What Makes Star Wars and Star Trek So Great, Part VI
Bad “Bad Guy” Ships
As I mentioned in Part 2, it’s important for the heroes’ ships to have a good enemy ship as the opponent. Here’s where I explore that idea a bit further.
But first, just a brief recap. As I discussed in previous parts of this little discourse, Star Wars and Star Trek before it, offer superbly designed spaceships and interesting and advanced tools used alike by the heroes and villains. However, they have since fallen from the lofty heights of their best days. In Parts 3 and 4, I explored the great ship designs in Star Trek and Star Wars sequels. In Part 5, I went through the ships in the prequels in each franchise. Here is where things went downhill fast for both.
And yet, the bad ship designs really didn’t start with the prequels. There were bad ship designs in the sequels of both as well—and they fall largely in the camp of the enemy ships.
To provide a contrast, let’s first look at some of the best “bad guy” ships. I’ve already gone through the first trilogy “bad guy” ships of Star Wars in good detail. This is where Star Wars excels—the Empire has the coolest ships. However, in Star Trek, the best bad guy ships appear in the original cast movies, in particular the Klingon Bird of Prey.
In Star Trek III, we get our first look at the Bird of Prey, which quickly became a fan favorite. This ship was so popular it appeared in five movies total (just one less than the first movie Enterprise!) as well as becoming a regular in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nice. This ship’s design, like many other popular designs (e.g., the X-Wing), features variable position wings—up for landing, straight for cruising, and down for battle. She also has a cloaking device, something that partially evened her chances in a battle with the much larger Enterprise. All this helped capture our collective imaginations.
She is thus a worthy advisory to the Enterprise. But even more so, the Bird of Prey was a worthy ship for great bad guys—the Klingons.
Similarly, one of the best bad guy ships appears in Star Trek: First Contact. Here the new Enterprise-E makes her debut and has a fitting adversary in the enormous Borg cube. It’s thoughtless, design-less construction tells us everything we need to know about the zombie-like Borg. These are great bad guys.
Bad “Bad Guy” Ships in Star Trek
That brings us to the bad “bad guy” ships in Star Trek. They start right after First Contact. After this movie, the awesome new Enterprise-E has less worthy adversaries. In Star Trek: Insurrection, the biggest problem among many was that the bad guys are pretty boring. And their ship, the Son’a (or “Ru'afo's”) flagship does not help make them any less boring. It’s also somewhat annoying that it is portrayed as any kind of match for the great Enterprise. After all, the Enterprise represents the greatest technology of the mighty Federation of Planets. How could a limited race like the Son’a produce a vessel that can compete with the Enterprise? It’s kind of stupid.
In Star Trek: Nemesis, the Enterprise-E faces off against the Reman vessel, a heavily armed flagship named the Scimitar. Captained by the Reman leader Shinzon, who is a clone of Captain Picard, this ship looks like a fat, large-winged bat in space. And talk about transforming, this ship adds like six different pairs of wings when going into battle alert, basically taking a cool design concept too far, making it ridiculous. It’s ugly and meant to be ugly. It’s a fitting ship for the Remans because it looks like them. They are ugly, bat-like Romulans. The problem is that we know very little else about them other than they were once oppressed by the more interesting Romulans. In spite of all that, they just aren’t very interesting bad guys. This did not help the movie.
Then in Star Trek (2009), the Romulan bad guys’ ship is the Narada. This is the ship from the future that goes back 100 years in time to seek revenge on Mr. Spock for failing to save Romulus from destruction. She’s so advanced by being from the future that she makes mincemeat of a whole fleet of Starfleet ships. Her design is indiscernible. She looks like the business end of a witch’s broom, but with no handle sticking out the back. The Romulans in this movie are boring and so is their ship.
Bad “Bad Guy” Ships in Star Wars
Bad designs of bad guy ships in Star Wars come into their own in the third trilogy, starting with Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But in all frankness, I really cannot go into detail on these ships. I could only stomach seeing the first two movies before quitting. Force Awakens wasn’t all bad, but was still easily the worst of all the Star Wars movies to date.
Then came The Last Jedi. I wouldn’t know where to begin, only that this film killed whatever interest was left inside of me for anything new from Star Wars. The ships play no significant part in the story other than it never seems to occur to the facsimile Empire to get beyond two-dimensional thinking. All they needed to do to catch the fleeing Rebels ships as to position a few ships slightly above the fleeing ships, go into hyperdrive very briefly, then turn around and come back in front of them to cut them off. This is only one of many problems with this movie. The pains continue on in so many ways, but when I saw “ape-like” AT-ATs lining up against the rebels, I was quite done.
The overall point is that a great ship, whether the heroes’ or the villains,’ must have a thought-provoking design with interesting features. However, no matter how good the design, this will not help if the characters within are not interesting themselves. And yet, I find it intriguing that a poorly written villain will very often have an associated poorly designed ship to go with him. It seems to go hand-in-hand.
This concludes my analysis of the greatness of Star Trek and Star Wars. The last two parts were certainly more critical of the later stages of the franchises, but I think this goes to show the greatness that remains, even if it is in the past. I think we’ve seen the best of both. Anything to come will not compare.