In my geekiest post to day, I argue about whether Star Trek is better than Star Wars.
(tl;dr, it is.)
As with many things, a lot comes down to childhood. I grew up in a house in which Star Trek was beloved and Star Wars, not hated nor despised, just didn’t feature massively to the same extent. I grew up watching The Next Generation (TNG) on TV, and The Original Series (TOS) on recorded episodes. Here was a world of possibility, and familiarity. The possibility of what the future may hold – of faster than light travel, of transporters, of holodecks, of mysterious aliens and exciting adventures. And yes, this may be also true of Star Wars largely, but I’ll come to that. At its core, Star Trek is a positive ideal. It puts forward the philosophy that humanity can achieve unity; that it can overcome the difficulties of our time and work together for a common cause, create things of wonder and unbelievable technology, and do it for the advancement of knowledge and human understanding. And it does it while defending itself admirably against enemy alien forces. At its core, Star Trek is about humanity. read more »
April 1999
I first realise that film adaptations of books are projects which carry equal levels of risk and certainty. An inbuilt audience will encourage ticket sales, but that is tempered with an almost definite inability to completely transfer the novel to the screen. Truly successful adaptations are rare. Where the book is short (The Shawshank Redemption), of lower-than-average quality (Jaws, The Godfather) or where the adaptation ignores key elements of the book in favour of a more cinematic approach (The Shining). But a film adaptation of a book which manages to respect the source material, maintain the tone and thematic elements and yet still work on the big screen is rarer still. The most recent film I can think of which does that most successfully – where both book and film are independently superb, individually different, yet tonally and thematically of a kind – is Fight Club. 
