NuTrek's Faulty Moral Compass

Just riffing on TWoK stuff - the nebula/genesis stuff has never sat with me very well. Great film, but with conceits that require a little squinting to sustain suspension of disbelief.

Wasn't trying to mischaracterize your post.

 

Just like Star Trek 2009.

 

I think the '09 film is in the top 4 for Star Trek films, maybe the top 3. Of course, most Trek films are pretty bad, so there's that. I think the 09 film is "good" - it's fun action adventure stuff. It is, basically, the sort of energy the franchise needed. I wouldn't call it great, but it stacks up well against other Trek films.

 

Me either, until I realized it was basically the premise of Star Trek online.

I think maybe you're under-estimating the effect of pacing on these newer films. Both of them have moved at a much faster pace and with alot more energy, rougher cuts, snappier dialog and a lot less exposition than previous Trek films.

In particular: in Search for Spock, the discovery of KidSpock on Genesis and the discussion after the destruction of Grissom are both fairly somber, slow-moving moments with a lot of deep emotion and reflection. Kirk's taking command of the Enterrpsie from Spock has this feature as well, and so nobody's questioning the idea that Kirk took command and then raced to save the day. OTOH, his promotion to captain as Pike's relief doesn't get a short emotional moment: there's no quiet meeting in the Admiral's office where he is told "Admiral Pike will be on medical leave for the next eight months and the Enterprise is going to need a commanding officer in the mean time. Admiral Pike recommended you for the job," To which Kirk replies ""

Basically, we saw the result of that decision and promotion, not the lead-up. That makes the presentation a bit awkward, but I kind of think that would have clashed with the NuSpock/OldSpock moment and would have made the movie drag a bit too much.

 

I agree that the pacing and general fun factor of the new movies is high. I enjoyed them very much. I wouldn't want anybody to think that because of a few silly moments my enjoyment of the movie as a whole was spoiled. The ludicrously obvious 'code' in TWoK is far dumber than most transgressions in the new movies. Of course that doesn't excuse the silliness here either. I'd have to make far fewer tweaks to ST09 and STiD than I would to the Star Wars prequels to make them 'better' in my eyes. Most of them would be minor, although I would have used Garth instead of Khan so the ripple effect beyond that would have been considerable.

 

I started off this thread by saying these last two movies are 3 and 4 on my list, after TMP and TWoK and before all the rest.

 

I actually rank them third (Star Trek Into Darkness) and sixth (Star Trek 2009) respectively. They are both a hell of a lot of fun to watch, both have flaws.

 

I assume you mean the "hours would seem like days" code which is incredibly stupid. The prefix code is asinine as well-why would you want your shields potentially remote-controlled from someone on another ship? And the whole "planet explodes and shifts another planet into the exploded planet's exact orbit and no one notices" nonsense.

It should be pointed out that MOST of the films have incredibly silly plot points when you think about it. When they're enjoyable, like TWOK or STXI, you overlook them. When they're not, you dwell on them.

 

To be clear, I consider rough cuts and pacing to be things to fault in their own rights, for those who actually find fault with such things. Sometimes those work for me, others not really.

My positions are that no amount of measured pacing or poignancy can erase the fact that Spock was brought back in STIII for sentimental reasons and that sentimentality trumped everything else. There was literally nothing we were told about the Genesis effect that enhanced the plausibility of Spock's bodily regeneration. Any plausibility borrowed from the word Genesis, that would have been unavailable for lending from a word like red, was only via incantation accompanied by hand waving. In other words, such an enhancement was only an illusion.

STXI was simply blunt about it, in foregoing the usual variety of incantations and apparently making "red matter" deliberately meaningless.

On the other hand, I really should point out that, when looked at from the rest of the universe, imploded matter is red-shifted, and that neutronium is modeled as a fluid, but I wouldn't want to suggest that red matter might have some etymology deriving from real science, taking the pulpy way around. No sirree.

 

Not for me. I wasn't bothered by it.

 

Star Trek III's good bit was the stealing of and then destruction of the Enterprise. The Spock stuff - whatever. The stealing of the ship could have been a bit slicker to make it look like Starfleet wasn't completely incompetent but it's so ingrained in canon now that I can't deny it any more.

 

Yes, that was quite nonsensical (and in the dramatic sense, cowardly) and really should not have been done; sentimentality was the fatal disease of the old franchise, and the symptoms really started showing in TSFS. Which is why I specified in my commentary on the Genesis device that I was referring particularly to its first film appearance.

And yes, hi Locutus, you're of course correct that elements of Genesis still require, as YARN later put it, "some squinting to sustain suspension of disbelief." But Genesis and the nebula is very clearly an extrapolation of "life from lifelessness" and of how such a device might behave in random circumstances that it wasn't designed for. The through-line to what we do know about it is clear and consistent -- albeit that yes, That Is Probably Not How Nebulas Work. So I'm afraid you're not really selling me on an equivalence between that and the randomness of Red Matter.

The Nexus as it was used was kind of dumb, but the idea was recognizably an application of ideas about space-time -- and the possibilities that would arise from being in a "place" or "state" that was genuinely time-less and space-less -- that could have been interesting. The story it was part of just made unimaginative and ridiculous use of it (why with all of space and time to access does Picard insist on returning to an arbitrary point just seconds before the bad guy carries out his evil plan?).

The elements of Prime Trek that came closest to being similarly contrived were the appearances of the Omnipotent Space Jerks of whom Q became the ultimate type, and who were allowed to work any way the writers pleased Because Sufficiently-Advanced Technology Something-Something Magic. (And for this reason the Omnipotent Space Jerk trope also started to draw fire as lazy writing, and deservedly so, whatever the camp charms may be of watching Kirk in TOS face off with an actual no-foolin' Greek deity.)

Trek "science" otherwise contained plenty of fudging and handwaving, but to equate all or most of it with the randomness of Red Matter is to do it a very real disservice. Handwaving and random Deus Ex Machina is not the same thing. And as I've pointed out more than once, this is often the unintentional side-effect of the kind of continuity tailgunning that's routinely employed to defend this or that NuTrek trope: in order to put NuTrek on an equal footing (and therefore legitimize it as Real Trek or something, is I gather supposed to be the idea) it frequently requires pretending the old shows and movies were worse than they were, and running into problems trying to defend those stances because they so often depend on false analogies.

The galaxy needs less of this continuity tailgunning, is I guess where I come out. The exercise is largely pointless anyway, because convincing someone that such-and-such element of NuTrek is only bad in a way consistent with the old franchise at its worst is not likely going to convince them that it's good if they don't already think so, or that it's "real Trek" if they don't already think it is. Better to let NuTrek stand and be discussed on its own merits, IMO.

 

Funny thing is, Apollo is one of the least poweful of the Omnipotent Space Jerks.

 

^ Yeah, kind of a kick in the proverbial divine gonads...

 

I totally disagree.
I think its the 'sentimentality' and the interaction between the characters in the TOS movies that make you accept the improbable science.
For instance NEM has similar scientific problems as the rest of any science fiction movie but the story and characterisation (some) in that movie are not good enough for me to ignore them.

 

I would call it something that can only be explained by out-of-universe dramatic considerations. In other words, doing the sensible thing - going back to earlier in the film and just arresting Soran in Ten-Forward - would have made for a terrible ending.

But the red matter situation is relatively easily fitted into a similar paradigm: how such a device might behave in random circumstances that it wasn't designed for. If different circumstances produce different results, that is really only what might be expected.

 

I agree completely with CommishSleer.

That is exactly why I think people have largely been taking the wrong tack in their criticisms of nuTrek. It's been a very common theme for people to point to things that are wrong with nuTrek, which are in fact sins committed by Prime Trek as well. The protomatter/red matter situation is an example. Wonky celestial mechanics are another.

Perhaps what Crazy Eddie was getting at, in the post of his that I last responded to, was that pacing and poignancy were ways that Prime Trek films compensated for these faults, whereas on the other hand nuTrek has nothing as substantial to offer in the way of compensation? I'm not sure I agree completely with the idea, since my agreeing would depend upon exactly what it is we'd be talking about that Prime Trek had but that nuTrek lacks (or on the other hand what nuTrek provides that gets in the way but that Prime Trek doesn't suffer from), but it seems like the idea has the potential to get better traction as criticism.

 

The only reason one would want less of the "continuity tailgunning" is because it brings to light the fact that older Star Trek wasn't as enlightened and scientifically accurate as some folks want to pretend. Just look at how hard some are fighting the notion of Kirk and Sulu obliterating Chang is worse than Kirk obliterating Nero. They never even offered Chang a chance to surrender.

Too many folks play the "Abrams films aren't Star Trek!" and "Oh my God! Star Trek would never do that!!!" card. When in fact, Star Trek did the same exact things over and over and over. Hell, look at how hard you're fighting the Genesis Device isn't the same exact thing as Red Matter. When it is used for the same exact purpose, to give a minor bad guy a big gun so the stakes of the film can be high.

Some folks simply need to take off the rose-tinted nostalgia glasses and admit that Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, Harve Bennett's Star Trek, Rick Berman's Star Trek and J.J. Abrams Star Trek are all STAR TREK.

 

spot-on analysis

 

Lol. Way off base analysis. Two wrongs don't make a right!

The differences between the Chang and Nero scenario for are mainly to do with immediacy. Chang was cloaked and was being damaged by weapons. I would not expect a vessel to be in a position to scan its enemy after every shot just to be sure they are no longer an immediate threat. Nero's ship on the other hand was trapped and after being scanned, deemed to be no immediate threat. In Nero's case the immediacy of the threat is gone. That's the difference.