I'm coming a bit late to the party in this thread, but what the heck...
The movie itself features no plot hole in this respect.
Nowhere in the movie is it suggested that the supernova would have been anything but the very homestar of Romulus going kaboom...
Romulans would not believe Spock's warnings that the star was acting up, so they wouldn't react until it was too late.
Sorry, but this makes no sense. First of all, the kind of stars that can support life as we know it (Type-G and -K stars in the main sequence sizewise)
cannot go supernova, and stars that can go supernova cannot support life as we know it. It stands to reason that the supernova was not Romulus's home star. Second, if it somehow was the home star, supernovae take a
long time to happen (centuries at the very least), with preliminary stages that would make it clear to the Romulans well in advance what the final outcome would be (and, realistically, would have rendered the system uninhabitable long before the explosion).
(Main-sequence stars
can suffer a nova, if they collapse to a white dwarf first or happen to be paired with one. However, a nova is not remotely the same thing as a supernova, and Spock certainly would not confuse one with the other. And in any event, it still doesn't happen by surprise.)
Timo said:
The only thing left unclear in the movie is why Spock bothered to stop the supernova from expanding after Romulus was already lost.
Well, hardly the
only thing, but it is one thing. "How" is as big a question as "why" here, too, since it's unclear how Spock could get close enough to seed the Red Matter (never mind how its "black hole" could absorb an explosion that already had an expanding wavefront apparently measured in light-years or, even in your hypothesis, AUs).
I don't see any problem with that one. A supernova that destroys Romulus is obviously a threat to the entire galaxy, even if it destroys nothing else...
You're being very generous to the writers here. Nothing about Spock's dialogue ("a supernova threatened the galaxy") suggests he was speaking in terms of political metaphor. Had it been the Romulan home star about to explode, why wouldn't he have simply said so plainly?
Timo said:
We don't know that it would have consumed the star; for all we know, it wouldn't even have created a black hole in those circumstances. And even if it did, having a star with a black hole at its core might not be such a bad thing after all.
We don't really know anything about Red Matter, since it's a McGuffin about which the writers told us nothing whatsoever. However, we can extrapolate from how we see it behave.
Every time it's used, it creates a super-powerful "black hole" and/or wormhole that Hoovers up everything in the vicinity (much faster than would a real black hole).
Moreover, even a regular black hole at the center of an aging star would hardly help stabilize it. After all, it's gravitational collapse in the first place -- into a black hole or neutron star -- that
creates the heat build-up that expels a star's outer layers into a supernova. You apparently know this, and I confess that your argument...
Timo said:
One may well prevent that back-bounce by eating the material faster, in a controlled manner.
...really makes no sense to me as expressed.
As for Remus being missing, I actually hail that development. Data's PowerPoint demonstration in ST:NEM shows that the planets don't orbit each other: they are depicted as being on separate orbits that brush against each other, supposedly at regular intervals. ...
The supernova simply caught Romulus when Remus wasn't in the neighborhood.
On this, at least, we agree. (Although of course if Remus was anywhere in the same star system, it would hardly escape the destruction.)
Sudden supernovas have recently been discovered actually.
Really? That's news to me. Can you link an article? (And what exactly qualifies as "sudden" in astronomical terms?...)
You are right, they don't say which star. Our current theories say a Supernova w/in 100ly of Earth would likely destroy 99% of all life. We don't know what the risk is beyond 100ly. I still see only 3 options. The star was the parent or nearby companion star or traveled FTL... Maybe it was actually a subspace shockwave which threatened Romulus.
Indeed, a nearby supernova can be a real threat. However, at a scientifically plausible speed (01.c), the wavefront from an event 100ly away would take 1000ly to get here, leaving plenty of time to prepare. An FTL/supspace shockwave is thus the only explanation that makes "sense" in the movie... except of course there's no explanation of how such a thing could happen.
Perhaps the FTL wave from the supernova similarly leaked STL components from subspace back to our universe when it went past, and those components then did the destruction?
See, now,
that's good fanwank. IMHO it makes "sense" of what we were shown on screen. Still doesn't explain how/why, though.
It's not a plot hole, the film is just a bit vague on the actual operation...
IOW, the film doesn't provide clear information about what's happening; instead, the story just moves on. If that's not the
definition of a "plot hole," what is?
Which is probably for the best. Nero isn't the sort of villain who's supposed to make sense. He's a madman type of villain ... Nero has his loco motive, needs his loco motive, and the more fantastic it sounds, the easier it is for us to sympathize with the heroes (who really need our sympathy as they all start out as assholes), not with the villain.
You don't consider this just another sign of cheap-and-easy writing? Wouldn't it have been a much better film if the protagonists
weren't assholes from the start and had to face down an antagonist with some actual plausible motivation?
I like to think the Hobus star was due to die millennia ago, and that an ancient super-race did something to extend it’s lifespan with dire consequences in 2387.
Something like: They put an inter-dimensional machine in the heart of the Hobus star, to power it long beyond it’s natural life with vacuum-flux energy from a protouniverse. Then, in 2387, long after said civilization died out, the prototuniverse exploded in it’s Big Bang. Virtually infinite energy was poured though the machine into the Hobus star, which exploded like nothing before.
I like this. Hell, even a single line in the movie about how the exploding star's internal processes had been manipulated by some ancient alien technology would have sufficed to rationalize what they depicted. No "technobabble" required. It's handwaving, but it would've been better than no rationale at all.
KingDaniel said:
Also: It’s just a film. Pretend. Make-believe. Is it really that much sillier than warp speed, time travel and teleporting people?
Actually, yeah, I think it is. There's a difference between story elements that are presented as
workarounds for familiar science, and misrepresentation of familiar science
itself. Decent SF understands that difference. (If we were told that the ship traveled at FTL speeds powered by ordinary rocket engines, for instance, that would be a similarly egregious problem.)
I am Sooo tired of people on this board saying that things like "The Supernova that will destroy the entire galaxy" aren't plot holes.
You and me both. Events that happen without explanation or motivation, for scientifically impossible reasons, or as a result of compound coincidences, are what "plot holes" are all about. It's lazy writing, and shows disrespect for the audience.
As in nearly all of the film, Here again the science is pretty far off: shock waves from supernova only travel at about 10% of the speed of light, meaning it would take hours for such a shock wave to travel from our own star to the earth. If we sent something to our nearest stellar neighbor at .1c, today’s babies could easily be having great-grandchildren by the time it arrived, 42 years later. Further, we might reasonably suspect that any red matter would need to be delivered at or near the center of the nova, (we will ignore problems of travelling into the supernova remnant and across a “galaxy threatening” shockwave), thus: travelling at the speed of light, the effect would need 4.62 more years to reach and effect the advancing shock wave, depending on the wave’s thickness.
Torturing the language is less productive to me than simply recognizing that the script was hammered out by people who had little time to know or care about science, ST canon, the military, logic or consistency.
This. Exactly.
The guys who wrote the script are pretty big fans of Trek who not only watched the shows but develed into the novels for ideas. So I think they might know their canon.
Shame they didn't demonstrate that in the film, then... or tell a story even a fraction as satisfying as the Trek novels they pointed to as favorites.
It's Hollywood writing in general. I think a lot of Americans have become desensitised to drivel
Bingo. Too many Hollywood studios (and producers, and writers...) feed us nothing but "junk food" entertainment, conditioning us to accept and even expect that... then defend themselves by saying it's what we have an appetite for. Sorry, but I'd prefer more of a well-balanced meal.
Science currently forbids any meaningful form of FTL.
True. However, SF as a genre has a long history of finding (and explaining) ways around this constraint. It's an accepted trope.
We know virtually nothing about Supernova.
This is simply
not true. And even if it were, it would be no excuse for misrepresenting what we do know.
Meh - a line of technobabble would have covered exactly this. They used language that they knew would make sense to 'lay people' (black holes, supernova) while giving them properties that are inconsistent with those phenomena. It's swings and roundabout but calling it a 'subspace supernova shock wave' would probably have covered them.
Again, yes. As with
many aspects of this film, even slightly better dialogue would have papered over a lot of the problem. Frankly, most of the dialogue was cringeworthy, laden with clichés and non sequiturs (on top of the scientific errors).
Given Star Trek's notoriety when it comes to bad technobabble, Abrams and his cohorts probably wanted to avoid the blank stares and confused masses that terms like 'subspace supernova shock wave' cause.
So they opted for the blank stares and confusion that come from bad dialogue about
actual science, rather than pseudoscience?
In the end you have to look at it from the perspective of making money. A splosion makes money. Make it a huge-ass galaxy-threatening splosion, to up the stakes and make it "exciting." Call it a supernova so that the audience knows it's a "space thing." That's the end of that.
That's crap. That's lazy, lowest-common-denominator writing, and no self-respecting writer approaches things that way. "The perspective of making money" is something for the studio and producers to worry about, not the creative types. Their interest, indeed their duty, lies in telling the best story they can. (The SFX crews obviously lived up to that duty. The writers, no.)
The Wormhole said:
Anything more complicated would have scared potential audience members away...
A story that makes sense would have scared people away? Do you really have such a low opinion of your fellow moviegoers?
Since I don't want to be treated this way, it seems unethical for me to justify others doing it.
Besides, the real science nearly always makes SciFi more interesting, IMO... The problem is that it costs things like time, effort, and caring.
I'm with you on this. Were you given the chance to write a Star Trek film, would you dumb it down just because some studio beancounter thinks audiences want it that way? Roddenberry and Coon fought against that kind of thinking on a regular basis during TOS. Abrams, Orci & Kurtzman, apparently not so much.
(Of course, that's giving them the benefit of the doubt by assuming they
understand why and how their story is dumbed-down.)
My ethics require me to be as honest with children as possible. If they are old enough to question magical or supernatural myths, they deserve the truth from us, IMO.
Bit of a tangent, but I agree with you on this too.
BurntSynapse said:
I think this [audience satisfaction] only holds when people are ignorant of science, or any area of knowledge for that matter. We cannot care about something about which we're oblivious.
And this.
We seem to have very different ideas on whether the ability to buy a ticket for a summer action flick qualifies one as "the right person" to assess film "goodness" and "level of entertainment".
In 100% realistic sci-fi, FTL is not possible, so therefore space ships won't be going anywhere.
I disagree: unless science can explain what distance actually is, there is no restriction *in principle* on circumventing the intervening distance between point A and B, and excellent reasons (as seen in the double-slit experiment) to believe that distance is no more real than the apparent movement of the sun.
False science is a necessity to tell a sci-fi story,
I agree that suspending disbelief and granting some creative license to creators is reasonable, but I also believe there is such a thing as really bad writing in films, and that based on the evidence, this film is an exceptionally fine example.
[/QUOTE]
The supernova/Hobus star/Red Matter thing is much less easily handwaved because they threw a bunch of known science and Trek-science terminology at us like none of us would know what it meant or have any context. Complete and utter technobabble might have been better, since then we could have thought "Hmmm.. guess maybe they'll explain that at some later point" but the explanation they gave left many of us instead thinking "I sorta know how that works, and that sounds like bullcrap."
That's what I thought, but I'm less of an obsessive Treknologist than some of our fellows here, so I let it pass and enjoyed the movie anyway. But when I think about that part of it, I can definitely feel their pain.
That's how it came across to me, too. And if you enjoyed the movie anyway, thanks at least for understanding where the rest of us are coming from, rather than insisting we have no right to complain and/or nothing to complain about.
They wanted a cgi monster and contrived an lengthy, unnecessary scene to shoe horn one in.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up the whole Delta Vega sequence.
The final battle where Nero refuses to surrender and the Enterprise opens fire at close range left me with a nasty taste in my mouth (I could hear the theme tune from Team America echoing in my head). Kirk and Spock's decision to enact satisfying and bloody revenge on a ship which was, according to their sensors, trapped in the gravity well was pointless. It delayed them escaping the event horizon and left them vulnerable to possible energy discharge from the Narada's exploding engines, and all for revenge. ...
I'd have had far more respect if Kirk had told the transporters to beam off as many of the crew as possible as soon as the Narada's shields were down.
Me, too. That scene really seemed not merely to misunderstand but deliberately to
reject the basic humanistic sensibility that used to be at the heart of Star Trek.
I'd go for "all of the above," but yeah, the lack of situational awareness by characters in this film was really disconcerting. It started with Robau's inexplicable responses to the Narada, both before and after going aboard, and continued pretty much through the entire film.
The Wormhole said:
...Trek XI still dances around the issue and refuses to call Starfleet a military, instead settling on "humanitarian peacekeeping armada." Which still sounds like a military to me, but apparentally Abrams and Cohorts think otherwise.
Actually, to be precise, they have Pike call the
Federation an "armada." Talk about painfully sloppy writing... might as well mix up the United States with the U.S. Navy!
