[ 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

[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).

[(Anonymous)]

I'll be honest, I prefer Pine's Kirk to Quinto's Spock. Quinto just always looks so constantly ANGRY as Spock. He just generally seems to be in a terrible mood or on the edge of a psychotic break. Pine's Kirk, at least, is okay (when he's not interacting with women…). But Nimoy just leant such a calmness and tranquility to Spock that Quinto just doesn't convey. Whether that's the writing, direction, or acting is debatable. I think it's the writing personally.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know about Pine, I thought his acting was fine, but his character, Nu!Kirk is terrible.

He's a brat and a bully in the first movie and he didn't actually earn his position. TOS!Kirk on the other hand worked his way up. While he cheated on 'the test', we know he earned his position through hard work.

Nu!Kirk just got the position because he needed to have it at the end.

After being on academic suspension, stowing away on the flagship, mutiny and completely disrespecting and pushing Captain Spock (more mutiny), he's captain? Why isn't Spock captain? Didn't he do more towards that final victory than Kirk? Couldn't Kirk have acted as XO and advised Spock?

It was poorly done, and it makes the character, and the universe they live in, kind of ridiculous.

[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.

[cushlamochree]

Exactly.

In the end Into Darkness actually kind of relies on people already knowing about the Klingons and Khan. They never take the time to set it up in the movie, so the main reason that you care about Khan is because you know what happened in Wrath of Khan originally. Which is a really fan-wanky thing to do when you're trying to reboot a series from scratch.

[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.

Bruce Greenwood is SO WONDERFUL

[(Anonymous)]

I love reboot Pike. So of course they had to kill him.

Watched Thirteen Days just for more Bruce -- was not disappointed as it's a great movie.

[cushlamochree]

I liked the characters so much in the first movie! I thought more or less all of them were well done, and especially Scotty, Kirk, and Bones. They did great work to set them up with it.

And then in the second movie they went precisely nowhere with it.

[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!