Star Trek III - The [Speculation Begins] (Spoilers)

Obsession would make a kick-ass big screen outing. But I think flashbacks would be huge in making it work and I don't think this version of Kirk faced any adversity on that scale while at the Academy.

 

Speaking for myself I guess, I'm tired of the Borg. I'm tired of them turning up in every game or expanded media effort since Next Generation. They are the go-to antagonists for almost everything in Star Trek nowadays. If you need a large-scale cosmic problem, Blame it on the Borg.

The borg aren't even that interesting or impressive as antagonists. Stiff-bodied drones that either ignore you or take over your body and are lead by a monologue-spouting queen. They have no other character than this portrayal so I find them really boring and one-dimensional. The whole core of their menace is taking you over, being unstoppable, and I guess body horror.

The Klingons on the other hand don't rely on being invincible, body-horror absorption, and have many personalities and faces to make dialogue and characterization interesting. Becuase they're not unstoppable it means their plans are more crafty and interesting than just move in and assimilate. Moreover it doesn't seem like a Magic Bullet is needed to defeat them, and it's not so much of a let down when they are.

The most enjoyable Trek-eras, in my opinion, are ones where this omnicidal cosmic horror are not present or considered in the setting. So I'm hoping we won't run into the Borg, because I think Star Trek is more fun without them in it taking over everything.

 

I have this idea that the Klingons were really set back by Nero's attack.

Didn't it look likea Klingon moon (Praxis?) was detonated before its due time?

Khan wasn't supposed to be found this early, so the timeline is rather out of sorts. Spock Prime should have ignored the temporal prime directive and mind melded with new Spock, so as to have him able to explain plot points to the audience and have a leg up.

So this universe is already accelerated by Nero's tampering--leading up to a new singularity. The Borg are found earlier.

 

Wouldn't it be great if the next menace was a fleet of Planet Killers that had destroyed the Borg completely and turned their sights on the Federation next?

 

Probably pretty slim.

They usually want the audience to connect with the hero's and the villain's faces to humanize them and so you can see them emote. Which is why we so often see Spider-Man and Iron Man and their enemies inexplicably taking their face masks off in the middle of a fight. They'll even give computer programs faces sometimes to convey emotion. It's been a while since we've had a faceless "villain" like the HAL-9000 with just the single red eye, but even that still managed to follow you around the room. Or Darth Vader with the unmoving facial expression that still managed to show anguish when Luke was being electrocuted by the play of light and shadow across his face and the tilt of his head.

So there's a pretty strong incentive to give your villain an avatar, a face or a representative we can relate to and fear because they're like us, but different. Picard as Locutus was the precursor to the Borg Queen in that respect, though with less individuality and emotion.

But I thought that the lack of that was what made the Borg so terrifying and alien at first, even though they're not actually even a species, but rather a collection of them. They had people aboard their ships, but they were little more than larger versions of nanoprobes themselves; tools to keep the "body" of the Cube operational and perform tasks, and act as the individual microprocessors in what was essentially one giant computer.

There's no negotiating with something you can't relate to in any way, that doesn't see you as anything other than a resource to possess or an obstacle to destroy.

That's fair, and I understand completely where you're coming from. I just think they can still be useful and entertaining as antagonist, and ideally I'd make some tweaks to them if I could.

 

Eh.. what ?

That's certainly the idea behind the Queen, and the actress was fine in the role, but I despise that idea.

 

^ I don't despise the idea, and you can still do interesting stories with a Queen or a Locutus character, I would just prefer to do without them if they ever brought back the Borg.

Khan and the Joker are the most iconic, memorable, and widely known villains of their respective franchises, they both previously appeared in highly regarded and successful films of said franchises, and they were both last onscreen in the 80s, which puts some distance between that and their reboots.

It's not the first time I've seen the comparison made between reusing Khan and reusing the Joker, in fact I've made the comparison myself elsewhere. I don't know if he was really their inspiration for bringing back Khan or not, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if that played some part in their decision.

 

From Wiki:

But I was obviously talking about Bob. Duh!

Cinematic escalation.

How so?

I never had a problem with the Queen per se. It was how they used her that was always the problem, which is too bad because I think both Krige and Thompson did a great job.

People like to rave about how great early Borg where, but really, they were the conceptual equivalent to Dystopian Fiction for Dummies. While they may have presented a potentially interesting premise, it's was never something that would be greatly missed. And, honestly, too much would have to be sacrificed to really make the concept work.

OTOH, the Borg's very existence was a paradoxical conundrum. You can't have an entire race of automatons that have a working consciousness and are self-aware.

Locutus was the first answer to this problem. But after that was done, they couldn't dive into that bin again, so they went with the more obvious hive queen.

Only because most zombies films are restricted to a unpopular film genre. The few zombie movies that have branched-out into other genres have been very successful.

Sure it will. There's a logical succession:

"Nero blew up Vulcan. Marcus made a new ship."

In the next movie:

"Marcus made the new ship with some alien technology Admiral Archer discovered back in the day."

"And it cannae help him find beagle?!"

So on and so forth.

Actually, it would be more like remaking Cheers, and this time have Niles come in with Frasier from time to time.

Five words:

"Jenny Lawrence, Star Trek poster."

Or:

"There will be a queen."

 

Both people here and the writers made comparisons between this sequel and the Dark Knight before the movie was released. The correlation to gather from that was that the writers were going to pick a villain who was comparable to the Joker. There really isn't one, but the closest thing to a memorable villain to the general public (at least for the original series) was Khan.

Both characters somewhat represent the bottom of the bag of tricks. Not many other characters will have as much of a draw, if that's the ultimate goal.

Yet everyone keeps asking this question of "How do you top Khan?" as if it absolutely has to be topped. Batman didn't bother to do it. They didn't pick a villain that was known to the public, and they didn't try and top anything. They just tried to tell a story that fit in with how they pictured their trilogy to work.

I'm guessing this is where the Batman analogies will stop.

 

Small nitpick: the Borg were not automatons until the queen came about, at which point they started to be called "drones", as if the bee analogy hadn't been done to death already.

I admit, however, that the borg should have remained a one-time or two-time thing, no more. After the Best of Both Worlds they should have left them alone.

 

Even in "Q Who" they were nothing more than robotic zombies.

They (figuratively) sucked brains and walked with lumbering arms and a rigid gait.

You know what they say about ducks.

 

It just strikes me that way. It's like taking two concepts that were pretty far removed from each other and bridging the gap, and then having to do a whole bunch of shoehorning to make it work. In a sense, STID struck me that way a little bit, but it wasn't nearly on the scale of what the Borg would be.

It just requires too many leaps for me. Like they already jumped through a bunch of hoops to get the first movie done. Fortunately there was a lot less of that in STID. I'd prefer they stick to that and just pick a story that flows from the last two in some way. Cater to a story that works rather than just picking by race/setting.

Except Niles is a character. The Borg aren't characters (with the exception of the queen). They're drones or set pieces. They're a piece of science fiction used to tell a story, and nothing more. That's why I compared sets, not characters. And it's not even so much the setting in terms of place, but of time.

Now if they used the queen, then yeah, that comparison doesn't really work as well. But I thought the general consensus was that the Borg Queen as a concept neutered the Borg and made them less special. I understand why there was a need for her inclusion, but it's not exactly something that I'm begging for more of. Especially, the petty, vindictive, arrogant Borg Queen.

 

The Whale Probe in STIV was certainly an antagonist, albeit an unintentional and unconventional one, but arguably the bigger antagonist of the film was 20th century humans. They're the ones who hunted the Humpback Whales to extinction, thus prompting the Probe to remain in Earth orbit awaiting a response, and they're the ones who most consistently represented an obstacle or threat to our heroes completing their mission throughout the film.

 

No Borg were British !!! More khan more Klingons !!! More space epicness !!!!

 

Well, Nerdbastards, Moviehole and other sites have Joe Cornish in the frame to take over Trel III with JJ busy on bigger franchises.

Now we in the UK know Joe as the public schoolboy partner of Adam Buxton in an odd assortment of childish, lewd or just plain weird comedy shows, often including nods to geeky fan favourites. Not the sort of idiot you'd let anywhere a major movie.

However, decent low budget productions such as Attack The Block got him involved in writing the Antman script for Marvel, and now...Trek ?

What do you think ?

 

You mean that collective super-counsciousness didn't count ?

That's taking the definition of "antagonist" a bit far for me.

 

Klingons! This will be a linked trilogy.

The 5-year mission is to set things up for the animated series.

 

Hmm...

A borg attack threatens to wipe out the entire Federation, so Kirk revives the Botany Bay survivors (whose super-blood makes them resistant to assimilation) to make a last stand.

 

I used to watch the Adam and Joe show on channel 4, so its kind of weird seeing him perhaps take on a Star Trek movie!

This isn't Joe, its Adam

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3HL8XVMih8[/yt]

 

I enjoyed ATTACK THE BLOCK, so going proto-Edgar Wright is not a bad call IMO.

In a perfect world, I'd go with writer/director Tom McCarthy, but only if it was starting over from scratch and didn't have to cater to summer audience pyro levels. Based on repeated viewings of THE STATION AGENT and having just seen and been blown away by THE VISITOR (no relation to DS9), this guy is genius on character, and the latter had some surprisingly clever cinematic moments as well.