So last weekend was the San diego Comic con and there has been some cool announcements and some new trailers released! Very exciting stuff. I need to get my stuff together and actually go there one day, or least go to one of the panels at the New York Comic con the next time I go. Most interesting, in my opinion anyways, were the trailers for Ready Player One and the new Star Trek show.
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I read the Ready Player One book I liked it quite a bit, and I thought that making a movie adaptation would be quite hard. The number of intellectual properties owned by rival company would have made really hard for the movie to have them appear. The trailer did however do decent job showing a good number of cool Easter eggs, though a number of them are IPs that Warner bros had rights to ( DC characters, the Iron Giant, Mad Max). I wonder how expensive the rights to use the Back to the Future Delorean are but I suspect that it was not cheap.
The thing that is somewhat concerning but not too surprising is the very evident rewrite of the story. A big chunk of the trailer is this cool looking racing sequence that 100% did not happen in the book. I suspect that they had to remove certain some what boring sequence of the book (say like when the main character play a perfect game of Pacman) and replace them with more impressive but generic action sequences. They might have not been able to secure right to certain things like D&D’s tomb of horror, which would explain why the Joust character appear in a random fight scene, fighting a giant robotic scorpion (which again did not happen in the book, as far as I remember). Are there event copyrights for Zork? Who knows…
I am sure that the movie will be decent but I have some reservation. Let us be honest for a moment and admit that the book was not necessarily that well written in the first place. I am not saying it was not entertaining but a big aspect that made book so successful was its reliance on nerdy references, the actual meat of the story isn’t all that great. Ernest Cline’s second book was not as enjoyable as Ready player One, despite trying to use a similar trick with sci-fi references, I am sure that the movie will be successful but don’t expect the final battle to actually have mecha-godzilla fight the Japanese Spiderman’s giant robot.
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I have already expressed my concerns with Star Trek Discovery and the latest trailer has not really alleviate my concerns. the thing is that they clearly put a lot of effort into this show. The sets look impressive, there are a lot good special effects and the make up for the alien character is top notch. However, it just feels so bland and feels like a trailer for a movie rather than for a TV show.
I understand that the original was made in the late 60’s and that they were limited in how advanced things could look. Things where mostly operated with switches and buttons and there were not actual computer screens, so I can understand updating the sets to include things like touchscreens, but they should at least try to keep the aesthetics similar which they did not. They did a good job with the phasers but just about everything else looks wrong. They even included comm badges, which as far as I know was not introduced until TNG, which is far later in the timeline of Star Trek.
Interestingly, The most interesting thing about Star Trek that came this week was a great video from the Youtube Channel Midnight’s Edge (watch it here), where they go through some of the latest rumors surrounding the show and, most importantly, who has the rights to Star Trek. Back when Viacom Split between CBS and Paramount, the distribution rights for all the movies and TV show went to Paramount but the actual IP rights stayed with CBS. When JJ abrams did his reboot, they were granted an alternate Star Trek license which forced which forced them to make their Star Trek distinct from the original show. It is also this alternate Star Trek license that is been used to make Discovery, which would explain why it looks nothing like the original shows. As to why CBS claimed it would be in the original continuity of star trek, it’s\probably because they are bunch of corporate liars…
I will probably see the first episode as it premiers in September but it is very unlikely that I will bother to subscribe to CBS’s on demand service to watch the rest…