‘Star Trek 3′: Roberto Orci Wants to Direct

They're guilty of making the first Trek movies in a decade that weren't boring-ass wankfests.

 

Tell me, at what point does STID become a "9/11 truther parable"?
I think you're confusing the writer's personal beliefs with the content of the script.

 

But they're different disciplines. Lots of people are better at one thing than another -- for instance, I think Jonathan Frakes is a better director than he is an actor.

So is this really about his skills, or is it just about personal dislike for his attitude online? There's really no correlation there. Lots of great writers and directors are jerks on a personal level. I have nothing but contempt for Harlan Ellison's half-century-long temper tantrum against Star Trek for daring to treat his sacred script the same way any TV show would treat any freelance writer's script; but I think he's an amazingly good writer and I have great respect for his work. And I don't think much of Tom Cruise's personal beliefs or his behavior in public, but I'm very impressed by his dedication and professionalism as a performer. The person is one thing, the work is another. Heck, I'm admittedly not the most civil person online a lot of the time, but I hope people won't hold that against my work.

I don't think that's a correct characterization of Marvel's approach. Yes, the directors are working for a larger machine, but that doesn't mean they're given no control at all.

"Guilty?" News flash: Telling a story in a way you don't enjoy is not actually a crime.

 

That fits ... surprisingly well when considering tone.

 

I want Star Trek 3 to be all about staff meetings and updates of the Prime Directive, followed by a short presentation on the rapid proliferation of space herpes throughout the Alpha Quadrant.

 

Is that an achievement given that there's a 7-year gap between Nemesis and Abramstrek 1, and a 4-year gap between Abramstrek 1 and Abramstrek 2?

 

I do find it less than Awesome that having been given the Big Dumb Action treatment, Trek henceforth will be deemed a "boring-ass wankfest" any time two people stand still and talk to each other. So not signing up for any view of what makes movies good that has no time for Glengarry Glen Ross; IMO it was precisely the problem with the TNG movies that they kept trying to make them Big Dumb Action movies instead of playing to the cast's strengths.

 

The problem was that two people standing around talking or staff meetings in general became a way for them to pad out scripts that ran short. We had plenty of it in TOS, but it was actually used to move the story along.

There was a "snappiness" that was lost the deeper we moved into Modern Trek.

 

Then they need to get the characters to say something interesting about something that matters. Bonus points for any reasonably successful attempt at replicating the patterns of actual human speech (not to mention, you know, expressing actual human concerns). Again, based on recent Trek history the chances of that ain't looking good.

 

+1

 

In my opinion, your reference to the list of Best Director Oscar nominations being first-time film directors is a bit misleading - especially in the context of this discussion. While the information is completely correct, it should also be qualified - while they were all first-time film directors, only 10 were first-time directors; the other 14 (one co- credit) had at least some directing experience. All my information is courtesy of IMDB.
While reading through this thread, I've noticed several people have mentioned a concern with a director with no experience - that's why I thought it a good idea to post this.

ME

 

^Thanks for the clarification; I was wondering about that. Still, 10 out of 23 is enough to show that it is possible for a first-time director to do a good job. Not guaranteed, of course, but possible.

 

Sure, definitely possible. And there are untold others that were not nominated, but who had successful film debuts. I'm trying to stay away from passing judgment on Mr. Orci's potential as a director, but I can understand a studio being reluctant to entrust a film with the mega-budget of the next Star Trek film to a novice. On the other hand Mr. Orci is close to the creative process that produced the last two films in the franchise. How the two relate is beyond my skillset.

ME

 

I don't understand this 9/11 Truther parable accusation? 9/11 Truther crap was a theory/accusation of the President and his Right hand man Darth Cheney being directly responsible for ordering the 9/11 Attacks. STiD had nothing whatsoever to do with a President, it was a Rogue Admiral/Rogue Agency (Section 31) doing it on his own, without the President's knowledge. IMHO, you'd be a Hell of a lot closer with your criticism if you were to simply accuse Orci of lifting the Plot Line from DS9

 

That right there would be the key.

 

STID features an internal Section 31 faction (represented by Admiral Marcus) that arguably schemes to generate false-flag terrorist attacks on the Federation in order to justify war with the Klingon Empire. The parallel with Truther false-flag theories about 9-11 and the Iraq War seems obvious to some... I can't really get there (on account of the story is too murky to fully make out who's scheming for what or precisely why or whose actions are part of whose schemes), but I wouldn't rule out that it's what they were going for.

 

I'd say the Cuba parallel is way more on-point.

 

But, 9/11 Truther stuff was a direct attack on Pres. Bush and VP Darth Cheney. There is no President, whatsoever involved in STiD, it was a Rogue Admiral doing it (presumably) behind The President's back.

If you're going to apply it to any Rogue Admirals and so on down the line, anytime, anyone in Government/The Military has gone Rogue in any movie, since the 9/11 Attacks could be levelled with that same accusation, and you could also accuse the 9/11 Truther believers of stealing the idea from any movies with a Rogue Government/Military official that were made prior to 09/11/01

 

I doubt that anyone who really had to "go through that horrible moment" in any personal sense would expend any energy feeling insulted by some vague parallelism to some of those events in a skiffy movie made twelve years later. Let's not wrap ourselves too tightly in that mantle just because we don't like something, hmm?

 

In the Operation Northwoods sense? Yeah, could be.

Arguably it's become a subset of a larger "false-flag paranoia" culture. 9-11 Trutherism often overlaps with beliefs that the Oklahoma City bombing or the Sandy Hook shootings*, for instance, were Federal government plots.

(* Yes, really.)