[ SECRET POST #2739 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2739 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 021 secrets from Secret Submission Post #391.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

And I think sometimes people revere TOS past the point of sense. It was original, innovative and shaped decades of sci-fi; it's also cheesy, clichéd, borderline incoherent and terribly dated. There's no way a reboot could be identical, or even close, to the original, not if they wanted it to be enjoyed by modern audiences.

[intrigueing]

I don't know about other people, but that's not the complaint I have and I doubt anyone else would stand for a retread of TOS in 2014.

My problems was the fact that the reboot has absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the values, themes, dreams, in-universe sociology and politics and culture, goals, and ideals and aspirations about morality, society, humanity, and cultural curiosity, expansiveness, and diversity the original series championed. The reboot is a severely isolationist and inwards-oriented world.

And the gender politics are exactly as bad as a show from the '60s, which is impressive.

[vethica]

Amen.

[skippydelicious]

And shot through with continuity errors, just from a film-making POV, that is bad enough before moving onto anything else.

[(Anonymous)]

My problems was the fact that the reboot has absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the values, themes, dreams, in-universe sociology and politics and culture, goals, and ideals and aspirations about morality, society, humanity, and cultural curiosity, expansiveness, and diversity the original series championed
Fucking agreed, you said it perfectly. TOS was all about things like idealism, humanity's potential, and making insightful commentary on society and people.

It also doesn't help that the AOS cast has like 1% of the charisma of the TOS crew.

[skippydelicious]

I blame Chris Pine for that. Or more correctly I blame whoever cast him. Kirk is central to making it work, and say what you like about Shatner but he had screen presence. Pine just doesn't. Its even worse when you stick him in between Quinto and Urban, both of whom easily dominate scenes with their own screen presence, and it all makes for a gaping hole in the middle of the movie. Quinto and Urban (and also Pegg, when he is there) completely steamroller him. I know that it isn't fair to say he is just a pretty boy (in fact that was part of the reason Shatner got hired back in the TOS days), but Kirk should at least be a pretty boy with some sort of screen presence who doesn't get wiped out by his co-stars whenever they are on screen with him, and it certainly shouldn't be the case that his co-stars are so much more charismatic that their stories are far more interesting than his. I wish they'd recast Kirk (and Nu-hura while we are at it, there is another character with a case of the blands - that could just be the misogynistic direction of course).

[bur]

Preach it!

[intrigueing]

Oh my god your icon <3 <3 <3

[cushlamochree]

The first reboot movie isn't miles away from the way Trek is presented in films. It's miles away from the TV series, yes, but so are many of the films in a lot of ways. The thing with the first reboot movie is that it doesn't really have much to say good or bad thematically. It's a fun action movie. Which is the genre in which several of the Trek movies have also fallen.

The second, now... yeah, the second is just fucking awful. They took the worst parts of Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country and combined them in a way that gets rid of everything that was interesting in both, and everything that was close to Star Trek in both.

[abharding]

After I saw the second movie, a friend of mine asked me what I thought of it...and I said it was a bad mix of II and XI. I wouldn't say it took the worst parts of those two movies as both were pretty good films, but they just didn't work here because there wasn't the back story to support them. In the original films we knew why Khan hated Kirk, we knew why Kirk hated the Klingons - In Into Darkness there was none of that.

[intrigueing]

Yeah IA that the first movie was okay -- it was more about presenting the characters than anything, so there were some very disappointing/annoying parts but if I thought "okay, this is just the intro, they can't delve into everything yet" it was sort of fun. But it all went to crap in the second movie and for me at least, that retroactively destroyed the first movie too *shrugs*

Reboot Pike is still epic though.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

The reboot of Wrath of Khan doesn't make any fucking sense, since the whole point of Wrath was that Kirk's history of playing fast and loose set the stage for a tragic conflict between two massive egos. Cumberbatch's ability to chew the scenery like a chipper shredder doesn't make up for the fact that he's written as a completely superfluous and pointless villain with no connection to anyone but Admiral Robocop. Kirk's on-screen death becomes a transparent fridging for the purpose of triggering Spock's entirely out-of-character bro-rage. So Into Darkness is a movie that uses all the plot twists of Wrath without any of the moral or emotional conflicts, and covers it up by having the cast shout at the camera a lot in the hope that we don't notice.

[skippydelicious]

Isn't that what they did with Star Trek Nemesis too? Just crib wildly from TWoK and hope no one would notice that shouting and explosions didn't cover the joins?

[(Anonymous)]

Funny, and true.

[(Anonymous)]

You know what? I can watch TNG and DS9 and Voyager for my intelligent, introspective looks at the Star Trek universe. TOS might have set it all up, but the later series were the ones that really teased out the interesting implications and dealt with interesting social situations.

Instead, I watch TOS and AOS for hilarious 60s anachronisms in the future, Bones sassing everyone out, Uhura doing fan dances, nuclear wessels, Scotty defying the laws of physics as a regular part of his job, George Takei/ John Cho doing their thang and, most of all, the epic love story of Kirk and Spock across space and time. No regrets.

[intrigueing]

That's okay. Just some people have different views than you.

It's more of a subliminal thing with me to be honest -- the stuff I mention is not normally what I focus on at all, but when it's missing, it sucks all the joy and compellingness out of the stuff you mention.

In fact, I almost thank the reboot for making me realize just how much important under-the-radar stuff I subconsciously loved about TOS that I never really focused on before, by throwing that stuff into sharp relief with its absence.

[(Anonymous)]

This, thank you for saying it

The reboot was one step forward, two steps back

[nyxelestia]

That one step forward was great special effects, action, etc. - and it did have plenty of good actors (personally, regardless of how "true" to the original characters they were, I really liked all the actors in the movie, even if I like some more than others).

The two steps back, though, were that it completely ignored all the themes and and values of the original franchise. And yes, I go beyond "series" straight into the entire franchise, because while there have been low-points, by and large the show was one that was all about progress, both in-universe and at the meta-level/how the show stood in our real world.

Even being "at the same level" as the original TOS series in terms of gender and race politics wasn't 'enough', because even that is effectively a backwards step in comparison to quite possibly one of the central points of the show.

I remember reading somewhere that JJ Abrams said he didn't really get into Star Trek until he was tapped for making the movies - but that he started to enjoy it after that. On the one hand, I firmly believe that someone who gets into a series well after it was over can just as thoroughly understand and enjoy it as much as someone who'd been there all along. On the other hand, the fact that he got into Star Trek "for the job" really shows.

The movies are less representations of Star Trek and more representations of what popular culture think of Star Trek/tend to think Star Trek is.

i.e. popular culture might hear "women" and "Star Trek" and think "mini-skirts", which is what JJ Abrams put in - completely ignoring that in the show, "women" and "Star Trek" meant "great characters, highly progressive for both their times and the genre, and who once wore mini-skirts but not for a long, long time".

Reboot Star Trek is what happens when you put a Fake Geek Boy in charge of a socially progressive franchise.

/rant

Re: The reboot was one step forward, two steps back

[(Anonymous)]

Good points about the reboot! I still love it, but i definitely has a lot of flaws.

Here's hoping that now JJ Abrams is off playing in the Star Wars sandpit Trek 3's new director can take a bit of creative control and fix it up after the shittiness of ST:ID.

Re: The reboot was one step forward, two steps back

[(Anonymous)]

You perfectly described why I think the reboot movies fail as Trek movies. I completely feel that the reboot movies were very intentionally created to be for the mass movie audience, and not for pre-existing Trek fans.

[allkindsoffur]

THAT!

[skippydelicious]

It isn't that they are not a retread of TOS that annoys people, it is the movies are basically one step away from Michael Bay movies. There is slightly more thought put into the story and the casting, but at the end of the day they are still just a collection of SFX shots with some continuity error ridden dialogue linking scenes; and according to this piece were designed to be a pair of origin stories for the third one. I mean it is bad enough that franchises are padded out with pointless origin stories when it is just one of the damn things, but now they are coming in pairs! That is just a blatant rip off.

[(Anonymous)]

If they wanted to avoid being a retread of the original, then maybe they could have, for a random example, invented an original villain or picked one of the more obscure original ones for ST:ID instead of dropping themselves into the middle of a clusterfuck of racial issues, plotholes (genetic supermen have magical healing blood that apparently cures death?) and crappy retreads of iconic moments (KHAAAAAN!) by half-assedly about-facing and stapling in the most iconic TOS villain ever?

If you're going to be 'fresh and new' to the point of dropping the entire ethos and outlook of the original, including any attempts to be as progressive about race or gender as a 60s TV show, then you could at least follow through and cough up an original storyline and villain as well, instead of cobbling together two plots from two separate sections of the original canons and slapping the most famous original villain you can find on the cover.

... I apparently still have feelings about this. Wow. Sorry.

[(Anonymous)]

The point is that there was no need for a reboot. Just continue the work that had already been started by TNG, DS9 and VOY. I liked those better than TOS anyway.

[skippydelicious]

They had to do a reboot though because of two words. Admiral. Janeway.

That pissed off more fans than the car chase scene and Data's superman flight combined. Something had to be done to wipe that away.