wherein Liz sees Star Trek a second time, and gripes about the novelization

[edenfalling]

I saw Star Trek again today. I still like it inordinately. :-)

However, on second viewing I started noticing some pacing things that bugged me. Like, the chase on Hoth Delta Vega really did not need to be that extended. Likewise the Scotty-in-the-coolant-tubes scene. Both could have been trimmed by, oh, at least a minute, I think, which would have allowed time for some extra continuity bits or character moments elsewhere.

Also, the mind meld scene is... on the one hand, the echo effect is kind of cool, and the visuals are interesting, but that monologue. Ouch. It is just too damn vague -- why no name for the star that went supernova, for one thing? Did Spock know Romulus had blown up before he got close enough to 'launch the red matter'? Nero and his crew apparently had time to shave and tattoo (or paint, in anticipation of later tattoos) their heads between Romulus blowing up and traveling back in time, so there must have been some gap between the planet's death and their confrontation with Spock, and that confrontation seems to have happened right after he turned the supernova into a black hole (speaking of which, don't supernovas turn into black holes naturally anyway? or at least neutron stars or something? so maybe he wasn't trying to collapse the star but instead was going after part of the expanding sphere of stuff the dying star throws out? I dunno, astronomy is not my strong point, but there's something fishy about that whole scenario) so there has to have been at least a several hour gap between Romulus-go-boom and Nero catching up to Spock at the new black hole. But you'd never know that from Nimoy's monologue.

He delivered it as well as anyone could possibly be expected to deliver that mess, but this time around, I was not so distracted by 'Spock! It's Spock! It's Leonard Nimoy playing Spock!' and actually tried to make sense of the plot and it made me want to beat my head against the back of the seat in front of me.

Hmm. When I saw the film on Wednesday, the theater was nearly empty. This was not at all surprising -- 3:10pm on a weekday is never going to be busy -- but it made for a sort of... well, I had to provide all my own excitement, because there was no crowd to have synergy with. This time, 4:10pm on a Saturday, the theater was nearly 3/4 full, and people laughed and gasped and cheered at occasional appropriate moments. For example, at any of McCoy's "I'm a doctor!" lines, or when old Spock introduces himself and Kirk says, "Bullshit," half the theater cracked up. And there was a brief round of applause as the credits began to roll. I like that atmosphere better, because it's sort of validating to know that everyone else is loving the movie as much as I am.

Amanda's death came off even more pointlessly objectifying on second viewing. Seriously, how hard would it have been to drop a nameless Vulcan elder off the cliff, have Amanda lunge toward him or her, and lose her balance in that motion? Then you could still have her fall out of transporter lock, and have Spock reaching fruitlessly for her, but her death would not have felt so utterly gratuitous. I know why she had to die. But why, why, why couldn't someone have taken a minute to give her death purpose?

...

I love all the characters to itty bitty pieces. I love the ships. I love the feeling of new possibilities. And I want the sequel yesterday, please.

I wish so hard this were the pilot of a new tv series. I don't want to just see the high points and grand adventures every few years. I want new Trek every week, damn it all. I would not buy a television, but I might possibly cave and find a way to watch it streaming online.

---------------

In other Trek-related news, I bought the novelization (yes, I am weak and obsessive) and started reading it on the bus ride home. It's by Alan Dean Foster, which is two strikes against it right there. I do not like his writing style one bit -- it's too showy, too 'let me dazzle you with my writing skills and style and vocabulary and stuff!' Foster never steps back to let the plot and characters shine through; he's always standing between the reader and the story, smirking and winking and showing off.

(I have not read any of Foster's original work all the way through. The couple times I opened one of his novels, I was always put off by the style in the first handful of pages and set the book down, regardless of my opinion on the characters and plot. I did read his novelization of Transformers, but with gritted teeth, because I was never able to fully work past or ignore his style. It is, I think, a style designed specifically so it can't be ignored. I don't like that. I consider it abominably bad writing. The style should serve the story, not vice versa.)

But anyway, so far I think that the revisions made by the scriptwriters between the version of the script handed to Foster and the version that was filmed were good and wise choices. The opening scenes and dialogue are much tighter and less stupidly annoying in the film. Also (and I don't know how much of this is due to dialogue changes, how much is a credit to Chris Pine's acting, and how much is a black mark against Foster's writing) film!Kirk is an oddly adorable jerk and I was rooting for him all the way, but book!Kirk is just a douchebag, which is unfortunate since he's one of the story's two protagonists and the one more clearly meant to fill the 'heroic' role.

Nonetheless, I am going to finish the book. It is useful to have nearly official canon details for stuff that there just wasn't time to put into the film, and I am hoping (perhaps fruitlessly) that Foster may have addressed some of the plot holes and continuity gaps from the film. (Though I will tell you, already he's gone and made the problem with humans knowing that Romulans and Vulcans are the same species even worse -- in the film, there's no indication that anyone on the Kelvin knows that, and I can handwave that the Vulcans admitted the truth specifically because of that mess, but in Foster's novelization, that connection is already common knowledge something like, IIRC, thirty years before it ought to have been known at all. *headdesk* That may not be strictly his fault -- it may have been in the early version of the script -- but it's not a promising sign.)

Comments

[artimusdin.livejournal.com]

But why, why, why couldn't someone have taken a minute to give her death purpose?

Because not every death has a deep and meaningful purpose. Do people want a death that was? Usually yes, when they bother thinking about it. Yes, Kirk's dad had a Meaningful Death, but he was a soldier. Spock's mom... was a mother. Doing whatever it is she does from day to day that I can't remember. The fact that she got a raw deal dying? Well, it happens unfortunately. o.O;

[artimusdin.livejournal.com]

... and because I think I forgot to actually say this: I'm not saying she shouldn't have had a more meaningful death, it's just that more often than not, it doesn't happen that way. No matter who you are.

[edenfalling]

See, I know this -- that death is random, because the universe is random -- but... it's a question of presentation, you know? We are given, in the film, two parents whose deaths drastically affect their sons subsequent lives. That's cool; I have no problem there. The difference is that the male character gets a death that is meaningful not only to his son's life but to his own story and character. The female character does not; Amanda therefore becomes a plot device in a way that George Kirk avoids. And while that is, on its own, merely annoying, when you put it into a larger cultural context of female characters treated as nothing but plot devices, as nothing but a way to affect the male characters around them, over and over and over, Amanda's death shifts from a mild annoyance to something that really bothers me.

Also, the randomness of her death isn't addressed within the film -- nobody says anything about 'why didn't she just stand two feet further from the cliff?' or anything like that. Actually, when he's provoking Spock, Kirk goes so far as to say, IIRC, "Your mother was murdered," and that jerked me out of the scene for a moment because NO, she wasn't murdered. Murder implies intentionality. Amanda died because, for no apparent reason, she stood two feet further out than the rest of the group. And that positioning is weird even within the story -- why was she not standing between Spock and Sarek, for example, to tighten the grouping and make it easier to get a transporter lock on them?

It would have been so easy to fix that. Even if you left the events of Amanda's death exactly the same, you could have changed Spock and Sarek's conversation, or maybe snipped some of the chase scene and added a conversation between Spock and Uhura, to talk about the randomness of it all -- I think that's called lampshading? -- and that would have mitigated the thing, because it would have brought the focus back to Amanda as a person, at least a little, instead of Amanda as an object whose removal hurts Spock.

I may end up writing a reaction story about that at some point, because it is, as you can tell, bothering me a lot.

[artimusdin.livejournal.com]

... meanwhile, my brain is coming up with reasons why that happened. >.> Meh. Oh well. Will look forward to your ficbit, if you end up doing that.

[edenfalling]

Well, I ended up writing three separate versions of Hakkai's backstory in order to come to terms with Kanan's suicide, so clearly awkward female deaths can provoke fic out of me. On the other hand, sometimes they just provoke annoyed meta comments, so only time will tell how this one plays out. :-)

[artimusdin.livejournal.com]

Heh.

[silverblade219.livejournal.com]

Actually, the info for what went on with Romulus seems to be in the prequel comic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Countdown)... (I haven't read the comic yet, but the wikipedia seems to be a good summary for something that was annoying me too.)

I somewhat hope that it will be referenced in the deleted scenes, but I doubt it.

[edenfalling]

Ah! I had seen mention of the existence of a prequel comic, but no real information about its plot. Thank you for the link; that's very interesting. I'm not sure I entirely buy it in the fine details, but in rough outline it makes the film more rational.

I am still all WTF about the supernova, though. How can one star threaten an entire galaxy? Maybe it's in a position such that the shockwave of its explosion could trigger some other supergiant blue-white stars to go supernova, in a sort of chain reaction? That's about the only explanation I can come up with -- and in that case, it would be very important to collapse the shockwave even after Romulus's destruction -- but you'd think if that were the scenario, Spock would have mentioned it. *sigh*

I can only handwave so much bad science, you know? I am already metaphorically closing my eyes and going lalala about warp drive and dilithium and whatnot, which leaves me only so much tension left in my suspension of disbelief... and then I used up all my remaining disbelief on the red matter. I don't have any left for impossible stellar phenomena! :-(

[deralte.livejournal.com]

I flipped through the prequel comic at the comic shop yesterday and it would probably answer your questions about what went before (all I really noticed was that Data was captain of the Enterprise (which, uh, didn't he die in the last movie? *confused*))

Re: Vulcans and Romulans, I think it's probably Enterprise's fault. I never watched it beyond the first two seasons, but considering they'd already introduced the Ferengi by then (the Enterprise D was supposed to be the first to encounter them)... Wikipedia tells me there's a whole arc with the Vulcans and the Romulans in season 4, so there's your answer.

[edenfalling]

I quit watching Trek movies after First Contact. From what I hear, this was probably a wise decision. *grin*

Oh, Enterprise... that show, apparently, has much to answer for. *sigh* Not that TOS always made sense, but if you have an established continuity, the least you can do is try to abide by it. (This is one thing I especially like about the reboot: because it's a different timeline, they can ignore continuity and introduce cool stuff early without scraping nails over the chalkboard of my soul. Heck, if Spock Prime makes a report of things that happened in his timeline that Starfleet might want to keep an eye on, then I would even expect continuity to get trampled all over; it would only be sensible. *grin*)

[deralte.livejournal.com]

Yes, it probably was;)

Well, since the new movie made Enterprise canon, they don't have quite as much freedom as I'd like them too (but at least having Enterprise as canon explains the changes in Vulcan culture).

I've been wondering how much Spock will tell them. Does he send them off to find Kahn? Should he mention the probe heading towards Earth in search of non-existent whales? (will they be planning a leisurely jaunt into the past this time around, or will they revive some whale dna?) Should he mention the Borg? Q? How much can he advance their technology? I need some fic on this, methinks.

[000-hester-000.livejournal.com]

(speaking of which, don't supernovas turn into black holes naturally anyway? or at least neutron stars or something? so maybe he wasn't trying to collapse the star but instead was going after part of the expanding sphere of stuff the dying star throws out? I dunno, astronomy is not my strong point, but there's something fishy about that whole scenario)

...Yeah, that kinda confused me, too. Actually, what confused me even more was the part on Vulcan. Because if you were one a planet that was collapsing into a super-dense object with incredibly strong gravitational pull? I don't know that you'd be able to run around and all that, especially since the gravity would be changing suddenly and your body wouldn't be used to it. (Okay, I assumed that the red matter adds a critical amount of mass somehow... or else just makes really itty bitty black holes most of the time.)

[edenfalling]

Yeah, you would think that, especially since I think Chekov comments about compensating for gravitational forces when he's beaming Kirk and Sulu back from freefall, but apparently science only matters when it doesn't get in the way of nifty action scenes. :-(

[000-hester-000.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder about sci fi as a genre... you'd never know that it's supposed to be science fiction given all the innaccuracies it can have while still being considered generally good. I mean, unless it was the sort of story where setting really, really didn't matter, you'd never hear someone say, 'Oh yeah, Insert Historical Fiction Here was really good. I mean, it's not like renaissance Venice was actually anything like that, you know, but hey, who cares?'

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

The science arguably made even less sense in this movie.. I think they were trying to go for 'let's get rid of the supernova!' but it really doesn't work that way. Black holes don't work that way. :|

[edenfalling]

Yeah. If even I can spot the bad science -- and I know next to nothing about astronomy and have forgotten most of what little I once knew of physics -- you know there's a problem.

[not-croaker.livejournal.com]

(Though I will tell you, already he's gone and made the problem with humans knowing that Romulans and Vulcans are the same species even worse -- in the film, there's no indication that anyone on the Kelvin knows that, and I can handwave that the Vulcans admitted the truth specifically because of that mess, but in Foster's novelization, that connection is already common knowledge something like, IIRC, thirty years before it ought to have been known at all. *headdesk* That may not be strictly his fault -- it may have been in the early version of the script -- but it's not a promising sign.)

This is one of the things that I actually like. It establishes that this is even more of an AU than the characters think, because it's already massively changed before Nero forks things up.

As for no evidence on the part of the Kelvin's crew... the total lack of reaction, to me, is very telling. Compare that to the shock and even paranoia (Might Spock be a Romulan spy?) reactions that we see from the Enterprise crew in Balance of Terror....

[edenfalling]

Or, as deralte said upthread, Re: Vulcans and Romulans, I think it's probably Enterprise's fault. I never watched it beyond the first two seasons, but considering they'd already introduced the Ferengi by then (the Enterprise D was supposed to be the first to encounter them)... Wikipedia tells me there's a whole arc with the Vulcans and the Romulans in season 4, so there's your answer.

What seems to be happening is that Enterprise overwrote bits of TOS and TNG, in the main timeline that Spock Prime is from. Since Enterprise is apparently canon for the new movie -- as referenced by the comment about Admiral Archer's beagle -- that canon overwriting was already in place when Nero came back in time. So I guess we have to pretend that certain episodes of TOS and TNG are somehow less canonical than episodes of Enterprise, at least with reference to the new film AU. Which bugs the shit out of me, to be honest, but there it is. *sour face*