Not even then, IMO. I mean, just because everyone agrees doesn't make it objectively true. Nothing would make anything objectively true, as I see it.
Beware of complete relativism.
I think we've got pretty solid certainty about the objective truth of most principles of mathematics, and possibly even quite a few laws of physics...
All [the Trump reference] does is escalate something that doesn't belong....which doesn't reinforce your credibility.
It remains a valid analogy. And it's not going to reduce my credibility in the eyes of anyone except Trump supporters, who have already cast far more shade on their own capacity to judge credibility than anyone else could possibly do, so there's no point being concerned about what they think.
The vibe that comes across is that you seem to think that films have to have a high level of cerebral content to be worthy of appreciation on any level. And that's just not the case. That's subjective. If that's not how you feel, then consider how it sounds by the way you present it.
I wouldn't frame it quite that way (in particular it's not quite clear what you mean by "high level" and "cerebral"), but it's close enough to accurate that I'm not going to quibble. As I've posted before, for me to consider a piece of narrative entertainment successful, it needs to engage me both emotionally
and intellectually. If it fails on either one of those fronts, then, well,
it fails. That's not to say a story has to be ostentatiously highbrow about it!... for instance,
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is a thoroughly engaging film on both fronts, while maintaining a wry tongue-in-cheek attitude throughout. But it does mean a story that just doesn't make logical sense even on its own in-universe terms, that IOW is egregiously
stupid, is one for which I have no patience.
As for how that sounds to others, I can't imagine anyone taking exception to it other than aggressively anti-intellectual types. And again, there's really no reason I should care what they think.
I have yet to hear an objective criticism to the films that wasn't slanted in some way.
I\m still waiting for one legitimate "objective" argument of ST09's poor storytelling that wasn't either total bullshit or slathered in pretentious condescension.
If either of you is genuinely interested in a detailed discussion of the debatable merits of ST09, nine years after the fact, by all means start a thread in the appropriate subforum and invite me to it, and I'll cheerfully get into the weeds of it. (Well, maybe not cheerfully, but at least only semi-grudgingly.) I'm still trying not to go off on that tangent
here, however.
(BTW, just as an aside, whether or not you feel an argument involves "pretentious condescension" is completely irrelevant to that argument's merits. If a critic makes a persuasive case as to why a given work is stupid, then he's made a persuasive case, and the reasonable response is to be persuaded. No matter how condescending one might consider his attitude about it to be, that's not a valid basis for disagreement. That's like voting against the candidate with the best policies just because you dislike his or her personality.)
Examples of things I'd call 'bad story telling':
-Spock jettisons Kirk (This makes no sense whatsoever. Surely they have a brig? Or just a empty closet? This is not plausible behaviour. This was a hostile planet, what if that monster had eaten Kirk?)
-Kirk happens to land on same planet than old Spock was jettisoned earlier, they happen to meet, and they happen to find -the only other person on the planet, who happens to be the person who can build the highly implausible warp transporter.
-Kirk makes Spock angry and assumes command, though he was relieved from command earlier...
After this sequence of events, I just could not take the film seriously.
Hear, hear! Excellent examples (and far from the only ones).
I mostly agree but Kirk and prime Spock landing on the same planet isn't even that unlikely, considering that Nero left him there to witness Vulcan's destruction and the Enterprise was approaching Vulcan. I may be misremembering, but didn't someone say that there's a near-by Starfleet base where they'd launch Kirk towards? It would make sense to me that Nero left Spock near that base, so that he has better chances of survival for witnessing his planet's death.
Except that Nero leaving Spock there in the first place
also made no sense, because (A) Spock was the main person against whom he was seeking revenge, (B) Spock was Nero's best source of intel about the Starfleet of the era, (C) it wasn't remotely plausible that he'd actually be able to see the destruction of Vulcan from that distance (as opposed to, say, from aboard Nero's ship), seeing as how planets are really far apart (but then, the entire film is rife with examples of how Abrams and the writers just don't grasp the scale of outer space), and (D) if Nero knew about the nearby base, then he'd have known that would give Spock an opportunity to contact Starfleet and disrupt his plans. (Which of course
also raises the question of why NuSpock didn't stop there to use the base to contact Starfleet, since the Enterprises's own coms were out at the time. But I digress...)
At the end of the day, that was the entire point of Star Trek (2009). To get the gang back together in the positions we knew them in.
But it did that in the most direct, point-A-to-point-B fashion possible, in reckless defiance of internal plausibility. That's bad storytelling.
Well, yeah. I think the film had too much 'We want these certain specific things to happen and we just contrive some transparently implausible stuff in between them" for my liking. A lot of storytelling kinda works like that, but good strorytellers don't make it apparent. But many films these days suffer from this, especially in adventure and action genre. Lazy storytelling which makes the supposed high points not feel earned.
Once again, you're right on the money. I couldn't agree more.
In my mind, all those things happened that way because when Nero crossed over, he really fucked up that Universes' natural order of things.
In fact it was so bad that the Universe itself was pushing people and events in such a way to correct Nero's destructive interference.
It's probably not very logical, but for me, it explains and gives reason to the entire premise of the movie.
Destiny does not imply life experience. It implies preordination. So, yes, it is.
through a lens of previous Trek. Destiny is a recurring theme
And this is yet another problematic aspect of the film. If the story requires us to accept "destiny" as a serious concept, to accept (as
@Groppler Zorn put it) that events are "guided by some omnipotent intelligence," then that's flagrantly in opposition to the Trek universe as we know it. Trek has always been dedicated to metaphysical naturalism. It has no place for the supernatural. Any time "destiny" has come up in past Trek stories it's been strictly a metaphor (e.g., as with Spock referring to Kirk's "destiny" to command as a shorthand for saying it's the role best suited to his character, abilities, and temperament), not something to be taken literally.
(And with that, I've already ventured further onto this tangent than I wanted to. To bring things back around: this is also a serious concern I have about the upcoming season of DSC and its announced theme of "science vs. faith." If the show does anything other than come down squarely on the side of science in the end, if it tries to pander to a broader audience by pretending "faith" actually has truth value of some kind, then that'll be a betrayal of one of the key principles Trek has always stood for.)
Explain to me how the location of the bridge is not stupid.
Okay, sure. If the shields are working, then the bridge is no less safe than any other part of the ship. And if the shields aren't working, then the bridge is no more endangered than any other part of the ship. A few extra layers of deck between it and space aren't going to make a difference, either way. So security concerns fall aside, and other factors rise to the forefront. One of them is modularity: how easy is it to modify, update, or replace the bridge? In practical terms, putting it on top simplifies that considerably (just as having outboard nacelles simplifies updating those). Another is aesthetics, and there's an undeniable attraction to having the ship's command center occupy a prominent visible spot.
what [ENT] tried to pass as sensual in 2001 just doesn't work n 2018
Nor did it work in 2001!...
