Winn always made my skin crawl!

  • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    No, that was bad too.

    I mean, s1 and s2 was very cringy too, but they had episodes that were very well written by people other than Roddenberry, and we all tend to blank out trauma in our past.

    Voyager? This wasn’t the first trek show in decades, we weren’t dying for want of decent scifi, we had tng, ds9, b5, farscape was coming online, stargate too, and before Voy finished we had The Phantom Menace and the Matrix.

    The mid-late 90s were a golden age for media, our standards had increased dramatically particularly for writing.

    For TNG I’d say 50% of episodes are either forgettable or near-unwatchable, with a bias towards the early seasons, S3 and S4 are just gold though.

    Voyager, I have a few episodes I like (, but many more I can’t watch, the writing is just so uneven.

    Btw, I have a warm spot in my heart for Enterprise, I think it got a majorly unfair rap, but the first 2 seasons are similar in their unevenness, though Season 4 is again, just gold.

    • elephantium@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      we had The Phantom Menace

      Hey, I thought we were talking about decent examples of sci fi

      TNG … 50%

      I’d put it more like 25%. That being said, I def consult episode guides when I’m rewatching and skip accordingly.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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        2 months ago

        Hey, I thought we were talking about decent examples of sci fi

        Yeah, they kind of screwed the pooch when they brought that up. Sort of negates the rest of their argument.

        • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Did you see it in theaters when it came out?

          I think we’re spoiled with all the cgi enabled scifi now, it didn’t hold as well as the ot (and the st is rancid garbage) but the prequels were epochal at the time, mass market, high budget scifi, alongside indepdence day they changed everything.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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            1 month ago

            I did. And the CG is not my problem with that movie. The plot and the characters and the dialogue are my problem with that movie. If a movie is good but the effects aren’t, I’m fine with it. I don’t generally watch movies just because they look cool.

            • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Compare the writing of the PT with the writing of most generic scifi in the 90s, it’s not worse.

              We didn’t have the well-written scifi till the 2000s really, in the middle we had stuff like the matrix sequels. We had some Phillip K. Dick in the 80s and 90s too.

              You’re comparing everything to the OT, yeah that was an epic classic, but also unprecedented (literally invented the blockbuster scifi genre), and there wasn’t really anything close to their level afterwards, which is why TPM was such a huge event in 99.

              • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                1 month ago

                Absolute nonsense. I can name tons of better-written science fiction films from the 1990s:

                Dark City, The Matrix, Contact, Starship Troopers, Galaxy Quest, 12 Monkeys, Gattaca, Tremors, The Iron Giant, Cube, both Star Trek VI and Star Trek: First Contact. I can list more.

                And the writing in the original trilogy isn’t exactly amazing either.

                • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  Contact, Starship Troopers,

                  written in the 1960s IIRC.

                  Gattaca

                  Seems partly inspired by Brave New World in the era of genetic sequencing.

                  Those were incredible Treks though (TUC is my favorite by far). Still, Trek wasn’t really mainstream at this point, definitely not a blockbuster, even though First Contact probably broke the threshold.

                  I honestly haven’t seen Dark City yet, never got around to it. The Matrix was part of the change and came out the same year, my point was we’d had a major drought till then. I’m arguing we went from a time of dearth to a time of plenty, and then walked face first into the MCU which recently imploded.

                  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                    1 month ago

                    You’re being ridiculous. The novels were written then.

                    Do you think they just put the novels into a screenplay machine and it came out the other end with a movie script?

                    Or do you think every movie adaptation of a novel is a well-written movie?

                    Anyway, since that’s not enough for you, I’ll keep going with well-written science fiction films of the 90s with much better writing than any Star Wars film George Lucas ever made:

                    Back to the Future III

                    Darkman

                    Edward Scissorhands

                    Total Recall

                    The Rocketeer

                    Terminator 2

                    Jurassic Park

                    The City of Lost Children

                    Six-String Samurai

                    The Handmaid’s Tale

                    Tank Girl

                    The Fifth Element

                    Primer

                    The Truman Show

                    Bicentennial Man

                    Predator 2

                    Delicatessen

                    Gremlins 2: The New Batch

                    Men in Black

                    I’d even put Stargate above The Phantom Menace in terms of writing. Also, not one of those movies had a long and pointless sci-fi version of a NASCAR race in the middle of it.