Whoa whoa whoa -- hold on. There's so much nonsense here it's hard to know where to start. I'll guess the top will do.
Therumancer said:
So you're saying that Abrams made a critically acclaimed blockbuster film solely through marketing and a "hype machine" even though the franchise was dead in the water, ridiculed by the masses outside of its own hardcore fan base, and held next to no interest from mainstream audiences? That's what you're arguing??? You're saying that Abrams is such an amazing marketing magician that he was able to turn fan backlash and online toxicity into box office gold -- with a freakin' STAR TREK film, for which there was absolutely no demand? Well, that'd be a neat trick.
I'd like to counter this idea with a new theory: I think a lot more poeple actually like (and in my case, LOVE) Abrams Star Trek films, but it's just made to seem like the opposite on the Internet because of some very vocal, very negative fans.
What Abrams did was rope the Trek-starved masses into the first movie, and do a good job of spinning both the backlash and negative hype. Given that it was a success on paper a sequel was green-lit, and big plans were made around it.
The problem in attempting to argue with me is that your missing the entire point of this discussion and what was established. The bottom line is the dislike of "JJ Trek", which is pretty much the default, and what this whole video is about, along with questioning why it seems that a movie that was "loved" saw such virulent hate when it's sequel was released which should have meant the sequel wouldn't have been inspiring this level of backlash, which has caused a lot of people who now look at the situation to realize you can't find much nice said about the first one either. I've simply been pointing out that it's based on a false assumption, that the first movie was actually well loved, which it wasn't, as if you were paying attention you would have noticed the backlash immediately, it's just that the hype and information control meant that a lot of people didn't notice.
What's more, a lot of the things I've mentioned about the business, aren't something you can really ignore. Like it or not Viacom has pretty much relegated JJtrek to it's own little box in the corner, while being rather assertive in it's handling of the core properties showing at least some long term plans. Simply put if they felt JJtrek was going anywhere they would have been more than happy to sell Cryptic the rights to put elements of it into their game. They are however very careful about what Cryptic can and cannot due, even with a heavily non-canon game, having stepped in on matters like what they can do with androids, what kinds of ships they can make playable, and what they can and cannot do with their future timeline. Given Cryptic's player base (especially then) the release of various ships, uniforms, etc... from the JJverse would have been a financial boon to both Viacom and probably Cryptic, but they are the ones who pretty much decided this wasn't happening, and also the ones who have pretty much laid out what IPs are considered to be attached to what.
See, "Trekkies" have gone massively multi-generational which is unusual, and the backlash here is from people already invested in the universe and concepts. This is not a small group of people, indeed it's the "core" audience that keeps this alive and is going to be buying the stuff for decades to come. While a lot of casual movie goers without much investment (emotional or otherwise) in the IP, like the films fine on their own merits, and others feel such a "Reboot" is positive because it lets them get involved in a universe they otherwise find impenetrable given how established it is, those people actually represent the minority, and the least valuable, and most fickle, part of the entire equasion.
As a general rule when something like this happens there is always a tendency to want to label the group you disagree with as an unusually vocal "small, toxic, fringe" but that is not usually the case especially when it becomes as prolific as your seeing here.
As far as your attacks on me, my point is that as "progressive" as Trek has been (which is highly debatable by the way) a lot of the critical praise has come about for PC reasons due to the people involved, rather than the merits of the movie itself. Largely because the people doing this don't feel society is that progressive and thus minorities need to have their contributions lionized even if the overall product is poor, even if this winds up propping up a poor product by association. Basically the new Spock and Uhura did good jobs (genuinely) more so than say the new Kirk who was kind of cardboard, you can't take that away from them. Wanting to lavish praise on that to be seen being PC means inflating the quality of the movies and of course a big part of that isn't the movies themselves, but how well they fit into "Star Trek" and it's established continuity.
As far as Trek being really progressive, that depends on a lot of things. There have been many people who have analyzed Trek in a number of ways, with mixed results: http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Trek-Marxism.html is one example.
At the end of the day though, the thing to understand about Trek is that it's hardly Utopian, and indeed is very critical of itself. For the most part you get to see things through the eyes of the military elite, Star Fleet, which can also arguably be considered the rulers even if they claim not to be, and make pretensions of listening to a "civilian government". This military elite is also deeply flawed in that it has a very elitist and discriminatory attitude about who can join. For example as much as people hate the character understand that "Wesley Crusher" was supposed to be a genius second to none, heralded as a messiah "he Davinci of matter and energy" or something like that at one point, and yet he was unable to fairly qualify right off the bat, losing to some alien from a backwater world who scored nearly as high as he did. In comparison for example it's pointed out later that politics play a huge role, as Nog, a Ferengi, is able to get into Star Fleet (and is later shown having a command in the future) with a reference and seems to be sort of paraded around as an example after that point. Other references to Star Fleet have mentioned the brutal curve, and how basically you had to compete on a planetary level to even get a chance to apply due to all the people who wanted in. So basically if your from a species, like the Bajorans (where it was mentioned in Voyager they at one point wanted to get as many Bajorans in SF uniforms as possible for political reasons, the Bajoran this was in relation to being incompetent at her job as the focus for the episode) or the Ferengi so they can say "we have one" and use it diplomatically, your pretty much screwed. Some people have also pointed out that Picard's reference probably accounted for less when it came to Wesley than Sisko's did for Nog, also because Sisko was at what amounted to a diplomatic post in a galactic flashpoint, where while a big wheel Picard's command wasn't quite as impressive on paper.
Outside of Star Fleet the rest of the galaxy is shown as being a mess, Tasha Yar's planet was a dystopian nightmare full of roving "rape gangs", which is mirrored in another planet visited by Picard when he goes undercover as a mercenary. Those seen in the background seem to go rambling around in matching jumpsuits. The Federation also seems to be willing to sell off it's citizens and colonies for diplomatic gain when the mood suits it, which is what caused the whole "Marquis" faction to splinter off when they pretty much abandoned tons of citizens to the Cardassians.
While The Federation hasn't gone after anyone for their skin color, they do go after people for genetic modification, all justified by a now-ancient war. In "enterprise" they were even seen to be keeping genetic kids in cryo-stasis for "moral reasons" and hunting down anyone with modifications. In DS-9 Bashir has to hide minor genetic upgrades and only stays in Star Fleet on a technicality while his parents are sent to prison. Other kids who were less fortunate? They got to be locked in an Asylum where they grew to be entirely dysfunctional.
There is a ton of stuff that can be said about it, but the bottom line is that while Trek is fun, and it's not as dark as many other science fiction universes, it's not what I'd call entirely "progressive" in any real sense. Indeed while stories about Star Fleet are fun, if you were actually born in that universe your life would probably be nothing like that. You wouldn't have it as bad as some plebe in "Warhammer 40k" of course, but chances are you'd be some jumpsuit wearing labourer locked into a schedule, mathematically you'd probably be on some backwater planet, or hauling freight on a cruddy ship or space station, far away from the perfectly maintained utopia of places like Earth that are occupied by Star Fleet and the Federation's administrative elite. Much like today your government would sell you out in a heartbeat for personal gain, except in this case the government has enough firepower to blow your planet away if you get too uppity. Of course if your really unlucky your probably as bad off as someone from "40k" living in one of the worlds like Tasha Yar was from.
Of course to be fair, most people don't think of Tasha Yar's planet while listening to a moral speech about an alien species and what it's doing, or selling how great The Federation is. Me, it's in the back of my mind, but that's part of what gives the universe a grain of reality. As good as some of the good guys are, and as well intentioned as they are, they aren't going so crazy as to present the reality of the Federation as being angelic space hippies who somehow made it work. If anything you could say The Federation is a sort of "enlightened facism" which does a good job of keeping so many diverse worlds and such an ungodly huge population in line, while oftentimes engaging in multi-front wars against empires that are far worse than they are. The Federation's big selling point to many who join it probably comes down to the bottom line of "your better with us, than as subjects of the Klingons" (or another big empire).
