My Gripes with STID!
- Thread starter DeMilburn
- Start date
Sorry man.
Captain Obvious wrote:
Yep. Thing is, many of the people who complain about things like racebending know perfectly well that those assumptions are circulating in the backdrop of casting decisions. And rightly resent it. It becomes a conveniently self-sealing rationalization; after all, why ever risk a major role on an "ethnic" when the most bankable stars are white males? (And if some of the most bankable stars happen not to be white males -- cf. Will Smith, Denzel Washington -- then obviously they must just be exceptions that prove the rule.)
In a depressing sort of way, the real surprise is that someone like del Toro was in frame to begin with. Let alone any South Asian actors. It's all a bit sadly retrograde.
It is similar to the fact that there can be multiple "hot commodity" white male comedians, but only one minority or female comedian can be a a hot commodity at a time.
Right now, Kevin Hart is the go-to minority comedian for TV shows, movies, and commercials, but he is treading the path worn by Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and David Chappelle - among others.
Right now, Kevin Hart is the go-to minority comedian for TV shows, movies, and commercials, but he is treading the path worn by Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and David Chappelle - among others.
Kirk was less of an asshole.It was manipulation, yes. He was a villain, after all.(Not that I think Kirk's various manipulations of the weaker sex in TOS were much healthier, but... it-was-the-Sixties-mumble-mumble...)
Janice of Turnabout Intruder, likely didn't share that opinion.
Yes, buts she was nuts. Seriously killing a bunch of people and stealing your ex's body for revenge is not the sign of a sane person.
And from the sounds of Kirk talking about their relationship, possibly emotionally abusive since it sounds like she took the whole can't command a starship thing out on him.
Of course this then begs the question of just how the hell McGivers pegged Khan as a Sikh?
And Gene Roddenebrry's argument with Harlan Ellison about City on the Edge of Forever just became funny as hell.
She saw his picture in a history book. She reads as well as paints to fill those long hours between actual assignments.
So the explanation is that McGivers knew it was Khan the whole time and decided not to mention that they were about to defrost a former dictator, just becuase.
She's an Augment fangirl. *
So the explanation is that McGivers knew it was Khan the whole time and decided not to mention that they were about to defrost a former dictator, just becuase.
* This post and my previous one are strictly tongue in cheek.
The entire debate about Cumberbund's portrayal, or Khan's ethnicity aside, (as interesting as they are) what bothers me most is this: what was the freaking point of having Khan in STID in the first place!?
TWOK Khan was a fantastic villain excellently portrayed, but his ONLY relevance, story-wise, was his history with Kirk. The only reason he resonated at all on an emotional level (think: KHHHAAAANN!!!) is because of the events in Space Seed.
STID's character could literally have been anybody. Bob from Starfleet Accounting. BOOOOOOOBBBB!!! Without the history, re-hashing Khan is utterly pointless.
TWOK Khan was a fantastic villain excellently portrayed, but his ONLY relevance, story-wise, was his history with Kirk. The only reason he resonated at all on an emotional level (think: KHHHAAAANN!!!) is because of the events in Space Seed.
STID's character could literally have been anybody. Bob from Starfleet Accounting. BOOOOOOOBBBB!!! Without the history, re-hashing Khan is utterly pointless.
Khan was and is a recognizable and marketable villain, and for some time the plot of Trek movies have been some variation on "good guys" v "bad guys".
But the history does exist. Isn't that the point of going back to the kirk era? They can play around with things that are already established. Instead of having to introduce him slowly like Space Seed they can skip that and get right to the betrayal. In this case they actually improved on that old character.
They actually showed him being superhuman rather than just have him shout how superior he is while being hit by a pipe. He's constantly outsmarted in the old stuff, way more competent in Into Darkness.
It wasn't Kirk's history with Khan they were trying to exploit in this film, it was the audience's. Apart from the Borg, Khan is the most recognizable villain associated with Star Trek to casual or non-fans, and they were seeking to attract that demographic most of all. Established Trek fans will likely see the film no matter what, even if they're not Abrams fans and it's just to hate-watch it. And established fans are also a fairly insignificant portion of the overall box office take you need to be a success.
It's sort of like Senator Palpatine in The Phantom Menace. There's no established history in-story when he first shows up, so you're counting on audience knowledge of his backstory from the OT in order to give his seemingly innocuous actions throughout the film a more sinister interpretation. Senator Nobody telling young Anakin Skywalker he'll be "following his career with great interest" is meaningless. The line only works because the majority of the audience knows who this guy will turn out to be.
He did get Kirk in trouble with the IRS, that's something he never forgave him for.
Can't agree with your reasoning there. If we start from the assumption that Khan is an interesting character --- and if you're not willing to grant that, we're not going to get anywhere --- then it's interesting to see him in new lights. Between Space Seed, Wrath of Khan, and Into Darkness we get a view of someone who's supposed to be a Napoleon, and in very different circumstances. This can be a great way to see someone.
And for Into Darkness, the fact that the audience knows something about Khan which the characters don't allows for some great plotting potential. Khan is --- to borrow Hitchcock's description of suspense --- the ticking bomb hidden underneath the table, and Kirk and Spock are the characters who don't know it's there.
And the vastly altered background of the 23rd-century setting means that while an informed audience-member knows to expect that something major is up, the fact that there isn't any relationship between Kirk and Khan means that whatever it is, can't be what the audience member thinks it might be.
The strongest stretch of the film (by my lights) was that period when Khan and Kirk were at least co-belligerents, and there was reason to think that in these circumstances even Khan's Inevitable Betrayal might not be so inevitable.
That is great story-telling potential: the audience gets to know more than the characters, but not actually enough to know were things are necessarily going.
Well, maybe I'll have to watch it again, but most of the replies seem to justify using Khan from a purely commercial point of view -- name recognition will sell tickets -- rather than from any story-telling merit. Though I will concede Nebusj's point about examining the character from another angle; I'd never really though about it like that, I guess because the character seemed so absolutely unrelated to a Khan as he had already been established. Maybe if they'd had someone channeling Montalban it would have twigged....
Perhaps (if I can get past the gut-wrenching stupidity of parking the E in a lake for no reason at all) (it was all downhill from there and maybe that's why I wasn't able to cut the new Khan any slack) I should try to watch it again with a more open mind.
But seriously.... In a lake? WTF?!
Cheers!
Perhaps (if I can get past the gut-wrenching stupidity of parking the E in a lake for no reason at all) (it was all downhill from there and maybe that's why I wasn't able to cut the new Khan any slack) I should try to watch it again with a more open mind.
But seriously.... In a lake? WTF?!
Cheers!
Yes. TOS Khan's Kirk fight should have been way more dramatic -- beat the Shat out of Kirk for a while, superhuman style, before a desperate comeback.
But one of the more interesting choices in WOK, and one I felt worked really well, was how they never even came face to face. Genetically engineered or not, I always felt Khan was first and foremost a tactician rather than a swordsman. Napoleon kept falling off his horse and wasn't much of a pugilist, and he conquered mainly by sheer force of personality.
I do question NuKhan's competence, though, when he can't come up with a better way to kill an unprotected room full of Starfleet brass than ineffectively shooting through a window with the most puny weapon in space history...
Not at all. I also said it was a combination of both, hence the Palpatine comparison. The character's actions are given greater significance and viewed in a different light based on the audience's knowledge of the character's history in related media even though in-story his history has not been established yet.
The film established difficulty with using both transporters in anything other than line-of-sight (due to the planet's magnetic fields) and shuttles (due to the heat and ash of the volcano) under the circumstances, so long term operations may have required the Enterprise to be in close proximity, hence hiding in the nearby ocean. Flying in low orbit or the upper atmosphere would have made it easily visible to the natives even with the naked eye.
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