Big vs Little
Oct. 17th, 2010 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI've been watching a lot of Star Trek Enterprise lately. I don't much write about it because the reasons I watch it are all 'Reed and T'Pol = Pretty' and that don't need saying often. At least without pictures. But I just saw a couple of episodes where they did time travel back to World War II and I was interested by the ways it didn't work.
Like, the aliens who allied with the nazis, they look like classic devil dudes with the red eyes and spiky face and looking kind of dead. Why? Why ever would the nazis work with them, while having a bug up their butt about racial purity? In the episodes it was because both sides had that racial purity thing going on, about their own race. And I'm wondering, who even thought of that? It's Daleks vs Cybermen all over again! Hi there, I'm the superior race. No, I'm the superior race! *FIGHT* Honestly, how do they think they can bond over that one? So if they want some alien race to team up with nazis, they'd have to be uber pretty nazi ideals that can pass for future nazis. Possibly with the help of shapeshifting. And oh look, they have handy shapeshifters in the story already! But no, they no use those as bad guys, that would make sense and stuff. *facepalm*
Rewriting it so the nazis invade the USA is just... I know they're showing it in the USA, but could they not at least pretend to care about the rest of the world sometimes? I know, British SF does the exact same thing, I have noticed. But the threats to the whole world are all about blowing up parts of the USA. *big sigh* Yeah, okay, that one is lost from the start. But I've read fanfic that showed me there's a whole half of the world I know absolutely nothing about that was busy having a war too, and TV could go there sometimes. Except maybe they were trying to just use white guys. They were doing an anti racist story with the black lady helping beat the nazis. That part works.
The biggest visual FX investment that didn't actually work well though was the Enterprise diving into the atmosphere and fighting nazi war planes and blowing up the evil time travelling aliens. I was watching it and thinking, spitfires vs Dalek ship is so much more cool. And the why of it isn't difficult: little vs big. If the big guy is beating up the little guy, there is not a whole lot of drama. If the difficult thing, from the ground into space with low tech, is achieved at great cost, there's plenty of drama. If instead things fall down, in the easy direction, with ultra high tech, so that the big ship can beat up the little ones... who had that bright idea? That's not going to work. That's a really hard sell as dramatic, that way is.
You can do it, you just have to explain that they're in fact doing a really difficult thing. Having to use visual targeting and having the hull munched to pieces by previous conflicts and having a time limit of extreme doom are all helpful elements, but it fails totally because there was no time invested in making the opposition look like they ever had a chance. They had Malcolm reminiscing about the capabilities of German planes and then they got hit by ultratech shiny lights guns. That part works, that has the potential to be a big oops of underestimating your opponent. But it isn't played through, they just dive and win. What you need is to have the planes be developed, their weapons be tested - which we almost got, but we saw an alien with a hand gun rather than a plane. If you saw a plane blow the crap out of a bunch of tanks, or better yet a great big ship, then you've got your threat, with almost the same FX shots. And then you have it flying over your alternate New York all the time, which is basically a sound effect and a couple of lines of dialogue about how oppressive it is under the air shield. And after that you send up all the little planes against an Enterprise with only visual targetting, and you emphasise how impossible it is to hit them, like trying to swat flies with their phase canons. And then you have them chewing small but noteable chunks out of the ship, and someone doing the 'the engines cannae take it!!!' equivalent, except they'd left Trip trapped on the planet so they don't have anyone to do the desperate engineers complaint but they need it, and they make the point that no one plane is a match for enterprise but there's bazillions of the things and they can't hit them. And then you have them diving through the firestorm, with the hull already damaged, the crew taking refuge in the toughest parts of the ship as the conditions Enterprise was never designed for take a steady toll, and then you've got a dramatic challenge going on.
But it's a tough one, because to look at, you've still got the exact same fight as spitfires vs saucer, but you're supposed to be cheering on the saucer.
Everyone always wants to cheer on the little guy. The big guy swatting even the most deserving opponent just looks like a bully.
It makes USA vs Anyone a bit of a tough sell, these days. And gives the Federation in Next Gen the same problem against anyone that isn't also an Empire.
Like, the aliens who allied with the nazis, they look like classic devil dudes with the red eyes and spiky face and looking kind of dead. Why? Why ever would the nazis work with them, while having a bug up their butt about racial purity? In the episodes it was because both sides had that racial purity thing going on, about their own race. And I'm wondering, who even thought of that? It's Daleks vs Cybermen all over again! Hi there, I'm the superior race. No, I'm the superior race! *FIGHT* Honestly, how do they think they can bond over that one? So if they want some alien race to team up with nazis, they'd have to be uber pretty nazi ideals that can pass for future nazis. Possibly with the help of shapeshifting. And oh look, they have handy shapeshifters in the story already! But no, they no use those as bad guys, that would make sense and stuff. *facepalm*
Rewriting it so the nazis invade the USA is just... I know they're showing it in the USA, but could they not at least pretend to care about the rest of the world sometimes? I know, British SF does the exact same thing, I have noticed. But the threats to the whole world are all about blowing up parts of the USA. *big sigh* Yeah, okay, that one is lost from the start. But I've read fanfic that showed me there's a whole half of the world I know absolutely nothing about that was busy having a war too, and TV could go there sometimes. Except maybe they were trying to just use white guys. They were doing an anti racist story with the black lady helping beat the nazis. That part works.
The biggest visual FX investment that didn't actually work well though was the Enterprise diving into the atmosphere and fighting nazi war planes and blowing up the evil time travelling aliens. I was watching it and thinking, spitfires vs Dalek ship is so much more cool. And the why of it isn't difficult: little vs big. If the big guy is beating up the little guy, there is not a whole lot of drama. If the difficult thing, from the ground into space with low tech, is achieved at great cost, there's plenty of drama. If instead things fall down, in the easy direction, with ultra high tech, so that the big ship can beat up the little ones... who had that bright idea? That's not going to work. That's a really hard sell as dramatic, that way is.
You can do it, you just have to explain that they're in fact doing a really difficult thing. Having to use visual targeting and having the hull munched to pieces by previous conflicts and having a time limit of extreme doom are all helpful elements, but it fails totally because there was no time invested in making the opposition look like they ever had a chance. They had Malcolm reminiscing about the capabilities of German planes and then they got hit by ultratech shiny lights guns. That part works, that has the potential to be a big oops of underestimating your opponent. But it isn't played through, they just dive and win. What you need is to have the planes be developed, their weapons be tested - which we almost got, but we saw an alien with a hand gun rather than a plane. If you saw a plane blow the crap out of a bunch of tanks, or better yet a great big ship, then you've got your threat, with almost the same FX shots. And then you have it flying over your alternate New York all the time, which is basically a sound effect and a couple of lines of dialogue about how oppressive it is under the air shield. And after that you send up all the little planes against an Enterprise with only visual targetting, and you emphasise how impossible it is to hit them, like trying to swat flies with their phase canons. And then you have them chewing small but noteable chunks out of the ship, and someone doing the 'the engines cannae take it!!!' equivalent, except they'd left Trip trapped on the planet so they don't have anyone to do the desperate engineers complaint but they need it, and they make the point that no one plane is a match for enterprise but there's bazillions of the things and they can't hit them. And then you have them diving through the firestorm, with the hull already damaged, the crew taking refuge in the toughest parts of the ship as the conditions Enterprise was never designed for take a steady toll, and then you've got a dramatic challenge going on.
But it's a tough one, because to look at, you've still got the exact same fight as spitfires vs saucer, but you're supposed to be cheering on the saucer.
Everyone always wants to cheer on the little guy. The big guy swatting even the most deserving opponent just looks like a bully.
It makes USA vs Anyone a bit of a tough sell, these days. And gives the Federation in Next Gen the same problem against anyone that isn't also an Empire.