Sunday 27 January 2013

On J.J. Abrams and Star Wars...

I’m sure you’ve all heard the news by now; if not well J.J. Abrams has been tapped to direct Star Wars ‘Episode VII’. Abrams is famously known for his rebooting of the Star Trek franchise, as well as being responsible for things like Lost and Alias, so of course the fandom is all a flutter over the guy controlling the two biggest Sci-Fi properties to coming out of the states. Naturally being both a lifelong Star Wars geek and a Trekkie, some people immediately wanted my take on this, and I feel this is a good idea for a post!

Okay to start with I feel I should clarify my stance on ‘Star Trek’ (by which I mean the Abrams film, just for your FYI if I’m referring to original Trek it’s be TOS), specifically my thoughts and feelings about this film as a big fan of the franchise. For starters let’s just say I liked the film for the most part, but for me it wasn’t something to shout about. If I were to rate it, 10 being ‘Wrath of Khan’/’First Contact’ and 1 being ‘Final Frontier’/’Nemesis’ then it’ll probably be about 5.5-6.5. Overall for me it was a good fun movie, but I’m not entirely sure it was a ‘Trek’ movie. It seemed like they were trying to both reinvent the wheel1 which was a little grating but I felt they needed to point these things out for plot relevance2, which I felt in some cases was redundant.

Another big concern is that they seemed to not know how to be, well, scientific. One of the most important plot devices in the entire movie surrounds this big blob of .. well red, which we find out that when it is ejected into the core of a planet has the capability of turning it into a ‘Black Hole’. Okay, finally wrapped your head around that? Good, because this truly terrifying substance3 is called by the highly technical name of “Transmogrifying Sub-atomic Black Hole Paste”... nah, but you might wish it was because it’s just called “Red Matter”... What. The. Fuck. Okay, I know they wanted to move away from the ‘Technobabble’, but come on that’s just being lazy. And why does this monstrosity exist? J.J. loves the red ball. If *urgh* “Red Matter” returns in ‘Into Darkness’, I’m hanging up my space suit4.

Okay I can possibly, maybe, unlikely, forgive all that if it weren’t for the one thing that just bugged me the fucking most... James Tiberius Kirk. Now I wasn’t as big a fan of TOS as I was TNG or DS9, but I know my damn Kirk and he wasn’t it. Okay, I’ll admit off the bat there is only one scene and one moment I believed Chris Pine was Kirk, and that’s right at the very end when he enters the bridge in his captain’s uniform (we’ll get to that later). Throughout the entire movie, Pine has absolutely none of the subtle nuisances or personality that made up Kirk, even a proto-Kirk, which in comparison to the rest of the cast did a superb job in channelling their characters and making them their own. Kirk whining and being a jerk just didn’t sell him to me, and he was the fucking main character next to Spock. When Kirk finally mans up and takes the captains chair, it was a relief but then instead of doing his job he teleports over the Romulan ship for a fist fight... wtf mate! Okay I know a lot has to do with the script and the direction, and I know Pine could be Kirk even if it’s for less than a minute at the end, but taking an entire movie to get there just wasn’t a great move imho. Oh and wtf Starfleet, promoting a washout rookie to Captain??? Okay so he saved Earth, it doesn’t mean you promote Batman to be the fucking President, especially he Batranged the previous President in the face and punched congress in the dick just because he stopped the Joker. That part just felt so wrong, especially I bet most of the crew still think he’s a fucking jerk who doesn’t respect that whole pesky ‘chain of command’ bullshit. It’s like “Okay he IS Thor’s kid and he saved ONE planet, but do I have to salute the prick even though I’ve spent that last 15 years in a uniform and he’s barely out of the academy???”

Wow talk about going on a tangent. So yeah I’m concerned about Star Wars. Not to say I know of anyone who could do it better, although I know a lot that could do it worse. I’m afraid this is just some bullshit stunt-casting to try and drum up news and drama with the whole “STAR TREK DIRECTOR MAKES STAR WARS OMG!!!!11.” I’m also hoping he might take his head out of this ass long enough to not try to put his ‘stamp’ on the franchise and try to make something more in line of a continuation... although I suppose it could be worse, he could include medichlorines. Oh and no ‘lens flares’.

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1 - Case and point with the usage of the Teleporter and having everyone stand perfectly still for half an hour
2 – Again with the Teleporter and Spock’s mom. Although apparently it is capable of teleporting Kirk whilst falling at terminal velocity for fifteen minutes (and wtf happened to inertia?) but if Spock’s mom moves half an inch its “Signal Lost”... *facepalm*
3 - Which by the way the enemy has got enough to possibly wipe out the entire universe of every single planet EVAR!!! If you haven’t seen it... well spoilers... the thing is bigger than a beach ball and it only takes one eye drop to turn a planet into a black hole. Here’s the even more bugnutty part. In a comic book prequel tie-in, which goes into explaining who Nero (the evil Romulan) has such a hard-on for Spock, the reason this stuff exists is to stop a star from going super nova and wiping out Romulus, the Romulan homeworld (which btw has finally achieved peace and reunification with the Vulcans after the events of TNG and Nemesis). So they build a ship that contains the ‘Red Matter’ (*urgh*),  which is piloted by Spock so he can set up the missile to save Romulus and something goes wrong and blah blah blah. Okay I grok that Spock’s ship is designed to contain the ‘Red Matter’ (*urrrgh*), and that Nero needed the ship to get the matter to finally reveal himself to the Jedi and at least he can get revenge. HOWEVER, if they knew that less than a fucking teaspoon of this shit could turn a planet inside out, why the hell did they equip a ship with what I’m informed is technically known as a metric butt-ton? It’s not like the made the whole inside the fucking ship to begin with? Oh and then because all the geniuses at Starfleet Engineering took a fucking break, they decided to not equip the ship with any defensive capabilities beyond the syringe torpedoes (used to inject the crap into the sun) because it’s not like someone is going to steal a defenceless ship full of a substance that destroy fucking galaxies! No I can’t think of anyone at all like the Borg, the Ferengi, the Cardassians, the Dominion, or the numerous other species Starfleet has managed to piss off throughout the centuries, who would dare try to take the ship and quite possibly try to destroy Vulcan or Earth... but I digress.
4 – Oh and if a droplet of this stuff can turn a planet inside out, then why the fuck didn’t the entire galaxy get turned inside out when the giant beach ball blew up inside the Romulan ship??? FFS!

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