Why does Hollywood produce bad movies?

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Crissa
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Re: Why does Hollywood produce bad movies?

Post by Crissa »

The movie 'Timeline', for instance, reduced the time of the story from weeks to days - to increase the drama, one might guess - but in doing so, they destroyed the required travel times between locations and the motivations for the characters.

Space Cowboys. Armageddon. ...there's a large number of movies which have done this.

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Re: Why does Hollywood produce bad movies?

Post by Draco_Argentum »

PhoneLobster at [unixtime wrote:1179831878[/unixtime]]and you thought I might be presenting flash gordon as the example of actual scifi?


No, I was just making fun of Star Trek. Both are not hard sci fi.
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tzor
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Re: Why does Hollywood produce bad movies?

Post by tzor »

They weren't intended to be. Seaquest, on the other hand, had their actors boasting of it. I laughed my ass off when they fell out of the true Science Fiction genre by going into the ESP and Aliens from outer space. Mostly because I was pissed off like hell from the Pre-Gorian solution to global warming being "kill all the cows." (Back then it was methane not CO2 that was the "vile gas of global warming.")
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Re: Why does Hollywood produce bad movies?

Post by RandomCasualty »

Joy_Division at [unixtime wrote:1179792339[/unixtime]]Why do the commanders have to be the main characters.

I've seen a lot of other scifi where the main characters are just joe blow trying to get along in the world (in space) and the commanders are cool but not hands on.


Commanders as main characters tend to be more of a sci-fi series thing. Mainly because your series tends to be about a specific starship or space station. Battlestar Galactica, Starship enterprise or Babylon 5.

Naturally to best depict the problems that the ship encounters you want to give a perspective from the commander and the rest of the bridge crew. While you can focus on a few lesser characters, the commanders need to be main characters because the majority of scenes are going to feature their decisions, since they're doing most of the starship diplomacy and inner decisions.

When you've got a sci-fi movie, where you're not particularly worried about continuing adventures, then you can very much focus on other non-command characters. In a series, you just don't really have that option at all.
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tzor
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Re: Why does Hollywood produce bad movies?

Post by tzor »

I'll start off by saying that I have not seen the latest incarnation of Battlestar Galactica and I have no intention of doing so. Heck, it took my 10 years to realize what the series was, so cleverly hdden were some of the plot lines that I can say with certanty they missed the boat in more ways than one.

Having said that the series was not like Star Trek in that the Commander was, for the most part commanding. His son was the one to get all the action scenes, while he set the general policy for their actions. Unlike Star Trek, low lranking officers had most of the show time. The disease that put almost all the pilots (except most of the main characters of course) and caused them to train civilian females for viper duty was a major feature of the series as daring as the use of a female first officer in the pilot of Star Trek.

This reminds me of a Rodenbury joke. He once explained the two revolutionary ideas in the pilot rejected by the networks; the alien science officer and the female first officer. In the end he managed to keep the sciece officer. As for the first officer, he married her. He certanly wasn't going to marry Nemoy. :rolleyes:

Also note that at the time of Star Trek, the series was more influenced by the isloated series like the Twlight Zone and thoughts of polt contitutity were not even considered. There are a ton of plot points in the old series and even the movies that were simply thrown away never to be used again. (Especially those that involved ultra powerful deus ex machina beings and races; one was found near the earth, one by the Klingon border, and of course where was divine Vejur when the Borg attcked?)
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Re: Why does Hollywood produce bad movies?

Post by RandomCasualty »

tzor at [unixtime wrote:1180010720[/unixtime]]
Also note that at the time of Star Trek, the series was more influenced by the isloated series like the Twlight Zone and thoughts of polt contitutity were not even considered. There are a ton of plot points in the old series and even the movies that were simply thrown away never to be used again. (Especially those that involved ultra powerful deus ex machina beings and races; one was found near the earth, one by the Klingon border, and of course where was divine Vejur when the Borg attcked?)


Yeah, classic Star Trek is pretty much all but ignored in the later series, aside from the basic elements, like Klingons and Romulans, they almost completely ignore whatever happened in the original.

Well, really all the Star Trek series are guilty of ignoring each other. If I remember right, there was an episode in Enterprise where the crew met the Farengi and supposedly the first time humans met Farengi happened in ST:Next Generation.

My personal favorite problem with Star Trek later series is how they portray time travel. You've got this like supposed temporal war going on in the future and all this complex equipment, but when time comes to actually stop time travellers, the guys from the future always tell the Enterprise crew to stop it. Because you know, they can't be bothered to travel back in time and fix it with their super advanced technology.
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