Star Trek: Axanar

Jesus Fucking Christ, can we talk about Axanar please?

 

Do the Moderators even visit these threads any more? There's a fair amount of comments aimed at post-ers rather than posts.

 

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Roddenberry was touring conventions and colleges in the 70's and just co-opted the ideas being bounced around by fans.

I'm not entirely sure Star Trek became better for it.

 

The Butthurt is strong with this one

I can't fault him for that. He was trying to pander to what he believed was a powerful and loyal fan base that would be able to sustain interest in a new trek production, and maybe that would give him more room to maneuver in other ways. Somewhere along the way he was almost certainly touched by the way the fans found inspiration in things he used to think of as mundane "Just to put something on TV" storylines and decided that he should really do a better job because his work affected so many lives in a positive way.

I think it DID, in the long run, hurt Star Trek, and maybe there's a lesson in this. The Trek universe is better off when we try to build it piece by piece instead of trying to build a whole grand vision of an entire future history. Add a little tidbit here, a culture there, an idea, a joke, a song, a character with an interesting background. It's nice to think that a man of huge vision can create a great sweeping future history, but really, it's just a compendium of stories and images by a group of writers in a shared universe.

Axanar can be a good litmus test for this idea. I strongly suspect that the best parts of this fan film will be in the small novel things it tries to contribute to Star Trek lore (what kind of person was Garth? What do Federation colonies really look like?) while an attempt at fleshing out the grander Star Trek Universe as a cohesive whole can only come off as more awkward and puzzling. There's already kind of an echo in this in the discussion about the Vulcan Council and the voting situation; it's hard to understand what's really going on there, but it seems to me we're better off filling in the gaps with fridge logic or else choosing not to care. If Axanar tries too hard to explain how the Vulcan political system really works, it could very easily fly off the rails and land in the Phantom Menace wasteland.

And God help us if they try to explain in paintstaking detail how the D7's warp drive works.

 

I'm well aware of that. The fact is that I feel like this forum is often left effectively unmoderated unless someone actually complains.

 

Yes, the moderator visits the fan film threads here several times a day. Yes, I intervene/moderate generally only when complaints surface. I generally have a laissez faire approach. As I've said before, we're all adults here (largely). The threads are as polite or crappy as members want to make them. I'm aware that for every action I "should" take that people complain about me not taking, there would be some reciprocal complaint if I had taken that action.

 

It almost makes me pine for the good old days of the laughably quaint little butt-hurt over the scandalous "Queen Bitch Whore" nonsense. Almost...

 

So was Garth the King Cocksucker of the Federation?

 

Nah, they's probably call him a tribble diddler

 

Well hey if there is fur on the tribble ...

but back to the most recent comments, I feel it is very hard not to cross the streams and make comparisons, the same way trek ( and other sci-fi) fed into star wars and then in turn the success of star wars returned the favor to trek, it all melds into one.

With the money Axanr has raised the expectation is of course very high, but (and please correct me if I am wrong), but the budget for Axanar is still closer to the STC, NV, P2, Farragut, and Potemkin budgets than one episode of TNG, DS9,Voy or Ent ( accounting for inflation) let alone the budget for ST09 /ID feature film.

In some of the episodes that aired you can see a boom shot, or a wall move, the wrong Klingon ship for the era, or even the reflection of a film crew person in a mirror, so why are we so hard on a fan film?

As for all the fan films groups I applaud them all, I do not agree with of the choices they have made and I have chuckled at some of the acting, or sets or costumes, but it's their bus and they get to drive it, and until I make my own film (which I doubt I will) I will sit in awe of those who have and are doing it and wish I could support them all.

 

How do you say "tribble puncher" in Klingon?

 

I think it depends on the material. I think TMP was hit and miss, but it had some large, grand, ideas, that, unfortunately, suffocated at times under its own weight.

TNG got better and DS9 did something different, taking the idea of utopia, but having the fringes that were not quite perfect, and (as science fiction is good at doing) demonstrating the consequences of such attitudes. Again, good and bad. I don't think Star Trek was ever perfectly consistent in its tone.

For Axanar, the tone so far is striking an interesting mix between action and historical drama. The documentary approach is interesting, because it explores a bit of Trek history that I didn't know, or care about, until it was shown to me.

It isn't TOS, or TNG, but an interesting mix of the two, that could work well.

I don't really like that line.

That's right. I said it.

 

That is rather presumptuous on your part, to wit: that people who don't like JJ's efforts either have not seen or have completely disregarded the films in favor of blind invective.

I've seen both and evaluated them both as well. They do not objectively measure up in terms of quality with Prime Universe Trek, for reasons I have made clear in other posts. For simplicity and clarity's sake I shall summarize them here:

The visual FX are harsh and distracting.

The characterization is shallow to the point of being perfunctory.

The stoies are equally shallow to the characterizations, and too dependent on "action action action" as a device to hold the audience.

 

There is nothing objective in a person's taste. If that was the case, "The Inner Light" would be the worst episode ever as I have objectively shredded it to pieces on more than one occasion.

People toss around "objective" in order to try and give their opinions more validity than they deserve.

Objectively, I have proven my point on more than one occasion that the Abrams films are some of the best Star Trek around.

 

People toss around the word "opinion" to diminish the positions of others just as often.

Read Cushman's books, esp the first one where he details GRs efforts to make Trek as literate as possible within the constraints of his studio mandate. He routinely sought out writers specifically with a SF background for just that reason.

For that matter look at "The Cage", rejected for being "too cerebral", and not enough action. Themes of illusion vs reality, the human need for freedom. Pike's personal struggle/crisis of conviction. Very weighty material, esp for the 60s.

And, btw, Trek wasn't the first time GR went "crusading". He did the same thing on an episode of The Lieutenant, and wound up costing it the support of the US military as a result (and royally pissed off NBC in the process).

 

Perhaps in a year, when Axanar puts out its next scene (Yes, I know they are still building sets, I'm making a joke, everyone chill) we'll have moved on to a different subject.

Until then, let's all take a step back and recognize that while we may vociferously hold to our opinions, that everyone else has their own, equally vociferously held opinions that are just as valid to hold, even though we might not all see eye to eye on some things.

Moving on:

I have a question for Terry McIntosh, Axanar's producer.

I was made to understand via the Axanar website from this November 14, 2014 post that the production was removing the name "Star Trek" from its various entities.

From Alec Peters' own words in that entry:

I am assuming this decision has summarily been reneged, as I see "STAR TREK" all over the current IndieGoGo fundraiser page and associated video?

Again, from that entry:

...or did you guys just mean "We're not going to use the "STAR TREK" name.... unless we need to use it to raise money." ? Or does Axanar no longer respect CBS? Or is it just that the earlier gesture in November really meant nothing?

Obviously, I'm having a little fun here with some of the more absurd suggestions, but I am curious about the reasoning behind the change, because to the uninitiated (like me) it comes across as awfully convenient that you're using the STAR TREK name again as you launch another fundraiser.

 

I'll take actual documentation generated by Roddenberry himself over third, forth and fifth hand recollections and poor research done by Marc Cushman.

And, I'll save you the typing... it has been pretty well proven what Cushman did was a hack job where he inserted his own opinions instead of doing actual research in many places. There's a whole thread in the TOS forum about it.

 

This again?

I'll reiterate what I said there. Harvey writes Star Trek Fact Check, a site infinitely more understandable, accurate and well-researched than Cushman's books. If you weren't so concerned with having to be right about this issue and actually looked at the FACTS, how they are being presented, and how Cushman's simply do not hold up under close scrutiny, you'd see how wrong you actually are.


Once again, with feeling. Marc Cushman is not a reliable source.

 

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