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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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?"
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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?
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Finally drawing close to the end of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part V: Golden Wind. This is surprisingly dark for a Jojo season. Darker, perhaps, than all of them save perhaps Phantom Blood... and only then because Dio racked up such a huge body count as a vampire in 19th century England. Passione is, if anything, even more unhinged than you'd expect a mafia full of Stand users to be. It's started to feel like Jojo has begun to run out of ways to keep the whole concept of Stands fresh though. The story's kind of forgotten about the consequences of using Gold Experience for healing that were elaborated upon early on, so as it ends up forced into the role of the party healer more and more it feels less and less distinct from Josuke's Crazy Diamond in Diamond is Unbreakable. Gold Experience's power is so broken that Giorno's been hit with The Worf Effect several fights in a row so that other Bucciarati Squad members with less overpowered Stands can contribute at all (like Narancia's Aerosmith and Mista's Sex Pistols). The only new concepts we've really gotten Stand-wise in this arc so far are the worn Stands like Ghiaccio's White Album and that horribly broken autonomous immortal Stand Notorious BIG, and so far those are one-shot villain Stands.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I'd beg to differ on First Contact's behalf. Star Trek: First Contact was 50% terrible space!zombie movie with Star Trek characters, but it was also 50% a genuine Star Trek time travel plot about humanity's first first contact and the creation of warp drive with some decent character drama about Zefram Cochrane floundering in the gap between his real self and what the crew who only know him from what history books say about his future self think he is. That's 49% more Star Trek than Star Trek '09 was. Star Trek '09 was more like the Futurama Star Trek episode, a non-Star Trek plot starring a complete idiot loaded with a bunch of in-jokes and references to Star Trek's original series. Star Trek: Into Darkness was just a mistake, start-to-finish. Trying to remake one of the most celebrated Star Trek films - Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan - would've been a mistake even with the best staff available because of how iconic it is. It was like announcing plans to remake Casablanca or The Princess Bride. If you saw Star Trek: Nemesis, then you didn't miss much. Star Trek: Beyond isn't a flat-out remake of Star Trek: Nemesis, but it was certainly copying its homework. That, good sir, is the very definition of "damned by faint praise".
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Apparently, yes. But just think of all the wonderful memes we wouldn't have if the prequel trilogy hadn't been written by someone almost totally unaware of how human beings speak and interact...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That's not a filmography, that's a suicide note. I'll admit, I am flat surprised that they were able to find someone (or several someones) clueless enough to agree to finance a fourth installment in J.J. Abrams's unsuccessful attempt to hard reboot the Star Trek franchise. That it's a terrible idea should've been glaringly obvious given that none of the three existing J.J. Abrams Star Trek films was an unqualified success. Both Star Trek '09 and Star Trek: Into Darkness fell so far short of Paramount's earnings projections that they barely managed to turn a profit at all, and Star Trek: Beyond flopped at the box office and finished over $50M short of breaking even. That should've been warning enough, never Netflix and Amazon both reportedly suffering buyer's remorse over bankrolling their respective Star Trek streaming shows or the licensees largely refusing to touch J.J.-Trek unless forced to and reportedly opting to pass on both Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard due to the J.J.-Trek aesthetic being a massive no-sell condition for many Star Trek fans. The only explanation I can think of - besides Springtime for Hitler - is that someone's got the rose tinted glasses on. I think it was Bojack Horseman that noted that when you look at a person (or thing) through rose-tinted glasses all the red flags just look like flags. Another J.J.-Trek film is a red flag factory on a scale not normally seen outside the PRC.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Certainly an understandable feeling... he's basically the sequel trilogy's low rent Han Solo replacement, but he has none of Han's redeeming traits. He's just another underdeveloped character who happens to be a gung-ho moron. Admittedly he would've had fewer opportunities to play the fool if his commanding officer(s) had kept him on a shorter leash or at least not been obstructive beyond reason the way Holdo was. I can think of a few, but they're mainly villain protagonists or reformed villains. No, it's just mean to compare a character who actually did something useful (that Ewok) to a character who embodies a plot tumor (Rose). (And it's all tongue in cheek anyway.) Cassian is pretty clear that he's no hero, though because of Jyn Erso he gradually becomes more heroic as the movie progresses.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Kill it with fire.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Because summary execution is the Empire's (and First Order's) schtick... it's a bad guy thing. The heros in melodramas like Star Wars are supposed to be above that kind of petty and vengeful behavior. If they execute someone, it'll only be after due process has run its course in the appropriate court. Poe Dameron's essentially off the hook because the entire command structure of the Resistance was wiped out except for Leia, who's in rough shape, so he's the highest ranking officer left standing. It strikes me as unlikely that he'd obligingly jump in front of a firing squad by giving the order to convene his own court martial, or convene those which might lead to his own by court martialing Finn and Rose for their AWOL adventure that ultimately accomplished nothing except vandalizing a casino and getting practically 99% of the Resistance killed.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Sorry, linear time has a strict No Refunds policy.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I meant in terms of her significance to the plot, as the one who introduces the Rebellion to the plucky locals of isolated moon X who ultimately turn the tide in the Rebellion's favor. Isn't it rather insensitive to insinuate that a non-human character who is clearly sentient, albeit from a primitive culture, whose people helped fight the Empire is nothing more than a pet?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Isn't a likely explanation that Finn's new bestie is literally the biggest loudmouth jackass in the entire Resistance?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That's the new girl, Jannah. She's one of the locals from the moon/planet where the Death Star II wreckage crashed. If this is a remake of Return of the Jedi, I guess she's like that one Ewok who takes a shine to Leia.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The Last Jedi was pretty clear that Rose's objection to the casino's racetrack was due to the abusive treatment of the animals by the casino's handlers, not the use of animals in general. Presumably Rose would not object to a working animal that was well-treated and properly cared for. (This, of course, mirrors real world attitudes once abuses of animals at race tracks became known... though racehorses were typically pretty well-treated because of how difficult it is to breed them, how delicate a horse's health is in general, and how sensitive their performance ability is to health problems. To me, the film's treatment of those racing animals mirrors a lot of real world treatment of greyhounds bred to race. Because they breed in numbers, grow quickly, and have a relatively short window of athletic viability, racing dogs are often not well-kept and have to cope with cramped and unhygenic living conditions, substandard food, and a lack of medical treatment. I've seen this firsthand, and briefly fostered a greyhound that'd been abused by its handler at a racetrack in Florida shortly after Florida banned dog racing a year ago. That difference in treatment of the animals is why horse racing is still very much legal in most places while dog racing is increasingly banned.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    According to my friends and one family member who work in the Ford Product Development Center: They're not thinking... like, at all. Because Jim Hackett is a drooling idiot who's destroying the company from the inside-out with his incompetent efforts to reorganize Ford Motor. OR They've forgotten the important lesson about brand dilution that the Porsche Cayenne taught the industry, and genuinely believe a "premium" SUV is a good idea that won't hurt the Mustang line's image. My own suspicion, based on my own experiences at Ford and FCA, is that Ford has lately come to the unavoidable realization that the current administration's efforts to roll back the Obama-era CAFE requirements, emissions regulations, and abolish CARB are going to be reversed in fairly short order. There's no way Ford's truck-heavy lineup can keep pace with tightening government fuel efficiency and emissions requirements around the world, and Ford lags well behind other major automakers in development and deployment of hybrid and full-electric powertrain technologies. I strongly suspect this ill-advised branding choice was an attempt to work around the public perception that hybrid and electric cars offer more anemic performance than conventional ones, by rebadging what was almost certainly intended to be a BEV variant of the 4th Gen Ford Escape to associate it with Mustang's reputation for high performance and escape association with the Ford Escape's poorly-received 2nd and 3rd Gen Hybrid variants. I'm also inclined to suspect Ford's choice of a C2 SUV to launch their next-gen electrification architecture is an attempt to get out ahead of its rivals by launching a fully-electric SUV while Jeep is still ramping up its Hybrid and full electric lineup Segrio teased shortly before his passing. Yeah, that's what they said too. I've been hearing what a turd this design was for a while now, and after clapping eyes on the un-camo'd version I have to admit they undersold the design's ugliness.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    If it's any consolation, there's been a fair bit of circumstantial evidence that her role has been minimized in response to the backlash against her plot tumor in The Last Jedi. My guess would be the studio felt they couldn't outright get rid of Rose for much the same reason Star Trek: Voyager ended up abandoning its plans to off Harry Kim... despite the character's unpopularity with general audiences, outside circumstances involving race-representation and fear of backlash make separating them from the cast politically difficult. *looks at literally millennia-long history of cavalry warfare here on Earth* Hey, low-tech worked for the Ewoks, right? I'd expect nothing less than an entire short story devoted to explaining their backstory, motivations, favorite food, mother's maiden name, and the symbolic significance of the last four digits of their social security numbers. The clone army was a Chekhov's Gun... you don't put that gun on the mantle and not take it down and fire it sometime. That said, the whole reason for the clone army is a single throwaway line in A New Hope about Luke's father having fought in the Clone Wars. Most would rank a dramatic reading of the phone book by Gilbert Gottfried and Fran Drescher higher than The Last Jedi. Comparisons to The Last Jedi are the new "still a better love story than Twilight". If you've heard anything about Lucas's plans for the sequel trilogy, what we got from Abrams and Johnson actually sounds less stupid. (George reportedly wanted Star Wars VII thru IX to be basically a trilogy version of Fantastic Voyage about the midichlorians.) Star Wars wasn't so much between a rock and a hard place as it was between Jar-Jar Abrams's dumpster fire and Lucas's tire fire.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Oddly, that was actually answered... in part in The Phantom Menace, and more fully in Attack of the Clones. The Republic had been at peace for nearly a millennium by the time the Clone Wars started. It didn't have a centralized military force, and hadn't had one at any point in living memory. Obi-wan was being entirely literal when he told Luke the Jedi were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. The next best thing they had, as far as I can find, was a group that answered to the Republic's judiciary called the Judicials, who were basically the space highway patrol (one of their ships was the one that delivered Qui-Gon and Obi-wan to the Trade Federation ship in The Phantom Menace). Individual planets had militias or organized defense forces, but there was no military answering to the Senate directly. As Mace Windu put it, "You must realize there aren't enough Jedi to protect the Republic. We are keepers of the peace, not soldiers." Any port in a storm, right? Probably? A quick skim of the character summary for the guy who authorized the creation of the clone army tells me the Jedi Master responsible ("Sifo-Dyas") was apparently kicked out of the Jedi Counsel because he foresaw the war and argued vehemently for the creation of an army necessary to defend the Republic. (Then went AWOL and commissioned said army.) The Jedi Counsel probably saw that as "OK, *sshole had a point."
  25. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I think the oft-returned-to point about The Force Awakens is that it's an OK film on its own... until you notice that it's just J.J. Abrams trying to pass off a cosmetically overhauled SparkNotes version of A New Hope as an original movie. Its perceived quality is all borrowed gloss from the iconic original Star Wars trilogy, tarted up a bit with expensive CGI. I'm not sure if it'd be better or worse if you took the Star Wars title and associations away from it. Examining The Force Awakens's original elements on their own, it's painfully obvious how underdeveloped every part of it was. It's all flash and no substance, and if they hadn't spent so much money on VFX the whole affair would feel more like a Star Wars mockbuster than a legitimate installment in the franchise with its shoddy dollar store knockoff versions of the first trilogy's cast and factions. The Last Jedi was Disney's almost understandable overreaction to the entirely justified accusations that they'd tried to pass a ridiculously underthought sh*tty remake of A New Hope off as a new movie. They got royally reamed for their unoriginality, so they tried to mix it up as much as possible and subvert expectations... which blew up in their faces when they tried to make steak with the fandom's sacred cows. The Rise of Skywalker seems set to be a The Force Awakens style terribly underthought remake of Return of the Jedi, complete with imitation brand Luke (Rey, who is only marginally less unoriginal than the EU's Luuke Skywalker) and imitation brand Darth Vader (Kylo Ren) killing Palpatine off (again).
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