My five unpopular fannish opinions meme

[scarfman]

Seen first at antikythera

1. The Voyage Home was not part three of a trilogy. It doesn't continue the theme or the action that united The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock; it contains only token resolutions to that theme and action while its actual main plot is irrelevant to them. And there ought to have been part three of a trilogy.
2. All the Doctor's companions are special. Rose happened to be the first after the Time War, after he can't or won't keep the distance he used to keep.
3. Episodes I-III are not crap. If you don't enjoy them you need to try again with your left brain disengaged, like it was in 1977.
4. Superman is only difficult, not impossible, to write well.
5. (rustyverse said this in his, but you already knew I believe it:) Reenvisioning the original Star Trek is proper and due, and Damon and Sinise would be good in the parts (I can't say about Brody because I don't think I've seen anything with him in it).

Comments

[xwingace]

(Is 2 such and unpopular opinion? I think it rather depends on which end of the fandom you're looking, no?)

Reimagining Trek will be interesting, even if nothing else (and it probably can be so much more...) Casting Sinise appears, to me, to be a stroke of genius: he fits McCoy to a tee. Not quite so sure about Damon, though. He's far too everyman (yes, even in roles like Jason Bourne), to fit Kirk in my opinion.

I've only seen Brody in King Kong, and that doesn't give me any impression on whether or not he'd be able to pull off the dryness of Spock.

XWA

[scarfman]

Is 2 such and unpopular opinion? I think it rather depends on which end of the fandom you're looking, no?

Perhaps. But it needed saying.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Have you seen my concept of how they should have made the Star Trek movies? It's in one of my early LJ posts.

[scarfman]

No. Did you tag it?

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

I think so. This was pretty early in my use of LJ, so I'm not sure. How do I send a URL if I need to find it for you?

[scarfman]

You can post it here, or email me at the @ddress on my profile page.

[billfl.livejournal.com]

Point by point (except #2, which I'm not qualified to judge):

1) I agree partially. They didn't necessarily *need* the events of WoK & SfS to film TVH, but the film does, in my opinion, provide some closure to those events.

3) I don't see why enjoying eps 1-3 and them being crap are mutually exclusive. Anyway, all six films play better if you imagine a guy and two robots at the bottom of the screen making snide comments.

4) Absolutely agree. Add Batman to that for good measure.

5) Mostly agree. I go along with the previous poster in that I have my doubts about Matt Damon as Kirk, but I think Sinese is a perfect fit, and Brody seems like he would be a good Spock.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Point by point:

1. I agree only in that it's not a trilogy. A few years back, my wife and I got the boxed set of all the movies through First Contact. After watching them over the course of a couple of weeks, we realized that everything from The Motion Picture to Generations was one big, extended story arc dealing with Jim Kirk's inability to let go of his glory days and, well, grow up.

2. Yes, exactly.

3. More recently, we watched "The Definitive Version" of the Saga: Episodes I-III, and the most recent revisions of IV-VI. Though I was one of the disenchanted, disillusioned masses when the prequels hit the theaters, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the Saga unfold as a whole. The original three are still better movies, taken individually, than the prequels, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

It's particularly interesting to see how David Prowse's body language from the original movies says something entirely different when you know Anakin's backstory.

4. Oh, but when he's written well, he's still the greatest superhero of all time.

5. Gary Sinise as Leonard McCoy is made of win and awesome.

[scarfman]

one big, extended story arc dealing with Jim Kirk's inability to let go of his glory days and, well, grow up

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Seriously, even if it's your argument that no real person in James T. Kirk's place could or should remain forever filling, or pining for, the niche in life that brought the most accomplishment and fortune, there's still the fact that James T. Kirk isn't a real person. He's an icon, like Superman and James Bond, and that's why - like them - his accomplishment and fortune need not to be associated with a single actor (see my Point 5), who is a real person for whom it would have been creepy not to move on to other things. (And before anyone cites things like Shatner's Kirk novels or his DirecTV ad, I'll point out that (a) there's a difference between failing to move on and milking for all it's worth (b) Shatner has moved on to other things as well.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I did? I didn't mean to!

I like the six-movie story arc, and I like Jim Kirk's role in it. What I was trying to say was that watching them back-to-back ties them together as Kirk's story, and his realization that letting Starfleet promote him to a desk job was the wrong path for his life to take.

The impression I got from ST:TMP and Wrath of Khan was that Starfleet bumped Kirk up to Admiral immediately after he returned from the Five-Year Mission -- despite the fact that, fanonically, he was the youngest captain in Starfleet, and could have conducted at least a couple more 5YMs before settling into a desk job. Instead, it was like putting him out to pasture -- and he chafed at that, rightfully so.

If they'd given Jim The Big Chair for a couple more missions, he would have gracefully accepted flag rank and been a damned fine admiral. Instead, he was chomping at the bit against a bureaucracy that he was NOW PART OF.

[scarfman]

Okay, I get you now. The way you phrased it the first time ("grow up") made it seem to me you felt that what Kirk resented was being expected to act like an adult from his thirties till he died; i.e., while he was, y'know, an adult. But (as you point out now, and I don't think I've articulated it to myself that way before) what he resented was the cutting short of the natural span of the "glory days" phase of his career - that portion for which, as the Federation pesident observes in The Voyage Home, he has the greatest aptitude and provides the greatest service - by being kicked upstairs for (according to novelizations and fanon) political reasons.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

...for (according to novelizations and fanon) political reasons.

The general idea being that he'd done a lot of well-publicized, remarkable high-profile accomplishments during the 5YM, but he'd pissed off too many people (both in the Federation and its adversaries) to be allowed to run around as a loose cannon?

And, yes, I phrased it badly. "Grow old gracefully" might have been better, but still wouldn't have quite been right.

[scarfman]

he'd pissed off too many people (both in the Federation and its adversaries) to be allowed to run around as a loose cannon?

More like, Nogura promoted Kirk to the main office less for operational concerns than to keep Kirk around as a sort of poster boy. Which, if true, backfired gloriously I maintain: Nogura milking Kirk and his successes for publicity seems to have made Starfleet the popular place to be, the in thing to have on a political c.v., attracting not the best and the brightest but the self-serving, and ennabling those already there who may have had tendencies in that direction. The epitome of this is Harry Morrow. That bit about loyalty in his last scene in The Search for Spock is pure Starfleet, and it rolled off Morrow's back like water in the face of the political issue. The Starfleet of Kirk's later career is not the same Starfleet that (to dodge in front of the fourth wall for a clause) Gene created earlier and later, which I'm sure is most of the reason for the ambiguous place Kirk holds in later Starfleet history. Janeway seems unaware of any revisionism but, at least when the Reeves-Stevens or I write him, Picard is smarter than that.

[(Anonymous)]

On your point 5 :
I can't speak to the casting choices, but in my opinion this "re-envisioning … is proper and due" if and only if the spirit of the original is preserved. Otherwise using the names, and whatever of the story and background elements is kept, is a disservice to the audience.
This was my biggest problem with Voyager and much of Enterprise : for them, the "strange new worlds … new life and new civilisations" were obstacles in the way of reaching a predefined goal, whereas for Star Trek they were the goal. If you want a narrowing perspective, rather than a widening one, you're better off with Battlestar Galactica, which does (I think) a much better job, from having less confusion of motives.

--publius--

[breenwood.livejournal.com]

1. Fair enough. Unless, of course, you're looking at it from Spock's perspective, possibly.

2. Well, yes, of course.

3. I don't enjoy them for the simple reason that they don't invoke the simple raw emotion IV-VI do. They are trying to be clever, and failing magnificently. Although at least episode I hadn't *completely* annihilated the humour.

4. Eh. The problem most authors have with Superman is that they don't know how to deal with omnipotence, so they impose false limits on it(Kryptonite!).

5. Hey, they did it with Doctor Who with a certain degree of success. There will be those who hate it (vocally and continuously) but there always are.

[scarfman]

1. Ehhh ... the return of Spock's memory is one of the things I call "token resolution" above. It was demoted from focus to subplot, and wouldn't've been included at all except it was a loose end from the previous film; and all they really did was revive for two hours schtick they'd last been able to use twenty years earlier when the character was new to serving with Earthpeople.

3. The prequels do invoke ("evoke"?) that for me. Well, the label on the meme says "unpopular opinions", but I do think anyone could see what I see with the right mindset.