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.
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.