Wicker Man was shite, but noit on the level of Left Behind.
And I won't hear a bad word about Ghost Rider 2. Crazy Nick was at his very best there!!
Star Trek Discovery Writing Staff
- Thread starter The Habs Fan
- Start date
And I won't hear a bad word about Ghost Rider 2. Crazy Nick was at his very best there!!
You can have Ghost Rider. I'll keep Left Behind. Thanks. At least I know what I'm getting in that film.
Okay, so from his Twitter handle it looks like he's the one with the "B"... so his track record includes Halloween 4, Ballistic: Ecks v Sever (a criminal waste of Antonio Banderas), Spawn, Wrong Turn 2, 3, 4, and 5 (what the hell is this?) and a lot of other ultraviolent direct-to-video stuff, and oh, I see, the 2000 version of Left Behind, not the 2014 version... Yeah, "absolute shit" sounds like a pretty accurate summary. What are the showrunners thinking? 
Aside: does everyone on a TV writing staff get a "producer" credit these days?...
Aside: does everyone on a TV writing staff get a "producer" credit these days?...
Yeah, "absolute shit" sounds like a pretty accurate summary. What are the showrunners thinking?
My sad conclusion is they can't afford to hire the writing talent that this show needs.
And yet, there are shows with a fraction of the budget and much better writing talent.
(Seriously, writing is never the budget-busting item in any Hollywood production. The money is just going somewhere else. If they hire crappy writers, it's because they choose those writers.)
(Seriously, writing is never the budget-busting item in any Hollywood production. The money is just going somewhere else. If they hire crappy writers, it's because they choose those writers.)
This guy is clearly a Z-lister though. He's middle aged and still hasn't produced anything beyond hackwork. It's not like their young, mostly unknown hires from the first season, where you could argue they might grow into the role. There's basically a certainty he will just produce schlock. I hate to say it, but could this be a "diversity hire?"
It's actually funny, thinking about it, that many of the heavy hitters on Berman-era Trek - Ronald D Moore, Brannon Braga, Rene Echevarria, Naren Shankar, Robert Hewitt Wolf, etc - had essentially no TV writing experience prior to Trek.
To give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he has hidden talents and just hasn't had the right chance yet. Maybe he came in with an absolutely great story idea and won everybody over. Heck, even F. Scott Fitzgerald scripted a fair amount of schlock during his Hollywood days. Maybe we'll all be pleasantly surprised.
But yeah, that's not the way to bet.
(And as "diversity" goes, what really worries me is that perhaps he was hired not for his race but for his religion... that the producers think someone who would write a Left Behind adaptation is the sort of person who can contribute to their "science vs. faith" concept for S2. And that's not encouraging at all...)
But yeah, that's not the way to bet.
(And as "diversity" goes, what really worries me is that perhaps he was hired not for his race but for his religion... that the producers think someone who would write a Left Behind adaptation is the sort of person who can contribute to their "science vs. faith" concept for S2. And that's not encouraging at all...)
In Hollywood?
Remember: Kurtzman said the theme for S2 will be "science vs. religion". (Despite somehow inclunding Section 31 and Pike's Enterprise as major parts, too). So it only makes sense to hire hacks that write lousy evangelical b-movies.
What about Benny Russell? He is the one actually writing everything.
Are they gonna be as honest about religion as TNG was? That it is a historical phenomenon, that relative to different cultures. Or will they pander to the times, rising anti-intellectualism, and the renewed post-1980s fundamentalism in Christianity and Islam? "Oooooo maybe religions are all partly true, ooooo." Rather than the reality, that they all poach myths and ethics liberally. I'm sick of hearing theological sophistry posing as actual philosophy.
Thousands of religions have existed across human history. Polytheistic, monotheistic, henotheistic, animist, pantheist, agnostic and even atheistic ones. Across 300,000 years of Homo sapiens history. Non-religious people have also existed all that time.
The only reasonable way to treat a given religion is as a finite sociological phenomenon to be studied; their holy sites will one day be pushed under a tectonic plate, they are clearly and obviously ephemeral. But we already saw in season one's lamentable confusion, some pretty irrational bullshit has passed through this writer's room. I can already imagine how bad this show's treatment of 'faith' will be.
Isn't it worrying that a series from the 1960s had a more rational attitude to anthropological concepts like religion than one from the 2010s may have? Despite the fact that nobody in human history has reliably recorded anything supernatural, and, lo and behold, in the age of instant communication, nothing supernatural ever happens any more.... we are getting a writer of religious fiction doing work on Star Trek, and Star Trek exploring science vs religion, as if there is any contest.
Thousands of religions have existed across human history. Polytheistic, monotheistic, henotheistic, animist, pantheist, agnostic and even atheistic ones. Across 300,000 years of Homo sapiens history. Non-religious people have also existed all that time.
The only reasonable way to treat a given religion is as a finite sociological phenomenon to be studied; their holy sites will one day be pushed under a tectonic plate, they are clearly and obviously ephemeral. But we already saw in season one's lamentable confusion, some pretty irrational bullshit has passed through this writer's room. I can already imagine how bad this show's treatment of 'faith' will be.
Isn't it worrying that a series from the 1960s had a more rational attitude to anthropological concepts like religion than one from the 2010s may have? Despite the fact that nobody in human history has reliably recorded anything supernatural, and, lo and behold, in the age of instant communication, nothing supernatural ever happens any more.... we are getting a writer of religious fiction doing work on Star Trek, and Star Trek exploring science vs religion, as if there is any contest.
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Oh Lord. That sounds horrifyingly plausible.
They wouldn't hire someone writing shitty Christian movies if they wanted a rational or sceptical portrayal of religion...
Hell, the entire show looks like someone untalented was trying to ape nuBattlestar Galactica anyway. Might as well copy the whole religious angle as well...
Or you bring a guy like him in to write a character, or a set of characters, so that the religious point of view on the show doesn't become a strawman as has happened every other time Star Trek has tackled this topic. It is still Star Trek, and I still want it to come down on the side of secular humanism, but I would also like for it to come to that after actually having the argument.
Like, don't get me wrong, "Who Mourns For Adonais?" and "Who Watches the Watchers?" are both great episodes. But they both present "our side" as blatantly, overwhelmingly right from frame one. Kirk vs. the Towering Tyrant, or Picard vs. the Frightened Primitive, neither of those is really addressing the complicated relationship religion has had with modernity for hundreds of years.
Like, don't get me wrong, "Who Mourns For Adonais?" and "Who Watches the Watchers?" are both great episodes. But they both present "our side" as blatantly, overwhelmingly right from frame one. Kirk vs. the Towering Tyrant, or Picard vs. the Frightened Primitive, neither of those is really addressing the complicated relationship religion has had with modernity for hundreds of years.
Thats true Ceridwen, but I'm not sure there are many writers I would trust to do that; like, I have watched pretty much all modern genre TV, and every time someone has tried it, they have fallen well short of academic nuance.
Mostly because, it shouldn't be a contest.
Also, we have this wonderful quote from Kirk:
Not in today's Hollywood, it doesn't.
It would be nice if there was a discussion, but I am doubtful of that point.
DS9 is part of the Trek corpus, and handled the question of faith very well in the early years, before the Prophets vs. Pah Wraiths conflict became like something from a shallow fantasy series.