I have this running theory that a lot of Discovery and Picard was written by people who haven't watched Star Trek, but do browse the wiki. I can just picture someone not really into Trek stumbling on the article for Section 31 and think, "Woah, this must be really cool and important!"
It's disappointing. DS9 was pretty unambiguous in its portrayal -- Section 31 is a violation of Federation ideals and shouldn't be allowed to continue. There is potential for an interesting story, but it's fundamentally not the story these guys are interested in telling. To them, Section 31 is just cool terminology to throw around; "I have the super-duper Q-clearance for top secret cool spy stuff!!!"
I agree, and i think 40k prefigured this. There are a lot of artists my age who remember how cool this stuff was when we were six, but they never learned why the slop was like that - they didn't go back and watch kurasawa and the battle of midway and the maltese falcon. They just like star wars. So when they try to make star wars we get jar jar's star wars. Like jj abrahms is a smart dumb guy so when he was given a big bag of money and told to make star wars he made star wars.
Rian johnson is a. Smart smart guy, so when he was told to make star wars he went and made, idk, casino royal and master and commander and a couple of other things, along with a meta-commentary on hero-worship that was frustratingly loyal to how Luke was portrayed (a petulant kid in over his head who kind of only won because of a moment of empathy when confronting a sith lord) and how the jedi were portrayed (a bunch weird old wizards living in exile who never told the truth straight and mostly fought by using clever misdirection.
Jj's movie sucked because it was star wars fan fic. Rian's movie had a bunch of good parts that didn't gel, i assume because he's in over his head. Subsequent star wars has followed the something vaguely like a pattern - when Mandalorian was Lone Wolf and Cub in space it was cool. When it started trying to be star wars it sucked. We're lurching in to simulacra and simulacrum territory where star wars movies are cheap copies of star wars movies instead of being cheap copies of some of the best movies ever made but with rubber aliens in space. Rogue one threaded the needle by being a cool wwii partisans doing a heist movie, andor isn't a star wars show at all and that's why it's the best star wars show, while a lot of the other stuff is increasingly fractally self-referential clone wars cartoon auto-eroticism.
Lotr? Peter Jackson made a Lord of the Rings movie. Then, idk, hbo or whoever said "well that made a lot of money let's drop the orcs, add a lot of sexual violence, and make our own pastiche of Jackson's movie and we got gambo. And then it started feeding on itself and we got epic fantasy shows that were trying to eb hbo's rip off of lotr instead of either trying to be a rip off of a better movie, which is where star wars is good, or an original adaptation of a good story, which is why Jackson's lotr worked.
I have hope for that gargoyles adaptation if it ever happens because gargoyles is a fun rip off of shakespeare and Branaggahs entire career has been making fun shakespeare movies, so he just has to do what he's good at but this time it's softcore cgi monsterfucker erotica, and he's a horny cornball so he'll be great at it.
But what's this war of rohan anime? That's the most boring fucking thing in all of lotr and i 100% gaurantee you that the tolkien estate gave it to them because they thought "there's nothing here for you to desecrate give us the check".
Idk what else is even happening out there, i very rarely watch tv shows and i've seen little to make me regret that lately.
The batman stuff does this too, all the cape shit. Batman was a standard costumed pulp adventure dude. 60s batman was a fun silly movie about comic books. 90s batman was a high camp celebration of how silly comic books had become. Nolan batman was fascist erotica and where the wheels really started to come off. Everything since have been batman movies trying really hard to be batman movies and have, accordingly, sucked ass.
Likewise with marvel capeshit - blade was a cool movie about how bad ass Wesley Snipes is, and was way better and more popular than the blade comic. Iron man was about look at this cool fucking guy. WInter Soldiers, for me hands down the best one was a 1970s political thriller and for authenticity they even got fucking Robert Redford. Subsequent marvel movies have mostly tried to be marvel movies and have been dogshit. A thing trying to be itself is going to end up being a poser, and as we all know a poser is the worst thing you can be. Then with dead pool we had a couple of marvel capeshit movies that were entirely about how silly and absurd marvel capeshit was, and that was fun. Idk if the new one was good, but it does seem to be a movie about how silly it's own success at being silly is so maybe it worked idk.
Godzilla minus one? Wasn't trying to be a godzilla movie. It was a movie about modern Japan's struggle between fascist nationalist revanchism and an attempt to finally move past that insane shit and let Shinzo abe and all his buddies, and the war, die. It was about how Japan is enslaved to the us at no benefit to itself and how it's government are inept, useless neoliberal cowards who can't find their asses with both hands. A bunch of civillians fight godzilla with crap they have lying around because neither their american overlords nor their captured, useless government will help, and the whole time they are looking directly at the screen saying "the war was a miserable failure that destroyed japan. There was nothing good or honorable about it except that some people were lucky enough to survive. We do not want to go back, we must not go back. The people of Japan must reject nationalist militarism, the US's geopolitical manipulations, and our shitty government and chart our own path or godzilla is going to wreck us".
Cool as fuck, best Godzilla movie sense the first one, all because it's a movie about contemporary Japanese culture and politics that uses Godzilla as a stand in for the threats facing Japan - as is tradition - instead of being about godzilla.no one being able to afford to have children in Japan's fucked up economy is a key plot beat. Excellent film.
Then with dead pool we had a couple of marvel capeshit movies that were entirely about how silly and absurd marvel capeshit was, and that was fun. Idk if the new one was good, but it does seem to be a movie about how silly it's own success at being silly is so maybe it worked idk.
It triples down on the absurdity of capeshit in a way it's hard to see how they top it.
Christ, right?i read gambo years before the show, got to the end at that time, and moved on. And then the show happened and i started re-reading it and was like "this is all miserable, all these people are horrible, only bad horrible things happen. Nooooooope" and put it down. All i remember about the show is that the armor looked awful. But i still got to hear about it for years while being unable to participate in any conversations because ir ead the books and knew what happened next! it was agony!
I'm glad we got lower decks. At least some group of artists out there "got" it.
Yeah, its lazy writing. At least in Deep Space 9, you get the sense that while Section 31 has enough connections to keep itself hidden, it wasn't all powerful. If I were gonna pick up the plot threads, I'd have it be what it was first stated to be: a small group of essentially vigilantes, high on their own mythology and exploiting the gaps and shadows of a huge organization like the federation.
I think in some ways, Star Trek let liberals indulge in American Exceptionalism. Like, here's all the values we purport to hold, being evangelized by a good democratic federal government and its space-navy! Yes, they're socialist; but its because of replicators! Don't worry about it! Obviously, this varied across episodes and writers. Some might be more explicitly socialist, some might have a little more yankee-brainworms. But New Trek feels like its all in on the American Exceptionalism. So now Section 31 is just Federation CIA and they do "critical work" whatever that means
I have this running theory that a lot of Discovery and Picard was written by people who haven't watched Star Trek, but do browse the wiki. I can just picture someone not really into Trek stumbling on the article for Section 31 and think, "Woah, this must be really cool and important!"
It's disappointing. DS9 was pretty unambiguous in its portrayal -- Section 31 is a violation of Federation ideals and shouldn't be allowed to continue. There is potential for an interesting story, but it's fundamentally not the story these guys are interested in telling. To them, Section 31 is just cool terminology to throw around; "I have the super-duper Q-clearance for top secret cool spy stuff!!!"
I agree, and i think 40k prefigured this. There are a lot of artists my age who remember how cool this stuff was when we were six, but they never learned why the slop was like that - they didn't go back and watch kurasawa and the battle of midway and the maltese falcon. They just like star wars. So when they try to make star wars we get jar jar's star wars. Like jj abrahms is a smart dumb guy so when he was given a big bag of money and told to make star wars he made star wars.
Rian johnson is a. Smart smart guy, so when he was told to make star wars he went and made, idk, casino royal and master and commander and a couple of other things, along with a meta-commentary on hero-worship that was frustratingly loyal to how Luke was portrayed (a petulant kid in over his head who kind of only won because of a moment of empathy when confronting a sith lord) and how the jedi were portrayed (a bunch weird old wizards living in exile who never told the truth straight and mostly fought by using clever misdirection.
Jj's movie sucked because it was star wars fan fic. Rian's movie had a bunch of good parts that didn't gel, i assume because he's in over his head. Subsequent star wars has followed the something vaguely like a pattern - when Mandalorian was Lone Wolf and Cub in space it was cool. When it started trying to be star wars it sucked. We're lurching in to simulacra and simulacrum territory where star wars movies are cheap copies of star wars movies instead of being cheap copies of some of the best movies ever made but with rubber aliens in space. Rogue one threaded the needle by being a cool wwii partisans doing a heist movie, andor isn't a star wars show at all and that's why it's the best star wars show, while a lot of the other stuff is increasingly fractally self-referential clone wars cartoon auto-eroticism.
Lotr? Peter Jackson made a Lord of the Rings movie. Then, idk, hbo or whoever said "well that made a lot of money let's drop the orcs, add a lot of sexual violence, and make our own pastiche of Jackson's movie and we got gambo. And then it started feeding on itself and we got epic fantasy shows that were trying to eb hbo's rip off of lotr instead of either trying to be a rip off of a better movie, which is where star wars is good, or an original adaptation of a good story, which is why Jackson's lotr worked.
I have hope for that gargoyles adaptation if it ever happens because gargoyles is a fun rip off of shakespeare and Branaggahs entire career has been making fun shakespeare movies, so he just has to do what he's good at but this time it's softcore cgi monsterfucker erotica, and he's a horny cornball so he'll be great at it.
But what's this war of rohan anime? That's the most boring fucking thing in all of lotr and i 100% gaurantee you that the tolkien estate gave it to them because they thought "there's nothing here for you to desecrate give us the check".
Idk what else is even happening out there, i very rarely watch tv shows and i've seen little to make me regret that lately.
The batman stuff does this too, all the cape shit. Batman was a standard costumed pulp adventure dude. 60s batman was a fun silly movie about comic books. 90s batman was a high camp celebration of how silly comic books had become. Nolan batman was fascist erotica and where the wheels really started to come off. Everything since have been batman movies trying really hard to be batman movies and have, accordingly, sucked ass.
Likewise with marvel capeshit - blade was a cool movie about how bad ass Wesley Snipes is, and was way better and more popular than the blade comic. Iron man was about look at this cool fucking guy. WInter Soldiers, for me hands down the best one was a 1970s political thriller and for authenticity they even got fucking Robert Redford. Subsequent marvel movies have mostly tried to be marvel movies and have been dogshit. A thing trying to be itself is going to end up being a poser, and as we all know a poser is the worst thing you can be. Then with dead pool we had a couple of marvel capeshit movies that were entirely about how silly and absurd marvel capeshit was, and that was fun. Idk if the new one was good, but it does seem to be a movie about how silly it's own success at being silly is so maybe it worked idk.
Godzilla minus one? Wasn't trying to be a godzilla movie. It was a movie about modern Japan's struggle between fascist nationalist revanchism and an attempt to finally move past that insane shit and let Shinzo abe and all his buddies, and the war, die. It was about how Japan is enslaved to the us at no benefit to itself and how it's government are inept, useless neoliberal cowards who can't find their asses with both hands. A bunch of civillians fight godzilla with crap they have lying around because neither their american overlords nor their captured, useless government will help, and the whole time they are looking directly at the screen saying "the war was a miserable failure that destroyed japan. There was nothing good or honorable about it except that some people were lucky enough to survive. We do not want to go back, we must not go back. The people of Japan must reject nationalist militarism, the US's geopolitical manipulations, and our shitty government and chart our own path or godzilla is going to wreck us".
Cool as fuck, best Godzilla movie sense the first one, all because it's a movie about contemporary Japanese culture and politics that uses Godzilla as a stand in for the threats facing Japan - as is tradition - instead of being about godzilla.no one being able to afford to have children in Japan's fucked up economy is a key plot beat. Excellent film.
Another Frank banger.
I loved Minus One. Great film
It triples down on the absurdity of capeshit in a way it's hard to see how they top it.
Blade gets a brief cameo.
Thanks for writing about the Godzilla movie. I had heard some buzz but didn't know about the depth to it's concept. I'll have to check it out!
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Christ, right?i read gambo years before the show, got to the end at that time, and moved on. And then the show happened and i started re-reading it and was like "this is all miserable, all these people are horrible, only bad horrible things happen. Nooooooope" and put it down. All i remember about the show is that the armor looked awful. But i still got to hear about it for years while being unable to participate in any conversations because ir ead the books and knew what happened next! it was agony!
I'm glad we got lower decks. At least some group of artists out there "got" it.
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: p
Yeah i would not want to see their star trek. JJ's Star Trek was bad enough.
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Yeah, its lazy writing. At least in Deep Space 9, you get the sense that while Section 31 has enough connections to keep itself hidden, it wasn't all powerful. If I were gonna pick up the plot threads, I'd have it be what it was first stated to be: a small group of essentially vigilantes, high on their own mythology and exploiting the gaps and shadows of a huge organization like the federation.
I think in some ways, Star Trek let liberals indulge in American Exceptionalism. Like, here's all the values we purport to hold, being evangelized by a good democratic federal government and its space-navy! Yes, they're socialist; but its because of replicators! Don't worry about it! Obviously, this varied across episodes and writers. Some might be more explicitly socialist, some might have a little more yankee-brainworms. But New Trek feels like its all in on the American Exceptionalism. So now Section 31 is just Federation CIA and they do "critical work" whatever that means
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I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
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