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Throb Robinson posted:If Khan has magic healing blood why didn't Prime Universe Khan save his wife with it? Because having your plot tied down by a forty year old film created by an entirely different set of people is stupid.
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May 22, 2013 21:06
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7thBatallion posted:I was referring to real life poo poo, and you're the chucklefuck who called casting Cumberbatch white supremacy. Whilst I have alot of sympathy for those people and thoroughly respect your Nazi bashing, you're still basically saying 'this Other Thing is worse so you're not allowed to care about this Thing, we can only care about one Thing.' which is a unfair to Warszawa and pretty reductionist. And SMG's reading is (as always) really smart and insightful, but something basically no-one is ever going to conclude without the aid of their own Critical Theory teacher, so I don't think it's so much worth outside of an insular film community discussion. Most people are going to simply conclude it was a profit-led piece of Hollywood casting to maximise ticket sales at the expense of minority representation, and from their level of analysis that is a good place to leave it. You're usually pretty on the ball with class/gender/race stuff SMG but in this case I think you need to ~check your privilege~ and consider that racial-casting is more than just an academic curiosity for some people. (http://www.racebending.com/v4/featured/star-trek-whiteness/) is a good article from actual people of colour on why this whole thing has been pretty lovely.)
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Jun 7, 2013 17:42
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Rabelais D posted:What this film was really missing was a chess-like starship battle with high stakes, back and forth and real tension. It's almost like the film is condemning the Military-Industrial Complex and the tools it uses, right? I certainly can't think of any other reason a war hawk admiral in charge of a black ops military division would menace a scientific-exploratory vessel with an overwhelmingly powerful doomship.
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Jun 15, 2013 20:08
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Snak posted:It functions completely differently though. The enterprise has a very large crew. This isn't The Next Generation, we've always been given the impression that these crew members have jobs that are necessary to some degree. The big black evil ship of doom has been designed to enable a small team of bring a massive amount of firepower to bear extremely quickly, and it can even be operated by a single man. The star trek equivalent of Metal Gear. This is the complete opposite of Starfleet's normal designs. This just makes me sad the Dreadnought never roared.
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Dec 23, 2013 13:27
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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. But one of the main thrusts of the film was that neo-con warhawks trying to start to start wars with rival powers is a bad thing? Having the Klingons (i.e. the Reds, or al-qaeda or whoever) be so intrinsically terrible and war-like that in lieu of a war starting on its own they try to trick the 'better side' into starting one is pretty racist and plays straight into the awful world-view of the film's antagonist(and the whole resurgent reactionary wing of Starfleet by extension). The film veers a bit close to 'Bush did 9/11' for my liking but it at least acknowledges Starfleet's problems aren't entirely the result of the terrible Other.
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Jun 30, 2014 21:47
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Snak posted:
That is veering into 'entirely different film which we didn't see' territory though. As it is, Khan functions as a representation of our own terrible history which Starfleet have revisited in their paranoid fear and of the threat they face to the Federation's ~evovled way of life~ if left unchallenged and changing that would be drastically altering what was actually going on in the film.
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Jun 30, 2014 22:25
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Do you really need to be so abrasive in discussions all the time? It's really not very Christian. I don't really disagree with anything you've said, I merely stated Khan is emblematic of Starfleet's deepening plunge into autocracy and militarism in that they wanted to win the next war so bad they basically dug up Napoleon, magnificent tyrant and conquerer of nations, and told him to get to it. I completely agree he's not the cause of it and Starfleet's full of the same old 20th century power structures, implicit ideologies etc etc which are the root cause, Khan just illustrates how far they've gone that it honestly seems like a Good idea to Marcus and co to dig him up and give him the keys.
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Jun 30, 2014 23:36
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Ah that's terrible reading comprehension on my part then, I honestly thought you were being sarcastic, sorry!
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Jul 1, 2014 07:59
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penismightier posted:It's a lovely point. Ah but have you considered that the medium is the message?? I thought not 
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Jul 10, 2014 14:29
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Arglebargle III posted:How can you say that Star Trek doesn't engage with this subject and then go "okay, except that one, I mean all those other start trucks" when Starfleet Does A Bad Thing was a staple of TOS and TNG scripts as well? Admirals, man. As soon as they get those admiral bars all those heroic captains go bad. People like Admiral Nachayev because while she was a hardass she was like the only Starfleet Admiral on the show that wasn't a straight up villain. TNG never really moves beyond a vacuous 'few bad apples' understanding of the situation though and none of the cast ever really acknowledge they're part of a authoritarian system that promotes endemic corruption, even DS9 doesn't really go anywhere with Edmonton's 'The Federation is the Borg speech' past the episode it's said in. Despite being a 'utopia' the Federation constantly seems to be one bad news week away from becoming a military junta. No Dignity fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jul 10, 2014 |
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Jul 10, 2014 16:54
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Dukat's decent into space-satanism was one of the worst parts of the show imo but they had to do something to stop the fans from sympathising with the literal nazi concentration camp commandant. Overall the Cardassians get a pretty fair shake though, they lose a bit of focus during their Weimar Republic era due to the network-forced Klingon War arc but I thought the show did a pretty good job of portraying them as a pretty diverse bunch of people who weren't a caricature of a rival cold war power and how and why they end up joining the Dominion is certainly more understandable and true-to-life than why the Klingons decide to be dicks for the umpteenth time or the Romulans are master schemers who can't seem to see past their own noses.
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Jul 10, 2014 18:08
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Lord Krangdar posted:Actual Nazis were still humans, so I don't see anything wrong with the show 'humanizing' a Nazi-analogue. He's explicitly shown to be wrong about the Bajorans, but he can be both wrong and understandable. I meant a large part of the fandom actually sympathised with him over the Bajorans and repeatedly complained that he'd done nothing wrong and the Bajorans didn't deserve him. It drove the showrunners mad and they eventually made him the anti-christ just to try and establish that Dukat is actually a huge dick. (Star Trek fans are loving terrible.)
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Jul 10, 2014 18:27
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Lord Krangdar posted:Like Dukat, another villain who wanted to be more than that but wasn't allowed to be. Dude, a Nazi family man is still a Nazi. He was a charismatic, three dimensional character but at his core he was still a terrible, terrible person, I wouldn't shed too many tears. Maarak posted:Before his eyes started glowing red, it seemed like Dukat and Sisko's arc would end with Dukat being assassinated by Kira after the Federation gives him a pass for helping to end the Dominion war. The question seemed to be whether Sisko would approve, or even involve himself with her extrajudicial action against a possible gov't leader in post-war Cardassia. But then he decided to join side with alien demons, and Sisko got raptured. This would have been a fantastic ending. Kinda feel the writers did let their nerdiness run away with them a bit towards the end, even with the extenuating circumstances for Dukat's villainry, Kira should totally have been the one to do him in.
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Jul 10, 2014 23:41
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Black Baby Goku posted:Love all this Star Trek talk. Keep it up guys! Thanks for stopping by in the Star Trek thread to give us this valuable opinion! 
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Jul 11, 2014 18:11
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With Pegg writing and Orci gone I wouldn't be surprised if it veered away from the topical post 9/11 commentary stuff from Into Darkness. I'd really love to see Star Trek do a TOS style weird sci-fi story, but given it is still a tentpole release for a major studio I'd be shocked if it still didn't end with Earth being imperiled at some point.
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May 5, 2015 17:03
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Of course it'd be cool if 'Beyond' referred to going beyond the faux-utopia of Starfleet, meeting up with V'Ger and establishing The Culture. Into Darkness got alot of stick but it was one of the rare times Star Trek really dealt head on with authoritarian militarism that's always been implicit in the background of the series, I'd love to see a film which actually dealt with how they try to resolve the issue on a structural level rather than dealing with the Bad Admiral of the Week and assuming it'll never be a problem again.
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May 5, 2015 17:12
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Snak posted:
It's the most obvious point of comparison and one Star Trek really leaves itself open to. Star Trek's idealism is paper thin and constantly undermines itself.
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May 5, 2015 18:15
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Snak posted:But Trek is not about those things. I wasn't referring so much to the tech as the general ideology and structure of the societies they represent. Star Trek might have talked a good talk about doing the right thing, but it presented it from the perspective of a society which was not only deeply unequal, but couldn't even acknowledge how unequal it was, which is why Picard and Sisko continually find new Admirals and factions of Starfleet to butt heads with but never solve the reason of why they exist. The end of DS9 is the only time I can think of where the protagonists ever go off the rails and directly oppose the legal power structure of the system itself as well (with Bashir and O'Brien vs Section 31), every other time it's presented as a case that the only thing that can stop a Bad Man with Institutional Authority is a Good Man with Institutional Authority. When that guy wants to cut open Data's brain, everyone, including Data himself, is willing to allow the vivisection of a clearly sapient being if Picard loses the case because it's the law. No one ever questions how such a situation could even be allowed to occur or how such a creep could ever become head of a scientific institution. Then of course you've got Voyager where Janeway goes off the rails or does something deeply unpleasant about once a season and her orders, no matter how insane or unethical are always obeyed because She's The Captain. Like when she gives biological superweapons to the Borg every member of the crew is saying 'this is literally the worst idea anyone has had, ever' and they still go along with it because the chain of command is sacrosanct. I didn't mean to claim The Culture is the only idea anyone should have about a utopian society, but it'd be nice if the series at least examined its own premises a little and actually wrote about what they mean, which is something The Culture series does very well
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May 5, 2015 19:10
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Also the last film which centred on space battles was Nemesis. Turns out 'his spaceship's power level is maximum' does not make an interesting film.Snak posted:Yeah, if you ignore Roddenberry's assertions that, by TNG erra, the Federation was a real utopia, a big theme of Trek, including TOS, is that civilization is a struggle. It's not possible to build a Utopian then move onto the next thing. People still have to keep being good people, and seek out injustice and try to make it right. In TOS, a lot of the hosed up planets visited by the Enterprise were hosed up by Starfleet. The Enterprise needs to go out, dock at strange ports, and learn from new life, and civilizations. Not just from what they offer us, but from our differences. The thing is though, that through all of TNG and Voyager alien species are portrayed as inferior, uncivilized or backwards and it's the duty of the crew to fix their shortcomings for them or otherwise suffer with dignity. I cannot think of a single example where the aliens actually teach the Federation something, though I can name a good five species off the top of my head whose sole character trait is 'vulgar and stupid', even Worf is treated with patronising contempt practically ever time he does his job on TNG because he's clearly still an irrational savage beneath his human training. I would love to see Star Trek do something along the lines you described and it sounds like the film might, but aside from a few high points in TOS and DS9 that's not what the show has been about.
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May 5, 2015 20:04
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I dunno, this strikes me as being similar to "yeah, it's nice they can get from star system to star system, but just how exactly do they warp spacetime?" Well for one thing the series invites the examination itself, episodes like The Drumhead, Paradise Lost and the like basically point out Starfleet top brass is full of fascists, they just never follow it on with 'therefore ...' Also as stories they lose meaning if they have no point of comparison with reality, it'd be a bunch of disconnected nonsense if it didn't try and place a comparison between what happens on screen and our own world. The fact those aforementioned episodes exist is because on a basic level that is what the writers were trying to do. Cingulate posted:The space battles were by far the best part of Nemesis. Not because they were any good, but everything else about that movie was so unbelievably bad. Or maybe ... Nemesis was bad because it thought that's all it needed to deliver to be a good film?
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May 5, 2015 21:33
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Snak posted:Well yeah. I mean, I recently went a long rant in the Star Trek TVIV thread about how Trek's only prayer for quality is a return to TOS ideas, since the politics of the TNG era are just completely unsalvageable. It sounds like you and Pegg may be on the same page. As I said, I did appreciate Into Darkness for really shining a light on the problem of Starfleet, but I would be pretty happy with TOS throwback adventure too. Zachary Quinto should stop getting mad about emotions and just get high off spores Cingulate posted:No. The movie was full of sibling symbology, a new Romulan Slave Race, heroic self sacrifice, and dune buggy car chases. All of which were extremely awful. Okay, in this case I am willing to concede Nemesis was bad for myriad reasons ...
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May 5, 2015 22:41
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Yeah, because the Federation isn't real. No, I'm not making a flip "nothing is real and therefore doesn't matter" remark, I mean that Starfleet and the Federation were not (and arguably still are not) firmly defined at all beyond being that organization where Our Heroes come from. They were background dressing meant to serve the needs of the immediate story, not to build a firmly self-consistent setting. In one episode they might be a pacifist organization willing to relocate its colonists (at no expense to them, to any planet they choose, or even to a not-yet-discovered planet of their specification that the Federation will send Starfleet out to find) in order to end a war whose deaths were measured in thousands. In another episode they might be willing to give a starship captain the authority to charge into the Neutral Zone and launch a preemptive attack against a suspected secret Romulan base which has a high likelihood of precipitating a war which would devastate both interstellar civilizations. Well the thing it it really permeates the entire setup of the series (again, particularly TNG and Voyager). As myself and others have pointed out, a tremendous number of episodes are in one way or another about the inherent superiority of Starfleet and humanity, it's a constant overriding theme that their society is organised in the best way and their morality is superior to all others; the episodes that directly address the structure and inequities of the organisation just bring the issue into focus and show the crew what it's like when the boot is on the other foot. I mean there's a fifteen minute compilation video of Worf getting shut down on TNG because the defining character trait the show gives him is 'irrational, violent alien', the irony being he's normally warning the crew about other irrational, violent aliens and he's invariably right. Snak's take on TOS in that respect is pretty good, the show didn't even try and pretend it was a utopia and was quite upfront about Starfleet loving things up and being in the wrong on occasion. While it was still far from perfect, the protagonists didn't act as Great White Saviors on quite such a regular basis whilst obviously having their own not-inconsiderable unadressed societal issues. Anyways to bring this back to the new film, while I doubt they're going to go full self-criticism and try and rebuild the world as a logically coherent leftist utopia it'd be interesting if they continued to acknowledge Starfleet's dual and often contradictory role as a nominally pacifist exploration and aid organisation and a hierarchically organised military body and what that actually entails for the crew if they want to be part of that organisation. Into Darkness was pretty on the nose with the whole in presenting them unambiguously as the armed forces but it was pretty pessimistic in tone and didn't really have anything to add past 'well we stopped this one crazy Admiral AGAIN' Snak posted:A big issue is that, since it started, Trek has played things progressively safer and safer. TOS was like "There's a Russian on the bridge, he's a good guy. There's a black woman as a main character, also an interracial kiss". TNG was like "Being into an androgenous person is okay, and also life on earth was seeded by aliens". Now we're really solidly in the "there's no gays in the future, definitely don't contradict religion". Echoing this is a good post
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May 6, 2015 22:15
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It's important to keep in mind that Star Trek is really heavily metaphorical. The interplanetary travel isn't literal at all, nor are the individual planets. 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.
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May 9, 2015 23:26
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It's a callback to all the times they were marooned on an alien planet made of styrofoam rocks and plastic sets and got caught up in a heavy-handed political allegory, so in that sense it looks like the most true to TOS film since The Undiscovered Country
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Dec 14, 2015 18:01
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It's incredibly f*cked up that Star Trek of all things is going for a camp, goofy tone. Gene Roddenberry must be rolling in his grave ...
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Dec 14, 2015 18:32
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Polo-Rican posted:Just as Jurassic World felt like poo poo because it was a dinosaur movie built on the premise that "nobody gives a poo poo about dinosaurs anymore," this will probably feel like poo poo because it's a Star Trek movie built on the premise that "nobody gives a poo poo about outer space stuff anymore." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ZVrbnG97w
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Dec 14, 2015 19:40
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The most critically and commercially successful Star Trek film of all time, as well as being a fan favourite, was a fish out of water comedy about saving the whales set in 1980s San Francisco; it's always been a slightly naff, tounge in cheek series. With that many writing credits I do wonder if it'll be a case of too many cooks, but if it's bad it won't be because it's set outside the Enterprise and has comedy in it
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Dec 14, 2015 19:51
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I just appalled this Star Trek film looks like Star Trek. Seriously
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Dec 14, 2015 21:23
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wyoming posted:Naval battles in space is a huge part of Star Trek though. So yeah, it would be nice for it actually fire some space cannons and sink some space Spaniards. It was a huge part of one film: The Wrath of Khan, and every attempt to copy it has been a stinking pile of poo poo Seriously though, the trailer genuinely carried the aesthetic of TOS far more than either than either of the other reboot films, getting salty that it wasn't a series of pew pew space battles like real Star Trek is downright bizarre Harime Nui posted:You know what'd be a good Star Trek III, set it 80 years after Into Darkness and be like yeah, the Federation and Klingon Empire totally went to war and poo poo's completely hosed---the galaxy is like a demilitarized zone, Federation society's turned militaristic and is run by Section 31 douchebags, large swathes of the galaxy have been wiped out etc. etc. and open it with a familiar character from the TNG era---probably Data would be best----and have him go back in time not to undo Into Darkness but to stop the Khitomer Accords from being sabotaged or something, there you'd have a movie. You could even cold open it with Kirk & crew getting wiped out in some battle in the opening scene and cut to 80 YEARS LATER w/e, as a sop to the people who really really want to see the new cast die for some reason. Yeah, I saw Yesterday's Enterprise too
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Dec 15, 2015 01:46
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Harime Nui posted:I watched TOS too and I dunno what you're talking about. One of the all-time top rated classic Trek episodes is basically a take on a submarine movie where the whole episode is a long duel between Kirk and a Romulan warbird, so yeah space navy battles is kinda there in the bedrock of the show too. There's a few episodes with that tone, and they are good, but for every one of those there's one where Spock gets high on spores or they go to the [history] planet and learn about fascism or something. Anyway, my point is it's a really narrow and arbitary definition of Star Trek and definitely doesn't represent the vast majority of the good films
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Dec 15, 2015 02:08
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Whatever your feelings about Into Darkness may be, that Starfleet dug up Hitler and put him in charge of the CIA is the point
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May 23, 2016 20:17
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Helsing posted:Is there a popular film franchise from the last decade for which this isn't the default CineD analysis? Uh, what? That's not a particularly left-field reading. I'm sure if you asked the screenwriter, who I believe is a fullblown Bush did 9/11 truther you'd get a similar answer. That's not to say the film is good (it's not) but it is a film about Starfleet putting on Nazi uniforms and hiring Hitler to run their black ops. That's just what it is.
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May 25, 2016 21:49
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Helsing posted:There is a tendency to talk about the political interpretations of the film to the exclusion of all other ways of analyzing how a film gets made. Of course it's valid and important to talk about what a film says politically but there are other ways to think about how a film is constructed. In the context of a film like Into Darkness what really strikes me isn't the cliched message about the Federation's corrupt Deep State. I'm more interested in the way the film feels like it's plot elements and characters were assembled and fabricated into a final product in an almost industrial process.I feel as though starting with that perspective changes the way you think about the film and de-emphasizes the significance of the plot itself. Sure this is a film about Space Hitler being put in charge of the CIA, but is that really particularly noteworthy or significant in analyzing the film? What about viewing the film's elements as marketing ploys designed to attract and retain an audience? I wouldn't really call my summarising of the plot an analysis and I don't really know why you took it as such, even less why you extrapolated it as being the default CineD line. As for plot elements-as-marketing, we can see it certainly exists such as flavour of the month actor Benedict Cumberbatch being cast as Khan to appeal to global audiences etc, but honestly that's just not very interesting to talk about and leads to second guessing what you think the author is trying to say or not say rather than just talking about what the film says. In any case I don't think you're blowing any minds by suggesting the film was designed to sell cinema tickets because, well, duh.
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May 26, 2016 15:59
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lizardman posted:I guess this is as good a time as any for me to mention that looking back it's pretty darn evident to me the marketing concept for STID was "make this The Dark Knight only with Star Trek instead of Batman". Could you give any examples? Because I'm not really seeing it
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May 26, 2016 21:45
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Again, I would like to see some concrete examples because Helsing's idea of marketing-focused analysis sounds broing and pointless as hell but I'm open to being proved otherwise Also, unless you're talking about the grim, dark future of space in Warhammer 40K please refrain from using the term 'grimdark' when describing a film because it essentially means 'I didn't like a thing but I'm unwilling to articulate why'
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May 27, 2016 22:28
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Helsing posted:I don't have a particularly deep investment in the Star Trek franchise. I was never a huge fan and when I revisit the old stuff I am mostly struck by how corny and dumb it all is. I just think that if there is one thing that actually made the Star Trek franchise stand out at all it was those moments when it did aim to be a bit more cerebral and philosophical. If you are going to bother to remake or update the series I'd rather see a new variation on those themes. Sure, do something new with them, but don't completely ditch the one part of Star Trek that actually makes it distinctive. So, what did you think of Beyond?
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Jul 13, 2016 12:52
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