Should novels set in the JJVerse rectify the film's plot holes?
- Thread starter EJA
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kkozoriz1
Fleet Captain
You're right. I should stop demanding to know why they did things (Although, I don't recall ever doing such a thing). Question the appropriateness? Yes. Say I disagree and even offer alternatives that could have worked better? Yup But demand? Don't recall pulling out that particular soapbox. I must be getting senile in my old age.
Perhaps we should all simply keep our comments to what we liked about the various books and such and not bring up the things we didn't. Let's all be one big happy fleet.
<sigh> It must be the reason that I'm not a writer if I can't get the point across. Delta Vega was the example I was using about things that didn't work for me. There were many things that did and many others that didn't. It is, however, a well known and obvious one that could have worked with just a little more thought on the part of the writers.
Did I enjoy the movie? Not as well as most of the others. Do I want them to stop doing a sequel? Hell no, bring it on!. Hopefully it will be better than the first and show more of what I know Star Trek is capable of.
Man, this thread is so hard to keep up with. Once a day is just not enough...
Because I'm not watching them. If there were Batman or Spider-Man live-action shows on TV (or pretty much any other major superhero), I would be greedily watching it every week. A cartoon doesn't interest me enough to even worry about when it's on DVD. If they did a Star Trek cartoon, I might take a look, out of curiosity, but I doubt it would be at the top of my Tivo list.
Let's face it; whether cartoons are valid/legitimate or not, you still must agree that they are ultimately different from live-action shows. That's why I didn't count them.
True. Of course, as an aspiring director, I kinda understand why it's not a bad thing for them to be in charge, but I think there should be a lot more of a synergistic relationship between them and the writers (like TV, as you said).
I don't know. I have to admit, it's impossible for me to make a judgment about whether I even disagree with you about that, because there are too many other factors affecting my opinion of the movie. I've never been much of an analytical movie watcher; I generally just think in terms of like or don't like. So, you might be right, I can't say.
I don't understand this reasoning. "Journey to Babel" didn't spend ten minutes explaining the significance of this, they just did it, and let the context carry it. The new audiences that are being introduced to the franchises know that Spock is an alien, so why shouldn't they expect him to do alien things? It wasn't catering to the established fans when Prime Spock mind-melded with Kirk, and that seemed to work okay.
I'd say the point of the scene was to show two hot young actors making out.
But would it have resonated with Spock? I don't know what kind of place kissing has in Vulcan culture, but there's no evidence about it either way. So, being that he is alien, who's to say that kissing would communicate love and support to him?
To my perception, he spent most of the movie abandoning his Vulcan facade. Each such occurence, then (to me), makes it even less effective.
So yeah, clearly it did work for a lot of people, I can't deny that, but there's my own two cents, if it helps illuminate why some people didn't like it.
[EDIT: Continuing through the thread, I see that JarodRussell made many of the same points, but heck, I already wrote all that, so feel free to just point me to the rebuttals you already made.]
I think it may have actually been in the original writer's guide, but I'm not even remotely sure about that.
Well, no, but calling the Earth date a "stardate" doesn't make a lot of sense. If they had just said, "Captain's Log, January 1st..." like in Enterprise, that would be fine. I don't really think I'd would've cried a whole lot about the stardates being excised completely (and in fact, I didn't even notice the earth date thing until I read about it later), but saying "stardate" does kind of indicate that it's gonna be something different than the Earth date.
Not a big deal, at all, I'm just sayin'.
Did the old stardates have two digits after the decimal point? (Again, not a big deal.)
I don't understand this reasoning. Who expected the old rules to apply anymore? I just watched the A-Team movie, and I didn't expect them to spend the first year with reporter Amy Allen, and then get recaptured after three more years, etc. It's a reboot (even though they explained it in-universe through the timeline divergence); one look at the Enterprise shows that the old rules don't apply. Why do they need to blow up a planet to prove that?
Because I'm not watching them. If there were Batman or Spider-Man live-action shows on TV (or pretty much any other major superhero), I would be greedily watching it every week. A cartoon doesn't interest me enough to even worry about when it's on DVD. If they did a Star Trek cartoon, I might take a look, out of curiosity, but I doubt it would be at the top of my Tivo list.
Let's face it; whether cartoons are valid/legitimate or not, you still must agree that they are ultimately different from live-action shows. That's why I didn't count them.
True. Of course, as an aspiring director, I kinda understand why it's not a bad thing for them to be in charge, but I think there should be a lot more of a synergistic relationship between them and the writers (like TV, as you said).
I don't know. I have to admit, it's impossible for me to make a judgment about whether I even disagree with you about that, because there are too many other factors affecting my opinion of the movie. I've never been much of an analytical movie watcher; I generally just think in terms of like or don't like. So, you might be right, I can't say.
I don't understand this reasoning. "Journey to Babel" didn't spend ten minutes explaining the significance of this, they just did it, and let the context carry it. The new audiences that are being introduced to the franchises know that Spock is an alien, so why shouldn't they expect him to do alien things? It wasn't catering to the established fans when Prime Spock mind-melded with Kirk, and that seemed to work okay.
I'd say the point of the scene was to show two hot young actors making out.
But would it have resonated with Spock? I don't know what kind of place kissing has in Vulcan culture, but there's no evidence about it either way. So, being that he is alien, who's to say that kissing would communicate love and support to him?
To my perception, he spent most of the movie abandoning his Vulcan facade. Each such occurence, then (to me), makes it even less effective.
So yeah, clearly it did work for a lot of people, I can't deny that, but there's my own two cents, if it helps illuminate why some people didn't like it.
[EDIT: Continuing through the thread, I see that JarodRussell made many of the same points, but heck, I already wrote all that, so feel free to just point me to the rebuttals you already made.]
I think it may have actually been in the original writer's guide, but I'm not even remotely sure about that.
Well, no, but calling the Earth date a "stardate" doesn't make a lot of sense. If they had just said, "Captain's Log, January 1st..." like in Enterprise, that would be fine. I don't really think I'd would've cried a whole lot about the stardates being excised completely (and in fact, I didn't even notice the earth date thing until I read about it later), but saying "stardate" does kind of indicate that it's gonna be something different than the Earth date.
Not a big deal, at all, I'm just sayin'.
Did the old stardates have two digits after the decimal point? (Again, not a big deal.)
I don't understand this reasoning. Who expected the old rules to apply anymore? I just watched the A-Team movie, and I didn't expect them to spend the first year with reporter Amy Allen, and then get recaptured after three more years, etc. It's a reboot (even though they explained it in-universe through the timeline divergence); one look at the Enterprise shows that the old rules don't apply. Why do they need to blow up a planet to prove that?
Exactly. Else how could they have ever made romantic movies before open-mouthed kissing was allowed onscreen?
The point would've been to make Spock look like an alien. Again, to my perception, there really wasn't much in the movie that made Spock seem like a Vulcan. This would certainly have accomplished the objective of showing that there was more alien about him than just pointy ears and slanted eyebrows. It may have actually been more of a "whoa!" moment if they had set it up to make everyone think they were gonna kiss, and then not do it. How Vulcan.
As I understand it, the thing that made Nimoy's Spock so virally popular was the depiction of him struggling to control his human emotions. This Spock didn't put up much of a struggle.
I'm surprised that you're stating this as an absolute. Are you really suggesting that it's objectively "right," universally? Because I don't see how anything like this could be absolutely right or wrong for everyone, either way. It can be right for someone and wrong for someone else, can't it?
I don't understand. Isn't that what we've been saying in the first place? I don't think anyone in the anti-kiss camp was talking about the turbolift scene. If you thought the finger-touching in the transporter scene would've been preferable, why were you arguing against it so vociferously?
But didn't you just say that about the kissing? (Right before you said you might've preferred it the other way.) Am I misunderstanding you?
Yeah, playing in my head, that seems to me (personally and subjectively) to be more like Spock.
I agree with the first part, and I'm glad that someone else made the point besides me. I, personally, don't see how making fun of the original universe shows respect for the source material. It shows that you know of it, but it doesn't actually indicate any appreciation for it. Whenever I hear that Wolverine line, I always think, "Yeah, that would be better, actually."
Again, I don't get it. What scene didn't have something the old show had never done before? You say this as if half the movie was just lifted word-for-word from TOS episodes.
To an extent, that's a good point. It's just the way it is, it's done, and we have to accept that. But I do know that, for myself, discussing my problems with the movie has helped me self-examine what I really disliked, and what things I just got upset about because I was already annoyed (like the plot holes). So, I think these discussions can still have value if the people in the discussions are open-minded about their own opinions.
What I find the most odd about the Orion make up in this movie is that the Orion make up in Enterprise looked vastly superior. In Trek 09 it looked painted on, in Enterprise it looked like the skin actually had that color.
Exactly.
I also said the transporter platform scene would have been the best possibility to include it. Especially since Kirk might not be familiar with the gesture as well, so there's a mirror for the audience within the movie. Perfect. Somewhere along in the discussion I moved into the turbolift scene, but as David cgc described how the scene might have looked like, I realized that might have worked immensely well, too.
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Your loss. No way could a live-action show remotely do justice to Batman or Spider-Man the way their best animated series have.
The fact that they're different is trivial and irrelevant to the question. This is not about your personal tastes, because no studio is going to base their marketing decisions on one person. This is about whether the owners of a film franchise would choose to create a television series to tie into it. The money a studio makes from an animated show has no difference from the money they make from a live-action show. It's still dollars either way.
In charge is one thing, but having no checks on one's power is something altogether different. There's nothing more valuable for a person in charge than to have someone else who's powerful enough to stop you from making a mistake. As a writer, I want to be in charge of telling my stories the way I want to tell them, but I find it invaluable to have editors who can criticize my work and help me improve it. And I hope I never get so successful that editors are afraid to tell me when I have a bad idea. Because that's a bad place to be creatively.
Which goes without saying, but that's a valid decision when you're trying to make a crowd-pleasing story, and it doesn't conflict with the other point of the scene.
Spock is not alien. He's half-alien and half-human. People sometimes forget that. Genetically and in terms of parental influence, he's fifty-fifty. He said as much in the film: with Vulcan gone, Earth was the only home he had left. Spock's an individual, not a racial stereotype. And humanity is an integral part of his makeup.
I saw it more as a case of Spock achieving the same synthesis of his halves at the end of this film as he did more gradually in the Prime universe, culminating in TMP. In that movie, Spock embraced the value of emotion, and literally ever since, he has been portrayed as serene and at ease with himself, openly expressive, neither hiding nor apologizing for his emotional reactions. That's the way the character of Spock has been portrayed for 30 years, far longer than he was played as rigidly Vulcan and in constant emotional denial. It took Spock Prime a long time to achieve that balance, but New Spock has come to a similar balance far more quickly due to the events and influences we witnessed in the film. Is that "abandoning" his Vulcanness, or is it simply finding a healthy balance between his Vulcan and human natures?
This is referring to the stardate explanation, right? (I hate the way this board leaves out the quoted portions in long messages.) Yeah, it's in my copy of the Third Revision from April 1967. And it does say in the bible that the setting was "about two hundred years from now," so evidently that was the intent fairly early on, but it also says they used stardates "to avoid continually mentioning Star Trek's century..., and getting into arguments about whether this or that would have developed by then." So I didn't have it exactly right, but I was in the ballpark.
Stardates have never made sense. Why start now?
On TNG they occasionally did.
Because human beings are emotional creatures, and movies are about stimulating an emotional response. What you notice or expect intellectually is beside the point. If a movie does something that hits you on a visceral level, that's effective filmmaking. As an aspiring director, you really should know that.
Besides, even if some fans could've expected things to change, that doesn't make it wrong to come right out and make the statement in bold and undeniable terms. I mean, since when have expectations rendered anything unnecessary in storytelling? By that logic, every story should just skip over the climax and right to the denouement, because you expect that the heroes will save the day and survive, so hell, why bother to show it at all? Come on. Even if you expect the heroes to survive, it can still be exciting and surprising to see how it happens.
I'll never understand people who think that a general argument and a specific argument are the same thing. It doesn't matter whether kissing might or might not have been necessary in some other movie. It still worked in this one.
Have you looked at his ears lately?
And as Greg has effectively pointed out, that wasn't the right moment to play up his alien nature. That was the right moment to show him relaxing his Vulcan control and embracing the freedom Uhura granted him to be vulnerable and human for a brief moment. Sure, I have no problem with playing up his alienness somewhere else in the movie, but not in the turbolift scene.
Well, that doesn't make any sense in the broader context of the story. If anything, the film surprised us by setting up this whole flirtation thing between Kirk and Uhura, and then turning it around and revealing that Spock was the one who got the girl. That was a very effective surprise.
Like I said, we spent 13 years watching a Spock who was engaged in that struggle, and then another 30 years watching a Spock who had resolved it. Okay, the number of stories about the former is greater, true, but we've had a lifetime to get used to the idea of a Spock who's resolved his conflict. That's the Spock we got in six movies, the Spock we got in "Unification," and the Spock Prime we got here.
And of course his struggle was resolved more quickly. It's a movie. Things have to go faster there than in a weekly series. A series has to maintain a status quo, but movies are supposed to show meaningful, life-changing events.
Obviously not everyone is going to agree with the decision on a creative level. But I'm not talking about the individual fan's assessment of the characters, I'm talking about results. Despite the intractable resistance of a few, this film was highly successful with audiences, and the kiss was well-received. That makes it the right decision, because it worked. It achieved what it was meant to achieve. Yes, some people may feel it was the wrong decision in terms of the characters or whatever, but that doesn't change the fact that it worked overall. It didn't harm the film's success and was in fact one of its most widely publicized and talked-about moments. So yeah, I think it's valid to say that it was the right decision from a results-oriented perspective.
Have you been reading the same thread I have? The focus of the debate for days now has been very specifically on the turbolift scene.
No it wasn't. It was a general audience of movie-goers.
ST-One
Vice Admiral
Or Wise or Meyer...
Because after ten previous movies and hundreds of previous episodes, the average moviegoer could be forgiven for thinking that this was just another STAR TREK movie. Ho-hum. That was a big psychological barrier to overcome, so you really had to hit them over the head with the idea that wasn't just STAR TREK, PART ELEVEN.
Remember, all of us hardcore fans who had been tracking the project for years understood that it was a quasi-reboot, and instantly noticed the subtle differences between the two universe. But the world is full of people who didn't even know there was a new STAR TREK movie in the works until they started seeing the trailers in the movie theaters. And who aren't going to pick up on any minor differences in Kirk's backstory.
I mean, seriously, do you think the average person took one look at the new Enterprise, which has the same basic design it's alway had, and went "Whoa! Look at the placement of those nacelles! What a radical reconception of the franchise." Nah, they just saw a spaceship with a big forward saucer and a couple of glowing nacelles and went "Yeah, right. The Enterprise. Beam me up, Scotty."
Heck, I remember the weekend the movie opened. This very message board was filled with posters who seemed convinced that the next movie was going to be all about pushing the reset button and bringing Vulcan back. Because that's what STAR TREK always does, right?
So if even our own kind expected the status quo to be restored, imagine how hard it must have been to convince general audiences, who had largely lost interest in Trek three movies and two tv series ago, that "No, really! This isn't the same old thing!"
You want to the audience to gasp when Vulcan is destroyed, or when Uhura kisses Spock.
Nobody who doesn't like Scifi or VFX fests watches a Science Fiction/VFX fest movie, no matter how cool the trailer is. What is the "general" audience in your eyes?
Two things.
Which part of the audience gasped at this? The Trek fans. Why should the new audience that doesn't know anything about Trek be "shocked" by that?
Did they gasp at the kiss? No, they gasped at the fact that Uhura and Spock have a romantic relationship. If you symbolize that by kissing or by a Vulcan gesture wouldn't have made a difference. An affair is an affair, whether they have sex the Vulcan way or not.
Did the reset button make Star Trek unattractive for a wider audience? The answer is again: No. It was the general impression of Star Trek movies being less fun, less state of the art, with unknown actors and cheesy dialogue. Star Trek was overrun by its own clichés. Shatner, Takei & Co made fun of themselves, Galaxy Quest and SNL skits made fun of everything, and yeah well, the loud minority of basement dwellers that called themselves Trekkies were there, too, etc... .
That has nothing to do with Vulcan being destroyed or finger stroking here and there or whether a reset button is pushed or not. Nobody who doesn't know Star Trek beforehand gives a fuck about these details when he judges the movie. It's about the general impression the movie made on him. Was it a fun ride, yes or no, do I like these characters, yes or no, have the other people who watched this movie been nerds, yes or no, etc... .
The stuff we are bragging about here right now is of no importance for the "general" (or better non-Trek-fan) audience. Finger stroking or kissing, it wouldn't have made a difference. Red bussard collectors or blue ones. Enterprise looking like a hot rod or like the TMP Enterprise. This really doesn't change anything about the general appeal of the movie.
And that's about my point: it would have been just as good to do it the other way. It would have made no difference for the "general" audience, but it would have been in line with the original. So why decide against it?
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It really, truly would have. Are you really arguing that Uhura passionately kissing and embracing Spock is no different than them standing apart and touching fingers in a passionless way? I'm no Martin Scorsese here, but I'm pretty sure that there's a pretty significant difference on the screen. I'm imagining how awful that scene would have been if it would have been the finger touch and holy crap am I glad you weren't a consultant on this film. There's not a single way I can think of that the "finger touch" would have made that scene better.
I'm not sure what the last question has to do with one's own enjoyment of the movie, but the first two should be important to anyone who watches a movie and the overwhelming answer to those from both Trek fan and non-Trek fan has been YES.
I think you're right about the last two - hell, *I* didn't care that it was red vs. blue or hot rod vs. TMP - but I do know I would have thought it remarkably stupid had that kiss been a finger touch and I guarantee Joe Moviegoer would have been put off by it.
There's a difference between people like you and me and people whose interest in science fiction is "I'll watch a good sci-fi movie when I see one, but I don't read those books/watch those TV shows/&c." I saw Star Trek with a group of people, several of whom had never seen any Star Trek before and wouldn't have seen this if it had been Nemesis II, but they were lured in by the trailers, which made it look fast, fun, and sexy.
Oh, yeah they had unknown actors like the Academy Award winner Alfre Woodard, Academy Award Nominee James Cromewell, Anthony Zerbe, 2 time Tony winner Donna Murphy, Academy Award Winner, and Laurence Olivier Award Nominee Tom Hardy and that's just in the last three movies. I'm sorry, but with those kinds of names, I don't think anyone could have thought they had unknown actors in them. In fact, I've always been amazed at the kinds of actors they were able to get even as the franchise's popularity plummeted.
Paramount worked out long ago that Star Trek fans make up about 10% of the audience of a ST movie, and only about 1-2% collect movie tie-ins, such as the ST novels. Of the remaining 90%, some would be people with a casual interest in ST, and others diehard SF watchers, but most of the others would be regular Mums, Dads, kids, dating couples, groups of single teens, etc. People who turn up to the multiplex, check out the offerings and select one.
Judging by the takings of "Nemesis", which was trounced on its opening weekend in the US by J-Lo's "Maid in Manhattan", not even all of the faithful 10% went to see it.
Curiously, at the Sydney premiere of JJ's ST, they distributed 900 free double passes to an audience of so-called "taste setters" (soap opera stars, fashion models, TV celebs, etc, including several "A-list" acquaintances of mine who had never followed Star Trek) and they sold 200 tickets online to ST fans. The movie got a five-minute standing ovation and celebrity Twitterings and Facebook entries the next day said things like, "Who would have guessed it? I'm a Trekkie!" While not a "general" audience, they were still a bizarre cross section of Sydney, ones who are often unimpressed by things 'cos they get so many freebies.
Insurrection
A number of people have mentioned that Insurrection:
the action hurt it because it was basically a TNG episode...
A number of people have mentioned that Insurrection:
http://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Insurrection-Patrick-Stewart/dp/B00000ILBK
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=9242
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x8542586
the action hurt it because it was basically a TNG episode...
Hold on, let me get this straight...you care more about the throwaway naming detail in this movie because it was less important?
It's an example of the myriad of things wrong with the film, and goes towards the mindset of the writers and director.
To quote Gene Roddenberry, "If I listened to the fans, Star Trek would be shit."
You don't create a work of artistic merit to please 1-2% of the audience, who have such varying opinions anyway, none of them can even agree with each other. In fact, over the last few months you've resisted every urge to listen to fans nitpick your ideas for the next edition of the "ST Concordance".