Quibble: They didn't find God. The evil alien was just pretending to be God.
Quibble: They didn't find God. The evil alien was just pretending to be God.
I'm going to presume everyone following this thread knew what I meant.
And yet, pretty par for the course in Trek.
The audience already knew going in that Sybok wasn't really going to find God. So that right there kills any dramatic tension or sympathy for Sybok's character or mission. Which is one of the many inherent flaws of the film.
At that point the question is what will he find?
The answer was probably the least interesting answer they could have chosen. Just another forgettable evil alien who Our Heroes defeat with ease.
The best thing they could have done was to have Sybok find nothing. And then have him come to the realization that:
1. Either "God" was never some thing that people can easily find, and Sybok is following his own concept of 'god' by healing people's pain; or conversely...
2. Sybok realizes that God doesn't really exist but that he can manipulate people into following him in His name (which was basically Shatner's original point about the dangers of television evangelists.)
The problem with this last scenario is that it then makes Spock's brother out to be an actual evil person and con artist, rather than just a deluded follower with good intentions who was himself manipulated by an evil entity and 'false god.'
Yes and no. Shatner absolutely was attempting to make a point about televangelists, but in his conception, they were going to find the devil. The actual devil. And from that extrapolate that God also exists. Shatner very clearly wanted Star Trek to make the statement that God is real. Which, whether you believe that or not (I happen to) is quite the.... unique.... idea for a Trek movie.
The part the astonishes me more, though, is that to this day he still believes that plot would have been better than the movie we got. Anytime he talks about TFF, he talks about how the change to an alien pretending to be God significantly watered down his original premise and that he thinks it was the ruination of the film. His Star Trek Movie Memories memoir makes the point quite explicitly.
I have zero problem with an alien entity sending out telepathic messages trying to convince Sybok that God waits for him.
Where the film fails again is that somehow this alien at the "center" of the galaxy glomms onto Sybok's quest for Sha'Ka'Ree and sends him this messages. In fact, there's to attempt to tell us when Sybok started getting these messages and what they mean to him. Or how the alien picked Sybok. I would have swapped out a couple of joke scenes for this. And not a mind meld of two actors in their 50's pretending to be 15. But a good actors scene where Luckenbill opens up one time.
I never give this movie thought because I watch it as pure entertainment. And on that level, for me, it succeeds. I have a great time with it. But it's a collection of scenes trying to be a story. There's one in there, but so many of these issues would have been knocked out in early drafts anywhere else.
Where the film fails again is that somehow this alien at the "center" of the galaxy glomms onto Sybok's quest for Sha'Ka'Ree and sends him this messages. In fact, there's to attempt to tell us when Sybok started getting these messages and what they mean to him. Or how the alien picked Sybok. I would have swapped out a couple of joke scenes for this. And not a mind meld of two actors in their 50's pretending to be 15. But a good actors scene where Luckenbill opens up one time.
I never give this movie thought because I watch it as pure entertainment. And on that level, for me, it succeeds. I have a great time with it. But it's a collection of scenes trying to be a story. There's one in there, but so many of these issues would have been knocked out in early drafts anywhere else.
I was happy that the novelization gave us considerably more insight into Sybok's background and even the memories that some of Our Heroes were reliving.
I was just thinking about how Treks 1 to 3 gave us a bunch of new ships, and Trek 4 kinda gave us a new ship as the whale probe. But the last two didn't really. What if Klaa had some new warship to battle the Enterprise?
They didn't have the budget to build a new Klingon ship. And they didn't need to anyway. By that time the BoP was basically Trek's generic Klingon ship. Not to mention that Klaa's ship really didn't do much until Spock used it to shoot at "God." No need for a new model just for that.
But blowing up Pioneer 10 was oh-so lulzy; humor makes our enjoyment go!
It was an interesting idea for a Star Trek movie. If you think about it, he was trying to go back to a more “cerebral “ movie like TMP. It’s the same relative dilemma the James Bond producers have between light hearted (Roger Moore ) and gritty (Daniel Craig ). Given the success of the previous few movies, were I a paramount exec, I’d direct the shat to do more light hearted.
God actually being evil is a concept of Gnosticism and neo-Gnostics today say that God and the angels (Yaldabaoth the Demiurge and the archons) actively cultivate suffering so they can feed from it like food. This would've been a deep concept to delve into for a Trek movie, but no studio would ever allow it because it would anger the religious viewers.
That's what they did. Shatner said he could do both.It was an interesting idea for a Star Trek movie. If you think about it, he was trying to go back to a more “cerebral “ movie like TMP. It’s the same relative dilemma the James Bond producers have between light hearted (Roger Moore ) and gritty (Daniel Craig ). Given the success of the previous few movies, were I a paramount exec, I’d direct the shat to do more light hearted.
Shatner was originally thinking about having it be the literal devil that they find. It's problematic because the story had already been done in TAS and kind of at odds with "televangelists are bad, m'kay," when you say the devil is real.
This is one of the several reasons why I thought it was worth expressing the quibble explicitly.
It was reasonably clear what the intention was, which is why I used the word quibble. But there's a chasm between reasonably clear and absolutely certain, which is exacerbated generally by Poe's law.
A third reason was that Star Trek has already explored finding a creature that occurs in human religious lore at the center of the galaxy, in "The Magicks of Megas-Tu". In that episode, Lucien was explicitly stated to be literally the creature who humans thought was the devil. So, it's a fair reading of the episode to say that the devil turns out to be a misunderstood entity from another dimension.
There are other reasons, such as those involving more broadly what defaults people might have as a function of their religion or lack thereof, but it's not really worth getting into all of that; enough reasons have been given, as if any were even necessary.
I don't think there's any circumstances where Shatner could make the movie he wants to make because the religious element risks offending tons of religious viewers. Shatner believes to this day that the movie would have done better if he hadn't compromised on certain elements etc. I'd argue it probably would've done even worse. And that was in the 1980s. If Shatner tried to make that movie today I think it'd do even worse than back then because the religious tensions in our society now are exponentially worse than they were back then.
"Who Mourns for Adonais" has entered the chat.
...frankly, Our Heroes encountering Apollo again might have been more interesting, especially if he was less hostile and one-note than what we got.
Yep. Apollo turns out to be an alien who feeds on worship. He wasn't just an alien presenting as Apollo; he was Apollo.
