Thom Posted 19 hours ago Posted 19 hours ago (edited) 9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said: It's back up... apparently my suffering has not yet ended tonight. Hide contents Honestly, aside from the massive levels of shakycam and the obvious problem of three meatbags attempting to wrestle a cyborg and a robot, this underground fight scene's main problem is the same one as that inexplicably vast space for the turbolift fight in Discovery's third season. Why is there a functionally infinite-seeming series of tunnels underneath this dead planet's surface? The trams never seem to run into anything or arrive anywhere, they just travel down this infinite tunnel at high speed. They completely bungle the fight's conclusion when one pair gets tossed from the tram, and the other end up shot into the sky somehow only for Georgiou to be knocked off and somehow silently pull herself up the other side of the tram to shank her opponent. So, after being beaten, her opponent who is not in any way mortally wounded or more than mildly inconvenienced on account of being a robot body for a microorganism dispenses the obligatory defeated enemy exposition about how her dead friend who killed himself in front of her is actually still alive... because apparently nobody checks dead bodies to make sure they're actually dead? He built up an immunity to the poison somehow and faked his death in order to take revenge on her. This feels like the previously mentioned what-year-is-this-set-in just became a bit of a plot hole. Hide contents After all, this is by all accounts 2324. Her friend was either the same age as her or very close to it when he failed to murder his family in order to become the next Emperor of the Terran Empire. Georgiou was born in 2202, meaning she was 55 when she left the Mirror Universe with the crew of the USS Discovery and approximately 57 when she got sent back in time by the Guardian of Forever. So her age seems to be roughly the same as her actress's (~60). Her friend who is apparently the film's Big Bad should be in his 120s if he had to get to 2324 the honest way. We then get to see an incredibly ugly and badly rendered CG starship that looks like something out of Red Dwarf. It seems to be a Terran Empire ship, and we see Georgiou's friend seemingly hasn't aged despite the 67 years that've passed since Georgiou went missing. Honestly, this thing looks like if you let Asus design a "gaming starship"... and I say that as someone who uses their gamer-grade network hardware. There's a lame attempt at soul searching as Georgiou becomes defeatist... only for the unit leader to reveal that he's the one who stole the critical part from the garbage scow's engine, and just couldn't tell anyone with the mole still on the team. They couldn't resist doing the fake-out "car won't turn over until you thump it" thing. Which is stupid and lame in this context... and most others. This ship also looks like absolute garbage... which is fitting, because hauling garbage is literally what it's for. It doesn't look like it belongs in Star Trek though. Like Rios's La Sirena, it looks like it belongs to Star Wars in terms of its grungy, used-future appearance and off-center cockpit. It also does the exact same thing the Onyx Cinder does in Skeleton Crew where it leaves a cloud of dust and debris behind when it goes FTL. Conveniently, the would-be slayer of the Terran Emperor fires exactly one photon torpedo at the incoming ship and nothing else, allowing the garbage scow to tank the shot and keep coming. That's actualy kind of weird in its own right, since civilian ships generally aren't armored or shielded well enough to take military-grade torpedo fire like that. (Normally they explode if anyone so much as breaks wind near them... must be all the main characters aboard.) They let nebula radiation wear the Terran ship's shields down and then board it. Somehow, they fail to notice the bad guys sneaking up on them... again. These folks are really REALLY bad at situational awareness. This is like their fourth or fifth time being ambushed in the space of an hour or so. The two Terrans conveniently either lower or drop their guns so it has to be settled by martial arts. So they do kung-fu at each other and accidentally arm the big bomb in the process. They try to have a moment, but it ultimately ends with him freaking out when she suggests they start over together. Garrett conveniently finds a toy with an explosive power source in the garbage in the ship's hold, and plans to turn that into a convenient missile to destroy the shuttle that's attacking them while everything else is going on. This amazing augment super-spy who runs this Section 31 team doesn't seem to be very sharp at all. He has spent the last five minutes trying energetically to strangle what he knows full well is a robot in humanoid form not a person. These people have phasers, but they absolutely insist on fistfighting things that can't be beaten in a fistfight. Georgiou's fight reaches a climax with her trying a barehanded blade block in a way that doesn't actually work at all. She's trying to stop a stab, not a slice, so there shouldn't be anything stopping the blade from just cutting through her hands and continuing down into her head. She somehow kicks the blade into his neck and kills him? It makes zero sense. Suddenly he pulls a complete 180 as he's dying and says he loves her. Eleventh pause. 1:24:25. Talk about a waste of a character, a plot... none of the aspects of this relationship work or make any sense at all. He hates her but he loves her but he hates her and wants to take revenge for HER family but he loves her as he's dying but he hates her for what she became... can we get a tiny bit of consistency please? Hide contents Georgiou finally picks up the bomb, and arms it... and then asks the augment Section 31 leader if he'd kill the woman who took him prisoner givne a second chance. He says yes. They fly the Terran ship into the rift, with the bomb slowly counting own, as Garrett and the Chamaloid try to beam them back. The bomb goes off, but Georgiou and the other guy got out in time. The passageway collapses. We get a jump cut epilogue of them on Georgiou's station, with them being all chummy. Garrett's been promoted to Lt. Commander for some reason. They found another guy of the same species as the traitorous mini-guy, in an identical fake-Vulcan body, though this one talks with an American southern accent instead of an Irish one. For some reason, they decide to take their next briefing for their secret black ops organization standing at a table in the middle of Georgiou's club. They're briefed by Control, who is revealed to be a cyborg Jamie Lee Curtis, who sends them to Turkana IV... Tasha Yar's homeworld. Well, that was frankly awful. I got through the whole thing despite my modem's attempt to preserve my sanity through honorable suicide. I can honestly see why this is the lowest-rated Star Trek title of all time. It DESERVES it. Star Trek V at least tried to be thematically consistent with the rest of Star Trek. Section 31 is an unholy mess that tries to make a quip-heavy Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff out of the very worst parts of Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Into Darkness. The whole movie looks and feels unmistakably cheap. I don't know if Paramount has disclosed how much was spent to make this movie, but it either wasn't enough or someone made the inexplicable creative decision to spent vast sums of money making a mockbuster-tier Star Trek film. So much of the design work from this film looks like it was nicked from Red Dwarf. Georgiou's garbage scow would fit right in parked next to one of the Starbugs and the cyborg in particular looks like someone nicked a Replicant costume from the BBC property master. The story is such a mess of terrible, cliche, unbearably stilted writing that it's actually almost a mercy when the action scenes start and everyone stops talking. The reason it's not is that the action sequences have so much shaky cam and motion blur that you'd swear the camera operator was a drunk Parkinson's patient with an inner ear infection, and the editing is clearly trying VERY hard to disguise the mediocre-at-best fight choreography with dozens of mid-fight cuts. As harsh as I judge some films and shows, I seldom feel like I've seen a true "Zero" on a five-scale or ten-scale. This is an authentic zero. This is "See me after class" levels of poor performance. This is the kind of project that, if it had come out in theaters, would probably have killed the franchise stone dead. This is a career ending fiasco of a film that ought to see Paramount clean house. If Alex Kurtzman isn't "invited to leave" after this, I will officially start wondering who on the board he has compromising photos of because there's just no explanation for how he can keep failing like this and still be employed. I was prepared for a bad movie. I was not prepared for a movie this bad. Yikes. I had zero interest in watching this, and now that has somehow become minus. I will gladly let this reside in your braincase, living rent free as I whistle upon my merry way - way way from this! A salute your sacrifice! ...I do wonder how the Empire survives at all with so much back-stabbing and outright murder. If no one blinks at someone killing their entire family for power, then they are all basically psychopaths, which means there should be nothing stable enough for their entire society to stand on. Rulers gain (and sustain) power through power blocs, which seems to a certain extent you can trust that the Emperor will not betray you, because enough people will be around after to pull the old 'Julius Caeser pin-cushion' on them. This however, describes an Empire in a state of continual flux, paranoia and madness that, again, is unsustainable. Even the most ruthless of dictatorships can't survive without reaching its own level of stability. Yet all we have seen of the Terran Empire, is one that cannot sustain itself for as long as it susposed to have had. Edited 19 hours ago by Thom Quote
Dynaman Posted 18 hours ago Posted 18 hours ago 57 minutes ago, Thom said: ...I do wonder how the Empire survives at all with so much back-stabbing... Right there you have already put more thought into it then the writers did. Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted 16 hours ago Posted 16 hours ago 4 hours ago, Dynaman said: I tried to warn you Seto! Your 13 minute mark is where I decided this film has no hope at all of being good - or even watchable. Indeed you did, but I was determined... and I managed to watch this dreck without giving Paramount one thin dime. 4 hours ago, Dynaman said: THEN that bar scene starts and just the camera work alone screams out garbage coming up! If anything, the camera work in the bar scene screamed "parody". It's the kind of camera work you'd expect in a spy movie spoof like Austin Powers, Johnny English, etc. 1 hour ago, Thom said: ...I do wonder how the Empire survives at all with so much back-stabbing and outright murder. 32 minutes ago, Dynaman said: Right there you have already put more thought into it then the writers did. That's the thing... it doesn't. Mind you, this isn't something we can credit the writers of Section 31 with even a little as it was foreshadowed as far back as the original Mirror Universe episode "Mirror, Mirror" (TOS) in 2267 and established to have already happened by the time of "Crossover" (DS9) in 2370. The Terran Empire was a profoundly unstable and unsustainable government that was forever at risk of collapsing in on itself like a failed souffle. The "glue" that kept the Empire together at the societal level was a combination of militant xenophobia and an extreme form of Social Darwinism. The Terrans are products of an alternate history full of awfulness that left them societally paranoid, and the event that led to the Empire's formation was the ultimate paranoia fuel: the existence of aliens. First Contact in 2063 led the Terrans to form the Terran Empire for fear of being invaded and conquered by hostile aliens. They've basically been burning the universe down ever since, having channeled their xenophobia into a Humanity-first master race ideology. That paranoia-fueled initial violent expansion into the greater galaxy became a self-fulfilling doom spiral. The Empire could only be maintained by keeping the population focused on external threats, to the point that it became circular logic. The Empire needed more resources because it was expanding and conquering new territory, and it was expanding and conquering new territory because it needed more resources. Eventually they were going to run up against an enemy they couldn't beat or the pace of their expansion would exceed the rate of new resources coming in and the whole thing would fall apart. Mirror!Spock predicted in 2267 that the Terran Empire would last at most another 240 years unless its internal policies changed dramatically. We already knew from "Crossover" (DS9) that Mirror!Spock's prediction turned out to be excessively optimistic and the Terran Empire had long since been overthrown by the Klingon Cardassian Alliance as of 2370 (103 years later). As of 2324 in Section 31, the Terran Empire seems to be at death's door because it has run out of resources and can no longer sustain the expansionism that's keeping its populace united. Pre-Kurtzman materials suggested that Mirror!Spock became Emperor at some point after 2267 and tried to reform the Empire into a more peaceful democratic society like the Federation, only for it to be subsequently overrun and conquered by the vengeful Klingon Cardassian Alliance in 2295. The novels from the Relaunch series also suggested that, after the Terran rebellion overthrew the Klingon Cardassian Alliance in the 2370s, they had learned enough about the value of cooperation and compassion to form a Federation-like government of their own and had made peaceful first contact with the (much kinder and more benevolent) Mirror!Dominion. Kurtzman-era materials seem to be a lot more pessimistic. Unless that rift is doing some timey-wimey stuff, the Terran Empire seems to still be around (but actively falling apart under the weight of a resourse crisis) in 2324. We also know from Prodigy that they didn't learn anything and simply reformed the Empire by 2384 after defeating the Klingon Cardassian Alliance Quote
MikeRoz Posted 16 hours ago Posted 16 hours ago (edited) Spoiler Did they ever, at any point, devote any technobabble to the idea that setting the bomb off in the passageway would be a good idea? I found it very jarring when she armed the quandrant-destroying bomb that they'd spent the entire movie chasing because it was such a threat. I went from thinking that she was actually going to drop the bomb on her universe (possibly explaining the fall of the Terran Empire?) to thinking that, since the bomb went off in the passageway, that both universes were due to lose half a quadrant. That would have been a fun way to retroactively reveal that Discovery took place in an AU, and would have given them plenty of fodder for angsty dystopian storylines! I didn't get the impression that Michelle Yeoh was in any way a victim here. Maybe I'm the victim of successful PR, but it always seemed to me like she'd been pushing for this series/movie to happen and enjoyed playing the mirror version of the character. I felt a little bit like I was watching a Stephen Segal film or a later Rock film. Spoiler They even vaporize the other femme fatale! Edited 16 hours ago by MikeRoz Quote
Seto Kaiba Posted 15 hours ago Posted 15 hours ago 9 minutes ago, MikeRoz said: Hide contents Did they ever, at any point, devote any technobabble to the idea that setting the bomb off in the passageway would be a good idea? I found it very jarring when she armed the quandrant-destroying bomb that they'd spent the entire movie chasing because it was such a threat. I went from thinking that she was actually going to drop the bomb on her universe (possibly explaining the fall of the Terran Empire?) to thinking that, since the bomb went off in the passageway, that both universes were due to lose half a quadrant. That would have been a fun way to retroactively reveal that Discovery took place in an AU, and would have given them plenty of fodder for angsty dystopian storylines! Nope. Not so much as a word. I was actually pretty confused by it, since up until the very last second it looked like Georgiou was going to... Spoiler ... commit suicide by taking the armed and about-to-explode "Godsend" back to the Mirror Universe and destroy a significant chunk of the Mirror Univese's galaxy with it. Doing that would've been a pretty big retcon, though. I can only assume the showrunners remember exactly how badly previous retcons in Discovery went over with fans and decided to play it safe. 9 minutes ago, MikeRoz said: I didn't get the impression that Michelle Yeoh was in any way a victim here. Maybe I'm the victim of successful PR, but it always seemed to me like she'd been pushing for this series/movie to happen and enjoyed playing the mirror version of the character. I felt a little bit like I was watching a Stephen Segal film or a later Rock film. Well, we'll see what comes of the interviews now that the movie has pretty definitively bombed. Back when Section 31 was first pitched to the public, I'm sure Michelle Yeoh was probably very enthusiastic about it. She'd signed on to Star Trek: Discovery knowing it was meant to be a seven season commitment to a major studio's flagship property and the lynchpin of an entire streaming service. A nice, steady paycheck in other words. Paramount then offered her what was essentially a contract extension and a pay raise to disembark the sinking Discovery for the starring role in a series. More, and bigger, steady paychecks. Whether she's happy with the character... well... a few interviews have seen her express her dissatisfaction with playing "bitchy" characters like femme fatales. Quite a bit of what she's said about the character suggests the producers promised a "redemption arc" and an opportunity to pivot her character away from being typecast like that if she signed on with Section 31. I guess that's why the movie makes an attempt to gradually scale back Georgiou's signature cattiness, her habit of reminding the people she talks to that she's VERY promiscuous, and her visible enjoyment of others fear and suffering. They ultimately didn't scale it back very far, and did so in a very halfhearted and desultory way, as that basically accounts for her entire character outside of her last episode on Discovery. Spoiler If we're being honest, the whole idea of "redeeming" Emperor Georgiou was probably a doomed one from the start. Both Discovery and Section 31 made it clear to the audience that Georgiou was considered an extremely evil and cruel person even by the standards of the Mirror Universe. There were only two people who were arguably even more evil in practice, Mirror!Lorca and Mirror!Burnham, both of whom were evil enough to argue that Georgiou Didn't-Go-Too-Far-Enough for their taste while her own subjects seem to be united in declaring her a Complete Monster. She's committed multiple genocides beyond the scale of anything in Human history, and we've seen that she's totally comfortable with slavery, torture, murder, and eating other sentient beings. Most fans would argue that Discovery alone justifies saying Georgiou is so unspeakably evil as to be beyond redemption. That she created a weapon capable of genociding an entire quadrant out of spite in case someone overthrew her... she was already so far outside the realm of "usual evil" that it hardly feels like it adds anything to her account. Quote
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