Robert Wright gives us a little bit of sublime:
Incidentally, that is William Shatner talking about the opening to Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a movie that most fans of Trek argue never actually happened. (Much like Rocky V and both Matrix sequels. They never happened. It was all a dream. Don’t you feel better now?)
Still, even in a movie that is best disappeared down the memory hole, the scene Shatner describes is a particularly egregious bit of suck. As you may recall, the movie opens with Capt. James Tiberius Kirk climbing El Capitan, only to fall off to certain doom. Spock, in an amazingly blunt bit of foreshadowing, uses anti-gravity boots to intercept the falling Kirk just before he hits the ground. Hooray!
Except, of course, for physics, the laws of which ye canna’ change. Kirk was probably falling at close to terminal velocity when Spock grabbed him by the ankle; assuming that his ankle wouldn’t have simply pulled off, Kirk’s brain most certainly wouldn’t have stopped moving at the same time his body did, leading to almost certain death from blunt force injuries.
Granted, Trek has never worried about physics when it got in the way of a good story, Montgomery Scott’s protests aside. But even so, this was a particularly egregious bit of stupidity, one that set the tone for the dumbest of all the Trek movies. The only good thing about the movie was that it gave us this exchange from “Futurama”:
Leonard Nimoy: Melllvar, you have to respect your actors. When I directed Star Trek IV, I got a magnificent performance out of Bill because I respected him so much.
William Shatner: And when I directed Star Trek V, I got a magnificent performance out of me because I respected me so much!
Truer words were never spoken.
At some point in the future, there will be a religion of gay rock-climbing Trek enthusiasts, and this video will be played every Sunday at church.
Superman “saved” Lois Lane in much the same way. She’d have splatted into his arms. Yet if they showed it realistically, with the flying person matching velocity with the faller and decelerating gradually, the physics-ignorant yahoos would throw popcorn at the screen.
This is why democracy can’t work, people!
They do exactly the same thing in one of the aforementioned Matrix sequels. Neo slams into a falling Trinity at jet-fighter velocity.
I think this same thing happens eventually in just about every film, TV show, or comic that involves human flight. It’s one of the unwritten rules.
My favorite sequel that never happened is the third XMen movie. OMIGAWD was that a severely disappointing movie and what gets me the most about it is I paid full-price at a theatre to see it. I never, never go to first run movies. Since then, I’ve seen lengthy debates on IMDB regarding whether a new sequel should be made. In any case, I hope it heads down the memory hole with other bad ideas.
Well, this is at least plausible in Matrix, they are in the matrix, after all.