Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Forbes investigates. It comes away with a mix: People are generally not in much of a movie-going mood; summer started earlier this year; inadequate marketing.
I have a couple more ideas.
Star Trek’s appeal, as a vision for the future, is reassuring. We didn’t wipe ourselves out of existence, people of all sorts of different nationalities are getting along together. That’s fine, but “reassuring” is boring. Also, the franchise didn’t rely on that part of it as much as it does now. There used to be this thing about “boldly go where no man has ever gone before!” Then that was declared un-P.C., so it became “where no one has gone before.” Then it got reversed, in the worst Star Trek episode ever made, in which the courageous and intrepid Enterprise crew discovers that the warp drive is tearing apart the fabric of the universe or something. Although they didn’t put it like this word-for-word, this effectively flipped the motto around like a pancake being turned: “To timidly avoid going where just about everyone else has already been.”
They just wanted to be socially conscientious progressives, I’m sure. Well, they nuked the spiritual essence of a beloved and revered cultural tradition when they did that…which is what progressives do. So, we’ve got this huge tub full of good-hearted people wearing uniforms, being very careful not to go faster than Warp 5 so they don’t break anything? What’s the point?? How about…just not go? Starting with the premises provided, that is where common sense goes.
Star Wars, in contrast, is two stories. One takes place in the technological realm, involving pilots, ships, space stations, and lasers that go pew pew pew…the other takes place in a spiritual realm, unseen by all who are not “force sensitive.” Good and evil battle each other, in both realms. There you go. Spiritual…and…good & evil. Star Wars believes in the compass points. Evil is objectively evil, no need to debate it. There are good people doing evil things, but that’s consistent with real life — people are books, their good & evil deeds are pages within the books.
Star Trek has a way of crossing this line, into the Hipster Zone in which the deeds themselves can be subject to endless debate, with great points made on both sides, about whether this is good or evil. This complicates things needlessly, since it is not consistent with real life. Best Star Trek movie ever? There’s little or no disagreement: The Wrath of Khan, within which there is no necessity, none whatsoever, to tediously debate the good & bad parts of stealing the Genesis device and killing Admiral Kirk. That’s all-the-way bad, and this bad guy must be stopped. That’s good drama. But this has been receding. With every good act debatable as a potentially bad thing, and every bad act debatable as a potentially good thing, the whole story dissolves into an opera about characters in uniforms flying ships and feeling certain ways about things.
Well…if we don’t relate to the characters, that’s all it takes to send the whole thing over a brink.
But this brings me to my second idea. Following is a list of what the villain is trying to do in each movie, and why; see if you can figure out where I’m going with this.
I: Merge with The Creator, so I can learn my purpose.
II: Kill Admiral Kirk, because I blame him for killing my wife.
III: Steal the plans for the Genesis device, for fortune and the glory of the Klingon Empire.
IV: Talk to the whales, to make sure they’re still there.
V: Go to Sha Ka Ree, to find God, because……….??
VI: Sabotage the peace conference, so we can keep fightin’.
VII: Extinguish the star, killing everyone in the solar system, to go into The Nexus.
VIII: Go back in time and mess up First Contact, to assimilate Earth into the Borg Collective.
IX: Poison the entire planet, killing everybody, because I’m angry about my prior banishment.
X: Kill Captain Picard, and everyone on Earth, because I’m angry about being abandoned by the Romulan government.
XI: Kill everybody on Vulcan, and everybody on Earth, because I’m angry that Spock didn’t save my planet.
XII: Kill everybody I can, because I’m angry that Admiral Marcus woke me up from my nap.
XIII: Kill everybody on the Yorktown, because I’m angry that Starfleet didn’t come looking for me or something.
You see the issue now? There is a gradual but increasing over-reliance on “kill everybody indiscriminately because I’m angry”…which, with all these terrorist attacks, could be said to mirror real life somewhat. But, that isn’t why they’re doing it. This second problem ties in somewhat with the first problem. Star Trek, now immersed deeply into the Hipster Zone in which so few evil deeds can be recognized as decidedly evil, all of them have to be put up to some endless debate, is grasping at straws in a futile search for the few evil deeds that are irredeemable and thus not subject to this debate. And they’re left with only one.
There’s no strategic thinking involved in this. Last time any Star Trek villain did any of that, was twenty years ago. And that, it should be noted, has not aged very well now that it’s established that traveling back in time and changing history, merely launches a new universe. So what the heck? Why not let The Borg go ahead and gobble up Earth like a big fish swallowing a guppy? Earth Prime is still safe.
As the Wrath of Khan decisively proves, the bad guy has a lot of pull in deciding if the movie is going to be any good or not. A lot of pull. More than the hero. It also proves vengeful bad guys can be interesting; there is a way to do this correctly. The bad guy’s lust for vengeance has to make him into a Determinator, that seems to be important. But there are other rules too, because many of the above films had that going on, and they still didn’t work.
Bottom line is, Star Trek is having trouble because it’s in denial of the worthiness of the instinct of self-preservation. What it really needs is good old-fashioned submarine warfare — which Wrath of Khan did have, and which elevated at least one old episode to true greatness. The producers, in their current mindset, won’t green-light this. It would shrug off the hipster mentality that says all life forms are equally worthy, and sometimes the gazelle should stumble so the lion can have a decent meal. That’s not the way it used to work. It used to be, “They’re coming for us, it’s us or them” was sufficient to establish the roles of good guy and bad guy. Today you can’t do that. The lives that are at stake have to be truly innocent, at a distance, multiple in number, and most important of all…strangers. The bad guy’s not coming for you, he’s coming for Boston, or London, or Africa or India, or that solar system over there, or Earth, or the Yorktown, or…
Now that they’ve taken this step of debating all goodness and all evil, into incomprehensibility, for sake of embiggening horizons; they have achieved the exact opposite. Star Trek movies can only have one kind of bad guy anymore, and he can only be doing one thing, for one reason. That doesn’t excite people into attending repeat viewings. And after the movie comes out on video, this doesn’t get the disc back into the player. That’s not enough to make these into bad movies, but it doesn’t make them good movies either.
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This right here is why I keep saying that today’s blue-haired bicurious vegan slam poet is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer:
As no one in the real world can ever satisfy all those conditions, anyone and everyone can be written off without a qualm at a moment’s notice — they had it coming, because _____. Worse, think about what that mentality does to one’s personal relationships. Could you ever trust a person who thought like that? Could they ever trust you?
Look at what’s happening with the gays right now. They thought they were at the top of the Left’s victim totem pole, but the outbreak of Sudden Onset Jihad Syndrome in Miami shows they were badly mistaken. Trump wants to deport the brown people, you see, and so now a few gay nightclub shootings are a small price to pay to cuddle up with swarthy foreigners.
The dirty secret of the “shades of gray” morality people is: They long for black-and-white more than any of us. They’re forever searching for the one group about which they can say “yes, group X is All Good,” so that they can worship it… or “group Y is All Bad,” so they can destroy it. Why they don’t try to make themselves All Good is a psychological mystery above my pay grade, but we know what happens when they identify the All Bad and get a single erg of power to do something about it….
I don’t know how many mass murders it’s going to take, but trust me: Within a few years, today’s SJWs are all going to be wearing armbands and jackboots and yelling about how they’ve always despised the untermenschen.
- Severian | 08/14/2016 @ 09:53[…] House of Eratosthenes […]
- Basic Laws of Human Stupidity | DAMN STUFF HAS GREAT STUFF! | 08/14/2016 @ 14:13DS9 was probably the last true great one because it was so willing to explore these things. But it also went both ways.
There’s the us or them, kill all of them episode.
And then there’s the enemy can be honorable and it’s a tragedy to have to kill him.
It’s what YardSaleOfTheMind calls moral flattening.
(links to the SF debris reviews for easy of summation – about 10 min each)
- Nate Winchester | 08/14/2016 @ 18:44” Merge with The Creator, so I can learn my purpose.”
- CaptDMO | 08/15/2016 @ 04:50I always wondered why folks who deem themselves smart enough to build a Tower of Babel , deem themselves to have arms long enough to box with God once they get there.
I’ve noticed that most contemporary Tee Vee “SitComs/daytime drama” use the same writer for “folly of man”
(para) “What a tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive.”…or something.
Now that I’ve read it again in detail, I’ll note something else.
Everyone agrees on best Star Trek (GalaxyQuest!) but every one also agrees on the SECOND best Trek movie: 4 the Voyage Home. Which when you think about it, kind of goes against what Morgan was talking about.
But thinking about what Morgan’s said, I think I figured it out.
See, the Whale Probe in 4 was fundamentally, a plot device/force of nature more than actual villain (like a storm being the villain in The Finest Hours or The Martian), what made 4 work was that it was just a good-ole fashioned adventure, made even more fun by the characters adventuring into our world. But at base the Whale Probe is “not coming for you, he’s coming for… Earth. The lives that are at stake [are] truly innocent, at a distance, multiple in number, and most important of all…strangers.” Khan, by contrast, was the singular, very personal threat.
Ever since then, they’ve been trying to do BOTH movies at the same time. Give the personal, singular villainous threat, but have it threaten huge numbers of people. But that never works in a limited form storytelling like a movie (longer forms like comics/tv can pull this off sometimes). Now that you mention it, I think Beyond could have been a much better movie had it just focused on the crew being trapped on a strange planet and trying to survive (though you’d want to put more work into it to keep it from seeming like a rip off of the Martian).
What’s killing Star Trek is that for awhile, it’s been very driven by committee, and not vision.
- Nate Winchester | 08/15/2016 @ 05:35Roddenberry had a lengthy track record of telling and re-telling this tale of some artificial being struggling to find its purpose & place. Questor Tapes, V’Ger, Lt. Cmdr. Data, etc. By all accounts, it bordered on being an actual obsession. He also had an eclectic hit-and-miss track record of getting the audience to relate to & sympathize with this.
Ugh…the damn Whale Probe again. Maybe I’m outvoted, but this one didn’t work for me at all. The sycophantic preachy overtone about what bastards humans are, I have to remind myself the movie really does take itself seriously. Like Star Trek III, the mission is too linear, has too many stopping-off points, and in spite of the hiccups and time travel and Chekov needing surgery and the bumbling hospital staff and Navy shipyard security, it all pretty much goes along without a hitch. Also, the option of fighting the whale probe is ruled out way too hastily, for sake of advancing the story, which has been done over & over, before & since, ad nauseum.
Popcorn is way overpriced, and going to the movies is expensive. I don’t pay that kind of money to be lectured by hippies.
- mkfreeberg | 08/15/2016 @ 06:28“Hippies struggling to find their purpose & place” pretty much sums up F/SF these days, from what I can tell. We all know that, for the Left, politics is just substitute religion, but for the subset of the Left that’s into Sci-Fi, everything is substitute religion.
Vox Day is a weirdo, but he’s right about this — modern F/SF is what you get when you ask the socio-sexual dregs to imagine what life’s like for the normies. That’s why Kirk got all the tail back in the 60s, Riker got all the tail in the 90s, and — I imagine — the disabled lesbian wymyn of color who con the Enterprise these days are too busy talking about their feelings to get any tail. It reflects the rank-and-file Left’s ever more frantic attempts to distance themselves from the real world where things happen. In the 60s, the Captain got all the ass. In the 90s, it was the second in command who scored. And now….? Well, y’all watch this stuff and I don’t, so maybe I’m full of it, but it seems like the trend of Lefties wanting to surrender everything to an ever-more-remote god-king continues apace.
- Severian | 08/15/2016 @ 08:41On DS9, the doctor, Bashir, was intended (and like all of us guys, wanted to be) to be the ladies man, but they made him more the butt of pratfalls, though he ended up with a decent tally by show’s end.
On Voyager it fell to Tom Paris as the ladies man – which then became ironic as he was the only one on the show to settle down, get married AND have a child on the show, counting the main timeline, not all the myriad alternatives.
Enterprise – who cares.
So we went, Captain – 1st Officer – Chief of Medicine – Pilot.
Also to get pedantic because I know Severian loves it when I do. 😉 Kirk’s pop cultural legacy is much like other aspects of history in pop culture – very incorrect & overblown.
Details: http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/how-many-women-has-kirk-kissed-slept-with.118028/page-3#post-3972735 or http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/32051/how-many-alien-women-has-capt-admiral-kirk-slept-with
Quote: “So, out of 79 episodes, we have only seven possible instances, and only four of those can we count as confirmed.”
Heck’s it’s arguable that Spock was as much or more of a ladies man as his captain.
- Nate Winchester | 08/15/2016 @ 10:13@ Nate Winchester,
the Experts at the Mount Vernon Association of Experts on the Expertise of Experts rates your pedantry “not not un-spurious.”
But even if Kirk’s notch count is (like various George Washington quotes) apocryphal, my point stands — it’s certainly the common perception among the unwashed masses that Kirk scored a lot. And wow, look at the negative slope of that curve — from the Captain to the pilot, via the doctor. If you remade the 60s show today, then, I guess Sulu would be getting all the ass? (I know, I know). One of the chief markers of masculinity keeps getting foisted further and further down the chain of command, being made more and more of a joke each time. My, Lefties sure do find their Daddies “problematic,” don’t they?
- Severian | 08/16/2016 @ 08:19I think Kirk’s rep comes from a few things besides his confirmed on-show tally.
There’s all the times when the female guest star would come on and the show would immediately soft-focus her, cue the romantic bumper music, and then shoot over to Kirk’s “Hello, LADIES” face. On top of that, there are a number of people he romances to try to get himself and his crew out of a jam – including the young lady of Triskelion in the jiffy-pop brassier up there. Finally, there are a good number of his ex-liaisons in space, whom he somehow keeps managing to run into despite being captain of a ship that’s supposed to be boldly going where no man has gone before.
Mystery and mastery do not require the highest rank to retain their allure; as it turns out Spock was much more of a hit with the lady fans than they’d anticipated, so they gave him a good share of plots like this, even though they usually had to involve spores or alien influences or whatnot. (I confess that one of my favorites was in the Animated Series, when Harry Mudd’s supposed “love crystals” actually work for a short while, before causing an extreme opposite reaction – the sound clip of Spock snapping THAT IS AN OUTSTANDINGLY STUPID IDEA at Kirk is a legit laugh-out-loud moment for me.)
In the meantime, of course, real guys really appreciate it more if their dashing leading man is, in fact, a leader – Sir Patrick Stewart certainly thought so and began to agitate for more episodes in which he got to buckle his swashes and get the girl. In DS9, they wisely moved away from the Doctor as a ladies’ man (and thus made him a more interesting character) in favor of eventual long-term relationships for Sisko, O’Brien (the audience POV guy, a reliable everyman to root for), and Worf (kick-ass warrior, at least by reputation).
Voyager, who gives a hoot about.
- nightfly | 08/16/2016 @ 12:02Yay, a Star Trek discussion! That gives me time to harangue on my favorite Star Trek villain of all time, Gene Rottenberry.
My hatred goes back a ways, before video games were incredibly popular, to a game called the “Star Trek Starship Tactical Combat Simulator.” It was a fantastic game, loved for its ‘easy to play and difficult to master’ style. You could play known and loved Star Trek ships, or create your own, and blast the hell out of the other guy with phasors, photon torpedoes, plasma weapons, etc., etc. It generated several successful spinoffs, most notibly “Mechwarrior.”
The game didn’t fail. After years of growing and being successful, the license was yanked by the afore-mentioned Rottenberry. Why, you ask? He had a new show that had just been approved, called “The Next Generation.” STSTCS had earned him a large sum on money, but he let it be know that he did NOT approve of the “warlike” nature of the game now that he had a new podium to preach from and money to finance his vision. War is fine as long as you are in need of cash. Hypocrisy reared its ugly head and Rottenberry saw no need to be subtle, telling the licensees that he was now able to go back to his original vision of forcing tolerance by beating conservatives over the head.
Flash forward to years of “new” series and politically-correct spin-offs. His minions have followed that vision and skewed far and away from what the actual viewing public wants. WoK was “we don’t want to kill, but we have to kill the bad guy to defend ourselves. He’s evil and he’d kill us first.” ST:B is “we don’t want to kill, but we have to kill because military conservatives will never stop being conservative and wanting to kill everyone because that’s what evil people do and all conservatives need to be proven to be evil, so sayeth Rottenberry.” Like their predecessor, they never see the hypocrisy.
- P_Ang | 08/17/2016 @ 09:54Mech Warrior!!! Thanks for the memories, P_Ang…. how I loved Mech Warrior. I’d probably be playing it right now if there were a version retrofitted to modern computers (I’m sure there’s a tech term for this). Shoot ’em right in the knee, rake in the salvage cash, hire mercs…. sheeeit, come to think of it, Mech Warrior probably made me a conservative.
- Severian | 08/18/2016 @ 06:42