Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
RomanesEuntDomus said:
Now I wonder what a soviet style Sci-Fi movie would look like. They have a knack of cool designs, but I feel the necessity to toe a political line would be so strong, you'd not get much entertainment out of the writing, cause it is equally hamfisted with its political messages as... well... ST today.
Click to expand...
Andrei Tarkovsky made some of the best sci-fi movies of all time in the soviet union, Solaris and Stalker.
 
DyingStarsForever said:
Andrei Tarkovsky made some of the best sci-fi movies of all time in the soviet union, Solaris and Stalker.
Click to expand...
I watched the original Stalker, but with Solaris, I only saw the rather lackluster Clooney movie, guess I'll have to watch the original one of these days.
 
Last edited:
RomanesEuntDomus said:
Now I wonder what a soviet style Sci-Fi movie would look like.
Click to expand...

No need to wonder; the Eastern Bloc made a pretty decent number of them.

1621184063782.png

For Big Space Travel, they had to get Alexei Leonov to appear at the end to apologize for the plot twist.

1621184266255.png

Ikarie XB-1 is a particularly nifty "first interstellar mission" film, with some very nice character background drama.

1621184533831.png

Orion's Loop is a personal favorite. I'd really like to see an improved translation, because I suspect some of the technobable is legitimately down to translators who didn't know what was going on.

1621184704399.png


Pilot Pirx' Inquest does bring up the "propaganda" question; unlike the original stories, much of the story is explicitly set in the US and there is a theme of "one honest man facing corruption" which honestly plays well on either side of any border.

1621184873532.png


Planeta Bur might look familiar because it was used in a few awful Corman films. The propaganda side is a little iffy; one of the characters and the robot are likely intended to be American. "J" is not a character in the Russian language.

1621185290103.png


Dream Come True really suffers in translation; "block" in this context is a "functional block" which in the West would be called a "module" or "stage."

1621185552436.png


Sky Calls probably had the most obvious and heavy-handed propaganda, with a Soviet Mars mission rescuing an American Mars mission. Amusingly, in the same year an American TV series flipped that on its head. Still, it's kind of heartwarming to note that both agreed it was only right to rescue the competition.
 
Solaris really failed to impress me for some reason, which is odd considering Stalker is one of my favorite movies. I felt the pacing was overall too slow, and it didn't have the incredibly beautiful desolated landscape shots to make up for it like Stalker did.
 
I haven't seen much Soviet sci fi, but what I have seen is way less political than anything coming out of Hollywood recently. Even though it was literally funded by a totalitarian regime that had gulags and secret police.

Stalker is weird in the best ways, and had a budget of around 5 roubles and a cabbage, and it's not at all celebratory of communism or the USSR. It's about human psychology and faith.

Solaris is another deeply psychological movie that's about exploring the mysteries of what it is to be human. It's also about loneliness and sorrow.

Kin-dza-dza! is a kind of vodka flavored Idiocracy that uses sci fi and comedy to critique Soviet society circa the mid 1980's.

There's an intelligence and humanity to these films that's the exact opposite of a modern Hollywood/Netflix production. And the science fiction elements are viewed from the opposite end of the telescope from traditional Western sci fi.

Western science fiction - the original Star Treks and Asimovs and Clarkes and Heinleins - was usually focused outwards, on grand space adventures and dreams of technology. Tended to be utopian and optimistic.

Russian science fiction is a lot more pessimistic and has less faith in "progress". They had 70 years of "progress" and were sick of it.

And maybe that's why Star Trek never took off there, because the utopian aspect of the Federation and its strange lack of normal human pettiness, jealousy, lying and guilt is the least believable thing in a universe that also includes FTL, transporter beams, and time travel.
 
Sexual Chocolate said:
I haven't seen much Soviet sci fi, but what I have seen is way less political than anything coming out of Hollywood recently. Even though it was literally funded by a totalitarian regime that had gulags and secret police.
Click to expand...
I think thatr's exactly why, I've heard it noted that artists working in the Soviet Union had a great deal of artistic freedom, as long as they didn't criticize communism. Easiest way not to do that eve by accident is to not bring up politics at all.
ToroidalBoat said:
V'Ger was originally going to be even weirder, and even more like a "living machine".

(but production didn't go as planned)
Click to expand...
That's a shame, looks really cool. I'm one of the few people who really enjoyed that movie; the idea of going for an epic space adventure that's a mix between Star Wars and 2001 was a great idea and it's unfortunate it didn't play out the way they hoped.
 
Last edited:
Rewatching some DS9 and I get to the episode The Adversary.
Pretty cool that Star Trek did their own adaptation of Who Goes There?, the same story that inspired The Thing. And the way the Changeling managed to fake it because it was impersonating Bashir and the blood sample extractor was in fact part of the changeling was actually fairly brilliant. The ruse would never have been revealed unless someone had somehow forced the changeling to let go of the sample extractor. As it stands they only discovered the ruse because they came across the real Bashir locked in a room on their way to take the person the Changeling implicated to the brig.

And the way Odo rammed that other Changeling into the warp core was just brutal. No shits given about that "No changeling has ever killed another" bullshit when it came to saving a half dozen others. His drive for justice was pretty damn strong. A good cop.
 
Last edited:
ToroidalBoat said:
As a little kid I liked it (even if I couldn't follow what was going on).

Why do most not like Motion Picture?
Click to expand...
It's very slow moving and has a much grittier atmosphere than the original series. Fans of the original were expecting something like The Wrath of Khan (which they got). It didn't feel like a film that picked up where the tv show left of, it tried to capitalize on Star Wars and 2001, films that had been released since. All fair criticisms IMO but I still think it was succesfull for what it was.
 
Honestly I would love to have seen what Star Trek Phase II would have been like. The pilot would have been the same script as TMP but sped the hell up. I would like to have seen what sort of stories could have come out of it. Don't get me wrong, the movies were great for the most part. But the shows is where the franchise has always shone brightest.
 
ExceptionallyExceptional said:
Honestly I would love to have seen what Star Trek Phase II would have been like. The pilot would have been the same script as TMP but sped the hell up. I would like to have seen what sort of stories could have come out of it. Don't get me wrong, the movies were great for the most part. But the shows is where the franchise has always shone brightest.
Click to expand...
Didn't they use several of those scripts for TNG though?
 
I also really like TMP. I understand why people dislike it, and it certainly deviates from TOS' feel, but I still like it. Slow pacing and all.
It's a very atmospheric movie with great visuals and I always liked the "v'ger/voyager" twist at the end.

It's kind of a shame that we never learn anything about the guys that turned V'ger into that fuckhuge cloud thing or what happened with Deckard and that bald chick - but then again, sometimes not knowing is better than a bad revelation.
fuck, I jinxed it, they are going to reference it in Picard's next season now, don't they.
 
ExceptionallyExceptional said:
Honestly I would love to have seen what Star Trek Phase II would have been like. The pilot would have been the same script as TMP but sped the hell up. I would like to have seen what sort of stories could have come out of it. Don't get me wrong, the movies were great for the most part. But the shows is where the franchise has always shone brightest.
Click to expand...
Yeah that was pretty much the first 2 seasons of TNG.
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
I also really like TMP. I understand why people dislike it, and it certainly deviates from TOS' feel, but I still like it. Slow pacing and all.
It's a very atmospheric movie with great visuals and I always liked the "v'ger/voyager" twist at the end.

It's kind of a shame that we never learn anything about the guys that turned V'ger into that fuckhuge cloud thing or what happened with Deckard and that bald chick - but then again, sometimes not knowing is better than a bad revelation.
fuck, I jinxed it, they are going to reference it in Picard's next season now, don't they.
Click to expand...
I agree. Never thought much about TMP in the bright light of "Wrath of Khan", but going back to it later in life, it has a certain charm. It's...cold...for sure. Almost "2001"-esque in feel at times. But the languid pace enhances the epic scope of V'ger. And fortunately a little warmth enters the film with Spock of all people, explaining his encounter with V'ger to "Jim".

Let's just hope V'ger didn't send Deckard to a planet with a bunch of kids.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom