Klingons Cut From Final Star Trek XI Movie 447
darthcamaro writes "Classic era trek was all about Kirk kicking the Klingons' tails. But the new Star Trek XI movie, the reboot, will not have any spoken Klingon in it — a travesty that has some fan sites up in arms already. 'We actually had a sequence that ended up getting cut from the movie that took place on Rura Penthe, in a Klingon prison,' Star Trek co-writer Alex Kurtzman said, explaining the deletion. 'And there was definitely Klingon spoken in the movie, and it ended up getting cut.' Frakkin' Federation ..."
Re:Travesty? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Travesty? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And..... why should we care? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since the Klingon language (tlhIngan Hol), as such (that is, having an actual grammar rather than just a handful of words) was created for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, this is not all that surprising. OTOH, its been used pretty heavily in the movies (and, to a lesser extent, series) since that, though I can't see why anyone would complain about it not being used in a new film (I can see, perhaps, complaining if Klingon's were talking in what was supposed to be "Klingon" but it wasn't tlhIngan Hol, particularly if there was no in-setting justification, but that's a different issue.)
Non-issue (Score:3, Interesting)
(minor spoilers)
I'm not a super Trekkie or anything, but I did see the movie this week, and I'm glad there's no Klingon. Hell, not only is there no Klingon speech, I didn't see a single Klingon at all. Who cares? The humans are the good guys, and they need bad guys. Since this is a fresh start, why re-hash the exact same enemies they already had in, what, 6 previous movies (just a guess, again, not a Trekkie)? I always thought the Klingons were just grumpy humanoids anyway. And AFAIK, they're been friends for nearly every TV series, so I'm not exactly fearful of their characters. Eric Bana as a really pissed off Romulan? That worked.
Re:Travesty? (Score:1, Interesting)
Did it also explain why Kahless is shown in TOS without ridges, and in other series with ridges?
Or am I not supposed to point out Enterprise's ham-handed mangling of the timeline?
Re:Travesty? (Score:5, Interesting)
All we've seen is a few trailers. What do you expect them to show?
Re:Travesty? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Travesty? (Score:3, Interesting)
What is clear is that later on Klingons played a much larger roll. ST:TNG was very Klingon, with Spock being replaced by Worf as the alien. I would argue that the social aspects of the Kligons were explored much more in TNG than vulcan in TOS.
Was I the only person who didn't find the obsession with the Klingons' background in TNG particularly interesting? I liked Worf enough as a character, and I didn't mind the Klingons as characters with a hint of background.
But I found all that stuff about Klingon society and the stories based around Worf's background quite boring. It just seemed like like a pointless and synthetic metaphor for various non-Western (primarily Middle Eastern and Central Asian) cultures seen through a left-leaning Hollywood script writer's eyes.
And while it was probably well-intentioned in a socially-aware 80s sort of way, it seemed to take itself a bit too seriously considering it was dealing with a totally a made-up, nonexistent culture with cod-Eastern guttural language and contrived religious ceremonies (with guttural names, etc.) that attempted to mimic the seriousness with which "real" non-Western people take such aspects of their culture.
But the problem was that the stories about the Klingon culture only worked if you took it Seriously. However, they *weren't* real enough to take seriously without feeling a bit silly; yet they weren't far enough from actual humans to work as abstract metaphors either.
What we are probably seeing is that the Klingons have been overexposed, and fully explored, so there is little interesting for a new writer to deal with, at least not without getting into trouble with the the Star Trek purists.
Yes, I hear that the writers of the rebooted Star Trek intend expanding the social background and politics of a different alien race- the tribbles.
Re:Travesty? (Score:5, Interesting)
The genetic alterations in question happened to adult Klingons, not newborns. Presumably, the cure later did the same.
Incidentally, viral vectors can be used in real genetic engineering [wikipedia.org].
I would have been satisfied leaving the whole thing as a retcon and pretending flat-foreheaded Klingons never existed, but the DS9 Tribbles episode was begging for it all to be answered. Tieing it into Kahn-like superhuman research and Data's family history was a surprisingly good idea for a frachise that didn't have Ron Moore to lean on anymore.
Re:Travesty? (Score:3, Interesting)
Many things are a matter of taste, I suppose. I'm just saying that you can sometimes, at least, reboot things. I suspect Batman Begins is probably the inspiration for recent series reboots, and the general strategy seems to be to scrape off all the cliches and pointlessly repetitious drivel that occupies so much of so many movie series.
Maybe it won't work, I dunno, but I've heard some folks who have seen it say the new Trek is very good, certainly a lot better than the last two TNG outings, and I think bringing in an outsider, someone who didn't feel any necessity or burden to layer things back up, was as good a chance to rejuvenate Trek as we're going to get. If this doesn't work, then I think that will be it. The franchise has been abominably abused, particularly after DS9 went off the air.
All I can say at the end of the day is that if there's a reference to the Borg, I'm walking out of the theater. Having them show up in Enterprise was what finally did it for me. I just couldn't stand yet another story arc of "we're-so-invincible-but-not-really-except-we-are-but-no-we're-not-and-yet-here-we-are..."
Re:What's the Klingon phrase for... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's kind of wordy for your average Klingon I prefer:
chugh SoH neH ("As you wish."). *squick*
Short sweet and too the point, with bonus points for cross genre snark.
Re:Travesty? (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides which, the whole Klingon language thing has gotten too ridiculous. The linguist they hired to invent the language actually tried to make the psychology behind the language truly alien. So he did things like not have words for "hello" or "goodbye". I actually heard an interview with him where he explained that Klingons don't believe in courtesy, and just start and end interactions without ceremony.
This was completely forgotten by the time TNG came out. I guess they decided that aliens acting alien was too subtle for a TV audience. So they decided that Klingons greet each other with "Qapla'!" Officially, that means "Success!" but I suspect it really means "Fuck off, patronizing bald guy!"
But what's really lame is the project to translate Shakespeare into Klingon, based solely on a stupid Cold War reference (one of many) in that Kirk-is-Nixon movie.
tlhap yIn!
Re:Travesty? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think both of you are 'right', but limited. We would have to ask Gene Roddenberry to be sure, though.
At the time(1966) of ST: TOS, tensions in world politics were high.(saying that looking at today sounds silly, but...)
The Cold War was simmering nicely with the USSR, while China was isolationist, but probing Western markets, we(USA) were looking at Vietnam(with both Soviet and Chinese support), etc...
The 'Space Mongol' scenario just played on this to avoid political/diplomatic finger-pointing. (Buck Rogers vs. Ming the Merciless, etc.)
We indemnify that we don't understand or accept(usually related), so we 'needed' a common cause to rally around for the 'betterment' of mankind.(read: become more like US[A] to be non-threatening)
Something else we are neglecting in this specific discussion are the Romulans. Who did they represent? And their 'cousins', the Vulcans?
For this discussion we should bring them both into the picture, IMHO.
I think that was Gene's intention. In hi own way, he was trying to get us used to the idea that 'National Borders/Politics' were less important than mankind as a whole. It may have been naive, but at least understandable by reasonable people that were fed up with the whole 'Cold War' thing impinging on space exploration.
Take all of that with a grain of salt, but having seen/read interviews featuring G.R., I will stand by my speculations.
I have mentioned this years ago(and thus cannot track down the post), but the 'launching' of Star Trek was treated as a big deal in NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center community.
The Premier was greeted with dinner parties galore. My family attended one of these hosted by a senior director of NTTF**/Goddard at his home. It was treated as a 'Big Deal' in the Goddard community...a way to tie-in what NASA was doing for us as a species...helping the ST:TOS world become a reality.
**NTTF==Network Test and Training Facility. I worked there as a High school senior, in the Logistics Dept. on the 'graveyard shift' in 1976-77, playing 'baseball'(text-based), and blackjack on NASA's mainframes! ten years after Star Trek was aired.
Looking at your /. UID, I'll resist the 'get off my lawn' speech here, and just get the fsck off of yours!...:-)
Re:who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
He looks more like the missing link or Bigfoot than he does a dog...
Re:What's the Klingon phrase for... (Score:4, Interesting)
I always loved that the Universal Translator could happily instantly translate even brand new alien languages into perfect English, but the Klingons had a way of talking that made it stop working.
Re:Travesty? (Score:3, Interesting)
All DS9 had to do, was make Worf look like a TOS-era Klingon, and have the other characters in the show not even notice the difference. Just exchange a couple of odd looks, perhaps coupled with a small joke along the lines of, "Did he cut his hair?" Then when they return to DS9's present, Worf is back to his fully-made-up self, and again, nobody sees the difference.
Much of the episode was played for humor in the first place, I don't know why they didn't go there for the Klingon make-up.