Star Trek

The trouble with prequels

I must admit that I have mixed feelings about this comic-con teaser poster for the upcoming new Star Trek generation.
On one side I like the play on sixties pop-art, on the other I’m sceptical about this new team which mars my enjoyment of the design.

Well now, to the title.
Sci-Fi in general and Sci-Fi movies in specific have always suffered from a major problem which no amount of FX can overcome, no matter how dedicated. No matter how well plotted your story and how carefully executed your movie is, in the end it will always be a visible product of its time.
This is not always as readily apparent in novels where the author has the advantage of playing things vague, so that a 60’s Spaceship will appear no different to the minds eye of the reader than a spaceships from the two-thousands for example, but even here the use of phrases or a better understanding of advanced physics will eventually give you away.


Kids in Space *giggle*



With movies and other visual arts we will always be able to roughly date them by a first glance simply because all Sci-Fi décor & clothing is invariably at the best of times a extrapolation of current culture and at worst a simple derivation. In Star Trek with its more realistic setting this is naturally more obvious than in, say, Star Wars which leans more towards fantasy, and still it applies there, too, nonetheless.

Now Star Trek has to fight a second problem, the fact that it started out as a small TV-Show of which some of the ‘technical advances’ used within must have looked already dated for its own time (due to typical budget reasons), and so one must simply wonder:

What happened in that Universe for humankind to drop so suddenly from the high-tech used in academy years to the comparative dark-age technic used later in the field?

Can I just say "butt-ugly"?

Star Wars has a galactic war, tyranny and following on its heel public upheaval it can blame. What was it for James T. Kirk and his crew?