I'm not a hardcore Trek fan, I've watched my fair share of Next Generation, I've watched the entirety of Voyager and I've attempted to watch Enterprise all the way through, but as soon as I get to the four part story arc about tracking down Vulcan terrorists in a 9/11-Afghan War commentary I fall asleep, because honestly if I wanted to see commentary about Post-9/11 America I'd watch literally anything else made after 9/11.
To name a few.
I've only seen the Next Generation movies, minus Insurrection but to my understanding that's just a long running episode. Point being, I'm just a casual fan, I'm not working on a JJ Abrams voodoo doll to make him pay for his crimes, and I'm not personally hurt by deleting the entirety of Star Trek via flying it all into a black hole.
Not even mad about how much sense Red Matter doesn't make.
In saying that, Star Trek: Into Darkness gets under my skin not from a Star Trek point of view, even though there is some small gripes that will surface, it's from a purely writing stand point.
No this isn't a saving grace, this is a part of the problem, though I feel compelled to thank you anyway JJ. So Thanks.
Into Darkness is this weird hybrid of bad and good movie, objectively the movie would be terrible, characters flip out at any moments notice, the plot is so manufactured that if you squint hard enough you can see "Made in China" in the bottom corner, and as we'll get to later, the story doesn't make all that much sense.
But it's so well executed that the movie is good in the sense that it'll entertain you all the way through. It's almost like if Transformers: Return of the Fallen was actually fun to watch and not insulting to the eyes.
What am I even looking at?
Even more confusing, the best and worst parts of the movie is Benedict Cumberbatch
"I am a complicated detriment to the story!"
Cumberbatch, like most of his roles, is amazing in this film. He's absolutely menacing in the movie. He's the strong silent type at first and then next thing you know he's screaming so loud he scared the crap out of Michael Shannon's great-grandkids.
2013 was the year of screaming.
He's introduced as the total opposite of Captain Kirk; Kirk is young and brash, Khan is old and calculating. Which is exactly what we saw in the last film.
Like the rest of the canon, Into Darkness hopes you forgot about 2009's Star Trek.
This is a common theme in the film, repeat what we did last time. But, the set up is good, we have an unknown foe that aims to tear down Kirk's belief that he is infallible, after a terrorist attack....
Wait, feeling a common theme here.
Anyway, we're good on the set-up, and we're going to go see the Klingons, awesome who doesn't love them?!
And that's all you see.
So what if the Klingons aren't on the screen long enough, you probably could of done more with them, but that's not the problem. The problem is slightly earlier before we leave for the Klingon Homeworld, and we're introduced into a forced situation to break up the crew for A) Plot convenience since we need Scotty back on Earth and B) Making Kirk look like a jerk, because we didn't have enough of that in the last move.
Character arcs? No we need to keep everyone exactly the same because four years of leadership experience will never change a person in anyway.
And even before landing on the planet, we're treated to a good ol' fashion couple fight on the dropship. Because Spock isn't showing enough emotions because he thinks they make him weak. Much like the first movie. And this shouldn't be a problem, because it was resolved, you know, in the first movie. But it's a problem anyway, because who needs to think of new problems when you can just resolve the problems from last time.
Much like the last three times a villain wants to be captured to get closer to his goal.
So we have Cumberbatch in the brig and he drops the bomb on Kirk that he is actually Khan in a very dramatic way, and everyone is surprised. Expect for the audience. Since everyone who knows anything about Star Trek saw this coming, and everyone else has no idea what the name "Khan" is suppose to mean.
The writers, noticing that they've written themselves into a corner, literally call up the older Spock form the original time line to explain who Khan is to the audience.
Yes, New Spock Skypes up Old Spock and has him explain who Khan is. And he mentions the Eugenics War which has been a confusing part of the Star Trek Universe since Voyager.
Long story short a war between genetically modified humans and normal humans happened in the mid-1990's followed by a nuclear World War III that almost sent all of humanity back into the Dark Ages, but it was from this that the world decided to stop this whole "war" thing finally and decided to convert the nuclear arsenal into faster than light ships and go exploring and stuff.
For how dumb this sounds, this has been essentially the origin story to Star Trek since the beginning, and Khan and his whole clan were a group of genetically modified soldiers during the Eugenics War in the mid-1990s and were put on trail to be killed but the whole War War III thing happened so they were frozen and apparently stuffed in long-range torpedoes.
This is all well and good, but the one weird thing about Star Trek, is that for a show that takes place in the future, every series has to have an obligatory episode involving the crew going to whatever time period the show was being produced in and have them interact with random people to show that the present sucks and that the future is so much better.
Also Abraham Lincoln showed up at one point, Star Trek is weird is what I'm getting at.
The problem with the time travel to present episodes, is that Voyager was on air when the world should have been in the middle of World War III after getting out of a war with genetically perfect humans. But instead we're treated to all the crazy 90's styles and Captain Janeway talking about Y2K.
Star Trek is weird like that.
Ok so it was actually Captain Janeway's ancestor that did the complaining about the Y2K thing, Voyager had some weird things going on.
Lots of weird things.
Ratings became an issue as you can imagine.
Anyway, so essentially the Eugenics War and the whole World War III thing was brushed to the background of Star Trek lore in an effort that hopefully everyone forgets about it.
Though Star Trek: Enterprise for some reason decided to use it as a reason why the Klingons look different from the original 1960's series than in the CGI heavy early 2000's series.
And they couldn't just say "lack of a make-up budget"
Yeah so Enterprise threw a whole new wrench into the already confused time stream of the late 1990's. I think this is more due to Gene Roddenberry thinking that we'd all kill ourselves before the 21st century.
Well if he'd seen 2014 coming he might of moved his timeline down a little.
So Abrams putting his whole new spin on what happened in the late-90's just makes it even more of a mess. But we need to remember that none of it matters since it all got sucked into a black whole.
Much like how Enterprises attempts at increasing ratings by having the entire female cast take their clothes off as much as possible also didn't matter.
So JJ's explanation for the whole thing is RoboCop explaining "Khan made weapons and stuff". Which is pretty much a microcosm for how everything is explained in Into Darkness, it does thinks and stuff.
The torpedoes can lock onto people from far away, and are actually cryotubes for centuries old soldiers.
Ok this is the biggest plot hole that bugs me, even more than the whole magic blood thing we'll get to later.
The actual plot is that RoboCop sends Kirk out to go kill Sherlock with long range torpedoes so that the Klingons won't notice. Kirk, choses not to use the weapons, even though he just had an argument with Scotty about how he is going to use the weapons the scene prior, he then goes down and captures Smaug instead.
The problem with this is that RoboCop never gave Kirk any torpedoes, they're cryotubes. And as shown when they open one up, there isn't anything inside them other than a person, so they can't be used as weapons anyway.
So ether, RoboCop was playing on Kirk firing duds at the Klingons to piss them off to start a war, which he wants by the way.
The problem being that the Klingons could only track the torpedoes if they gave off any signal, which we were shown earlier that they don't. There isn't any form of propulsion so it's not like they'll ever get to the planet anyway. And even if Kirk was killed by the Klingons for trespassing, forcing the Federation to go to war, RoboCop only had one ship partially build.
Yes your ship is cool and all, but you can't invade a warrior race's entire space empire with just one ship.
So what was RoboCop's entire plan anyway? Or was he just so excited to preemptively go to war with the Klingons that he was just waiting for the opportunity?
Ignoring how the film is trying to makes us think that there's an inevitable war with the Klingons brewing, mainly through just one line of RoboCop's entire "this is why I'm the bad guy" speech, his whole plan structurally doesn't make sense at this point in time.
So let's dig really deep here and assume that Khan threw everything off by trying to kill RoboCop in the beginning of the film, causing him to move his plan forward and send Kirk after him to Klingon space, it still doesn't make sense.
If Khan would have never killed the admirals at the security meeting, then RoboCop wouldn't have a reason to send Kirk to Klingon space to get killed and start a war.
So did he actually have long range torpedoes on hand just in case?
What was the actual plan here?
This makes the whole train thing in Skyfall make more sense.
At least saying a cheesy one liner made up for this.
The infamous magic blood that has everyones' blood a boiling can be explained in one simple way. Lazy writing. It's introduced in such a ham-fisted way that it's almost as if the writers thought that if they ddin't make it obvious enough that the audience might miss it.
"OH GEE" says Bones "I WONDER WHAT THIS WILL DO" he continues as he winks at the camera.
I mean, look at the composition of the shot, the Tribble is so far in the foreground towards the audiences almost nothing else in the shot is in critical focus.
That's not even a fancy film term, I mean literally nothing else in the shot is in focus on the camera, the only sharp image (which the eye latches onto automatically) is the Tribble with the magic blood.
I'm not going to complain about the whole killing Kirk instead of killing Spock thing, it was a really well done sequence and it showed that Kirk was finally willing to sacrifice himself for his crew which is something he'd been struggling with since the first movie.
There is a lot of important characterization happening right here.
Granted, Zachary Quinto's "KHAN" scream was about as lame as the Judge Dredd reference in Expendables III: There's a Chick in This One
"I DO WISH WE WERE STILL IN THE 80'S WHY DO YOU ASK!?"
So other than the absolute by-the-book introduction to the magic blood, what really gets me is why they needed Khan's blood?
They purposely showed that Bones removed all of the people from the cryotubes in the torpedoes, why can't you use their blood?
I wouldn't mind as much if Bones had said that they needed to be awake for a period of time, or that he needed a compatible blood type and Khans' was the only one he knew could work in the short period of time they had before they couldn't revive Kirk.
The whole thing was an excuse to have a fist fight on top of a flying firetruck between Sylar with a haircut and Sherlock Holmes also with a hair cut.
Also for some reason Spock's girlfriend is there to essentially be a cheer leader.
Because that's the solution to every relationship problem kids, just cheer on your boyfriend as he beats a man to an inch of his life. Hey, you can even join in too!
To summarize, this is further proof that the guys who wrote Lost shouldn't be allowed to write third acts.
"Wait stories are suppose to have endings?"
Or it could have been the guy who wrote Amazing Spiderman 2: Amazingly Bad's fault.
"Yeah Green Goblin disease, I went there"
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