CBS/Paramount sues to stop Axanar 2 - Electric Boogaloo-Fanboys gone WILD-too many hyphens
- Thread starter jespah
- Start date
What? "Fire photon torpedoes!" immediately followed by "Photon torpedoes, FIRE!" wasn't riveting-enough prose for you? Pfft! Some people just can never be happy...
Tried reading the new Four Years War script. It's a slog. Not a real improvement on the previous atrocity that was the Axanar screenplay. Still no story. Still BSG in Trek drag.
Also still not sanguine about the Enterprise being built in an arms race, as a weapon to balance the scales.
Also still not sanguine about the Enterprise being built in an arms race, as a weapon to balance the scales.
FWIW, it is a (barely) subtextual element of the text in the TMP blueprints by Kimbell and Probert that the refit of Enterprise was undertaken to keep up with Klingons' improved/upgraded D7, so-called model DRELL-4 aka the K't'inga-class; see final paragraph on sheet 6 of 14 [https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/star-trek-the-motion-picture.php]. So, my point is simply that it would not be an original idea.
To be fair, Hollywood hasn't had an original idea in decades, so why should we expect Alec Peters to have one??
To be fair, the motion picture industry wasn't exactly built on new ideas.
Hollywood isn't here to tell you new stories. They're a business, and if shitty shlock is what sells, and it does because that's what people eat up, then that's what they're going to make.
I do not go to Hollywood for originality.
Movies based on the play Show Boat
- Show Boat (1929)
- Show Boat (1936)
- Show Boat (1951)
- The Maltese Falcon (1931) pre-Code
- Satan Met a Lady (1936)
- The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Boy, we're really overdue for a reboot of both at roughly 69 (!) and 79 years respectively! Mine deeper, Hollywood! The Balrog is a myth!
Don't forget adaptations of Who goes there?/Frozen Hell:
- The Thing from Another World (1951)
- John Carpenters's The Thing (1982)
- The Thing (a.k.a. "That damned prequel!") (2011)
- Frozen Hell (2021?)
The Thing From Another World's my favorite of all of them.
I prefer John Carpenter's adaptation, but the original black-and-white movie is not without its charm.
I don't entirely hate the prequel, but I also kinda fancy Mary Elizabeth Winstead, so that that with a grain of salt.
She's good but I liked the other woman but she had a sad fate.
I don't mind the old 1950s version it's fun. That leaves me with the 1982 version which is the best still I think.
Oh, sure, Carpenter's version is everybody's favorite. I love it too, but what does it for me in the 1950s version is that "fun." Others can be turned off by it, but I love the almost non-stop rapid fire quips that punctuate the dialogue, and that's something none of the other movies has.
I took a glance at the script and...well, it ain't "pro" in any way. It's totes amateur hour screenwriting. Just for a lark, I decided to mark up a few pages of it the way I mark up screenplays for "coverage". Here are only those marked-up pages. (link)Today's AxaMonitor Daily:
The Axanar You'll Never See:
Download ex-director Paul Jenkins' disputed screenplay for the two Axanar short films
[...]
But as an example...
Well elements of the story and the setup are just plain stupid.
I mean the entire strategy of the battle hinges on the fact that the Klingons change their shield frequency "once a day" And that somehow the Federation ships have to hack it, and once hacked it's not so they can just fire their weapons through it; it's so they can be in photon torpedo warheads onto the bridges of the D7s.
And then there's the fact that the D7 shields are photon torpedo proof and phasor proof, but somehow another Federation ship going at slow impulse speeds can penetrate them and sever the boom of a D7.
My point? If the shields can deflect matter and energy propelled at near light speeds; why wouldn't a starship hull just bounce off them as well?
Hell the deflector shields are supposed to deflect meteorites and other particles that could otherwise penetrate the hull at FTL speeds.
Bottom line this script just screams fanwank. And hell I'm an old-style TOS fan, but even for the TOS era this whole thing is ridiculous and just poorly written and executed. In all the maneuvers they talk about and battle plans that are discussed I still fail to see why Captain Garth of Izar is considered such a military genius by the Admiralty. I mean hell The so-called a gas giant maneuver he makes is already so well postulated by Starfleet that his helmsman said it was included in their helm/pilot training, so it's not something new that Garth suddenly came up with.
Also I love how after 4 years of grabbing territory that somehow the Klingon Admiralty feels it's their best bet to send every single ship in their fleet to one location. Yes let's take all that territory and then leave it undefended And even though we're decisively winning the war, risk every gain on an attempt to destroy a few star fleet ships.
Also earlier in the interviews everyone claims that the Vulcans are pulling out of the Federation so the Federation fleet has no Vulcan ships; yet at the end of the battle Captain Robert April states that the Enterprise NCC 1701 was towed in by three Vulcan Warp Tug vessels. So hell Alec Peters can't even keep his own continuity straight.
And speaking of in universe continuity, The script claims they gave the Constitution class ships a safe cruising speed of Warp 8. I guess Alex hasn't actually watched a TOS episode in a while because for at least the first two seasons (which are 20 years after this incident) The maximum safe cruising speed of a Starship/Constitution class vessel is Warp 6. Yes the ships can do Warp 8 or better; but every time Kirk orders that speed, either Mr.Spock or Mr Scott would bring up the fact that such a speed is extremely dangerous to maintain.
Also if this is "true Star Trek", what's the message here? Again it's all pew pew with no real underlying message; yet somehow compared to current CBS Star Trek; this is "real Star Trek" that Gene Roddenberry would approve of.
Yeah right.
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This reminds me of (of all things) the movie Erin Brockovich. Sorry, Julia Roberts.
Here's what I mean.
EB solves every problem. She's gritty. She's tough. She's bursting out of every shirt she owns. And everyone against her is big and bad and mean and incompetent and this and that and the other thing.
It annoyed the hell out of me.
Beyond the clear Mary Sueishness of it all, it was supposed to be based on reality, and call me crazy here, but lawyers actually do know how to practice law. Not saying we are all at the same skill level, and God knows that paralegals and the clerical staff understand process far better. Ask a lawyer how many copies of a subpoena go to the court clerk and anyone not a sole practitioner will look at you blankly. But the clerical staff will know.
But there is a damned fine reason that we go to law school, and that we pay lawyers more than paralegals, and they get to charge more, and we only let people sit for the bar if they've got law school under their belt or (often) at least a good 5 years of serious studying. It's because there is an actual value to law school. Making EB better at everything, even things which lawyers really should do better, was ludicrous. And we are talking about being up against a major corporation here, with lawyers who were undoubtedly paid well. If they were as incompetent as the movie claimed, they would never have been hired, or at least would have been fired long before.
Same here. Generals are supposed to understand tactics. This is not the MU, where you move up by knifing your superior officer. It's where you move up because you're good at what you do.
EB throws a big, fat thumb on the scale so that our heroine can look smarter, more moral, and overall better than anyone around her – even when that's utterly unrealistic. And the same thing is happening here. Garth gets the heavy thumb treatment, too, and everyone is pushed down to ludicrous levels in order to create an impression of superiority that the character has not honestly earned.
Here's what I mean.
EB solves every problem. She's gritty. She's tough. She's bursting out of every shirt she owns. And everyone against her is big and bad and mean and incompetent and this and that and the other thing.
It annoyed the hell out of me.
Beyond the clear Mary Sueishness of it all, it was supposed to be based on reality, and call me crazy here, but lawyers actually do know how to practice law. Not saying we are all at the same skill level, and God knows that paralegals and the clerical staff understand process far better. Ask a lawyer how many copies of a subpoena go to the court clerk and anyone not a sole practitioner will look at you blankly. But the clerical staff will know.
But there is a damned fine reason that we go to law school, and that we pay lawyers more than paralegals, and they get to charge more, and we only let people sit for the bar if they've got law school under their belt or (often) at least a good 5 years of serious studying. It's because there is an actual value to law school. Making EB better at everything, even things which lawyers really should do better, was ludicrous. And we are talking about being up against a major corporation here, with lawyers who were undoubtedly paid well. If they were as incompetent as the movie claimed, they would never have been hired, or at least would have been fired long before.
Same here. Generals are supposed to understand tactics. This is not the MU, where you move up by knifing your superior officer. It's where you move up because you're good at what you do.
EB throws a big, fat thumb on the scale so that our heroine can look smarter, more moral, and overall better than anyone around her – even when that's utterly unrealistic. And the same thing is happening here. Garth gets the heavy thumb treatment, too, and everyone is pushed down to ludicrous levels in order to create an impression of superiority that the character has not honestly earned.
The Judy Garland Wizard of Oz movie is the fourth adaptation of that book, and if we include Oz movies not directly based on the first book, then it's the eighth.
Some remakes butcher the original. Was shopping with a lady on Tuesday and a modern version of Africa, the best song ever was playing and it was totally bastardized. They just bastardized and buggered it.