The Heart of Into Darkness

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I misremembered - it wasn't Jake, it was a one-off character in "The Passenger."

 

[sj4iy]

Well, there's a quote floating around on the Internets that's from Marina Sirtis I think. It's something to the effect of "On Trek, characters don't interact, they hit their marks and declaim." There was a stilted and stifling theatricality to Trek that dated back to the TNG era that robbed the series and the films of their immediacy and humanity.

I was wondering if you were refering to all of Trek before the reboot, or to TNG more specifically. DS9 didn't seem to have this problem.

It certainly did. All of modern Trek including Enterprise did.

Even in Abrams's movies, as I noticed as I watched STID for the third time, Trek characters tend to speak in complete grammatical sentences without interrupting one another, avoid sentence fragments (except to demonstrate extreme stress) and so on. It's a style of writing that's still imitating 1960s television to some degree. Nonetheless, the Abrams films are better in this regard than TV Trek of the 1980s/90s.

I noticed a lot of characters interrupting or talking over each other in natural situations in these movies. I agree it didn't happen in any of the series or movies very often before, but it seemed completely normal to me here. The grammar was fine, I didn't think it sounded any differently than normal. People don't often speak with incorrect grammar except in certain accents or having grown up with English as a second language. None of these characters grew up in those areas nor spoke English as a second language, so they talked fine. Obviously, I haven't scoured the movie for bad grammar, but nothing egregious or too perfect popped up on my radar.

I will say this conversation reminds me of this xkcd comic:

 

[Belz...]

I'm not sure modern movies should try to emulate The Big Lebowski. It works sometimes but "realism" isn't always preferable.

 

[M'Sharak]

I'm not sure modern movies should try to emulate The Big Lebowski. It works sometimes but "realism" isn't always preferable.

1. Not sure I understand what you mean. In what way would you say that movie is being emulated?
2. I know each individual has their own personal milestones to mark what's new, older, really old, etc., but if The Big Lebowski isn't a modern movie, then what is it?

 

[Belz...]

No, no. I mean, Lebowski had a very distinct way with the dialogue, full of stops and misspeak, etc. It was intentional, of course, and fully scripted, but what I was saying to Admiral Buzzkill was that Trek's 'clean' dialogue wasn't necessarily a bad thing, or rather than the polar opposite, while ok for certain movies or series, wasn't necessarily right for Trek.

 

[ALF]

I'd love to see a spin off following Khansickle and The Dude.