My Gripes with STID!
- Thread starter DeMilburn
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Or different people had different opinions of Khan. He is after all, the man who tried to kill the Enterprise bridge crew one at a time in an attempt to gain information about the ship.
Space Seed said:
and killed the staff of Regula One
Wrath of Khan said:
This is not a nice guy.
Nope not a nice guy. No details on what he did to gain control, just what happened after he took power.Space Seed said:
As for his attitudes
Space Seed said:
It was Kirk, the Romantic,who offers comparisons to Napoleon and Alexander. but even he new what Khan could be
Space Seed said:
You're mistaken, then.
Explain, simply and directly, in exactly what ways Ricardo Montalban is more like a Southeast Asian than Benedict Cumberbatch.
This is kind of tricky - you're making some odd connections here that you may not be aware of.
It certainly wasn't the last time a Hispanic was cast as an easterner...
http://www.projectcasting.com/casti...eastern-talent-for-a-scene-in-north-carolina/
But, like I said, why not right the ship for this most recent movie?
Is this supposed to make a point?
Can you explain in what way Ricardo Montalban's casting was more appropriate to the ethnicity of the role as you're describing it than Cumberbatch's was?
Yes. It made my point. Cumberbatch being an Anglo is further off the mark and definitely not true to the character's orgins.
It did not. You're wrong. Cumberbatch being "an Anglo" is in no way further from being appropriate casting for a Southeast Asian character than casting Ricardo Montalban.
There's a valid argument to be made for not casting European actors to play asian characters - obviously - but you're nowhere near making that kind of argument with this foolishness about Montalban being more appropriate than Cumberbatch.
I disagree, and apparently so does Hollywood since it has been done frequently there. Alfred Molina comes to mind...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102555/?ref_=nv_sr_1
Did I say that Khan was a nice guy? I don't think I did. To become a king and a conquerer in antiquity, like Alexander did, required blood letting.
Thanks for correcting me about who made the comparison of these "supermen" to Alexander and Napoleon. It's also interesting that in the episode we hear references to Richard the Lion Hearted and Leif EriKson.
Khan believed that Earth would be ruled under one man, like Rome under Caesar.
Fifteen years of living on a hellish world, keeping your people alive, and watching your wife die horribly will do terrible psychological damage to a person.
The point I am making is that the writer or writers deliberately decided to impress upon the viewer that Khan and his people were conquerors in the vein of Alexander and Napoleon and Richard the Lionhearted and Leif Erikson. (The last is an oddity, until I realized that LE discovered the "new world" and founded a settlement called Vinland.) Further, in that vein, Khan was dangerous because he knew how to maintain stabiity in his reign by doing acts that were brutal and didn't cross the line into massacres. This creates creative and careful political maneuvering and a keen eye for observing friends and enemies.
Using 20th century real world examples, Khan would be a Auguste Pinochet of Chile. Pinochet was not a nice guy, he killed over 3,000 political opponents. However, he didn't do genocide. Like Pinochet, he staged a coup that overthrew the existing government. (These supermen had to be well-funded, for they simultaneously seized power in over 40 countries in 1993. It's interesting that Khan seized power in 1992, before the other supermen. Was he a test case for the other supermen?)
Thanks for correcting me about who made the comparison of these "supermen" to Alexander and Napoleon. It's also interesting that in the episode we hear references to Richard the Lion Hearted and Leif EriKson.
Khan believed that Earth would be ruled under one man, like Rome under Caesar.
Fifteen years of living on a hellish world, keeping your people alive, and watching your wife die horribly will do terrible psychological damage to a person.
The point I am making is that the writer or writers deliberately decided to impress upon the viewer that Khan and his people were conquerors in the vein of Alexander and Napoleon and Richard the Lionhearted and Leif Erikson. (The last is an oddity, until I realized that LE discovered the "new world" and founded a settlement called Vinland.) Further, in that vein, Khan was dangerous because he knew how to maintain stabiity in his reign by doing acts that were brutal and didn't cross the line into massacres. This creates creative and careful political maneuvering and a keen eye for observing friends and enemies.
Using 20th century real world examples, Khan would be a Auguste Pinochet of Chile. Pinochet was not a nice guy, he killed over 3,000 political opponents. However, he didn't do genocide. Like Pinochet, he staged a coup that overthrew the existing government. (These supermen had to be well-funded, for they simultaneously seized power in over 40 countries in 1993. It's interesting that Khan seized power in 1992, before the other supermen. Was he a test case for the other supermen?)
Montalban being non-white (because we're not going to be trotting out that facile nonsense about his being a "white European," right? right?) is pretty clearly a not-as-bad casting choice for Khan from a racebending standpoint as a Brit who glows in the dark. Neither of them were ideal from the racebending-critique standpoint, but they're very obviously not equivalent.
Words to live by.
Hi Jake!
^This. And "right" or "wrong" Hollywood usually understands that as well.
Solid post, Lakenheath 72. Thanks for taking the time to explain this, I rarely have the patience.
Casting a Hispanic actor to play a South Asian is NOTHING like casting an Asian actor to play an Asian.
Solid post, Lakenheath 72. Thanks for taking the time to explain this, I rarely have the patience.
Um, Pinochet was charged with genocide and terrorism by a Spanish judge in Spain for crimes against Spanish citizens in Chile. He was arrested while in a hospital in London and the British sent him back to Chile because he was considered too ill to stand trial.
While just over 3000 political opponents were killed in the coup that put him in power, as many as 30,000 political opponents died over the decades he was in power. It's estimated nearly half a million were tortured, and another million Chileans fled the country. Countless other people simply disappeared.
Pinochet was a tin-pot dictator who ruled only through ruthlessness and fear of a knock on the door at night. Khan would be insulted to be compared to him.
You're also reading a lot in between the lines about Khan compared to on screen knowledge of him. The next thing we'll hear is that at least he made the trains run on time.
Edited to add: Napoleon is also associated with genocide or at least mass murders. He attempted to put down uprisings in Haiti by ordering every black person over age 12 killed.
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Okay. Would he be correctly insulted, in your opinion? And if so, why?
He's not, really. The basic jist of Khan's original appearance was obviously that he was a ruthless, but nevertheless admirable-in -certain-respects, figure from history.
(You may nevertheless have a point about the trains running on time thing. This after all was the same show that had a Federation agent pervert a civilization into Nazism because it was the "most efficient state Earth ever knew." Which... yeah.)
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