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Star Trek: All Good Threads...


SpaceChampion

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21 hours ago, Durckad said:

I know people love to hate on Star Trek V, but... I don't think it's the worst. It's certainly not good and actually quite bad at times, but it's also got a dumb, fun charm to it.

It does also pose one of the more existential questions of science fiction: "What does God need with a starship...?"

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I think Abrams biggest issue with Trek is be plays up the action and violence a little too much, IMO.

I want more scenes in my Star Trek shows with characters trying to come up with peaceful solutions to problems, that don't always involve killing someone.

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Into Darkness is very dumb in some ways but there's a weird thing where it's treated as absolutely rancid and... that's not what the critics or most audiences say.  It was the biggest box office of any of the films, turned a tidy profit, and probably the biggest strike against it was not the film itself but the mendaciousness of the creators and talent in the lead up to it when they outright lied about Khan being in the movie. 

The fact that people can think it's horrible while at the same time saying it was really well made is very dissonant and I think suggests deeply personal confusion or animus rather than any kind of attempt at a holistic perspective that tries to step out of one's own head a bit.

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15 minutes ago, Ran said:

Into Darkness is very dumb in some ways but there's a weird thing where it's treated as absolutely rancid and... that's not what the critics or most audiences say.  It was the biggest box office of any of the films, turned a tidy profit, and probably the biggest strike against it was not the film itself but the mendaciousness of the creators and talent in the lead up to it when they outright lied about Khan being in the movie. 

The fact that people can think it's horrible while at the same time saying it was really well made is very dissonant and I think suggests deeply personal confusion or animus rather than any kind of attempt at a holistic perspective that tries to step out of one's own head a bit.

This might not be fair but I deduct a lot of points for the bullshit lies about who Cumberbatch was playing leading up to the release. "He's not Kahn, we swear. PSYCH HE IS KAHN WASN'T THAT AN AWESOME TWIST!?" fuck you. 

But the whole end of the movie with Kirk dying and being revived was amazingly bad and stupid. I don't remember much else about the movie and I'm never watching it again.

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26 minutes ago, RumHam said:

This might not be fair but I deduct a lot of points for the bullshit lies about who Cumberbatch was playing leading up to the release. "He's not Kahn, we swear. PSYCH HE IS KAHN WASN'T THAT AN AWESOME TWIST!?" fuck you. 

Yeah, that was just completely shitty of them to do, but if you're able to divorce yourself from that and just look at the film as a film, there's just no way at all it can be seen as being anything like as bad as Star Trek V, IMO.

26 minutes ago, RumHam said:

But the whole end of the movie with Kirk dying and being revived was amazingly bad and stupid.

I mean... yes, the loose ends of it are painful. But the idea that someone's magic blood can bring people back to life is surely not alone among the list of silly or crazy things Trek has done over the years. 

 

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15 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yeah, that was just completely shitty of them to do, but if you're able to divorce yourself from that and just look at the film as a film, there's just no way at all it can be seen as being anything like as bad as Star Trek V, IMO.

I mean... yes, the loose ends of it are painful. But the idea that someone's magic blood can bring people back to life is surely not alone among the list of silly or crazy things Trek has done over the years. 

 

Yea, but doesn't Khan's magic blood basically break Star Trek as a whole, since it means people in Abrams universe have found a cure for death. I remember RLM made a joke about Star Fleet just strapping Khan to a wall, draining most of his blood each day and sending out shipments of his blood to hospitals.

Ignoring all that though, even the set up for the blood is pretty dumb. For example why is Bones even injecting human blood into a dead Tribble anyway? Nothing about that even makes sense.

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8 minutes ago, sifth said:

Yea, but doesn't Khan's magic blood basically break Star Trek as a whole

Yeah, that's the loose end thing. It's dumb. They could literally just cut out the glimpse of his body being stored and the film would be better for it. But still, that's a dumb ending to a movie that is largely okay. 

9 minutes ago, sifth said:

Ignoring all that though, even the set up for the blood is pretty dumb. For example why is Bones even injecting human blood into a dead Tribble anyway? Nothing about that even makes sense.

In the universe of technobabble, nothing ever really makes sense. It's all super-science.

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The Final Frontier had a reasonable philosophical grounding that they wanted to explore, which could have been interesting if, y'know, they had a director who wasn't mediocre at best.

However, the film was also hit by several waves of bad luck. Paramount rushed the film into production because they thought it had been too long without an OG Trek film (a year longer than the gaps between II and III, or III and IV) and that caused a whole cascade series of problems: ILM couldn't do the effects and the only company they could find to them was utterly inexperienced (using back projection for the space shots in 1989 was quite a choice). ILM were also wizards at working with very tight budgets and the new guys were...not, so a film with half again the budget of Star Trek IV and with half its sets prebuilt (most of the Enterprise-A sets are - not very well - disguised ST:TNG sets) ended up looking half as cheap (at best) because they spent so much money on test shots that went nowhere. They also spent way too much money on stuff they didn't need to go overboard on (the Nimbus III sets) and not enough on what they really needed (the ending).

The film also crashed into the 1988 Writer's Strike. David Loughery completed one draft which Harve Bennett managed to get hold of and "de-Shatnerise" (mainly to stop them getting lynched by evangelicals) just before pre-production began, with the idea that Bennett would do another script pass during pre-production (possibly with Bennett sneaking in some help from Nimoy, since their usual collaborator Nick Meyer was out of town) to iron out some of the remaining bullshit. Of course, the strike halted all rewrites and additional work on the script, which is why it's kind of all over the place, with some great stuff between the main three actors and why everything else is crummy.

To be frank, the fact that the film is even half-watchable with several excellent scenes and one reasonable set-piece (the shuttle bay crash) is quite impressive.

Against that, you have Star Trek Into Darkness, a film which had absolutely zero of these problems, more money than God, CGI coming out of the arsehole, some writers who had actually written some competent things before and would again (there's probably an interesting story why Damon Lindelof seemed to lose his writing skills between the years 2008 and 2012 or so, as everything he wrote in that time was poor and almost everything before that was solid and everything since, excellent), all the time in the world for rewrites, a reasonably good cast, a quasi-competent director and they still managed to make a derivative piece of lazy, hackwork Wrath of Khan fanfiction.

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So the rebooted franchise's big failing in its 11th film (2nd of the reboot) is that it's an unoriginal retread of the franchise's original 2nd film? Hmm... 

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2 hours ago, Ran said:

Yeah, that was just completely shitty of them to do, but if you're able to divorce yourself from that and just look at the film as a film, there's just no way at all it can be seen as being anything like as bad as Star Trek V, IMO.

 

Cannot agree here.  It's impossible to look at Into Darkness as an independent piece of storytelling. It's completely dependant on what came before to make even the most incomprehensible leap to make sense of it, and even then, it's contrived and, as referenced in the next part quoted, unoriginal to boot.

1 hour ago, Ran said:

So the rebooted franchise's big failing in its 11th film (2nd of the reboot) is that it's an unoriginal retread of the franchise's original 2nd film? Hmm... 

As a second film in a reboot of a series that is essentially rehashing the second film of the original material, It's a total failure. Into Darkness is only interesting in that it attempted to turn on its ear the whole premise of the earlier version of the film, and it couldn't even get that right.  So maybe it wasn't that interesting...

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I haven't seen Into Darkness in ages (twice in theatres I think). The Khan retread is simply unimaginative - and the strength of the ending of Star Trek II is that the emotion of Spock's sacrifice feels earned. There was subtle foreshadowing that he'd be back, but it took a whole other movie for that to happen. With Into Darkness, this happens in 20 minutes or less, and it's very telegraphed. The plot mechanics are obvious and cliched - like the thing with Kirk losing his command only to get it back a few scenes later (leaving aside how he got said command in the first place - the very definition of lame Mary Sue plotting). 

The thing I hate most is the Spock/Khan fight that takes half of downtown San Francisco with them. How many thousands (millions?) had to die for that atrocity? I'm not interested in brainless MCU-style destruction in Star Trek

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17 minutes ago, Aemon Stark said:

I haven't seen Into Darkness in ages (twice in theatres I think). The Khan retread is simply unimaginative - and the strength of the ending of Star Trek II is that the emotion of Spock's sacrifice feels earned. There was subtle foreshadowing that he'd be back, but it took a whole other movie for that to happen. With Into Darkness, this happens in 20 minutes or less, and it's very telegraphed. The plot mechanics are obvious and cliched - like the thing with Kirk losing his command only to get it back a few scenes later (leaving aside how he got said command in the first place - the very definition of lame Mary Sue plotting). 

The thing I hate most is the Spock/Khan fight that takes half of downtown San Francisco with them. How many thousands (millions?) had to die for that atrocity? I'm not interested in brainless MCU-style destruction in Star Trek

Ohh that crap is worse than you think. Pike demotes Kirk to a cadet after the opening action scene, only to give Kirk a promotion to his first officer about 5 minutes later, in the very next scene featuring both characters, only for Kirk to be made a captain again 5 to 10 minutes after that, once Pike is killed. So why was Kirk losing his rank even part of the story, if he was going effortlessly get it back in record time?

 

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Yeah, that's the loose end thing. It's dumb. They could literally just cut out the glimpse of his body being stored and the film would be better for it. But still, that's a dumb ending to a movie that is largely okay. 

In the universe of technobabble, nothing ever really makes sense. It's all super-science.

Yea, but usually there is a reason for that technobabble. Bones injecting blood of a human, into a dead creature of a completely different species makes no sense at all. I mean I'm going to assume Bones wasn't expecting the blood to cure death, so what exactly was he doing it for? Also why did he expect human blood to have any effect on a creature that wasn't human. It's basically the equivalent of injecting human blood into a dead cat, lol

 

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49 minutes ago, sifth said:

Ohh that crap is worse than you think. Pike demotes Kirk to a cadet after the opening action scene, only to give Kirk a promotion to his first officer about 5 minutes later, in the very next scene featuring both characters, only for Kirk to be made a captain again 5 to 10 minutes after that, once Pike is killed. So why was Kirk losing his rank even part of the story, if he was going effortlessly get it back in record time?

Yes yes yes!!! It was so utterly pointless and it was so clearly telegraphed that it would hardly end there. The only way to have made it worse would have been to make us think Pike was dead only to show him alive again immediately. I mean, Ashley Judd didn't fall for that when he played her dirtbag husband in Double Jeopardy, did she? 

49 minutes ago, sifth said:

Yea, but usually there is a reason for that technobabble. Bones injecting blood of a human, into a dead creature of a completely different species makes no sense at all. I mean I'm going to assume Bones wasn't expecting the blood to cure death, so what exactly was he doing it for? Also why did he expect human blood to have any effect on a creature that wasn't human. It's basically the equivalent of injecting human blood into a dead cat, lol

It's just so random. Abrahms plots are all Maguffins, except instead of simply being Maltese falcons, they take over major plot points. 

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5 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

The more clues we get about the next season(s) of Picard, the more pessimistic I get. It sounds like a soft reboot, but only to make it worse than season 1...

 

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On to season 4 of Enterprise.  Probably the worst thing about season 3 was always present in the series:  the whiplash morality that switched up Archer's character for plot convenience every other episode.  One episode Archer would be the moral scold for episode "we got to hold on to what makes humanity humane!", and the bridge crew would be "but we wanna kill/torture this alien!"', and then the next episode Archer would be the ends justifies the means guy while everyone stood around shocked.  Consistency would have been nice.

I wasn't a fan of the execution of the Xindi arc at first, but the concept seemed cool.  Then the story became more interesting, with the Xindi serving as an interesting look at what similar dynamic in the early Federation might have looked like.  I expected going into this season 3 would be my favourite season, so surprised the rewatch/watch of episodes never seen before by me has resulted in my preferring the earlier seasons -- even with the whole Suliban / temporal cold war.  I'm not sure TCW could have been executed any better, and on it's own it's not a bad idea.  I'm finding a lot of things about previous viewings of Trek shows are annoying me a lot less now.

Horny/emo T'Pol will probably be the thing I'll find most memorable, but I'm a simple man.

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50 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

On to season 4 of Enterprise.  Probably the worst thing about season 3 was always present in the series:  the whiplash morality that switched up Archer's character for plot convenience every other episode.  One episode Archer would be the moral scold for episode "we got to hold on to what makes humanity humane!", and the bridge crew would be "but we wanna kill/torture this alien!"', and then the next episode Archer would be the ends justifies the means guy while everyone stood around shocked.  Consistency would have been nice.

This is a big problem with Enterprise, they never really settled on what kind of captain Archer is. He’s basically an averaged out version of all the previous captains and doesn’t have any unique characteristics to distinguish him.

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1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

This is a big problem with Enterprise, they never really settled on what kind of captain Archer is. He’s basically an averaged out version of all the previous captains and doesn’t have any unique characteristics to distinguish him.

This is a big problem that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had. Voyager had exactly the same problem, Janeway would just act whichever way in each episode with no rhyme or reason, and certainly no regard for consistency or continuity. There's individual episodes of TOS or TNG where you might think the same thing (remember when Picard blasted the atmosphere of a planet with photon torpedoes as a display of badassery to cow the natives into respecting his authoritaaah?) but they were relatively limited in number.

We were spoiled by the much more rock-solid character arcs on DS9.

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

This is a big problem that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had. Voyager had exactly the same problem, Janeway would just act whichever way in each episode with no rhyme or reason, and certainly no regard for consistency or continuity. There's individual episodes of TOS or TNG where you might think the same thing (remember when Picard blasted the atmosphere of a planet with photon torpedoes as a display of badassery to cow the natives into respecting his authoritaaah?) but they were relatively limited in number.

We were spoiled by the much more rock-solid character arcs on DS9.

I think the problem here is that both Enterprise and Voyager have a clear serialized storytelling, especially Enterprise season 3-4 (and Voyager may want to sell itself as a show of standalone episodes but the very premise of the show makes it clear it is not telling self-contained stories).

If you have a show were there are overreaching arcs then character development and consistency are aspects the audience cares about ... not so much in shows with (mainly) standalone episodes.

As for the Abrams movies:

They really aren't worthy to be mentioned or discussed. The first one is a joke with red matter and Romulan oil rig guy. There is so much wrong with that movie that you do not know where to begin.

All I can say about the second movie is: Hiding people in torpedos. How stupid and dumb is that as a plot device? Not to mention how unimaginative it is to use Khan yet again ... and then literally doing nothing new with the character. Not to mention that the character didn't even look Indian (which Ricardo Montalban at least did).

And the third one actually succeeded at creating a silly continuity issue revolving around the type of warp engine the people used.

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49 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

And the third one actually succeeded at creating a silly continuity issue revolving around the type of warp engine the people used.

What was the continuity issue? And when it comes to warp travel, the first two are way more dreadful than anything else.

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