Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Wednesday Wire
The very first scene of the very first episode of The Wire. Because I don't just watch PGSM.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
CAP Congress, Part I
Greetings from Moncton, New Brunswick!
I've just finished presenting my thesis research at the 2009 CAP congress. Naomi and I left Prince George on June 1st (I handed in my thesis and Oral Defence/External Examiner Request forms the same day) and drove cross country, arriving in Moncton on the June 5th. My journey has taught me many intersting things, about Canada, physics, and life in general. I shall now impart my wisdon in no particular order:
-- Don't wear a suit to a physics conference. You'll look like a pretentious ass, and despite your delusions to the contrary, it won't make you a more eloquent speaker.
-- The Prairies aren't as boring as they're made out to be. Then again, it's hard for any place to be boring when it's rushing past you at 140 km/h. (I kid, Mom.)
-- If you are native, you can get away with naming your convinience store 'How' Convinient. Get it?!
-- Quebec is all in French. I know I should have known that already, but that fact only really dawned upon me when we approached Quebec city and saw billboards annoucing that we were entering "La capitale nationale." Seriously. If it weren't for the fact that we needed to fuel up in Quebec city, I probably would have passed though the whole province without stopping.
-- Despite the anxiety I felt passing through Quebec, though, there were some beautiful towns along the St. Lawrence River. We had to take a detour off of Highway 40 because of construction (I think-- again, it was all French) that took us through some of these towns. This, plus Miyuu Sawai, almost makes me want to try learning French again. Almost.
-- New Brunswick, unlike pretty much the rest of Canada as far as I can tell, actually is bilingual!
-- When giving a presentation, in physics or otherwise, be sure to point at the screen in front of the room and not at the computer screen in front of you. A professor was kind enough to inform me of that rule, and as a result I'll likely be brooding on the embarassment of that moment for months. Maybe I just won't come back home. North America's a big place, I'm sure they'll never find me.
-- There's a maritime garbage disposal company named "Fero." Only three people will understand why that is so bloody weird.
-- New Brunswick, while geographically rather dull, is otherwise quite awesome. Unless you want to find an open liquor store at 11:00 pm on a saturday night. If that's the case, New Brunswick is not for you.
-- You can order a whole lobster at a restaurant in Shediac, New Brunswick. Naomi did so, while I worked on my presentation back at the hotel. Fuck!
-- Despite what you tell yourself, you cannot present thrity-nine slides of text, equations, and graphs in twelve minutes.
-- Time zones change as you travel across the country. Yet another thing I hadn't considered when planning this trip. There's actually a North American time zone east of New York.
-- We're east of New York! And Boston!
-- The beauty of Canada is greatly exaggerated. Aside from B.C., Jasper, and Ontario near the Great Lakes, Canada is just trees and plains on flat earth.
-- Parliament Hill is right smack in the middle of downtown Ottawa. I thought there would be some separation from the city centre, but there it is.
-- Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal is not as good as I imagined it would be.
Stay tuned for Part 2: America!
I've just finished presenting my thesis research at the 2009 CAP congress. Naomi and I left Prince George on June 1st (I handed in my thesis and Oral Defence/External Examiner Request forms the same day) and drove cross country, arriving in Moncton on the June 5th. My journey has taught me many intersting things, about Canada, physics, and life in general. I shall now impart my wisdon in no particular order:
-- Don't wear a suit to a physics conference. You'll look like a pretentious ass, and despite your delusions to the contrary, it won't make you a more eloquent speaker.
-- The Prairies aren't as boring as they're made out to be. Then again, it's hard for any place to be boring when it's rushing past you at 140 km/h. (I kid, Mom.)
-- If you are native, you can get away with naming your convinience store 'How' Convinient. Get it?!
-- Quebec is all in French. I know I should have known that already, but that fact only really dawned upon me when we approached Quebec city and saw billboards annoucing that we were entering "La capitale nationale." Seriously. If it weren't for the fact that we needed to fuel up in Quebec city, I probably would have passed though the whole province without stopping.
-- Despite the anxiety I felt passing through Quebec, though, there were some beautiful towns along the St. Lawrence River. We had to take a detour off of Highway 40 because of construction (I think-- again, it was all French) that took us through some of these towns. This, plus Miyuu Sawai, almost makes me want to try learning French again. Almost.
-- New Brunswick, unlike pretty much the rest of Canada as far as I can tell, actually is bilingual!
-- When giving a presentation, in physics or otherwise, be sure to point at the screen in front of the room and not at the computer screen in front of you. A professor was kind enough to inform me of that rule, and as a result I'll likely be brooding on the embarassment of that moment for months. Maybe I just won't come back home. North America's a big place, I'm sure they'll never find me.
-- There's a maritime garbage disposal company named "Fero." Only three people will understand why that is so bloody weird.
-- New Brunswick, while geographically rather dull, is otherwise quite awesome. Unless you want to find an open liquor store at 11:00 pm on a saturday night. If that's the case, New Brunswick is not for you.
-- You can order a whole lobster at a restaurant in Shediac, New Brunswick. Naomi did so, while I worked on my presentation back at the hotel. Fuck!
-- Despite what you tell yourself, you cannot present thrity-nine slides of text, equations, and graphs in twelve minutes.
-- Time zones change as you travel across the country. Yet another thing I hadn't considered when planning this trip. There's actually a North American time zone east of New York.
-- We're east of New York! And Boston!
-- The beauty of Canada is greatly exaggerated. Aside from B.C., Jasper, and Ontario near the Great Lakes, Canada is just trees and plains on flat earth.
-- Parliament Hill is right smack in the middle of downtown Ottawa. I thought there would be some separation from the city centre, but there it is.
-- Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal is not as good as I imagined it would be.
Stay tuned for Part 2: America!
Friday, May 22, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
My Sunday Morning
After a fairly late night of work, I went to bed. I was hoping to sleep in this Sunday morning, but at about six-thirty in the morning, I felt the slight pangs of a headache. After some brief effort to sleep through it, I eventually decided to get up. By eight o'clock, I was off to town.
I realized that this would be the perfect opportunity for a drive. I've frequently enjoyed travelling the back roads of Prince George. The peace and solitude of the countryside helped me clear my mind. I had already travelled north and east of Prince George far too often, so I decided to venture where I had never gine before-- south, down highway 97 toward Quesnel.
I found myself travelling down Red Rock Road West, some twenty to thirty kilometers south of Prince George. The nieghborhood of Red Rock consisted of a long gravel road, with a few houses and, to my surprise, a closed-down elementary school dotted along its sides. The road promised some intriguing exploration, but unfortunately my journey was to be cut short.
I am one prone to travel down side roads. When I saw a red pick up truck pull out of a junction on my right, I followed my foolish exploratory instincts and turned in. Alas, within fifty meters I saw the sign indicating a dead-end, along with a looped arrow which, to me, indicated a turn-around up ahead. Following the road over a small crest I found not a turn-around but a ranch. Dissapointed, and just a little frustrated, I turned the car around and headed back out, only to find the red pick-up barrelling along toward me. Ah, I thought, the man of the manor! He must have mistaken my simple and admittedly rather childish excursion as a visit of greater portent. A trivial, if embarrassing, misunderstanding.
And yet, a dread fell upon me at the thought this man, who knew of me through only the most awkward of contexts, being forced by his own routine to follow me out of Red Rock and into Prince George. I thus decided to turn to the right and continue further down the road, certain that the man in the red truck would break left toward town.
Yet, he did not turn left, but instead followed me to the right. My hands, in fear, clasped tighter to the wheel, and an anxious warmth flushed upward over my face. I wondered, did he sense in my confused detour not merely purpose, but malice? My thoughts raced, first to denial-- surely, he did not think me some burglar, scoping his house like a common vagrant? Yet even a surplus of experience, forged by the fires of common sense into a veritable blade of inference capable of piercing the heavist curtains of doubt, cannot truly hope to penetrate that mysterious force which shrouds the thoughts of men. And when confronted with such an overwhelming incomprehensible vastness, ones own thoughts, like the shodow's of Plato's Cavern, take on a life all their own. My heart raced as the pick-up followed ever closer, my eyes darting rapidly between the road ahead and the persuer behind. My thoughts, like the snowflakes of a winter's storm which first dart about in the wind before crystallizing into the frigid white terrain, converged into a single idea, a single word: escape.
On my left, as though summoned by my fears, another road appeared. Without hesitation, I bent left. The pick-up followed. There could be no doubt now. He was following me. And yet even as I resigned myself to the terrible reality of this misunderstanding I saw the pick-up dart to the right, toward the Red Rock Volunteer Fire Brigade headquarters. And then, a further relief: the Highway! I turned north onto the highway and accelerated; though relieved at the pick-up's departure, I soon noticed its driver deliberating with a pair of uniformed men, no doubt members of the fire brigade. In more rational times, the scene would have suggested the jovial camaraderie of old friends, perhaps even equals, brothers in that fellowship of volunteer fire brigadiers. Yet my thoughts, still trapped in Hollows of Plato, continued to rage on.
"That's the one!" said, no doubt, the pick up driver. "I have his license plate number! Alert the dispatchers! Rally the cruisers! We must not allow him elusion!"
And at that moment, indeed, in my sights appeared the form of a partol car, its side branded by the words "Red Rock Community Patrol," its sparkling electric lights of crimson and azure luminous even in the brightness of this fateful sabbath morn. I pulled to the side, and yet even as the police officer emerged from his vehicle, eliminating all doubt of his intended target, I was overcome not by fear but relief. I had tired of the chase. Now, at the very least, I was allowed an audience for my account of the preceding events, and with it, the chance for redemption. I rolled down my window.
"Sir, were you aware that this is a construction zone?"
I was not. I had no way of knowing that I'd pulled out of Red Rock into a construction zone. But, nonetheless, I was speeding, and I got a ticket for it. The police officer was pretty decent about my fine. He could have been much crueller than he was.
This was the first time I've ever gotten a speeding ticket. My spotless record, ruined!
By the way, the events described above unfolded in the span of about a minute and a half. Still, this story, in all its purple glory, has to be better than Star Trek.
I realized that this would be the perfect opportunity for a drive. I've frequently enjoyed travelling the back roads of Prince George. The peace and solitude of the countryside helped me clear my mind. I had already travelled north and east of Prince George far too often, so I decided to venture where I had never gine before-- south, down highway 97 toward Quesnel.
I found myself travelling down Red Rock Road West, some twenty to thirty kilometers south of Prince George. The nieghborhood of Red Rock consisted of a long gravel road, with a few houses and, to my surprise, a closed-down elementary school dotted along its sides. The road promised some intriguing exploration, but unfortunately my journey was to be cut short.
I am one prone to travel down side roads. When I saw a red pick up truck pull out of a junction on my right, I followed my foolish exploratory instincts and turned in. Alas, within fifty meters I saw the sign indicating a dead-end, along with a looped arrow which, to me, indicated a turn-around up ahead. Following the road over a small crest I found not a turn-around but a ranch. Dissapointed, and just a little frustrated, I turned the car around and headed back out, only to find the red pick-up barrelling along toward me. Ah, I thought, the man of the manor! He must have mistaken my simple and admittedly rather childish excursion as a visit of greater portent. A trivial, if embarrassing, misunderstanding.
And yet, a dread fell upon me at the thought this man, who knew of me through only the most awkward of contexts, being forced by his own routine to follow me out of Red Rock and into Prince George. I thus decided to turn to the right and continue further down the road, certain that the man in the red truck would break left toward town.
Yet, he did not turn left, but instead followed me to the right. My hands, in fear, clasped tighter to the wheel, and an anxious warmth flushed upward over my face. I wondered, did he sense in my confused detour not merely purpose, but malice? My thoughts raced, first to denial-- surely, he did not think me some burglar, scoping his house like a common vagrant? Yet even a surplus of experience, forged by the fires of common sense into a veritable blade of inference capable of piercing the heavist curtains of doubt, cannot truly hope to penetrate that mysterious force which shrouds the thoughts of men. And when confronted with such an overwhelming incomprehensible vastness, ones own thoughts, like the shodow's of Plato's Cavern, take on a life all their own. My heart raced as the pick-up followed ever closer, my eyes darting rapidly between the road ahead and the persuer behind. My thoughts, like the snowflakes of a winter's storm which first dart about in the wind before crystallizing into the frigid white terrain, converged into a single idea, a single word: escape.
On my left, as though summoned by my fears, another road appeared. Without hesitation, I bent left. The pick-up followed. There could be no doubt now. He was following me. And yet even as I resigned myself to the terrible reality of this misunderstanding I saw the pick-up dart to the right, toward the Red Rock Volunteer Fire Brigade headquarters. And then, a further relief: the Highway! I turned north onto the highway and accelerated; though relieved at the pick-up's departure, I soon noticed its driver deliberating with a pair of uniformed men, no doubt members of the fire brigade. In more rational times, the scene would have suggested the jovial camaraderie of old friends, perhaps even equals, brothers in that fellowship of volunteer fire brigadiers. Yet my thoughts, still trapped in Hollows of Plato, continued to rage on.
"That's the one!" said, no doubt, the pick up driver. "I have his license plate number! Alert the dispatchers! Rally the cruisers! We must not allow him elusion!"
And at that moment, indeed, in my sights appeared the form of a partol car, its side branded by the words "Red Rock Community Patrol," its sparkling electric lights of crimson and azure luminous even in the brightness of this fateful sabbath morn. I pulled to the side, and yet even as the police officer emerged from his vehicle, eliminating all doubt of his intended target, I was overcome not by fear but relief. I had tired of the chase. Now, at the very least, I was allowed an audience for my account of the preceding events, and with it, the chance for redemption. I rolled down my window.
"Sir, were you aware that this is a construction zone?"
I was not. I had no way of knowing that I'd pulled out of Red Rock into a construction zone. But, nonetheless, I was speeding, and I got a ticket for it. The police officer was pretty decent about my fine. He could have been much crueller than he was.
This was the first time I've ever gotten a speeding ticket. My spotless record, ruined!
By the way, the events described above unfolded in the span of about a minute and a half. Still, this story, in all its purple glory, has to be better than Star Trek.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
French and Just Star Trek
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck all of you.
Fuck you, The Onion. Fuck you, Saturday Night Live (fuck you twice for not allowing videos to be shown in Canada from nbc.com and then filing a copyright clain against Youtube.com for showing the same video!). Fuck you, Spill.com. Fuck you Leonard Nimoy.
And fuck you*.
Fuck you for buying into this ridiculous lie, that if someone doesn't like the new Star Trek movie. . . it's okay. It's not because it's a bad movie. It's because it's a great movie, and the only people who would be dumb enough to complain about it are those closed minded, continuity horny Trekkies. That's right, only the hard core losers who never moved out of their parent's basement would dislike this movie. Those pathetic losers don't realize what their missing out on. It's not our (ie. your) problem, it's their's.
Now that I've undoubtably won you over. . . what did I think?
Star Trek is a bad movie. It's notexceptionally all bad, but it's bad. I say this as a lapsed Trekkie, open minded enough to want to see where the film-makers would go with this movie. In fact, I was anxious to see some change. Like I said, I'm a lapsed Trekkie. I'm lapsed because the stories that Star Trek the franchise was trying to sell me all sucked. I wanted something new.
I'm stressing this because I truly believe that the fact of Star Trek the movie's badness is something objective. It does not rest on your being or not being a Trekkie. Everyone, of all colors and creeds, should be able to see how bad this movie is with but a little bit of thought. This film is borne of a suckiness that transcends barriers of (sub-)culture, the kind of badness that, I had hoped, would touch the very depths of our common humanity.
But no. I was wrong. 96% wrong.
Sigh.
It's not the changes that bother me. I don't mind the parallel universe time altering thing. I don't mind the new design of the Enterprise. I don't mind new actors-- in fact, I thought Karl Urban and Simon Pegg were great in this film. I don't mind a more emotional Spock, and I don't mind Spock and Uhura becoming intimately involved (though I did perform a truly earth-shattering head-smack when Uhura looked longingly into Spock's eyes and told him "I will be monitoring your communication frequencies" as though she had just said "love means never having to say you're sorry"). I don't even mind the fact that the Death Star somehow missed Alderan and instead destroyed planet Vulcan, or at least I don't mind it for fanboy reasons.
What I do mind is that it's a bad story. In fact, it's a fractally bad story. Just when you think you've found every plot hole, every ludicrous motivation, a closer look at one reveals a dozen more. It's like the Madelbrot set of incompetance (Just so you know, I may have "unconsciously" borrowed this metaphor from SFDebris).
Just to list off things as they come to me, in case this didn't look enough like a rant:
The main villain, Nero, is driven to genocidal rage by the fact that his homeworld, Romulus, has been destroyed by a supernova. He directs this rage, specifically, at Spock, and more generally at the Federation for failing to save his homeworld.
First of all. . . this was Spock's plan. He, personally (what, did they run out of red-shirts?), will pilot a small ship into the doomed Romulan star. Right at the moment it explodes, Spock will release a strange substance called Red Matter (or as I call it, Red Bull) that will magically, and I mean magically, create a black hole that will suck up the exploding remnants and save Romulus. . . at least until the planet freezes thanks to the lack of a life-sustaining sun (hat-tip to Spoony).
Now. . . as both a lapsed Trekkie and a masters student in physics, I know that Star Trek has frequently raped humankind's vast knowledge of science for the purpose of cheap story-telling. But I couldn't let this slide. Besides, I'd like to beat SFDebris to the punch for once in pointing out a huge scientific boo-boo. Here's my first problem with the whole create a black hole to suck up the supernova: when a star goes supernova, quite often IT CREATES A BLACK HOLE! That's where black holes come from! Supermassive stars are the stars that undergo supernova. It is these stars that have the mass required to collapse into a singularity. So what makes Spock think that creating a black hole will suck back the exploding stellar remants? In countless supernovae, it's never happened before. . . why would it work this time?
Okay, okay, you might argue that Spock will just use the Red Bull to create a more powerful black hole, one of those million solar mass monsters that will easily suck back the star in on itself. Even if you ignore what effect this would have on Romlulus (the planet we're trying to save, remember?), there's that pesky matter of, you know, the million solar masses! Hell, forget a million masses, what about the minimum 1.4 to 3 solar masses needed to form a black hole? Are you just gonna store it in the trunk? Well, I hope you have pretty big trunk, at least as big as the minimum Schwartzchild radius of 4 to 10 km needed to contain your not-yet-a-black-hole on your way to Romulus.
But on to the plot. . . Spock arrives at Romulus too late, and the star explodes-- cause, you know, scientists can't predict which stars will go supernova many millions of years in advance or anything like that. Still, Spock, not wanting to let perfectly good Red Bull go waste, decides to release it. . . or at least a very small part of it. I don't know. Anyway, this creates a black hole and, funny thing about black holes, they pull things in, and soon Spock finds his ship in an inescapible free fall of death. And so too, convineintly, does the ship belonging to the aforementioned bad guy, Nero.
But as it turns out, Red Bull, in addition to magically creating black holes and giving you wings, also causes time travel. Thus, both Spock and Nero plus crew are sucked over a century back in time to before the events depecited in the original Star Trek series. Actually, to more accurate than this film deserves, the two are launched to different times, twenty-five years apart. This, by the way, is not revealed at the beginning of the movie, but rather right smack in the middle, by means of the Vulcan exposition meld. . . but more on that later.
Nero and his massive ship arrive right in front of the Federation starship Kelvin. This is where the movie begins, and it's at this point that some reviewer, I think Spoony again, asks a good question: What was a Federation starship doing in the Romulan system at this time? I mean, even if you don't know that the Federation and the Romulans were in a centuries long state of cold war. . . there is no explanation given for this. In fact, there's no indication given that they're even at Romulus. And if they're not at Romulus, what is Nero doing there? Anyway, Nero's ship, the Narada or Ramada or Nirvana or something like that, does what any good Star Trek villain does-- he opens fire on the Kelvin after the Kelvin attempts to hail them. Now, knowing what I've already told you, you know that this makes absolutely no sense, but as I already mentioned, what I've already told you about Nero's situation and motivations isn't revealed until the middle of the movie. What that means is that the first time viewer has no way to know how stupid this is until the end of the movie. This goes beyond mere incompetence and into the realm of dishonesty, as though the writers knew how moronic this was and, instead of trying to create a plot that makes sense, instead just tried to cover it up with bad non-linear exposition.
So Nero orders the captain of the Kelvin aboard and starts asking him questions. Again, Nero has no reason to know that he's travelled back in time. . . and yet the second question he asks of the Kelvin's captain is "what stardate is it?" When the Kelvin's captain answers, Nero flies into a rage and kills him, and then proceeds to destroy the Kelvin. When I saw this in the theatre, my first thought was that Nero has deliberately travelled back in time to kick ass, but has arrived at the wrong date. That would explain Nero's question about the stardate, as well as why he was attacking the Kelvin. Looking back, I seriously wonder whether the writers were just making this up as they went along.
(Just to nitpick-- we learn in the film that Nero's ship is mining vessal. . . what's a mining vessal doing armed to the teeth? To fight pirates? Maybe.)
So it turns out that the first officer and acting captain of the Kelvin is none other than George Kirk, father of James T. Kirk, who, in another amazing coincidence, was just being born right at the moment the Kelvin came under attack.
Why am I doing this?
So Captain (George) Kirk protects the fleeing crew of the Kelvin and, once they're safely out of range, slams the Kelvin into the Narada, a heroic sacrfice. . . preceded by an argument over what to name the newborn baby. I'm serious. George Kirk on the Kelvin, and, let's say Wheezy Kirk, on a fleeing shuttle, communicate via radio over what to name their son, right in the midst of battle.
So after destorying the Kelvin, Nero just. . . hangs around. For twenty-five years. Again, having no foreknowledge of his motivations or reasons for his current situation, I thought that maybe the damage caused by the Kelvin was so significant that it took twenty-five years to repair. But no. You see, he's been waiting for Spock. As I mentioned earlier, Spock and Nero arrive twenty-five years apart, and Nero has been waiting at the black hole, for Spock to come out. First. . . if he's been waiting there, how come no-one else found him? I mean, he destroyed a Federation vessal. Don't you think they'd send send the space marines to go looking for him? Second, even though he didn't know that he had even been sent back in time and even though he, presumably, knew nothing about the properties of Red Bull-- other than perhaps that it exists and makes black holes-- he actually mentions that, according to his calcuations, Spock should be coming out of the black hole (you know, the thing from which there is no escape!!!) at about this time. So what was he doing all this time? Coming up with his brilliant plan of. . . sigh, I'll get to that later. I mean, couldn't he have been trying to warn Romulus about thet Supernova that's about to engulf their world in century's time? But then again, everyone in this universe is so stupid they can't figure out that the Romulans' massive red-giant star that's produced an awful lot of carbon will probably go supernova. Maybe Nero just decided it was futile.
So, Spock arrives, Nero captures him, takes the Red Bull, and unleashes-- oh, Jesus fucking Christ in a bag-- his plan.
That's it. That's the plan. And we spend the whole movie following the crew of the Enterprise trying to stop it.
I haven't been focussing too much on the introduction of the crew because, to be fair, that part is handled okay. Not great, not even good, but okay. Okay, that is, save for one huge exception, which leads back to the Vulcan exposition meld I mentioned earlier.
Nero Arrives at Vulcan and drills his hole. Because most of the fleet is busy elsewhere, it's up the the newly minted cadets of Starfleet Academy to save Vulcan. Once everyone is aboard their assgined ship, they fly off to Vulcan. . . except for the Enterprise. For the purposes of this film, Sulu, the pilot, is an idiot. An idiot who can handle a sword real nice, but an idiot nonetheless. You, see, Sulu forgot to turn off the "external inertial dampener," which prevents the Enterprise from reaching warp. Seriously, "external inertial dampener?" That's as stupid as calling something an "inert reactant." Anyway, they arrive, find all the other ships blown up, and are attacked by Nero. Nero is about to about to destory the ship, when. . .
As he did with the Kelvin, Nero orders the Enterprise's captain, Christopher Pike, aboard his ship. Capatin Pike orders young Spock, ie the one just out of Starfleet Academy serving on the newly commissioned Enterprise, to serve as acting Captain. He then orders Kirk to serve as first officer. . . which is weird because he had to sneak aboard the Enterprise with Dr. McCoy's help and. . . you know what, never mind. Spock takes command, Captain Pike goes to Nero's ship, and Kirk and Sulu do the flashy oribtal skydiving thing onto the aforementioned platform and accomplish nothing of consequence.
Nero then drops the Red Bull into the Planet's core. Vulcan starts imploding, and Spock beams down to the surface to rescue a small council of Vulcans responsible for the preservation of Vulcan's cultural heritage. As the planet is imploding, the council is hiding in a transporter-impermeable fortress. All six of them. There are a couple of things to nitpick here. First, are they just keeping all that culture in their heads? That, strangely, would made a weird sort of sense; we already know that Vulcan's had pass their essense or Katra from one individual to another, and it might make sense for culture to be passed on in the same way. Unfortunately, this is never explained. Second, and this relates to the chain of events leading back to the Vulcan exposition meld, Spock's mother is there. Now, I presume the reason for that is because Sarek, Spock's father, is on the cultural heritage council, and spouses of council members, for whatever reason, allowed into the cultrual fortress of logitude where they're all hiding. Still, it seems strange, given events earlier in the film, that she'd be allowed in there. Spock was tormented endlessly as a child for having a Vulcan mother. They even called Sarek a "traitor" for marrying a human. And yet this same apparently threatening human is now allowed into the vault containing, presumably, the very essence of Vulcan culture?
But anyway, Spock's mother and father are kneeling in the Fortress of Logitude-- apparently their plan was to just sit out the destruction of their planet. Spock brings them out into the open and orders a transport. Unfortunately, due to surface instability, the Enterprise fails to beam up Spock's mother from Vulcan. You gotta love the false moral equivalence on display. An enitre planet, aand its six billion inhabitants, are wiped in in a span of minutes. Men, women, and children, all extinguished. But what's really bad is that Spock lost his mother! I guess the writers though audiences couldn't possibly relate to mass genocide. . . so they decided instead that they could relate to the death of their Winona Ryder looking mother.
So, naturally, Spock is a little pissed off, though being a Vulcan he handles it well, or seem it seems at first. Unfortunately, his fellow cadet-turned-crewmate, James T. Kirk, has been giving Spock shit over the decisions he's made. Spock, understandably, orders Kirk removed from the bridge. Kirk then fights backs against the officers asked to remove him, and Spock nerve piches him, rendering him unconscious. Again, all well and good. Then Spock says this:
"Get him off my ship."
Wait. . . what? "Get him off my ship", not "Throw him in the brig"? Immediately we see Kirk marooned on some ice planet with minimal supplies. The computer aboard his space pod makes some excuse about how there's a Federation outpost fourteen miles away, but see. . . it's an ice planet. An ice planet that turns out to have ice fucking dragons that try to eat Kirk, and nearly succeed. There is no way Spock couldn't have known that it was dangerous to send Kirk down there, but he did it anyway. This relates to yet another a stupid plot point which I will get to later.
So Kirk is eventually chased into an ice cave by the aforementioned ice fucking dragon and is about be devoured when all of a sudden the dragon is chased away by a man with a torch. The man turns around and reveals himself to be none other than. . . future Spock! That's right, my friends! Nero happened to maroon Spock on the very same planet that younger Spock would later maroon Kirk. Not only that, they were marooned within a fucking ten-mile radius! How overly convenient it that?!
So Spock greets Kirk, with an allusion to an earlier movie. Not, "Jim. . . your name is Jim," (or maybe he did say that, I don't remember) but "I have been and always shall be your friend." I remember him saying that because it felt just so damn out of place in this context. You do not say something like "I have been and always shall be your friend" as a greeting, but as a parting. That's why it worked so well in Star Trek II when Spock was dying, and why it just feels awkward here.
Anyway, Spock reveals that he is, in fact Spock, from the future. The conversation that follows, as usual, is utterly idiotic.
Why? Who knows.
"But how can I do that?" asks Kirk.
"You must show that is showing emotional distress which makes him unfit for command."
Ah. Do you mean the kind of emotional distress that would prompt him to abandon Kirk on a deadly planet with few supplies and no defences?
Anyway, they go to the Federation outpost, meet Scotty, and teach him about his own invention of transwarp transporting or some such. Kirk and Scotty then beam aboard the Enterprise, leaving Spock behind. They could have kept this simple, but nooooooo. They had to be funny. When they arrive, Kirk is just fine, but Scotty, he's. . . *snicker* . . . he's trapped in a tank of. . . "inert reactant"! And then. . . *snicker* he's pumped along a series of pipes! Ha ha ha ha! He's pounding on the pipe walls and Kirk is running after him, trying to save him fron drowning! Hahahahahaha! And then, Kirk, *snicker*, Kirk pulls an emergency release, and Scotty falls fifty feet onto a hard floor! And the best part is that this scene served absolutely no purpose to the overall story! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Seriously, fuck you.
So anyway, Kirk and Scotty are captured and brought to the bridge, and Spock asks how they were able to beam aboard. Kirk decides this is the ideal moment to provoke Spock into anger and thus show he is to emotionally unstable for command. He does this by. . . berating him about his lack of emotional response over his mother's death and the near extinction of his race. Well, it does the trick, and Spock proceeds to beat the living snot outta Kirk. Spock ends up nearly strangling Kirk to death, only to pull back and declare himself unfit for duty. Wow, it happened just like Spock said it would. It's almost as if everyone were following a really hackeneyed script.
So, with Spock relieving himself, Kirk crowns himself, Napoleon-like, as the captain of the Enterprise. And what does he do with this newfound authority? He beams over to Nero's ship, leaving Chekov, fucking Chekov, in charge. Is there no chain of command here? And of course, because we need these two to be friends again, Spock decides to join him on his little away mission.
So they beam aboard, some stupid action sequences ensue, and Kirk and Spock destroy Nero's ship with Red Bull. They return to Starfleet academy, Kirk earns a commendation and, I swear to fucking God, is instantaneously promoted to captain of the Enterprise! There really is no chain of fucking command! And to top it off, Spock comes aboard and requests a position as first officer. Kirk replies, saying he would be "honored." This is supposed to be touching, but it just feels cheap. This friendship was not earned in any way. One minute they're rivals, the next minute they're friends. Why? Because that's what the script needed to happen.
The Enterprise flies off into the unknown, its crew united, with Leonard Nimoy narrating the famous Star Trek opening, as he did in Star Trek II.
And that's it.
If you've made it all the way through this long-winded rant, I defy you to still tell me that Star Trek was a good movie. In fact. . . could you explain to me what you saw in it? Please? I mean, this movie makes the Star Wars Prequels look good. It makes M. Night Shayamalan look. . . better. I mean, you hate the Star Wars prequels, and you hate M. Night. What do you see in this? Please tell me! And if you didn't like it, for reasons other than fanboy BS, please let me know as well. Me and ConfusedMatthew can't be the only ones out there.
Until then. . . live long and . . . on second thought, don't.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck all of you.
Fuck you, The Onion. Fuck you, Saturday Night Live (fuck you twice for not allowing videos to be shown in Canada from nbc.com and then filing a copyright clain against Youtube.com for showing the same video!). Fuck you, Spill.com. Fuck you Leonard Nimoy.
And fuck you*.
*If applicable. Otherwise, have a good day.
Fuck you for buying into this ridiculous lie, that if someone doesn't like the new Star Trek movie. . . it's okay. It's not because it's a bad movie. It's because it's a great movie, and the only people who would be dumb enough to complain about it are those closed minded, continuity horny Trekkies. That's right, only the hard core losers who never moved out of their parent's basement would dislike this movie. Those pathetic losers don't realize what their missing out on. It's not our (ie. your) problem, it's their's.
Now that I've undoubtably won you over. . . what did I think?
Star Trek is a bad movie. It's not
I'm stressing this because I truly believe that the fact of Star Trek the movie's badness is something objective. It does not rest on your being or not being a Trekkie. Everyone, of all colors and creeds, should be able to see how bad this movie is with but a little bit of thought. This film is borne of a suckiness that transcends barriers of (sub-)culture, the kind of badness that, I had hoped, would touch the very depths of our common humanity.
But no. I was wrong. 96% wrong.
Sigh.
It's not the changes that bother me. I don't mind the parallel universe time altering thing. I don't mind the new design of the Enterprise. I don't mind new actors-- in fact, I thought Karl Urban and Simon Pegg were great in this film. I don't mind a more emotional Spock, and I don't mind Spock and Uhura becoming intimately involved (though I did perform a truly earth-shattering head-smack when Uhura looked longingly into Spock's eyes and told him "I will be monitoring your communication frequencies" as though she had just said "love means never having to say you're sorry"). I don't even mind the fact that the Death Star somehow missed Alderan and instead destroyed planet Vulcan, or at least I don't mind it for fanboy reasons.
What I do mind is that it's a bad story. In fact, it's a fractally bad story. Just when you think you've found every plot hole, every ludicrous motivation, a closer look at one reveals a dozen more. It's like the Madelbrot set of incompetance (Just so you know, I may have "unconsciously" borrowed this metaphor from SFDebris).
Just to list off things as they come to me, in case this didn't look enough like a rant:
The main villain, Nero, is driven to genocidal rage by the fact that his homeworld, Romulus, has been destroyed by a supernova. He directs this rage, specifically, at Spock, and more generally at the Federation for failing to save his homeworld.
First of all. . . this was Spock's plan. He, personally (what, did they run out of red-shirts?), will pilot a small ship into the doomed Romulan star. Right at the moment it explodes, Spock will release a strange substance called Red Matter (or as I call it, Red Bull) that will magically, and I mean magically, create a black hole that will suck up the exploding remnants and save Romulus. . . at least until the planet freezes thanks to the lack of a life-sustaining sun (hat-tip to Spoony).
Now. . . as both a lapsed Trekkie and a masters student in physics, I know that Star Trek has frequently raped humankind's vast knowledge of science for the purpose of cheap story-telling. But I couldn't let this slide. Besides, I'd like to beat SFDebris to the punch for once in pointing out a huge scientific boo-boo. Here's my first problem with the whole create a black hole to suck up the supernova: when a star goes supernova, quite often IT CREATES A BLACK HOLE! That's where black holes come from! Supermassive stars are the stars that undergo supernova. It is these stars that have the mass required to collapse into a singularity. So what makes Spock think that creating a black hole will suck back the exploding stellar remants? In countless supernovae, it's never happened before. . . why would it work this time?
Okay, okay, you might argue that Spock will just use the Red Bull to create a more powerful black hole, one of those million solar mass monsters that will easily suck back the star in on itself. Even if you ignore what effect this would have on Romlulus (the planet we're trying to save, remember?), there's that pesky matter of, you know, the million solar masses! Hell, forget a million masses, what about the minimum 1.4 to 3 solar masses needed to form a black hole? Are you just gonna store it in the trunk? Well, I hope you have pretty big trunk, at least as big as the minimum Schwartzchild radius of 4 to 10 km needed to contain your not-yet-a-black-hole on your way to Romulus.
But on to the plot. . . Spock arrives at Romulus too late, and the star explodes-- cause, you know, scientists can't predict which stars will go supernova many millions of years in advance or anything like that. Still, Spock, not wanting to let perfectly good Red Bull go waste, decides to release it. . . or at least a very small part of it. I don't know. Anyway, this creates a black hole and, funny thing about black holes, they pull things in, and soon Spock finds his ship in an inescapible free fall of death. And so too, convineintly, does the ship belonging to the aforementioned bad guy, Nero.
But as it turns out, Red Bull, in addition to magically creating black holes and giving you wings, also causes time travel. Thus, both Spock and Nero plus crew are sucked over a century back in time to before the events depecited in the original Star Trek series. Actually, to more accurate than this film deserves, the two are launched to different times, twenty-five years apart. This, by the way, is not revealed at the beginning of the movie, but rather right smack in the middle, by means of the Vulcan exposition meld. . . but more on that later.
Nero and his massive ship arrive right in front of the Federation starship Kelvin. This is where the movie begins, and it's at this point that some reviewer, I think Spoony again, asks a good question: What was a Federation starship doing in the Romulan system at this time? I mean, even if you don't know that the Federation and the Romulans were in a centuries long state of cold war. . . there is no explanation given for this. In fact, there's no indication given that they're even at Romulus. And if they're not at Romulus, what is Nero doing there? Anyway, Nero's ship, the Narada or Ramada or Nirvana or something like that, does what any good Star Trek villain does-- he opens fire on the Kelvin after the Kelvin attempts to hail them. Now, knowing what I've already told you, you know that this makes absolutely no sense, but as I already mentioned, what I've already told you about Nero's situation and motivations isn't revealed until the middle of the movie. What that means is that the first time viewer has no way to know how stupid this is until the end of the movie. This goes beyond mere incompetence and into the realm of dishonesty, as though the writers knew how moronic this was and, instead of trying to create a plot that makes sense, instead just tried to cover it up with bad non-linear exposition.
So Nero orders the captain of the Kelvin aboard and starts asking him questions. Again, Nero has no reason to know that he's travelled back in time. . . and yet the second question he asks of the Kelvin's captain is "what stardate is it?" When the Kelvin's captain answers, Nero flies into a rage and kills him, and then proceeds to destroy the Kelvin. When I saw this in the theatre, my first thought was that Nero has deliberately travelled back in time to kick ass, but has arrived at the wrong date. That would explain Nero's question about the stardate, as well as why he was attacking the Kelvin. Looking back, I seriously wonder whether the writers were just making this up as they went along.
(Just to nitpick-- we learn in the film that Nero's ship is mining vessal. . . what's a mining vessal doing armed to the teeth? To fight pirates? Maybe.)
So it turns out that the first officer and acting captain of the Kelvin is none other than George Kirk, father of James T. Kirk, who, in another amazing coincidence, was just being born right at the moment the Kelvin came under attack.
Why am I doing this?
So Captain (George) Kirk protects the fleeing crew of the Kelvin and, once they're safely out of range, slams the Kelvin into the Narada, a heroic sacrfice. . . preceded by an argument over what to name the newborn baby. I'm serious. George Kirk on the Kelvin, and, let's say Wheezy Kirk, on a fleeing shuttle, communicate via radio over what to name their son, right in the midst of battle.
"Let's name his after your father, George!"
"Wheezy, no son of mine is going to walk around with the name Tiberius!"
"George!"
"Wheezy!"
"George, I don't care if you're about to crash into that Romulan death star, we are going to pick a name for your son!"
"Fine. We'll name him after your father, James."
"My Father's name is Jean-Luc. . ."
Kelvin smashes into Narada. The theme song starts.
Movin' on up
To the east side
To a deluxe apartment in the sky
Mov-movin' on up
To the east side
We finally got a piece of the pie!
So after destorying the Kelvin, Nero just. . . hangs around. For twenty-five years. Again, having no foreknowledge of his motivations or reasons for his current situation, I thought that maybe the damage caused by the Kelvin was so significant that it took twenty-five years to repair. But no. You see, he's been waiting for Spock. As I mentioned earlier, Spock and Nero arrive twenty-five years apart, and Nero has been waiting at the black hole, for Spock to come out. First. . . if he's been waiting there, how come no-one else found him? I mean, he destroyed a Federation vessal. Don't you think they'd send send the space marines to go looking for him? Second, even though he didn't know that he had even been sent back in time and even though he, presumably, knew nothing about the properties of Red Bull-- other than perhaps that it exists and makes black holes-- he actually mentions that, according to his calcuations, Spock should be coming out of the black hole (you know, the thing from which there is no escape!!!) at about this time. So what was he doing all this time? Coming up with his brilliant plan of. . . sigh, I'll get to that later. I mean, couldn't he have been trying to warn Romulus about thet Supernova that's about to engulf their world in century's time? But then again, everyone in this universe is so stupid they can't figure out that the Romulans' massive red-giant star that's produced an awful lot of carbon will probably go supernova. Maybe Nero just decided it was futile.
So, Spock arrives, Nero captures him, takes the Red Bull, and unleashes-- oh, Jesus fucking Christ in a bag-- his plan.
"It's very simple, Mr. Spock," says Nero, stroking his Romulan British Shorthaired Cat. "I cannot save Romulus, for reasons neither of us could possibly comprehend. So I will do the next best thing. . . I will destroy each and every planet in the Federation! Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
"Yure Inshane, Neroh," says Spock, speaking, for reasons known only to him, with a lisp and Scottish accent. "To do that, you would need a firepower greater than half the Starfleet!"
"That is where you are wrong, Spock! You underestimate the power of the Red Bull! I will use this mining ship to drill a hole to the core of the planet. Then, I will drop a small bit of Red Bull into the core, causing a massive singularity that will envelop the planet! And since you were packing enough Red Bull to collpase a supermassive star, I will have more that enough to destory every single planet in the Federation!"
"But that makes no sense! We tried to help you!"
"And you failed!"
"Well sorry! Last time we try to help the Romulans. Sheesh. And besides, I've seen that drill! All anyone would have to do is shoot it off from a distance."
"Wrong again! I will block all transporters and communications!"
"But what does that have to do with--?"
"The only way to stop the jamming signal would be for a small group of soldiers to skydive from space onto a small platform and destroy it, and no-one would dare try anything that stupid!"
"Do you expect me to believe this cockamamee plan, Goldfing-- I mean Nero?"
"No, Mr. Spock. I expect you to die. . . with a guilty conscience! You see, I will leave you behind on an ice planet, near the desert planet of-- wait, ice planet near a desert planet, (sigh) whatever-- and make you watch!"
"What do you mean 'watch'?"
"I think it's time we demonstrated the full power of this Red Bull. So your course for Vulcan!"
"No! Vulcan is peaceful! We have no weapons, you can't possibly--"
"Would you prefer another target? A military target? Then name the system! I grow tired of asking this so it will be the last time: Where is the rebel base?"
That's it. That's the plan. And we spend the whole movie following the crew of the Enterprise trying to stop it.
I haven't been focussing too much on the introduction of the crew because, to be fair, that part is handled okay. Not great, not even good, but okay. Okay, that is, save for one huge exception, which leads back to the Vulcan exposition meld I mentioned earlier.
Nero Arrives at Vulcan and drills his hole. Because most of the fleet is busy elsewhere, it's up the the newly minted cadets of Starfleet Academy to save Vulcan. Once everyone is aboard their assgined ship, they fly off to Vulcan. . . except for the Enterprise. For the purposes of this film, Sulu, the pilot, is an idiot. An idiot who can handle a sword real nice, but an idiot nonetheless. You, see, Sulu forgot to turn off the "external inertial dampener," which prevents the Enterprise from reaching warp. Seriously, "external inertial dampener?" That's as stupid as calling something an "inert reactant." Anyway, they arrive, find all the other ships blown up, and are attacked by Nero. Nero is about to about to destory the ship, when. . .
"Wait!" says Nero. "Zoom in on that ship!"
The screen zooms on the ship, revealing its name-- Enterprise.
"Ah, yes," says Nero. "Finally, my chance. . . for revenge."
"Revenge," says General Zod.
"Revenge!" says Ursa.
"REVENGE!" says Lex Luthor. "Now we're cooking!"
As he did with the Kelvin, Nero orders the Enterprise's captain, Christopher Pike, aboard his ship. Capatin Pike orders young Spock, ie the one just out of Starfleet Academy serving on the newly commissioned Enterprise, to serve as acting Captain. He then orders Kirk to serve as first officer. . . which is weird because he had to sneak aboard the Enterprise with Dr. McCoy's help and. . . you know what, never mind. Spock takes command, Captain Pike goes to Nero's ship, and Kirk and Sulu do the flashy oribtal skydiving thing onto the aforementioned platform and accomplish nothing of consequence.
Nero then drops the Red Bull into the Planet's core. Vulcan starts imploding, and Spock beams down to the surface to rescue a small council of Vulcans responsible for the preservation of Vulcan's cultural heritage. As the planet is imploding, the council is hiding in a transporter-impermeable fortress. All six of them. There are a couple of things to nitpick here. First, are they just keeping all that culture in their heads? That, strangely, would made a weird sort of sense; we already know that Vulcan's had pass their essense or Katra from one individual to another, and it might make sense for culture to be passed on in the same way. Unfortunately, this is never explained. Second, and this relates to the chain of events leading back to the Vulcan exposition meld, Spock's mother is there. Now, I presume the reason for that is because Sarek, Spock's father, is on the cultural heritage council, and spouses of council members, for whatever reason, allowed into the cultrual fortress of logitude where they're all hiding. Still, it seems strange, given events earlier in the film, that she'd be allowed in there. Spock was tormented endlessly as a child for having a Vulcan mother. They even called Sarek a "traitor" for marrying a human. And yet this same apparently threatening human is now allowed into the vault containing, presumably, the very essence of Vulcan culture?
But anyway, Spock's mother and father are kneeling in the Fortress of Logitude-- apparently their plan was to just sit out the destruction of their planet. Spock brings them out into the open and orders a transport. Unfortunately, due to surface instability, the Enterprise fails to beam up Spock's mother from Vulcan. You gotta love the false moral equivalence on display. An enitre planet, aand its six billion inhabitants, are wiped in in a span of minutes. Men, women, and children, all extinguished. But what's really bad is that Spock lost his mother! I guess the writers though audiences couldn't possibly relate to mass genocide. . . so they decided instead that they could relate to the death of their Winona Ryder looking mother.
So, naturally, Spock is a little pissed off, though being a Vulcan he handles it well, or seem it seems at first. Unfortunately, his fellow cadet-turned-crewmate, James T. Kirk, has been giving Spock shit over the decisions he's made. Spock, understandably, orders Kirk removed from the bridge. Kirk then fights backs against the officers asked to remove him, and Spock nerve piches him, rendering him unconscious. Again, all well and good. Then Spock says this:
"Get him off my ship."
Wait. . . what? "Get him off my ship", not "Throw him in the brig"? Immediately we see Kirk marooned on some ice planet with minimal supplies. The computer aboard his space pod makes some excuse about how there's a Federation outpost fourteen miles away, but see. . . it's an ice planet. An ice planet that turns out to have ice fucking dragons that try to eat Kirk, and nearly succeed. There is no way Spock couldn't have known that it was dangerous to send Kirk down there, but he did it anyway. This relates to yet another a stupid plot point which I will get to later.
So Kirk is eventually chased into an ice cave by the aforementioned ice fucking dragon and is about be devoured when all of a sudden the dragon is chased away by a man with a torch. The man turns around and reveals himself to be none other than. . . future Spock! That's right, my friends! Nero happened to maroon Spock on the very same planet that younger Spock would later maroon Kirk. Not only that, they were marooned within a fucking ten-mile radius! How overly convenient it that?!
So Spock greets Kirk, with an allusion to an earlier movie. Not, "Jim. . . your name is Jim," (or maybe he did say that, I don't remember) but "I have been and always shall be your friend." I remember him saying that because it felt just so damn out of place in this context. You do not say something like "I have been and always shall be your friend" as a greeting, but as a parting. That's why it worked so well in Star Trek II when Spock was dying, and why it just feels awkward here.
Anyway, Spock reveals that he is, in fact Spock, from the future. The conversation that follows, as usual, is utterly idiotic.
"I'm Spock," says Spock.How do you know about Nero? Fuck that! How do you know who I am? How do you know Spock? Anyhoo, we proceed with the Vulcan exposition meld and Spock then tells Kirk "You must get Spock to relieve his command."
"No way," says Kirk.
"I am. And you're James Kirk."
"Whatever."
"I'm from the future. That's why I look like an older version of the Spock you know." (Just go with it.)
"Pssshh."
"I was brought here by Nero."
Kirk looks back at Spock with a sudden somber seriousness.
"How do you know about Nero?"
Why? Who knows.
"But how can I do that?" asks Kirk.
"You must show that is showing emotional distress which makes him unfit for command."
Ah. Do you mean the kind of emotional distress that would prompt him to abandon Kirk on a deadly planet with few supplies and no defences?
Anyway, they go to the Federation outpost, meet Scotty, and teach him about his own invention of transwarp transporting or some such. Kirk and Scotty then beam aboard the Enterprise, leaving Spock behind. They could have kept this simple, but nooooooo. They had to be funny. When they arrive, Kirk is just fine, but Scotty, he's. . . *snicker* . . . he's trapped in a tank of. . . "inert reactant"! And then. . . *snicker* he's pumped along a series of pipes! Ha ha ha ha! He's pounding on the pipe walls and Kirk is running after him, trying to save him fron drowning! Hahahahahaha! And then, Kirk, *snicker*, Kirk pulls an emergency release, and Scotty falls fifty feet onto a hard floor! And the best part is that this scene served absolutely no purpose to the overall story! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Seriously, fuck you.
So anyway, Kirk and Scotty are captured and brought to the bridge, and Spock asks how they were able to beam aboard. Kirk decides this is the ideal moment to provoke Spock into anger and thus show he is to emotionally unstable for command. He does this by. . . berating him about his lack of emotional response over his mother's death and the near extinction of his race. Well, it does the trick, and Spock proceeds to beat the living snot outta Kirk. Spock ends up nearly strangling Kirk to death, only to pull back and declare himself unfit for duty. Wow, it happened just like Spock said it would. It's almost as if everyone were following a really hackeneyed script.
So, with Spock relieving himself, Kirk crowns himself, Napoleon-like, as the captain of the Enterprise. And what does he do with this newfound authority? He beams over to Nero's ship, leaving Chekov, fucking Chekov, in charge. Is there no chain of command here? And of course, because we need these two to be friends again, Spock decides to join him on his little away mission.
"Say, sorry about saying that you don't love your mother and aren't saddened by your species' near annihilation."
"No worries. Sorry about nearly killing you in a fit of rage."
"You know what I say? That's why pencils have erasers!"
So they beam aboard, some stupid action sequences ensue, and Kirk and Spock destroy Nero's ship with Red Bull. They return to Starfleet academy, Kirk earns a commendation and, I swear to fucking God, is instantaneously promoted to captain of the Enterprise! There really is no chain of fucking command! And to top it off, Spock comes aboard and requests a position as first officer. Kirk replies, saying he would be "honored." This is supposed to be touching, but it just feels cheap. This friendship was not earned in any way. One minute they're rivals, the next minute they're friends. Why? Because that's what the script needed to happen.
The Enterprise flies off into the unknown, its crew united, with Leonard Nimoy narrating the famous Star Trek opening, as he did in Star Trek II.
And that's it.
If you've made it all the way through this long-winded rant, I defy you to still tell me that Star Trek was a good movie. In fact. . . could you explain to me what you saw in it? Please? I mean, this movie makes the Star Wars Prequels look good. It makes M. Night Shayamalan look. . . better. I mean, you hate the Star Wars prequels, and you hate M. Night. What do you see in this? Please tell me! And if you didn't like it, for reasons other than fanboy BS, please let me know as well. Me and ConfusedMatthew can't be the only ones out there.
Until then. . . live long and . . . on second thought, don't.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Katana Found Near Murder Scene in Prince George
I saw an intriguing story on the cover of today's Citizen. Police have discovered a katana (the paper insists on calling it a "samurai sword") in the Hudson's Bay Slough canal near Queensway. The katana had "red discolouration[ie. blood, most likely] on the tip and more splattered down the blade." This fact, as well as the location where it was found, have led police to consider whether it might be related to a murder that occured on Saturday. The victim is rumored to be a gang member, though police will only say at this time that he was "known to us."
I'm waiting to hear if more information is released about the sword, specifically whether it really was used to kill the victim and whether it was an authentic katana or just an imitation. Prudence leads me to believe that it's probably an imitation. If it is authentic, it means that the sword is, to say the least, not cheap.
UPDATE: Or, rather, non-update. Since the story broke on the fourteenth of April, there has not been a follow-up story in the Citizen, though they did run an op-ed on the sixteenth, which can pretty much summed up as "killing people with swords is bad." The Free Press did run a story on the sword, but it doesn't offer anything not already revealed in the Citizen article.
I'm waiting to hear if more information is released about the sword, specifically whether it really was used to kill the victim and whether it was an authentic katana or just an imitation. Prudence leads me to believe that it's probably an imitation. If it is authentic, it means that the sword is, to say the least, not cheap.
UPDATE: Or, rather, non-update. Since the story broke on the fourteenth of April, there has not been a follow-up story in the Citizen, though they did run an op-ed on the sixteenth, which can pretty much summed up as "killing people with swords is bad." The Free Press did run a story on the sword, but it doesn't offer anything not already revealed in the Citizen article.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Weren't we all told . .
. . . that the cold war is over? Apparently, it's not quite done yet.
So. . . President Bush, in 2004, decides to take advantage of the popularity surrounding the Spirit and Opportunity missions on Mars to announce his new "vision for space exploration," which involves ditching the space shuttle, completing construction of the International Space Station, and "return[ing] to the moon by 2020, as the launching point for missions beyond." Then, China, ever so eager to prove it's not a dumb kid anymore, announces its own plans for a moon mission, which I wrote about earlier. Now Russia, which had earlier annouced that it had no interest in taking part in the Nasa plan, has now suddenly decided it will build a new spacecraft capable of lunar orbit.
At least Canada's not being dragged into this moronic new space race. . . we're too busy trying to beat the Russians in the moronic new oil race.
MOSCOW - The Russian space agency has ordered design work to start for a next-generation spaceship capable of flying missions to the moon, setting the ground for a potential new space race with the United States.
The space agency granted the state-controlled RKK Energiya company a US$23 million contract for initial work on a new, reusable craft to replace the 40-year-old Soyuz.
The as-yet-unnamed Russian spaceship could emerge as a potential competitor to NASA's prospective Orion spacecraft.
Design requirements for the Russian craft appear similar to Orion's specification, prompting some experts to nickname it "Orionski."
Orion is scheduled to carrying humans to the International Space Station beginning in 2015, and to the moon by 2020.
Alexei Krasnov, the chief of manned space programs for the Russian space agency, said last week that the prospective Russian spacecraft is set to make its maiden flight before 2020, without elaborating.
James Oberg, an experienced aerospace engineer who worked on NASA's space shuttle program and is now a space consultant, wrote in a commentary that the new Russian space program could help NASA win funds for its plan to return astronauts to the moon.
"This will give NASA a long hoped for boost in Congress by echoing the space race motivations of the 1960s," Oberg said.
Energiya beat the other leading state-controlled spacecraft builder, the Khrunichev company, for the prestigious order. It was announced on a government website.
Energiya has until June 2010 to complete the initial design. The company builds the Soyuz and its unmanned cargo version, named Progress, which are not reusable.
Krasnov said the new spacecraft will be capable of carrying a crew of six and a payload of 500 kilograms to orbit around the Earth. The Soyuz can only carry a crew of three.
Krasnov told reporters last week that the new spaceship should also be capable of delivering a crew of four to lunar orbit.
"We want the new ship to be a step into the future, not just a scaled up version of the Soyuz," he said.
Russia plans to start construction next year of Vostochny, a new space launch facility in the far eastern Amur region near China. The new cosmodrome is expected to host launches of unmanned spacecraft beginning in 2015 and the first manned missions starting in 2018.
Russia currently uses the Soviet-built Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for all of its manned space missions and most important commercial launches. Another launch facility in Plesetsk, northern Russia, is mostly used to launch military satellites.
Windfall oil revenues of the past years have allowed the Kremlin to spend more on Russia's space program, which had suffered badly in the post-Soviet economic meltdown. But with Russia facing its worst financial crisis since 1998, observers say the government may find it hard to fund the ambitious new program.
So. . . President Bush, in 2004, decides to take advantage of the popularity surrounding the Spirit and Opportunity missions on Mars to announce his new "vision for space exploration," which involves ditching the space shuttle, completing construction of the International Space Station, and "return[ing] to the moon by 2020, as the launching point for missions beyond." Then, China, ever so eager to prove it's not a dumb kid anymore, announces its own plans for a moon mission, which I wrote about earlier. Now Russia, which had earlier annouced that it had no interest in taking part in the Nasa plan, has now suddenly decided it will build a new spacecraft capable of lunar orbit.
At least Canada's not being dragged into this moronic new space race. . . we're too busy trying to beat the Russians in the moronic new oil race.
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