I'll be honest: I liked Star Trek: the Next Generation more when it was Doctor Who. I mean it! Star Trek always labored under being the pseudo-military offspring of Gene Roddenberry, whose status as a former sailor is something I've always taken some small measure of pride in.
And that's the problem. Star Trek has to have guns and missiles and shields and Worf basically because audiences here in the US probably wouldn't be able to accept the universe of Doctor Who, where being cunning and absolutely dedicated to the morality of not injuring another soul[1] is enough to see you through your problems.
Some small part of the greatness of Doctor Who is the distillation of its core concept: even when you see The Doctor with a gun, it's a lie. In Bad Wolf, The Doctor hits a low point as Rose is seemingly disintegrated and he picks up a gun to threaten the lives of the operators of Satellite 5, but only throws it aside as soon as someone speaks to him. In The End of Time, he carries a pistol into the sanctum of The Master with the obvious intent of using it, only to turn it on some machinery.
And that's just it, The Doctor is just a tourist, wandering the universe to behold it's wonders. He doesn't have to maintain the militaristic facade of The Star Fleet simply because he isn't really beholden to anything. His conflict with Harriet Jones is based on that: humans don't need to don the weapons of interstellar war because The Doctor will protect them...unless he doesn't.
But I'm veering wide of the point. There's a new trailer out for the new Star Trek movie, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and it's...just watch:
It's just rubbish. Seriously, fuck that. Who's the bad guy? What happens? Who does the what thing? There is no information on this film. None. It might as well be Transformers or The Matrix: Revolutions or fucking fucking fucking Battleship.
But, in a miracle to match that of the fishes and loaves, I'm not angry. I'm really not.
I'm out of anger. I'm out of pissed-offedness. I'm out of any of the emotions that come from expecting better, really.
Science fiction is just another wasteland, picked bare by Hollywood. It's another desert planet left barren after the fleet of executives and hack writers tore every piece of savory meat off of it and converted it into waste, and for some reason I don't even blame them. Dodging the larger implications, I'm just going to call Hollywood unoriginal and pretend like it's an isolated case of unimaginative pricks paying for unimaginative movies which have tapped out the real core of principled human behavior.
Game, set, match, guys who market idealistic human sentiment; it's much better managed as a commmodity we can sell as a character hook you barely understand instead of a real thing with a tangible raison d'etre and consequences.
Fuck you all; you're awful. You're going to see this awful movie because of the brand recognition or because "That dreamy Sherlock Holmes is in it." Fuck you; this kind of empty, meaningless tripe is the posterchild of the once-sometimes-food of entertainment having taken centerstage of our intellectual nutrition after having long-since outlived any worth it once had.
I'd get up on a soapbox--ostensibly one on top of this soapbox--and spout admonishments about your inevitable viewing of it, but it's fruitless; you have no shame: you've been well-programmed from the start to ingest shit and pretend it's rainbows.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
That The Dark Knight Rises review is forthcoming.
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[1] Unless you do it on a truly epic and genocidal scale.
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7 comments:
Most bloggers who spew hate--the good ones anyway--tend to temper it with a tiny amount of humor.
Just a thought for next time.
Fingers crossed for a free-walking holographic Moriarty, but honestly, a different brand of meatless, unoriginal hackery is what really makes my mouth water.
From how you're talking about how ST:TNG and Doctor Who differ in their approaches to cunning & principled human behavior, I'm going to go ahead and guess that you haven't seen Firefly yet. Its characters may be less successfully nonviolent than the Doctor but it gives the decisions and principles surrounding that more screentime than Star Trek does.
(Of course, Firefly is long since cancelled, so its only relevance to modern day modern time screenwriting is whatever lessons Whedon's carried forward from it.)
And it seems I got around to watching DK Rises just in time!
Great post if a little heavy with the angry. I tend to enjoy your blogs that involve entertainment/pop culture the most.
While it does suck that math and marketers have hollowed out a once potent vehicle for art into so much statistics and profit margins, there lies different motivations for watching a movie.
While I won't walk into this movie expecting anything of content I do expect to be entertained by action sequences and pretty graphics.
My argument, that I will not further in this post, is that you may be mistaking subject for content which causes you to look for something you expect in a place it doesn't exist
Yeah Cabin in the Woods was good.
And no. I'm a horrible person who hasn't seen Firefly yet. I'm amenable to the idea of seeing Firefly, but never actually compelled to do so.
That's fair. If you haven't seen Twin Peaks, that's another (short) one for your "amenable but uncompelled" list. Same kind of following as Firefly, just... twenty years earlier.
We actually did watch a little bit of Twin Peaks, but I might come back to it. I happened across a Twin Peaks-related thing yesterday, which might be a blog in and of itself soon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZzyOs2bh3PU
Haha, that's awesome.
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