Star Trek Into Darkness

[jetpack_monkey]

This will not be pleasant. I know a lot of you are looking to not have your squee harshed, so I've put this behind a cut.

What the fucking shit? What the fucking shit was that? It offended me as a movie lover. It offended me as a Trek fan. It offended me as a movie lover who is also a Trek fan.

I don't want JJ Abrams near Trek anymore and I'm pretty sure I don't want him near Star Wars. I really enjoyed the 2009 film, but you know, I think part of me only did so because I assumed they would move on from that particular story type and do some stories in the vein of, oh I don't know, Star Trek.

But no. Let's start with the film as a film, because honestly, the Trek fan in me is still a blinding white hot rage.

Some of the action sequences were completely unintelligible, especially the one on the Klingon homeworld. Carol Marcus's big emotional moment was ruined by the fact that she'd barely developed as a character up to this point and she'd transformed into a being entirely made of lens flare. Benedict Cumberbatch and Peter Weller were both ridiculously bad. Cumberbatch in particular, with his choked up monologue and snarling anger, was almost unwatchable. I love Sherlock, so that pains me to say.

There were plot holes you could drive, well, a starship through, if I'm allowed to be cliche. What could Khan possibly hope to achieve by installing his crew into torpedoes. Originally I thought that maybe the torpedoes weren't actually armed, but apparently they were! So that was excellent planning. Good one, Khan.

Also, didn't they eject the warp core in the last movie? So how is it suddenly that a non-functional warp drive removes all critical functions from the ship? I mean, even if you don't take into consideration that Trek engineering never worked like that, it still makes no sense within the universe of new Trek.

We're moving into STID as actual Star Trek now. Which it's not. Who takes a rich universe like Star Trek and makes into Earth-centric action movie fodder? If your Star Trek movie's big climactic battle (ugh, battle) is a foot chase and a fistfight in San Francisco, you should seriously reconsider your decisions. All of them.

There's an entire galaxy out there, but you'd hardly know that if you watched STID. Sure, there's a detour to the Klingon homeworld, but that's pretty much what it amounts to. A detour.

It's like the screenwriters -- at least two of whom are notoriously awful at developing decent characters in a cinematic context -- are using the franchise as a means to make the audience fill in the characterization work on their own. Fanfiction does that, too, but it's an appropriation to continue the stories, to fix perceived flaws in their presentation, or to reconsider the characters. In good fanfiction, when you stray as far as this AU has, you make a strong effort to worldbuild so that the audience can center themselves in the new reality. Fanfiction doesn't make me feel like my fannish knowledge is being exploited to save someone else hard work. Star Trek Into Darkness does, and no amount of Alexander Courage music can soothe this seething soul.

I mean, who is Khan? What's his deal? What's his story? There's vague references here and there, but to really find out, you'd have to go watch Space Seed and Wrath of Khan. And you know what? I'd rather just watch those two.

Also, there's some serious A-level bullshit in appropriating the most emotional scene in Wrath of Khan for a cheap fucking emotional sting which doesn't even work. The two characters haven't earned it here at all and if you're propping the scene up on the residual emotions of Wrath of Khan (which is clearly what's happening here), then congratulations, you've just reminded us of a much better movie. Also, there was an easy out introduced with a heavy plot mallet midway through the film. Of course they're not going to kill Kirk.

I don't want to even get started on the Starfleet having a fucking Dreadnaught class starship (named Vengeance according to the credits). What the shit.

The whole thing is depressing, because it's a bad Trek movie, it's a bad movie, and the studio executives will probably stay this course until it stops making money. Going back to thoughtful, Roddenberry-inspired Trek will probably happen someday, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll just keep watching what I have. They can't kill the old shows and movies.
 

Comments

[jetpack-monkey.livejournal.com]

I am actually comparing it to original Trek, which far more than TNG and the other post-TNG series, actually went out and explored strange worlds and new civilizations. You know, they boldly went. And when they did, they did social commentary and philosophy and all those things the new movie series is missing.

And the original Trek was *never* Earth-centric. They went to Earth three times in 79 episodes, all of which were time travel eps. It wasn't until the movies that they started hanging around Earth and even then half the time it was just a jumping off point.

I think that a lot of the interpretation of Khan relies on how well Cumberbatch worked. I don't think he did at all, so we'll have to agree to disagree here. I will note that Khan still doesn't stand on his own. You still have to extrapolate his motivations from his character's reaction under different circumstances.

Also, the film is incredibly unclear as to how much of the early events of the movie are Admiral Marcus's plot and how much of it is Khan going rogue. I still have no clue.

The torpedoes had to be armed. Marcus wouldn't have given them to Kirk if they were not. By Khan's own confession, he was caught installing his people in the missiles, so Marcus knew they were in there. So they were armed. Unless there's a specific line of dialogue contradicting that, but if there is, then it makes even less sense, because there was no freaking time to pull all of those bodies out and put explodey material in.

[diannelamerc.livejournal.com]

Well, then we'll just continue to disagree. :)

(And I am sorry that it was such a disappointment to you. That sucks beyond the telling, regardless of why.)

I would argue that the social commentary was neither as all-pervasive in TOS as you suggest, nor as absent as ITD.

I see a need to extrapolate motivations to generally be a good thing in characters, and in keeping with the thought-fodder you see lacking in this. (But again, I can't speak to working from a blank slate on Khan--although I will admit I believed them when they said they weren't doing Khan and only realized it must be at least a Khan-type character when he started handing the Klingon patrol their asses. And up to that point I was still doing fine.)

Again, I don't think avoiding a "here's what happened" layout of how exactly Marcus and Khan's plans interacted is a bad thing. Skipped on screen because it doesn't technically matter to the plot, but gives great fodder for later fan discussion and argument--which is TOS all the way!)

I admit to a three-weeks' delay in watching it meaning I don't remember the specifics as clearly as I might. I spent the entire beginning of the movie thinking those torpedoes were designed to backfire when fired from next to the warp core and Khan was counting on the "fire and take him down" plan to explode the Enterprise... after that I kept switching theories on the nature of those torpedoes every five minutes.

I would, however, argue that there was indeed enough time between when they first learned what was in the torpedoes and when they were beamed to Khan to trade his crew for explosives. But there was clearly time to pull all the bodies out, they did it. (I would guess a mass internal transporter beaming and Scotty pulling that part off in about 5 minutes flat, no problem.)

Marcus knew they were in there, and hence held them hostage, threatening to dump them or launch them into something, not explode them. There would be no particular reason for Marcus to have put explosives in there originally (they were unneeded for the threats he was making)and every reason for Khan to avoid it.

I gotta disagree, I don't think there's a line of dialog _supporting_ that, and no reason for them to be.

[jetpack-monkey.livejournal.com]

I think leaving this at an agree to disagree point is good. I'm actually finding more things that piss me off about STID in the course of this discussion and that list is already brimming full.