Posted on 05/21/2013 11:34:44 AM PDT by Bratch
YES, THERE ARE SPOILERS.
It’s generally a bad idea to go into darkness. You tend to bump into things and hurt yourself. You break things and people will get very cross.
And yes, there are fans very cross at STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS. To them, this is STAR TREK dumbed down. It’s looking backwards and recycling old storylines in a banal way. It shits on Gene Roddenberry’s legacy. It’s hollow fanservice. The counterargument is this is STAR TREK for the kids, for people who have never seen Star Trek or liked it before.
I don’t hate STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS. It’s a fast, slick and highly entertaining movie, straining desperately to throw in as many explosions and action as possible to keep the audience from getting bored. It also moves as quickly as possible to dazzles the audience with pretty pictures so as to keep us from actually thinking about the plot, since once we do, it makes almost no sense whatsoever.
The script is full of things that are only there so that plot can happen, and made me think of a bunch of questions:
Why does the senior command of Starfleet have an emergency meeting in a room high up in a building with big windows so that the baddie would know and be able to attack them?
CumberKhan has a portable teleporter, why does he bother flying a fighter ship to attack the senior command when he could have either teleported in and planted a bomb, or teleported in to kill them all up-close to make sure they’re dead, then teleport out again?
If CumberKhan can use his portable teleporter to anywhere he wanted, why the hell did he teleport to Klingon space to wait for Starfleet to come after him? There’s no way he could possible know whoever they send would decide not to kill him. Why doesn’t he just teleport to the secret weapons base that he helped design and steal the big fuck-off starship that he helped design and then attack Starfleet with it? How could he possibly anticipate the evil Starfleet admiral would come after him if the ones they sent decided not to kill him?
Gravity fails – why are people and things falling? There’s no gravity!
Why were there no other Starfleet ships rushing out to intervene when their flagship The Enterprise is being hammered by an massive unidentified fuck-off battle cruiser right over the Earth, where all of Starfleet’s defense systems are?
Yes, magic healing blood at the start of the movie. Wonder if it’s going to be a big plot point at the end…
I could go on.
I don’t really understand hiding the fact that Cumberbach was playing Khan in all the film’s marketing and publicity. Who else could the character possibly be that’s going to mean anything at all to Trek continuity? Every fan pretty much sussed it out long before production even began and non-fans don’t care one way or another.
Anyway, snark aside, I was struck by the overall message of the movie. Instead of the usual revenge action movie, it’s actually about advocating due process and avoiding a blind rush to war. CumberKhan becomes a bin Laden manqué, initially used by a hawkish Starfleet admiral create new weapons and then painted as a boogeyman in a ruse to lead Starfleet to war with the Klingons. Kirk becomes a representation of post-Bush America, shocked, outraged and initially vengeful, but comes to his senses and decides to uphold the law instead. It’s a post-Bush-era, post-War on Terror message the movie is overtly pushing. Even Harry Knowles at Ain’t It Cool has picked up on this and runs with it even more enthusiastically than I do.
I often think every version of STAR TREK is an idealised metaphor for America of its time. The original 60s series reflected Kennedy-era optimism and liberalism. THE NEXT GENERATION represented the late 80s and 1990s’ emphasis on therapy culture and earnest questioning. In the post-Cold War era, DEEP SPACE NINE was about the late 1990s’ sense of trying to maintain moral and ethical integrity while dealing with increasingly grey moral questions amid the complexities of factionalism, and sister show VOYAGER was about former enemies having to work together to survive (and also inadvertently about idiotic and terrible decisions). ENTERPRISE’s portrayal of Earth trying to present its best face forward as it ventures into the stars is an interesting reflection of the folksy side of the W. Bush era. The new movies’ callow, reckless, somewhat stupid but earnest Kirk and a darker, more violent and menacing galaxy is consistent with the current era (and the preoccupations of screenwriters, like daddy issues).
STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS is not exactly subtle, but blockbuster action movies rarely are. Along with IRON MAN 3, which also has a post-War on Terror theme in its depiction of a fictional terrorist boogeyman created by corrupt big business to stir up public panic for propaganda purposes, this summer’s action movies might indicate an interesting, possibly schizophrenic, shift in how Hollywood sees the current state of War and Terror. There’s no way any movie would have dared push the themes of IRON MAN 3 or STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS anytime between 2001 and 2010. It’ll be interesting to tally them up when the summer’s over. The other interesting thing is that when movies like THE DARK KNIGHT premiered, they were hotly debated by pundits on the Left and Right in an attempt to claim the movie as reflecting their viewpoints. I haven’t seen anywhere near the volume of debate over IRON MAN 3 or STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS. But the summer season has barely started and we still have a bunch of other blockbusters with interesting subtexts, like MAN OF STEEL, on the way. This could be the most interesting summer blockbuster movie season for a long time.
Could be, but there are obvious implications as well. Khan an d his crew, Al-Qaeda would be used by the Gov't in the past, but they come back and hurt ya again. Secondly, the whole 72 members of the crew, like 72 virgins, as in I would do anything for that, death is fine.
Well.
OK, I’m a Star Trek fan and like the new direction. Had to get a younger Captain Kirk somehow.
Since Earth’s history was changed the day JTK was born all the folks that were alive then would have carried over into the new story line.
I’ll see it on the big screen when the crowds thin out.
Cumberbatch is no Ricardo Montalbán by any stretch... 
but he is a pretty good bad guy and he is set up to come back down the pike.
I tell you, Bendy, this pretty boy Benedict just does not have the perfectly sculptured pecs... 
to be an effective Khan.
Now, now, Ricardo. Did those... 
really get you laid that much more?
Truthfully, I did expect these bad boys... 
to get me way more trim that they actually did--
Well, let us see what Khan... 
is best:
Gee Mr. Peabody, what historical era... 
are we are we going back to this time?
1978, Sherman, to see how the new Khan... 
measures up to the old Khan. Flip the switch, if you please?
Wow, we're here in 1978. Who... 
is that?
The new Khan... 
Sherman.
The 1978 Vauxhall Magnum... 
is superb transportation--
That allows one... 
to pick up the pretty birds--
And surround them with an interior of rich, unsurpassed Newcastle... 
Naugahyde!
That's pretty lame... 
isn't it, Mr. Peabody?
Never make a decision before seeing... 
the opposition and in this case, the old Khan.
The 1978 Chrysler Cordoba, a masterful... 
design--
With an interior of rich, unsurpassed Corinthian... 
Leather--
Wow! That was really, really... 
fantastic, wasn't it, Mr. Peabody?
AND, in the Wrath of Khan my pecs are also made of rich, unsurpassed Corinthian... 
Leather!
Well, until that... 
it was--
Now the writers can go back, revisit the old Roddenberry stories and "reimagine" them - in other words they can use any characters or situations they choose and weave their own schlock around it. This time it was Kahn (same character only different). Call it "homage" but whole scenes were lifted out of Wrath of Kahn with only minor differences (This time it's Kirk dying inside the radiation-filled chamber).
I also witnessed the introduction of those furball tribbles, or one of them anyway.
Is Roddenberry's widow still alive? Wonder how she feels about this?
This movie made enough $$$$ there's bound to be another one, which begs the question, "What character will they resurrect this time? My money's on:
...and his wife, of course.
Crappy movie.
They fly to a planet to stop volcanoes from ruining it, violating the “prime directive”. Spock gets caught in the volcano and is rescued by Kirk.
A rescued Spock then accuses Kirk of violating the PD, when he, and all of them did it first by interfering with volcanoes !?
DONE ! ( stands and walks out of theater )
I saw this movie yesterday. It is a steaming pile of nonsensical crap. The Star Trek franchise is officially out of ideas.
•I didn’t like that they changed the original stories.
The original time-line was disrupted when Nero came back and destroyed the planet Vulcan. It’s pretty much a new parallel universe. Clever, huh?
-Frank
Ah, I didn’t understand that.
I picked up that Vulcan had been destroyed, and briefly wondered about that, but didn’t understand that was the result of time travel.
Ah, I didn’t understand that.
I picked up that Vulcan had been destroyed, and briefly wondered about that, but didn’t understand that was the result of time travel.
If they do, you might be surprised.
"What character will they resurrect this time? My money's on:
...and his wife, of course.
In TOS, Pike was badly crippled in an accident (a bit of an homage to that was seen at the end of the previous film). Pike didn't die, though - he ended up living on Talos IV.
This film takes the plots of Space Seed (TOS) and The Wrath of Khan and squishes them into one story. That may have neen necessary because of the "new" fans, but it also resulted in the writers glossing over the villain's past (specifically, a global genocidal war). It turned him into a mere tool, used by the *real* bad guy (Admiral Robocop).
Lame-o.
Also, he is collaborating with Robocop, and teleporting to the neutral zone after the attack to help cause the war. But if that is true, why fire into the room where his collaborator was sitting, who escaped only with luck?
This movie could not settle down and develop a character or plot for longer than five seconds. If that is really what we have become in our attention deficit generation, the next reboot should be acted by those chipmunks with the helium voices.
Then “Mudd’s Women” would be about lesbians. No wonder that last frame looks like Hillary.
I had to watch the first in the series on an airplane, and turned it off mid film. Why?
Well, the baddies, who had just blown up the entire starfleet fleet of ships, were destroying Vulcan with a black hole.
So how do they try to stop them? They “parachute” down three men to fight with their fists (one of whom, JTKirk, is still half drugged from a ruse that got him on the ship...).
Then the ever logical Spock tries to save his mom. Huh? Eight billion Vulcans getting blown up, and you aren’t trying to beam up as many vulcans as will fit in your ship, but instead beam down to save a few family members?
not logical
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