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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    ... why does this feel like we're going to have to sit through another plot where the main character is a broken old man sitting around waiting to die? Other than the hints of the omnipresent misery that defines Kurtzman and Chabon's imitation-brand Star Trek, this almost looks promising. I'm not going to get my hopes up, though. I've been burned by this stuff too many times already.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The name of that someone is "Sir Patrick Stewart". He's an activist and a very progressive one at that. His views are actually quite well-aligned with the morals of Star Trek as a whole, which has always strongly advocated for social justice causes. Unfortunately, the writers gave him a lot of creative input on Star Trek: Picard and that seems to have contributed significantly to the show's problems. The show's first season is very much Stewart's ten episode soapbox diatribe about American and British xenophobia and isolationism, Brexit, and discrimination against minorities. On a high level, it's 100% consistent with Star Trek's overriding themes and message. They just did an absolutely terrible job with the delivery, to the extent that the show's moral is often at odds with the show's story, basic science, and/or common sense. Since season two is supposedly angling to be an even less subtle diatribe about contemporary society, I expect the writing to be every bit as unworkable. Ah, yes... Robert Beltran was very unhappy with Star Trek: Voyager and his role in it. His main reasons for signing up to play Chakotay were that he would be playing opposite celebrated film actress Geneviève Bujold, and that Chakotay was supposed to be far more aggressive and adversarial towards Janeway as the leader of the ship's Maquis contingent. Bujold quit after just two days of filming because she was unable to adjust to the stricter, faster-paced production environment and her role was recast. Executive meddling from UPN also completely declawed Voyager's premise. The network wanted TNG 2.0, and so its premise was retooled to avoid the longer story arcs that'd worked so well for DS9, to lighten the tone considerably, and to remove the interpersonal conflicts between the Starfleet and Maquis members of Voyager's crew. You can see some of the vestiges of the original concept in "Parallax", "Worst Case Scenario" and "The Year of Hell". As a result, Chakotay was left in plot with little or nothing to do since he was supposed to be butting heads with Janeway on a daily basis as the leader of the Maquis. Instead, to Beltran's disgust, they made Chakotay into glorified extra and Janeway's right hand man. He's also gone on record a number of times to attest that he found the writing surrounding his character's Native American background often veered into racist territory. UPN had hired Jackie Marks AKA "Jamake Highwater" as a consultant on Native American culture. Where this became a problem for Voyager and for Beltran was that Jackie Marks was not a Native American. He was a Jewish man of Eastern European descent born and raised in LA, who adopted a stereotypically Native American-sounding penname and falsely claimed Cherokee and Blackfoot ancestry in order to help his writing career and later to receive grant money earmarked for Native Americans under false pretenses. He's been outed nine years earlier, but somehow UPN missed that little detail... and Marks's knowledge of Native American culture could best be described as an unholy mélange of early 90's new age spiritualism and things he remembered seeing on old western films and TV serials. So, to his great disgust, Beltran was stuck reading dialog written with Marks's consultation and feeling every bit like he was wearing redface while doing it. Oh, living there is outrageously expensive... but that's a function of property values (rent or mortgage), for the most part. The area differential between much of the midwest and SoCal in terms of rent/mortgage costs is easily 50%, and often more. ... well, either a Riker-centric version or the inevitable adult film parody will have a ready made title in Star Trek: Pound Town if they go that route.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Overall, I feel like Star Trek: Picard gives the impression of a series that's just going through the motions. Star Trek: Discovery, for all its many faults, feels like a series where the showrunners are actually trying quite hard but consistently miss the mark because they never took the time to understand their audience and its expectations. They just keep plowing ahead with all the wrongheaded self-assurance of a conspiracy theorist. For its part, Star Trek: Picard's presentation feels distinctly halfhearted. The production values are shockingly low for a series with such a gargantuan reported budget, and it keeps showing up in bizarrely high visibility ways like the terrible visual design, the weirdly low-quality and poorly-composited CG effects, etc. There's nothing quite so telling about how far standards have fallen in the time Kurtzman and Chabon have had stewardship of the franchise as fans getting excited about the series using Star Trek Online updates of TNG ship designs because they actually look like Star Trek designs. (One has to wonder why they didn't just update the textures on the already well-traveled CG models of the actual TNG ship classes. Starfleet doesn't exactly just usher working ships out the door... the Excelsior and Miranda classes were a century old during the Dominion War and still putting in good work.) Aside from shifting funds from Picard to Discovery under the table or getting fleeced on location shooting fees, the only other possibility I can think of for why the show looks like complete arse most of the time is that they got Robert Beltran'd by actors who didn't actually want to appear. (Robert Beltran made several attempts to get himself fired from his role on Star Trek: Voyager by maliciously demanding increasingly outrageous salary increases between seasons, only to be thwarted each time as UPN met his demands without any complaints.) With so many Star Trek veterans, they can probably get away with some pretty outrageous demands for compensation. Even in Los Angeles, $25 a plate is well into middle-tier sitdown restaurant territory. It'd be one thing if this 10 Forward: the Experience were a recreation of the 10 Forward fans are familiar with from TNG or the TNG movies like the Quark's Bar in the now-defunct Star Trek: the Experience in Las Vegas... but this is just an utterly generic-looking American bar like the 602 Club set used in Star Trek: Enterprise. It also might get a pass if those photo ops were photos with the cast members fans actually give a flip about. Or even if Star Trek: Picard had a merchandise line worthy of attention beyond cheap wine sold at a huge markup because of a novelty "collectible" bottle, given that they're promoting "exclusive" merch. But this is food truck food at a generic looking theme pub in a Los Angeles arts district rental office space. At the hotel most SD Con attendees use in the Los Angeles fashion district, $26'll you get a steak dinner with two sides and a non-alcoholic beverage at the hotel restaurant. The more upscale options nearby aren't significantly more expensive either. Food truck food and cheap pub ambeance at hotel restaurant steak dinner prices? Someone must be mad.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I've heard that rumor a number of times, in connection with the news reports about Netflix's dissatisfaction with Kurtzman's constant overspending on Discovery's first and second seasons. It would not surprise me. Picard's second season was filmed while we were still more or less at peak pandemic. All in all, I can't imagine that filming on location was that expensive when most locations would've been desperate for ANYONE to show up. Likewise, I'd have a hard time believing they paid out significantly for hotel reservations given that Picard was filmed at Santa Clarita Studios in Santa Clarita, CA and all of their on-location filming was within easy driving distance of the studio: Chateau Picard was the Sunstone Villa and Winery in Santa Ynez, a two hour drive from the studio (171km) Vasquez Rocks, playing itself, is a mere 30 minutes from the studio (31.1km) Starfleet Headquarters was the Anaheim Convention Center, an hour and a half from the studio (112km) Starfleet Archive Museum was the College of the Canyons campus in Santa Clarita, not even ten minutes from the studio (<5km) Daystrom Institute interior shots were the Sony Pictures Plaza in Culver City, about an hour's drive from the studio (58.8km) Daystrom Institute exterior shots were filmed at Golden Cove beach in Rancho Palos Verdes, about an hour and a half from the studio (91.5km) Vashti Colony was the Mexican Street backlot at Universal Studios, half an hour from the studio (44.8km) Stardust City exterior shots were also filmed at the Hollywood CityWalk right next to Universal Studios, half an hour from the studio (45.5km) The Nightbox Bar was Jillian's Bowling Alley at the Hollywood CityWalk, half an hour from the studio The Troi-Riker household was on the Universal Studios backlot, a log cabin originally made for The Great Outdoors, half an hour from the studio (44.8km) The world where The Admonition was located (Aia) was the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch in Santa Clarita, less than 20 minutes from the studio (12.4km) Coppelius Station, A.I. Soong's residence, was a private residence on Rambla Pacifico Street in Malibu, an hour's drive from the studio (73.6km) Santa Ynez was the farthest-afield they went by a pretty significant margin. The only one who had to leave California for filming was Jonathan Frakes, since the Zheng He's bridge was a redress of the USS Discovery bridge set at Pinewood Toronto Studios in Canada, on the other side of the continent. Even that was cost-economized because it was done while Frakes was present there to direct an episode of Discovery's third season. EDIT: I should add that this is not an indictment of their method... if anything, I'm actually quite impressed by the efficiency of their operation here in terms of finding all the locations they needed within two hours of the studio. $25 a head to eat literal food truck food in a hastily-assembled, blue-tinted, TGI Friday's knockoff as part of a two-hour sales pitch for Star Trek: Picard's lackluster wine collection with "photo ops"? Seriously. Food truck food. We can't make this sh*t up. Someone at Paramount is taking the piss. Possibly the entire company.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    In all seriousness, it really is bizarre and off-putting how bad the design work is on Star Trek: Picard. It's hands-down the second most expensive Star Trek series made to date... but where its sister series Star Trek: Discovery's (admittedly hideous) sets, costumes, makeup, props, and visual effects look like they blew the entirety of the show's gargantuan budget on making it look impressive, Star Trek: Picard looks like they could barely spare any money on anything that wasn't on-location filming. The La Sirena set is so dull and so spartan that it could easily be mistaken for a warehouse if the helm console and chairs weren't in the frame. Most of the UI is bad CG effects, so the sets look even duller with none of Star Trek's usual backlit displays and blinking lights. They couldn't even be bothered to redress the one crew quarters set, so Picard has to live in a holosuite that's conveniently recreating his home so they could film on location at that cheap winery in Santa Ynez. Costume choices are regular contemporary clothes that look like they came out of the actors own closets for the most part. The props - especialy the phasers - are unmistakably cheap. The La Sirena's armory is full of what appear to be completely modern rifles and pistols with some plastic bits glued to them to disguise their shapes a bit. The new uniform for Starfleet in the first season was clearly a rush job and so poorly tailored it didn't fit anyone properly. Now we've got a new season set in almost the present day, so the props are mostly off-the-shelf and sets are looking like mostly unmodified location shots. Combine that with a noticeable dip in the quality of the digital VFX when the Borg Queen beams over to the Stargazer and you have to wonder where all the money went. So is Star Trek: Picard now. Season two's opener is set a year and a half after Picard's death and the Federation's last second gunship rescue of Coppelius. That means it's in mid-to-late 2400, before they go back in time.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Really, that much could have been addressed with makeup or just hiring an actor who looked like the previous actors who played the Borg Queen... it's actually kind of weird they didn't, since they went to the trouble for Data and he DID have the ability to age. ... that is highly debatable. For my money, the best Star Trek comic or novel is How Much for Just the Planet?... which achieves peak TOS flavor by refusing to take itself or its subject matter seriously and going all-in on camp. (Imagine Kirk and the Klingons visiting a planet where the locals spontaneously break out into choreographed song and dance numbers ala Disney just to mess with you.) It's one of the main reasons that the Star Trek: Titan novel series is basically unreadable. They gave Will Riker the most diverse crew in Starfleet history and any moment not spent on him and Deanna having relationship trouble is spent on him agonizing over whether he's imposing his human beliefs and values on his nonhuman crew. Fans breathed an audible sigh of relief when they decided to leave that sh*t out of Picard AND Lower Decks.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    No. The Star Trek "relaunch" novelverse that picked up where the various Star Trek TV shows and prime timeline movies ended never got that far. The last few books released for the TNG, DS9, and VOY relaunch series were set in 2382, five years before the destruction of Romulus that precipitated the creation of the Kelvin timeline and Star Trek 2009. AFAIK only Star Trek Online, which was its own alternate universe setting separate from the novelverse, actually made it to and past the point of Romulus's destruction with the present day there being in the early 25th century. You have no idea how relieved I am to say that the answer to that is also "No". Star Wars ran into issues with throwing out its licensed novels, comics, etc. because they were canon or pseudocanon until Disney pitched them and started over. But for a brief period right after TOS, the Star Trek franchise's official canon policy has always been that only the TV shows and movies are canon. The licensee-created works like the novels, comics, and video games are non-canon and some unofficially or implicitly style themselves as alternate universe stories (e.g. Star Trek Online). Few, if any, fans are all that upset that the relaunch novelverse is on indefinite hiatus because of Discovery and Picard. Most will quite cheerfully admit that a lot of the novels and most of the comics are frankly awful and borderline unreadable unless you're a die-hard fan, infested as they are with terrible fanfic-tier writing. No, the Star Trek fandom's grievances with Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard are motivated entirely by the quality (or lack thereof) and content of those shows. I can't imagine there are any Star Trek fans out there on the warpath because Paramount disregarded wonderful story arcs like "Janeway becomes the Borg Queen and destroys Pluto", "Bajoran archaeologists discover atheist scripture (no really) and society loses its collective sh*t", "Will Riker of the USS White Man's Burden", or "Trip Tucker, Secret Agent". 🤣 Unlikely, IMO... especially given that Discovery's second season basically borrowed most of its plot from the DS9 relaunch's Control story arc. I suspect no other motive besides the novels being non-canon already and frankly awful in the eyes of fans and casual readers alike.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Considering they apparently spent big to bring back John de Lancie, I'm interested to know why they didn't bring back either of the actresses who've previously played the Borg Queen in First Contact or on Voyager... ... and, for that matter, why does the Borg Queen look old now? She's not a person, she's an artificial construct that with barely any biological components that the Borg assemble on an as-needed basis.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    So... if that trailer was meant to entice fans back into watching, then mission failed. This is enough to make me go sign that petition that's going around to have Paramount classify all Kurtzman-era Trek non-canon. This looks like ARSE. Especially that Borg Queen makeup. The Borg Queen makeup and visual effects from Star Trek: Voyager looked infinitely more convincing and impressive than this sad mess, and that effects technology is now over twenty-five years old! This Borg Queen looks like costume, makeup, and effects are so unmistakably cheap that they look like they'd be more at home on Red Dwarf IX: Back to Earth or an episode of Power Rangers than a Star Trek series that supposedly has $8 million per episode to play with. If you told me this was actually a cosplayer who coincidentally wandered onto the set in a costume and makeup of their own design, I'd believe you. But I guess that's on brand for the Picard series. The Borg makeup and effects in the first season looked like something out of a mid-90's PC game cutscene too. The writing clearly says "We remember First Contact was the last time anyone liked Jean-Luc Picard as a character", and the decision to ape First Contact's story with a time travel plot to just after the present day says "we needed to film this season as cheaply as possible". All in all, I would be absolutely floored if this series hadn't received a VERY large budget cut between this season and the last. Either that or they couldn't get a budget approved for season three and are spreading season two's budget across both. There's no way a show this expensive should look this cheap, unless someone is engaging in some "creative accounting". (Bialystock und Bloom~!)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Given that the New UN Forces are using twenty or so factory satellites to produce hundreds of warships a year and not using anywhere near the full capacity of those facilities, I'd assume that the individual factory satellites set up to manufacture warships are likely producing them at a pretty respectable clip. The rate probably goes down the larger and more complex the ships get, but I'd assume that warship factories are likely churning out hundreds of ships a year.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nah. Attack on Titan needed an ending that brought actual closure to the story. Instead, there's a 30-gambit pileup as the different flavors of genocidal fascist in the story turn on each other that is almost immediately capped by... But the author still wants Eren to be sympathetic, and thus tries to excuse him becoming a Complete Monster by revealing... We're apparently supposed to be sad for him when Mikasa and co. finally catch up to him and she... And, of course, the aftermath of it all proves that nobody in the story learned a goddamn thing... The ending doesn't offer any real closure for any of the characters, it doesn't really do anything to resolve any of the mysteries surrounding the Titans themselves or the ontological nonsense surrounding their connections to the Eldian royal family, and it absolutely doesn't offer any hope for the future. The last chapter all but directly states it's all going to keep happening over and over again... Basically, the story doesn't so much end as it does just drunkenly lurch to a halt and the aftermath leaves only the uncomfortable realization that the closest Attack on Titan has to a character who isn't running on black-and-also-black morality is... And that's completely horrible too, when the distance between your protagonist and final antagonist is simply a matter of disagreeing...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Other way around, actually. Fantastic Beasts was originally planned as a trilogy, but after the first one they announced they were going to do five of them.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Not unless you're really really bored. As Star Trek novels go, the writing's actually not that bad.* They're a long way from "great", but the main problem with both The Last Best Hope and The Dark Veil is that the writers (Una McCormack and James Swallow) spent most of their respective books frantically tying the story in knots in their efforts to introduce, explain, and justify the various pants-on-head idiotic parts of Star Trek: Picard's setting. The ill-advised decision to not retcon the Kelvin Trek movies out of existence by incorporating the destruction of Romulus into PIC's storyline proved to be a huge mistake in the TV series, but the implications are way worse in the novels. The only way the writers could justify the infamously cunning Romulan Star Empire being wiped out by the its homeworld's sun going supernova was for the entire Romulan government to be Too Dumb To Live on a level that makes even the dimmest Pakled would find deeply concerning. The lemming-like determination the Romulan Senate, Tal Shiar, and Zhat Vash show in suppressing and dismissing any concerns about the impending destruction of Romulus by supernova is a truly bizarre thing to behold. It's so nonsensical that you could be forgiven for wondering if the Romulans actually hate Picard for interrupting some kind of species-wide ritualistic mass suicide. They know their world is doomed. They know that it's going to be destroyed SOON. But even though they're still on the planet that's about to be destroyed, they keep doing everything in their power to hinder their own efforts to evacuate. The Tal Shiar spends its time abducting and torturing scientists to get them to retract their analyses of the timetable of their star's destruction, while the Zhat Vash launch a major operation to commit an act of war against the Federation and destroy the Starfleet rescue armada that an enormous percentage of their population are depending on for evacuation for the flimsiest possible reason. In hindsight, it makes both Picard and the 2009 Kelvin Trek movie absolutely ridiculous. In what way is anything Picard's fault? The Romulans did absolutely everything they could to kill themselves en masse and succeeded spectacularly. Nero's complaint now makes NO sense, given that the Federation DID send substantial aid to Romulus and only stopped because the Romulans sabotaged shipyard servicing the humanitarian fleet. Personally, I suspect a TNG-era Picard would suspect PIC-era Picard was some kind of alien imposter or a terrible prank being played by Q. * Which is Damned by Faint Praise, at best. Next to turds like Shatner's The Return**, almost any licensed novel would come away smelling of roses. ** A book that is already terrible for being Shatner's attempt to permanently settle the Kirk vs. Picard debate in his own favor, made worse by the realization that Shatner originally pitched it to Paramount as a Star Trek movie script after Generations.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    So... Star Trek: Picard now has three tie-in novels out that attempt to explain the show's backstory. They aren't great, which is expected given that they're basically Fix Fics intended to justify or handwave the dumber bits of writing in Picard season one... ultimately making the story worse, not better. The Last Best Hope Sets up Picard, Musiker, Maddox, and Jurati's backstories. The Dark Veil Riker and Troi's backstory. Nothing of any actual relevance happens, really. Rogue Elements Rios's backstory. It could best be summed up as "All those jokes about him being a walking collection of slightly racist Latinx stereotypes and a terribly obvious ripoff of Han Solo were surprisingly on the nose." All in all, pretty disappointing offerings that do more to undermine the show's story than anything. Only the first book actualy has much to do with setting up the series, and there's precious little in terms of takeaways except that Picard is so self-obsessed that he not only blames himself for things that he had no control over, he blames himself for things that don't involve him at all AND believes that he is so utterly indispensible that Starfleet will buck the orders of the Federation government to do his bidding. (It really lends something to the criticism of PIC Picard as an entitled old man manipulating everyone with sob stories because he's upset that he's no longer relevant or influential.) Raffi's tragic backstory turns out to be entirely her own fault, which would actualy have made her arc in the series more poigniant if she hadn't laid all the blame for her actions on "JL".
  15. Seto Kaiba
    He's currently 81 years old... so if he looks old, he's earned it.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Got caught up on The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest... and I swear if there's an actual direction to this plot, I can't grasp it. Six episodes in and the first major story arc just sort of ends without any real fanfare or sense of anything being accomplished. Perhaps it's because the protagonist is just so stupidly overpowered that nothing in the plot is any more than the most trifling inconvenience to him, but the story was at least starting to toy with subverting the whole unstoppably-overpowered protagonist schtick with a partially developed subplot about part of the difference being a major drop in the level of basic competence in magic since his past life. Then they kind of just abandon it so he can go do generic adventurer things elsewhere.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm still keen to see where this one is headed... and obscurely pleased that a few of Newt's critters got posters of their own.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    This makes me very happy indeed. Getting caught up on the various new titles now that I've finally found some free time. In the Land of Leadale's still form letter isekai fantasy... and, six episodes in, I have a distinct feeling that either the production committee cut the budget or Maho Film lost interest in this one. The production quality was never great on this one, but the number of off-model moments increased dramatically. It's not too bad yet but there are some really jarring moments where characters faces are radically different shapes shot-to-shot. Caena's granddaughter gets hit with it real hard. The plot's still a mess too. A main plot thread Ceez stole from Overlord gets forgotten completely when Caena, who had set out into the world partly to see if there were any other players left alive, runs into another player out of the blue and completely forgets about her own motivation. The plot changes gears so often, and with such an audible clunk each time, that it feels like an anecdote being related by an exciteable child.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    It's definitely not going to the writers, that's for sure... Given the badly-rendered CG cyber-tentacles criss-crossing the bridge in that scene, it looks like a very safe bet that we're seeing the Borg Queen hijacking another Starfleet ship. Given that we know this entire season takes place in an altered past where Earth is evil, that means the Borg Queen likely took it into the past. It's looking unpleasantly like this is going to be a literally low budget remake of First Contact.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    What in the hell did I just watch? It looks for all the world like Star Trek: Picard's showrunners decided that the best way to promote the series would be to show a bunch of badly-constumed extras coming out of a turbolift, running down a badly lit hallway that looks like something out of Alien: Covenant, and getting into another turbolift. This looks like a f***ing fan-film. And not one of the good ones either. Paramount's supposedly spending ~$8M per episode... where the hell is it going if the series looks this amateurish? Are we watching Patrick Stewart's Springtime for Hitler? Was he so reluctant to return that the entire budget is being spent on retaining him, Jeri Ryan, and Lohn de Lancie?
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it's more likely than him making a Star Trek movie... Why not solve two problems and kill off Pine's Kirk again, but permanently this time? Or, better yet, just retcon the entire Kelvin timeline out of existence at the end of Kelvin Trek 4. Have the Federation Temporal Agency and/or Temporal Integrity Commission roll up to fix Nero's mess with the help of the Enterprise crew and Ret Gone the Narada before it can attack the Kelvin. Then none of that sh*t has to happen and they can retool the timeline to make the characters less unpleasant to watch.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It does a bit, yeah... It'd probably have helped matters if Abrams had gone into his bastardization of Star Trek with a plan for a story arc. The original six Star Trek movies have some overarching themes that help link them up into a rough story arc about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy coming to terms with growing older and Kirk having to confront true no-win scenarios and accept loss. The Kelvin Trek movies don't really have anything like that... which might hurt the fourth installment, since it doesn't really have anything to build on.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... hm... really, I feel like that's almost a symptom of a deeper, more fundamental problem with the character. The James T. Kirk of the official Star Trek timeline was a decent, upstanding, highly principled man and a hard worker. The James T. Kirk of the Kelvin timeline is a sh*theel. And not even a capable sh*theel, come to that. His (dubious) achievements are mostly attributable to a combination of riding his dead hero father's coattails and nepotism from his father's friend Captain Christopher Pike. He's infuriating because most of us have known someone exactly like him. He's that one brainless jock who peaked in, and mentally never left, high school. The one who gets admitted to college as a legacy and joins the frat his father belonged to in order to spend his days drinking cheap beer, smoking pot, and trying to pick up every girl who'll give him the time of day while trusting his father's connections to keep him from being expelled or worse. He's unprofessional and his rank is undeserved, but that's really just a symptom of the fact that he's so painfully underdeveloped as a character that he's mostly just a flat character mindlessly going through the motions of Kirk's backstory armed with only the jokes Star Trek fans have always made about the behavior of Shatner's Kirk. To be frank, it's just lazy writing. The studio wanted an origin story, but for some reason they felt compelled to make it a shared origin story for ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE instead of for the main character. So there's a lot of moon logic in play to make it work. Hrm... I disagree, for one main reason. From its inception, Star Trek's Starfleet was always intended to be at-most Mildly Military. Gene and co. were insistent even in the early development of the original Star Trek that Starfleet was a non-military space exploration service. A future analogue of NASA (and the Soviet space program). That aspect actually got carried forward throughout the prime timeline clear to the end of Enterprise, with references to Starfleet being an outgrowth of the United Earth Space Probe Agency. It wasn't until Nicholas Meyer took the helm in Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan that Starfleet started adopting the trappings of modern navies with any real devotion. Of course, those trappings also disappeared when he left because the creators working on the TV shows and most of the movies were following the originally laid-down concept that Starfleet was the Federation's space agency not its armed forces. That idea also got carried through into Enterprise, where there was a clear distinction drawn between Earth Starfleet's personnel and the Earth military's MACOs. It's not that the production staffs of the pre-Kelvin Star Trek works didn't know how the military works... it's that they were specifically NOT depicting Starfleet as a military. It's not a bug, it's a feature. What Abrams did was just take that to its illogical extreme with a Designated Hero who has to be The Captain because he's famous in the real world as Captain Kirk, not Cadet Kirk, so the plot bends over backwards and makes confetti out of common sense to make it happen.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Odd thought... if they wanted to do Kelvin Trek 4 as a comedy-focused story like Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home, Seth MacFarlane would actually be a pretty good fit given his work on The Orville. I might actually go see that in theaters if they did it. I know it's been said that they've thrown out several story treatments for Kelvin Trek 4 because the studio rejected them or actors were unavailable/too expensive...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    If the only thing that entertains you is mindless violence, you need help. Badly. The arts do not exist purely to entertain, artistic expression is a form of communication and education. Star Trek has always been political, always been driven by social commentary, to the extent that it would not be even a slight exaggeration to say that that is very much The Point of the franchise. How subtle it's been about it has varied over the years, but it has always been driven by that. If that bothers you, then Star Trek isn't for you and it never will be. Y'see, Star Trek's creators were/are educated people... people who paid enough attention in their history, political science, and civics classes to know that western democracies aren't exactly different in that regard. Imperialist western democracies like the US, Great Britain, etc. have perpetrated just as many horrors as the "Communist" or fascist autocracies... in many cases the exact same horrors attributed to the Communists, as a hostile joint venture with them in the great zero-sum game that was the Cold War. Star Trek is not exactly a subtle voice on that topic. Indeed, there's hardly any bit of scenery without toothmarks once they really get going about the Cold War. They, and indeed most Star Trek fans, would find your argument here hilariously hypocritical. Doubly so since you profess your favorite Trek movie is Undiscovered Country... you're basically making the exact same unconvincing argument as Cartwright or Chang, the villains of the piece. Nobody in this universe - or any other - cares. For the record, Paramount has tried going the "dumb action movie" route with Star Trek several times in the past and it has never ended well for them It was the cause of two of the three worst financial disasters in the franchise's history: Star Trek: Nemesis and Star Trek: Beyond. Might be four for five given Paramount+'s significant losses, poor reviews, and slow-to-minimal merchandise returns for Discovery and Picard as well. Yeah, that's definitely been a spanner in the works for new Trek. Though, IMO, the reason that's such a problem is because [CBS/ViacomCBS/Paramount] insisted on retrying ideas that they knew from past experience didn't work. It's a big universe. All they needed to do was put enough space - literal and/or chronological - between the new developments and previous material to prevent any crossover and the creative staff would have had a lot more freedom to work. A lot of new Trek's problems - especially with the Kelvin movies - stem from trying to simultaneously hold existing material at arm's length and lean on it to drive sales. If they'd either just made a new main timeline Trek movie or done a straight AU story focused on an all new group of original characters they'd be in better condition than they are now because they would either be able to lean on continuity fully or dispense with it fully and do their own thing. By trying to have it both ways, they're trying to run a marathon while dragging a bicycle behind them. Seth MacFarlane has, at least, proven that you can do something that respects the spirit of Star Trek without any direct connection to existing material as long as you have decent writing behind it. Kelvin Trek 4 - or Star Trek XIV - is probably not going to get made, IMO. If it does, I expect it'll run afoul of the same problems that sank the previous three because Paramount doesn't learn from its mistakes anymore. I dunno... Mel Brooks kind of lost his touch as time went on. The remake of The Producers was pretty weak stuff compared to the original.
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