Qualms With Star Movies

I have a bunch of qualms with Star Trek. For some people, all those interstellar movies are the hot shit. But I’ve found that Star Wars and Star Trek cannot peacefully coexist on the same shelf. For most people, it’s either one or the other. First of all, there’s the fact that all the shit in Star Trek is brand new looking. Like it’s never been used. Never been flown through a stellar dust cloud, or blown through an asteroid belt. Star Wars opposes. All the shit in Star Wars looks like it’s been around the universe a few times. Taken a beating. Looks a little more realistic.

Secondly, it pisses me off that Star Trek uses an up reference in deep space. why the hell are all the spacecraft planed on the same scale? Why is it that when two ships come in for close range combat, they are both upright? As if there is some universal up in null gravity. Obviously there is no up or down in null gravity. This tells me that some of the shots of the ships taken from distances should show the ship at awkward angles, not relative to the up and down you know sitting in front of your television screen. And furthermore, when there are two ships on the same screen, they won’t be exactly nose to nose, and there won’t be a common up. It just won’t happen, people.

Coming from two separate ends of space, you think they are gonna be perfectly level with each other? Perfectly even, like they’re sitting on a table together? Both facing up? Coming exactly at each other as if coming from opposing ends of a railroad track to converge in a head on collision? The chances of all those positional situations becoming happenstance are so far remote you cannot even calculate them. It’s like an 85 to the 10 with 59 zeros after it.

And the aliens in Star Trek all are humanoid. Okay, so they are in Star Wars too. And “Ahha hhahha hahhhhhhaaaaaaa” coming from Chewbacca means something totally different than “Ahha hhahha hahhhhhhaaa” and Han Solo can completely understand it no matter what. I didn’t say Star Wars was perfect. But it sure kicks the shit out of Star Trek. I propose a versus movie. The creatures and starships from Star Trek meet and battle with those from Star Wars. Then we’ll truly see the power of the Force.

I guess it’s like any technical movie, I guess. I do the same thing when I’m watching movies that have military aircraft in them. I sit there and criticize how that can’t really happen, or no one would really do that. Or the same with guns. When someone waves a semi-automatic pistol around and it clinks and clicks like there’s loose pieces in it, just for effect. Yeah it sounds cool, and maybe it would be cooler in real life if your pistols did that, but it would also mean it was more likely to fail. Loose pieces means loose engineering. It also means movement. Movement on a precision instrument like that can only be defined by the pre-determined build of the instrument itself.

Anyway, I go off on these tangents, you see. But the point was that most of what I’ve seen in the very little Star Trek I’ve seen are just full of things that just simply wouldn’t – or, more to the point, couldn’t – happen. Now there is one thing I kind of like about it though. Captain Kirk will hump anything that even remotely resembles a human. Yeah I would tear me up some green bitch. Hi-five there, chief. But I’ll pass on taking a ride on your dumb ship.

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Bishop

    While you’re ragging on these two, why not slam the fact that BOTH of them continue to have audible explosions when fighting in space. Space = vacuum = no air = no way for sound to travel = NO SOUND!

    The answer for this is that people wouldn’t sit through a movie without cool sound effects. And one that had completely silent explosions wouldn’t keep audience attention even if it was realistic. Just like driving a car off a cliff in the movies automatically means it will explode, so do explosions make noise in space battles.

    Same answer applies to everything being on one plane or x-y axis. Audiences can’t think three-dimensionally, so they don’t film it that way. If they did, it would confuse viewers and no money would be made.

    As for humanoid aliens, well, until the past 10 years or so, that was the only kind you could make in the costume department and still come in close to budget.

    So, if you really want to gripe about all these things in Star Wars and Star Trek, you need to put most of the blame where it belongs: on dumb viewers, the lowest common denominator.

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