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Are you satisfied with Krall's agenda?

M

Mountie1988

Lieutenant Commander
Red Shirt
Seeing the trailers I thought Krall was hostile towards the Federation because he felt its expanding borders were threatening his way of life. Just like globalization endangers local cultures and is met with scepticism accordingly. Me, as well as my girlfriend, were kinda disappointed with his seemingly shallow xenophobia and racism and him being portrayed as an old-fashioned, non-modern veteran, yet feeling left alone, exploited, betrayed and thus becoming revengeful worked fine with me.

Now this guy, who is never wrong, has some perspective I find interesting. What are your feelings?

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I thought Krall's motivations, when elaborated, were remarkably thin and unlikely. It didn't particularly damage the movie for me.
 
Krall was a deranged individual whose humanity had been shed over many decades. He had nothing but a single thread to hold on to - that conflict made him stronger and that the Federation was weak and disloyal.
It worked for me, and I appreciate the fact that they never let him seek redemption or "convert" at the last minute.
I found his story to be rather realistic and convincing.
 
The Wormhole said:
Krall - Still a better villain than Nero.
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One aspect I like about Nero is that he is just an unimportant Captain of a mining vessel in his time. Then he's thrown into a new situation where he finds his civilian ship being way superior to the ships of the line of the age. He suddenly is a powerful man who can decide the fate of the galaxy, and as so often, power corrupts people. They didn't spend much time elaborating this point though...
 
Nero was an incredibly thin villain. Krall at the very least is more purposeful and intelligent, and he is given a decent amount of time to explain his motivations and actions.
 
I was expecting more about the expansion of the Federation trampling on his turf. That would have resonated with me a lot, what with all that's going on with the EU at the moment in my part of the world. As it is it was a bit too thin. It only got interesting at the very end. I loved the tease of him looking into the glass shard. It didn't really hurt my enjoyment of the film too much. It was a least better than the OTT contrived bodies in torpedoes nonsense in STID and the badly thought out first villain.
 
Trek villains aside from Khan have largely been weak or undercooked. Krall sort of fits within the latter, having a pretty strong concept that I would have liked more explored.

Much better than Nero and nuKhan, for what that's worth.
 
I liked Nero for the simplicity and clarity of the character. "Thin" may well be a synonym for "strong" in that there are no unrealistic distractions: Nero fights with what he has, for what he had.

Krall would be a non-entity if not for the contrivance of him suddenly gaining an army. Nero's power is delivered to him in a plot-relevant manner, and it's a power used for both good and evil in the movie. Krall's alien slave race and its conveniently attached superweapon just turns the main adversary into a mad emperor; without those, he wouldn't have been an adversary at all. Not that "power corrupts" would be an uninteresting story, or even that "alien machinery looks useful but makes people crazy" would be that, but it's certainly slimmer than Nero's internally motivated rage. There's no "concept" behind it at all IMHO.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Fourth villain in a row who's angry with the Federation and wants to inflict harm on it. About the only thing that separates him from Shinzon, Nero and Khan is that he never directly attacked Earth.
 
It would kind of hard to have a villain who is willing to break laws and violate principles to strengthen the Federation, to save it from itself. I mean can you imagine a villain like that - someone who would even make a special super ship or something to advance his agenda? ;)
 
I thought it was a good allegory to how veterans are treated once they return from war. As someone who volunteers time to help make sure vets get proper treatment upon returning home, I know well the impact it can have for them to feel appreciated. These guys go through a lot and then to come home and be ignored and neglected can be devastating.

So put yourself in Edison's shoes. You fought for your planet, lost countless friends and fellow soldiers along the way. You were victorious, and upon returning, the people you fought for have no use for you anymore but need to give you *something* to do, so they throw you a bone in the form of an old cargo ship and tell you to go make nice with the very people you were just fighting.

Now imagine you're on this mission and along the way you find yourself stranded on an alien world, your calls for help going unanswered. Thanks, Starfleet...you send us so far out that you can't even rescue us if shit goes south. Like any good captain, you do what you can to keep your crew alive, but in the end only 3 of your survive.

So he uses the alien tech to prolong their lives with the unfortunate side effect of it obviously transforming them into whatever alien race left the stuff behind...which also can't be good for the ol' psyche. Pretty clear as to why he's be pissed off at the Federation to me. A little extra time could have been spent on fleshing him out and really pressing the "neglected and forgotten" angle. I would bet that a fair amount of deleted scenes on the DVD will reveal more about him.

I also didn't see the Abornath (sp?) as a superweapon, as it seems like a fairly straightforward biological weapon. I also liked that (finally) the bad guy ship wasn't some gigantic black dreadnaught (Vengeance, Narada, Scimitar, Borg cube) and was dangerous *because* they were small and maneuverable and not simply because they were bigger and badder than the Enterprise.
 
Having seen so many angry, xenophobic people on this site alone who won't compromise enough to even show simple compassion to groups they don't understand, having a soldier like Edison witness the murder of millions by extremists then blame their entire culture, framing his entire life around hating them, doesn't seem much of a stretch.
 
Chemahkuu said:
Having seen so many angry, xenophobic people on this site alone who won't compromise enough to even show simple compassion to groups they don't understand, having a soldier like Edison witness the murder of millions by extremists then blame their entire culture, framing his entire life around hating them, doesn't seem much of a stretch.
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Yep. Plus his aching for a "simpler" time when choices were more clearly defined and strength was recognized and honored was a reasonable motivating force for his villainy.
 
I don't see the grievance Edison was supposed to have. He wasn't neglected in any fashion - he was sent to soldier on, in a mission he seemed very enthusiastic about in the video clip where Uhura recognizes his voice. He then hit a wormhole and sailed beyond all hope of salvage.

That he would expect to be rescued across an impossible distance just paints him as childish. That he would find fault in others when he himself was stupid enough to plunge into a wormhole shows his rapid descent into self-pitying senility.

If he's supposed to be some sort of an allegory on war veterans, he's a guy who gets a nice pension, buys an RV, and goes mad when an earthquake cuts short his trip across Mexico, deciding to slaughter all seismologists, car dealers, road constructors and old army pals in revenge once he manages to walk back to the civilization. Either he was nuts in the first place and should have died in the war already, or then he's nuts now and deserves to be gunned down by the local police before he does harm.

Timo Saloniemi
 
...Was his second-in-command, the one Jaylah had a grievance and a fight with, a fellow survivor? Did we get a hint in the Yorktown scene towards the end where Edison's crew files are shown?

Timo Saloniemi
 
Mountie1988 said:
Me, as well as my girlfriend, were kinda disappointed with his seemingly shallow xenophobia and racism and him being portrayed as an old-fashioned, non-modern veteran, yet feeling left alone, exploited, betrayed and thus becoming revengeful worked fine with me.
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I think we have people on Earth who would kill millions for pretty shallow reasons if given a chance. It is scary that people would kill on epic scales for little to no real reason.
 
Timo said:
...Was his second-in-command, the one Jaylah had a grievance and a fight with, a fellow survivor? Did we get a hint in the Yorktown scene towards the end where Edison's crew files are shown?

Timo Saloniemi
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I didn't catch that. Probably will have to wait till the Blu-Ray comes out.
 
We learned that Edison had found a slave race of the Ancients, and supposedly these were the folks with the green-lit helmets. The second-in-command could have been one such slave without the trademark helmet, I guess. But it's odd that he and he alone got a name and a face.

I don't see an easy way to link a crew member's real name with an assumed name, though (why Edison -> Krall?), so I'm not sure what such a hint could be in that scene.

Timo Saloniemi
 
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