Like, advanced technology, focusing entirely on intercrew arguments, (terrible dialogue and cheesy action), ships flying sideways, no knowledge of ship operations and procedures. Magic technology. Blasters of different colours so we can tell good guys from bad guys. Robots and drones. Really, that's the big one.
If you hate star trek so much Kurtzman, just make a different show.
Imagining a better future is an inherently revolutionary endeavor. It's step 1 of convincing society to revolt.
Roddenberry's Star Trek, while problematic and sexist, was a vision of a better future for humanity. Our late capitalist overlords don't like this. They love to make dystopian films about climate hellscapes, because it's a form of manufacturing consent for the future they want. They want to make our society into a place where all we do is relive nostalgia for a past that never existed, rather than built a brighter future for humanity. Facebook Meta is following this path already, launching a few years after Ready Player One. That movie pretends it's a dystopia, but what they really want you to think is "isn't all this tech cool?" to prep you to consume more Facebook garbage.
i think youre overestimating "our late capitalist overlords" a bit. Action sells, happy endings sell, philosophical dramas don't. 2049 flopped, ready player one was a financial success. One was filled with pop culture references, the other was bleak and nearly 3 hours. Making things dumber & easier to understand will usually get you more money.
Anyway, imagining a better future or a worse future are both leftist perspectives, because as you said, a better future is revolutionary, while a worse future is usually from the perspective of someone suffering from capitalism, but it doesn't matter as long as opportunistic producers make either one marketable. :porky-happy: That's the beauty of capitalist realism.
I miss the days of hour and a half movies. It's just such a time sink to sit in front of a three hour movie and get invested in it. Because so many of them aren't worth the effort. When Tarantino made Pulp Fiction, it was awesome because that two and a half hours were worth it. The only thing better than good movie is even more good movie. But everyone else doesn't have the talent.
I watched a John Candy movie recently. It was splendid. 88 minutes and I was out of there.
Anything over 90 minutes has to earn each extra minute exponentially. An intermiss resets the clock by 20 minutes.
It's a bit sad when The Orville is more optimistic than Star Trek, and more willing to tackle sensitive subjects.
The Orville is literally the only real Trek. It's just gone from the Star Trek franchise.
I've heard people say the same thing about Lower Decks too. I wonder what it says about society that our most hopeful view of the future is the background for comedy sketches.
"Roddenberry's Star Trek" is kinda misleading. His being the visionary architect of the utopian future is a result of his creating and then believing a cult of personality surrounding him. He would basically just tell audience members at conventions stuff about his vision of Star Trek that he thought that audience wanted to hear while doing a lot of dope and drinking a tonne between 1966 and 1986. When TNG roled around everyone including him had been tricked into his snake oil show a bit and gave him too.much trust leading to the first two seasons of TNG and the worst aspects of them. He was a big part of what Trek is but far from deserving of the credit he gets and he deserves a lot more criticism.
his creating and then believing a cult of personality surrounding him. He would basically just tell audience members at conventions stuff about his vision of Star Trek that he thought that audience wanted to hear while doing a lot of dope and drinking a tonne
Sounds an awful lot like another guy :posadas:
Well, Roddenberry apparently was a Maoist when he died according to Majel Barret. I'm guessing that meant Maoist and not Mao Zedong Thought to some extent as well. Gene was a wacky doodle dandy in many many ways
The first two seasons of The Next Generation had awesome music. Something that disappeared after that.
I totally agree. They had a change of head composer after those seasons and also cause Rick Berman wanted the music to not be noticeable.
Because Star Wars movies make a billion dollars, and CBS would like their space IP to also make a billion dollars. They do not care about anything beyond that point,
And there's no middle ground ground in stakes between "perfect peace on a planet" and the planet is going to be destroyed or genocided.
Like, what happened to stakes like a trade pact or slave state.
Watching a thousand ships blow each other up is literally less compelling the Mutara Nebula fight.
The Motion Picture is more engaging and that has exactly one photon torpedo fired by the Enterprise in the whole movie and it's not even at another ship.
Star Trek probably has more advanced tech then Star Wars tbh, with the replicators and transporters and what not.
I guess Star Wars has a huge space station that can destroy a planet, but everything in Star Wars is pretty rustic.The average Federation starship can also destroy a planet. Not like, explode it but they could wipe out all life from orbit in like, no time at all.
SULU: Mister Chekov, phaser setting for planetary target A.
CHEKOV: Co-ordinates seven one two stroke four, Mister Sulu.
SULU: Port batteries locked.
SULU: Phasers Locked on target A, Captain. Approaching optimum range. Commence fire, Captain? Captain?
KIRK: Stand by, Mister Sulu.
SULU: Secondary target now moving beyond our phaser lock.
KIRK: Put phasers on standby, Mister Sulu.
SPOCK: A serious breach of orders, Captain.
UHURA: Captain, I have the leader on the Halkan Council waiting on channel B.
KIRK: It is useless to resist us.
-- Mirror, Mirror. Original Airdate: 6 Oct, 1967
I love Kirk's use of the classic sci-fi evil villain line.
Maybe that's it. They're making star trek very rustic, with lots of robots and drones flying around, and sword fighting. And they resigned phasers to look more like blasters.
JJ Abramhs pretty much said he was trying to make Star Trek more like Star Wars and I think it's been a trend since.
Its bad, like, not only is there already a star wars, just literally call it anything else. Make up a new franchise - dont plaster an NCC on the millennium falcon and call it a day
plaster an NCC on the millennium falcon
somewhere Rick Berman just got a hard-on
star wars is a mostly junk fleet going up against a massive empire. It's hard to clean the empire's ships and the rebel ships are made of trash sometimes. The smaller ships of the prequel era are a lot cleaner looking, given they are roughly equal navies in terms of size and power. Star Trek ships are also mostly designed for living in, with families and scientists, while star wars we mostly see the ships of soldiers or rugged survivalists. Commander Riker has to entertain foreign dignitaries and friends in his quarters often, no one goes into Darth Vader's room unless they're informing him the emperor has arrived. but yeah the federation has tech to destroy poverty while Tatooine is like every third planet in the empire
Honestly having gone back and watched Star Trek for the first time recently, it seems like it has had magic technology from the start. The teleporters made an evil clone, there's literally a God species and two people who were turned into gods because they were already espers, multiple forms of mind control and just some other weird shenanigans going on just for the first season.
Some of these characters are more magically powerful than anybody in Star wars
It's science fiction. You could do anything you wanted. It was just imagination.
And that's the part of Star Trek I miss the most. Science. If it's science fiction, you've got to have science in it. Yeah teleport beams were fanciful but not out of the realm of what could happen. At least by the standards of science that existed in the 60s. Who knew where technology was going to go? We went from the Wright Flyer to the moon landing in 67 years.
I think the "magic technology" thing is a bit of a mislead. It isn't that Star Trek never had fanciful things in it, it's more that it took the implications of its tech a lot more seriously and thought it all through a lot more than the more "soft" sci fi shows like Star Wars. Like in Star Wars you have FTL travel, sentient robots, laser cannons and stuff - but for some reason everything is either the Wild West or World War II and it's best if you don't think about it too hard. Star Trek though goes way out of its way to explain how its tech shapes its worlds and the people on them, so it's a lot more jarring when the technology is just being made up on the fly instead of based on something that's been preestablished.
Anyway the transporters work by disassembling you at an atomic level and reassembling you somewhere else. It's unclear whether the "you" at the other end of any given teleportation is actually you or if you die in the process, but I'm of the opinion that the clones that sometimes emerge (both evil and not) from transporters imply that the original is being killed every time someone transports but that the galaxy is ideologically committed to telling itself over and over that that isn't the case.
But at least the technology wasn't a character on the show - and they made an effort to make it believable and consistent -and where it wasn't believable - they don't try to explain. It just is, it's normal, and it's not a big deal.
And they don't try to make giant waterbears travel through and interdimensional fungal network. Like, it's just dumb, actually. And in the decades before the original series.
Yes, there were some magically powerful people, including the pah wraiths even on DS9 that are some kind of religious magic that I try to ignore, but it just seems so badly done on disco, and on every scene, as if the future technology is the focus, and not the people.
They set up the Pah Wraiths and other "magical" species really well though. It's like this attainable but distant level of advancement. It's supposed to sort of humble humanity.
They have the wormwhole alien/prophet dichotomy from the get go. You realize that the line between Bajoran gods and advanced beings is very blurry. Like they're confronting the issue head-on the whole time. It's clear that the prophets are just very powerful life forms, and Starfleet doesn't believe they exist until they have clear an unambiguous effects upon the universe.
The Path Wraiths and Prophets are not believed by everyone and in part probably from Starfleet cause they've seen shit like that before.
Not really. I think it has a long way to go before becoming a good show instead of an obnoxious one. In a way I guess that is already Star Trek as fuck though, considering the first couple seasons of TNG.
Check out Jessie Gender's interview with the creator of Lower Decks on YouTube. It's a comedy but it's not meant to be a joke. It's canon and bringing the story forward from DS9. There is a concerted effort to make it count as real Star Trek as well as be a comedy.
They have Micheal FUCKING Okuda as a technical/design advisor. It's the most real new Trek simply based on that alone.
For sure. Mike McMahon, the creator/showrunner says in the interview they have piles of old books and ship blueprints and everything in the writer's room to double check for consistency and to just skim around for plots/gags
Because no one working on Star Trek has any imagination, or they're not willing to steal from other Science Fiction sources.
I dropped Discovery after season 2, and the moment that truly turned me off was when Saru, literally the First Officer, lets two crew members get into a fist fight because "it would be good for them to sort this out themselves".
Even ignoring that violence should never be the first answer in Star Trek, that is behaviour completely unbecoming of someone of that rank or any enlisted Starfleet Officer.
Eh. I doubt it makes more money.
I believe it's because the writers don't give a shit about Star Trek. They want to write a different TV show. But Trek was all they could get. So instead of writing Trek, they're writing the show they want to write.
I found this out back in the 90s with DS9. Bafflingly, there were several episodes based on the holodeck that featured this Las Vegas crooner. Like, WTF is that Trek? I found out later in an interview with the writer. He was like, "Oh, those episodes? I was just really into the Rat Pack at the time." Yeah, so everyone had to suffer through shitty non-Trek episodes, just so you could exercise your momentary interest in a dumb subject.
That's why.
I like those episodes, sort of. That character was a good plot device a few times.
And it let the crew interact in a different way on the show, which is crucial to star trek - the crew relationships.
The point is that he shoehorned his temporary obsession into somewhere it didn't fit. How about something with the Romulans? No, it's a Las Vegas lounge singer. In Star Trek. Uh-huh.
No way at all it's cheaper. Star Trek was cheap. There is definitely some money going into this, and the new ones do look very good. That's all I'll give them.
Trek was in a realy bad shape before the 09 movie, the TNG movies were all mostly just ok/good, and the best/most popular First Contact was nothing but a self contained action extravaganza. With Patrick Stewart being so cancerous(he realy fought the producers/writers to make him the next big action star) it was only natural the movies would end up like that.
Enterprise was also mostly seen as a failure despite being good at the end.
So all their motivations are not in a vacuum evil for the sake of evil. Trek as an IP is realy vast with a lot of potential but that potential is untapped. A TNG reboot with the Enterprise J would have been a far safer option as well with everything being a reboot these days.
But CBS was cornered because when they look back at Enterprise and Nemesis it seemed like "old trek" just wasn't working anymore, and that the new JJ approach was miles better. So when they went to JJ to ask him to help bring that shit to TV he refused and made Kurtzman his substitute. But you have to understand that the consensus is that Kurtzman production team managed to secure an exclusive license that gave him pretty much total freedom and CBS blessing to do whatever he wants, probably on the back of ridiculous promises, many powerpoint presentations by """market researchers""" pitching the magic formula you know the stereotype,
The source of all the mediocre TV we got as a result is more to do with Dunning Kruger and hollywood nepotism/favoritism, you know it is the most incompetent ass kissers that rise to the top and as long as enough competent people surround those assholes they'll never fall.
Discovery could have been good is all I am going to say.
I hate to say it but the more standalone episodes of discovery season 2 and 3 hint at the old format and were actually pretty decent. It's just so melodramatic and badly written.
I did enjoy Christopher Pike as a character though.
Yep the ingredients were there even despite the disappointing S1 it was still salvageable. When they teased the Enterprise and Spock there was a tiny bit of hope they "listened" to the fans. Pike was good but he was the only good addition. Some people liked Saru but too little too late.
But of course they were cynical assholes, they even ran the usual media blitz creating the narrative before S2 that they were "finaly listening to the fans" etc. Fucking assholes.
S03E08 of STD, about 32 minutes in, has a small ship attacking a large ship, and the big ship is shooting hundreds of small blaster shots. It's exactly a scene from star wars.
I need a better understanding of IP law so I can publish some generitrek fiction
I really like the Orville model. The exact setting doesn't really matter, it's just established, nostalgic and familiar. The real meat of Star Trek is the concepts it explores, and any old universe will work, no need to worry about IP.
