point with this post regarding the current topic other than to say that squares and circles are both rigidly defined shapes. They aren't subjective. If you're trying to demonstrate how authorial intent is irrelevant you'll need a more accurate metaphor.

Subyng posted:

Okay, I'll bite.

The shape is a square.

You intended to post a picture of a square because it is highly implausible that you accidentally posted a square when what you really wanted was a circle.

Your present intent has no bearing on the picture, since you cannot intend something that has already occurred.

Hbomberguy posted:

What does the word SQUARE next to the triangle mean?

Timby posted:

How in the blue hell does this have anything to do with Star Trek? Jesus loving Christ, this is as bad as the 150 pages about fascism in the Pacific Rim thread.

Jack Gladney posted:

This is a pretty gross thing to say about Ricardo Montalban, dude.

penismightier posted:

The original Star Trek was never depicting a utopia. It was depicting a relatively decent society that still has major problems with militarization like in The Ultimate Computer and barely-surpressed rage like in Mirror Mirror. Spock was created as a way to comment on our failings and our successes. You are completely off-base here.

Cingulate posted:

I wonder if there is any kind of pattern behind what Trek movies somebody likes and hates, and what series they favor. Like, if you like TNG, you're also more likely to like TMP, and if you like JJTrek, you're more likely to also like First Contact. Or whatever.

BiggestOrangeTree posted:

Whiteknighting for that pos Into Darkness must have paid off.

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

Broadly speaking, what would a story where they "try to resolve the issue on a structural level" look like in a two hour format?

Cingulate posted:

"Star Trek shows cracks in the liberal utopia" is probably the most conventional thing I've ever seen SMG write. It's, like - d'uh. That's so obvious, even the writers themselves knew it, and they sometimes even intentionally made that point.

Jack Gladney posted:

Oh like you don't know the characters' first names.

A Steampunk Gent posted:

Christianity has a pretty bad history when it comes to spreading its good word with less advanced peoples. The Prime Directive quickly becomes absurd in most of the scenarios it crops up in but the concept that our hyper-advanced spacemen shouldn't become so full of their own poo poo that they think they have a moral obligation to spread their society to everyone else, particularly those who don't have the means to resist them, isn't a bad one. As I think we'd both agree, the Federation is pretty inadequate despite the technological wonders it's achieved, that they're not going round trying to induct pre-industrial civilisations into their society is one of their few saving graces.