I finally got around to watching the new Star Trek movie.
J.J. Abrams [IMDB] is a genius, and I have completely forgotten TOS (the original series, for non fans. To be honest, I never watched it much anyway) while watching the movie. Although his plot device is probably the most abused in all of SciFi, Abrams manages to do what none of the other directors of earlier Trek movies could – break free of Trek Canon. Jason Kottke explains:
All excerpts are quoted from the respective link(s).
All excerpts are quoted from the respective link(s).
But the graph's most striking feature is the boom all the themes apparently experienced in the 1990s, and which now seems to be on the decline. It seems to suggest a huge investment in genre television shows (and perhaps in television in general) that we simply aren't seeing any more.
Via Slate:
"Star Wars, at its secret, spiky intellectual heart, has more in common with films like Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books or even Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle than with the countless cartoon blockbusters it spawned. Greenaway and Barney take the construction of their own work as a principal artistic subject, and Lucas does, too. ‘This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level,’ one of John Ashbery’s works begins. Star Wars, we might say, is concerned with plot on a very plain level. Everything about the films, from the opening text crawls to the out-of-order production of the two trilogies, foregrounds the question of plot. As an audience, we grapple with not just the intricate clockwork of a complex and interwoven narrative, but, in postmodern fashion, with the fundamental mechanics of storytelling itself."
