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Old August 23 2013, 06:18 PM   #39
Location: North Hollywood, CA
Re: Benedict Cumberbatch /John Harrison [SPOILERS]

DonIago wrote: View Post
1) It wasn't a copy-paste given that the roles are reversed and it calls back to earlier developments in the film itself, and you're doing it a disservice to call it such. That said, if Khan wasn't involved then it would remind me more of NEM's take to emulate TWoK without "overtly" emulating TWoK...and that's not at all something I wish to see again.
Actually it is in fact a copy-paste. If you tried to turn in any sort of literary work that is clearly based on a preceding work from another author and have so many exact lines and dialogues, your professor would undoubtedly note that you had essentially copy-pasted from the older work and almost certainly give you a very poor grade as a result. This is not an opinion, its pure academic and literary standards. If you tried to emulate a song this closely with exact lines being taken, you would have a lawsuit against you which you would most certainly lose (there's mountains of evidence to support all these statements). If there weren't already a large number of cases where this has already happened in this exact manner, I might give your view some more thought but this is not the reality of the matter.

2) That's my point though - changes would need to be made. The premise brought to me was "drop the name Khan but keep everything else". Any changes made to the film aside from that support my point that it's not that simple.
Taking the idea too literally has led you to a rather skewed viewpoint. Most all of the story can remain intact as it is with extremely minor changes being made and the so-called "villain" doesn't have to be Khan for any of it to make sense. All changes in any scene are extremely minor and the overall script and most other scenes for story-line development could remain almost identical.

However, you are correct if you take the statement completely literally. Just going through the script and changing the name "Khan" would not work. This is not what I understood from what people were suggesting though. I took it as "96% of the dialogue and scenes would work with any villain, not uniquely Khan. The other 4% would need adjusting or deletion/replacement scenes but only 4% or so wouldn't work with a different villain."

3) Personally I liked the phonecall, and Spock Prime made a point of saying that he wasn't generally comfortable discussing this sort of information. It seems likely that for a lesser (or perhaps less personal) threat he wouldn't have been so forthcoming. Anyway, if you know there's a future version of yourself out there that may have information about a current threat that you don't possess, it would be the height of irresponsibility -not- to ask them about it.
The idea of a timeline being different would make such a phonecall extremely illogical. How could he give you advice on an event that is not unfolding exactly the same as it was in his timeline? Temporal mechanics 101 stands contrary to your statement. It also was very poor in my opinion having Spock Prime quite literally state "I have told you I would not reveal anything that might alter your fate. That being said, I'm going to reveal a lot of things that will most certainly alter your fate." It attaches this timeline to the old one and I was under the impression the whole point of the Nu-Trek timeline was to reboot and break away from the old one. This scene flies directly in the face off their own statements about a desire to be a different Trek universe.

Since I didn't feel what transpired was a poor copy-paste job but rather a fairly respectful homage that maybe on occasion was a bit too on-the-nose, the idea of dancing around Khan without making it obvious that that's exactly what they're doing strikes me as...dubious. Which is what I've been saying the whole time. Maybe they could have made it happen, but since we don't have such a version of the film to look at for comparison, I'll say I'm glad they didn't try to pull off that kind of dance. It's been my experience that Trek writing frequently doesn't handle that particular kind of delicacy very well.

Anyway, we have exactly two movies now to use as a baseline for how the series might progress, so to conclude it's never going to do anything original with that degree of evidence seems shortsighted.

If memory serves, the first two episodes of TNG weren't exactly breathtaking either..but they did lay the groundwork for, pardon my French, some pretty cool shit to come.
I know that TNG basically copy-pasted episodes from TOS like "The Naked Time" for example or "Where No Man Has Gone Before", but you can do that with a TV show and not get a huge amount of backlash because you have many more episodes left in the season that will diverge the storyline and promote more unique stories down the line. In a movie, its a lot worse to do something like that because the feature is just a feature. There is no 20+ movies scheduled to come out in the same year that could complement or elaborate upon the characters and long-term plights without losing the audience over years of production.

I thought the 2009 reboot did a decent job of allowing us to see the open door for some "cool shit" as you put it. It was completely unnecessary for them to make another film that did nothing special compared to the first. In my very small and largely-unimportant opinion, they should've used the 2nd movie to build upon what the first one established. They can still toss in some small homages that probably only avid Trekkies would get, but it was important that they break away from the Prime universe as much as possible. The whole point of rebooting was so they could be a new universe and bringing Khan back is completely the opposite of that. If anything showing that Khan might not be so pivotal to this universe would open far more doors and more "cool shit".
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