Guardians of the Galaxy: Lessons Learned

Hutch wrote:

61Cygni wrote:Hopefully, the script won't go through rewrite hell and suffer from the too-many-cooks syndrome, and Evergreen gets the right director. Because that's where the movie can really go off the rails, as the wrong director may decide he doesn't care much for the source material and decides to make his own version of the story. Imagine if Uwe Boll gets hired...who then casts Megan Fox as Honor...who spends most of her time in tight pants and tanl tops. That may not be the worst of it. Someone may decide that the Graysons are too close to Muslims for Hollywood comfort, so they get remade into Space Aliens. Oh, and since the whole political situation is too complex for the average moviegoer to understand, the new Graysons are turned into Evil Space Aliens and made the Bad Guys for the movie, and Haven is left out completely. Oh, and the director thinks Jar Jar Binks was the best thing ever, so Nimitz now talks...with the voice of Gilbert Gottfried. And hey, someone equates the Age Of Sail analog of the battles with pirates, so the ships now fire actual cannons at each other at ranges of 100 meters.

Oh, thank you very much for that mental picture, 61Cyngi. Now I have to go to the store for the X-large bottle of Brain Bleach....

I will make one prediction. They'll call the "Thunder of God" a Battleship, not a Battlecruiser--because everyone knows that a Battleship is something big and mean, but since Battlecruisers haven't been built for 60 years, the term won't add the amount of menace you need to have for the Big Bad.

But hopefully (and as of now it seems the producers are interested in staying with the main story, for potential sequels if nothing else) the movie we finally see will resemble the book we have come to love....more or less.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

I doubt they will call the Thunder of God a Battleship. To many moviegoers I think a Battlecruiser would be just as well known as something big and mean as a Battleship.

Roguevictory wrote:I doubt they will call the Thunder of God a Battleship. To many moviegoers I think a Battlecruiser would be just as well known as something big and mean as a Battleship.

You may be right, Roguevictory, and it wouldn't trouble me either way. It's just that the last ships that could be called Battlecruisers were built right at the end of WWII (Alaska-class, IIRC). That's 60+ years since the class has been in the picutre, and they were really only a part of naval warfare (at least under that name) for a brief time. While we here all know about them, I'm afraid that the vast public won't have a clear picture of just how outclassed the Fearless is.

However, a Battleship has been around in one form or another for ages and most everyone knows it's a badass ship you don't mess around with.

At least that's my logic (such as it is and what there is of it). We shall hopefully see in 2016.

Hutch wrote:

Roguevictory wrote:I doubt they will call the Thunder of God a Battleship. To many moviegoers I think a Battlecruiser would be just as well known as something big and mean as a Battleship.

You may be right, Roguevictory, and it wouldn't trouble me either way. It's just that the last ships that could be called Battlecruisers were built right at the end of WWII (Alaska-class, IIRC). That's 60+ years since the class has been in the picutre, and they were really only a part of naval warfare (at least under that name) for a brief time. While we here all know about them, I'm afraid that the vast public won't have a clear picture of just how outclassed the Fearless is.

However, a Battleship has been around in one form or another for ages and most everyone knows it's a badass ship you don't mess around with.

At least that's my logic (such as it is and what there is of it). We shall hopefully see in 2016.

I don't think Battleships were around that much longer then Battlecruisers honestly. If I remember right the early classes of vessel officially known as Battleship classes were the result of a ship reclassification program in the 1890s while the term Battlecruiser was officially adopted a few years before World War I. There was defintely a gap but not a huge one, and IMO not one someone who hasn't researched naval history would notice.

You know, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to make Thunder a battleship in the context of the Honorverse. After all, they'll probably make some adjustments to Second Yeltsin, so maybe a speed vs. strength approach?

Meshakhad wrote:You know, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to make Thunder a battleship in the context of the Honorverse. After all, they'll probably make some adjustments to Second Yeltsin, so maybe a speed vs. strength approach?

Doubly so because, in canon, the Havenites are explicitly noted to use battleships for system pickets, whereas Manticore hasn't built them in centuries. Manticore finds them useless, but the Havenites, with their multitude of systems, use them as a kind of jack-of-all-stats below-waller ship class. So it's not even like we'd be stretching the truth all that much - Haven is known to use battleships.

IIRC, The Klingon D-7 ships seen at the beginning of ST:TMP (and I think in one episode of TOS as well) were called battlecruisers, and they've been known by that term ever since. I think the term can be used for the Thunder Of God in the HH movie, most people associate the word with "big-ass ship" in sci-fi movies.

And I think it should be used, because in the books the term "battleship" refers to something else entirely. Again, most people associate the word with the "top dog" ship, the biggest, baddest of all. In fact, I see a potential problem with David's use of "dreadnought" to refer to what is basically a larger-sized battleship. The finer points of difference between the two will be lost on the general audience, so one of the terms will have to be discarded--either there are "dreadnoughts" and "super dreadnoughts" or "battleships" and "super battleships". Or just use the base term; after all, the US Navy used the "BB" classification for ALL battleship-type vessels, all the way from the early ones that massed under 15,000 tons and had 12" guns to the Iowas and planned Montanas. Those ships called "battleships" that Haven used could be either older-type BBs or reclassed to something like a "large battlecruiser", kind of like the US Alaska-class "large cruisers".

Hutch wrote:<snip>...
Still, I think it is worth saying, since so many movies with major budgets and great hopes can and do forget them and fall flat (see "Dune" and "Battlefield Earth" for examples).

But I would like to hear from deeper thinkers than I on this.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

Oh, Come ON!...
Nobody had high hopes for "Battlefield Earth" except the Church of Scientology front office.

It is pretty much an un-secret that even Travolta lent himself to the project only out of a sense of obligation, almost under duress.

Certainly anyone who had attempted or <shudder> forced themselves to read all of the source novel knew it was a disaster waiting to happen.

dreamrider

Hutch wrote:<snip>... It's just that the last ships that could be called Battlecruisers were built right at the end of WWII (Alaska-class, IIRC). That's 60+ years since the class has been in the picutre, and they were really only a part of naval warfare (at least under that name) for a brief time. ...

Actually, the Soviet> Russian Kirov-class large surface combatants are almost universally referred to in western references as "Kirov-class battlecruisers". That terminology is used in both official sources and authoritative non-government publications like Jane's.

The first was commissioned in 1980, and one of the type is currently in active service. The other three are undergoing extensive modernization, and the Russian Federation Navy expects to have them all back in service by 2020.

dreamrider

dreamrider wrote:
Certainly anyone who had attempted or <shudder> forced themselves to read all of the source novel knew it was a disaster waiting to happen.

dreamrider

I actually read it several times, and enjoyed it for what it was - fluffy yarn. It's not a great story, but it's not the worst thing I've read either.

That said, it doesn't negate the last part of your sentence. I pretty much knew from the first announcements of the movie being in production that it was going to end badly.

strapakai wrote:

Hutch wrote:
1. Grab Them Fast.
2. Make them Care. YMMV.

I like your idea of opening the movie with Honor dreaming. What if it was Young trying to rape her in the shower? We'd get action, intrigued, someone to love and someone to hate right off the bat. It would be a hint for future movies. We'd get to see Honor's moves. A hint of skin, for those who it attracts. It would also explain the depth of her reaction to what later happens to Madrigal's crew.

She wakes, out of breath and hugs a cute and cuddly Nimitz.
Instant caring!

It isn't his idea.

The waking from a dream approach is something that David suggested to Evergreen, when they were discussing ways to incorporate backstory AND get an action sequence right up front. He has mentioned it in several con appearances, notably at Honorcon last year.

David says he has no idea if the screenwriters will end up using this approach, but the execs in the room with him at the time kinda liked its "shortcut" value.

dreamrider