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An Animated, Open Letter To J.J. Abrams About Star Wars
juliangamble writes "Designer Prescott Harvey has written and animated an open letter to J.J. Abrams about the plans for the next Star Wars movie. He says, 'Like so many people, I've spent most of my recent years wondering why the original Star Wars trilogy was so awesome, and the new movies were so terrible. What are the factors that make Star Wars Star Wars? I took an empirical approach, determining what elements were in the original movies that differed from the prequels. My first major epiphany was that, in the originals, the characters are always outside somewhere very remote. The environment and the wildlife are as much a threat as the empire. All three movies had this bushwacky, exploratory feel. Contrast that with the prequels, where the characters are often in cities, or in the galactic senate. In order for Star Wars to feel like a true adventure, the setting has to be the frontier, and this became my first rule.'"
I couldn't find a transcript of the video. The video on YouTube didn't even have a (non-automatic) closed caption track. Where should I read what's going on?
But it's Star Wars, not Weed Wars.
Table-ized A.I.
If you wanna know why the original trilogy worked, read about Joseph Campbell's book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces "George Lucas' deliberate use of Campbell's theory of the monomyth in the making of the Star Wars movies is well documented. On the DVD release of the famous colloquy between Campbell and Bill Moyers, filmed at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch and broadcast in 1988 on PBS as The Power of Myth, Campbell and Moyers discussed Lucas's use of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in making his films.[11] Lucas himself discussed how Campbell's work affected his approach to storytelling and film-making." "I [Lucas] came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what's valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is...around the period of this realization...it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology...The Western was possibly the last generically American fairy tale, telling us about our values. And once the Western disappeared, nothing has ever taken its place. In literature we were going off into science fiction...so that's when I started doing more strenuous research on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, and I started reading Joe's books. Before that I hadn't read any of Joe's books...It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs...so I modified my next draft [of Star Wars] according to what I'd been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent...I went on to read 'The Masks of God' and many other books." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell
http://www.slashfilm.com/watch-this-70-minute-video-review-of-star-wars-the-phantom-menace/
Which brings me to rule #4. Have characters.
The key seems to be that nobody would say no to Lucas. Yesa sir Jar jar be a good character that peoples will loves. So has JJ Abrams reached that point where he is surrounded by Yes men? Or is there someone who will say, "That sucks." Not necessarily someone who can order him around but simply someone who isn't a simpering fool and has good taste.
I recently read about LucasArts and all the bizarre choices that were made there. Basically they jumped from whim to whim. Hopefully those people are left by the doorstep by Disney. I suspect that they will weasel their way into the "creative" process and ruin everything anyway.
... and he liked this. Enough said.
Dog is my co-pilot.
You can take .
There is another robot character and another dog like companion and of course a totally even more evil dark lord and emperor.
http://saveie6.com/
He already turned Star Trek into a battle-oriented space opera. If anything that shows he has a decent handle of what Star Wars is. More than he has on Star Trek at least.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Yeah, I hated how he brought in decent writing, exciting setpieces, and competent directing. What an asshole. What I really wanted was two hours about an autistic robot learning to cry.
I always felt that the original trilogy was a better story (and better written), underdog heroes fighting a massively superior enemy and the story of the rebirth of the Jedi and their fight against the sith. I felt that the prequels on the other hand were poorly written and they didn't mesh properly with the original three movies, there were severe continuity issues. Some of the characters were utterly ridiculous, such as the much reviled (and deservedly so) Jar Jar Binks and we all knew that our heroes and the Republic were going to lose and the Empire was going to be born. Who wants to watch a series of movies where the hero is going to go over to the dark side and the bad guys win, everyone knew essentially what was going to happen and where the story would end.
Rule 1: On the frontier.
Rule 2: Old (well, at least broken) Not 'squeaky clean.'
Rule 3: The force is mysterious?
Rule 4: It's not cute.
All of those perfectly describe Firefly, (except the Force thing, and that's not really applicable.)
In fact, Malcolm Reynolds is a pretty accurate analogue for Han Solo, as Serenity is to the Millennium Falcon.
Who knew we liked Firefly for the same reasons we originally liked Star Wars?
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
Agree that it's more than just the setting. I'm probably spoiled because I saw the originals at least a decade before the prequels, is the feeling the same for anyone who saw the prequels first? I know it's still considered cool to hate the prequels, but I don't think they were that bad. I mean they were bad, and the franchise deserved to be treated better, but they were at least as good as most of the crap hollywood dishes out these days.
Part of the thrill of the first movies for me is it combined superpowers and space, which were two things the average 5-10yo boy is going to be fascinated with, or at least it was in the 80's when I first saw it. Fortunately the storyline is good too, but even when i'm watching it as an adult then enjoyment is partially biased by the memories of watching it as a kid. Anyway my point there is that anyone who watched it as a kid in the late 70's / early 80's is probably going to be a little biased by the dazzle of the time they first watched it, and maybe isn't in a neutral position to be commenting on the prequels...
There's something about actual models and props that makes the interaction with humans so much more lifelike and realistic than _any_ greenscreen "let's pretend we're talking/holding/prodding something imaginary" type of activity. And don't get me started with painting over scenes with computer generated, always so slightly wrong, enhancements.
The original Star Wars trilogy, before stuff was retconned in, had no CGI.
In the original you did not see Luke jump 4 stories in the air like the jedi episode 1. Infact the jump in episode 5 from just 6 feet in the air impressed Darth Vader when he tried to freeze him.
Now every Jedi can magically do 4 somersaults many stories in the air on command, survive re-entry and falling back to Earth at 200 mph and being totally unhurt in a 1 trillion ton ship, mysteriously jump in the air from flying taxis at 100 mph and catching a grip and using the force to land in another convertible totally unhurt some 900 feet below. When you see this shit your brain desensitizes the content so it is no big deal as it knows it is fake at this point.
You sensed real fear with the light-saber of losing a limb in the originals. They were slow and precise fencing with careful concentration aided by the force. The new ones they just wank them around everywhere fast like nothing and it ruins it and takes away any concept of a real fight.
The original script of Star Wars included Batman (Abrams style) like effects and Luke as a 50 year old general with lots of action all over. The studios felt it was too unrealistic and lacked a story line. Totally opposite of every annoying action movie today!
My advice would be to Instead focus on things like big ships without advanced graphics and cinematics that can't be done with every kid with Blender or a pirated copy of Maya. Make new aliens and concepts with a great story lines. I like how the Millennium Falcon had grinding noises when it opened and closed which gave the appearance of it being bandaided over with Hans Solo using parts from anywhere he could. No metallic SGI ships with no models that are flawless. I like the sounds that were not all computerized but make from TV sets and other improvised devices that made them look realistic in a non computer way.
The Matrix 1 was fucking awesome for its time but now it is annoying as we seen everything. I like J Abrams but he is too fucked on bass and things getting blown up. Star Wars Episode 5 was my favorite as Lucas was not involved in the writing or directing as much. It really showed when Darth Vader came out as his father to Luke!
I have a feeling this will be a disaster of epic proportions but I could be wrong hopefully.
I think this states the problem perfectly.
http://saveie6.com/
Star wars is no better or worse than any other story, except that it had the potential to be told over a number of movies.
Movies are also pressured to maximize the use of technology to tell a story. This can work, but with episodes i,ii,and iii I think the advanced technology worked against the story, and in any future movies will be a fx tour de force, rather than story telling.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I've only seen the first of the 'new' Star Trek movies, but the only thing I noticed him bring in was explosions.
Dear JJ Abrams,
We heard you're making the next Star Wars movie. Please don't fuck it up like George Lucas did with the first two prequels.
Thanks,
Star Wars fans everywhere
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
The original Star Wars trilogy wasn't great by any objective measure I can think of, it was just a good product of its time with people involved in its production willing to share the characters and stories and build on the world.
What objective measures of art, or even film specifically, can you think of? If you say, "Amalgamation of movie critic and audience reviews" then I'll say "No, by those measures, the first Star Wars trilogy, and "The Empire Strikes Back" in particular, were great. Check out Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, or whatever if you like. They compare favorably with Casablanca, what do you want, Citizen Kane*?"
But I don't think that's what you meant. I believe that you just hoped we'd accept what you'd said, "The original Star Wars trilogy wasn't great by any objective measure," without thinking WTF an "objective measure" might mean in this case.
*Despite the fact that Citizen Kane is often called something like "best movie ever" and similar, it's actually entertaining -- you should watch it sometime.
I am not a crackpot.
You mean this decent writing? Please, tell me more.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
He brought an alternative timeline in the New Star Trek (two spok's and all that) which means it doesn't have to stick to the original or be loyal to mythology around it.
I have only seen the original too. But I saw where it was setting up the ability run off in any direction it wanted to. From what other people have told me, the other movie has taken advantage of that. Imagine a prequil that can ignore the future that has already happened. But it gets pretty stupid in the process. A better critique can be found here with a lot of spoiler information and a jackass who doesn't like the movie at all it seems.
http://io9.com/star-trek-into-darkness-the-spoiler-faq-508927844
a clueless whore (sorry, I don't usually call people names but I simply have no better word for someone who does anything for money) not to be himself? To him and the studios is all about making money. JJ Abrams has no clue how to design a story line, have plausible characters, or stay true to the spirit of the series. He tramples over everything that was there before him, ignores the fans that are begging him to stop and comes up with the most idiotic ways to justify cramming in more special effects. But what he does appeals to the casual viewer and therefore translates to profits...
Peter.
Star Wars, when you see it when you're young, looks cool. A later analysis of the text shows that the writing is crap. People that were young when they saw the first films are not anymore, they see the second set of films after having developed a sense of taste, and realize that the writing was crap -- but just the new ones, the original ones that they loved for so many years must be perfect after all!
My wife and I just last week did a marathon watching of all six. She hasn't historically been a Sci Fi fan, and she thinks she saw ANH as a child but didn't really remember it. Overall, she enjoyed all six fine. She recognized some of the stilted handling of the romance and such, but in general she liked it fine. She had no preconceived notions or expectations going in.
She'll admit the original trilogy are better movies, but she liked them all fine. As a lifelong Star Trek/Star Wars fan myself, it's interesting seeing her perspective on it all since for her, they're just more movies. She doesn't have a lifetime of expectations or fandom or anything.
Are you fucking kidding me? The first one had it's plot holes but it was okay and some stuff only struck you after you walked out of the theater.
The second one was pathetic for anyone with half a brain during viewing. The beginning started well enough until the attack/secret mission, then it was all swiss cheese. Just for example: the head admiral is building a ship 3x the size of anything they have with next to no crew needed, and Scotty can fly to the shipyard from earth in a couple hours, and get in a construction patrol with no big problem.... but it's super secret? And this same admiral secretly puts Khan's men in missiles as some type of ransome rather than holding onto them himself?
And a million WTFs!
It was eyecandy, it was your typical (for the last 10-15 years) epic movie in the vein of Iron Man, etc with Star Trek simply as the setting. Pretty, glitzy, and uninspiring. It sucked to think about.
It made Avatar seem like a written masterpiece, because in reality man going native was a much older theme than Dances with Wolves and it held up under it's own weight.
Was the big problem with Star Wars that it didn't have enough action or glitz and glamor? I don't think so.
There are plenty of objective measures by which a film can be judged, as can any story. Innovation is a key aspect in which films are judged, although in contrast to this we also have adherence to a form. Star Wars is almost a genre-defining space opera, doing for cinema what series like Flash Gordon failed to accomplish years earlier. The science fiction of the 80s and 90s owes a huge amount to its commercial success, and its release prompted the production and sequels of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, amongst other franchises. Star Wars showed that science fiction could have popular appeal without being a B-movie, a process that 2001: A Space Odyssey and Forbidden Planet were only partially successful in instigating due to their relatively cerebral tone.
...and as a fan of Dresden Codak, I somewhat have to disagree with the AC on the points about the plot; the vast majority of epic literary works have multiple threads in the same fashion, often with significant diversions from the main plot. This is a key element of pacing, and can be found in everything from Tolstoy to Tarantino. Diaz has a particular fondness for expressionism and symbolism that make such realist diversions incompatible with his storytelling style, but the recent prevalence of this in literature is a largely postmodern revival of a rather old idea. Such a creative choice can barely be called a subjective criterion, much less an objective one.
...and on that note, DC isn't very rigorous about world-building, either. In neither series is it all that important; Star Wars is a drama about emotions, and Dark Science and Hob (Dresden Codak's largest comics, for those following along at home) both focus on metaphysical and personal questions; the world's beauty is merely a backdrop for characters, played in a different regard.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It is the guy in charge...Lucas had help directing AND producing the first round of movies. By the time the prequels came out Lucas had grown to believe his own hype, that he was the 2nd coming of Christ in the form of a director and producer, which we all quickly found out was not true...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
... many years ago and did something about it. The result was called Firefly and Serenity. Harvey described Firefly! There might be something wrong with the theory, though, because look how that turned out: one series that didn't even make it to Season Two and a single movie, no "franchise" in sight.
I'm not at all convinced that Prescott Harvey is a cinematic genius. If Joss Whedon can't make it work, the formula ain't ready to leave the drawing board.
Age. Everyone seems to forget the influence of age on how we perceive things. Most fans of the original films were kids when they first saw those movies. Kids don't analyse plot holes or care about clichés*. Kids don't get hung up on bad costumes or silly characters (if Ewoks had first appeared in the new trilogy, there would have been even more endless Lucas bashing). Those films are still viewed through the nostalgic eyes of children and that is a large part of why the new films received so much criticism from this vocal group.
Some of that criticism is fair, but nothing can live up to the inner child's expectations when filtered through the eyes of the outer grown up.
Of all the things that J.J. Abrams may be able to do, taking this guy back to the early 80's for the new films is not one of them. Sorry, kid.
* It's the latter half of 2013 and you still don't have proper character encoding... can't someone take a break from writing sensationalist headlines that mischaracterize the story and do some coding for once? I know you miss SgtBurrito, but you are allowed to update the legacy code.
ST:2009 was the best film by Academy Awards, inflation-adjusted box office, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and IMDB. Abrams blew it with ST:ID. While ST:2009 had great special effects, Abrams was so overly focused on special effects with his Trek-unprecedented $190m ST:ID budget that he forgot about the plot.
Lucas suffered a similar problem. Oh, Lucas didn't forget about the plot in the prequel trilogy -- in fact it was richer in the prequels. Lucas was so focused on special effects in the prequels that he left all the character development on the cutting room floor. The prequels would have been much better with the cut scenes that are available on the DVDs. Couldn't let the special effects budget go to waste on the cutting room floor, you know.
Resource constraints increase creativity. Thus, I sadly have little hope for Abrams Wars.
The missile thing was indeed a plot hole, but all the rest is unfair critic, sorry.
Yes it is possible to heavily automate a ship whose sole purpose is to fight by Star Trek cannon. It is usually not done because most Federation ships are multi-role exploration ships.
And it is trivial to go from Earth to Jupiter in a couple hours by the same cannon as long as you have a warp capable ship.
Last but not least, the best way to make something secret is to make it in a hiding place few people know about, and you do that by heavily automating the dock too, which makes it a nice target for a genius engineer that is informed where it is.
All in all it was a very good movie with great actors and just a few plot roles (less than the average Star Trek movie for sure, and much less than the average Sci-fi movie)
Agreed. I saw the original Star Wars in theaters. I saw of the original trilogy in theaters, and then the special edition re-releases in theaters when I was in college. I still enjoyed the movies then just as I had before, then again, I had an absolutely cool Rocky Horror Picture Show type crowd in the audience. The movie could have been Manos: The Hands of Fate, and everyone would have been just as awesome.
Looking back, Star Wars really wasn't good except for the special effects. He is right about the frontier aspect, but more importantly, Star Wars was a combination of swashbuckling Errol Flynnn and Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns wrapped up in a WW2 war movie. There was a universality to the stories in the original trilogy. The conspiracy aspect of the new trilogy is very black helicopters and tin foil hat in nature, and seems to naturally fit in our era today. Whereas the original trilogy was largely a light heroic high fantasy adventure, the new trilogy was a dark tale about corrupt governments, secret alliances, and a shakespearean tragic hero. Darkness isn't bad; it is the standard now, but the dark serious aspect of the new trilogy is greatly hampered by the cuteness that appeared in Return of the Jedi and was turned up to 10. All the jokes C3P0 made during the first film was unbearable to me, more so than Jar Jar Binks.
But looking again at the original trilogy; the acting was largely cookie-cutter. The dialogue was intentionally comic bookish in order to make the film fit within its heritage. That's fine. There were a lot of sci-fi fantasy movies you could have watched then, and the acting was pretty much on par. The original trilogy's greatness comes in the nostalgia. I actually know adults who have never seen the originals, and upon watching them, thought "Meh, that was fun." And that's it. Star Wars was fun. And it was made more fun by the fact that we were kids when we saw it.
She doesn't have a lifetime of expectations or fandom or anything.
Sure, except for you and your fandom sitting right there next to her the whole time.
Just wait 'till the bill comes due on that one...
First rule is get rid of the midichlorians and get an alternate explanation for the Force. That's something that could actually be explored in the first movie.
Han Solo finds a strange artifact that turns out to be a communication device which puts him in contact with an enigmatic race of time travellers. These time travellers lead Han Solo and a group of adventurers to a distant planet from far in the future. But during the time jump the Millennium Falcon is severely damaged and starts to plummet towards the planet below. But as they fall Luke Skywalker senses an extraordinary Force presence, and the Millennium Falcon is no longer falling but is being pulled, pulled by a mysterious large figure standing on the beach of an island...
I stole this Sig
Enough of Star [Trek|Wars|Gate]! Been there, done that. We need to move on.
"Harry Potter" did it right. They did the series of novels, in sequence, and then stopped. There's no "Hogwarts, the Next Generation".
Even in the future we have security through obscurity!
BTW Khan put his own men in the missiles, he was trying to smuggle them.
I can, and I'll do it using only three words: "The Lone Ranger"
Okay, bear with me.
While thinking about good and bad sci-fi inspired by the success of "Star Wars," I thought about "The Black Hole," an example of the latter. And since I was already using my internet-box-thing, I checked the wikipedia entry. And I came across this gem:
In November 2009, it was reported that Disney has plans to remake the movie. Director Joseph Kosinski (who directed Disney's 2010 blockbuster Tron: Legacy) and producer Sean Bailey are attached to the production,[5][13] and Jon Spaihts, who wrote the original script for the Alien prequel Prometheus, was confirmed as writer for the project on April 5, 2013
Light bulb.
Give this project to Abrams instead -- he can't make it much worse -- and we let Star Wars rest in peace without further damage to the series. Everyone's happy.
I am not a crackpot.
I detected a certain spaciousness to the whole galaxy. It was totally cosmic. I found myself becoming one with my navel. Then the hairball came.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
If you've never watched the 70 minute review of Phantom Menace, you should. Just Google it. It hits the nail on the head about why the originals are so much "better" than the prequels.
"What objective measures of art, or even film specifically, can you think of?"
Aesthetics, if we replaced realistic imagery with black and white stickmen and stick buildings/environment, would it still be the same movie?
Star Trek (tos) was canceled because it was too "cerebral" , Star Wars was cool in the first movie, wavered in the second movie, then flipped over and sank in order to sell toys for kids - mainly fuzzy little toy bears singing some weird disco chant.
The following three flicks were made in order to sell jar jar and farts.
While people can point and laugh at William Shatner's acting, I'd like the same Star Wars loving nerd defend the flatulence, or even the loose lipped jar jar as being movie excellence,
In the sixties, Star Trek was aimed to be "Wagon Train" to the stars, While Star wars was aimed at selling little plastic toys to children.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
None of Prescott Harvey's rules matter to me.
My rules are more basic:
Rule 1: The audience prefers characters who are competent. Good examples are Spock, Data, Seven of Nine, Khan, Paul Atreides, Jason Bourne, etc. Bad examples are JarJar binks, Rest of Voyager crew, Prometheus crew, etc.
The Jedi Knights can free Anakin from slavery but not his mother? Wtf.
Rule 2: The "good guys" should be just as ruthless as the bad guys. In so many movies, the bad guys kill quickly and the good guys yell 'stop or I'll shoot'. That is BS. The "good guys" should be like Jack Reacher and Malcolm Reynolds.
Jedi Knights can't figure out what Count Dooku has been plotting but Count Dooku knows all about Anakin's dark secrets?
And the lens flare.
Circumcision is child abuse.
In the odd chance you are not being a troll and a grammar Nazi, and asking a fair question, the correct spelling is actually "canon", as in "canonical".
More like rule #1, and it is illustrated ingeniously in Mr Plinkett's epic 70-minute Episode I review.
The aforementioned review is also widely accepted as the best thing to come out of the wreck that is SW: Episode I.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
The first one was just some fun comic space opera. Then someone started taking himself too seriously.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
My biggest plot hole is the damned "transwarp beaming" (especially to Kronos, quite a distance). I mean, seriously, what's the fucking point of a spaceship when I can just beam anything I like across the galaxy!? Oh, they're attacking us, okay let's just beam a torpedo to their home planet and see what happens...
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
ts Disney, so big budget + Disney = Johnny Depp as main character.
d00d! They could remake the PotC movies set in the SW universe! Reuse the plots, rename the characters, switch sailing ships for space ships. It'll be the biggest hit since last week's canned fare.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
How hard does it have to be to see this?
They were all likable and they argued and sniped and competed with each other bitterly while also being friends.
Meanwhile, the next set of movies had essentially no character conflict at all except Jar Jar.
Darth Maul vs Qui-Gon
They fight.. then they sit.
And they sit.
And they sit.
And then they fight and Darth Maul wins.
We don't learn a thing about either of them.
meanwhile Jar Jar.. spearfishing Fruit irritates the hell out of the otherwise completely stoic Qui-Gon. "STOP!"
In fact, some of the only character building banter (such as the whether the welded door will hold or not between Anakin and Kenobi) are CUT from the film-- giving us more scenes of people not saying anything and being pulled up the sides of buildings on magic ropes.
Give us characters.
Have those characters say things.
Give them points of view.
Have them show ordinary emotions like...
Romantic Interest
Foolishness
Excitement
Overconfidence
Lust
Depression
Happiness
Enjoyment of food and drink.
Snarkiness
Rude statements they regret.
Make them believe they are the best and then throw them in with each other and see which ones are best and how they react to finding out they are not quite so good- or that they are good (confident? humble?)
One of the great things about Admiral Thrawn was that he was brilliant-- he kept figuring out every move the rebels made-- and then he made an error-- a reasonable error but he was so smart he couldn't believe he could make an error. Fantastic! The plot flowed FROM the character's traits. A very strong villain makes the hero's seem even stronger.
Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters
It's not about the scenary. Good writing with good characters can take place in a one room set and be fully engaging-- because we care.
The original 3 insulted each other. Almost constantly. And they also liked each other.
And the actors found ways to make the characters likable-- that's what actors do.
But actors need good writing to start with. Then they put little twists on the words or in the way those words or delivered-- the subtext.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
With this I agree, but it was not a plot hole specific from the second movie, it was a very bad idea carried from the first.
And being fair it is not worse than Picard being able to come with the Enterprise from the Romulan Neutral Zone to Earth to combat the Borgs in a few hours, or, God preserve me, the Enterprise going from the border to the center of the Galaxy in a few days in the 5th movie (the one that never existed), or Scott recursively inventing Transparent Aluminium in the 4th movie.
Of course. It Just Works... ;)
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It's not about making a good movie, it's marking territory. What he'll do is lift his leg and piss all over the original to make something that is uniquely his, just like was done with Trek.
Advice on making a good movie is pointless since it's about breaking the old story and making it irrelevant.
Oh and this plot hole can still be "fixed" and I hope it will. Some possible fixes would be something on the sorts of "only Khan managed to figure out how to jump this far away and the secret is lost with him", or better "it was extremely risky and could catastrophically destroy the point of origin together with whatever is being transported", etc.
All in all it is like the can of worms they opened when they decided to use time travel in the movies. Although I liked both movies that used it, it was despite the many plot holes generated by it.
It also wasn't startrek. It was, well, a generic action flick with no particular consistency with itself, nevermind the old canon.
this does a decent job describing a lot of it.
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/inconsistencies-trekxi.htm
In fact, all they'd have to do is tweak a few things and it would be a great star trek parody. As far as 'serious' scifi goes, it's awful.
Sorry to break the groupthink but the real reason the original movies were "great" and the later movies were great is really simple - you saw the first batch when you were 12, and the second batch where you were 35. Nothing could have matched your original 12-year-old's assessment of the movies.
The original movies were amazingly unsophisticated and simplistic *special effects movies*. There had be absolutely nothing like them before, ever. The opening sequence of "A New Hope" sold you on the entire series, it was an absolutely stunning special effects masterpiece and there wasn't a person who saw it who wasn't amazed. At the same time, the acting was dismal, the story was simplistic, formulaic, and utterly predictable, aside from the effects. That doesn't matter to a 12-year old. The other movies, prequels included, were better in a plot/script/acting sense. The prequels followed the same formula with a better plot and acting, aimed at the same kids who were 12 in 1977 and 34 in 1999. Of course, by then, the special effects were not stunning any more, the expectations build up over decades couldn't possibly be met even if it was Citizen Kane in Space.
I have an advantage over most of the rest of you - I was 17-18 when the first movie came out, and possibly more objective. It was a great movie because it had 2001-quality special effects used for a action-packed story. It wasn't great cinema, Lucas was no more skilled in 77 than he way in 99, and the later movies aren't significantly worse.
Um ... no. We're still having trouble with automated docking :)
However since we're obviously discussing fiction the problem here is that it is inconsistent and a jarring change to the story, not whether it can be brought into the story with a bucketload of offscreen technobabble to excuse it after the credits have rolled.
It's just as bad as the teleport to Klingon homeworld thing, Klingons being seen as a pushover the first time they fight, starships landing on planets when they never did before - a plot that is full of pretty well nothing but twists on the viewers expectations until they have no fucking idea what the setting is supposed to be, which is a massive weakness because the only reason people are lining up to get tickets is because it is a well know setting.
Suspending belief is one thing. Having a story that goes in all directions where only the names are the same as what people remember is another and is just a cash grab on brand recognition for what should have been something original (or never made at all). Galaxy Quest is far more consistent even though in that setting all the Trek stuff is fictional.
Personally I just sat there hoping that Spock would cut the top off somebodies head or Khan would solve crimes - neither actor had anything to work with in Star Trek: The Franchise - vanishing into oblivion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHqjmlM3kxs
Funny little lens flare bit
Honest trailer for JJ's Star Trek..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTfBH-XFdSc
Funny star wars comparison at 2:09.
And ..... lens flare at 2:55
And... even more lens flares....
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Now tell me all your theories on how it could possibly be worse.
Han shoots second.
The term 'different' is not the same as 'bad'. The new trek movies' plots aren't even internally consistent, nevermind consistent with the old canon (your assumption). Take out the character names, and the ship design for the starfleet ships, and suddenly you've got a mundane action flick with lots of shakycam, skydiving, and lense flares.
Quit the shaming language and look at the movies objectively. They're terrible.
Green screens were everywhere in the 1977 Star Wars, it was quite famous for using it more than anything else up to that point. I've got no idea how many "making of" things I saw on it and the other two. The differences lie in attention to detail instead of the techniques themselves. Crap SFX is like crap props and our current problem with CGI is special effects going too far into uncanny valley and just not fitting in. The stop motion chess game stuff in Star Wars was very much crap SFX but worked perfectly because of the context, just as CGI in Toy Story etc works because the things portrayed are not expected to be photorealistic. The problem IMHO is pushing things beyond the limit where the flaws show up - like the full sunlight scenes in Labyrinth where the puppets that looked very real in shadow were as obvious as muppets in the sun.
I said it is possible accordingly to Star Trek canon. Do not cherry pick parts of a text without context unless you intend to work on a TV News show or to be a writer on a newspaper,
And no, it is not as bad as the Klingon homeworld transport. THAT was a big plot hole, albeit not as big as time travel related ones, which are endemic throughout the original movies and series.
Actually the ship automation wasn't even bad, it was perfectly reasonable accordingly to the canonical capabilities of the Federation, as actually shown several times throughout the series.
The main plot was actually pretty good despite its holes, and as I said before, the holes are not worse than many holes in the classical movies. And both actors are excellent actors, your prejudices regarding them are just your own, fortunately.
It was a money spinner, delivering exactly what his bosses wanted, so the problems lie a bit higher up the tree than those two. Firefly was axed while more expensive options that rated less continued. We can't blame them for being better at entertaining than playing office politics.
The first Knights of the Old Republic was a masterpiece, and plenty of it took place in cities. There is nothing about Star Wars that needs to be in the boondocks to work. It just needs to be directed well, which many parts of the prequel series didn't have the benefit of because nobody was willing to tell George Lucas anything. It's my understanding that in the original trilogy, Spielberg walked him back from alot of his usual idiocy.
It's not going to be directed well now either, because JJ Abrams is simply a hack.
Which is why I wrote "a jarring change to the story, not whether it can be brought into the story with a bucketload of offscreen technobabble to excuse it after the credits have rolled"
The setting is broken multiple times with no on-screen excuse to try to convince the audience that it is still in the same setting. All we can do is grasp at straws thrown up by other continuity errors in the past and call them canon. One of two huge inconsistencies doesn't hurt a lot but those two movies just kept on piling them on leaving us to just ignore the remains of the setting and story, watch the pretty explosions, and hope that a twist no more stupid than others would have somebody saving a cheerleader from Spock.
"neither actor had anything to work with" should obviously be seen not a comment on their ability but that the director did not supply them with "anything to work with" so their talent was wasted on a terrible script that they could not breath life into. Watch "Sherlock" and then you'll get some idea of the potential when given a decent script.
Was the big problem with Star Wars that it didn't have enough action or glitz and glamor? I don't think so.
Close. The Original Trilogy had Vaseline under the hover cars, but not much elsewhere. In other words: It was missing Saturation Filters and Lens Flares.
Please ruin it like you did Star Trek. Oh sorry, that's a given.
I still have mixed opinions about that. But if he put R2D2 all the way through Trek then maybe he can put Enterprises in Star Wars.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Seriously, that video was actually better than all three of the prequels combined.
Especially the Yoda bit.
I wish I was kidding.
Read Pynchon.
Pretty much. http://asciimation.co.nz/
He also brought in lens flares. A lot of lens flares.
At least, like George Lucas, he has an ego the size of a Death Star.
Wow it's amazing how much you know about be from one post. You must be a psychic or something! No actually more likely you're a just toddler JJ apologist.
I liked the 1st Star Trek but Into Darkness sucked.
Here's the real trailer for this movie. Says it better than I can,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B22Uy7SBe4
I can't take it anymore, and definitively is so 80s; is was already out of place in 2000 IMO, we already are tired of seeing star wars, move on and invent something good for a change.
Was the big problem with Star Wars that it didn't have enough action or glitz and glamor? I don't think so.
Close. The Original Trilogy had Vaseline under the hover cars, but not much elsewhere. In other words: It was missing Saturation Filters and Lens Flares.
Ya, but didn't they add that when Lucas redid them during the 90's?
Be seeing you...
Star Wars, when you see it when you're young, looks cool. A later analysis of the text shows that the writing is crap.
Well, the first one (IV: A New Hope) is strongest because he based it on a film from a master film maker: Akira Kurosawa. He loved the old movie serials, but he never intended it to be more than a one-off. (The 3rd draft title was: "The Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Starkiller." It was originally released just titled "Star Wars." It didn't get the 'serialized' title until its re-release in "81, after the release of "Empire Strikes Back" in "80.)
Unfortunately, after the success of the first one (IV) he proceeded to make more - but he didn't have any more high quality story to steal from.
Of course - the film he based "Star Wars" on was Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress;" stealing everything from the two wacky robots/Japanese peasants telling the story, to the wipe transitions.
"Star Wars" was so close to "Hidden Fortress" that Lucas actually considered buying the rights to the film.
...THAT was a big plot hole, albeit not as big as time travel related ones, which are endemic throughout the original movies and series.
Indeed - and all those "gadzooks we've been wormholed to $SOMEWHEREPLACE" trips (and trips to "fix the timeline") leave the Trek universe with so many patched-up potential paradoxes that someone only has to look at someone wrong and the whole thing will collapse into a fuzz of GR technobabble.
Fucking right.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
I only saw the second star trek movie and I noticed him bring in 15 minute warp trip back to earth from Klingon home planet, a space mobile phone capable of calling said earth-klingon distance, a rehashed plot but still manages to fuck even that up, a borderline joke call to spock, a fucking earth-klingon teleportation device(rendering all warp and spaceship technology obsolete)... making total tally for earth space forces something like 4 ships(which I suppose makes sense if everyone with any sensibility was using teleportation).
the other stuff in the movie that took you out of the star trek spirit were so fucked up that one barely remembers the opening scene with underwater enterprise and their grand plan to freeze a fucking volcano. at least breaking the prime directive was done straight at the beginning so that was out of the way and the rest of the plot didn't need to involve any aliens(except klingon, who appear just to provide a far away place of warriors, a company of who get shot in the eye by a single super human so not much of warriors and since it's fucking 15 minutes of a trip away from earth it doesn't matter that much. oh well at least we had some battle IN WARP SPACE).
fuck jj. really. fuck him in the ass with a chainsaw. and I'm not even a trek fan but fuck if you do a joke scifi why don't you add jokes and then why the fuck pay for star trek license... where the fuck did all the money go?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Canonical! Now we know why the movie sucked, Mark Shuttleworth has something to do with it!
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
Because you write what you know. When Lucas was the head of a multimillion dollar entertainment empire, he spent all fucking day at meetings. So when he wrote his epic, he wrote about what he was doing which is BORING DEATH TO EVERYONE BUT HIM.
So as long as the author of the scripts has the skill level above that of apprentice screenwriter, he can remember not to stage every goddamn important scene around a god-damn CONFERENCE TABLE WHICH IS BORING AS FUCK GEORGE!!! /rant off
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
And lens flare. Oh so much lens flare.
in my opinion, the first two star wars (not even the third), i.e. episode VI and V were great because they were set in a space opera universe that was easy to understand, where actual people could make a difference. In other words the technology and stuff was there for the "O, shiny" effect but really you cared about heroes, their skills and their troubles. It was highly imaginative and fun. Plus we had Harrison Ford to save the day, everyday.
In the latter trilogy, in spite of all of its flaws (trade dispute ! Jar jar Binks !) it could have been all the same had GL spent the time to actually develop Anakin into a believable villain. Dooku and Sidious were actually pretty good but not enough to save the franchise because expended too soon. The heroes were actually OK, from episode II onwards. Mc Gregor and Portman were actually showing some pretty good acting. Anakin was OK in places only and never great.
Well to be fair, blue shirts have always been the smart techies on Star Trek.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Hayden Christensen
He can't act. He's terrible in any role he plays.
Oh, and lens flare. I think there were even a few lens flares from the lens flare...
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
Hey, at least he's not the one who came up with "Infinite Velocity" and hyper-evolution to salamanders a-la ST:Voyager's episode "Threshold", so he's got that going for him.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
In the first Star Trek 2 we had a whiney middle aged man moping around an apartment filled with relics. In the second Star Trek 2 we had a starfleet officer in is prime chasing 2 girls with tails in his apartment.
There's something to be said for producing stories about characters when they are in their prime rather than when they are having a midlife crisis or have one foot in the nursing home.
Any new version of a intergenrational story will trigger complaints of the "purists". Doesn't matter if it's Sherlock Holmes, Batman, or Star Trek.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Put up new-khan next to old-khan and it all doesn't seem that bad really. Much like with STAR WARS, a lot of us have forgotten how genuinely cheesey and flawed the original source material is. In some ways, reboots can be more genuine because they interrupt whatever slow and steady distortion of the source material that may have occured in recent memory.
Young minds, fresh ideas...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I've only seen the first of the 'new' Star Trek movies,
You missed something *SPOILER ALERT* Spock "force powered" leaping from ship to ship like Anakin Skywalking in Coruscant traffic.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
These reviews take about an hour for each film describing in detail just how dreadful the prequels are. Very insightful and well worth watching.
You're kidding, right? I like the actors (except for Checkov, way too young and Doogie Howser-ish) and their portrayals. They really did an excellent job. But everything else was just plain bad.
Apparently, "training ship" means you have one of the most respected captains in the fleet, a part time academy professor, and nothing else but academy students? Really? This actually makes sense to you?
So the bridge was designed by Apple, but the engine room was designed by Anheuser-Busch. Remember those lovely, Whirling Blades of Doom in the beer line that almost chopped up Scotty? The scene was much more effective in Galaxy Quest, where they were mocking you for such idiocy. Or the super-large alien, completely out of any realistic/believable environment, chasing them before being eaten by an even larger alien? That scene was bad enough in SW:TPM, but sure, let's recycle it here. I really need to go on?
Sure, why not. How about the basic plot itself: The Romulan star is going super-nova... over a year rather than over 10s of thousands of years. Instead of evacuating the system, they ask the Vulcans for help. They only need a single drop of Magic Red Goo, but Spock decides to wait until they've synthesized a 55 gallon (Imperial?) drum of it, dooming them. So a mining captain, in charge of a mining ship that's larger, faster and more powerful than any warship ever created anywhere else in the galaxy, decides to go back in time and take it out on Earth. Sure wish I could just go back in time whenever I felt like it and blame all my troubles on other people.
This actually makes sense to you?
Sure, TOS was cheesy. I'm all in favor of re-imaging it. I just would have preferred a story that wasn't so incredibly stupid. I passed JJ Trek 2 because everything I've heard about it makes it sound even worse.
And Nimoy can go fuck himself. I am not a dickhead for not liking that crapfest-of-a-movie. He, however, is a major league asshole for blaming fans for not liking the garbage he was peddling.
All the jokes C3P0 made during the first film was unbearable to me, more so than Jar Jar Binks.
I understand why you posted as AC.
As for the rest of your comment: I can only advise you to watch the hilarious and spot-on review of The Phantom Menace by 'Harry Plinkett':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI
It's a more rewarding watch than any of episodes 1 to 3 and will leave you with a greater understanding of movies in general.
Are you fucking kidding me? In the first movie, they made a damn fuck-up cadet the captain!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Decent writing? lol. I liked Star Trek. Into Darkness was pure shit. Not because I'm going to say but canon this canon that. Into Darkness /was/ canon. It failed all on its own as a shallow shit story with 1d characters. Sorry. I don't like boobs and I didn't realize that the only appealing part of that move would be drooling over boobs and laughing at Checkov.
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Hell, sidenote. When both feminists and me agree that a movie is a piece of shit and degrading to women, hold on, it might have been a really horrible excuse for a generic summer action movie. I can't believe I'm with feminism on something. Gah!
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I think other than Jar Jar, the thing that killed the newest 3 Star Wars movies was the horrible acting. It is like every actor everywhere wanted to be in the movies, but they cast extras who stood around in swimsuits from the background of Bay Watch. (Not really. But it kind of seemed that way.) Then, there was the writing. I mean, take young Anikin Skywalker. The one thing they needed to demonstrate about him is a strong emotional connection with his mother. It should have been a little bit like Heavy Rain. There should have been a strong bond there and he should have been sad to leave her but done it anyway. Instead, it seemed they wanted to make him like Wesley Crusher from Star Trek. Then, the love scenes were like watching Natalie Portman try and do a love sceen with a wall. They were just so flat and unbelievable. Seriously, did the casting director from Star Wars go on to cast people from Twilight? Then, there was Jar Jar. I actually could have forgiven them for Jar Jar if they would have done the third one right. I would have had Jar Jar say something inane to Anikin like "Don't worry about your mother. Meesa think a slave is not worth worrying about." Then Anikin would have went all darkside on him and obliterated him. That would have been epic.
And US progaganda.
Military uniforms all over Starfleet. Evil terrorist Khan on the loose! Don't trust him! Gotta beat him up so he talks! Gotta militarize starfleet to defend against the Klingons! War War War! Star Trek is all about the space battles, it's not like the best episodes of the series were all almost totally devoid of space battles, or featured any such battles as a massive negative (TOS: City on the Edge of Forever, Balance of Terror, DS9: Far Beyond the Stars, Duet, TNG: Darmok, The Inner Light, All Good Things...) etc. The 9/11 reenactment near the end was totally necessary to the plot, and not a blatant reference to real world events to evoke sympathy from the audience...
Not a sentence!
The conspiracy aspect of the new trilogy is very black helicopters and tin foil hat in nature, and seems to naturally fit in our era today. Whereas the original trilogy was largely a light heroic high fantasy adventure, the new trilogy was a dark tale about corrupt governments, secret alliances, and a shakespearean tragic hero.
Episodes 2 and 3 were an exercise in futility, with the good guys fighting the bad guys on behalf of the bad guys. If they'd wanted epic tragedy, they should have had the Trade Federation be genuinely free from Palpatine and Dooku, and genuinely been building the Death Star to defend the galaxy. Then it would have been Obi-Wan who was responsible for the fate of the galaxy.
They also shouldn't have turned the Jedi from being a bunch of Shaolin-style zen masters to the Team Jedi: Galactic Police. Remember that Leia refered to Obi-Wan as "General Kenobi". Despite his abilities, he was considered a soldier, not a superhero. His talk of a "bygone age" was drawn from the decline of the samurai, and taken along with Admiral Motti's challenging of Vader, it just doesn't make sense. The Jedi, the most powerful beings in the galaxy, and within 20 years of their mass slaughter, they're forgotten and a joke, and Obi-Wan's wistfully reminiscing about them, instead of having 'nam-style flashbacks to the worst trauma he had ever faced?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Sorry, but I think you are grossly exaggerating on your critics. The movie has no more inconsistencies than any other star Trek movie and no continuity error at all. It is perfectly consistent with the setting, and the characters are basically the same from the classic movies and series. It is absurd to say "neither actor had anything to work with". And I watched all the 6 episodes of Sherlock and like it very much. Cumberbatch is excellent there as he is as Khan. He was a great choice for this character.
Finally this new series of movie is not sold because "people are lining up to get tickets is because it is a well know setting", as you think. Now, already in the second movie, both huge successes, it is selling tickets because a lot of people actually liked Abrams work, even though, some, as you did not.
I know it was invented by Scott. I watched all movies old and new and all Star Trek series. But, as I said no limitation was imposed upon it when used by Scott. It can be said that Scott used it in a relatively short distance and that the risk is too great for greater distances, or the energy restraints are too great and only Khan managed to perfect, or that it was too risky all the time and they didn't realize it.
Neither Transwarp nor Warp are technologies that really exist and they both violate a lot of the physics laws as we comprehend them now, but a lot less than "Inertial Dampeners", which are endemically used throughout fiction, albeit only named in the Star Trek universe, rest assured.
They are not terrible. They are run of the mill action flicks made after the same safe recipe that Hollywood uses for any movie these days, no worse and no better.
The original movies are in a league of their own.
First of all, everything this JJ Drunk as touched, destroyed the franchise. This same mentally disabled criminal has decided has the gall of directly lying to the world several times when he was destroying Star Trek. This kid has no right to direct anything ... But oh well, greedy employers hire greedy mental nut cases.
well if JJ's material has to be compared to voy-timetravellers-ager then it really just underlines how badly he screwed it up.
I think the teleportation to klingon implied infinite velocity though.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Well the problem is that the second movie _didn't_ take advantage of that since it's a mere rewrite of The Wrath of Kahn, where the rewritten parts is about adding the superhuman powers that is common in the modern mutant/superheroe movies.
The true crime of the prequels wasn't that they were childish, mediocre and kind of stupid
It was that they made us realize that the original movies had always been childish, mediocre and kind of stupid.
I beg to differ, the old Kahn was believable. He wasn't the omnipotent superhuman that the new Kahn was. Watch "The Space Seed", since he was hibernated for so many years he had to trick the crew into teaching him how the modern space ships worked in order for him and his followers to take over.
In the new movie however he somehow manages to develop groundbreaking new warp technologies, weapons and star ships, singlehandedly.
And what about the new star ship capable of sustaining 78 quantum torpedoes exploding from within the hull! Yes most of the payload was of course removed by Kahn in order for him to hide the bodies of his people but don't tell me that Spock and Scotty took the pains to beam them over to the ship without arming them properly.
The original series was just a tiny bit gritty. Not too much, just a little.
Han Shot first, Luke swore ("Dammit R2!"), Leah got pissed off and shot people. The original ending for Return of the Jedi was supposed to be a bittersweet moment with Han dead and the rebel forces taking stock of their losses until Lucas decided he'd sell more toys if he made it more kid friendly. The fight scenes were even a bit more believable - these were humans fighting with whatever equipment and abilities they have.
The new movies are nothing but special effects and acrobatics designed to entice kids and sell toys. That's why the originals are loved and the new ones hated. The originals actually told a story and made it believable, the new ones are just acrobatics and CGI.
And the US Navy made a 12-year-old the Captain of a prize ship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farragut So, making a senior cadet - who figured out what was going on, and just saved your ship when the rest of the fleet got destroyed - the First Officer isn't that big a reach.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Not sure if this has been posted already, but you must see:
Phantom Menace deadly review
My karma ran over your dogma
Wesley wore grey.
He wasn't given the rank of Captain, he was just given an assignment to bring a captured ship to port. There is a huge difference.
Really well done, and really good points. I would like to be the first to say, except for the ewoks. I don't ever want to see those again. I mean, ever.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Another rule: The prequels did not exist. It's not necessary to include any information from the prequels that wasn't already alluded to in the original three films. They were never made. Forget them. Destroy the artwork. .......Forget...... Oh, sorry, wrong franchise.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
After the first two story telling gave way to greater marketing interests.
Not to mention, taking Star Trek back to the old OLD series, when it was still, you know, exciting. There's what, two generations now? ...for whom Star Trek had always been long meetings in dark boardrooms. It's natural for 90's fans to view an action and adventure Trek with distaste. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been fans of the Berman shows in the first place. Qu'est-ce que c'est.
Similarly (and somewhat frighteningly) there are probably two generations now for whom Star Wars is a hyperactive kaleidoscope of overly cutesy and somewhat racist characters in a non-engaging, overly complicated storyline. Going back to a frontier storyline where futuristic technology is old, shoddy and nearly falling apart [1] instead of reflective, sparkling and new, will be jarring for some.
What I want to see is pretty specific. A throw-away line: "Gungans? Destroyed utterly. I think their star went supernova or something." And: "Endor? Hit by a comet, I think. Wiped out the entire race."
[1] It was said of the original Star Wars all those years ago that it had a gritty look to it "like it was shot on location, in space". Something that was completely lost in the prequels. Even Tatooine sparkled. (Side note: Now that Disney owns Star Wars, is it possible for someone with a sense of propriety go back to the prequels and *take out* special effects?)
Yes, I do miss the Star Wars that was before, you know, Lucas lost his mind.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Well the problem is that the second movie _didn't_ take advantage of that since it's a mere rewrite of The Wrath of Kahn, where the rewritten parts is about adding the superhuman powers that is common in the modern mutant/superheroe movies.
I respectfully disagree. The first movie not only set up the alternate timeline, but it set up the push for a militarized Federation, which was, I think, explored fairly well in the second film. I submit that this was the real plot, and the Kahn elements were more like collateral damage.
Not to seem too much of a Trek geek (I was such in TOS days, lost it in the Berman days, and regained it in the Bad Robot days) but I see the second film as having a lot of elements from Carey's TOS novel "Dreadnought". A giant battleship built in secret, a civil war within the federation, a strong female lead trying to make things right, and an starfleet admiral as the bad guy. It worked for me.
But it doesn't have to work for you -- that's why they make different kinds of movies, because there are different tastes. You'll always have the Berman-era series and films. I'm looking forward to the next film. And I'm guardedly (very guardedly) looking forward to the next SW film.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So wrong.
Everyone knows the ESB was the best of the first three SW movies. The first was fun but campy; I may have seen it as a kid, but I could recognize campiness then just as I can now on rewatchings. The acting was never great; the movie was good only because of the FX and scenery and the overall way the movie was put together. ESB was a huge step up in quality: acting, writing, dialog, etc. This wasn't "unfortunate", it was a good thing he was able to make ESB. It's just too bad ROTJ wasn't as good.
The reason for the movies being the way they were was not because of stealing a high-quality story (though that provided the impetus for the whole thing), it was the writing. ANH had mediocre but passable writing, and the reason is because Lucas's wife (now ex-wife) had a big role in cleaning up his sloppy writing and turning it into a decent script. ESB kicked ass because 1) it had a professional writer write the script, and 2) it had a great director (unlike Lucas), Irvin Kirschner. ROTJ was a step back because it had a different director who wasn't quite as good, and Lucas had more of a role in the script than before. And of course, the prequels sucked ass for one simple reason: Lucas did everything. He directed, he wrote the script, he did all of it (and this time around, he didn't have that loyal wife around to fix his screw-ups, since he had dumped her on her ass by this time). That's why those movies sucked so bad.
How do inertial dampeners violate physics any more than warp speed or even artificial gravity? I mean, if you have the ability to control gravity so finely that you can have artificial gravity (not fake gravity like rotating rings) on decks on a starship, and even selectively turn it off in places like the shuttlecraft bay, then why would inertial dampeners be a problem? Likely it's done with the very same technology: you're using gravitational force to counteract undesirable forces, so that the crew on the ship feels a constant 1g downwards acceleration, with no or minimal other forces, at all times. It's just that with ID, you have to generate forces in horizontal directions, not just vertical.
Now, already in the second movie, both huge successes, it is selling tickets because a lot of people actually liked Abrams work
A lot of people also like Honey Boo Boo, Jerry Springer, Maury Povitch, and The Kardashians. That doesn't make them quality entertainment.
Star Trek was "serious" not about the science part, but about the social commentary and morality plays. That's what made it great. If you're looking for hard sci-fi, look elsewhere (and probably not on any movie screen).
The new JJ Trek sucks not only because the science is horrible (we really should be better at that stuff now than we were in 1967, because the average viewer should be expected to be more educated on it now), but because the social commentary and morality plays are completely absent, and it's all about boobs, explosions, and propaganda training us to accept militarization in the name of "fighting terrorism".
The problem was not the overall direction. But the little things. Like plot holes, and how nothing that anyone did every made any sense, or those really stupid hats.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
But the problem was not that Scotty could break into this secret facility, but that he kindof just strolled over to Jupiter, spotted this gigantic contraction facility, and then a door just randomly opens and he decides to go inside. So he is not even trying to break in, apparently this military base does not even have sensors. A farengi shuttle on the way to trade with Earth could just commender the largest and most powerful warship of the time.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Maybe they cannot beam large powerful weaponry and equipment? You you cannot blow stuff up at your destination, what is the point in going?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Lucas had a lot more help with the first script that just Marcia. I suggest reading the excellent "The Secret History of Star Wars" by Michael Kaminski.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Thank you! I was trying to figure out what was really meant.
Well, part of the problem with the approach as they took it is that they just can't throw everything out. For example, everything that happened in Enterprise is part of the Abrams universe as well as the original universe. As well as anything that was established as happening before Nero brought his ship into the past, such as Khan's whole backstory. Of course, Khan's original backstory already has problems as the events in it such as the Eugenics war happened in the 1990's.
If they were going to do this, they probably should have just done a total reboot instead of an alternate timeline.
It would be a problem because you need to accelerate the bodies with the ship to ridiculous speeds at ridiculous accelerations. Even if you manage to accomplish that and keep the bodies stable in relation to the ship referential with pinpointed gravitational fields you would submit them to a ridiculous amount of stress because an extremely high resultant force must be applied to the body center of mass. You simply cannot give that amount of kinetic energy in this short time to a human body without making it fall apart.
So it is at least one extra degree removed from our current understanding of physics than artificial gravity or warp speed.
Depends on how you define "quality entertainment". In the end there is no objective way to do it, so all you can say it is not "quality entertainment accordingly to my standards".
If you think nostalgia is the only positive aspect of the original trilogy compared to the prequels, then you haven't RTFA, nor have you actually watched the 6 movies.
Except it does, it really does.
"Old Khan" is still, without a doubt, arguably the best film in the entire Trek franchise. Even after all this time it still holds up as an engaging story with just the right amount of character development and action. I've seen it more than 40 times, its one of my absolute "go to" favourites, and I still cry when Spock dies at the end - every single time, without fail. Say what you will about Shatner's acting in general, that one scene is so emotionally touching and moving - the grief and hopelessness he exudes at the death of his best friend, its hard not to be moved by it.
The "New Khan", I laughed my ass off at New Spock's "NooooooooOOOOooooo" Vader moment - as did most of the theatre I watched it with on opening night. It was utterly pathetic, devoid of any emotion at all. It was the big death scene and it played like a cheap joke, a pale comparison to a 30+ year old movie which did it far far better than J.J. was able of coming up with.
Not saying I didn't enjoy the new film, it was a decent action flick, but it was a pale imitation of the original. I definitely won't be watching it 40+ times, when I want to watch a good "Wrath of Khan" story I already have the far superior original to choose from.
Exactly the point. Star wars was fun. That whole swashbuckling adventure/heroes journey thing clicked, and was (and still is) great fun to watch. Then, Empire Strikes Back was good. Return of the Jedi was also a movie.
Episodes 1-3 weren't fun. They were cynical re-hash of the original trilogy.
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> starships landing on planets when they never did before
*cough* Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home *cough*
Others things Jerk Jerk A brought in was the advancement of 'water cooled' starships, expelled cadets as captains of fleet flagships, 'red matter'?, oh why bother, let's just cut it down to saturation advertising being able to gloss over a Saturday morning cartoon script as being a "major reboot", that resulted in no TV series and the next even worse effort being put off years, that has pretty well killed the whole trekky thing (I was never into it, but it's demise is becoming pretty apparent).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
New Spock is excellent, even better than Nimoy (there I said it).
New Kirk is meh, but who was ever going to fill Shatner's shoes? Cumberbatch and other supporting actors are great.
Plotholes aside, the stories are decent enough and build on the old movies. Dialogue is pretty good too for a scifi.
FX are brilliant of course, if you like lens flare.
So what's wrong with them?
In a word, pacing. Something twist happens and boom you're in another action scene. There's no time to digest the implications or even WTF just happened.
Pacing was so bad that I could barely even remember the plots and had forgotten about the films the next day. Why is this? The plots weren't bad as I've already said. The reason is the same reason we don't remember dreams easily. The transition from one state of mind to the another is so extreme that memories don't carry over and don't get recorded properly.
[BTW, this is what hypnotists use to create amnesia and/or confusion. Talking from 16 years experience here.]
JJ Abrams -- you screwed up the editing. Please let someone else edit Star Wars.
It could even be trying to fit too much in. What happens in Star Trek tOMP? A monster ship approaches Earth, takes over weird chick & makes her weirder and eventually they find out the ship is actually you-know-what [no spoilers here]. But that's all that happens. You don't actually need more of a story than that. If you do, it's because your screenplay or your dialogue sucks.
I turned off after the "cold fusion bomb". I tried but was not able to forgive them for that.
C'mon, Berman was the king of plot holes. Back in the day, there were whole Usenet threads devoted to identifying all the abandoned threads in TNG. For just one, those creatures that lived inside people and controlled them, at the last they sent a message out into space... clearly meant to be followed up... never was. I found that extremely annoying and it contributed to me eventually abandoning TNG. Plot holes? It is to laugh.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
My first major epiphany was that, in the originals, the characters are always outside somewhere very remote.
That was seriously your first epiphany? You didn't notice that the dialogue was terrible, the actors were wooden and the screen was plastered over with CGI?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
OK, so that sets the bar as low as Trek five or worse, but since it's reset so much of the setting I'd say it really should have to stand on it's own merits or lack thereof like any new movie. There were so many parts where it was so jarring because the story did not work at all without the setting but it was in the process of tearing up the setting so that made it hard to work out what the hell the story was. For example - are Klingons utter weaklings now or not? The changes seem to suggest very strongly that they are, and that's the impression someone coming in cold would get yet the canon says the opposite.
IIRC, the baddie starship in 'Into Darkness' *IS* a 'Dreadnought' class - so you may be right about that connection.
-Jar.
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The point of inertial dampeners is that you dont give that amount of kinetic energy to a human body. You reduce the energy needed to get it moving (by dampening the inertia), so the body absorbs less energy, fixing the problem you describe.
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Good to know, and thanks for the reference, but this just reinforces my point even further: Lucas by himself can't make a decent movie.
The beginning started well enough until the attack/secret mission, then it was all swiss cheese.
Are you kidding? The beginning was remarkably stupid. The crew doesn't want simple alien beings to see the Enterprise, so they hide in the ocean? REALLY?! Since when do starships go in and out of the atmostphere? Why didn't they just stay in high orbit and shuttle down at night, or on a hidden course? It was all downhill from there IMO.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I know, right? When we saw it in theater, and they panned across the models on the Admiral's desk, I said "That's a Dreadnought!" Daughter whispered "Ok, dad. Calm down."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Is that really that incredible? The Empire has every reason to make the Force seem like a "silly religion", both to hide Palpatine's true power and keep anyone from investigating the old stories and perhaps re-establishing a new Jedi Order. Real world is ripe of examples of just how easy it is to make people believe absurd bullshit.
Obi-Wan lives as a hermit on a desert, comes up with pleasant lies about the past ("I didn't really hack my best friends limbs off and leave him to burn to death after he became a mass-murdering monster who tried to wipe us all out and establish tyranny on galaxy, only for him to survive and finish the job. Vader's a different guy, he did it, it's his fault!"), and when the opportunity comes, basically commits suicide by Vader. Yoda lives in a swamp, the only sapient being on the entire planet, ignoring the affairs of the galaxy even when a whole planet gets blown up, never once trying to fight the Emperor again, perhaps this time with Kenobi's help. I think it's safe to say both suffer from a heavy case of PTSD.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Exactly and that is why it goes completely against everything we know of physics, and considerably more than anything else in the series. Barring magic there is no way to accelerate a boady from speed A to speed B without transferring the equivalent amount of kinetic energy to it.
Right right right.... it was a moon, wasn't it? I've tried to block a lot of "return of the jedi" out of my mind. There was a lot good about it -- the final conflict between father and son, a last desperate plan to overthrow the empire. Spoiled by too many minutes of overbearing cuteness. But I admit now I hadn't known what "overbearing cuteness" really meant until Episode 1 came out.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It may be what you think, but it certainly is not what I do, and most certainly not what I said in the excerpt you decided to quote. This movie does not set the bar as low as the 5th and does not "tear apart the setting". It is a good movie as good as the best classical movies and with no bigger plot holes than they all have.
Except, of course, there's no stress: giving energy through a uniform gravitational field means the body is basically accelerating in freefall. Every particle has the same acceleration vector, thus the difference vector between any two of them is null vector, thus the stress is zero.
Actually, coming to think of it, if you also use artificial gravity to accelerate you reaction mass, you get this "naturally": both the ship and the RM are basically falling away from a common center of gravity (presumably the engine), thus they are in freefall and experience no acceleration whatsoever. Tidal forces could be a problem, but the technology needed for artificial gravity would likely allow shaping fields too, so they would be uniform throughout the ship; if not, you could simply put the engine far behind the rest of the ship, tow it along with a cable and accept the resulting lower efficiency.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It's exactly what a warp bubble does, and there are theories around that. Dampen the energy transmitted to the body in violent maneuvers by eliminating the mass of the body, or the movement of the maneuver. Eiter will suffice, and both are theoretically used in moving the ship.
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Is that really that incredible? The Empire has every reason to make the Force seem like a "silly religion", both to hide Palpatine's true power and keep anyone from investigating the old stories and perhaps re-establishing a new Jedi Order. Real world is ripe of examples of just how easy it is to make people believe absurd bullshit.
Yes it is that incredible. The Jedi are running around commanding armies and a handful of them can do the work of an entire platoon in battle. They fly round the galaxy as embassadors of the Republic resolving disputes with their wisdom (and their ability to read the minds of the other party, which isn't particularly just and fair, to be honest). You cannot make people forget that quick -- hell, Motti probably served under a Jedi at the start of his career. The outwash of the massacre of the Jedi would realistically have to be more like McCarthyism -- Jedi's as the great evil bad thing, and we'd be more likely to have people lynching someone for being suspiciously lucky with the dice and therefore a Jedi witch than people laughing about them.
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Old Khan wasn't that bad.
Put up new Khan to old Khan and you might notice a distinct difference in - say - ethnicity which isn't so easily explainable by even the alternate timeline theory
It's "canon" not "mythology," unless Star Trek: The Original Series was actually written in ancient Greece.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
How exactly was it a rewrite? I seem to remember that the second movie describes Khan's origins, and does not in fact cover what he does later WRT the Originals.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The problem is the story line, with respect to Episodes I-III and VII-IX isn't about the frontier. Episodes IV-VI could be about the frontier, because that was the story line- the time after a civil war, when nobody could afford anything new, and all the good guys had to hide from the big bad evil empire.
Unless they blow up Coruscant in Episode VII, they're going to be stuck with having to incorporate urban planets into the New Republic.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I have to agree with you on *all* points. I really enjoyed the first film and was hoping the second one would live up to it. The character exploration felt authentic - and let's remember, these are characters who have been dissected over the decades in multiple mediums. I look forward to the next outing and like yourself, hold hope (A New Hope?!? LOL) for a Abrams helmed SW saga.
Please ruin it like you did Star Trek. Oh sorry, that's a given.
What are you talking about? I got hooked on TNG and TOS thanks in part to JJ Abrams's rendition. This coming from a person who avoided them all before the first movie came out.
Besides, I also happen to like his show Person of Interest.
is why the first three Star Wars films were awesome. There was a lot of other stuff that was cool, and some that wasn't, but Vader makes it all irrelevant. He is such an iconic badass that every line of his dialogue carries the weight of several thousand action movie one-liners. His absence is why the newer movies sucked, and why the yet-to-be-made movies will probably suck. Darth Vader is the crack rock of bad guys.
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I guess you're retarded then. I feel sorry for you.
I guess you're retarded then. I feel sorry for you.
Not really. I don't have an explanation other than the JJ Abrams movie sparked my dormant interest in the Star Trek series.
Is the new movies well written, well acted, or the best in the series? Hardly. However, I have stood by the fact these movies are introducing people to the Star Trek Universe so eventually they find out on their own the new movies are crap without the fanboys scaring them off or dumping on them (like you seem to be with me). Keep in mind: Not everybody has watched the series before these movies and movies like these do spark interest to new comers despite how bad they are. It also creates a possibility of resurrecting the dormant series that has suffered since Enterprise.
If anything else, it awoke my latent interest in Star Trek so some good came out of these highly flamed, highly expensive movies. They can be crap and people can call them crap but they did serve a noble purpose.
Thank you for the clarification, but you do realize that none of that is actually relevant, right? You just told me that, for the movie to make sense (and it still doesn't), I have to go and check out an additional source, ST:O. The vast majority of people who saw JJ Trek have never even heard of ST:O. A movie really needs to be able to stand on its own. If you have to put out additional material, you're doing it wrong.
"decent writing"?
Despite thinking the new Trek movies are awful, there is a lot about them I think was done well, "exciting setpieces" definitely being one of them. However, in no way would I ever consider the writing "decent". The plots were incoherent, actions and motivations made little sense, the rules that any fictional world requires to be believable were regularly flouted for no other reason than to provide a substrate for more mindless (although visually attractive) action. The character development was minimal or non-existent.
JJTrek isn't science fiction, it's just a typical high-budget, low-concept action fare. There's nothing wrong with that. I liked the first Transformers movie for the most part. But we already have more mindless CGI-laden blockbusters that any sane person could want. What we don't have much of is decent science fiction, and there's no reason to squander an honest-to-Roddenberry science fiction property to do the same thing that almost every other director is doing. I realize you'll never get more than the most basic science fiction from a movie (compared to books) and Star Trek certainly has a long history of action, SFX and sex, but it also has a longer history of being thoughtful considerations of the human condition and optimism for the future, both of which are completely lacking in the new movies.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
You're entire premise relies on the fact that A New Hope is the best of the Star Wars films.
It kinda falls apart when The Empire Strikes Back is widely regarded as the superior product.
De gustibus non disputandum est.
No it is not. A Warp bubble deforms space in front of a starship by applying strong localized gravity fields. The theories about it are far beyond anything we are capable of doing today, but they are at least theoretically possible. Dampening inertia by mass elimination is not even theoretically possible, on the other hand, and eliminating inertia without affecting a body's mass, which would be necessary to avoid killing people, even less.
And wouldn't "strong localized gravity fields" be used to generate artificial gravity? And couldn't such a technology be used to generate "gravity" to mimic the ship's movements so that if the ship tilts left (performs a right turn) gravity "turns on" on the right side to keep the person feeling a regular 1g located "down" from their perspective?
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The person is not a perfect rigid body. It is an immense amount of particles. Internal forces generated between these particles would tear the person apart. The only way to prevent this from happening would be by applying the exact force to each particle of the body and every other particle in the ship.
These forces must be different for each one of these particles and depend on their exact quantum state (position and speed) which cannot be precisely determined accordingly to Heisenberg's principle.
In addition at these speeds you would have to make corrections and apply these forces at intervals shorter than the Planck Time, which is also theoretically impossible accordingly to our understanding of physics.
Fair enough, but personally I'm not impressed with those other movies with plot holes either and see these two movies as the director lifting his leg on the setting to mark it and showing contempt for the audience. I rate it below Highlander three that changed the setting so that they were all space aliens. I just was not my kind of movie I suppose while Trek IV was.
The person is not a perfect rigid body. It is an immense amount of particles. Internal forces generated between these particles would tear the person apart. The only way to prevent this from happening would be by applying the exact force to each particle of the body and every other particle in the ship.
So how does gravity not tear me apart while I'm standing on the ground?
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For the same motive your flashlight does not incinerate you when you point it at your face. It is all about intensity, my friend.
That would be Highlander 2, the 3 was also bad but not this bad.
The issue wasn't intensity, but particles being affected differently. 9.8 m/s^2 is 9.8 m/s^2, regardless of whether it's natural or artificial.
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Your ignorance is appalling. Ignorance per se is not a problem as it can be fixed, but stubbornly keeping discussing about a subject you are totally ignorant about is very unseemly.
Let me educate you. A body needs to be submitted to an insane resultant force to achieve the necessary accelerations in our fictitious study case. There is no way around it. When this force is applied to any part or parts of this body it will generate internal forces against the other parts that will rip them apart or crush them.
The only way around it would be to individually apply forces to each and every particle of the body and to each and every particle around them in order to make them accelerate in harmony without generating internal forces between them at sufficient intensities to destroy such body, and that is impossible for the reasons I stated in my previous posts.
Use your head a little, even in situations where the resultant force is zero, you cannot "compensate" a ridiculous force by applying another ridiculous force to a body without destroying. If you still disagree try entering into an hydraulic press and turning it on. The resulting force over you will be zero but you will still be crushed to death, my friend.
I snorted coke through my nose after reading that...
Thanks I needed a good laugh.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
> "Old Khan" is still, without a doubt, arguably the best film in the entire Trek franchise. Even after all this time it still holds up as an engaging story with just the right amount of character development and action. I've seen it more than 40 times, its one of my absolute "go to" favourites, and I still cry when Spock dies at the end - every single time, without fail.
--Amen.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I can take the lens flares etc...
However:
1) Your entire planet and race gets blown up by a supernova (including your wife and kids).
2) You travel back in time through a black hole decades prior to the explosion.
3) Do you A) Warn your world (or at least send a msg to the wife and kids) about their impending destruction, to you know, prevent it or something? or B) Murder all the Vulcan's in a genocidal rage?
Seriously. It was the one thing I couldn't get past.
The only reasonable explanation is Nero was driven batshit crazy (and I guess his entire crew as well) and because his was mad, could not think at all and thus acts stupidly. The only other is that the script is just stupid.
But hey it did have a really cool intro! :)
And lens flare...
Free Martian Whores!
After finishing my first completely nonfiction book (in print soon, bought ISBNs yesterday) I have to say that filling plot holes in a single story is hard, let alone a series that lasted as long as TNG.
Free Martian Whores!
Another thing is to know in advance where you are going. Joss Whedon is very good at this. Tim Krieg is not. His series tend to have very good premise and then dissolve into chaos in the second season.
Trek in the Berman era didn't even try. With few exceptions episodes were the moral quandary of the week solved by the technobabble of the week, with no thought of what comes before or after or how this fits into canon. It was sloppier than usual writing, even for TV.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
To continue, nothing is perfect, but it could have been a lot better. There were many episode plots that could have been worked into story arcs, or at very least affected future stories in some fashion, but they didn't even try, until (I'm told) the very end of enterprise, after most got bored and stopped watching.
The TNG movies also tended to ignore each other (and with few exceptions weren't very good). So, to see into darkness depend on circumstances set into motion in the reboot was a very cool thing.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.