To Whom Should the Movie Mantle Pass Post-Abrams
- Thread starter BigJake
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No one has been announced, that's hardly the same thing as no one having been cast. Also, it seems JJ Abrams is going for an unknown cast, like the original trio, so, it's possible (maybe even probable?) that announcing the cast wouldn't mean anything, anyways.
Abrams gave us Star Trek that actually resembled Star Trek, rather than a collection of geriatric stars musing about their impending old age or a group of stolid moral paragons who are as interesting as drying paint. Star Trek was an action-adventure series, after all.
^ I'd say Melakon has it right. (ST09's script for instance is nearly a beat-by-beat parallel of Star Wars: A New Hope and incorporates "destiny" themes hitherto foreign to Trek, among other things.) Although certainly replacing the aging casts in the prior movie franchises was a genuine boon.
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Of course you'd say that. You'd be wrong, but it hasn't stopped you so far.
Some lifted shots and a fairly standard 'hero's quest' structure does not a 'beat-for-beat' parallel of Star Wars make.
Choose Your Own Rejoinder:
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You really must learn to govern your passions, The Stig. They will prove your undoing.
Your snark is weak, old man.
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Take it away, Jeff Overstreet:
Jeff Overstreet said:
I think he has it right, too. Come at me, bro.
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Meaningless bullet points are meaningless.
Of the many and myriad criticisms one can lay against Trek '09, this has got to be the most vapid. I mean, it's a movie that has massive plot problems and relies entirely on circumstances that beggar the imagination but you chose a few lifted scenes and generic movie tropes to hang your hat on?
Get a grip.
- Kirk was always a farm kid from Iowa and Lucas was hardly the first to have his hero gaze off into the middle distance.
- Wow, a mentor figure. That's never, ever been done before Star Wars. Nope.
- Yes, planets explode in Star Wars and Trek 09. They do so under totally different circumstances and for entirely different reasons, but why would one let that get in the way of a predetermined point?
- Kirk chases every single woman he lays eyes on. He and Spock didn't compete for Uhura, at all.
- This point is so totally broad as to have no meaning. A protagonist having their beliefs challenged happens in pretty much every story ever written.
- The last-second escape is another well-worn action trope.
- Not so much, no. It ends with the Enterprise warping off for planets unknown.
Of the many and myriad criticisms one can lay against Trek '09, this has got to be the most vapid. I mean, it's a movie that has massive plot problems and relies entirely on circumstances that beggar the imagination but you chose a few lifted scenes and generic movie tropes to hang your hat on?
Get a grip.
Coming from a director who wasn't a Star Wars fan doing Star Trek as basically an audition for doing Star Wars movies I'd be a trifle more willing to see them as meaningless coincidences. (A very small trifle.) At the mome, though, it looks like you're totally unnecessarily and hyper-defensively trying to squirm out of admitting something that's fairly evident.
And it is unnecessary, since of itself it's neither a criticism nor a point of praise, it's just a fairly well-founded common point between two properties. Read Jeff Overstreet's review: for him it's a selling point, it's what made him a NuTrek fan after having been a Star Wars fan. I don't think that's coincidence either. That it did something else for me is really neither here nor there, point is from either side of the divide we can both see it. So you may want to take your own advice and:
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trevanian
Rear Admiral
I remember a lot of folks dismissing LAST STARFIGHTER as just being a STAR WARS ripoff, but for me it was just a ton more fun, regardless of whether you could do a blow-by-blow comparison of similar faults and plotpoints.
OTOH, all 09 did for me (besides piss me off by trying to pass itself off as TREK) was remind me of the first STAR WARS and of PHANTOM MENACE, just with ADD cutting to make even more of a mess of things, though to be fair, some of that was obscured ... by ALL THOSE GODDAMN AMATEUR SUPER-8 FILMMAKER LENS FLARES!
I do have to wonder why Lucas' version of mythology is the one that caught on so strongly with filmmakers. Miller's take with THE ROAD WARRIOR was closer to a lot of Campbell's stuff, and fer chrissake, if you want a movie with the myth elements in place (AND in cheek), then we should all be going to see PRINCESS BRIDE conventions instead of TREK and WARS ones (which is probably what is happening in the prime reality rather than the pseudoverse we've been stuck in for most of my life.)
OTOH, all 09 did for me (besides piss me off by trying to pass itself off as TREK) was remind me of the first STAR WARS and of PHANTOM MENACE, just with ADD cutting to make even more of a mess of things, though to be fair, some of that was obscured ... by ALL THOSE GODDAMN AMATEUR SUPER-8 FILMMAKER LENS FLARES!
I do have to wonder why Lucas' version of mythology is the one that caught on so strongly with filmmakers. Miller's take with THE ROAD WARRIOR was closer to a lot of Campbell's stuff, and fer chrissake, if you want a movie with the myth elements in place (AND in cheek), then we should all be going to see PRINCESS BRIDE conventions instead of TREK and WARS ones (which is probably what is happening in the prime reality rather than the pseudoverse we've been stuck in for most of my life.)
The reason for the similarities is that both movies used the classic Hero's Journey story structure.
No, the Hero's Journey is by design very, very general; it wouldn't account for the more specific similarities. It's like the way would-be prophets couch their prophecies in very vague terms in order to have plausible deniability when the specifics of their predictions inevitably fail.
(Perhaps for just that reason, the "Hero's Journey" is the source of a whole lot of sorry-arsed excuse-making for bad, lazy scripts and plots. Star Wars: A New Hope caught a zeitgeist moment, but that doesn't make it particularly well-written, it wasn't. It was just adequate to its purpose enough to not get in the way of the genuinely brilliant visual design and effects.)
Since there are no specific similarities, as I mentioned above, captainkirk's explaination is completely on-point.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
But TOS already had its own structure, courtesy Gene Coon and some others who effectively built on the slightly thin GR concept, with the Kirk/Spock/McCoy dynamic integrating into a single compelling whole that was always at odds with itself to one degree or other, with THAT set against whatever the issue or villain or plot happened to be.
When you throw that out the airlock and plop in the Campbell framework, you're jettisoning or replacing core key aspects with a template that while conventionally safe, is probably as ill-suited to TREK as the many attempts to retrofit TWOK onto various Trek projects of the last 30 years.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Along with editing and use of sound (effects AND music.) Ever since I started looking at that movie on laserdisc, I realized that while I have never really loved it (for all its structural oddness, EMPIRE is the last really good SW movie, and for me probably the first as well), I really dig certain sections, and that is owing more to editing and use of sound (even, I grudgingly concede, to the misuse of sound in space) than the way it was shot or even the VFX.
Even though I was there opening day in 77 and enjoyed myself, it was never a thing for me. When William Goldman mentioned seeing SW on a reissue (1980 or so) and feeling how the whole audience felt embarrassed watching it, that they couldn't understand what had gotten them so thrilled before, I GOT that ... and therefore really don't get why SW continues its hold over so many, especially newer audiences that should by all rights find it stodgy as well as barely credible. By the fact I can't point to a single reason, and definitely discount the Campbell mythos as a key, I have to just accept it is just the mix of the aforementioned elements that captured lighting in a bottle for so many. And I can console myself that at least they're not holding SMOKEY & THE BANDIT conventions by the boatload.
Well, you tried, anyway.
I'm curious, though. What would qualify for you as a specific similarity?
Here's how I see the similarities:
Elements that existed long before J.J. took over (Kirk being a farmboy, the movie being set in space) + Hero's Journey = a movie that some people might find similar to Star Wars. And I'll admit that J.J. may have taken inspiration from SW, but didn't Roddenberry steal from Forbidden Planet?
Elements that existed long before J.J. took over (Kirk being a farmboy, the movie being set in space) + Hero's Journey = a movie that some people might find similar to Star Wars. And I'll admit that J.J. may have taken inspiration from SW, but didn't Roddenberry steal from Forbidden Planet?
captainkirk said:
Everyone steals from everyone (if not usually quite this wholesale, although to his credit Abrams does remix some of the elements). Like I already said, it's neither a criticism nor a point of praise, it's simply description.
Yeah, basically, when I said "specific similarities": the Hero's Journey meme involves very vague, general descriptions of story beats. Many other stories using it have involved variously:
Those are all separately items you could find in many stories. As a group of concepts though -- each of them a more specific versions of the general Hero's Journey beats -- they're an aggregate that is pretty much native to Star Wars (and recognizably so). That pretty much this same highly recognizable aggregate also just happens to crop up in Trek films made by an SW fan could of course be sheer coincidence... if like The Stig one is dedicated to not seeing what is directly in front of one's nose.
It's fun to watch people argue on the internet, trying to one-up each other and stuff.
But all that aside, back to the topic at hand: Who should the mantle fall to next?
But all that aside, back to the topic at hand: Who should the mantle fall to next?
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