Star Wars or Star Trek ? Which would you recommend and why?

[Pendragon]

Star Wars is garbage and always will be.

[Martymark]

Both long running series have some great films/shows, and a lot of bad films/shows (especially bad recently).

Star Wars original movies and Rogue One were good, Star Trek Next Generation and Deep Space 9 were good.

[Derrick Robinson]

Star Wars unequivocally

[Iamolive]

I recently watched the movie Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The previous film, The Last Jedi, left a deeply positive impression on me. "Skywalker: Rise", unfortunately, turned out not so cool, but rather the opposite ... The film cannot boast of audience versatility, that is, it is focused purely on fans who remember in detail what happened in the previous parts. Before, Star Wars was better - that's a fact. It seems that Disney is saving on everything - on actors, special effects, screenwriters and so on. If earlier SW set a trend in science fiction, now they are trailing behind. I state with regret that the new Star Wars is the minimum of a fantastic adventure and the maximum of a cheap melodrama.

[vitor210]

Star Wars for light sabers and force stuff. Star Trek if you're into that kinky trekie girl you saw on the sci-fi convention last year

[Dundebuns]

Both. They both have their pros and cons. One is decidely more space opera while the other is more of a samurai western in space.

[Beloren]

Both. They both have their pros and cons. One is decidely more space opera while the other is more of a samurai western in space.

Many months later, Star Wars actually feels more eral and realistic.

Show wise, the closest Star trek ever came to feeling real was in the new star trek movies - but Star wars feels a lot more relatable at least form what i would expect a space faring future world. The star trek philosophy /dream, it's utopic future whiles a nice fantasy, seems utter nonsense to me in more ways than one. Still enjoy the show though.

[Kokolums]

Star Wars is really just about the Force. You can't get away from it or else it stops feeling like Star Wars. You also can't overexplain the Force unless you get some REALLY good writing and even then, once the mystery is lost you can't go back.

Star Trek has a lot more latitude. The downside to Trek is that it actually attempts to ground itself in science, so when we make new groundbreaking scientific discoveries in real life, it invalidates parts of Trek.

Overall, Star Wars will have a longer shelf-life.

[Ivanstone]

Star Trek has a lot more latitude. The downside to Trek is that it actually attempts to ground itself in science, so when we make new groundbreaking scientific discoveries in real life, it invalidates parts of Trek.

The point of Trek is to approach things as if they were scientific even if its just horse shit. Trek is never invalidated for that reason. It really is about the spirit of discovery.

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The star trek philosophy /dream, it's utopic future whiles a nice fantasy, seems utter nonsense to me in more ways than one.

And these ways are?

[schwarzkopf]

Star Wars for science fantasy.
Star Trek for science fiction.

Neither is better - they are just different.

[Endus]

Star Wars is really just about the Force. You can't get away from it or else it stops feeling like Star Wars. You also can't overexplain the Force unless you get some REALLY good writing and even then, once the mystery is lost you can't go back.

Star Wars' biggest issues emerge when it tries to explain things. Midichlorians and all that. Sometimes, silly mysticism is all you need.

Star Trek has a lot more latitude. The downside to Trek is that it actually attempts to ground itself in science, so when we make new groundbreaking scientific discoveries in real life, it invalidates parts of Trek.

*Ahem*. No. Star Trek makes essentially zero effort at that, any more than Star Wars does.

ST's Warp Drives work by magic crystals that you shoot lasers at, which creates zoom-juice.

Like 60% of episodes (number made up) in TNG involve space-time anomalies you convert the deflector dish to fire tachyons at to fix. This is a unique solution every time, despite being the same solution every time. And that deflectors don't work like that. It's just magicking reality to make the weird go away.

Nearly every alien looks like a human with latex face bits, and can freely interbreed with basically everything else, because nobody in the writers room knew the first goddamned thing about what panspermia really is or how convergent evolution works. Humans are more closely related, genetically, to fruit flies and sea sponges than they are to Klingons or Vulcans; the lore is that life was "seeded" galactically and that's why everything evolved similarly, but that original event was the earliest origins of life. There's absolutely zero reason we'd have all uniquely settled on upright humanoid body forms, and genetic compatibility is ridiculous, even between any two species, let alone basically every species. Could you have sex with a dog and have a human-dog hybrid baby? No? Then of course you can't do that with a Klingon. You're way more similar, genetically, to the dog.

And I'm just focusing on TOS/TNG-era stuff, here. Not the newer Trek everyone but me seems to hate so much. Star Trek writers aggressively avoid science in most episodes, and just play madgabs with sciencey-sounding words to techbabble at the audience to make them think it's sciencey. It's all "we have to deflect the matter stream into the wave manifold to compensate for the sub-space distortion fields that reversed the polarity of the plasma conduits". That's meaningless garbage. I literally came up with that by hitting buttons on a star trek technobabble generator and picking bits that tickled my fancy. It may as well be "cast Wingardium Leviosa at the swamp ogre to break the magical connection it has to the earth". Except the latter makes more sense.

Star Trek touches lightly on sociological and philosophical matters. It's never particularly deep in those respects, but it makes the effort. Science, though? I'd argue the writers are actively hostile to actual science.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I always looked at the two as different types entirely.

Star Trek is usually more intrapersonal as it kind of asks you about the morality of the situation and puts you in a position to question or agree with it as the story unfolds. Then it also focuses, usually, on a smaller group of folks, the crew of a ship, and what they do while traveling the stars so more a sci-fi drama that does attempt to stay in the realm of science (even if its technobabble bogus science). Also a lot of how these people are getting along or not with each other as they see things happening in the story differently. Sometimes they solve it with shooting but usually its with tact.

Star Wars is more about big galactic groups doing their big things and what are the people going to do to change it. A lot less asking about what is right and wrong because honestly it's pretty cut and dry most the time. You know hard to question stuff like that side commits genocide and this one doesn't? Check! So more big guns, sword fights, big ships fighting, big explosions type of thing so more a sci-fantasy action adventure (force is "magic" and things just "work" without science talk). In Star Wars they solve most the problems with pow pow.

So neither is really superior to each other because they aren't really in direct competition unless the setting of "space" is a genre or if marketing makes the decisions. If you want to see current events explained in a sci-fi setting as a sort of metaphor (current for when it was filmed at least) than Star Trek will be your jam. If you just want action with over the top villans and heros saving the day then Star Wars will be more to your speed. I personally like them both.

[tromage2]

Star Wars.

But only watch episode 1-6 and maybe rogue one between 3 and 4.
Otherwise skip Disney Star Wars you will reget it episode 7 is decent but after 1-2 hours it will start to become clear that its the same as episode 4.
Episode 8 and 9 are franchise destroying quality so if you like Star Wars at this point DONT WATCH THEM!

[Varitok]

Star Wars.

But only watch episode 1-6 and maybe rogue one between 3 and 4.
Otherwise skip Disney Star Wars you will reget it episode 7 is decent but after 1-2 hours it will start to become clear that its the same as episode 4.
Episode 8 and 9 are franchise destroying quality so if you like Star Wars at this point DONT WATCH THEM!

When you say "This one BUT don't watch 50% of it" you know it's a bad recommend.

[Nastard]

Nearly every alien looks like a human with latex face bits

I recall there being a Star Trek TNG episode that explained this. I think it was called "The Chase" or something like that. Essentially there was a big ol' scavenger hunt that led the Cardassians, Klingons, Romulons, and the Enterprise to the same destination. There, they found a recording (of an alien species that looked suspiciously like a Changeling from DS9) that explained that they were responsible for the presence of life in the Alpha Quadrant. When that alien race was first there, no other life was around other than themselves, so they planted life on various planets using their DNA. The message was left in the hopes that it would bring the aliens races together in harmony. The Cardassians and Klingons were like THIS IS SOME BULLSHIT and left, but the Romulon leader privately communicated with Picard and said something like "maybe we're not so different after all."

Yeah, that was something made up to kinda handwave the similarity between all races, but still an attempt was made. Though I don't know if it was necessarily lack of creativity that accounted for all aliens just being similar latex looking beings. You still have to find actors for those roles, and have to be able to relate to them. I'm not going to relate much to a space jellyfish. Though there were a fair amount of non-humanoid aliens like the Crystalline Entity (when budget allowed for it)

[Endus]

I recall there being a Star Trek TNG episode that explained this. I think it was called "The Chase" or something like that. Essentially there was a big ol' scavenger hunt that led the Cardassians, Klingons, Romulons, and the Enterprise to the same destination. There, they found a recording (of an alien species that looked suspiciously like a Changeling from DS9) that explained that they were responsible for the presence of life in the Alpha Quadrant. When that alien race was first there, no other life was around other than themselves, so they planted life on various planets using their DNA. The message was left in the hopes that it would bring the aliens races together in harmony. The Cardassians and Klingons were like THIS IS SOME BULLSHIT and left, but the Romulon leader privately communicated with Picard and said something like "maybe we're not so different after all."

Right, but the idea behind that was that the life they planted was the very beginnings of life. Bacteria and amoebas and stuff, with the potential to evolve.

Now, quick, go look at things like the Cambrian era organisms and such, and compare to the Jurassic era, and then the modern era, and how wildly and chaotically things changed.

What's absolute steaming counter-scientific wharrgarble about Star Trek's canon is the idea that the humanoid shape is somehow a natural emergence that would naturally come about in every evolutionary path. That's just sillypants nonsense that fundamentally sees evolution as a process towards a goal, which it isn't. Those other planets would have had different disasters, different pressures, different evolutionary paths entirely. While we might all share an ancestor some 4 billion years ago, in this hypothesis, that's as far as it goes.

That's why we (humanity) would be more closely related to cabbages and sea cucumbers and trilobites than we are to any alien species that evolved on some other planet, even with the shared origin in question. We'd be more genetically and sexually compatible with all those Earth species than any alien, even if panspermia was a thing. So unless you think we can make adorable little sunflower-human hybrid babies just by rubbing up on some stalks, the idea of human-vulcan hybrids like Spock should be hysterically ridiculous. And vulcans should have, say, 6 feet and four hands and 5 eyes, 2 of which are geared for motion and the other three of which sense a higher range of color than human eyes, and a thick defensive carapace.

In fact, that's freaking more likely, given that Earth's evolution does show one weird constant emergence in the evolutionary tree, and it's not humanoid bipedalism. It's crabs. Seriously, the idea even has a scientific name; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

It's stuff like this that drives me nuts when people claim Star Trek tries to be scientifically accurate. It doesn't. It's all space magic woo-woo. The difference between it and Star Wars is that in Star Wars, "the Force did it", and in Star Trek, "the pulse manifold created a sub-space paradox field that inverted the tachyon flow and caused a space-time conversion collapse." A lot of sciencey-sounding words that mean absolutely fucking nothing in context.

Edit: Which doesn't mean Star Trek is "bad". It just really doesn't give any kind of shit about science. It's sociological/philosophical sci fi, where it tries to be smart about anything.

[Gamingsince1981]

Star wars is just boring as can be to me, I can't even get through a whole star wars movie and I've tried ever since the first one I watched in 1986 or 7, I would suggest star trek, its more about thought and cultures and trying to find a peaceful solution than pew pew laser beam like star wars is.

[Swnem]

Currently, i would recommend Star trek.

As long as you aren't oversensitive over minorities being represented, i found great enjoyment watching it. Discovery gets better with each season. Very worthwhile.
Picard was interesting but it felt contained. Given how Discovery kept getting better i expect Picard to get better in the following seasons.

Star wars is in a rut atm. The new trilogy is trash that shits all over the 6 first episodes and while the mandalorian was really good, now that Pedro Pascal walked and baby yoda is out of the picture they are gonna try to focus on Bobba Fett and it's certainly gonna lose the magic it had.

[Nastard]

Right, but the idea behind that was that the life they planted was the very beginnings of life. Bacteria and amoebas and stuff, with the potential to evolve.

I don't find it out of the realm of possibility that they knew how to seed life that had a code of DNA that allowed for similar evolution across all worlds, with some variances depending on world climate. They were advanced enough that maybe it wasn't even by chance but was by design that there was a dominant race on each planet that looked similarly humanoid. Now, I don't believe for a moment that it would ever come close to being that true in reality, but within the vision they created it is. Maybe that's where your disconnect is coming from - even though it takes places in the same universe, has humans with the same past etc, it's really not our universe, but rather an idealized version of it, as corny hokey and lazy as it may be. Though the more I think about it the more I wonder if there's a contradiction here. In the season finale, Q showed Picard the starting of life on Earth as amino acids and proteins or some shit mingling in a puddle. Just what did that alien race do to seed life then? Throw some space ingredients around on some random planets and call it a day?

I agree that the different environments would contribute a LOT to how a species would evolve. The gravity alone on differing worlds would make it so some species would be built vastly differently. Though, again for the sake of finding actors you have to have some suspension of disbelief as 14 foot tall actors are difficult to find. I feel they took this point into consideration as much as costumes and make-up would allow by giving the different races some very unique traits. Cardassians and Jem'Hadar look fuckin' awesome. Granted, in reality the differences would be so extreme we might not even be able to fathom it or even perceive it with our limited senses. But hey, it still needs to appeal to the masses to be successful AND stay under budget so it can't be 100% realistic. It's more about "what if?" but still trying to be vaguely rudimentarily rooted in the rules they created for the show.

I still think they did a decent job of creating some interesting non-humanoid beings. A giant space snowflake that ravages worlds is pretty creative. A black tar puddle that's the literal personification of negative attributes purged from a society is pretty out there too. A giant pregnant space slug that attaches itself to the enterprise, a race of beings that exist in a wormhole so time isn't linear for them, a species that's nothing more than refracted light. All kinda crazy. A human with pointy ears? Not so much. Not to mention all the races that humans can't even perceive of so they CHOOSE to appear as humanoids because their true form may drive a mind mad.

Anyway, I'm not someone who believes that Star Trek is scientifically accurate and always laugh at the technobabble scenes, but I do appreciate the attempt they sometimes make. My response was more because you stated there was literally "zero effort" made to ground itself in science. A bad effort still counts.

[MrPaladinGuy]

Both, they're very different, and even if they weren't- why would it matter.