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[QUOTE]Originally posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim: [QB] God, I love this place. (That was not a sarcastic comment. It's fun here.) In light of the sheer volume of responses and discussion that has intervened since I made my last post, this one is probably is going to seem a little scattered. My apologies. Firstly, one should not make the mistake of thinking that I cannot appreciate or enjoy the drama of TWOK. The movie is exciting and entertaining. It offers some good character development for Kirk. It contains one of the most emotionally-moving scenes yet seen in any [i]Trek[/i]. However, it suffers greatly from being formulaic and inelegant as a motion picture. It's a typical Hollywood flick with its chase-'em-down, shoot-'em-up, good-guys-versus-bad-guys scenarios, and appeals ONLY to the audience's emotions and NOT its intellect. I, for one, am not particularly interested by so-called "revenge movies." I mean, what's deep and meaningful about revenge? It seems to me that whatever is has already been covered by Melville and other serious authors. I'm sure Nick Meyer [i]et al[/i] thought they were being sophisticated and literary in cribbing lines from Melville and Shakespeare but, to me, it just comes off as crass. I am quite familiar with those authors and do not feel that their interjection into the film was as artful as so many do. I sort of expect more depth, complexity, and originality from [i]Star Trek[/i]. I deeply lament the dumbing-down of American film that has occured in the last couple of decades, and the increasing willingness of audiences to refrain from looking critically at motion pictures as pieces of art and to overlook "the details." Thus, part of what irks me about TWOK's persistent deification as the pinnacle of cinematic [i]Trek[/i] is the very nonchalance towards those "minor" plot holes I mentioned that so many people exhibit. (By the way, I would be most interested to see anyone claiming that TMP has similar logical flaws present their criticisms; we might want to start a new thread, though.) That about sums up my general feelings on the subject of TWOK's flaws, aside from the aforementioned issue of the film significantly altering and greatly oversimplifying Khan's character and the dynamic between him and Kirk. Now, on to a few specific things: [QUOTE]Originally posted by Sol System: [qb] Anyway, just why Kirk is giving Khan and his cronies a second chance on Ceti Alpha V isn't really addressed in "Space Seed" that I can remember, beyond that sort of thing being more or less standard practice in the series.[/qb][/QUOTE]Kirk did it because he felt it would be "a waste to put them in a reorientation center." It's part of what I was trying to get at earlier--Kirk [i]admired[/i] Khan, and vice versa. [QUOTE]Originally posted by PsyLiam: [qb] At what point is it established that Kirk knew about Ceti Alpha VI exploding?[/qb][/QUOTE]I think Jason's comments are based on the scene where Terrell says to Kirk that Khan blames him for the death of his wife and Kirk replies: "I know what he blames me for." I hadn't really thought of this exchange in that light before, but it's an interesting angle. [QUOTE]Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: [qb] Pacing is part of what kills TMP- lots of "people sitting talking in a lounge" scenes really kill any built up tension of Earth's potential destruction. [...] TMP also suffers from there not being any villan to be intrested in- V'Ger is like fighting a tidal wave- it's just this incomprehensible force to be dealt with, but you cant get any satisfaction from it's defeat/destruction like you can with Kahn or the klingons.[/qb][/QUOTE]See, in my opinion, these are precisely the sort of things that make TMP a [i]better[/i] piece of science fiction cinema than TWOK. The impact, the payoff, of the film is not in dramatic devices like building tension or in simple emotional reactions like taking satisfaction in the destruction of an enemy, but rather in its probings into the human psyche and the nature of sentient existence. Its main purpose is not mere [i]entertainment[/i], but [i]exploration[/i] of those abstract concepts. [QUOTE]Originally posted by Lee: [qb] [...] just because TMP was the first film to use the "only ship in range/in the quadrant/etc." excuse doesn't make it any less silly than all the other occasions. [/qb][/QUOTE]In TMP, the issue of the [i]Enterprise[/i] being "the only ship in interception range" was due to the fact that her recent engine and weapon upgrades made her the only vessel with any reasonable chance of meeting and dealing with the V'Ger threat in a timely fashion. There were a number of other ships around, (several of them are mentioned by name in early drafts of the script: the light cruiser [i]Aswan[/i], the [i]Boston[/i], the [i]Paris[/i], and the [i]Delphi[/i]) but none of them were powerful or fast enough to be effective. Anyway, it's not really surprising to me at all that I'm very much in the minority on this issue, but differences of opinion are part of what make us individuals. IDIC, yo. -[b]MMoM[/b] :D [/QB][/QUOTE]
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