| Title | Qt3 Movie Podcast: Star Trek: Beyond |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Movie podcasts |
| When | July 23, 2016 |
You can tell how strongly some of us feel about this movie by the fact that we don't get to the 3x3 until the 1:45 mark. Then we adjust our mics to do a 3x3 on microphone scenes..
Read the full articleIf the movie did not do as well on the first weekend as expected, is that a cold open?
Thank you so much, Christian, for misparsing the title of Star: Trek Beyond. My favorite Qt3 joke of 2013 (ugh) makes a comeback!
Of course I'm always happy to callback my own dopey jokes. Someone has to. Thank you for noticing!
As if anyone would recognize a reference to obscure 1/5 stars videogame.
I think Pegg did a good job with a script. Not offensive. Funny how he works on the script to strengthen his rule of uneven Star Trek movies.
Tom and others had missed 2 important points of why is this the best Star Trek movie. First, unlike almost other Star Trek movie it acknowledges typical episode structure. I'm not just talking about this bit in the beginning where Kirk participates in a usual Federation stuff (as opposed to bombastic volcano action from Into Darkness); this idea of couple of people stranded away from the team and having a time together is the most Star Trek thing ever. Some of the best episodes are based on this idea. And here we have it quadripled. Meanwhile Into Darkness has the same generic 2010's story of "why do we need all this military tech". Go see Captain America 2: Winter Soldier. It's the same movie minus Star Trek fluff. It's a dystopian manifestation of a world where every franchise is reduced to a surface features easily stitched to a next soulless entry.
Second - the villain motivation. Yes, it's not explained as good as it should be. But hear me out. This villain is supposed to be understandable for us. Because he embodies every other sci-fi future universe we know. He even embodies later Star Trek eras. What was the universe like in TOS? It was a hippy dream for a time. You had unexplored galaxy, most of the creatures were benign but misunderstood. Spaceship crew was very diversified yet no one cared (which was a very big deal for a time) and outisde of bullshit mindcontrol universe there were no disagreements between crew members apart from who'll sacrifice himself for the greater good. Later sci-fi is not like that. Star Wars is about evil empire, Alien is about incomprehensible horrors. Even later The Next Generation is about unstable Federation, unbeatable inevitable Borg and constant internal conflicts. Beyond villain is supposed to be the rest of sci-fi and also us, the veiwer. He asks how long we are going to pretend this hippy communist TOS thing is OK and ignore the fact that universe has all the horrible stuff you can't take on in orange pijamas.
Could be done better. But works well enough I think.
Anything in the Star Trek universe that is not the original series or followup movies should be labeled Star Trek[sic].
And, of course, Free Enterprise.
SPOILAR: The best moment involving a female character in the Star Trek[sic] series is when Bing Crosby's granddaughter dies.
Regarding the difference in tone between Star Trek the TV series and Star Trek the movies, I think that's been a problem since first TNG movie in 1994, at least: the series, especially TNG and DS9, continued to explore increasingly ambiguous and subtle problems of philosophy, psychology, and sociology, while the movies kept reusing Kirk's classic formula of "break the rules, beat up the baddie, be celebrated as the hero" even when the protagonist was changed to Picard, a pacifistic diplomat and scientist who planned to retire as a vintner someday. Red Letter Media sums it up pretty well: https://youtu.be/d-f3bscZa0E?t...
So yeah, if any fan of Star Trek has been paying attention, the violence and gung-ho attitude of the reboot shouldn't surprise them. They simply took the most commercially proven parts of the original run of movies and put them in a new universe where they could turn them up to eleven, something they've probably been dying to do since the first Wrath of Khan.
"...and the others." Always a delight to be referred to as one of the others.
I don't think I can go with you on the villain thing. Whatever you might say about what the writers think the villain represents, as it turns out this has almost nothing to do with his actual motivation. He might go on and on about how the "frontier is now starting to push back" but it turns out he's really just mad that Mommy and Daddy didn't come looking for him hard enough. He's kind of the toddler version of Kurtz.
I do like your Winter Soldier point though.
As a lifelong Star Trek die hard, I very visibly and physically cringed when Christian defended any of this as a remotely cerebral or even classical Star Trek. I enjoyed this movie as a silly action scifi movie, but this is Trek purely in name. To be fair, none of the Star Trek movies are terribly true to the original notions of the Trek series, including the movies where Gene was involved in the production, but these are in a league of their own. Apologies for the length of this comment!
At it's core, Star Trek is about man's struggle with our darker impulses, and understanding our role in a barely understood universe. A key theme is accepting that our understanding of universe, no matter how advanced our science or technology may seem, is still in its infancy. The JJ Abrams line of Trek films is that it really only pays lip service to these ideals.
The most obvious example I can give is the perpetually unbelievable, unexplained escalation of technology and threat. All three of the Abrams' Trek movies revolve around these unexplained technological threats that are an immense leap forward in technology, but I'll focus on Beyond.
Comparing Beyond to Undiscovered Country; the central threat to both movies is a rogue element with some form of advanced weapon or technology. In Undiscovered Country the threat to peace is a Klingon bird-of-prey that can fire while cloaked. In the Trek setting this is a superweapon. Cloaking technology is clearly understood, its strengths and weaknesses are defind. While cloaked, a ship cannot travel at warp speed, fire weapons, or raise shields; they are undetectable but exposed.
The ability to fire while cloaked isn't a doomsday scenario; it's not going to wipe out planets or space stations. While a devastating technology, its strengths and weaknesses are clearly explained and demonstrated in the film. This technology doesn't defy any of the known and understood constants of the Trek universe without explanatio. Perhaps most importantly of all, this technology seems to be designed to compliment the core conflict of the story; a rogue Klingon using subterfuge in an effort to prevent peace, avoid blame, and frame the Federation.
The threat in Beyond is a swarm of navigable, nearly indestructible drones, capable of shredding through a star ship, and possibly a space station. This technology is largely unexplained, and violates not just the constants of the Trek universe without justification, but even our modern understanding of science.
For instance, we can clearly see those drones shearing cleanly through the Enterprise's hull. The drones do not appear to suffer any damage, or even lose momentum while seemingly effortlessly cleaving through the hull. From this, we can only infer that these drones are constructed from sort of undiscovered super-dense material, but this is never questioned or explained. Why are none of the science or engineering officers puzzled at this new marvel of technology? No one stops to consider what this technology, produced on a mass scale, would do in the larger universe.
The writers don't want you to think about it, because it's a big dumb action movie, and I enjoyed it as a big dumb action movie, but it's not Star Trek. I believe that is what Tom means when he said it's not cerebral.
"The JJ Abrams line of Trek films is that it really only pays lip service to these ideals."
Should've been "The JJ Abrams line of Trek Films only pay lip service to these ideals." I cut and merged a couple of sentences to try and make it cleaner, but didn't proofread! Mea culpa.
It was kind of hard to follow, but did Kirk and Chekhov actually fire their phasers into the warp core? I don't really see how a I think that was probably the moment I actually asked my girlfriend if she was sure this was a Star Trek movie. The destruction of a warp core on a planet's surface would basically be akin to setting off a nuke. Colossally stupid.
With that said, I have no problem at all with making an action Trek franchise. My problem is this franchise is now using "sciency" words like "gravitational slip stream" to explain their action sets, which is pretty antithetical to Star Trek.
I also cringed a bit when Christian said that the TV series were more lightweight than the movies, because that's not my experience. I honestly don't think that TOS has aged well, either in its production or in its depiction of issues, but TNG and DS9 have an incredible weight behind a majority of their episodes. The stuff happening in "Far Beyond the Stars" in DS9 (granted, an exceptional episode) has a weight that wouldn't be matched by Hollywood for another decade, and it makes the reboot movies look like Punch and Judy sometimes.
I should note that I was speaking specifically of TOS. I have tried to make it clear that my understanding of the universe is almost entirely confined to the movies, and TOS from my childhood since my dad liked that show. (My dad got me a record player for Christmas one year, and the album I chose to test it out with was his copy of "The Transformed Man"...I said,"Ooh! Star Trek!" He said, "uh.")
So when I talked about it being more lightweight, I was thinking about the tone of the original shows as a memory from my childhood. I am very up front about the fact that I only have a passing familiarity with TNG and almost no knowledge of DS9 (I was a Bablyon 5 dude, as it turns out). Most of what I know is from the movies.
That said, I think the things Roddenberry was going for in TOS aren't lightweight in retrospect. You might could say he was a sci-fi Norman Lear at that stage. So I probably should have conceded that point when it came to contending about the cerebral with Tom.
I understand that everybody is cringing when I try to explain how the more thoughtful elements of this movie--thoughts about being lost, about unity, and how the directionless of space in the middle of a five-year exploratory mission might impact both of those things--made a difference to me. Maybe me contending with Tom on the word 'cerebral' is a matter of semantics, and I just should have chosen my own word.
I hardly think that the elements you mention above, especially in your second paragraph, are that much loftier than what is being attempted in this movie. Or, perhaps more to the point, were executed with such greater aplomb as to make this thing just a big dumb action movie with no cerebral elements whatsoever. I think you're succumbing to nostalgia, frankly, and being unfair to some of the ideas put forth in the new movies. I realize this makes me into a naif in the eyes of you all who cringe when I try to defend what the script and actors are trying to do, and I concede below to Gormongous that I probably should have conceded that point about Roddenberry to Tom, but still I think being utterly dismissive of those elements of this script is, if not cringeworthy, is certainly worthy of head-scratching.
I would agree with you that the overall emotional tone of TOS was lighter than these movies, but only because these movies are so "grimdark." I also think that was a key element to TOS! Star Trek is and has always been meant to be optimistic and hopeful about the future.
To put it another way, Roddenberry's Star Trek always took the progressive hopeful outlook, but their outlook was a conclusion derived from rational, logical justifications. In these movies, on the other hand, the outlook is perpetually dark until the script calls for the actor to deliver a seemingly heartfelt message about family, or overcoming adversity.
Roddenberry appealed to your mind in hopes of swaying you toward his optimism. Abrams appeals to your emotions.
I really like that last bit in this post, Matthew. Especially in light of where the other, "original" script, was supposed to go.
I can appreciate the appeal of ponderous subjects like feeling lost or isolated, the importance of unity and camaraderie. I'm not saying that these don't exist, or that they're not interesting. I would, however, argue that I don't think this movie does it particularly well, and I think that's by design.
I think you're right that the core theme of this movies are aimlessness, isolation, and the struggle to belong. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, or that it's not potentially interesting. However, I would argue that they weren't particularly interesting in this movie, that it was only lightly sprinkled in through expository dialogue, and it's a very shallow, surface-level examination of these subjects.
The reason I contrasted it to The Undiscovered Country is because, before yesterday, I thought it was one of the less interesting Trek movies, but watching Beyond actually gave me a new appreciation of how measured and well designed it was. TUC was an allegory for the Cold War, and everything about the movie reinforced this. The fire-while-cloaked bird-of-prey was explicitly designed to emulate a nuclear submarine, and reinforced the dangers of a rogue villain like Chang.
When compared to the technological threats from the latest movies, I can find no connection or meaning. They needed to introduce some form of new technology to propel the conflict, I can understand that, but why shredder drones? How do shredder drones reinforce loneliness, aimlessness, or the quest to belong? What are the implications of shredder drones?
The conclusion I drew from it is the writers didn't think about it, and they didn't want us to either. Does it build tension? Sure, but it's not very interesting.
You can call me dismissive or nostalgic, but I think that is a very shallow understanding of my points, and this movie.
P.S. Sorry for the repetitive first couple paragraphs. I actually meant to cut the second. My English is not the best.
