Foreign spies and that one Admiral concerned about the Defiant aren't the same as "lunatic psycho mass murderer with totally obvious dreadnought factory on Jupiter"
Public perception of Star Trek?
- Thread starter dahj
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Foreign spies and that one Admiral concerned about the Defiant aren't the same as "lunatic psycho mass murderer with totally obvious dreadnought factory on Jupiter"
No - you misrepresented what I said. I said that Star Trek isn't your personal 9/11 conspiracy theory soapbox and any decent person should be offended by it unless they have explicit evidence the US Government plotted with terrorists.
Star Trek is Star Trek is Star Trek. You can see whatever you want, but Into Darkness isn't the first time an evil Admiral has subverted Starfleet for his own purposed.
I'm pretty sure it's the first time one decided to mass murder starfleet officers just for the lolz.
Marcus is a complete cartoon. He's not as well developed as the other delinquent Admirals depicted in Star Trek. In fact, he's not developed at all. All the villains in the JJ films are poorly done cartoons. Which is frustrating because a courageous effort was made to bring some of the heroes to life but they just got lazy and went off to get pizza when it came to writing the antagonists.
I'm apparently in a minority on my dissatisfaction on the new Treks. I watched Star Trek 2009 in theaters and was so impressed with it that I saw STID 2 years after its release on Netflix when it happened to pop up under recommendations.
I really want a good Star Trek again - but these ones are just too wrenching. I don't feel like these guys have earned the right to wipe out Romulans and Vulcan homeworlds and make Starfleet some sort of "save Saddam Hussein" metaphor.
If that's what you got out of it, then that's on you. I got "think before you lash out". Which might have been a better premise for which to handle Hussein under.
I don't like the JJ outings either. I don't test them according to some metric of what Star Trek is or was, I test them as to whether they constitute good cinema. I don't lower my standards simply because someone slaps a Trek logo on them. I like the interplay between Kirk and Pike and bits and pieces here and there but I gotta be frank here; overall, it's a largely vacuous, unoriginal action romp/FX extravaganza. Cinema and Star Trek can be so much better than that. Let's have a degree of depth for the next one please.
Paramount thinks "Directed by the guy who made The Fast and the Furious" is a selling point. That sure makes me far less than optimistic and I'll probably wait till it's on Netflix to see it like I waited for STID to be on Netflix.
Not sure what you mean. He seemed genuinely surprised and terrified when Khan attacked that conference of officers. He also could've very easily ended up among the casualties.
If you mean his intent to destroy the Enterprise, that gets to my point about his character as I saw it and describe below. Specifically target fixation on the cause to the point of no longer having a moral compass.
He was as deep as he needed to be. A mash up of Lemay and the fictional characters Colonel Jessup and General Jack D. Ripper. He makes it very clear he exists to do the dirty work no one else will do to live the lifestyle the Federation has come to expect. He has no moral compass and little regard for anything other than the cause. If a few million people have to die in a war now to settle the Klingon issue, then that's better than tens of millions dying in a future war against a stronger Empire. In his opinion. He'd further think while others entertain those thoughts, he's the only one bold and brave enough to carry them out. The necessity of it is not debatable. At least that was my take on him.
Horray! It had a toddler level moral to it. Honestly, that's what I was sitting there thinking when he fired Scotty and then called Spock a robot and that was BEFORE I had knew what was up with those torpedoes.
I don't have any interest in this Kirk - he's Tony Dinozzo without Gibbs to smack him in the back of the head. He's not Kirk - he's an asswipe whom no credible organization would put in charge of hundreds of lives.
Myself and others have spelled out Marcus' motives in detail, and yet you still keep coming back with "he had no motivation" or "he did it for the lolz." You don't have to find his motivation plausible, but it comes across as not seeking genuine discourse when you keep ignoring people and beating a dead horse like that.
And no, it's not the first time a command level Starfleet officer decided to try and mass murder his fellow officers, or provoke preemptive war that would have resulted in countless deaths.
As mentioned, Admiral Leyton was perfectly willing to sacrifice the 50+ crew of the Defiant to protect his coup attempt, which could have itself ended up costing countless more lives as Starfleet split itself apart between factions supporting the coup or not.
Captain Ben Maxwell was willing to unilaterally drag the Federation back into war with the Cardassians. They were up to no good, but that doesn't give him the right to go rogue and try and provoke a war.
Admiral Cartright was willing to assassinate the Klingon Chancellor, the Federation President, Cartright's two assassins, possibly the entire crew of the Enterprise if the Klingons shot back, and possibly start a war against the Klingon Empire.
Future Admiral Janeway wiped out an entire timeline to save a few of her dead crewmembers.
Ah, so it's a lesson in evil Starfleet capitalist exploitation of the Soviets?
Alright, whatever, this guy isn't believable - all of them are. I would certainly complain about Voyager given the time. If Orci weren't aiming for a "the US did 9/11" metaphor then I probably would be more willing to accept lectures from a foreign national on how evil Starfleet is.
The thing is, there is absolutely no balance in Orci's Trek - all of those evil admirals are balanced out by decent and sensible people somewhere within Starfleet. Admiral Marcus appears to be all there is in Starfleet other than the crew of the Enterprise. I don't remember how many people got shot during Khan's terror attack... was it all of them? Anyway - there's no hint of a President of the Federation, not another Starfleet ship in sight, no apparent other admirals wondering what Marcus is doing on all his secret trips to Jupiter.... etc..
He's not as he needs to be. He's below the threshold. He mets the threshold of an antagonist in a Warner Brothers cartoon. Utterly sloppy characterisation. How this Yosemite Sam/Ted Bundy type with no "moral compass" got anywhere in life, still less runnin' Starfleet is a mystery. A genuinely menacing character is a guy with a moral compass, total conviction with a good sales pitch but is profoundly wrongheaded in his morality. That's what is genuinely threatening and how destructive people gain influence in contemporary terms. Marcus has none of that depth though.
Actually, the Vengeance was probably a ship that was known about in general, with the specifics about it only on a "need to know" basis. Kind of like the stealth bomber years ago. After all, Marcus had a model of the Vengeance in his office along with the other ship models.
He could've easily been persuasive enough to get a ship like that funded as a "black budget" project.
You may have done a better job describing him than I did, up to the point you then say you saw none of that in him. I meant no moral compass as in being convicted enough to a cause to do whatever it takes to win or preserve it. Any means justifies the ends. He does have morality in the sense that he believes the cause for which he compromises his morals is moral. He sacrifices his morals for the greater morality of the cause (if that makes sense). His take on "the needs of the many..." if you will.
At least he wasn't as bad as Nero...
Anyway, this whole thread got really sidetracked. I was originally talking about how the new movies lacked humanism and are leftist progressive diatribes instead. And that I believed that the slander Star Trek has received was an effort to suppress humanist thought in the media.
I think Orci's 9/11 conspiracy theories are nuts, but the "foreign national" crap needs to go. Who the hell cares where he was born? What, foreign born people aren't allowed to have an opinion on matters of domestic policy and events affecting not just the US but the entire world? Besides which, he was raised in the US and spent the majority of his life here, so pretending like he's not a real American is disingenuous and frankly rather tasteless.
It's a two hour movie, not a TV series where you can afford to build up that kind of background plotting over time. Other admirals are extraneous to the plot of the Enterprise > Khan > Marcus triumvirate.
Oh. I see.
In other words, it's Obama's fault.
In other words, it's Obama's fault.
Not even in the most twisted of minds is slaughtering 250 innocent officers of your military to start a war that may never come to fruition "moral."
