If you don't think Nemesis is better than Star trek 2009....

Discussion in 'Star Trek Movies I-X' started by trek_futurist, Dec 14, 2011.

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  1. trek_futurist

    trek_futurist Lieutenant Commander

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    I don't think star trek V is a good film by any stretch of the imagination (the humor in it was terrible). I was just pointing out that it, at the very least, employed some attempt at storytelling and philosophical message, instead of a jumble of scenes designed to distract the viewer from the fact that they ware watching a special effects extravaganza (I know there were no amazing effects in star trek V but you nonetheless get my point).
     
  2. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Here's how they came up with it.
     
  3. Cyke101

    Cyke101 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I'm going to make this my sig one day.
     
  4. horatio83

    horatio83 Commodore Commodore

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    In my opinion "Who Mourns for Adonais?" made the point far better than TFF. I perceive it as a simple point and not even as a dense theme so I wouldn't call it a philosophical message.
    I would agree though that TFF had more potential to be good. While the script was not perfect its main issues were production problems and I think that with ST09 it is the other way around, great production, mediocre script.
     
  5. trek_futurist

    trek_futurist Lieutenant Commander

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    Exactly. Star trek 2009 was not a bad film to LOOK AT but as a life long admirer of profound dialog and decent script writing, I was frustrated through out the entire thing.

    And I still can never get past how easily Imposter kirk was promoted to captain. That is just not logical in a 23rd century starfleet setting, alternate time line or not, unless of course it's the mirror universe time-line where evil bastards will do anything to increase their rank overnight.
     
  6. trek_futurist

    trek_futurist Lieutenant Commander

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    I will say this though,the one thing I actually did like about it was the presence of Leonard Nimoy. But I wish he would have protested the horrid dialog in some places and the rank discrepancy and bad characterizations. If these things were dealt with adequately, I may not have ended up hating this movie so much.
     
  7. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    I read it and the other ______of Star Trek books years ago. I think it came out almost 20 years ago. Had it been written today it would include chapters about the science in the new movies. No doubt covering time travel ( as seen in the new film), black holes/wormholes, alternate realities, Many Worlds Theory and perhaps the possible ways Red Matter works.(is it a form of exotic matter?)

    The ______of Star Trek books tend to pander to the Trekkie market and use Trek as a platform to introduce the topic they cover to Trekkies and others who might otherwise pass on the subject. Often they work backwards show how science was inspired Trek rather showing how Trek was inspired by science.

    The "science" behind phasers was gee we need a raygun. A raygun that can do everything the script calls for.

    The transporter was just a way to get the story from one point to another quickly and cheaply. Just some handwaving about molecules was mostly what TOS said about.

    Dilithium, (as used in Trek) made up.

    The idea that humans and alien could produce offspring also impossible. The idea that they even look remotely like humans is also absurd.

    Need I go on?
     
  8. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    He did it because he loved the script.
     
  9. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Indeed. He'd turned down several prior offers to reprise his role as Spock before JJ Abrams and Bad Robot came along.
     
  10. BillJ

    BillJ The King of Kings Admiral

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    Yeah, apparently he came out of retirement to do it.
     
  11. trek_futurist

    trek_futurist Lieutenant Commander

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    I believe the release date of this book is at least 5 years after TNG ended. There are a a few old technical manuals from TOS which precede my own birth by many years, perhaps you are referring to these. Anyway, here is one of many amazing paragraphs from this book, reminding one of just how close the star trek writers (with help from their science advisors) got it.

    'Finally, the Star Trek writers added one more crucial component to the matter-antimatter drive. I refer to the
    famous dilithium crystals (coincidentally invented by the Star Trek writers long before the Fer-milab engineers
    decided upon a lithium target in their Antiproton Source). It would be unthinkable not to mention them, since they
    are a centerpiece of the warp drive and as such figure prominently in the economics of the Federation and in
    various plot developments. (For example, without the economic importance of dilithium, the Enterprise would
    never have been sent to the Halkan system to secure its mining rights, and we would never have been treated to
    the "mirror universe," in which the Federation is an evil empire!)
    What do these remarkable figments of the Star Trek writers' imaginations do? These crystals (known also by their
    longer formula— 2<5>6 dilithium 2<:>1 diallosilicate 1:9:1 heptoferranide) can regulate the matter-antimatter
    annihilation rate, because they are claimed to be the only form of matter known which is "porous" to antimatter.
    I liberally interpret this as follows: Crystals are atoms regularly arrayed in a lattice; I assume therefore that the
    antihydrogen atoms are threaded through the lattices of the dilithium crystals and therefore remain a fixed
    distance both from atoms of normal matter and one another. In this way, dilithium could regulate the antimatter
    density, and thus the matter-antimatter reaction rate.
    The reason I am bothering to invent this hypothetical explanation of the utility of a hypothetical material is that
    once again, I claim, the Star Trek writers were ahead of their time. A similar argument, at least in spirit, was
    proposed many years after Star Trek introduced dilithium-mediated matter-antimatter annihilation, in order to
    justify an equally exotic process: cold fusion. During the cold-fusion heyday, which lasted about 6 months, it was
    claimed that by putting various elements together chemically one could somehow induce the nuclei of the atoms
    to react much more quickly than they might otherwise and thus produce the same fusion reactions at room
    temperature that the Sun requires great densities and temperatures in excess of a million degrees to generate.
    One of the many implausibilities of the cold-fusion arguments which made physicists suspicious is that chemical
    reactions and atomic binding take place on scales of the order of the atomic size, which is a factor of 10,000
    larger than the size of the nuclei of atoms. It is difficult to believe that reactions taking place on scales so much
    larger than nuclear dimensions could affect nuclear reaction rates. Nevertheless, until it was realized that the
    announced results were irreproducible by other groups, a great many people spent a great deal of time trying to
    figure out how such a miracle might be possible.

    Since the Star Trek writers, unlike the cold-fusion advocates, never claimed to be writing anything other than
    science fiction, I suppose we should be willing to give them a little extra slack. After all, dilithium-mediated
    reactions merely aid what is undoubtedly the most com-pellingly realistic aspect of starship technology: the
    matter-antimatter drives. And I might add that crystals—tungsten in this case, not dilithium—are indeed used to
    moderate, or slow down, beams of anti-electrons (positrons) in modern-day experiments; here the antielec-trons
    scatter off the electric field in the crystal and lose energy.
    There is no way in the universe to get more bang for your buck than to take a particle and annihilate it with its
    antiparticle to produce pure radiation energy. It is the ultimate rocket-propulsion technology, and will surely be
    used if ever we carry rockets to their logical extremes. The fact that it may take quite a few bucks to do it is a
    problem the twenty-third-century politicians can worry about.'-Lawrence M. Krauss, The physics of Star Trek
     
  12. trek_futurist

    trek_futurist Lieutenant Commander

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    I thought that was more about money than anything else (for example, his refusal to appear in Generations, which necessitated them recruiting James Doohan to reprise his role as Scotty).
     
  13. trek_futurist

    trek_futurist Lieutenant Commander

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    Because the price was right.

    Does that mean he didn't love the essence of what Star trek was? Of course not.
     
  14. BillJ

    BillJ The King of Kings Admiral

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    Nimoy turned down Generations because he wanted Spock's lines rewritten.
     
  15. Herkimer Jitty

    Herkimer Jitty Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I love how there's a Star Trek Vision.

    Even though Roddenberry had no intention of creating a vision for a world of Morally Superior Supermen Who Go Out Of Their Way To Lecture About Those Backwards 20th Century Neanderthals when he pitched The Cage.

    More to the point, I think a future where human flaws have been eradicated is a nightmare dystopia, myself. Without anything to work against, there will be absolutley nothing to drive us. I think that dynamic forces drive human change and development, and that to supress ourselves in the name of evolution and progress is tantamount to a neutering.

    Let's not forget, this isn't a thread about ST09, trek_futurist. You've spent 17 pages evading and double-talking this by talking down on the movie, meandering from the writing to the production design to the acting to the writing to the science. Prove. To me. That people who like that movie aren't real trek fans. You're the OP after all. The responsibility falls on you to back that shit up, or say "oops, my bad, I was kind of a dick, guys."
     
  16. Stoek

    Stoek Commander Red Shirt

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    So far as I know Mr. Nimoy is not hurting for money. At this stage in his life he seems to only take on those projects which interest him. It is well known that he's fairly protective of Spock and prefers not to be involved with anything where he does not believe there's a genuine point to the characters appearance. This was the case with Generations where he felt that the lines being attributed to his character could just have easily been given to another actor. Which they were.

    With the latest movie however his Spock was integral to the story.

    To the best of my knowledge this and only this was his prime concern. If he had not liked the script and felt that there was a reason for his Spock to appear I do not believe there is any amount of money they could have offered him that he would have accepted.
     
  17. Robert D. Robot

    Robert D. Robot Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    ;)
    (Looks like like Stoek the Halls beat me to the punch!)

    IIRC, Nimoy stated that Spock's lines and actions as originally written in Generations were so generic that he felt that they really did not do the character justice or advance the character's
    development in any way.... ANYBODY could have given the lines. They weren't really having Spock contribute in a Spock-like fashion, so he declined to appear. It was not a money thing.

    In any interview I have seen or read about relating to Trek 2009, Nimoy has only been full of compliments for Abrams and the script and the movie.

    I was lucky enough to meet J. J. Abrams in L.A. and I told him how much I loved the movie. I was another one of those 5 years old watching Trek when it premiered. I would suggest that anyone implying that I am not a real Star Trek fan has a tenuous grip on reality. ;)
     
  18. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    Not sure that proves much of your point.

    The book came out in 1995. TNG ended its run 1994.
     
  19. horatio83

    horatio83 Commodore Commodore

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    Thanks for the excerpt. Let's phrase it like this, dilithium is a fictional substance with an idea behind it. Even without Krauss' explanation I guess most Trek fans would be aware that the vague idea of dilithium is to moderate or control the matter-antimatter reaction.
    Doesn't make it scientific but believable. Same with tieing ENT design into NASA designs, it helps the audience to imagine a design history and think that this spaceship is pretty realistic.

    Yet you always gotta ask a second question, does this serve any dramatic purpose? Not at all, it merely paints the background on which the actual stories are playing. Think about City, Darmok, In the Pale Moonlight, you mainly remember what the characters have done in the foreground and not so much the background.
     
  20. trek_futurist

    trek_futurist Lieutenant Commander

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    Non-sense. Plenty of interviews with both him and Majel confirm that they wanted to use star trek as a vehicle to portray a humanity that is better than it is now. This is further evidenced by his involvement in TNG as executive producer, up until his passing. He really wanted to perfect his vision, so in some ways TNG can be seen as a furtherance of his vision.

    Again, non-sense.

    Just because you do not have a currency based system as incentive to grow, does not mean you shrivel up and die. You simply replace one incentive with a better one. In this case space exploration, and having anything you could possibly imagine at your fingertips. It is folly to assume money is the only worthwhile incentive available. Generationally, you would witness an increase in selflessness, due to the expansion of the human capacity to give and the knowledge that working together leads to the greatest patterns of growth (something evidenced by the human genome project, that is, the fact that working together, as opposed to 'competition' may yield the greatest results, especially in scientific advances).
     
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