Skyscrapers in the background.

I've always found the huge ass skyscrapers in Iowa were a nice touch. They were never explained either, which leaves room to the imagination.

 

I'm glad they made San Francisco like it should be: a real city. Not Gene Roddenberry's lameass idea that all cities would be underground. Yeah, that'd be real fun, living in a damn cave...

 

Re: Skyscrapers in the background

I thought the enourmous, looming shapes in the background were really cool, too. As M'Sharak said, they're theorized to be arcologies (insanely massive, self-sustaining skyscrapers) but I have no idea if that was the intent of the CG artists. They could be fabrication facilities for the shipyard or massive automated farming plants, or anything.

I also loved that STXI left a lot to the imagination (Archer's somehow alive in 2258, there's been some sort of contact with the Romulans since the Kelvin was attacked), and that it hinted at several things that longtime fans would know (parallel timelines, the Vulcan/Romulan schism, Vulcan katras, Spock Prime's mission of reunification) rather than (re-)explain them all in excruciating detail, in a way that didn't interrupt the film or stop newbies in their tracks.

 

I assumed they were manufacturing facilities. Hm. I may be way off.

 

I assumed they were silos. Very Big Silos for grain to be shipped to Mars. Or something like that.

 

Neither Archer nor his dog need be alive in 2258 for that scene w/ Scotty to work. Perhaps the beagle that Scotty "lost" in his transporter experiment was the stuffed and mounted (or the futuristic equivalent) remains of Porthos or one of his successors. And Starfleet is pissed that Scotty lost him, as he was one of the few artifacts they had that related to the very late and questionably great Admiral Archer.

 

Eh? Mr Laser Beam quite clearly said that he was glad that San Francsico was made out to be a 'real' city in the sense that there are buildings and skyscrapers as opposed to utilising an existing idea of cities underground.

It seemed perfectly in keeping with the OP's opinion that the buildings were a nice touch.

 

It was a living beagle - Scotty said he was testing it on a life form.

Maybe Archer and dog time travelled again, or he was the first human to visit Centaurus and use the anti-aging pills from "Too Short a Season" (they were seemingly already known to the TNG crew) or it was Archer's grandson and his beagle, or Archer and beagle were frozen in a stasis pod Aliens-style, or he was just really really old (like McCoy in "Encounter at Farpoint") and it was Porthos XXIV, or whatever.

Hence, 'left to the imagination'.

 

One is tempted to imagine a lot of things about an Iowa where urban and urbane arcologies full of city-slickers coexist with hicks who go to a lone bar in the middle of a corny nowhere. Wouldn't Kirk have more fun going through the thousand bars and half a million teen girls of one of those arcos?

We might be looking at a multi-tier society, or then seeing communities isolated by biological necessity. Say, the arcos might house chlorine breathers, or humans engineered beyond surviving in the open.

If those are just futuristic grain silos, though, then we're keeping to a fairly traditional view of midwest life...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Likewise, I thought they were part of the shipyards. Hey, there's got to be more to it than the contruction yard where the Enterprise was being welded together, right?

 

^ That was also my thought. I thought those Iowa buildings were massive factories of some kind. Not skyscrapers. Why would there be just two of them, and in the middle of nowhere to boot? If they're going to build skyscrapers, might as well build a whole city.

 

The OP wasn't talking about the buildings in San Francisco. He was referring to the large structures seen in the background in Iowa when Kirk is riding his motorcycle. They are two completely different things.

 

Toss me in the group that thought they were starship construction facilities rather than arcologies. I just assumed there would be several other ships being built simultaneously.

 

Ah right. I still think it's kinda relevant though, albeit tangentially, and not worth jumping down someone's throat over.

 

Factories make sense, especially because we see giant quarries. For starship production perhaps?

 

The structures are so far away - on the horizon in some instances - that they must be huge to take up as much horizontal space in the frame as they do. You could probably lay out a hundred Enterprises on the floor of one.

 

^Well... fifty of this Enterprise.

 

It makes me wonder what other cities on Earth look like.

 

More like for making those buildings...

Even if they have walls one millimeter thick, they must contain enormous amounts of construction materials. The quarry we see might suffice for making one such building - if the rock being extracted could undergo total transmutation to the desired construction materials!

Timo Saloniemi