Star Trek: Axanar

Am I the only one who is still trying to figure out what standard is being used to measure?

I've commented about Axanar before that the Prelude didn't interest me as much because the characters were not as well defined for my liking. The tone of the piece was akin to documentary piece (intentional, I'm gathering). The recent clip released felt more character driven, with a lot of Soval's personal history driving his behaviors.

That's more interesting to me. If we are analyzing characters, I could do a whole psychological paper on Pine's Kirk. Fascinating stuff, on par with any thing else in Trek's history.

 

You're just full of shit. Phantom has objectively proven that the characters are shallow.

 

I'm a little slow. Takes me time to realize things

 

That's just it: "People who don't like JJs efforts" are not, at the end of the day, finding fault with the films, they're finding fault with the man who made them.

There's quite a bit to find fault with in both films, to be sure. The usual scattering of plotholes, editing mistakes and flubbed lines. The same kind of stuff we've been seeing in Star Trek for 50 years already. But rarely in the past did we have an entire clique who seized on those criticisms as an indictment of the film's director. For example, Jonathan Frakes didn't catch a whole lot of flak for all of the things that were wrong with "Star Trek: Insurrection." Likewise, people still manage to find some measure of amusement in watching "The Final Frontier", and we even (somehow) managed to forgive Shatner for making it.

There is a difference between not liking something and not thinking something should be liked by anyone. The former is having an opinion; the later is having a grudge.

For example:

...and nobody should like the FX.

... and nobody should like the characterization.

... and so the audience shouldn't like the stories either.

And yet I somehow still enjoyed both films way better than TFF or, for that matter, Insurrection. I suspect I'm also going to enjoy Axanar considerably better than either of those films. But you know what I'm NOT going to do? I'm not going to try and explain to you why I didn't like Insurrection or why I thought TFF was a crappy movie, mainly because
1) It doesn't actually matter and
2) I'll still watch them whenever they come on TV.

Unless STID is on, then I'll watch that instead.

 

Y

This is insulting beyond the pale.

Quite a few people--myself included--have laid out specific reasons why we disliked the films since they first started coming out. But that isn't good enough. And it gets ignored simply to label dissenters as haters and thus easy to denigrate and discredit. And few chances are missed to do so.

In the past I made no bones about why I disliked these films, but over time I simply got tired of it. But even so I (and others like minded) simply have to utter one simple word of criticism, no matter how mild, and it's leapt on with rolling eyes and exclamations of exasperation.

Fuck that. We get just as tired (if not more so) of hearing praise heaped on what many of us see as mediocrity (at best).

Flip it around. You don't see me jumping down people's throat just because they don't care for TOS or TMP. It has to be really out of left field for me to bother with that kind of criticism. And often enough I've seen a lot of criticism directed at TOS that I thought was ignorant as hell and I still let it pass.

Furthermore you don't see me haunting the forums of the subjects I don't care for. If I was really out to constantly tear nuTrek down I'd be doing exactly that. And I'm not alone. I also sure as hell don't lose any sleep over these films especially given I have a lot better and more enjoyable things to do.

In the end time and the shear weight of materiel that came before nuTrek will diminish any of its significance. TOS alone still garners new viewers even after forty years and fan productions also fuel the interest. In the end nuTrek won't register much against that once it's done and they've gone on to the next inevitable reimagining.

 

Physician, heal thyself!

Effectively, you're saying that you are not wrong, that you've never been wrong, and that to suggest you might be wrong is an insult. That's bunk, my friend. Bunk.

You may not "haunt" other forums for subjects you don't care for, but good lord you are certainly prolific about the things you do care for, writing endless paragraph after paragraph flooding those threads with largely the same commentary being regurgitated over and over until new topics arise.

Don't make this more than what it is, friend. You don't like the Abrams Star Trek films. We get it. You're like that Doctor Who joke, with the prime minister who always tells people her name and that she's the prime minister -- "Yes, we know!"

Ignoring the context of the commentary that led us down this agonizing tributary of mundanity isn't helping matters either. If you didn't need perspective before, you sure do now.

And no, that's not an insult. It's an appeal to reason. It's me telling you "Jim, you're pusing." Take a step back and try to look at all angles of the conversation and the situation outside of your own.

If none of us can do this, can we at least all agree to just move the fuck on already and go back to discussing Axanar?

Terry McIntosh, I'd still love to hear your thoughts on my earlier questions.

 

Why?

 

I swear to God if you people get the thread locked with all the Abrams shit I am going to...

... be very, very upset. And eat some Nutella. And then I will gain pounds, and the pounds will lead to my early death, and then the orphan I would have saved from a rockslide in Kenya will die. DIE, I tell you.

That's right. You are all KILLING ORPHANS IN KENYA. I just... well, I just hope it's worth it.

No, indeed. I was implying more of a "hiss," I think.

I'm just messing with you, of course. I can see where you get the parallel from, it just struck me as a touch catty because a) the politics stuff in the Star Wars prequels was actually almost literally meaningless (we couldn't have had the conversation about it that we've had about this scene in this thread), and b) Soval alone conveys more emotion in this scene (quite ironically) than we saw in any half-dozen of Lucas' walk and talks, and no I'm not even exaggerating. YMMof-courseV.

 

I actually am in agreement with you about the emotion. I found that to be one of the more interesting aspects of Soval's character. It was reminiscent of Sarek in "Journey to Babel" when he was talking with Amanda.

A credit to Graham's performance and great anticipation of more to come.

 

Fffftt!

Clearly my MMDV (My Mileage Does Vary) because I found the dialog just as dishwater dull as the prequel stuff. That it includes Trek's tiresome (even during TOS) "human exceptionalism" rubbish is another negative for me, personally, as a viewer.

 

I knew I was hooked the moment my thoughts shifted from "that looks pretty good, nice effect," to "what's Soval going to do? How do you convince an entire Vulcan governing body to change their minds once their decision has already been put into motion?"

Nice work.

 

YMIATVBISDSWYGT*. I will not be out-acronymed.

(* Your Mileage Is Allowed To Vary But I Still Don't See Where You're Getting That. I'm with J. on this one. The idea works better here because both through performance, content and even what little we have of context so far, there's an actual sense of the stakes and the urgency emerging from this scene.)

 

Are you expecting too much? Jaded perhaps? Or just too many prose written that it seems bland because you have seen far, far too many screenplays in your lifetime.

 

I've had the grave misfortune of reading the first two Cushman books on Star Trek (thankfully, the generosity of the L.A. County Library system meant I didn't have to pay for the second volume). To be frank, Cushman is a bad scholar, a dreadful historian, and a lousy writer. He's also a serial fabricator, and I'm not referring to his professional conduct (itself problematic) when I make that charge.

Star Trek was far from the only series pursuing weighty themes in the '60s. Roddenberry liked to characterize the face of network television at this time as little more than Gomer Pyle and Lost in Space, but the fact of the matter is that network television was much more complex than that, even after the so-called "Golden Age" of television anthologies gave way to the "vast wasteland" of action adventure shows. Cushman's conception of television during this period is just about as shallow as Roddenberry's.

 

Indeed you did. Repeatedly. In fact, if I recall, you personally did so every chance you got, so often and so bitterly that you have actually cultivated a bit of a reputation for it. At least now you only bring it up whenever or wherever anyone else in a thread with you dares mention it, oh tireless warrior of "JJtrek" hatred.

When was that, exactly? I seem to recall you and Zim high-fiving each other over how ugly you thought the new Enterprise was, way the hell back in 2009 before the movie was even released. You were initially part of the "This movie is going to suck and I am not going to be watching it because it's not real Star Trek" bandwagon.

I made no bones about it then either. It's not like you were optimistic for a good Trek movie but were disappointed at the theaters; You made up your mind WELL IN ADVANCE that you weren't going to like anything JJ Abrams produced. Six years later, your mind has not changed and it's not GOING to change, because your hatred of the movie isn't actually about the movie at all.

Haters gonna hate.

Should I give you a list of reasons why I know for a fact I'm not going to like Axanar and why I think all of its ships are ugly and why the producers don't really respect previous Trek lore? Of course not. Because that would be stupid. Instead I hold out optimism that the finished product will be, on the whole, entertaining; that I will be able to suspend my disbelief and follow the story, and that I'll come away from the experience a little happier for the enjoyment of it. I'm sure I'll disappointed with some things, pleasantly surprised by others. But if I ever make Axanar my hobby horse of hatred the way the reboot movies have been for many posters here, I hope you track me down and strangle me with my own entrails.

That's because people who don't care for TOS or TMP (and such people do exist) do not spew invective dishing on those movies and trying to convince other people that they're unwatchable. I would, however, consider that to be a dick move on whoever engaged in such behavior and I would probably nod with approval if you told TOS/TMP bashers where they can shove their opinions.

Which, by the way, Timo does to me all the time when I bash Voyager. It's kind of expected, but it is what it is.

... anymore.

Thanks for that, by the way.

 

It's kind of easy to overlook this because SciFi fans like to think of Star Trek as having virtually no "serious" competition on the air at the time of its broadcast. But that would assume that Star Trek's only possible competition was other sci-fi shows, which is simply not the case. I'm not even convinced it was the most "cerebral" science fiction show of its time.

On the other hand, Star Trek was still on the air when "2001: A Space Odyssey" released in theaters. SPEAKING of cerebral...

 

Do we have a functional purpose for the various older Federation starships seen so far in Prelude to Axanar? There are four older style classes of ship. Do they have purposes? Ages? Technical data (mmmm technical data).

 

Only what we can piece together from the kewl visuals. Tobias seems to have based the designs on the Kelvin and Newton types from 2009, scaled down and slightly modified to a more TOS-style. If I had to guess, though, the fact that the Ares is built for combat implies the older-style vessels AREN'T.

Also seems like they're implying the Constitution class was primarily built for combat too and only modified into an exploration platform later. Which I suppose was FASA's interpretation of the ship's complement doubling between The Cage and No Man.

Sort of wrapping my head around the fact that a lot of the source material is coming from an RPG book that was practically a collector's items by the time I was old enough to read it. Despite the welcome attempts at visual/stylistic modernization I feel like if manage to watch this thing without book shopping, I'll be very pleased with myself.

 

You know what'd be awesome? Axanar ships that match the Eaglemoss releases. I would so "donate" to get a few of them. The models they've already done look awesome, but my gluing and painting days are long over.