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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Jeffery Harrell
"Let's not lost that?" Way to spell, bad speller guy.
Wow. You're right. Making fun of people is fun. I guess that's why they call it that.
EDIT: Damn. You had to come along and correct your own typo and thus rob me of my mockery. Curse your nimble fingers!
Just a wild-ass guess from a guy who doesn't know anything from anything?
We're being mean to Brian 'cause we know he's tough enough to give it right back.
Eddie, I both like and respect you. Y'know, from afar. But seriously, the movie I went to see was called "Star Trek." It was not called "Read Captain Pike's Mind." Everything you pointed out would have made perfect sense if it'd actually, y'know, happened in the movie. At the very least, Orci and Kurtzman are guilty of demanding that their audience spend time sussing out the motivation of a character who's on screen for roughly a fifth of the film and who basically has only three scenes, yet who drives the entire plot with decisions that might indeed make sense in his mind but that are depicted in the film as being about as rational as a sushi sandwich.
In the end, though, I'm whipping out Occam's Razor for this one. Is this script actually far more clever than it seems, with lots of subtext and a refreshing overestimation of the audience's intelligence? Or is it the cinematic equivalent of connect-the-dots? I vote dots.
(Now's one of those times when I feel compelled to remind everyone that I really, deeply like the film despite its jaw-droppingly hideous flaws.)
And as to the brewery thing that Mayhew reminded me of … meh. On the one hand, yes, it's conspicuously a brewery, and that's lame. But on the other hand, engineering spaces in previous Star Trek depictions have looked about as engineering-y as my childhood best friend's finished basement rec room. A for effort, C+ for execution.
You're ascribing motive and intent where there's no evidence of same. I'm as yet unwilling to stipulate that Orci and Kurtzman's Starfleet was based on or inspired by anything.
That's definitely not how the Naval Academy works, but the Naval Academy has no room for notions like "I'll do it in three" either. So sure, why not. Maybe McCoy clep'd out of his first year or something.
Or maybe Kirk's "I'll do it in three" was total nonsense, and he was in fact a middie second just like he should've been, only he ended up being … sigh. Graduated early.
I'm becoming a fan of the Montessori explanation.
Hmm. Yeah, that's true, nobody ever says "Hey Jim, you're graduating soon, isn't that awesome?" But he takes the Kobayashi Maru, which I inferred was a sort of final exam for Firsties. So that was me reading between the lines.
Similarly, now that I think of it the only reason I assumed Kirk and McCoy are in the same class is because they were mustered in ranks together in the hangar, and I just jumped the the conclusion that of course they were in the same class, 'cause otherwise they'd never have been in the same formation together. Not a totally rock-solid conclusion.
I guess we could debate whether the writers' intent was that Uhura, McCoy and Kirk should all have been in the same class (midshipman second, midshipman first, whatever) despite Uhura's apparent head start. But knowing Orci and Kurtzman, we might well get the answer that their Starfleet Academy is more of a Montessori school than a traditional military academy blah blah space hippie utopia whatever man.
Oh, but wait. On the four-year, three-year thing I just remembered: McCoy is a raw recruit too, just like Kirk. But he's in the same class as Kirk and Uhura and the rest by the time three years elapse. Which means McCoy also "did it in three."
In my best Hermes voice I exclaim, "Dat just raises furder questions!"
I have much catching up to do, 'cause I'm an east coast person and thus made the sleepytime earlier than you guys.
Jeffery Harrell wrote:Hell, I'm still bothered by the fact that a bunch of cadets were hanging out in a bar a thousand miles away from campus for absolutely no reason other than so Jim Kirk could meet them.
I actually have an answer for this one! [snippy] Decent enough for you?
Almost, actually. But not quite. I don't think the cadets in the bar are just about to leave for school. I think they've already been in school for a year. Kirk makes that boast about "four years? I'll do it in three," and then we get a big title that says "Three years later," but he's in the same class as Uhura and Cupcake whom he meets in the bar. That means they start out a year ahead of him. Plus they're already in uniform, and they're already responding to Pike's authority like plebes, not like raw recruits. Oh, and Uhura has already declared her major. Yeah, they're already plebes, going on middies.
It's fine that they were in a bar. My complaint is that they were in a bar a thousand miles off campus for no apparent reason. In another post weeks ago I postulated the whole field-trip-to-the-shipyard idea, with Pike as their chaperone, but … meh.
Now, I'm not saying this is a movie-killing plot hole for me. It's just an example of how the plot is shaped entirely around putting characters in certain situations with little lip-service given to internal logic. If I were given the script as shot, then asked to write a novelization or something that told the story of what happened off-screen during and surrounding the events of the film, I'd struggle.
Remember that one continuity error at the start of Star Trek VI, where that one actor appears in two different shots, seeming to be in two places at once? The fans wanked that one to the point of soreness and chafing. I think I read that they came up with the idea that that character was actually a pair of identical twins assigned to bridge duty on the same ship, on the same watch. I'm sure the fans would have no problem wanking an explanation for why these plebes were in Iowa that night … if they cared enough to try.
What in THIS MOVIE gives any indication that Starfleet hierarchical system is in anyway at all similar to any system we know or recognize??
The rank system, the uniforms, the basic protocol we see on screen, Pike's very brief description of what Starfleet is and how it works in the bar. Basically everything we see and hear on screen implies that Starfleet has some more-or-less familiar bureaucracy and hierarchy. There's very little on screen to imply that it doesn't … except when things happen that make no sense at all in the context of other similar organizations. I would have had absolutely no problem with the premise that Starfleet is just-plain-different … but that's not established in the film.
Pike seems to have a certain connection with Kirk that transcends Teacher/Cadet.
Oooh, that would have been incredibly cool. I get why McCoy broke the rules to get Kirk aboard, from a purely utilitarian story point of view. But it didn't mean anything, really, because there's no indication that McCoy ever felt like he was putting anything on the line. I like your suggestion, and I wish Pike had been the one to get Kirk aboard. I'm captain, and we're not leaving without this kid aboard. And then Pike just keeps promoting him. Kirk, you're now an observer, stand here and don't touch anything. Oh shit, it's a trap, Kirk I'm giving you a battlefield commission to first lieutenant so you can be in the chain of command. Oh shit, I've gotta go over there, Kirk, I'm giving you a brevet promotion to XO. Meanwhile Spock is seething 'cause he wanted the kid drummed out of Starfleet but his immediate boss keeps undermining him. That would have been a really cool dynamic.
Why is the Enterprise being built in Riverside, as opposed to San Francisco as has already been established? Other than so it's coincidentally close enough for Kirk to go look at it?
No reason whatsoever. The butterfly effect is the excuse, but the reason is proximity to Jim Kirk. Which kinda makes young Jim Kirk the most important person in this entire universe, I guess. Shades of Zaphod in the Total Perspective Vortex.
True, IN FRICKIN SPACE would have made even more sense, but whatever.
See, I actually dug the fact that the Enterprise wasn't assembled in space. I read some article or something after the trailer came out but before the film debuted where Orci and Kurtzman were like, "It's not a fragile ship. It's a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to build it on the ground." That makes sense to me; I buy that. Hell, the only reason we're assembling the space station in orbit is 'cause we don't have any lifters big enough to get the whole thing up in one go. So we take it up in prefab'd pieces that are just small enough to fit in the lifters we do have and no smaller, then bolt 'em together on orbit.
Kirk was not supposed to be on the ship in the first place and was damn near drummed out of Starfleet.
Right. I was saying that the movie would have been better if Kirk had been in the chain of command, not a stowaway.
Hell, I'm still bothered by the fact that a bunch of cadets were hanging out in a bar a thousand miles away from campus for absolutely no reason other than so Jim Kirk could meet them.
On the other subject, I'm not a Tolkien nerd, but I think I remember hearing on the DVD behind-the-scenes docs that Tolkien got a letter from somebody asking why the eagles didn't just drop the ring into the volcano, and he basically made up an answer in reply in a winking acknowledgement of his own plot hole. But that's an example of what I guess you could call a load-bearing plot hole. Without that hole, the whole plot falls apart and we don't have a story. "Star Trek" had, like, eight load-bearing plot holes.
Hmm. That's a valid point, Kyle. So how do we write around all the implausibilities while keeping the good stuff?
Kirk's class is on their training cruise, which is aboard the Enterprise which is still on shakedown. The distress call comes in, every available ship makes best speed for Vulcan. Enterprise stays behind because duh, they're crewed by midshipmen and a handful of instructors. Then … well, actually then the rest of the movie happens pretty much unchanged. Kirk learns of the "lightning storm in space" thing, gets his cuh-razy conspiracy theory, implores Pike to set sail for Vulcan, Pike refuses until the flotilla goes unexpectedly radio-silent forcing his hand, movie proceeds as written.
And Kirk ends up in command because he's legitimately in the chain of command, not because of plot contrivances that strain credibility.
The down side? There's probably no good way to shoehorn Spock Prime into the story, since that required Kirk getting thrown bodily overboard. Whether this is a flaw or a virtue is up to you to decide. Also, we're basically retelling the story of "The Wrath of Khan" here except from the cadets' point of view … which I don't really see as a bad thing. The best retcons are the ones that put previous events in a new context. It'd have been incredibly cool if we could have watched "Star Trek," then re-watched "Wrath of Khan" and seen it through new eyes. Lines like Kirk's "boatload of children" and Spock's "each according to his gifts" could have taken on new resonance.
But instead we got felony after felony after felony. And yes, ass was kicked, and the movie was fun, but it could've been better, goddammit.
Ohmygodthat'sawesome.
If I levitate because I just got punched in the face in slow motion, it's a Hong Kong kung fu film.
If I levitate because I just met a cute girl, it's a rom-com.
If I levitate because I just met a cute lesbian while my roommate draws comic books passive-aggressively, it's a Kevin Smith rom-com.
If I levitate six inches above a horse, it's a western.
If I levitate in black-and-white while speaking Swedish, it's a Bergman film.
If I levitate and the camera focuses intently on my combat boots, it's a Cameron film.
If I levitate and the camera focuses intently on my bare feet and I'm also a 21-year-old girl, it's a Joss Whedon film.
If I levitate for absolutely no goddamn reason while country music plays on a broken radio and a midget personifies my fears, it's a David Lynch film.
Brian, you have just provided the mechanism by which we can categorize all of modern cinema.
"All I know is my gut says 'maybe.'"
Hey hey hey. Try and keep up. We're done fighting over TV shows and movies. Now we're fighting about pie.
All kidding aside, the large-scale parts of "Star Wars" were always the bits that worked least well for me. Even as a kid, I never quite bought into the whole "the Emperor's dead, the civil war is over" thing. I liked that story best in IV and V, where it was a few scrappy heroes and a menacing villain against the big backdrop of a galactic civil war. The bit that always piqued my imagination the most was that line in A New Hope where Tarkin says, "The Emperor has dissolved the council permanently." And then they spend twenty seconds talking about the bureaucracy, and the Tarkin doctrine. It's not gripping stuff, but it's fantastic world-building, because absolutely none of it is as-you-know. It's all setting, and it got real verisimilitude.
I guess I personally respond best to stories about little heroes in big settings. Cause that's how I like to imagine myself.
Now, back to the pie question, goddammit, 'cause that's what's really important. I submit to you, honored friends, that whipped cream is inherently superior to ice cream as a pie topping, and that it always will be!
Is that the one with Jim Rockford, Dirty Harry and Agent Kay? Yeah, never saw that one.
"Unforgiven," though, is a goddamn masterpiece.
Fuck me? Fuck you! All I said was that I like pie! You're the one who kept harping on the subject! I would have dropped it if you'd just let me have my opinion!
Of course Star Trek is just a movie. But there's this whole spectrum of plausibility. If Kirk had sprouted wings and flown across the galaxy, I think we'd all be on the "not buyin' it" side of the argument.
I'm freely admitting that I'm the weirdo here. I have no problem accepting spaceships and suspiciously humanoid aliens and time travel and black holes that don't work at all like black holes, but show me a large, hierarchical organization that doesn't work like a normal large, hierarchical organization and I call bull. That's me, that's my quirk.
You know what I like though? Pie. Apple, pumpkin … mmm. Pecan. Yeah. I sure could go for a nice slice of pecan pie right now.
Who's with me?
It's possible that the whole Earth defense fleet got blowed up off-screen. But unless I'm totally misremembering, all that actually happened on-screen was that six or seven ships got blowed up. That's like four or five thousand people total, maybe a quarter of those commissioned officers.
Okay, so maybe Starfleet's small. Maybe that was the vast bulk of the O6-and-below officer corps. But if that's the case why promote Pike? The guy was clearly fit for duty, although he was still recovering. Even if most of the deployed officers were killed, it's not like there was a sudden, unexplained shortage of flag officers.
Okay, so maybe Pike's injuries were sufficient to take him off the line. The promotion to rear admiral was a courtesy. And maybe Starfleet really did need to promote cadets quickly in order to shore up the ranks. But Enterprise? They gave the brand new flagship of the fleet not to one of the surviving commanding officers — remember, the fleet was massing in the Laurentian system during the events of the film — but to a cadet who broke many, many laws?
That can't be hand-waved away. The only thing that could make it make sense is to postulate that Starfleet works on entirely different rules from any existing human military or pseudo-military organization. Hell, the Salvation Army has a more well-defined order of battle than Starfleet.
Well, it's a meaningless point to debate. There is no set of circumstances short of the totally collapse of the entire structure of Starfleet that would have let that make sense. But it was dramatically necessary, so it got written in.
Unnecessary, too. I get that the goal of the film was to end with Kirk as captain, but that point could've been dropped with no other changes to the story at all.
On the other hand, "And then he rose through the ranks for ten years" seems a bit anticlimactic.
Okay, let's run through that. Nero has enough red matter to choke a sperm whale. He knows the date and time of the supernova as well as you or I know "9 a.m. September 11, 2001."
Let's assume he can live that long. Vulcans are longer-lived than humans; Romulans presumably are as well. He'd be old when that date comes around again, but let's just assume he's got a reasonable chance of still being alive.
If he does just hide out for a hundred years or however long, then manages to stop the supernova, what will he have achieved? He'll have saved another planet. One very similar to his, to be sure, but it won't be his. It's not like he'll be hitting the cosmic rewind button and undoing his own personal subjective history; what happened to him happened, and is totally irrevocable.
Even if the guy wasn't thinking clearly, which would be reasonable given what he'd just been through, it'd only take him about twenty seconds to work that through in his head. "Fuck this," he could very plausibly say. "I'ma get me some revenge."
In fact, I'd find it a real stretch to imagine that that character, in that situation, would do anything else. Except possibly steer his ship into the first sun he comes to. Rage or despair, those are the only options that make sense there.
Nero is not Khan. He was never going to be Khan. Dude's basically one of those guys from "The Deadliest Catch."
As for the science … meh. No, black holes certainly don't work like that. But if you ignore tidal forces, which is asking a lot but go with me here for a second, then they could work in a way that's not entirely dissimilar. Certain exact solutions in general relativity imply that closed time-like loops can exist around sufficiently massive rotating objects, as a consequence of the frame-dragging effect that was measured by Gravity Probe B. A guy named Tipler published a paper in 74 called "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation," which is basically the best name for a scientific paper ever, and he went into all the math.
In the real world, a black hole on the scale of the one depicted in the movie would have to be spinning much, much faster than the speed of light in order to create closed time-like curves in spacetime. And plus anything that got close enough to move along one of those curves would be torn apart by tidal forces immediately. And plus-plus, closed time-like curves don't work that way; you can't move along a closed time-like curve to a point earlier in spacetime than when the curve came into existence. And plus-plus-plus, the math of closed time-like curves is really, really iffy anyway. But if you ignore all that, then the science isn't the worst ever.
Course, even then it wouldn't look anything like that.
But dude. Kirk got promoted from midshipman cadet to captain in one go. There are bigger issues with the movie than a shallow villain, space-fins on the nacelles or a callous mishandling of the general theory of relativity.
Oh, you did? Whoops. I listened really late last night, and must have fuzzed out when you said that.
Show Teague "Family" as soon as you can. He may not get it, 'cause it's really sorta predicated on the Picard character and what's come before, but seriously, man. It's the episode that transcended the premise.
Anyway.
My feelings about this movie have been well documented here. (Thanks for mentioning it, guys. Thanks in particular for pronouncing my name right. Hardly anybody ever does.) So I won't repeat myself here.
I do wanna touch on one thing, though. I get why both Brian and Trey didn't dig on Nero. I think you both make valid points, and I won't presume to defend the film as executed here.
But his motivation totally worked for me. I don't remember the precise line, but it was in reference to Romulus' destruction. Something like, "It did happen! I saw it happen!"
There's a lot in those seven words, guys. Remember that Nero's subjective reality is purely linear. The destruction of Romulus is in the past for him. It's in his backwards light cone, shut up, I'm a nerd. Nothing can ever change that, no matter what.
But ruminations on the arrow of time aside, think about it from his point of view for a minute. Say you've got a girlfriend or something, maybe a wife. Things are good for you. Suddenly something awful happens, and your home town is destroyed, and your woman and your dog are both killed before your eyes. Then you get flung back in time a hundred years. It's 1910. Topeka is still there … but it's not the Topeka you know. Your chick? She hasn't even been born yet, and you'll be long dead by the time she's out of diapers. Despite your little jaunt through time, everything you ever cared about is gone, just as surely as if you'd stayed put.
Is Nero insane? I dunno, maybe. Depends on how you define the term. He's certainly consumed by his desire for revenge. And not revenge for something that, as you guys said, hasn't happened yet. Revenge for something that did happen, that he witnessed. It's as valid a motive for all-consuming revenge as any I can think of.
"Oh, but why not just prevent the destruction?" Setting aside for the moment the fact that he can't — it was a natural disaster, not an accident or act of war — what difference would it make? He'd still have lost his planet, his wife, his child. Even assuming his wife still ends up being born — which isn't guaranteed — his child will never be. Getting all clever-time-traveler and trying to change the future won't get Nero anything he wants. What he wants is revenge, and that's what drives him.
Maybe you guys would have liked it more if the movie had brought this up in dialogue. Maybe not, I dunno. But in either case, it wasn't a problem for me.
I was too busy demanding to know why McCoy and Kirk weren't in irons, and what Starfleet was doing about this apparently galaxy-threatening epidemic of lungworms that had apparently disabled virtually their entire officer corps.
Four friends in your head … who sound like they're about ready to punch each other.
This is my impatient face.
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Jeffery Harrell
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