Spoilers ST: Beyond - Surprising fact about Sulu
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Have you gotten a chance to see it yet? I am curious what you thought of the "reveal"
I have been waiting for my niece to get out of jail to see it with her. I had thought she might be getting out of jail today but that didn't happen. She has another court date next Friday but there's been some developments there that might mean I'll have to watch the Blu Ray with her.
I'm sure that has to be one of the more colorful answers to Why haven't you seen the movie yet.
Actually it was only John Cho who said that Sulu was gay. In the various news articles that I have read, Cho is the only one identified as the source. But in this case, I feel that the studio is taking the role of those graphics on DVDs and Blu-Rays that say that any comment made on an audio commentary only reflects those making it and not the producers or production company. Cho said Sulu is gay, but the studio never confirmed that, and Cho, as far as I am aware, is not a producer on the movie or is part of the higher-ups at Paramount.
As for easily establishing it, it could be as simple as Sulu walking into his quarters and seeing that a video letter has arrived, and when he opens it the little girl goes Hello Uncle Hikaru! while the other guy says How is it going bro?
Or to elaborate on that previous post I made to stave off that sort of claim, tomswift: No, that will literally never happen, however flimsy you think it was in the movie. Because the negative media response were they to walk back including a gay character by claiming that it was just his brother all along would be horrendous, and no studio would ever allow that choice. Even setting aside how horrible it would be in a general cultural sense, that would put their bottom line at risk, and I do not think that Paramount's executives are that stupid. That is far from an easy thing to achieve, even if it's not difficult in a literal sense to type the letters "hello Hikaru I am your brother" in a screenplay.
I can't tell if you're purposefully being blind to that aspect or if it literally didn't occur to you, but while yes it would be easy to put that line in the screenplay, that doesn't mean it would be an easy decision to make in an overall sense. It's like you don't think anything matters but the literal words in the screenplay and there are absolutely no other factors needing to be considered. We aren't talking about what's canon or what's in continuity or nitpicking plot details or anything else that honestly doesn't really matter, we're talking about what the studio would choose to do in the current climate.
Do you honestly think that they could say "well, it was only John Cho who said he was gay, it wasn't actually explicitly in the movie, and so it didn't actually happen for certain" (which isn't actually the case, by the way; Pegg said it too, I'm certain), and people would accept that as anything but pathetic backpedaling?
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It's funny that straight Sulu was played by a gay man while Gay Sulu is played by a straight man.
What side of the rock did you come out from under? I do take into account what I see on screen, and what I saw on screen did not give me the impression that they were a married couple. It give me the impression that Sulu was just meeting a brother or first cousin.
Where is the denial?Denial is not a river in Egypt.
Which merely illustrates your own preconceptions. You're culturally conditioned to see heterosexuality as the norm, so you've convinced yourself of the bizarre premise that a person would be more likely to keep a photo of his niece at his station than his daughter. There are plenty of other people who had no trouble recognizing that Sulu was meeting his husband and daughter, because they aren't blinded by heteronormative assumptions.
Which, of course, is exactly the intent. The filmmakers had to balance the decision to establish Sulu as gay with the studio's desire to show the movie in countries that still normalize discrimination against LGBT people. So they had to present it in an ambiguous enough way that open-minded people would recognize it for the marriage that it was while those still trapped by prejudice could fool themselves into thinking it was "just" a fraternal relationship or something.
You don't want to believe that it was his husband, so you will say anything no matter how strained to deny that possibility.
Hear, hear!
What is so bizarre about keeping a photo of a niece at your workstation? I am a single person who does not have any kids, and yet I still keep a photo of my two nieces on me because for me, I do not have kids of my own, so my nieces are the closest thing that I have to a next generation.
But it seems like nowadays everyone expects for there to be a gay character in a story, and then object when there is not or the character is very undefined. At the same time, would we get this wrapped up about whether a character was gay or not if we were talking about an adaptation of Shakespeares Julius Caesar and saw men kissing, especially in the scene where the murder is planned to seal the deal?
And how much more common is it to possess a personal picture of one's children than one's nephews/nieces?
Did you know that a great many of Shakespeare's romantic sonnets were gender neutral, that is to say it is impossible to tell from the poem if the person talked about is male or female?
What are the odds of something like that happening unintentionally? According to the experts, infinitesimal.
So what? Besides Shakespeare there has been thousands of sonnets written by different people about love that were meant to be read from the point of view of the reader. Even Gene Roddenberry's sonnet to his airplane that we heard in Where No Man Has Gone Before could be read by either male or female, or at least the section that was heard.
But really, with Beyond, the scenes with Sulu and his brother/husband and niece/daughter could've easily have been cut from the final film, as they didn't add anything to the plot of the movie. Besides not being sure what they were showing, in the theater I could easily tell that they were scenes that could've been cut from the movie and included as deleted scenes on the Blu-Ray/DVD. Unfortunately they didn't explain anything or have anything to do with the plot, they felt like the scenes included in the deleted scenes of Star Trek Nemesis that feature Wesley Crusher, and then we are just left with a wide shot with Wesley at the end of the table, unlike the one scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan where Kirk was doing the engine room inspection, and then talks to the cadet who we then learn is Scotty's nephew, and helps explain why Scotty shows up on the bridge and in sickbay later when the cadet is dying. The Beyond scenes I can easily see them being cut in countries where they might have issues, or even on TV re-runs, the scenes will probably be cut if they are trying to fit the movie with a 2-hour time slot (the theater that I was at said the full run time was 2 hours and 2 minutes).
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What? Simon Pegg, the author of the film, has repeatedly said that Sulu is gay in the film and that he and Doug Jung came up with the idea. It's clear that the authorial intent is that he is gay.
Doug Jung, tomswift, being both Pegg's co-writer and the person that played Sulu's husband.
Yeah, why would John Cho publicly declare Sulu to be gay unless he had the backing of the rest of the production team?
Do we know if John Cho is gay?
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