And I second what you wrote whole-heartedly... but you know what they say - 'Everybody fights for what he lacks most!'
no...no...NO!!!!!
- Thread starter RobertScorpio
- Start date
And I second what you wrote whole-heartedly... but you know what they say - 'Everybody fights for what he lacks most!'
Right you are, my Bavarian friend.
That would explain a lot, too, I mean concerning the Klingons and their obsession with being honourable warriorrrrrrrrrs. 
No, really... NuTrek really could do without a Worf/B'Elanna Torres character or without any kind of TNG/DS9 Klingons... and, thanks to the Great Bird of the Galaxy, nuTrek is set in a time period - Kirk and Spock's time period - that can show Klingons the way they truly are! 
No, really... NuTrek really could do without a Worf/B'Elanna Torres character or without any kind of TNG/DS9 Klingons... and, thanks to the Great Bird of the Galaxy, nuTrek is set in a time period - Kirk and Spock's time period - that can show Klingons the way they truly are!
Classy badguys that have no problem being sinister when they need to be.
Three things to avoid:
1. ANY appearance by the Shat-man or the Shat-man's toupee.
2. Going back in time to fix ABSOLUTELY EVERY GODDADGUM THING by killing, in order, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Le Xuan, and Croetus. Especially my man Croetus. His three-point game is boss, and he needs to be left alone to work the net.
3. No Space Hippies. Any appearance by Space Hippies is grounds for jihad.
WE DON'T EFFING REACH!!!
1. ANY appearance by the Shat-man or the Shat-man's toupee.
2. Going back in time to fix ABSOLUTELY EVERY GODDADGUM THING by killing, in order, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Le Xuan, and Croetus. Especially my man Croetus. His three-point game is boss, and he needs to be left alone to work the net.
3. No Space Hippies. Any appearance by Space Hippies is grounds for jihad.
WE DON'T EFFING REACH!!!
No, really... NuTrek really could do without a Worf/B'Elanna Torres character or without any kind of TNG/DS9 Klingons... and, thanks to the Great Bird of the Galaxy, nuTrek is set in a time period - Kirk and Spock's time period - that can show Klingons the way they truly are!
Yeah, the classic Klingons are great. They sort of remind me of that line from Blazing Saddles:
"Women Rustled! Cattle Raped!"
There's just one little hitch. TOS was made during the Cold War and the Klingons were stand-ins for the Soviets, the Red Chinese or Communists in general. However, the design of nuTrek has been updated and the mindset and its resulting connotations have to follow. I don't want to see any futuristic Taliban, be they Klingon or any other species (ENT already was a sometimes all-too-embarrassing mirror of George W. Bush's America)!
Yep... Bad luck for the Shat (don't get me wrong - the Shat rules!), but THAT train has left the station - Star Trek XI (at Spock's side due to some unimaginable story twist) would definitely have been his last chance.
Nah... that's apparently been done in Star Trek XI. The least thing we need is anybody going back into any time period - particularly nobody from the TNG era to try once more to get the nuTrek timeline back on track!
No space goths or space emos either. No all-too-obvious parallels to any contemporary youth culture whatsovever.
1) No numbingly superficial moral messages. You want to wrestle with Big Questions, go take a philosophy course at UCLA first.
2) Tagging onto number 1, please, no melodramatic speeches to let us know how a character feels. "Show don't tell" is something they teach you in high school creative writing classes, people.
3) Take every line that has been repeated more than five times during a bridge battle scene in every previous Trek movie or show, and make a list. Do not use any of those lines. (This goes double for calling out percentages of shield strength.)
4) Dear sweet lord, no arcing/sparking/exploding bridge controls (fuses were invented in the 20th century.
5) The deflector dish. is not. the solution.
2) Tagging onto number 1, please, no melodramatic speeches to let us know how a character feels. "Show don't tell" is something they teach you in high school creative writing classes, people.
3) Take every line that has been repeated more than five times during a bridge battle scene in every previous Trek movie or show, and make a list. Do not use any of those lines. (This goes double for calling out percentages of shield strength.)
4) Dear sweet lord, no arcing/sparking/exploding bridge controls (fuses were invented in the 20th century.
5) The deflector dish. is not. the solution.
^AMEN! And I really don't want to hear a story about how all that warping of space is causing ''Galactic Warming'' or some such ''CRAP''
Hey...after I saw that episode (Force of Nature) as a kid, I actually tried to drive the speed limit on the D.C. beltway to conserve gas---my attempt at self-control lasted about 2 days.
Granted, it did make for a cheesy episode though, with some of the dorkiest "forehead aliens of the week" we'd ever endured. The allegory rarely makes for a good episode when it's so patently obvious, with some exceptions, like Star Trek IV. Then again, that wasn't allegory; it was a blatant Green Peace extinction message taken directly to our present day. Better examples of allegorical social commentary episodes for me include TNG's The Outcast and Enterprise's Stigma, though the latter was anachronistic and should've been done in the 80's (Gerrold's rejected Blood and Fire script shows how ready they were to tackle such an issue).
1. No gratuitous Star Wars-level action sequences that don't drive the plot.
2. No purely "evil" antagonists who lack complexity and moral ambiguity. (Star Trek's usually pretty good on that front, but the protagonists are usually way to purely "good", esp. TNG era, which is why I like DS9 most because there's a lot more conflict over competing virtues and values among the protagonists).
3. No tribbles.
I understand your aversion to "preachiness" but to what extent do you draw a line between contemporary relevance and "agenda driven 'message'"? I assume that, in terms of the movies, Star Treks IV and VI come to mind? Esp. the former (save the whales) and then VI, which dealt with nationalism, racism, and the end of the interstellar "Cold War". These are usually considered the second and/or third-best movies next to TWOK. (To be honest, First Contact was episode-ish and frankly, there were Borg episodes of Voyager that had more scope.) Insurrection had a message about forced relocation and exploitation, but the logic of the allegory was somewhat flawed.
Nemesis, while a deeply flawed and poorly executed mess, had a very intriguing premise in the tradition of the naturalist genre of literature (which depicts characters as being shaped and driven by the forces of their environment, beyond their control). It was a nature v. nurture debate, demonstrating the fact that nurture/environment/socialization is ALWAYS the overriding determinate of personality formation and behavior. It was also political, because it touched on the nature of "racial" identification, which is one of the essential underpinnings of human political dynamics. Shinzon was clearly, for all intents and purposes, REMAN---not human ("My Reman brothers"). How he viewed himself, who he identified with, and the way he was raised/acculturated matter far more than his genetics. That hardly "hit people over the head". Many may have been oblivious to it. Frankly, I think it was too subtle, and a better movie should've been built around that premise. But the premise is good Roddenberry Trek.
Is the tackling of a big question concerning the human condition in Star Trek usually superficial, IYO? These big questions are the very essence of Trek. It wouldn't BE Trek otherwise. The very soul of Trek is the conviction that human beings, given the proper, civilized conditions of an enlightened future environment, can and will do the right thing. It is unequivocal altruism. I'm just not sure if you mean macro-sociological moralizing (like preaching about poverty, the evils of Capitalism that Roddenberry clearly disdained) or ANY moralizing in general? Virtually every Trek movie moralized on some level. In TWOK, it was Spock sacrificing for the good of the many; in TSFS, the crew sacrificed for the good of the one.
We all have different reasons for liking Trek. I'm a political animal myself, so when DS9 did the near-future Earth Past Tense, I was hooked. It was The Cloud Miners without the facade of an allegorical setting. It was an explicit indictment of unregulated social disparity and trickle-down society (one of the characters even called for the reinstatement of a full-employment act, echoing FDR's call for the right to a job in his Economic Bill of Rights proposal) in which the superfluous population was put in camps (whereas for now, they're stuffed into prisons). But I digress. I'm not saying such a story would necessarily make a good Trek movie, and maybe I'm misunderstanding the type of moralizing to which you'd object, but devoid of any moral message, it wouldn't be Trek and wouldn't be fit to carry the title.
2. No purely "evil" antagonists who lack complexity and moral ambiguity. (Star Trek's usually pretty good on that front, but the protagonists are usually way to purely "good", esp. TNG era, which is why I like DS9 most because there's a lot more conflict over competing virtues and values among the protagonists).
3. No tribbles.
I understand your aversion to "preachiness" but to what extent do you draw a line between contemporary relevance and "agenda driven 'message'"? I assume that, in terms of the movies, Star Treks IV and VI come to mind? Esp. the former (save the whales) and then VI, which dealt with nationalism, racism, and the end of the interstellar "Cold War". These are usually considered the second and/or third-best movies next to TWOK. (To be honest, First Contact was episode-ish and frankly, there were Borg episodes of Voyager that had more scope.) Insurrection had a message about forced relocation and exploitation, but the logic of the allegory was somewhat flawed.
Nemesis, while a deeply flawed and poorly executed mess, had a very intriguing premise in the tradition of the naturalist genre of literature (which depicts characters as being shaped and driven by the forces of their environment, beyond their control). It was a nature v. nurture debate, demonstrating the fact that nurture/environment/socialization is ALWAYS the overriding determinate of personality formation and behavior. It was also political, because it touched on the nature of "racial" identification, which is one of the essential underpinnings of human political dynamics. Shinzon was clearly, for all intents and purposes, REMAN---not human ("My Reman brothers"). How he viewed himself, who he identified with, and the way he was raised/acculturated matter far more than his genetics. That hardly "hit people over the head". Many may have been oblivious to it. Frankly, I think it was too subtle, and a better movie should've been built around that premise. But the premise is good Roddenberry Trek.
Is the tackling of a big question concerning the human condition in Star Trek usually superficial, IYO? These big questions are the very essence of Trek. It wouldn't BE Trek otherwise. The very soul of Trek is the conviction that human beings, given the proper, civilized conditions of an enlightened future environment, can and will do the right thing. It is unequivocal altruism. I'm just not sure if you mean macro-sociological moralizing (like preaching about poverty, the evils of Capitalism that Roddenberry clearly disdained) or ANY moralizing in general? Virtually every Trek movie moralized on some level. In TWOK, it was Spock sacrificing for the good of the many; in TSFS, the crew sacrificed for the good of the one.
We all have different reasons for liking Trek. I'm a political animal myself, so when DS9 did the near-future Earth Past Tense, I was hooked. It was The Cloud Miners without the facade of an allegorical setting. It was an explicit indictment of unregulated social disparity and trickle-down society (one of the characters even called for the reinstatement of a full-employment act, echoing FDR's call for the right to a job in his Economic Bill of Rights proposal) in which the superfluous population was put in camps (whereas for now, they're stuffed into prisons). But I digress. I'm not saying such a story would necessarily make a good Trek movie, and maybe I'm misunderstanding the type of moralizing to which you'd object, but devoid of any moral message, it wouldn't be Trek and wouldn't be fit to carry the title.
Win! That's exactly why I like Nemesis...maybe even the only reason(besides Riker & Troi's wedding...I'm a sucker for that stuff). It was definately deeper than most people are willing to realize.
RobertScorpio
Pariah
You nailed it Vector...if this movie has any hopes of being a hit with "normal" people, it better follow all THREE of your suggestions...
Rob
You hit the nail on the head with the word “preachiness.” I have no desire to go spend ten bucks to sit in a theater for two and a half hours and be lectured allegorically about how I’m destroying the planet or how capitalism is evil or whatever else the Hollywood cause-of-the-month happens to be. I don’t want to feel like the person who wrote or directed or produced the movie is up there on the screen wagging their finger at me and trying to “raise my consciousness” or something.
The difference between “contemporary relevance” and “an agenda driven message” is subtle and, I’m sure, largely dependant on whether or not you agree with the message. I don’t agree with most of what comes out of Hollywood message-wise these days but I am capable of watching—and enjoying—movies about controversial issues when they don’t try to pretend that there is only one side to the argument.
To cite a Trek-relevant example, DS9 was generally very good at contemporary relevance without being preachy about it, thought-provoking rather than condescending. The questions it raised were usually messy and multi-faceted and frequently not resolved according to the established and over-simplified Roddenberry ideals, if they were resolved at all. TNG, on the other hand, tended to be very preachy and heavy-handed with its moralizing about all sorts of things, IMHO. I still enjoyed it and even count a few episodes among my all-time Trek favorites, but they were notably NOT the ones with an obvious agenda attached.
The Trek movies, on the other hand, have mostly avoided the “message” thing. Sure, if you look hard enough, you can find all sorts of relevance and commentary and deeper meaning in many of them, but for the most part you have to look for it and find what you will; you aren’t being clubbed over the head with it like a baby seal. The TOS movies walked this line pretty successfully, I believe, and it wasn’t until the third TNG film, Insurrection, that they really started to go overboard. I might credit Nemesis with the same problem if I had ever been able to make enough sense out of it to draw any such conclusions.
It remains to be seen what line, if any, the new Star Trek film will attempt to walk. My gut feeling is that they will avoid any overt, heavy-handed messages beyond the personal, character level, but I guess we’ll see.
I'm all for Big Questions being tackled. What I don't care for is simplistic answers to big questions, or exposition masquerading as dialogue. At it's best, Trek shows that problems like racism, terrorism, and drinking too much blood wine are not solvable in 42 minutes or 90. But sometimes we get the characters clicking their tongues at those silly primitive humans from the 20th/21st century.
No dead red shirts. That and no songs anywhere in the soundtrack.
RobertScorpio
Pariah
I actually started a thread about a song for this new movie..and I actually think they will put some song in this movie. Why? Because they are going for "TOP GUN" kirk here..you see. So they already have the motorbike Kirk..the rebellious Kirk...all they need is the song. And not a soft-ballad like Faith of a Fart, but a rock song...oh, sung by Bruce Springstien or something like that..
And as I said in that thread I started, which was closed for some crazy reason that it wasn't time for such a post (but it is now) JJABRAMS is a master PR guy. And a big Rock song, a hit on the radio, premiered during AMERICAN IDOL (mark my words by the way) will be exactly what the doctor ordered...
Rob
That was after-the-fact, imposed upon the characters somewhat in their later TOS appearances. The Klingons as portrayed in the single episode for which they were created, "Errand Of Mercy," were Nazis with a fresh coat of paint.
C
cynical dreamer
Guest
Wesley Crusher
...he's still annoying.
...he's still annoying.
