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I see a lot of the JJwars discussed in depth on these forums, and some star trek discovery and that kinda thing, but not a lot on the JJTreks! Perhaps this explains itself. I have some questions to kick things off. What made them send EVERY ship in the fleet, filled with students, to investigate a wormhole? They sent ONE man, a dodecagenarian, to fix a galaxy killing supernova. What is the film's perspective on starfleet and the federation? There is a part briefly, where pike tells kirk to enlist in starfleet in front of a big blinky screen filling TV with big pixels. There's a bite to it, something that gets turned to 11 in the sequel, but nothing in the rest of the film (except the prior incompetence with the killing college students) seems to suggest disillusionment with the establishment. Vulcan is saved by heroes....or what's left of it. But maybe that's ironic too. It was cool in 3d when the english subtitles for klingon...turned...towards the screen... Pine is doing an informed and practiced shatner. No complaints. Spock blows. We find the green girl, the most notoriously enslaved character in the galaxy, where else? racking up debt at starfleet academy. I do think these movies have a generally skeptical perspective which is interesting, about the worth of the whole thing or the competence of everybody. I REALLY like the scene with scotty in front of the warp core they shot in a real university, it's like visual proof of real life exceeding the 1960s fiction and scotty questioning if it's being driven for the right reasons. I don't think the whole film is that good, but there is usually at least 10%-40% of these films that works well like that, depending on your mood. I mostly find the resolutions cheap and think the morality is simplistic, about good and bad actors specifically before faults in the system. Altho maybe robocop working alone works in the context of the whims of a secret org. Nero is silly, as an idea. Go hog!
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Mar 14, 2021 01:33
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nine-gear crow posted:I think JJ Abrams is a very good director, he should just never be allowed near a keyboard and an open word document ever again. Nor should he be allowed to direct any script that one of his roving band of cronies wrote for him. I hear this a lot but don't understand the logic. If he were a good director, he'd be able to communicate the story well. It's not like the movie looks nice, and there is a story, the images are communicating information. Bogus Adventure posted:I had the highest of hopes for Into Darkness when I saw that 10 minute clip showing what a classic TOS episode might look like with 21st Century special effects. It was glorious. Then I saw the movie and how absolutely lovely it was because it attempted to be overly clever by building it around plot elements of Wrath of Khan while trying to toss in as many Trek references as possible. It also overly militarizes Starfleet, a peacekeeping and exploration force, and shoves them into dress uniforms that look like they were taken straight out of Starship Troopers. And to that point, these uniforms are visually communicating his whole perspective on into darkness. Creepy, secret, extrademocratic things are happening in the high ranks of starfleet, the organization within that story rightly would have ss style uniforms. Kirk being revived at the end is possibly an explicit reference to starship troopers, and post revival is used as a mouthpiece to smooth over a huge disaster. I don't think it's such a bad message either that a thing that advertises as a "total peacekeeping armada" could be lying or at the least suffer from organizational realities that make that difficult, but the movie's so sloppy its hard to say. It's been a while since I saw it tho.
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Mar 14, 2021 18:53
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Bogus Adventure posted:Yeah, but those uniforms were there in the first movie as well. Withstanding the hats, these guys are dressed in the timberline fall sweater collection, or else they are in red which seems to imply expendability, especially since we just saw a blundred of their peers blasted dead, into space over the course of the movie this is ending. I do want to play devil's advocate with some of these decisions, because hile I do not like these films that much I don't think JJ Abrams is as reliably a moron as everyone thinks. Maybe he has chronic stage flop, but sometimes the stuff he makes means something. come at me with star trek complaints!!!! And yes, discuss beyond, and also the show "star trek enterprise," which is just about the sexiest prequel I can imagine.
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Mar 15, 2021 03:33
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Bogus Adventure posted:The red unis were cadet unis, and ugly as hell imho. Star Trek is all about vibrant color and far out style (and seeing people serving with weird hairdos and unique style was one of the things I enjoyed about JJ's take). Why make it that ugly and boring? But symbolically, they're all wearing red shirts. Red is the most famous color a shirt can be in star trek. These cadets are marked by the hand of the reaper. Bogus Adventure posted:
In star trek enterprise, there are mandatory reciprocal oil rubdowns as part of routine military decontamination procedure. An alien gets a human pregnant.
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Mar 15, 2021 04:02
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TOS is certainly sexier than Enterprise, but it isn't a star trek prequel! That's a paradox. It IS sexier than the star wars prequels however, where the only act of sex happens implied in a cartoon
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Mar 15, 2021 14:54
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:at no point did fellow forums poster Lemniscate Blue make mention of prequels: I'm sorry, but it's a prequels only thread in here. My hands are tied. The only TOS episodes we can talk about are "the Cage" and "trials and tribbleations" We can talk about O' Brien in the war.
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Mar 16, 2021 15:18
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I am now "live" blogging what I'm noticing about into darkness. So far it appears to be about directing. Pike keeps yelling that kirk isn't responsible for "the chair" because he breaks the rules. When they're walking to pike in their SS uniforms, Kirk asks who else they would send on a five year mission. The background and foreground are full of uniformed cadets. He hits on some lady SS officers. In Pike's office there's a weird long TV with like Fox news and some graphs and a stock ticker. He doesn't turn this off to yell at kirk and spock.
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Mar 16, 2021 17:23
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I forgot Mickey form doctor who set up the blood thing with kirk! There's that.
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Mar 16, 2021 17:27
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Bogus Adventure posted:You should take a drink every time a reference to a past Star Trek thing is mentioned out of context and never explained. So far it's more visual references to star wars and robocop
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Mar 16, 2021 18:20
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The klingon post is lit like seti alpha six and the klingon taking a mask off is a reference to kahn doing so. The earlier mention of klingons, who robocop is starting a war with, is that they have conquered two empires and attacked earth ships "half a dozen" times. The city they fly to resembles a denser depiction of the film's san francisco. But importantly, they are also some sort of old sacred ruin. In this universe, O' Brien is never born, because his grandfather dies fighting a kligon with a knife.
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Mar 16, 2021 18:51
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Him punching kahn a lot is a 2001 reference. not a great one, but theres a big rock and whistling and primates fighting. The fight scene is really not bad, it's like they're just in a labyrinth and kirk (and you) begins to see why not to incite a war. Every step of the way the characters are like "don't start a war moron" but he proceeds. That's also good.
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Mar 16, 2021 19:05
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Incidentally, as a bunch of red shirts are escorting kahn, there is a huge red lens flare, cut to the next shot of the same, and there is a man carrying a large red light in the foreground. We see carol marcus (who lives) and a blue light flashes.
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Mar 16, 2021 19:08
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 More 2001!
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Mar 16, 2021 19:13
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I haven't watched this in ten years but I'm enjoying it more than I remember. I don't think Most of the references add up to much more than a fluffy action movie but it ain't bad on those terms.
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Mar 16, 2021 19:59
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The thing isn't a remake of Kahn it's a remix of 2001! The end is kirk going into the same thing bowman did (red striped lights and all) and kicking the tv until it works, as opposed to breaking the spaceship. This is a joke but The film is much about how the ship functions as a body. Everything that goes wrong happens after scotty is fired, the "heart" of the enterprise is broken, and chekov can't fix it. The set is v'geresque and the camera is whipping around the pipes like as if the ship were a living organism. Since the gravity is screwy, maybe it would look like that from a fixed perspective. Kirk hasn't been mourning Pike the entire film, and here is where he lets out his anger by kicking and self-sacrifice. Some pics:  Kirk in the (blue) discovery brain room   Kirk with little red Hal eyeballs    Woosh!  He's climbing it like a tree. It's like if at the end of 2001, a gorilla fixes the ship by hitting it with a bone. I think this is the thesis.
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Mar 16, 2021 21:19
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Some stuff from the end: Whale-shaped vehicle in the background of the shot with the cable car. The Leviathan!  Neat uniforms. White blood cells? medical stormtroopers?  Lots of stuff whips by in the city chase. I don't know if it's relevant that cars have barcodes, but the sequence is very busy. The part with spock beating kahn is given a little theme similar to the pon farr fight music, which is appropriate. Very pro-punching. Anyway, more interesting than I remembered. Worth a watch! Better star wars than the force awakens.
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Mar 16, 2021 22:40
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We need a new phrase than, "cyberpunk dystopia"
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Mar 17, 2021 04:31
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 05:10 |
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The image of the starship enterprise as an icon recurs frequently in Into Darkness. The natives at the beginning draw it in a dirt, a drawing that dissolves into the "real" deal. But it shows up a lot ON the enterprise, outside of engineering, and not either in the diagrammatic cross section we see on TNG and stuff. Specifically, the top down perspective from the beginning of the film. A drawing like that is crucial to the understanding and operation of the starship, yet it is not quite ever what people are seeing when they are working inside of it. The natives from the beginning may now be constructing icons of it in their worship, but this will be a crucial step in their understanding as it was and is for ours. They need to understand a picture bigger than themselves, which is the lesson kirk learns. He's not really the ship, he's the guy who sacrifices himself to the ship so it can keep going. The ship's bigger than anybody, it's a collection of everybody. Kahn can't save the ship because he's one guy. The stuff at the end is an interesting inverse of the stuff at the beginning. The people of earth are presumably as innocent of the stuff that happens in space as the goofy stereotypes from the beginning, so instead of being presented a spaceship disaster as if it were a larf (kirk's perspective), we see it horrible, from the ground. These people know what starships are, how scared out of their godzillas must the natives have been? Do you think freezing the volcano impacted the cycle of life on their planet?
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Mar 20, 2021 15:32
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