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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, but most militaries do accept extentuating circumstances if you're taken prisoner or so on... they don't exactly encourage you to do anything to save your skin, but they also don't actively encourage you to do anything in your power to get your *ss shot while being held prisoner. Odds are they do have something like that... which ties into my response to your second point. There probably was something similar to the monitoring station we saw on Snoke's ship that noticed even the momentary flicker in the ship's shields. The First Order, like the Empire before it, ingrains strict (blind) obedience to the military hierarchy into its troops in all divisions of the service. Shield Monitoring Mook A likely saw the shields going down, had a brief "WTF" moment, then saw it was a shield deactivation requested/ordered by Captain Phasma and assumed that if one of the First Order's most senior officers on base was requesting shield deactivation it must be some real sh*t well above their paygrade and questioned it no further. After all, it's not like the Empire or First Order ever encouraged subordinates to ask questions. Drawing attention from one of the most senior officers can be a distinctly unhealthy thing when the chain of command includes unstable psychopaths and magical space monks who can strangle you to death with their mind or chop you into bits with their laser sword with impunity. (I mean, a pair of First Order stormtroopers investigating a disturbance on the detention level at Starkiller Base not only don't investigate an open cell formerly holding a priority prisoner, they practically run away when they notice Darth Tantrum is in there engaging in his vigorous laser sword anger management routine.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Was he? I don't remember him doing much besides whining at Vader and standing around menacingly. Who's going to know? Unless she tells someone herself, literally the only way anyone would find out would be if they were a force user and read her mind, and those are pretty thin on the ground and not part of her normal social circle since her branch of service is normally represented by General Hux. Any access records related to her disabling Starkiller Base's shields went up in smoke with the base itself. They held her at gunpoint and made her deactivate Starkiller Base's shields under the implicit (or perhaps explicit) threat that they'd blow her head off if she didn't. That is the very definition of coercion. I mean, yeah, her actual job is to NOT do that kind of thing but still... If you take the bounty head alive, sure... "storm the place, guns blazing and then pick through the bodies afterwards" doesn't really require much smarts. Boba Fett did have to be warned not to disintegrate the target by Vader. Oh, I'm knocking both... put simply, both the old Star Wars Expanded Universe and the new Disney Star Wars sequel trilogy are the same garbage, just packaged differently. Neither the EU writers nor Disney could conceive of a way to move the story forward without effectively undoing the happy ending of Return of the Jedi. Balance wasn't restored to the Force, the Emperor isn't actually dead, the Empire continues to exist and just retreats a bit from its former key holdings before ultimately reconquering the galaxy, the Republic that our heroes fought so long and hard to restore barely lasts a generation, the next Skywalker generation falls to the Dark Side and repeats Anakin's mistakes, etc. The old, familiar characters from the movies get beaten into the ground until everything likable about them is gone. Remember that time Han, Leia, and a bunch of other characters all collecively got highly selective amnesia about Han's fascist cousin and arbitrarily commit treason against the Republic to help him? That's some quality writing there, eh? Or the time that the galaxy was invaded by the BDSM space bat-people immune to the Force? Or the time Leia almost f*cked a neon green reptilian crime lord who was trying to make Darth Vader jealous and capture Luke while everyone else was trying to track down the Death Star plans and a bad Han Solo knockoff was trying to track down the real Han Solo? Or the time the giant space lizards who had tongues in their noses invaded to turn people into batteries for their technology because it never occurred to them that you can store energy chemically? Or that time Han Solo's kids did a multi-novel anti-drug PSA? Or even a happily after of finite duration... everything must exist in a state of perpetual f*ckedness in order for the galaxy far far away to exist in a state of semi-perpetual war. The Expanded Universe seemed to have a new major conflict or diplomatic crisis every alternate tuesday. Honestly, a novella of Carrie Fisher-style musing on the nature of politics actually sounds like a pretty good time to me... she had very little time for bullsh*t (or diplomacy, a proper subset of bullsh*t). I dunno, I think Disney could've had a real good time with her as an evil queen the way she was originally intended to be... but they don't have the balls to write a face-heel turn for a popular character like that.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Ah yes, what new and exciting holes with the feared and fearless Captain Phasma fall down this time? She's already fallen down the garbage chute and into a hull breach the size of a city... why not go for the gusto and fall into a black hole next time? Surely there won't be another convenient desert-dwelling space anus for her to fall into. It sounds exciting and dramatic until you realize he just tailgated the Falcon to Bespin. Other than that, all he does is growl out a protest that Vader might accidentally kill his bounty head and stand around omniously without talking. Phasma does a lot more talking, for one... she's apparently the First Order's Drill Sergeant Nasty. She doesn't really do much in The Force Awakens besides talk a lot of sh*t and get thrown down the garbage chute after she takes the shields on Starkiller Base down at gunpoint. Phasma gets more in The Last Jedi, since she passes sentence on and presides over the attempted execution of Finn and Rose, then gets an actual fight scene with Finn aboard Snoke's ship before she gets the laser trench club or whatever it is upside the head and falls into the hull breach. That officially puts her one-up on Fett, whose only action scene was shooting Luke in the back of the hand before a blind Han Solo hits his jetpack with a stick, sending him sailing into the side of Jabba's sail barge and then into the mouth of the majestic desert space anus. You could just as easily interpret Vader's rebuke of Fett as Fett being a gung-ho moron like Killcrazy from Red Dwarf... the fact that Darth freaking Vader has to remind you that alive means don't kill them when most people wouldn't need to be told twice by one of the highest ranked Imperial officials (and the galaxy's all-time leader in casual workplace homicide) doesn't argue for intelligence or discretion. Everything the fans built Boba Fett up to be is so weirdly irrational, because he's literally nothing more than another death-prone mook in a slightly cooler mask who checks out with even less dignity than the average masked mook. His only real trait is that he's a very action figure-y design. Y'know, that hadn't really dawned on me until you said it. I'm not much of a Star Wars fan, but I can at least hum a few tunes from the original and sequel trilogies from memory. I can't for the life of me remember a single piece of music from the sequel trilogy. To be fair, this was a problem with the old Star Wars EU as well... the fans just don't want to acknowledge it. Ultimately, to keep the story going and have more wars in Star Wars, everything our heroes did must inevitably come to nothing. The galaxy would never know peace and stability again, and every victory would become a bitter defeat in the long run, because nobody's buying Star Wars without the wars. Characters would get old, and grey, and long in the tooth, and be forced into many situations that would be ridiculously out of character, the government they helped restore would fall again to the ambitions of Imperial posers, the Sith take over again, etc. The more I read of the old Star Wars EU, the more convinced I am that these new movies are actually a MASSIVE step up from what Star Wars had before. It isn't so much that fans didn't want or expect their childhood heroes to grow old, it's that they didn't expect them to grow up. The profound lack of imagination in Star Wars's efforts to grow its story past Return of the Jedi requires certain conditions like the Jedi Order collapsing again, the New Republic that Leia worked so hard to establish to fail hard enough for the Empire to come back, and another Skywalker to take up the mantle of the Dark Side and Darth Vader. Luke's naive farmboy optimism, Leia's belief in the power of democracy, and Han's devil-may-care attitude were never going to survive that. The result? Luke goes into exile the way his mentors did, Leia starts her own damned militia and to hell with the government, and Han falls back on his old bad habits after whatever stability he'd gained in a life with Leia broke down when she became a paramilitary commander and went off the grid. I'm sure there are probably some Gen Z kids who thought The Last Jedi was a perfect movie, but I suspect those are few and far between given how the response sank Solo and that even Jar-Jar Abrams has been forced to admit Star Wars fans hate the new trilogy in interviews. That and, a lot of those younger viewers will have been introduced to Star Wars by their elder siblings and parents and will be judging Disney Star Wars by much the same yardstick as older fans.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, exactly like Boba Fett... who just stood around looking menacing then got one-shotted by a blind man and plunges headlong into a giant anus monster in the desert. Phasma arguably accomplishes more than he ever does, but because she's an obvious attempt to create a designated cool character the attempt fails.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's what happens when you try to deliberately make a "cool" character. She's the Great Value version of Boba Fett.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the best part of the whole thing is how the characters react to them. 3-CPO panics as is his custom, while Finn sounds outraged and slightly offended and Poe sounds wearily resigned to this bullsh*t. Rey, meanwhile, seems to offended beyond words by their very existence and just starts shooting with a disgusted look on her face. You have to admit, they're pretty effective in that regard every time they actually show up.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    One of the bigger, more problematic plot holes in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek bastardization that will only get worse as time goes on is that Starfleet crossed the Godzilla Threshold more or less right off the bat for reasons unclear in Star Trek '09. Even the USS Kelvin, a ship constructed before the timeline diverged from the main Star Trek timeline, is absolutely colossal by the standards of the period. The Constitution-class was Starfleet's biggest, fastest, most advanced, most powerful starship class for almost half a century until the Excelsior-class was introduced in the 2280s. The USS Kelvin, according to the special features on the Star Trek '09 Blu-ray, is almost 60% larger than the Constitution-class and has not quite twice the crew of the USS Enterprise... and she's supposed to just be one of Starfleet's scoutships. The Kelvin is dwarfed in turn by the alternate universe Constitution-class, which is larger than a prime timeline Sovereign-class ship and is armed to a similarly heavy extent. Unless I missed something, it's only the Federation who benefitted from detailed scans of the 24th century Romulan mining ship (with Borg technology). That'd make the Enterprise a proper bloody dreadnought by the standards of the day. What possible threat can the other major powers in that part of the galaxy possibly pose when the Federation's rocking that future tech that puts them half a century or more ahead of the hostile powers in their neck of the woods? The Romulan ship from "Balance of Terror" wouldn't be much of a threat to the Enterprise-E. The only way to credibly threaten the Enterprise was to bring a ship from the late 24th century, then an even bigger and more advanced version of itself, and then an entire functioning armada of ships from a much more advanced (but extinct) civilization. You can't have every movie feature a new apocalyptic threat to the entire Federation, it loses most of its sting in consecutive uses like that. Who's left who can threaten them, unless they steal a plot from the Star Trek relaunch and have the Federation's enemies team up and form their space Warsaw Pact (the Typhon Pact) a century and a half early. Depending on which version of its development history you ascribe to, the Miranda-class is potentially over 130 years old...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    ... and people wonder why Cycomi apparently dropped Macross the First. Mikimoto-sensei must be a Douglas Adams fan. Mr. Adams once opined "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure where you're getting that, to be honest. Of the five new Starfleet starship designs that debuted in Star Trek: First Contact, the Sovereign-class is the only one described as having been redesigned in any way in response to the ongoing Borg threat after the Battle of Wolf 359. Even then, there's no description of the design changes being specifically anti-Borg countermeasures. It's just described as a general expansion of the ship's offensive and defensive systems. None of them were developed as warships, but rather as multi-mission explorers (Sovereign-class, Akira-class), utility transport ships (Saber-class), and border patrol ships (Akira-class, Norway-class, Steamrunner-class). None of them, save the multi-mission explorers, overlapped roles with other new classes like the Intrepid-class long-range exploration/survey ships. They were, instead, replacements for older models of ship used for border patrols and general duty like the Constellation-class, the Miranda-class, and Excelsior-class. They weren't built to fight the Borg or even redesigned to fight the Borg specifically. They were just shootier than previous generations of Starfleet ships because the Federation had more belligerent neighbors in the second half of the 24th century than it was used to having. Starfleet, as so many episodes and movies insist, are not soldiers (most of the time). They're explorers. Their ships are built to explore, for science and for diplomacy. That they're so heavily armed is just an acknowledgement of the reality that not everybody they meet is friendly (and that the Federation's philosophy of mutual cooperation is vastly superior to the Federation's rivals policies of conquest). That's why J.J.-Trek is such an affront to the Star Trek name. He tried to reinvent Star Trek to make Starfleet into the Federation Army so he could focus on ray gun battles, explosions, and lensflares... because diplomacy doesn't make for exciting action sequences full of special effects the way fights do.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Ruse or not, it's still a massive plot problem caused by trying to write a Star Trek action story. The more action-ized Star Trek gets, the bigger and more glaring the plot holes become. That's why news of a fourth J.J.-Trek movie is so disappointing... they embody that very problem. The more action-ized Star Trek tries to be, the more they end up sacrificing its soul and its quality. Like the last few episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, it was such a mess that the relaunch novels could only shake their heads and take cheap shots at it for the entertainment of fans. The Borg apparently didn't assimilate their time travel tech, it was given to them by a faction in the Temporal Cold War, and was apparently confiscated after they failed given that the Borg never used it again and had never used it before that point.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    So, I did some checking into this, and that statement seems to be based on the fan assumption that the Defiant was the only prototype built and not anything in the episodes cited. The only source I could actually find alleging the Defiant-class was actually put into production was an AOL Chat with Ron Moore from 1997, and I'm not sure how official that'd be considered given that it wasn't an official interview or anything. (Granted, Starfleet absolutely IS stupid enough to engage in No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup, but they have had moments of Reality Ensues where multiple prototypes of ships were acknowledged to be present and actively tested on, like the Vesta and Luna classes, the Yellowstone-class runabouts, the NX warp 5 testbeds, etc.) Was that ever in any doubt? The man himself complains to Worf about how wasted he was on the Enterprise-D just standing around in a transporter room waiting for something to break down, and he does things that'd make even Scotty's eyes cross... like turning an unviable prototype into one of the meanest ships in the fleet, and making a Cardassian space station's systems play nice with grafted-in Federation and Bajoran technology. (One has to wonder how Sisko, and not O'Brien, ended up posted to the Utopia Planitia yards on Mars.) Starfleet had the Borg cube essentially swinging wild for the entire time it took the Enterprise to warp all the way from the Romulan Neutral Zone. Depending on the writer, that's either most of a day or several days. So, I did some checking into this as well and while I distinctly remember hearing the Akira-class was designed to fight the Borg, I'd never heard it of any of the other original designs used in the film (e.g. the Sovereign-class, Steamrunner-class, Saber-class, and Norway-class). I wasn't able to turn up any statements to the effect that any of them had been built to be "Borg killers" in official material. Most of them lack any kind of official development history, but the ones that do have one mentioned in expanded universe material are weirdly consistent in being said to have been on the drawing board before Wolf 359, several (e.g. the Steamrunner, Saber, Akira) are implied or outright stated to have been developed as a response to the Federation's border conflict with the Cardassian Union as upgunned patrol and utility ships to police the Cardassian border. The closest I was able to find to a ship designed to fight the Borg (besides the Defiant) was a mention that the Sovereign-class was reworked while still on the drawing board to increase its combat performance after the Battle of Wolf 359 (but not specifically to make it an anti-Borg warship). TL;DR, the Defiant is basically the one and only time Starfleet set out to build a dedicated warship... their fleet is made up almost exclusively of (well-armed) exploration, patrol, and utility ships.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Later incidents in the Dominion War proved that the Galaxy-class was more than the equal of practically any hostile warship. The USS Odyssey still massively outgunned the Jem'Hadar ships attacking it despite being outnumbered three to one, and would very likely have won that engagement without breaking a sweat if it'd had shields able to deflect phased polaron beam fire at the time. Starfleet's engineers plugged that hole in their defenses in short order... it's not a representative sample. Because the objective wasn't to defeat the Dominion fleet, it was to break through it and recapture Deep Space Nine. Sisko slowly fed his forces into the grinder trying to provoke the Cardassians into opening a hole in the Dominion formation he could fly through. Did they, though? Or are those other Defiant-class ships prototypes that Starfleet dug out of mothballs like the USS Defiant herself? Speaking as a design engineer, you usually don't build just one prototype if you can help it because every breakdown means losing test time and you're SOL if that one prototype breaks down. Something the scope of a Galaxy-class is so big and expensive that a single prototype is the only practical method, but the Defiant-class is pretty small and would be a lot easier to build multiples of to test (esp. if the ship were to be tested in live fire testing given its role as a warship). So far, the only enemy that's ever been acknowleged as prompting the Federation to consider a dedicated warship design was the Borg... and Starfleet backed away from that in favor of improving its tactics. As noted by First Contact's creators, Starfleet's main problem at Wolf 359 was trying to fight the Borg in orderly battle formations and standard maneuvers, allowing the Borg to make use of Picard's knowledge to turn the engagement into a shooting gallery. Starfleet had all but deadlocked the Borg by using the chaotic battle plan they used in First Contact until the Enterprise showed up and finished the job. Even century-old ships can still kick ass and take names if updated properly by Starfleet. Even in the noticeably more militant, xenophobic J.J.-Trek Federation, Starfleet's multi-mission explorers seem to be the shootiest things they've got, by dint of being able to redirect all that extra power from things like science labs and elaborate sensor arrays to weapons and shields, likely giving them an advantage over ships built without that kind of excess output in mind. The stupidly fanfic-y USS Vengeance wasn't a warship per se, she was an instrument of genocide... meant to launch a preemptive decapitation strike against the Klingon Empire using advanced weapons that could engage from beyond the range of any Klingon retaliation. It's basically Admiral Marcus's My First Death Star.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Still psyched for this one. This is the first anime title I've seen make the jump to 3D that actually still looks good.
  14. Seto Kaiba
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Needing "more ships" isn't the same thing as needing "warships". It's seldom directly acknowledged, but one thing Star Trek has been pretty consistent about since its earliest days is that most of the ships Starfleet uses for missions of peaceful space exploration and diplomacy are so heavily armed and armored that they're equal or superior to the dedicated warships of the Federation's enemies in a stand-up fight. Every now and then, a new alien species of the week will note that the Starfleet ship visiting them is suspiciously well-armed for a ship on a mission of peaceful exploration. TNG made a lot of it implicitly, with almost every belligerent confrontation with a major hostile power (Romulans, Cardassians, etc.) involving the Enterprise up against two or more of the latest, best warships the hostile power in question has. Voyager hung a lampshade on it several times early on, with the Kazon considering the lightly armed (by Federation standards) science ship to be almost stupidly overpowered. Deep Space Nine had a moment during the Dominion War where the USS Defiant was stopped in its tracks by an almost century-old Excelsior-class ship (USS Lakota) that'd been upgraded with the latest Starfleet weapons updates... a purpose-built anti-Borg warship stonewalled by a eighty-year-old multi-mission explorer that had just come from the refitters that was nevertheless able to fight it on an even footing (and was actually winning until the Lakota's captain stood down). The only time Starfleet main line ships have ever been depicted as unequal to the task of handling enemy warships was Star Trek: Enterprise, before the NX-01 Enterprise was upgraded with phase cannons and photon(ic) torpedoes.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Quidditch troopers? Nay, those are Adidas Troopers... Sith gopniks! Turns out Palpatine's actually Russian... we'll see him in the Death Star II's throne room, slav squatting, and he'll greet Rey with "You underestimate the power of the Dark Side, сука блять." Hey, a laser sword is a fine thing but some asses cry out for a cap.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, the biggest shooting mistake is Abrams's presence (and involvement). Into Darkness's writers left Admiral Marcus holding onto the idiot ball with both hands, both feet, his teeth, and a rope made from his own intestines. He literally found the greatest, most destructive despot of the Eugenics Wars and decided "So what if he's smarter, stronger, faster, more durable, and a master manipulator? I'll defrost his *ss and force him to work for us developing weapons and espionage technology for our secret plan to start an interstellar war. After all, giving an unstable genius with a messiah complex and near-unlimited access to our resources reason to hold a massive grudge against me and the Federation can't possibly cause problems, right?" So yeah, Marcus WAS that dumb... and he'd somehow made it all the way to Admiral. We can only assume Starfleet gave him a really excellent nanny who kept him from running with scissors and eating too many crayons. That kind of insane writing is all over the J.J.-verse Star Trek stuff... like the Jellyfish (Spock's ship with the red matter) being "their fastest ship"... capable of a whopping Warp 8. Did they f*cking forget that practically every Starfleet ship to appear since 1987 could go faster than Warp 9? When has that ever happened, though? Today: "Hello IT have you tried turning it off and on again?" Star Trek: "Hello Engineering have you tried reconfiguring the primary power coupling?"
  18. Seto Kaiba
    This was probably the worst moment of "did not do research" in all of J.J.-Trek, IMO. James T. Kirk goes crawling around inside the (stupidly massive) matter/antimatter reaction chamber of the Enterprise's warp core. Never mind that the dilithium crystals that moderate the reaction are MIA, or that matter and antimatter injectors have tolerances measured in microns, warp cores get hot. Like, unreasonably hot. 2.5 million Kelvin hot during cold starts, and 2 TRILLION Kelvin at the reaction site. You're not gonna have time to worry about dying from radiation exposure, because just opening the reaction chamber hatch of a core that's not properly shut down will vaporize you and everything around you. Kirk is two feet from the plasma stream when he kicks the injectors back into alignment. The only way to recover Kirk's body from THAT would be with a vacuum pump... but fortunately for our hero, convection is so utterly out to lunch that he manages to not even get burned.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Really, the USS Vengeance itself shows how low the standard of writing on J.J.-Trek is... and is a pretty damned strong argument against making a fourth J.J.-Trek movie. The USS Vengeance is an idea straight out of the very worst sh*t-tier fan fiction. She's a massively upscaled version of Starfleet's best class of starships (the Constitution-class), she's got an all-black paintjob (for maximum edginess), she's several times faster, more agile, more heavily armed, more heavily armored, she's got new weapons the Constitution-class didn't get, she's heavily automated so one character can run the entire ship, and she was built in super-secret by the Federation's super-secret elite intelligence agency for a super-secret mission. She's unbeatable in a one-on-one fight. All it's missing for maximum cringe is for its executive officer to be an anthropomorphized character from My Little Pony that's in love with its commanding officer, who uses Japanese honorifics in English conversation (fedora and katana optional). The design itself isn't bad... because it's just a 5/1 scale Connie... but everything to do with it in the story is eye-rollingly stupid. I'd heard the original plan for J.J.-Trek 4 (AKA Star Trek XIV) was set to be a time travel plot not entirely dissimilar to Star Trek IV, though featuring Kirk going back in time to meet his own father. Sadly, it's rather unlikely that George Kirk would give Jim a "the reason you suck" speech, so now we can only wait and see what kind of cringe awaits us.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, doesn't Anson Mount kind of not get on with the current crop of Star Trek showrunners? I know he's said that he'd be open to discussing more involvement if it were someone else in charge, and he'd expressed frustration with the show's tendency to have shooting sessions run weeks over schedule. Granted, he was easily the best thing about Star Trek: Discovery's second season. The potential was always going to be squandered... because the inclusion of Captain Christopher Pike and the original USS Enterprise were a bait-and-switch band-aid meant to make the series appeal to Star Trek fans after season one failed to meet Netflix's expectations. (In hindsight, the showrunners probably wish Jason Isaacs hadn't shot off his mouth about it not needing Star Trek fans to succeed after season two fell so flat Netflix almost refused to fund season three at all and did refuse to fund Star Trek: Picard.) If anything, having the Enterprise show up and seeing what Discovery could have been just made Discovery look that much more substandard. Next to the USS Enterprise, its much better-looking uniforms, and its actually-likable characters, the USS Discovery looked like a hot mess and its crew like a bunch of unprofessional antisocial Starfleet rejects in cheap pajamas. The good stuff had to stay offscreen as much as possible or audiences would never be able to take Discovery's original content seriously. (Which just highlights that the real squandered potential was that Star Trek: Discovery didn't use those vastly superior TOS-like designs from the word go. How much easier would the Star Trek: Discovery series gone down with fans if it actually looked like classic Star Trek, albeit more cosmetically advanced?) There are two "Short Treks" and one or two episodes right at the start of Star Trek: Discovery season two that actually feel like real, honest-to-goodness Star Trek. Unfortunately, that doesn't last and the show quickly falls back into the stupidly grimdark nonsense of the previous season with a touch of Hideo Kojima-grade incomprehensible BS. Among casual viewers, I think it might've gone over a little better than the hilariously narmy schtick of Spock screaming in rage over Khan indirectly killing someone he didn't even like. Among Star Trek fans, I think the scene would still be poorly regarded because it's a very poor knockoff of one of the most iconic scenes in classic Star Trek. This kind of lazy writing is, unfortunately, a hallmark of J.J.-Trek and properties derived from it like Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard. Ironically, that's kind of how they tried to advertise the film... and the studio admits that it wasn't all that successful at getting attention that way. Khan has name recognition even outside the Star Trek fandom, thanks to Ricardo Montalban and the aforementioned iconic scenes from Star Trek II that even non-fans know from parodies and memes. You can't shortcut right into the action the way they wanted to if your villain is an unintroduced new character nobody's ever heard of before. You'd have to take time to actually introduce them, build them up as a threat, etc. Outside of the jokes about his name and his involvement in The Hobbit and Marvel movies, Cumberbatch isn't really much of a draw in film. He's just another mumbly Brit who's only entertaining when he's going full ham or engaging in Mr. Bean-esque rubber-faced buffoonery. That whole part of the film just wasn't thought out at all... from its connections to Section 31, to its alleged secret status despite Admiral Marcus keeping a model of it on his desk in Starfleet Headquarters, to the idea that the ship would be inconspicuous and impossible to trace back to the Federation despite being obvious at a glance it's a Federation ship that some edgelord painted black and carved a giant Starfleet delta into the saucer section of. It's all just silly.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... putting aside my dislike of Kingdom Hearts, I don't think Hikaru Utada is stylistically a good fit for Macross. Macross's music tends to be more uptempo, bouncy pop music with the occasional sad song thrown in. The obvious exceptions being Fire Bomber, which was uptempo rock music and the occasional ballad, and Sharon Apple's more experimental pop style that was achieved by having virtually every track be by a different artist. Hikaru Utada's style, or at least the parts of it I've been most exposed to, are almost exclusively slow, sad songs, most of which sound the same. Not really a great fit, in my opinion. That kind of cameo is also pretty expensive, and even well-funded anime productions are still running on a razor-thin margin. If they're going to do something like that, I'd rather see a collection of previous Macross vocalists collaborate on a show's opening, like what was done in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part IV: Diamond is Unbreakable with the UNITS version of Great Days.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I know the feeling. I wasn't ready to believe it was actually Tesla's real design until I looked up the presentation and discovered it wasn't an elaborate prank. Entertainingly enough, it already doesn't live up to the Elongated Muskrat's promises... while bragging about how bulletproof it is, they managed to break its windows during the demo complete with a "oh my f*cking god" from the Muskrat himself. Quite a few auto engineers out here are talking about investigating whether we can buy Tesla a gift license to AutoCAD or 3DS MAX so they can design something that doesn't look like it's from a late 90's console video game.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I'm sure this'll be a very unpopular opinion, but I think Quentin Tarantino is probably the single most overrated filmmaker in Hollywood. His school of filmmaking relies too much on style-over-substance minimalist storytelling freighted with over-the-top effects-heavy action sequences. It's something that demonstrably just doesn't work in Star Trek, as evidenced by the slow decline of Star Trek: Voyager's ratings as the series gradually shifted its focus to more action-heavy episodes, the decline of Star Trek's film franchise as First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis increasingly leaned on action sequences, the continued ratings slide of Star Trek: Enterprise, the first two J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot films barely breaking even, Star Trek: Beyond finishing well in the red, and Star Trek: Discovery falling flat with Star Trek fans. So we're left to wonder why Star Trek's producers are so determined to stick with an approach that demonstrably does not work... especially when fan projects are eating their lunch by showing that fans vastly prefer Star Trek that keeps to the spirit of the original. Isn't the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    "Dark" and "absurd" are exactly why Quentin Tarantino should never be allowed within five hundred yards of a Star Trek project. Both J.J-Trek and Star Trek: Discovery tried very hard to be "dark", and came off as pretty absurd in the process, but all that darkness accomplished at the end of the day was to leave the audience suspecting the writers and showrunners were a bit dim.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Ford: Let's ruin an iconic brand with an ugly AF electric SUV. Tesla: HOLD. MY. BEER. Look at this f*cking thing. It looks like a graphical glitch in a twenty year old video game. It's like we found a glitch in The Matrix and the textures failed to load on a low-poly collision detection model.
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