John BullGuess what I found on the hotel TV...
"Gallioping around the galaxy is a game for the young."
"I'll never forget a face" Says Khan of someone who wasn't technically on the Enterprise when he tried to take it over.
the only possible good use of AI would be to do a cut of Wrath of Khan that has Khan and his men in genuine 1996 fashion, given that's the year they're meant to be from.
The Enterprise lighting up and leaving space dock in Wrath of Khan is one of the finest scenes in cinema history.
I will die on that nebula
As I've said before, Wrath and Undiscovered are the best Trek films because they show Kirk for what he is: a brilliant, arrogant, bloody warrior.
And then they have him realise that it is everyone else pays the price for that, not him. And, for a moment, he hates himself for it.
Nicholas Meyer was one of the few to realise that Kirk is an anti-hero, not a hero. He's a borderline, narcissistic, brilliant weapon of war.
But he's surrounded by friends who he lets become his conscience. That's his salvation. His one noble strength.
That's the only difference between Kirk and Khan, or Kirk and General Chang. He trusts his friends when they tell him he's fucked up.
The other films never got that. They saw all the stuff about Kirk the intergalactic boyscout and play it as a compliment, not a sarcastic insult
This is also the main reason why the director's cut of Wrath is WORSE than the regular cut, btw.
In it, the dead young engineering officer isn't just another victim of Kirk's stupidity over shields. He's also Scotty's nephew.
NO WAY Scotty forgives Kirk that death. Ever.
Those scenes were cut for good reason. They do nothing to make it clearer how badly Kirk fucked up. They just make Scotty look weak and callous too for moving on from it so quickly. Which he would never have done. He's not Kirk.
Ultimately, both Wrath and Undiscovered are films about loss. About how our flaws and prejudices only define us if we let them. That the real enemy isn't external, it's internal.
They just hide that inside pew pew space opera. They're the Roddenberry ethos of Star Trek distilled and refined to perfection.
I do apologise btw. I know I end up doing a variant of my rant about what makes Kirk work as a character (and what doesn't) every time I stumble across either Wrath or Khan on TV.
Back onto effects, Wrath and Undiscovered both go the whole hog and show us TORPEDOES BEING LOADED.
They treat the Enterprise as an actual fucking ship. With crew who have to do things in battle. Not just some magical box that farts energy on demand.
"Scotty. I need warp speed in three minutes or we're all dead."
Literally every tech director I've had has done the web version of this to me at some point.
"Jim... i think you better get down here." 😭 😭
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few..."
Phil Haigh@garius I bought the Trek film collection a while back, I’ve motivated me to go back and watch more of them…
Iain Bancarz@garius See also Babylon 5, where "battle stations" means satisfying metallic ka-chunk/whirr sounds as cannons are deployed and fighters launched. Not to mention "shields up" meaning an actual metal shield covering the bridge windows. 😀
Alex White@garius I really liked that Wrath of Khan sort of channelled starship combat as being like man-o-war galleons, unleashing fusillades at one another as they slowly went past.
It was such a distinctive change in ‘describing’ space combat, and I was disappointed that they didn’t lean it into more in subsequent stuff. It gave the starships a real sense of mass which is typically lacking.
@PlaneSailingGames Wrath does it better than any of the others. Undiscovered comes close, but feels more like frigates than ships of the line.
Both at least treat Starship crews as MATTERING though. These crews are there for a reason. they have jobs.
@garius Last summer I listened to a series of podcasts about HMS Belfast - one from a historian, one from a current curator and one from someone who actually served on her. Fascinating stuff and something that I’d never twigged before was that “Battle stations” wasn’t just some general alert - it was the station you went to for battle.
For kitchen crew it mean going down to the magazines to feed the turrets. Hairy stuff.
@PlaneSailingGames exactly. and Wrath captures that.
Paisley P. Peinforte 🪬@garius It's a take on Kirk I hadn't really considered and it's interesting food for thought.
@paisley_peinforte i don't want to make it sound like Kirk is a bad person. I don't think he is. I think his default state is just "self-obsessed neutral who wants to be persuaded to be good"
And who, at several big moments, goes one further and accepts and recognises his own flaws.
@garius You can see some of this in "Errand of Mercy" when he realises how badly he wanted that war with the Klingons.
@paisley_peinforte deffo. That's the thing - Meyer didn't invent it from nothing in Wrath. He just realised it had been hinted at before and was the thing that made the character interesting and different from a cookie-cutter space opera hero.
1r0n51d3@garius never apologise for sharing interesting stuff. That's proper social media that is 👍
⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe@garius I rather like how the fact that Kirk can't stand to lose, what makes him such a "heroic" figure so much of the time – is *at the same time* a character flaw.
@fishidwardrobe it's both a strength and a weakness. And again a very 'warrior' trait. It's pure Alexander the Great.
@garius Appropriate, since that's what Shatner based Kirk on, ofc.
Michael Gemar@garius Great analysis!
LemLems@garius those two are my favourites too, for similar reasons. The central relationships (Kirk-Spock in particular) are what, when handled well, make Trek so special to me.
Search for Spock is my next favourite because it shows what happens when Kirk doesn’t have Spock (or McCoy, in a different way) there to anchor him.
It’s also why I hate Into Darkness with a passion.
@garius Interesting - I saw Undiscovered at the cinema when it came out and was really unimpressed by it, and I’ve never seen it since. Maybe it deserves another viewing.
@PlaneSailingGames definitely.
I'd back-to-back it with Wrath. To be honest it's best thought of as a direct sequel, but with a "10 years later..." card between them.
@garius It’ll go on “the LIST” then 😀
Mark Dennehy@garius It fades from memory, wiped out by "From hell's heart..." though.
It's like, the chase in Blade Runner is grand, but Tears in Rain just eclipses it completely in the memory.
It's like, the chase in Blade Runner is grand, but Tears in Rain just eclipses it completely in the memory.
Zalasur 🐸🇺🇦@garius That is one thing that's bothered me about the newer Trek shows/movies. It's like the special effects people have forgotten that those starships are *huge* and have lots of inertia. All the new shows make them look like toys, not lumbering bohemoths that house hundreds of people, like an aircraft carrier or destroyer.
Brian Drell@garius That footage was all ripped from Star Trek The Motion Picture. Paramount didn't have enough SFX money to do a new sequence so they just reused footage from the first film. I personally prefer the Jerry Goldsmith score from the first film too.
@drell they're very different scores. Personally I couldn't imagine either film without each of them. I think they're perfect matches.
That's another flaw of the Wrath director's cut. There are sections where the score dips out in the extended nebula sequences, and suddenly you realise just how MUCH the score drives the action there, not the effects.
Dirtysnowball@garius Don’t get me wrong, the Horner scores are very good. I just really love the Goldsmith score from the first one for all of its late 70s weirdness and maritime grandeur.
And I know I’m in the vast minority, but The Motion Picture is my favorite of the films.
Darkedge@garius absolutely beautiful model work
Rob Landley@garius Star Trek 2 is an opera. The music carries the action point by point, and every major character and location has a musical signature. (Although the "scotty/engineering" drumbeat is basically the same, as are Uhura/spacedock...)
But you can listen to the soundtrack and describe what's happening screen with 5 second granularity.
@landley 100% agree. This is another reason to avoid the director's cut. The added scenes aren't soundtracked.
In the nebula sequence, this REALLY jars as it makes clear how much of the action isn't actually action on screen, it's in your ears.
David Goodman@garius shell suits? Or were they out by then
@davegoodman by 1996 i think we're heading out of lumberjack shirts into jeans and tees with a jacket.
Tom Forsyth
Geoff 🏴@garius He did have brief access to most of the Enterprise records in Space Seed though?
Cab@garius We don't know Chekov wasn't on the Enty, but we do know he wasn't bridge crew (yet).
William Hamilton@garius
“How are you doing, Richmond?”
“But Khan…my name is *Chekov*!”
“Like I said, I never forget a face. Names, on the other hand, give me *real* problems!”
“How are you doing, Richmond?”
“But Khan…my name is *Chekov*!”
“Like I said, I never forget a face. Names, on the other hand, give me *real* problems!”
Abi Sutherland@garius
I thought it was "gallivanting".
I thought it was "gallivanting".
@evilrooster quite possibly.
Avram Grumer@evilrooster @garius I’m still bothered by the fact that one can apparently remotely gain root on a Starfleet vessel with a mere five-digit numeric password.
@evilrooster @garius A more realistic password scenario would have been tedious to film.
“Type an x — no, lower-case — then a zero, then a zǐ — no, not the English zed, the Chinese glyph that means ‘child’ — and then — wait, you’re gonna have to enable the Klingon keyboard extension for this — yes, it’s installed, the Klingon character set has been part of Unicode since before we made First Contact — no, I don’t know, everyone in Linguistics figures time travel was involved…”
Droid41@garius ...and I just *had* to go look at how old Shatner was when he said that line.
One year younger than I am now.
🧓
Gary Parker@garius did you need a UV lamp to find it? 😬
Jeff Xilon@garius Bester epsiode of Babylon 5!
Fuzzysteve@garius It's Bester, isn't it? ;)
Viss