I’ve indulged in a bit of geekdom lately by partaking of the latest Blizzard World of Warcraft novel, Arthas, and the latest Star Trek movie, curiously titled Star Trek. The novel, incidentally, came thanks to this kind lady, who pulled my name from a hat. If you have any interest in sci-fi or fantasy fiction, she’s got a lot of good reading around her site.
I’ve made some comments about the book over at Spinks’ place (it’s worth bouncing over there, not just for my comments but for her reaction and any other great articles she may have up). Now that I’ve finished the book, my impression is about the same. Arthas just isn’t the tragic hero that I’d hoped for. He’s an arrogant, morally weak, shortsighted, unintelligent caricature of the Greek tragic heroes he’s trying to emulate. (Which isn’t to say the Greeks were sterling samples of humanity, but their falls made more sense. Arthas “falls”, but because he’s easily manipulated into idiotic decisions. Puppets aren’t nearly as interesting. It’s tragic that he’s so malleable, but it doesn’t make for a terribly compelling moral tale.)
I lay the blame for this squarely at Blizzard’s feet. Christie Golden does a good job filling out the character and some of his life and motivations, but it just throws his “fall” into sharper relief than we saw in the WarCraft 3 game itself. His reasons for declining into madness and villainy are terribly shallow, and don’t follow organically or logically from the “good caring prince” that he was presented as initially. We also get precious little of Arthas questioning himself, or a really good look into what he was thinking that spurred his actions. He just acts, and while that can make for a rip roaring plot, it’s not all that effective as a character study.
Arthas is a puppet, “destined” to become the Lich King’s greatest servant, and perhaps even usurp his throne. That’s not tragedy, not a legendary story of twisted motives (like, say, the story of Watchmen‘s Big Bad). It’s just a Face/Heel turn going through the motions to give the Scourge an iconic face, and a traitor for the Humans to hate. They were probably going for the Well Intentioned Extremist in Arthas, but I didn’t buy his conversion in WC3, and I don’t buy it now that I see more of his character.
Ms. Golden did what she could, but the core structure of the Arthas mythos is to blame here. So, if you like what they did with Arthas in the games, you’ll find a lot to like about the Arthas novel. Ms. Golden knows her lore, and weaves some interesting threads into Arthas’ life. If you didn’t find him to be a very sympathetic character there, or were hoping for more depth, well… I’m not sure it’s there to be found. The book’s a good read, but Arthas is an underwhelming character. I wasn’t expecting a psychoanalysis of the guy, but what I did get just isn’t all that satisfying. I’d still recommend the book for anyone who likes to geek out to WarCraft lore, though.
As for Star Trek, it’s been argued that the universe’s “reboot” in the movie is necessary to keep Trek relevant to today’s world. I concur: it’s dumber (terribad science, plot holes, odd characterization of established characters), louder, sexier, grittier, blingier and bloodier. That can be praise or condemnation, depending on what you want out of entertainment and the Trek universe. And, since Trek wasn’t exactly high literature in the first place, well… it’s not straying too far from its original roots. (Star Trek: The Next Generation was a different animal in the family, for better or for worse. This movie happily goes back to the Original Series heyday of stunts and silliness.)
As an artist trained to do these things, I’ve got to point out that J.J. Abrams’ high budget alternate reality fan fiction has ILM on board, so at least it looks pretty. Of course, I’ve already faintly cursed such misplaced priorities (that money could have been better spent on a decent script). Still, a movie that lets Ryan Church go nuts will get a thumbs up from those who want a healthy helping of eye candy. (Spock’s ship has Ryan’s fingerprints all over it, so it looks awesome… despite being distinctly non-Vulcan.) The only slightly sour note that struck me (beside the general Star Wars>Star Trek vibe) is the scale and clutter of the interior spaces of starships. They certainly scream “unnecessarily complex” in an effort to appear “deep”, but even if you’re not seeing Okuda’s starship blueprints in your sleep, the size hinted at in the sweeping camera movements around the Enterprise’s belly doesn’t gibe with the external proportions, or with even the vaguest sense of utilitarian design (which is kind of important in practical space travel, though not in movies). It’s not a big deal, just another discordant note in a symphony of noise.
In short, then, it’s a decent popcorn blockbuster flick (way more so than any other Trek movie, with the possible exception of the similarily loud, hyperbolic and overblingy First Contact), but it’s not really what I’m looking for out of Star Trek. So it goes; dinosaurs like me have to die out sometime.
I’ve heard lots of people complain about the actual layout of the Enterprise itself, myself included. The pipes in the engine room and all the unnecessary stuff placed in made it look like they just put stuff there to be there. Number 1 rule in making movies: “Everything the audience sees has a purpose.”
Or at least that’s the mantra I try to follow, whether it be dialogue, sets, whatever.
I liked the movie purely as an action movie and I would see it again, but yes the science, design and even some of the plot progression items made me cringe.
Arthas as a character always felt shallow to me too. I think most of his current attractiveness is leeched off of cultural touchstones: he’s basically Darth Sauron now. I don’t have any respect for him, which makes him work OK as a villain but not as a sympathetic tragic hero. So I would find a novel about his pre-lich life uninteresting.
As for Star Trek, I loved it, but I’m more of a popcorn-movie comic book guy. It was so pleasurable that I could ignore the plot holes and script problems and science problems. Every time the movie touched the source material, it hurt the movie. As you noted, the spaceship design doesn’t fit, for instance. And the thing that always grated on me is that they send away teams out in just their skin-tight spandex uniforms when they should be wearing laser-proof body armor, tactical goggles, more weapons – hell, even gloves.
And the movie would have been twice as good if they cut out that scene with Kirk getting chased Disney-cartoon style through the snow by a Dinosaur.
The deal with Arthas is that Blizzard failed to make people fall in love with Arthas before they turned him bad. There’s little lore on how he was pre-lich aside from what we see in WC3. There’s nothing on his childhood or his growing pains, nothing with him dealing with Uther and the paladins or the hardships he faced growing up as a prince. There is just Prince Arthas and that’s it.
In order to tell the story, Blizz needs to give people a reason to like and love Arthas, then wrench that away from them, falling him into evil and becoming the lich king.
I really liked Star Trek. Giving us a look into the under belly of the ship wasn’t overtly distracting to me. I think showing that it wasn’t just some set with christmas tree lights added a little depth to the mythos of the show.
And the purpose of a movie, specifically a science fiction one, is to suspend your disbelief. I mean, bad science? It’s not real and half the stuff that would be considered believable is that way because scientists saw this show back in the 60′s and said, I think we can make that happen.
Centuries from now, someone might event red matter because they saw it in a movie.
oakstout, I actually really liked that the sets were more interesting than the TOS sets, but they were overcomplex (read: expensive to produce for little payoff) and scaled inconsistently with the external size of the ship. They were complex just for complexity’s sake, which is idiotic when it comes to practical spaceship design and smart budgeting for moviemaking. Plus, the silly water pipe system just seemed complex for humor’s sake, and I’m not fond of cheap gags. It’s not terrible, no, but the money they spent making these overcomplex systems and silly throwaway jokes makes me cringe. Belief can be suspended a bit, certainly, but if things are too outlandish just for the sake of visual bling, it’s going too far into Star Wars Prequel territory.
Part of the Trek appeal is that it’s our plausible future, not a galaxy far, far away. That’s especially true in this movie, where they take pains to put young Jim Kirk in a roadster on Iowa’s dirt roads, and have him in a local bar fight. They wanted to ground it in plausibility, but then they threw it out the window when they got to the meat of the show. And as Hatch rightly notes, they don’t really do sensible things with away teams or any other of a handful of things that anyone with a lick of sense would do in a “believable” universe. It doesn’t have to be real, but it needs to be believable.
And yes, bad science. Black holes don’t work that way, as variable time warps, planet eating vacuums or planar shearing ship eating monsters. The whole point of a singularity is that it’s omnidirectional; it has no planar dimensions to make that sort of event disc. This is one case (among many in sci-fi) where avoiding jargon and “technobabble” does a disservice because black holes are defined critters with specific parameters. They could have easily made some sort of handwaving name for the red matter product, say a “subspace vortex”, and it would have been fine. They could have even gone with a “hyperstring loop” or the like, spurring interest in phenomena that are still fairly unknown. It’s the cavalier use of the known term “black hole” that is the trouble. That sort of confusing and incompetent use of terminology doesn’t help education, it hampers it. It’s a bit like telling a vampire story and calling them revenants instead of vampires. You just don’t use known terms for different things without some backlash.
Also, a random star going supernova wouldn’t have threatened Romulus like that. Stars are typically really far apart. The only star close enough to present a panic for Romulus’ survival would have to be its primary star, and a spacefaring people would have had a better bead on whether or not their sun was going to explode. We can keep track of that now, with our modern technology; Romulans could have done so, and would have had the ability to move people offworld. If it were a star a few light years away (really close by interstellar measurements), the blast wouldn’t have been that powerful. It might have stripped the atmosphere and radiated the planet, but not dissolve it. Also, the blast wave wouldn’t travel faster than light, so they would have had some warning; enough to get people out of town.
Then there’s the final “run from the black hole” bit after Nero’s ship implodes. That’s even bad science using in-universe “magic” technology. One, a warp-driven ship should escape a singularity easily. Two, throwing your warp engines into the thing, hoping for the explosion to let you out is silly; they are the only thing keeping you from being sucked in at all. Toss out the warp engines, and you don’t have time to blow anything up; you’re stuck. Those same engines are also stuck, and no explosion is going to toss you out.
Again, if it wasn’t a black hole, it could work, but the defined parameters for how black holes work make the whole sequence silly.
But that doesn’t look cool enough. No, everything has to be big and Bruckheimer/Bay blingy. Bah, Humbug, I say. Bad science is bad science, even if it looks cool. That’s why I say it’s still a fun movie to watch, but it’s not one you can enjoy with an eye on plausibility. They are angling for too much suspension of disbelief, and it suffers for it.
That’s always been a trouble with science fiction, though; too many writers don’t understand the science. Trek had made strides to being better about that than Star Wars, but this is a step backwards for the franchise. Maybe that’s necessary for mainstream acceptance, but it’s disappointing for me, since I do like science and smart storytelling far more than bling and flashy pretties. And honestly, I expect more of the Trek franchise. That may be my failing rather than theirs, but that’s how I approached the film, and why I was disappointed.
Ultimately, I don’t dislike the film. I’m a bit ambivalent in the balance, but I don’t hesitate to recommend it to pretty much anyone. It’s a great action flick, and perhaps the most watchable of any of the Trek films.
Wiqd, aye, that’s what I was hoping for out of the novel. There’s a bit of that backstory, and the bit about his horse is nicely constructed, but it still doesn’t lend credence and credulity to Arthas’ fall. His turning is still just a paint by the numbers plot because that’s what Blizzard did.
Oh, and despite my nitpickery, I do think Star Trek was a great movie, and fun to watch. It’s not one that I can enjoy with my brain in gear, or with my Trek hat on, but that’s just how these things go.
What I wish most is that they would have done a different time period and/or a different set of characters. The Challenger crew and Peter David’s Excalibur crew have demonstrated the ability to make quirky and interesting non-TV-canon Trek characters.
I think if J.J. had made his own crew, rather than try to make Kirk his own, it would have worked a lot better.
To be completely honest, I’ve always hated Arthas. In Warcraft III, I was shouting at the computer screen in frustration when I had to “kill the peasants in order to save them” in Arthas’ stage before he turns. “You can’t really be that &$@#&$% stupid!” Yeah, he was, and the game gave me no opportunity to not be a moron. I really don’t remember much about WC3 besides that now. I didn’t even get the expansion to the game I thought it was kind of dumb.
Even when I was playing WoW, I just rolled my eyes in those “cinematic” moments when the Lich King came and blathered on a bit. I had a running joke where I’d have my character yell, “Ozzy is cooler than you are!” whenever he showed up. I really dislike having such a heavy-handed treatment of stories in games that are supposed to be about interactive choice.
As for the Star Trek movie, I don’t care that they called it a “singularity” or “black hole”. I understood it was a plot device, just like the “red matter”, that let the story happen and gave a thin veneer of explanation about why the universe wasn’t what I expected.
I think that using Kirk, etc., works well because they are able to do more with the characters. In TOS, Kirk was supposed to be this badass rule-breaker, but he had to fit within social expectations of the time when the show was on the air. The thing I liked about the movie is that it showed that Kirk was a real rule-breaker. There wasn’t implied sex with green women, he was actually in his underwear with a green babe! You saw a more cocky character, something I think the original Kirk was supposed to be but couldn’t show explicitly in the 1960s. His attitude during the Kobayashi Maru was a defining moment for the new character, I thought.
As for the interior design, I think the “messy” design was a step in the wrong direction. I like the clean aesthetics of the TOS and TNG series because it allows the focus to be on the characters. I thought the scene with Scotty going through the water tubes was downright silly in the inefficiency of the design; it was obviously only that way to provide an opportunity for physical humor.
My thoughts.
Red matter didn’t actually bug me because it was a new “magic” stuff. It’s the abuse of the “black hole” that really bugs me. Then again, I’d like to go back to school for a Ph.D. in Astrophysics, so I’m hardly normal.
The Kobayashi Maru test was a highlight of the film for me. It really sold the Kirk character. I think that Mr. Pine does a great job with him.
Good call on the cleanliness of the ship interior and character focus. Tangentially, I liked the design of the Enterprise in the series Enterprise. They extrapolated from submarine design (very compact and utilitarian) into space, and it made sense. The movie just seems to be doing the “it’s cool” thing rather than trying to be plausible, and that rubs me the wrong way. I’m a biased artist with an old Trek streak and science bent, though, so I’m atypical.
Still, I wish they would have done their own thing. I’m tired of Hollywood retreads. Trek is a whole galaxy of characters, and we’re stuck with a reboot/rerun. It’s just… underwhelming, and somewhat disrespectful of what has gone on before. It’s not enough to make the movie a bad one, or even an average one, but it does sully the experience somewhat for me.
As much as I’ve always liked the stories in WC3 (to the point that I bought Frozen Throne last year in order to live these stories; couldn’t, the game is faaaar too slow for me nowadays), the character of Arthas was always a thorn in my side.
I like corruption stories as much as the next guy, but there was something that didn’t click with this. Arthas basically just wanted revenge on Necromancer-Dude, and wanted more power to achieve that. It wasn’t even “I need more power to protect the innocents, whatever the cost”, it was just “I want to shove a sword down this guy, the bigger the sword, the better”. I would have hoped the story, heavyhanded as the style might be, might have redeemed the character at least a bit…
Reminds me of the dragonlance chronicles, particularly Sturm Brightblade. The character was one of the blandest of the books, in my opinion, even if he has his moments (spoiler) especially his death is an incredible moment (/spoiler). So I bought a book telling his youth, hoping to have something more.
Ewww. I know characters that are written by other artists than the original one sometimes aren’t in the same spirit, but… Ewww ! The character was now following stupidly the letter of the Knights of Solamnian’s code, and had bouts of Arthas-like anger for no reason.
To be fair, I think it’s no easy task to revisit a character’s childhood, or events coming before the first known appearance of the character without setting any paradox and while creating something compelling.
And to be fair, stories based on games are often crap on a stick (and I’d love to be directed towards good adaptations of games in books)
J.J. needs to cut it out with the lens flares.
Other than what has already been said re: romulans as a space-faring race should have seen the supernova coming and evacced years before it happened, the one aspect of the movie that bothered was the black hole being conveniently ‘plugged’ after it had served it’s purpose. As far as I know, black holes can’t be ‘plugged’, can they?
Also, it seemed to me there were far too many coincidences going on. Earth getting saved seemed as much about the RNG giving the character’s a bunch of good rolls when needed as much as their own decisions and personal ability.
Destral, I’ve read theories that small black holes can eventually “evaporate” into a flash of gamma radiation, based on Hawking radiation. It certainly wouldn’t just iris shut though, it would be a singularity one moment, a blast of radiation the next.
…I guess that redshirt dude with the explosives rolled a 1, aye?
Rofl, yeah, I guess he did!
[...] you might remember, I got my grubby little hands on a copy of his biography, which wound up bring a pretty good read, even though the titular character isn’t my cup of tea. So, it’s far past time I pass [...]