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How are Australians getting something first? 
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Apr 28, 2013 12:06
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 09:48 |
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Should I bother to go see the film in theaters? Movie tickets are kind of expensive. For reference, I probably would have payed to see Trek 2009 once, but only just. Now I hear this is a kind of breathless, brainless, half-baked remake of Wrath of Khan that tries to jam in Klingons and races from setpiece to setpiece and then Kirk dies and comes back to life... I used to be a huge Trek fan but based on that description I'm not even sold on the price of one ticket. Should I go check it out or just make a note to rewatch Star Trek II sometime this year?
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Jun 9, 2013 19:00
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Saw the show, was pleasantly surprised after the plot description but still, the movie was all over the place. "Taking out the shiniest toys in the box" indeed. The way Abrams (mis)used the camera deserves a special mention. The focal plane is extremely shallow and he's constantly loving with it. Especially in the first half of the movie I felt like I couldn't see 50% of the screen because it was just all a blurry mess. The opening scene of Kirk and McCoy running through the forest was nearly unwatchable in 3D. There are some shots where a character's face will be in focus and their ear will be noticeably out of focus. Why on earth would a director choose to do that?
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Jun 14, 2013 18:18
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1st AD posted:Oh you're right, this was a post-converted 3D movie. Unfortunately that's not an option here. I was wondering if it was the 3D because the second half of the movie seemed okay to me, and I kind of doubted that the cinematography had changed. Maybe my eyes adjusted to only looking at the part of the screen that was in focus. Minor complaint: that engine core is the engine core from Star Wars  it looks nothing like the warp cores we've always seen in Trek. At least the external shots appeared to have been modeled after some sort of laser fusion initiator instead of a loving brewery. But then we went back to the brewery anyway.To go on more about the all-over-the-place-ness, they had Khan without really explaining who he was beyond frozen superman, they had Klingons for two seconds for no reason, the had Section 31 in an off-screen mention. Klingons and Section 31 weren't needed for the movie and deserve a little bit more than what they got. The odd missing piece was Genesis, which is an experimental weapon from the original Wrath of Khan and I was surprised to not have them truck out. It's a more in-character superweapon for the Federation to design since it's mainly a terraforming device and only a weapon of mass destruction as an afterthought. Torpedos with engines that go far is a bit underwhelming as an experimental technology. And then Carol Marcus gets to be an "expert" on nothing in particular when in the other movie she's a real expert. I don't think the story really holds up as more than a scaffold to jam in action scenes. If the story is going to be about Admiral rear end in a top hat and his Section 31 then they could have made a story about that that was a lot better and more focused. That story was kind of there in the background with some characters questioning the militarization of Starfleet, but then at the end it turns out that's not the background at all and was actually the main story the whole time, only we were dicking around with Khan and Klingons and weren't paying attention to the main story. If the story is going to be an amalgamation of Space Seed with the superweapon plot from WoK I could see that working too, but again that turns out to be just mashed into the Admiral Dickhead storyline. If they were going to do a story about a self-fulfilling war with the Klingons being averted by the characters' nobler impulses winning over their aggression, then they could have done that but then that would be a completely different story because the Klingons barely show up. I think it's really, to jump to a cooking metaphor with no warning, a case of too many ingredients in one dish. Sure, that lobster may be great quality, and those strawberries may be excellent but you shouldn't put either in the venison stew much less both.
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Jun 15, 2013 05:03
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computer parts posted:The whole point with the Klingons is that they're the Pandora's Box. You're not supposed to see them very much because if you do, it's game over (because then the war would begin). I'm not saying there should be more Klingons. The problem is that, once it's all shaken out, the plot appears to be all about the admiral (what was his name if the whole movie was about him, huh?) and section 31, yet the admiral is on screen for maybe 10 minutes and section 31 is mentioned once.
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Jun 15, 2013 12:23
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A Steampunk Gent posted: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. You can sniff it out and it's certainly there, but it's overpowered by the amount of other things going on. It's a theme on the edge of being lost. No Wave posted:What's the problem here? If the Admiral is the main antagonist, what's his name? I don't remember. Probably because he was on screen for like three minutes before the finale and then he got maybe seven or eight more minutes. A movie about the tail wagging the dog with a manufactured war and the Enterprise crew at odds with each other and themselves, choosing between duty and doing the right thing, would have been good. (It was also Star Trek VI but fine, whatever, that wouldn't bother me if it was done well.) Instead we got that jammed into the whole Khan thing like a head-on collision between two semis: big, loud, violent and exciting but not very clean or pretty. Would Star Trek VI be a better movie if General Kang had Khan impersonate a Federation officer and assassinate Gorkon? Of course not, there's too much going on with that character for him to fit into the story in a two hour film. It wouldn't just get in the way, it would undermine the whole point because Federation officers conspiring to assassinate Gorkon is essential to the movie working. If Starfleet wasn't conflicted and divided there would be no inner conflict for the main characters. Star Trek Into Darkness has exactly this problem. Not only does Khan get in the way of the main conflict, he actively undermines the main theme that A Steampunk Gent is talking about. Khan isn't Starfleet, he's just some guy with an unusual past, he's not even working for Starfleet by the events of the movie. Admiral Whathisface comes off as practically acting alone. There's no conflict for the heroes to resolve within themselves, no explicit threat of the Federation turning to war beyond a couple lines that frankly aren't well supported by what the movie shows us. Nobody on the bridge crew has any personal stake in going to war with the Klingons, much less inner conflict over their desire to fight the Klingons. In typing out this post I've also come to the conclusion that Into Darkness is basically just Star Trek II and Star Trek VI mashed into each other, and both halves suffer for it pretty badly. Quinto and Pine pull some real pathos out of their roles and they should get a lot of credit for their performances, but the story doesn't really earn it. Star Trek II and VI both carried strong themes from their exposition to their conclusion, served by plot and character behavior that made sense and earned some real emotional payoff in Spock's death and the bridge crew's retirement. Star Trek Into Darkness tries to pull from both and ends up with themes that are working at cross purposes, plot points that seem by turns unnecessary or under-emphasized, and character moments that ape the other movies but don't fit very well into the new story. I think either a new what-if version of Space Seed or an accelerated-timeline version of Star Trek VI would both have been good stories for Abrams to tackle in his second Trek outing. I would have genuinely been excited to see what he would do with those story premises with the new crew, big budget and an action-movie approach. Unfortunately he decided to bite off more than he could chew and we got Into Darkness. Wow that turned into much more of a review than I was intending. I just want to say, far from wanting Abrams to adhere to the old movies, I think Abrams and his story writers would likely do better with a freer hand. Why retread II or VI at all? Things are different now, just tell some new stories, maybe with some more re-imagined premises. What would happen if they unfroze Khan in new trek? He could probably run circles around young impatient Kirk. What would happen if Praxis exploded now? What would a Kirk deeply hosed over by time travel do with the Guardian of Forever? If new Kirk got into a smugging contest with God, would he still win? Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Jun 17, 2013 |
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Jun 17, 2013 15:15
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Piedmon Sama posted:E: I'm going to go one further and say I thought Quinto was the weak link in this movie. Yes, he should make the role his own and not rehash Nemoy's performance, but his Spock is honestly just kind of a dick. We have no reason to buy into his emotional arc in the movie. I really like Quinto's performance and his take on Spock; I think the problem is the story not the actor. You're right that we have no reason to buy his emotional arc or even really believe that Kirk and Spock are friends, but that's because the movies just haven't given them time to act like friends. The movies constantly play on their conflicting character traits rather than their friendship. Quinto plays Spock like he's Kirk's friend, but his time on screen is dominated by their professional differences. I think Quinto does a very good job of it, it just seems off because the character hasn't been justified by what we've seen. Like I said, I think the principle actors' performances were all good to great in this outing, the problem is that the story doesn't earn the emotions we're seeing from the cast. That's part of the problem with the pacing, I think, is that there's so much crammed in that we don't have any time to see what normal behavior from these characters looks like. We only see them under duress because the story doesn't have any breathing room for them to be not under duress. A couple three minute scenes that establish Kirk and Spock's friendship, Bones and Spock's mutual respect, and Spock and Uhura's relationship would have done wonders for the character moments in the movie. As it was the conversation in the alien shuttle (which I expected to be awful) was some of the most natural and affecting interaction in the whole movie. We just have a conversation between a hurt and frustrated girlfriend, a best friend who's kind of feeling the same way but felt too awkward to say it before now, and a friend who's trying to explain himself to people he cares about. It worked when I absolutely didn't expect it to and judging by the audience they agreed. It got a lot of understanding chuckles. A few more scenes of Spock and Kirk just being friends would have made the emotional payoff work a lot better. fake edit: What how can it be essential to the plot that Khan be a foreign superman so that he can pass as normal? computer parts posted:This movie is specifically about having a crew and feeling empathy towards it. Khan fits because he is a villain who is defined by his crew. Space Seed ends with him choosing his crew's life on a planet over getting tried by Star Fleet. Wrath of Khan is about how losing most of his people drew him to madness. All these things you're posting make me wish the movie I saw was about that. Yeah you can see these themes peeking through the shellacking of action sequences and the sheer amount of stuff going on, but they're not well developed or the focus of the movie. Yes, Kirk and Khan both had "anything for the crew" moments but there was also this yelling admiral and a ship crashed into San Francisco and Kirk died and it got lost, unfortunately. Heck Kirk's crew-loving moment gets lost on the next page when he turns it into a trick. I just realized this is yet another story beat from Star Trek II, where Kirk pleads for mercy for his crew and then uses it to trick Khan. Yet again it's just not in the right place and there's too much happening for it to have the impact it did in the original film. In Star Trek II it's a five minute sequence with a lot of dialog, and Kirk explicitly apologizing to his crew for his hubris. Most importantly, the whole victory is Kirk managing to slink away with his tail between his legs and his character arc woefully incomplete, to be picked up again with his rumination on the Kobayashi Maru in the cave and finished by Spock's death and his emotional devastation. In this version the trick defeats Khan in seconds and then we skip straight to Kirk sacrificing himself for his crew, brutally truncating the arc that took Kirk from acts 2 through 5 in WoK. Again the re-imagining picks up on some of it but fumbles the important themes. And then there's this admiral guy and Klingons and rumbling about a ginned-up war. I honestly would like to see Abrams' movie about Kirk's learning humility and Abrams' movie about the struggle against militarism, but I don't think they make one good movie. Turning Khan into an anti-hero who's able to bond with Kirk and come away honorably would have been great.
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Jun 19, 2013 03:19
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It's because people don't have perfect recall and can't remember to what exactly they cut away from the thematic moment and exactly how many seconds they didn't linger on it, but they can remember that they seemed to rush past it. Too much happening in a movie is a legitimate complaint the same way that poor use of negative space is a legitimate complaint about visual art. If a remake pulls story beats from an original fairly faithfully, obviously context within the story is the thing people will look at to see whether it works or not. I obviously can't do a shot-by-shot comparison but in the Enterprise's shellacking and subsequent trick sequence, in WoK the crew has a long "we are so hosed" moment when Khan calls them up to gloat, followed by their trick, followed by the time to have a conversation about how their win is still a failure and Kirk should have listened to Saavik. In Into Darkness the trick is preceded by Khan crushing the movie's other main antagonist's head, Kirk escaping him, then the lopsided space battle which is no longer a surprise and has nothing to do with Kirk's hubris. Then we go straight from Kirk's trick to a lengthy sequence of both ship tumbling out of the sky, Kirk's self sacrifice, and a lengthy crash sequence followed by a fistfight on top of a flying aircraft. There's no immediate connection between Khan's easy crippling of the Enterprise and Kirk's hubris, and no time for anyone to comment on it because we're watching USS Venture explode. Then the theme that wasn't really related to this sequence suddenly pops up when Kirk announces he has to go be engineer, but the characters are literally too breathless to say anything about that because they're running and jumping through another major action-effects sequence inside 20 seconds. Again, I can't do a shot-by-shot on this but it's not just white noise. There's little to no time for reaction shots because we have explosions to watch, no time for more than 8 lines of dialog before we have to go run and jump through a gravity-warped Enterprise. Anyway, this is all secondary to the problem that the themes don't work that well anymore because they've been taken from other movies and put into a new plot. Kirk's hubris hasn't been important for quite some time, and doesn't figure into any of the lengthy combat scenes at the climax, until suddenly it does when Kirk announces that it does. Compare that with Wrath of Khan where the Enterprise's asskicking and resulting shield trick is entirely a result of Kirk's hubris. In one movie the theme is organic to the plot, in the other one it's clearly being introduced to a story that doesn't necessarily need it. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Jun 19, 2013 |
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Jun 19, 2013 09:36
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It's not odd at all, the character is out of place to the point that other characters comment on it, and then she has a moment that is out of place in the movie both tonally and in content. It's not weird for people to remember that moment as being notably out of place. What's odd is bringing up Gene Roddenberry's intentions as relevant to viewers' experiences of this movie.
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Jun 24, 2013 06:33
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This thread is making me re-evaluate the movie. It's positively refreshing in comparison.
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Jun 29, 2013 05:53
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Klingons are space vikings, Romulans are space russians, Humans are space racists.
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Jul 1, 2013 16:22
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Cingulate posted:Agree on both counts. Pine actually sold the line, and Spock's near-sacrifice seemed stronger. The actors overcome, or nearly overcome depending on your point of view. That's why the script is such a shame in my opinion, since there's such talent on display you know they could make something great if given the chance.
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Sep 23, 2013 11:32
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Keith Urban and Karl Urban are different people.
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Jan 27, 2014 02:49
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The new Star Trek theme sounds like it belongs to a detective thriller set in the late 19th century. I rewatched Into Darkness. Some things it reinforced were the excellent cast somewhat wasted in an overstuffed plot and just how much it doesn't work on its own. In the first 10 minutes the camera does a literal 10 second zoom in on Cumberbatch's face while ominous music swells. Without knowing who he is it's laughable. The following scene with Kirk in bed with a pair of alien twins was worth a chuckle though. Michael Fassbender would have been a great Khan. I think he doesn't get cast as villains as much as you'd expect because he's catapulted to lead roles already. drat his IMDB article says he's playing lead roles in two upcoming movies in addition to reprising roles in upcoming sequels. With his first major big screen role in 2009. Doing pretty well for himself. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Jun 4, 2014 |
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Jun 4, 2014 10:27
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Corek posted:Also T&A hasn't never been a profitable element to Star Trek, except maybe some Enterprise episodes (I'll never see them). Hasn't stopped them from trying. Are green girls not a thing? Hahaha what the gently caress is going on with Admiral Robocop's shoulder pads? I wonder if the multiple instances of "everyone on this ship is going to die" from different characters' mouths was intentional. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 11:44 on Jun 4, 2014 |
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Jun 4, 2014 10:51
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Hbomberguy posted:The idea of society as something fragile and difficult to build or protect is completely at odds with Star Trek's bizarre happy spacefuture where everything is fine except for those Reptilian Jews. The latter is quite clearly an ideological fantasy. Are you joking they did episodes about the fragility of future-paradise all the drat time. I'm not going to bother with all the italic and bold and sub and superscript tags to a transliteration of a Sisko voice but let's just say that ground has been explored pretty thoroughly.
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Jul 10, 2014 16:12
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:'Unintentionally', this utopia was actually several shades of hosed up - something that became increasingly clear as the universe was expanded upon with sequels and spin-offs. You would never see anything in the original series like the episode of Voyager where the feds enslave AI workers and force them to perform dangerous tasks. What McLuhan described above as a borderline-communist Christian ideal to be fought for has been coopted into that fantasy of 'the singularity', AKA 'the rapture for nerds' - and the series has changed to keep pace. Counterpoit, Voyager's writer room was a horrible travesty and that episode directly conflicts with a whole bunch of established canon. gently caress Voyager basically. Really, gently caress Voyager. I don't remember the name of that episode (I became a critical viewer in real life around the end of DS9/middle of Voyager in their original runs and realized that Voyager was actually bad television and stopped watching) but it seems to completely negate Measure of a Man, one of the better episodes of early TNG. And it's seriously like a throwaway shot in the last 30 seconds of the episode that declares FEDERATION DOES SLAVERY NOW. When apparently the Federation legal establishment weighed in on that like 14 in-universe years earlier on the side of "no loving slavery, guys, seriously." Voyager was SO BAD. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Jul 10, 2014 |
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Jul 10, 2014 16:28
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Hbomberguy posted:DS9 is better than the rest because of this reason though. I'm referring more to the TNG/Voyager/some of ToS attitude. 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. Bringing this back to Into Darkness, I don't really see anything new about it at all, including the examination of corruption. It just mashed up Star Trek II and VI and turned up the volume knob.
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Jul 10, 2014 16:36
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Timby posted:I only just now realized that Admiral Marcus' whole character and plot in Into Darkness is weirdly similar to what they did with Admiral Tolwyn in Wing Commander IV: Ostensibly on the side of the main characters, but is secretly behind the false flag operation, has a giant gently caress-off ship and intends to frame the protagonists for everything, and goes on a huge speech about how a war's coming, and only he knows how to fight it. Did you even see Star Trek VI?
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Jul 11, 2014 04:46
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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 sides with alien demons, and Sisko got raptured. That would have ruined Kira's character arc. "Hey guys it took 7 years but I'm finally de-radicalized and I can deal with my anger issues even though I may never be rid of them!" ~~assassinates a political figure~~
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Jul 11, 2014 04:49
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Hbomberguy posted:Yes but the show always presents these admirals as 'corrupting their principles', 'abandoning their ideals' etc. - the lesson is always that they 'weren't starfleet enough.' The Admirals failed, and not the system that by your own admission seems to continuously produce them. I am saying that maybe they were TOO starfleet. Maybe starfleet is the problem. You're squeaking through an awfully narrow rhetorical out for yourself. Sure, Picard may give everybody from admirals to Wesley speeches about how they've failed the lofty principals of Starfleet, but because he doesn't question the legitimacy of Starfleet itself his criticism doesn't count. That's basically what you're saying. Even when he gets very close to flipping the table and disobeying direct orders a few times. And then the Maquis arc starts in TNG actually, questioning whether the Federation is doing right by all its citizens, but that doesn't count too. And yet DS9 is looming there and kind of makes this whole argument look dumb, because in season 6 of TNG they were already starting to air this other show that concerned itself with these issues so explicitly that you can't deny it.
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Jul 11, 2014 04:56
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Hbomberguy posted:Picard disobeys orders in every one of the movies because in order to have Action Movie Bullshit happen he basically has to. Action Movie Bullshit the thing show-Picard is usually above, so to 'please the crowd' they have to snap his character in half. The point is the crowd-pleasing element. What if, in the future of man, people cared less about putting on a spectacle and being like an action movie would be, and gave a poo poo about the 'boring' thing - figuring out how to get proper egalitarianism? You can't have your cake and eat it. I like TNG a lot because it comes pretty close to this in a lot of respects. I'm pretty sure Picard doesn't disobey any orders in Generations although it's been a long time since I've seen it. Generations and First Contact were at least willing to explore Picard's character (Nemesis I guess was but it failed hilariously) so that's a plus mark on their report card. First Contact actually does show Picard disobey Starfleet's orders to stay out of the fight because they're worried he might lose it and go apeshit. He disobeys orders, shows up and saves the day and promptly loses it and goes apeshit. I actually really like First Contact because despite being a Star Trek zombie action comedy it actually has some believable character moments for Picard that we've never seen before. It takes a lot to push Picard into Captain Ahab revenge mode but being stuck on his ship fighting hand-to-hand with the Borg for a few days might just do it. Actually I take that back, I like First Contact being a Star Trek zombie action comedy unreservedly. It's just a shame that they handed Frakes the franchise after that and he wanted to just keep making action movies and only action movies. The most popular Star Trek movie (before the advent of international spectacles) was a comedy and the most critically acclaimed was a submarine drama. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Jul 14, 2014 |
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Jul 14, 2014 06:12
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PriorMarcus posted:Does anyone know a good resource chronicling (with screencaps) the enhancments and changes done to the Blu-rays? Aatrek? 
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Jul 20, 2014 13:47
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I'd like a movie where the villain attacks Earth. They need to up the stakes for this one.
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May 5, 2015 13:32
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 09:48 |
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Timby posted:This is literally my only complaint with the Abrams Enterprise, which is a design I otherwise love (especially the giant gently caress-off nacelles). I think I've posted this quick and dirty Photoshop in the TV IV thread, but seriously, move the neck forward and you have a near-perfect design. Hey that does look better.
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Jun 29, 2016 21:25
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