Star Trek Into Darkness
Written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof
Directed by J.J. Abrams
Release date: May 16, 2013
Stardate: 2259.55
Captain’s log. On Nibiru, a planet with white-skinned natives and red plants, Kirk is running very fast, having pissed off the locals. Kirk is attacked by a giant animal and stuns it—except that was the mount McCoy had secured to get them out of there, and now it’s stunned. They keep running, having angered the natives deliberately to get them to chase him so that they won’t be harmed by the volcano that’s about to erupt.
While Kirk and McCoy run for their lives, Sulu pilots a shuttle over the volcano and Uhura puts Spock in an EVA suit. Spock is lowered on a cable into the volcano in order to detonate a device that will calm the volcano and save the locals. However, the shuttle has been damaged by the volcano, and Sulu has to abandon it and Spock, whose cable snaps, leaving him stuck in a literal hot mess.
Kirk and McCoy jump into the ocean, on the floor of which the Enterprise is inexplicably sitting. They go in an airlock—Sulu and Uhura had done likewise. They can’t beam Spock out thanks to the magnetic fields created by the volcano, but Chekov thinks they can do it if they have line of sight. Despite the risks mentioned by Spock, Scotty, and Sulu, Kirk goes for it, bringing the Enterprise out of the ocean and over the volcano. Spock is beamed safely aboard even though it means the natives have seen the Enterprise, which violates the Prime Directive.
Spock’s device does what’s intended and neutralizes the volcano, thus saving the Nibiru people.
In London on Earth, Thomas and Rima Harewood get up and go to the Royal Children’s Hospital to look in on their dying daughter. Outside, Thomas is approached by a man who claims he can save his daughter.
At Starfleet HQ, Kirk and Spock are summoned to meet with Pike. Kirk is hoping it’s to be assigned to the new program of deep-space exploration, but it turns out Pike wants to ream them for what happened on Nibiru. Especially since Kirk left some details out of his report, and Spock did not. Pike dismisses Spock and then rips Kirk a new one for filing a false report, for mistaking blind luck for skill, and for not following regulations. He says he doesn’t respect the chair and he’s not ready for it, which makes you wonder why Pike gave it to him in the first place.
Admiral Marcus has convened a tribunal—that Pike wasn’t invited to—and removed Kirk from command of the Enterprise.
In London, the man who approached Thomas puts his blood into a vial, which Thomas puts in his daughter’s IV. Her vitals return to normal almost instantly. (That sound you hear is a gun being put on a mantelpiece.) Thomas, who is a lieutenant in Starfleet, then goes to the Kelvin Memorial Archive and blows it up, with himself inside it.
Pike finds Kirk in a dive bar very similar to the one Pike found him in one movie ago, announcing that he’s getting the Enterprise back and Spock has been transferred to the Bradbury. Kirk will be Pike’s first officer. It took some convincing, but Pike talked the admiralty into it.
They’re interrupted by an emergency session. En route, Kirk bumps into Spock and chastises him for stabbing Kirk in the back after Kirk saved his life. Spock is mostly just confused.
Admiral Alexander Marcus leads the meeting. Thomas has claimed responsibility for the destruction of the archive (and the 42 resultant dead), and said he did it at the behest of Commander John Harrison, also in Starfleet, who has, according to Marcus, gone rogue. Per Starfleet protocol, all the senior captains and first officers of ships in the region are gathered in this room, which happens to be at the top of a very tall building. Kirk wonders if that was the point of the attack—and then a small shuttle shows up and shoots at the meeting, thus proving him right. Kirk seems to be the only one with the wherewithal to fight back for some reason, and he damages the shuttle enough that Harrison must beam away.
Pike is one of the casualties, and Spock mind-melds with him as he dies. Kirk and Spock are both devastated.
The next day, Scotty summons Kirk and Spock. He’s examined the wreckage, and discovers that Harrison had a portable transwarp beaming device that sent him to the Klingon homeworld. Kirk reports this to Marcus, who reveals that the Kelvin archive was actually a front for Section 31. Harrison was a 31 agent, and he’s gone rogue. Spock says he’s hiding in the uninhabited Ketha Province, so Marcus authorizes the Enterprise to go to the border, fire special torpedoes that 31 has developed that Klingon sensors can’t detect, and then haul ass home without crossing the border. He puts Kirk back in the center seat, and Kirk requests Spock to be reinstated as his first officer.
When they board the shuttle that will take them to the Enterprise, Spock objects to the mission. Firing a weapon at the Klingon homeworld is an act of war, and killing Harrison without a trial is against Federation law.
Their argument is interrupted by the arrival of Lieutenant Carol Wallace, a new science officer assigned by Marcus.
They arrive on the Enterprise to find Scotty pitching a fit, as he refuses to allow weapons on board that he can’t scan the inside of nor be informed of the contents, being told that it’s classified. Kirk orders him to sign off on them anyhow, and Scotty resigns rather than follow that order. Kirk goes to the bridge, finding out from Uhura that Spock isn’t just being annoying with Kirk, but is being annoying in general. Kirk also makes Chekov the new chief engineer.
Kirk addresses the entire ship, and while in the middle of informing the crew of their mission, he decides to disobey Marcus’s orders and announces that he will lead a mission to capture Harrison so he can stand trial for his crimes.
Spock also exposes Wallace as being Carol Marcus, the admiral’s daughter. (Wallace is her mother’s name.) There is no actual transfer order for her to be on board. She says that the admiral can’t know she’s here, but before they can continue, the Enterprise drops out of warp unexpectedly. Chekov reports something wrong with the warp core and he had to take it offline before they had a meltdown.
Kirk, Spock, Uhura, and two security guards use a trade ship they confiscated during an incident the previous month, and, wearing civilian clothes, they travel to Ketha. If they’re caught, they have nothing on them tying them to Starfleet.
Sulu contacts Harrison and tells him to surrender to the landing party or he’ll fire the torpedoes. Meanwhile, the trade ship is fired on by a Klingon patrol, which they are unable to evade for long. The Klingons order them to land and surrender. Kirk wants to fight, but Uhura convinces him to let her negotiate on their behalf.
Uhura goes out alone to speak to the Klingons saying there is a criminal hiding in these ruins and they’re here to take him. But before she can continue, Harrison shows up, armed to the teeth, and fires on the Klingons. He singlehandedly takes most of them out, then asks how many torpedoes there were in Sulu’s threatening messages. The answer of “72” seems very significant to him, and he immediately surrenders.
Kirk hits Harrison a few times, which Harrison barely seems fazed by, and then they take him back to the Enterprise. They put him in the brig, where Harrison guesses that the warp core has been damaged, leaving them stranded at the Klingon border. He supplies Kirk with coordinates, and says that what he’ll find there will explain why Harrison did what he did. He also urges Kirk to open one of the torpedoes.
It turns out that Carol came on board because her father wouldn’t tell her about the torpedoes—and they’re not on any official record, either. On Kirk’s order, Carol and McCoy beam down to a planetoid to open the torpedo safely, using McCoy’s steady surgeon’s hands to aid in the operation. They almost detonate the warhead, but they do get it open—and there’s a person inside in suspended animation.
Kirk asks Scotty—hanging out with Keenser in a bar in San Francisco—to check out the coordinates Harrison gave him, which are near Jupiter. There he finds a giant dock holding a giant ship, which is apparently called the U.S.S. Vengeance, based on the comms traffic he overhears.
McCoy reveals that the cryotube is ancient, and the person inside is three hundred years old. Kirk confronts Harrison, who reveals that that’s not his real name, but rather he’s Khan Singh. After the destruction of Vulcan, Marcus sent ships out to aggressively find anything in deep space they could, and one of the things they turned up was the Botany Bay. Khan was the only one revived, and Marcus used him to design weapons, threatening the lives of his 72 compatriots.
Khan managed to stash the other Augments in the very torpedoes he’d designed, but he was discovered. So he got Harewood to commit a terrorist act that would put Marcus where Khan could fire at him—only he missed (and killed Pike and others instead), so he ran away to Kronos, where Kirk found him. He’s grateful that the others are alive in the torpedoes, still.
Sulu reports a ship on approach: it’s the Vengeance, a Starfleet vessel that’s about twice times the size of the Enterprise. Marcus is in charge, and Kirk makes it clear that he knows more than Marcus is comfortable with. However, Marcus insists that Khan is dangerous and should be turned over to him, the other Augments killed.
Kirk agrees verbally, then has Sulu go to warp. However, the Vengeance is a bit more souped-up than Kirk realizes, and Marcus not only catches up, but fires on the Enterprise while both are at warp. They fall out of warp near Earth, and Carol urges Kirk to let her talk to him, as the only thing that will keep Marcus from destroying the ship is her being on it.
Unfortunately, Enterprise‘s shields are down, so Marcus can just beam his daughter off. He then explains that Kirk will be labelled a fugitive working in concert with “Harrison,” and Marcus was forced to execute him and his crew.
Kirk pleads for the life of his crew, offering to surrender himself and Khan as long as the rest of the crew is allowed to live. Marcus is impressed, but casually says he never intended to spare the crew.
But then Vengeance’s power goes down—Scotty snuck on board and has sabotaged it. However, the Enterprise has no weapons or propulsion, either. Their only chance is to board with a surgical team and retrieve Scotty and do more damage. Khan helped design the ship, so he knows it. Despite Spock’s caution against the notion, Kirk takes Khan along for a two-person insertion team.
Sulu aligns the ships and Kirk and Khan fly across in EVA suits. Scotty opens the hangar airlock, delayed slightly by a Vengeance crew member. However, the crew member is not secured, so Scotty opening the airlock blows him into space while Khan and Kirk are allowed ingress. (Scotty secured himself before he was caught by the guy.)
Khan leads them to the bridge. Meanwhile, Carol is brought to the bridge, where she slaps Marcus and says she’s ashamed to be his daughter. Just as power to Vengeance is restored, Kirk, Khan, and Scotty storm the bridge. On Kirk’s order, Scotty stuns Khan, and then Kirk places Marcus under arrest. Marcus sneers at him, saying the Federation needs him for the coming war. Kirk again asks him to get up from the chair so Kirk doesn’t have to stun his ass and drag him from it in front of his daughter.
Khan makes this all moot by regaining consciousness, slapping Scotty and Kirk around, breaking Carol’s leg, and crushing Marcus’s head. He then contacts the Enterprise and demands the return of his people or he will destroy Enterprise’s life-support, killing everyone on board, but leaving the torpedoes intact so he can still rescue his people.
However, Spock is smarter than the average bear. Having contacted Ambassador Spock and learned that Khan is nobody to be trifled with, Spock removed the Augment cryotubes from the torpedoes and armed them before beaming them over. Vengance is badly damaged when they detonate following transport.
Unfortunately, so is Enterprise. The power dies, and the ship starts to plummet into Earth’s atmosphere. Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov work to get the engines back online while Spock and Sulu try to minimize the damage as they fall. Kirk goes into the warp core itself to realign it, as it’s fallen out of whack, exposing himself to a crapton of radiation. He kicks it back into place, thus saving the ship.
Scotty calls Spock down to engineering to watch Kirk die. For no good reason except that someone else did it in a movie with a similar plot in a different timeline, Spock screams Khan’s name at a very loud volume after Kirk perishes.
Khan has Vengeance crash into San Francisco, causing obscene destruction. Khan himself survives the crash and tries to lose himself in the San Francisco crowd. However, Spock beams down and goes after him, chasing him through the streets. (Why he doesn’t alert the planet-bound authorities or other Starfleet ships to assist him is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
In sickbay, McCoy discovers that the dead tribble that he injected Khan’s blood into to test it is now alive again. (By the way, the tribble hasn’t moved from the place on the table where we saw it the first time, even though in the interim the ship tumbled into Earth’s atmosphere with the gravity out. Did McCoy nail it to the table, or what?)
McCoy puts Kirk in a cryotube to preserve his brain function, then tries to call Spock to tell him that they need Khan’s blood. (Why he doesn’t see if any of the other 72 genetically enhanced folk he’s got lying in his sickbay also have magic blood is also left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Spock can’t answer, however, because he and Khan are in a fistfight aboard a giant red thing that flies through the air and serves no obvious function except to serve as a cool-looking locale for an utterly pointless fistfight. So Uhura beams down to get Spock to not kill Khan, which she barely does, and then McCoy uses Khan’s blood to save Kirk. It’s a Christmas miracle!
All 73 Augments are put in stasis and hidden away, never to be seen again even though at least one of them has magic blood that can cure death. The Enterprise is repaired and sent out on a five-year mission to seek out new life and new civilizations and boldly go where no one has gone before. Cha cha cha.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently Khan has magic blood that can cure anything. So, of course, every Trek movie in this timeline will have people being injected with Khan’s blood every time they’re sick, right? Right?
Fascinating. Ambassador Spock tells Spock that he made a vow never to tell his counterpart anything about his life and travels, which he then breaks to tell him about Khan, saying he is the most dangerous foe the Enterprise ever faced. Meanwhile, Gary Mitchell, Nomad, Chang, V’ger, Kruge, Bele and Lokai, the space amoeba, the planet-killer, and the Tholians are standing in the corner saying, “Yo, some respect over here!”
I’m a doctor, not an escalator. McCoy’s attempt to get the torpedo open fails, and he tries to get Carol to beam out so they won’t both die. He also figures out that Khan has magic blood.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu goes all badass when he sends the message to Khan, and later flies the Enterprise even though it only has about the equivalent power output to that of a digital watch.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura takes a stab at talking to the Klingons, but is interrupted by Khan mowing them down.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty resigns in protest rather than compromise his or the Federation’s ideals. Kirk accepts the resignation and then does what Scotty (and Spock) asked anyhow. But it’s okay, because it makes him available to sneak onto the Vengeance. How fortunate for the plot!
It’s a Russian invention. Chekov takes over engineering after Scotty resigns, and the ship breaks under his watch. (Though it wasn’t actually his fault.) He seems very relieved to have Scotty back on board.
Go put on a red shirt. Two security guards accompany Kirk, Spock, and Uhura on the mission to Kronos, and are never seen or heard from again after the trade ship lands.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Spock and Uhura are having issues, mostly relating to Spock’s apparent death wish, but Spock explains—in a totally inappropriately timed conversation on an away mission—that mind-melding with Pike made him realize that he doesn’t want to die and he’ll stop doing that now.
Kirk wakes up in San Francisco after returning from Nibiru with two women (both with tails) in his bed. He also can’t help but stare at Carol changing clothes.
Also in the scene where Carol boards the shuttle reporting as a new science officer, Spock acts exactly like a jealous lover. It’s kind of hilarious.
Channel open.
“Had the mission gone according to plan, Admiral, the indigenous species would never have been aware of our interference.”
“That’s a technicality.”
“I am Vulcan, sir, we embrace technicality.”
“Are you giving me attitude, Spock?”
“I am expressing multiple attitudes simultaneously—to which are you referring?”
–Spock raising pedantry to a new level, and Pike calling him on it.
Welcome aboard. The big guest is, of course, Benedict Cumberbatch, taking over the role of Khan from Ricardo Montalban. We’ve also got Peter Weller as Marcus (Weller previously played Paxton in the Enterprise episodes “Demons” and “Terra Prime”), Alice Eve taking over the role of Carol from Bibi Besch, Noel Clarke (best known for his work on Doctor Who) and Nazneen Contractor (best known for her work on 24) play the Harewoods, Christopher Doohan makes a cameo as the transporter operator, a nice tribute to his late father James. According to Doohan, Simon Pegg was instrumental in getting that cameo to happen.
And back from the 2009 film are Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, John Cho, Pegg, Zoë Saldana, Anton Yelchin, Bruce Greenwood, and Leonard Nimoy. As is Deep Roy as Keenser, whom I forgot to mention in last week’s review.
Trivial matters: One of the working titles for this movie was Star Trek Vengeance, though that was scotched due to the similarly timed release of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Hilariously, the last Trek movie to feature Khan was supposed to be called The Vengeance of Khan, but it was changed due to the similarly timed release of Revenge of the Jedi—which itself was later retitled to Return of the Jedi. Obviously, the fates don’t want “vengeance” to be part of a Star Trek movie title…
This movie establishes that the Botany Bay was found much sooner, and by Marcus rather than the Enterprise as it was in “Space Seed.”
Benicio del Toro was in talks to play Khan, but the sides couldn’t agree on money. When Benedict Cumberbatch and Alice Eve were cast, several actors and production staff gave misdirects in interviews, including Karl Urban saying that Cumberbatch would make a great Gary Mitchell.
The building tensions between the Federation and Klingons that Marcus discusses matches that seen in “Errand of Mercy.”
The U.S.S. Bradbury is named after the great science fiction author Ray Bradbury, who passed away the year prior to this movie’s release.
Section 31 was first established in the DS9 episode “Inquisition,” and Enterprise later established that the organization was up and running in the 22nd century.
The Daystrom Conference Room is named after Richard Daystrom, established in “The Ultimate Computer” as revolutionizing 23rd century computers with duotronics.
Christine Chapel is mentioned by Carol as one of Kirk’s previous conquests. Chapel was also mentioned as a nurse on the Enterprise in the prior film. Played by Majel Barrett in the mainline timeline, she’s never seen in this or the previous film.
Khan seeks refuge in the Ketha Province on Kronos, which was the birthplace of Martok on DS9, as established in “Once More Unto the Breach.”
The Klingon homeworld has a devastated moon in its orbit, apparently a tribute to the destruction of Praxis in The Undiscovered Country, though its destruction thirty years sooner raises all kinds of questions the movie doesn’t address (though it could be the reason why Ketha is uninhanbited…).
Uhura is fluent in Klingon, even though The Undiscovered Country showed us an older Uhura with no clue as to how to speak Klingon. I know which of the two I find more convincing for a communications officer in 23rd-century Starfleet, and it ain’t the 1991 film…
Alan Dean Foster also novelized this film, as he did the prior one. There was no comic book adaptation of this movie, though IDW did release three companion miniseries: Countdown to Darkness by Mike Johnson, David Messina, & Marina Castelvetro, which chronicled the “Mudd Incident” Sulu refers to in the film; Khan by Johnson, Messina, Castelvetro, Claudia Balboni, Luca Lamberti, & Giorgia Sposito, which details Khan’s life in this timeline; and Manifest Destiny by Johnson, Ryan Parrott, & Angel Hernandez, which bridges the gap between Into Darkness and Beyond.
To boldly go. “Shall we begin?” This is such a half-assed movie. Seriously, they half-assed everything in this film. They half-assed Khan, they half-assed Carol Marcus, they half-assed the Klingons, they half-assed Section 31, they half-assed the death-to-save-the-ship, they half-assed Spock’s arc, they half-assed Kirk’s demotion, they half-assed the Kirk-Spock friendship, and right at the beginning, they half-assed the Nibiru mission.
I reviewed this movie when it came out in 2013, and I stand by pretty much everything I said there, but I do have a few things to add after seeing it again for the first time in four years. One is that the plot even makes less sense than I remembered. Okay, Khan has Harewood blow up the sooper-seekrit Section 31 base so that they’ll have the big meeting of ship captains and first officers in the big and tall building with the massive windows on a high floor, thus enabling Khan to kill Marcus.
We’ll dance around the fact that this meeting is held in a big and tall building with massive windows on a high floor, thus making it the biggest security risk ever. There’s also the fact that Khan manages to do everything pretty much perfectly in this film except kill Marcus, who manages to escape the carnage. Oh yeah, and Kirk is the only person in a room full of starship admirals and captains and first officers who has the wherewithal to fight back. That totally makes sense.
Also, funny, isn’t it, how when the archive went kablooey in London there was a table full of ship captains around, but when the Enterprise is getting its ass kicked in Earth orbit at the film’s climax, there’s nobody around to give them a hand?
Moving on, Khan escapes to Kronos for no compellingly good reason. (You have a long-range transporter, why not go to a neutral planet? Or at the very least, a planet where attempting to stop you won’t actually play into the hands of the guy you’re seeking vengeance against, since Khan being in Klingon space squares perfectly with Marcus’s plan.) Marcus gives Kirk 72 shiny new torpedoes to use. Scotty resigns in protest over using torpedoes he can’t scan and isn’t told the contents of due to 100% legitimate safety concerns, but that’s not to illuminate character, it’s to get Scotty off the ship so he can go to Jupiter later. I know this because Kirk lets Scotty resign so he can keep the torpedoes then turns around and doesn’t use them the way Marcus intended anyhow.
By the way, if Khan’s so super-brilliant, why did he enact an escape that resulted in Marcus ordering a ship captain to kill him with his own people? Marcus supposedly didn’t know that the other 72 Augments were in the torpedoes, so what if Kirk had obeyed Marcus’s orders and fired on Kronos? Khan and his followers would all be very dead. Good plan, there, übermensch!
And we find out that Marcus is the head of this huge-ass conspiracy to put the Federation on a war footing and we have no idea how far this conspiracy reaches, what they’ve accomplished, or what happens to it after Khan turns Marcus’s head into scrambled eggs.
After the Enterprise loses power, it takes ten minutes of screen time for Kirk to kick the engine frammistat back into place and Spock to scream Khan’s name for no compellingly good reason, and only then does Khan do his kamikaze run into San Francisco, which begs the question—what the hell was he doing for all that time? Taking a cigarette break?
I haven’t even mentioned the Nibiru prologue where the Enterprise hides underwater. This makes no fucking sense on any conceivable level. If the idea is for the natives not to see the ship, one wonders how they responded when the giant fireball that would have resulted from the Enterprise‘s friction-filled entry into the atmosphere appeared in the sky and dove into the ocean. If the idea is for the natives not to see the ship, how did they plan to leave the planet? They have transporters and shuttles, so why not keep the big honkin’ ship in orbit where the natives can’t actually see it (Pike says they barely have the wheel, so probably no telescopes)?
Also, Spock goes on (and on and on) about how letting the locals see the ship is a violation of regulations, yet what Pike reams Spock and Kirk out for is the artificial calming of the volcano. Wouldn’t Spock have objected to that as well?
Perhaps realizing that it looked kind of stupid for them to promote Kirk to captain when he hadn’t even finished his tenure at the Academy, they tried to walk it back by having him lose his command after the Nibiru mission. Which would’ve made a great subplot for the movie, except it’s reversed in no time flat, as right after the demotion is when London goes boom and they have the incredibly un-secure high-level meeting and Pike dies and Kirk gets his ship back, so what was the point of that, exactly?
Spock’s arc is even more botched. We see on Nibiru that he’s perfectly okay with dying in the volcano, and we see him mind-meld with Pike when he dies. And then Uhura confronts him with it—in the trading ship, of all places, while they’re in the middle of a mission, but leaving that aside, she confronts him and he explains how the mind-meld brought him back to himself. And—er, well, that’s it. We’re only 48 minutes into a two-hour movie, and one of the promising character side plots is already done, weakly.
But hey, that puts it in good company. We get a lengthy speech from Marcus about the Klingon threat, and then nothing’s done with it aside from a doofy action sequence in Ketha that mostly serves to show what a badass Khan is. We get a lengthy speech from Pike about how Kirk is such a colossal fuckup that he’s being demoted, and then he gets the ship back anyhow, and then he spends the rest of the movie stumbling around like an idiot—even admitting to it at one point—to no good end.
The one change I would make to my four-year-old review is that I found the pacing to be much less brisk this time around. Maybe it’s because I watched it on my 23″ monitor rather than a big screen in a theatre, or maybe it was because I knew what was coming, so it drained the tension and suspense.
It’s interesting, both this movie and the James Bond film Spectre suffer from the same problem. We go through the film thinking the antagonist played by this superlative actor is a nasty-ass bad guy, and then they go and reveal that he’s really this iconic villain from the franchise’s past. Spectre did it with Blofeld, and we have it here with Khan, and it’s a mess in both cases. Aside from the nostalgia hit, the revelation that the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. is named Ernst Blofeld and the revelation that “John Harrison” is really Khan adds nothing of consequence to the movie. (It does add the Leonard Nimoy cameo, but that’s not really of consequence, as the ambassador’s revelation doesn’t really change anything, since the crew wasn’t actually bursting with trust for Khan anyhow, what with him having been responsible for the deaths of around 50 people or so, including their former CO.) It’s a sign that the screenwriters are counting on nostalgia to do the work for them, not trusting the actors to handle the load on their own—which is spectacularly imbecilic when the actors in question are Christoph Waltz and Benedict Cumberbatch…
For all the complaints that Cumberbatch doesn’t look like an Indian sikh, it should be pointed out that Ricardo Montalbán doesn’t, either. They put him in brownface in 1967, remember, and his accent is no more Indian than Cumberbatch’s. And besides, when the actor’s as good as Cumberbatch, who gives a shit? I always point to this movie as an example of what a great actor Martin Freeman is, because Cumberbatch here acts everyone off the screen, and these aren’t scrubs he’s in this movie with. It’s to Freeman’s credit that he doesn’t let Cumberbatch outshine him on Sherlock the way he outshines everyone here.
And, again, we’re not talking no-talents here. These are some superlative actors, and as with last time, they make the movie watchable. John Cho and Simon Pegg stand out in particular here, as they do quite a bit with their small supporting roles. As with last time, the exception is one of the antagonists, as Peter Weller is simply dreadful, doing a third-rate Jack Nicholson. The moment when Khan kills him is a relief because we’re being spared his idiocy for the rest of the movie. Points also to Noel Clarke and Nazneen Contractor, who do an amazing job of conveying the Harewoods’ misery and heartbreak almost entirely with facial expressions and body language. (Only Clarke has dialogue, and it’s all of seven words.)
Although even they are there mostly in service of establishing the magic blood early on so it’s not completely out of nowhere, though I still want to know why Khan’s magic blood doesn’t revolutionize the entire galaxy’s medical procedures henceforth…
In the end, Into Darkness is like the 2009 film, only more so—decent visuals, great acting, script that’s dumber than a box of hair.
Warp factor rating: 2
Next week: Star Trek Beyond
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest work of fiction is “Live and On the Scene” in Nights of the Living Dead, edited by Jonathan Maberry & the late George A. Romero, an anthology of stories set around the events of Romero’s seminal 1968 zombie film.
Didn’t they rename the Klingon homeworld to Qo’nos in this one?
As for the destruction of Praxis, If Nero and his crew were imprisoned there, waiting for Spock after their ship was damaged in the battle with the Kelvin, they probably blew it up during their escape, similar to when Kirk and co. escaped in VI. Granted, none of this is exactly explained (and the Praxis scene was cut from ST ’09), but the pieces are there.
Then again, that’s probably the LEAST of the plot holes this movie introduces.
Not to disagree yhat hiding the Enterprise in the ocezn is stupid (it is fortunate the water is a couple hundred feet deep within running distance of the Nibiri temple), but yhe Entrrprispe would not necessarily cause a fireball entrring s planetary atmosphere to land. Current spaceships do that because they cannot carry enough fuel to slow down from orbital velocities and use atmospheric friction as a free brake.
In yjis movie they butchered Wrath of Khan and a few DS9 episodes and pieced them together seemingly randomly to make an illogical Frankenstein’s Monster of a story.
I am 60+ As a kid I watched the original series on TV and was in love with it and Sci-Fi in general, I have watched all the spinoffs, I never cared much for any of them but hey its Star Trek. I almost gave up on the series after watching the first movie but hey it’s Star Trek so I kept watching. That is until this movie. It is the straw that broke the camels back. I can not bring myself to see this once great series butchered so badly in the name Box Office sales. I just can not express enough just how much I hated this movie, I found ZERO to redeem it.
Agreed. This movie really doesn’t hold up. And despite the skill of the actors involved, they are given neither the time nor the scripts to establish the easy camaraderie that the other Enterprise crew had and made them easier to watch (despite bad movies). The script is relying on a nostalgia that simply cannot deliver on its own. This will become even more readily apparent in the next movie.
It also just occurred to me that if Augments have magic blood that cures death, wouldn’t someone during the Eugenics War have noticed that? Maybe analyze the blood and synthesize the magic stuff, thereby revolutionizing medicine in the late 20th century (or whenever it is the Eugenics War happened according the current ST backstory)?
Yeah, I enjoyed this one the first time I saw it, but any amount of thought reveals the gaping logic holes in the plot.
I didn’t see this in theaters. I was too upset to, after learning that the producers had been lying to the fans about Khan. When I did finally see it on my computer, I had to keep turning it off to take breaks to get through the idiocy. It might have been visually pleasing – but not enough to get me through it. Like the previous movie, Star Trek 09, I would have enjoyed a movie set in prologue of each.
I have a long running agreement with a friend – I will watch Man of Steel with her if she watches Star Trek into Darkness with me – but neither of us can really convince ourselves to needlessly subject ourselves to following through.
For me, the real issue is this: by the end of the film, they have a freshly-resurrected tribble with Khan’s mutant blood coursing through its veins. I’m pretty sure that can’t be a good thing. When, inevitably, the ‘Enterprise’ gets taken over by rapidly multiplying, unkillable, genetically-homicidal uber-tribbles, Dr McCoy is going to have a lot of explaining to do.
I haven’t seen either of these New Trek movies, and these reviews don’t make me regret that decision. There is too much good entertainment out there to waste my time with a reboot/rehash of Khan.
“For all the complaints that Cumberbatch doesn’t look like an Indian sikh, it should be pointed out that Ricardo Montalbán doesn’t, either.”
Its not that Cumberbatch doesn’t look like an Indian Sikh. Its the stupid lies that preceded the movie about him not being Khan. I’m willing to accept a lot when it comes to casting, but treating the fans like morons who can’t see thru a lie is the last straw. I never saw ID in the theater and when it came on TV I managed to sit thru roughly the first half, at which point I turned over to another channel. Its simply a horribly bad movie. A 2 is about 6 ranks too high.
Or could Hollywood have actually cast an Indian as Khan. Shocker!! Or they’re gonna ignore Bollywood exists, I guess.
Maybe the tribble was killed by McCoy nailing it to the table?
Man, this movie was just a mess on any number of levels, including but not limited to the horrific but strangely bloodless destruction when the USS Vengeance (really? Vengeance?) crashed in San Francisco. Literally no part of the plot makes even the tiniest scintilla of sense. In some ways, it reminded me not so much of SPECTRE as of Skyfall, where Javier Bardem’s entire escape plan hinged upon a subway crashing through the wall at exactly the right moment.
@angusm
I’d pay a dollar to see that movie…
I do remember a fan theory that would have been an interesting take on the plot – that Khan had basically seduced Admiral Marcus and it was his plan all along to stir up hostilities with the Klingons, which he manipulated Marcus into. It would explain why Khan sent himself to Qo’nos. Marcus had no idea he was also sending Khan his people in the torpedoes, which would in that case of course not exploded. Basically, Khan would be setting up a new empire on a planet of warriors he was confident of manipulating.
And would explain why Marcus was acting like a jilted lover throughout the movie.
Regarding the spelling of the Klingon homeworld’s name……
Keep in mind that anything we read in Klingon isn’t really in Klingon, it’s a transliteration of Klingon, since Klingon doesn’t actually use the Roman alphabet. The best analogy in our own world would be the differences between the Wade-Giles transliterations of Chinese versus the Pinyin transliterations — Chung Wah versus Zhong Hua, e.g.
With Klingon, we’ve got the more common anglicizations — Kronos, bat’leth, gin’tak — versus the tlhInghan Hol transliterations — Qo’noS, betleH, gIntaq.
Most tie-in writers have used Qo’noS for the Klingon homeworld, but the script for The Undiscovered Country that established the name spelled it “Kronos,” as did the scripts of every episode of DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise that referenced it, as did the script for Into Darkness. So I went with that here.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I still wonder how much of the movie could have been helped by allowing John Harrison to be…John Harrison, one of Khan’s lieutenants (perhaps more of a technology man, seeing his work with the transporters and such). It would just be a matter of who among the Botany Bay augments was first thawed by their discoverers — and would clarify the 72 capsules story a bit as the likes of Old Spock would fear that one of those contained the even-more-dangerous Khan Noonien Singh. You lose the ability to shout “Khaaaaan!,” but the non-magic-blood parts of the story are a bit more sensible
This movie lost me in the first ten minutes. It’s not that I don’t like the Enterprise hiding underwater, they just don’t give us a good enough reason for it being down there. Why not ditch the volcano idea altogether and have them hiding from a bunch of Klingon patrol ships? The Klingons are supposed to be a threat in the story to come. Might as well establish it there. And Kirk’s arrogance and violating the Prime Directive could still play a part.
Like you said, it’s a half-assed movie. An ‘almost there’ movie. Just when they regain my interest they blow it with another bit of dumb writing. Uhura is going to bravely make a truce with the Klingons? Interesting. Nope, we have to interrupt this moment of understanding with an action scene and lots of cool violence, yeah baby! Khan is a victim who could possibly redeem himself? Interesting. Nope, he’s an evil space Nazi who wants to wipe out all life he sees as inferior. (When was that ever a thing with Khan before? The crew had something of an admiration for his reign on Earth in Space Seed, much to Spock’s disgust. His full-on Nazi tendencies here make no sense, other than they need every villain to be a destroyer of worlds in blockbuster movies these days.)
Easily Abrams’ worst movie, and possibly Star Trek’s worst written entry as well.
This is a bad bad bad movie, made worse because Cumberbatch would have made a great Gary Mitchell.
Now I want to hear more about the uber tribble. I would like to hear of its many adventures that end with it being assimilated by the Borg.
I am sorry, of course I meant assimilating the Borg.
I refuse to take a movie seriously when it was pre-spoofed by Futurama years before the script was ever written:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4RLOo6bchU
It starts off stupid and it just rides that stupidity right on down the runtime and across the closing credits. Simon Pegg’s Scotty is again the most wildly out of character and based on the closing scene of Trouble With Tribbles, but also the movie’s most competent seeming character too.
And they used Section 31, a concept that ought to have been left on DS9. It worked on DS9, it did not work on Enterprise (but then what did?) and it does not work here.
STID is one of those movies that leaves you dumber for having watched it, it is so aggressively dumb that your braincells commit suicide just to get away from it. This is the dumbest movie in the entire franchise, by a huge distance.
14. bhaughwout – That’s basically how I see it. The only time he’s referred to as anything other than Khan is when OldSpock calls him Khan Noonian Singh. I know three different people with the name Khan, none of them are related to each other. Yet, with billions of people to choose from and no reason to think that the Botany Bay has yet been discovered, Spock immediately jumps to the conclusion that it must be the same person.
In my mind, the augments all used Khan, a title given to rulers in central Asia and a few other areas. Cumber-Kahn never called himself anything other than Khan once he was discovered.
What a freaking mess of a movie. It’s like they took various parts of Trek lore and tossed it into a Cuisinart and set it on liquefy. You can almost see a table meeting of the writers as they tossed out ideas they wanted to use and nobody bothered to edit the list. They just kept finding ways to fit it all in.
Does McCoy keep lab animals around (see TAS – The Ambergris Element) just to he can inject various body fluids into them? Seriously, where did he get the idea to do that if he hadn’t watched the beginning of the movie already? And magic blood cures whatever the little girl was dying of, whatever killed the tribble AND radiation poisoning?
The rapidity of Kirk’s demotion, first promotion and second promotion is just as absurd as the first movie making a cadet directly into a captain. We continue this in Into Darkness when Kirk decides to apply (?!?!?!) to be an admiral. Cadet to admiral in about three years.
Why do they still have the ship from the Mudd Incident aboard? They’re back at Earth. Surely they’d offload it once they got to port. Or is Starfleet in the habit of letting their Captains play “finders keepers” with the ships they impound?
Uhura continues having the worst sense of timing about talking to Spock about their relationship. last movie it was on the way to answer a distress call, this time it’s on final approach on a secret mission to a hostile planet.
Kirk still has his habit of watching women as they change clothes. At least he’s much more mature about it and isn’t hiding under the bed this time.
My brain hurts. I’ll finish up the “plot” in a later post.
I wish I could remember the Dead Tribble/ Monty Python Dead Parrot riff from the night we first saw this.
A rating of 2 is far too generous; I came out of this movie literally feeling vaguely offended. It was *that* bad.
Hmm, I guess since I commented on Keith’s review from 2013, I don’t need to repeat myself here. (We also got into talking about STID during the Voyage Home rewatch last month, oddly enough.) Although I’ll add some stuff I didn’t seem to bring up there:
I think this movie mostly worked okay, aside from some significant problems like the TWOK death-scene ripoff (which was stupid as hell and totally pulled me out of the film) and the gratuitous city-destruction porn in the third act (seriously, what was it with Hollywood and mass urban destruction in movie climaxes that year?), and the incredibly bad science like the “cold fusion” thingy to freeze the volcano (really, solidifying the top layer of magma is just going to build up more pressure and cause a worse explosion, plus that’s not what “cold fusion” means). I’ve always liked the way it replicates the Gene Coon Kirk-Spock dynamic seen in “Arena” and “The Devil in the Dark” — Kirk all gung-ho after an attack, Spock urging a more peaceful path, Kirk rejecting it, but then later rethinking and trying Spock’s way after all. I like Scotty’s principled stand, even if it is just a plot device. And I still say this movie handles Khan better than TWOK did, because he’s the sane, nuanced, cunning figure from “Space Seed” instead of a vengeance-crazed madman. So it’s the most flawed of the three, but a fair amount of it still works.
And yeah, the magic blood and all that, but Trek has given us countless discoveries that should’ve revolutionized medicine or civilization yet were never heard from again, like the transporter cure for aging in TAS: “The Lorelei Signal” or the cure-all nanites in DS9: “Battle Lines.” So there’s nothing new there.
@1/LazerWulf: Nero and his crew were imprisoned in Rura Penthe, not Praxis. Both are from TUC, but Praxis was the moon that blew up and Rura Penthe was the ice world where the prison colony was.
Seriously? The Enterprise? Underwater? That’s totally insane! No I didn’t see the movie, not even for Benedict Cumberbatch.
@23/princessroxana: Voyager‘s shuttle the Delta Flyer went underwater in the episode “Thirty Days.” There was a comics story where Voyager itself did the same, and you could say its trip to fluidic space in “Scorpion” was akin to being underwater. Anyway, starships are designed to handle intense g-forces for maneuvering in space, so I guess they could be tough enough to withstand underwater pressures. (Unless you go by Futurama logic. “How many atmospheres can the ship stand, Professor?” “Well, it’s a spaceship, so anywhere between zero and one.”)
Spaceships in the Star Trek universe are also designed to keep a Class-M atmosphere, complete with artificial gravity, intact inside it……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
They question isn’t so much “Can it” but “Why would it”? We all know the real reason is that we got a kewl shot of the Enterprise rising out of the water.
Wow, this may be a first – I’m seeing…no one defending this movie at all? Save you, Christopher, with qualifications of course! I do agree with you – the thing that bothered me the most about this movie was the end bit…total copy-cat ripoff. Honestly, first time I saw this, I “mostly” enjoyed it, but the ending left an extreme sour taste in my mouth that I tried to pretend didn’t exist. The more time has passed though, the more I’ve realized there really isn’t much to recommend this movie. I’ve had zero desire to see it again. This movie’s plot feels like pure fan fiction. And *bad* fan fiction at that, the kind that would have gotten torn apart if it was released on FFN. I really do love the actors, which still helped me to enjoy watching this movie…but apart from that…nothing remotely good. Didn’t enjoy any of the action sequences. Dialogue wasn’t that great. Visuals weren’t that special. This makes me sad, because I love Trek as much as anyone.
I still am just revolted by the fact that they thought it was a good idea to rip-off STII and switch Kirk/Spock. They didn’t even do it well. I’ve heard they consider this a homage to tWoK but that’s just lazy slip-shod writing and the fact that they thought the climax was a good idea illustrates an extreme lack of imagination.
I’m looking forward to next week’s review – probably my favourite of the new movies.
#26
Yup, to go along with the kewl shot of the Enterprise rising through the clouds on Titan in the previous movie. And then there’s the kewl shot of the ship rising through clouds on Earth in this movie, and there’s the kewl shot of the Franklin rising through water in Beyond.
They really like diving and rising! Are we sure these aren’t submarine movies?
Zombie Tribbles!
Somewhere I read a story about a Borg trying to assimilate a Tribbles, and being Tribbled.
This could’ve been a great movie. It came so close… Instead, it was awful.
Honestly, my biggest problem with the opening sequence (aside from the “super ice cube” thingy) was that they named the planet Nibiru, after the mythical planet that idiot conspiracy theorists have been predicting would destroy the world at various times over the past two decades. I mean, really, why that name, of all things?
Another weird bit of science: when Enterprise and Vengeance lose power they immediately start falling towards Earth, even though they’re closer to the Moon. When Apollo 13 was damaged and losing power on the way to the Moon, it didn’t start tumbling back to Earth. They’re spaceships, guys, not airplanes.
@31/HiWayCafe: The thing about the Apollo capsules is that they had the Moon’s orbital velocity when they left it (since they had been orbiting it) and had to decelerate to fall back toward Earth. Keep in mind that orbiting means moving sideways very, very fast to counteract the inward pull of a planet’s gravity. The hard part in that case is decreasing your sideways velocity so that gravity can pull you inward again. By contrast, if something were teleported near Earth with zero orbital velocity, if it were just sitting there (relative to Earth), then it would be pulled pretty much straight downward by Earth’s gravity.
And it’s also quite possible that the ships came out of warp with a velocity vector in the direction of Earth, since after all it was an uncontrolled exit. It’s a bit of a coincidence, but they were headed in that direction anyway. So in that case they could’ve reached Earth faster than if they’d been moving purely under gravity.
Although it’s a huger coincidence that they’d seemingly just left the Klingon border and been knocked out of warp after mere moments, yet somehow were already in Earth orbital space. I choose to assume there’s a bigger gap during that sequence than we were shown.
But of course, all of this is an attempt to rationalize a totally nonsensical sequence.
@24 CLB, I am imagining the biggest belly flop in the history of Nibiru or Earth. Granted it must have made some cool visuals but why the whole ship? Something was wrong with the shuttle craft?
#32
I suppose it was more a visual storytelling flaw than a science one. As soon as the Enterprise’s power goes out, it immediately takes a dive Earthward as if it’s propeller came off. Probably could’ve been more artfully done, but I could say that about a lot of things here.
Well, this is the series (albeit in an alternate timeline) that had the Excelsior make funny noises and float to a halt when it suffered engine difficulties.
I wish they had left Pike as Captain with Kirk as his first officer and Spock as science officer for at least an entire movie. Also I wonder if they’ll ever show the consequences of the people on Nibiru seeing the Enterprise in a future movie.
@35/hoopmanjh: And let’s not forget, TOS was fond of the nonsense trope of a ship “falling out of orbit” when its engines failed, as if orbit were a powered trajectory. It’s not like science mistakes in Trek are anything new.
36. Mike – Sadly, they all killed each other over disagreements if the nacelles were red or blue.
For all the complaints that Cumberbatch doesn’t look like an Indian sikh, it should be pointed out that Ricardo Montalbán doesn’t, either. They put him in brownface in 1967, remember, and his accent is no more Indian than Cumberbatch’s.
The key word (er, number) being “1967”. The world was a different place back then. We should hold movies made in the 21st Century to a higher standard. It’s not like Abrams doesn’t have the number of a highly talented Anglo-Indian actor who could’ve easily matched Cumberbatch’s performance.
@38 — That (sadly) makes as much sense as anything else in the movie.
Again, somebody needs to take Abrams and/or the writers aside and explain how space works, and such concepts as size and distance and travel time, on all of which their grips are tenuous at best.
Have we ever gotten a straight answer on how big the Jjenterprise is compared to the original?
An old Star Trek tradition!
“And besides, when the actor’s as good as Cumberbatch, who gives a shit?”
Me. I give a shit.
The main problem with casting Cumberbatch as Khan is there’s no reason for Khan to be in the movie except, as Keith says, half-assedness.
Khan was in TWOK because Harve Bennett thought the problem with TMP was that it didn’t have a strong villain, and Bennett was a TV guy, so when he watched the original series for the first time after taking over the movie franchise for Paramount, the episode featuring the star of the top-rated TV show in the early ’80s, Fantasy Island, is what stuck out for him.
The thing about that is that “Space Seed,” while being a perfectly okay, middle of the road first season episode, is merely okay and Khan merely an adequate, not great, villain. He comes up with a dumb plan to take over the ship and it doesn’t work very well. (Seriously, what’s he going to do if nobody who can fly the ship cracks as he’s killing them off?)
I know TWOK gets little love around here, but the idea that Khan is Kirk’s arch-nemesis is something Nicholas Meyer assembled out of whole cloth because Harve Bennett was keen on Ricardo Montalban being in the movie. That everybody believes it now is an ingenious trick that Meyer pulled off. Harry Mudd was a greater threat to the Enterprise than Khan was originally. Kor a better personal nemesis for Kirk. Until Bennett and Meyer pulled Khan from Trek’s B-listers and made him Kirk’s Blofeld or Moriarty.
Which is what Into Darkness tried milking. Instead of building or rebuilding an antagonist, they decided to recycle one and cash in on a much loved chapter. To hide it, the filmmakers announced–unbelievable that they thought this would work–announced (a) they were bringing back a classic antagonist (b) named “John Harrison,” which fooled exactly no one because who the hell is John Harrison? And when fans said, “Well, whatever they do, I hope Harrison is Gary Mitchell or somebody else, because doing Khan would be stupid,” the filmmakers lied about it and then tried to treat it like a twist: “Aha, he IS Khan! Surprise! You didn’t see that one coming!” as if we were three year olds terrified our noses were about to be stolen.
It’s a lazy, stupid, and insulting film.
@43/eric: “The thing about that is that “Space Seed,” while being a perfectly okay, middle of the road first season episode, is merely okay and Khan merely an adequate, not great, villain. He comes up with a dumb plan to take over the ship and it doesn’t work very well. (Seriously, what’s he going to do if nobody who can fly the ship cracks as he’s killing them off?)”
He learns how to fly the ship himself? Or one of his people does? After all, he has studied the engineering manuals, they’re all really smart, and they’re in space, so no risk of crashing the ship while they learn the ropes.
IMO “Space Seed” is a great episode. It has action, it has suspense, it comes up with a more inventive dystopian future/past than “the post-atomic horror” or “World War III”, it has a good message, namely that the “great men of history” were ruthless tyrants who caused a lot of suffering, and it casts a character from India in the role of a future Napoleon, played really convincingly by Ricardo Montalban.
As for this film, I don’t dislike it quite as much as the previous one. Kirk and Spock have become slightly less unsympathetic. It’s a nice twist that Khan turns out to be a victim, and the real villain is Admiral Marcus. It criticises the militarisation of Starfleet. Oh, well – faint praise.
I always imagined an alternate version of this movie where they lean into the idea from the comic books that Khan has had his appearance surgically modified, but instead say he made himself look like a specific person, the captain of the ship that discovers the Botany Bay in this timeline, John Harrison. He takes Harrison’s identity in order to escape Section 31. It would’ve made the false lead of the “Starfleet officer gone rogue” idea a bit stronger, I think.
Also, I interpreted the “magic blood” as some sort of something something radiation antibodies, something that could fix that particular situation but not be a total cure all for death. Though I guess that doesn’t explain the zombie tribble.
As for Khan retreating to Kronos, I have no in-universe explanation but it seems to me that at some point in the development of the story they were looking at the Augment trilogy from Enterprise where Malik wanted to start a war between Earth and the Klingon Empire in order to keep Starfleet occupied while the Augments go off on their own looking for a new home. It wouldn’t surprise me if Khan had a similar motivation in an earlier draft of the script.
One more thing: the climax with Uhura saving Spock on the garbage truck is almost a full copy-paste from the climax of The Legend of Zorro, written by Orci & Kurtzman.
#44
I think it would’ve been a nice twist had they stayed with Khan being a victim fighting for his people, but then they twist again and it’s revealed Khan is planning to restart wiping out inferior species. Uh… remind me again why I’m supposed to feel sympathy for this person. So he got used by a paranoid militarist. But Khan’s even more evil and has been all along, so I stop caring on rewatch.
@47/HiWayCafe: That’s true. Still, at least it made him more interesting.
@46 — I just rewatched Legend of Zorro, and wow, that was kind of a terrible film (despite being a sequel to a very good film). Which, given that it shared writers with Into Darkness …
@47/HiWayCafe: Yeah, that line of Spock’s about “the mass genocide of any being you find less than superior” was strange, since “Space Seed” made a point of Khan being the most benevolent of the eugenics tyrants, with no massacres under his rule. But I find it easy enough to dismiss. After all, Khan never confirmed that Spock’s assessment was correct. It was merely a thirdhand assertion, Spock repeating what he’d heard from Spock Prime and perhaps the historical record in the computer. Perhaps he somehow got it wrong, or perhaps he was trying to goad Khan. Perhaps he was speaking figuratively, suggesting that even without deliberate massacres, eugenics-based rule would be fatal to non-Augments in the long term.
I’ve frankly lost all hope for these movies. They’re totally unappealing from an intellectual point of view, and not only because of the nonsensical plots. They’re just generic “ships, explosions, fights” trite and common sense be damned. I can’t empathize with these characters either, it’s like I should take their chemistry and many hours of backstory for granted but I can’t see it anywhere onscreen. There’s an aura of implausibility over the whole thing, the movie-logic punches to the gut, the abuse of physics in the supposedly great CGI… all of that combines and feels to me much more fake than the cardboard sets of old, to the point I cannot suspend disbelief.
I guess it all boils down to a lack of purpose; they’re just filler.
As many flaws as this film might have…and over-indulging the nostalgia factor to ridiculous lengths is one of them…I can’t really fault them (or more specifically, Lindelof) for insisting the villain be Khan. Frankly, from the moment the Kelvin Timeline films started, there was a huge amount of speculation and interest in when they would “do Khan again”. It came up constantly in the online buzz as soon as a sequel was announced! Had they not gone right to the Khan well with the second film, the same endless push and speculation would have dogged them into each new film until they finally did it. So I can’t blame them for wanting to, in a sense, just get it done and over with.
That said, while there are a lot of interesting ideas in this film, not the least of which was the notion that the Kelvin Timeline’s different history led to a push for a more militaristic Starfleet, the plot is filled with nonsense, contrivance, and unnecessary retreads of scenes from WOK. Some of the same ideas could have been used far more effectively with a better scriptwriting team. (I blame Orci and Kurtzman, personally.)
I liked this movie well enough, despite the glaring plot holes pointed out above. I will admit that my standards may be lower than others, though, so it may say more about me than the movie.
I am an unashamed fanboy of Benedict Cumberbatch, and have been since the first moment I saw him onscreen in the Sherlock pilot. I was thrilled that he would be playing a villain in a Star Trek movie, but I didn’t want him to be playing Khan. Primarily because I wanted an original story, but I also figured he didn’t look right for the part. Not because he didn’t look like an Indian Sikh, but because he didn’t look like Ricardo Montalban. The comment above suggesting that they were all using “Khan” as a title works a bit better than my headcanon, which holds that the augments had an arrangement going into stasis that, whoever was thawed first, that person would assume the name/title of Khan and begin the process of paving the way for their takeover. Therefore, Cumberbatch might be Khan John Harrison, rather than Khan Noonien Singh. It lets him be “Khan” without automatically making him the same man Montalban portrayed.
@52/CriticalMyth: As you acknowledged, Damon Lindelof was the screenwriter who insisted on redoing Khan, over Orci’s objections. So I’d assume Lindelof was the one responsible for the TWOK rehash elements. I know you can’t always trust movie writing credits to be accurate, but STID is the only film of the three with a writing credit for Lindelof and the only one of the three that’s so heavily based on rehashing the past.
Anyway, I don’t think a Khan story was inevitable at all. In-universe, it was sheer chance that the Enterprise came upon the Botany Bay at all. And space is enormous. If it could go undetected for 300 years, there’s no reason it couldn’t have gone undetected for 400 or 500 years. In another timeline, Khan’s people might not have been discovered at all. It’s actually a huge coincidence that they were discovered in the Kelvinverse, let alone a decade sooner. (It’s sort of justified by the idea that Nero’s attack prompted Section 31 to make a more aggressive push to look for things out in space that they could use for defense. Still a coincidence, though.)
And writers should never be at the mercy of fan expectations. Good writing should surprise the audience, defy their expectations, not simply pander to them. What’s the point of fiction that only gives the audience what they already have in their minds? So the fact that the fans expected Khan or clamored about redoing Khan did not obligate the filmmakers to do so. Fan speculation always happens and it’s frequently quite inane, because most fans aren’t professional writers. So people who actually are professional writers shouldn’t be bound by what the fans speculate, any more than airline pilots should let their passengers dictate how to operate the controls.
@53/JamesP: Khan was not a title here. For one thing, it’s not a Sikh title, but rather is one in Mongolian and other Central Asian cultures. For another, in “Space Seed,” Khan repeatedly and explicitly stated that Khan was his name. He was referred to consistently as Khan, never “the Khan.”
We go through the film thinking the antagonist played by this superlative actor is a nasty-ass bad guy, and then they go and reveal that he’s really this iconic villain from the franchise’s past
You can add Doctor Who‘s “The End of Time” to that list, where they slapped a ‘Rassilon’ namebadge on the bad guy being played by Timothy Dalton — just after he’d been defeated through his own bungling. Again, it added nothing to the character.
By the way, if Khan’s so super-brilliant, why did he enact an escape that resulted in Marcus ordering a ship captain to kill him with his own people? Marcus supposedly didn’t know that the other 72 Augments were in the torpedoes, so what if Kirk had obeyed Marcus’s orders and fired on Kronos? Khan and his followers would all be very dead. Good plan, there, übermensch!
How clear is it Marcus didn’t know their were Augments in the torpedoes? I had assumed seeing it that Marcus knew, which is why he gave those torpedoes to Kirk in the first place both to dispose of the Augments and as an act of cruelty against Kahn. (Though l don’t think you can blame Kahn for not expecting this.)
Anyway, starships are designed to handle intense g-forces for maneuvering in space, so I guess they could be tough enough to withstand underwater pressures. (Unless you go by Futurama logic. “How many atmospheres can the ship stand, Professor?” “Well, it’s a spaceship, so anywhere between zero and one.”)
Lots of structures can be strong against one set of forces and not another.The Futurama line, like many such, is actually true; as a trivial example, a balloon is resistant to negative pressure but not positive, and I suspect if you put a sealed Space Shuttle under 33 feet of water it would crumple. Of course technobabble structural integrity fields or polarized hull plating could protect the ship, but I definitely miss the old days when it was clear the Enterprise couldn’t cope with gravity or much atmosphere.
STID is terrible, but most of the ways it was terrible were kind of foreshadowed in the previous movie. There’s room for a longer rant here about how although the science of the original series doesn’t hold up, there was at least some efforts – not always – to make it consistent, and more broadly to make a universe where things made sense; Captains working their way up to command (having people involved with WWII experience probably helped), distances and travel times that had meaning, the sense that there was a universe beyond the main characters; ultimately that was one of the key things that distinguished Star Trek from its contemporaries, and in the movies it’s pretty much lost.
This films has a sizable share of problems, but interestingly enough I can overlook most of the story and plotting issues. My biggest problem is with the film’s ending.
I had no problem with Abrams/Lindelof/Kurzman/Orci doing a Wrath of Khan rehash, for the most part. They did enough things right, such as casting the superb Cumberbatch, who’s superior to Montalban in every way, and gives his version of Khan enough nuance and power to make for some compelling viewing.
The real problem is in Kirk’s sacrifice, or rather, the lack of real payoff to the whole event. If the movie was going for depicting this version of Kirk as a flawed person, someone willing to embrace those flaws and commit to a real sacrifice, I’d be real game for that. For what it’s worth, I feel Chris Pine really sold this version of Kirk, someone who truly begins to feel he’s not fit for being captain and that Spock should be the one in charge – when he decides not to use the torpedoes, I always viewed that as Kirk’s first real moment of humility, accepting Spock and Scotty’s viewpoints.
Had Kirk actually died, I would have been far more invested in the outcome. It would have given the film some real power, real consequences, and really set it apart from any of the previous entries.
When Kirk died in Generations, it was in service of passing the baton to a new generation. ST09 established that Nero’s temporal intervention caused seismic consequences to the Alpha Quadrant, and the ensuing new timeline. Marcus’ warmongering is a direct consequence of that. So having a sequel where the galaxy is inherently more dangerous, and in which the writers have the balls to kill its protagonist, carries some real power. It makes this timeline more interesting.
Plus, Kirk and Spock’s tearful scene speaks volumes. These two didn’t have the time to really grow comfortable with one another and truly establish the friendship that Nimoy’s Spock Prime hoped to see again. In Wrath of Khan, their goodbye was punctured by years of established trust and friendship. This time around, it was going to be an unfulfilled promise, which to me is as much of a gut punch as losing an old friend. Remove Spock screaming Khan’s name and you have what I consider to be the best scene in all of the Bad Robot films. Kirk’s fear of death, plus Spock and Uhura’s sorrow. It works, despite the film’s previous issues.
And then they mess it all up by resurrecting him.
Magic blood or not, the writers had no right to rob viewers of this emotional catharsis. Kirk should have stayed dead. Chris Pine did a superb job in the role for two films. That, plus Pike’s death, really gave the film some power. The squandered that potential by reviving him. It should have continued on with Spock as captain (and possibly either Sulu or Uhura as first officer).
My other big problem with this film is Abrams’s direction. The lens flares weren’t even that much of a problem this time around. Instead, it was the camerawork, or lack thereof. When it comes to depicting action sequences, I’m not opposed to some shaky camerawork. I find the Bourne films directed by Paul Greengrass pull it off brilliantly, putting the viewer in Bourne’s shoes, giving it a documentary feel for the action. Abrams, sadly, isn’t as capable and can’t edit these scenes as well as other action directors. Viewing Into Darkness can be headache-inducing at times. There’s no need for that much movement.
By the way, don’t try watching this in 3D. It’s even more nauseating.
At least the filmmakers apologized for the gratuitous Alice Eve scene.
For whatever reason, I’ve yet to buy this film on Blu-Ray. I’ve bought all of the previous films, up to ST09. I think it says something about how divisive it was. It undid a lot of my goodwill towards ST09, that’s for sure. But it’s also a film I’m compelled to rewatch again down the road. It has just enough good in it to justify it.
Unbeknownst to everyone, the magic blood doesn’t really bring the dead back to life, it reanimates their bodies, which becomes more and more apparent as time passes and the remnants of the recipient’s brain fall into zombie normal.
Soon, the ship is populated solely by zombie NuKirk, the zombie tribble and anybody on the ship that got zombified. They make their way across uncharted space on a five year mission zombifying new worlds and new civilizations….
And back on Earth, somebody gets the idea to use magic blood to bring all the hundreds of thousands of people killed by having a huge starship crash on San Francisco back to life….
@50 – I’ve always justified that line as thinking that Quinto’s Spock didn’t have the leisurely amount of time Nimoy’s Spock had in Space Seed to research Khan and the Eugenics Wars so he’s operating on more of a layman’s understanding of a historical figure and time period. And Khan is not really going to delve into a history lesson to correct Spock’s preconceptions so he’ll just say “Well, if I’m such a monster then you better give me what I want before I kill you and your captain.” Besides, Spock Prime didn’t have much patience for his shipmates explaining that Khan was the “best of the tyrants” either.
@56/Bruce: “…to make a universe where things made sense… ultimately that was one of the key things that distinguished Star Trek from its contemporaries, and in the movies it’s pretty much lost.”
That’s true, but I think it’s important to remember that that’s true of nearly all the Trek movies, not just the current series. The Genesis Device was one of the most fanciful, implausible, scientifically absurd contrivances in Trek history. (My father was able to tolerate a fair amount of TOS’s implausibilities, but Genesis broke his suspension of disbelief.) And there’s been plenty of similar nonsense in other movies — protomatter, consequence-free time travel, quick jaunts to the center of the galaxy, faster-than-light interstellar shock waves, the Nexus, fountain-of-youth radiation, thalaron particles. Movie Trek has been more ludicrous than TV Trek for a very long time. For that matter, American movies these days are, on the average, much dumber and more superficial than American television these days. The only reason the Kelvin timeline seems more superficial as a whole is because it’s exclusively a movie franchise. I still think that if there were a TV series set in Kelvin, it would be able to build a much deeper, richer, smarter universe than is possible within the tentpole feature-film paradigm.
Err… I tried to watch this movie, got to the point of “use cold fusion thingy to freeze volcano,” and walked away. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, demanding the audience lobotomize themselves is another.
It’s bad when “half-assed” comes across as overly lenient. My expectations were fairly low going in, but the first few minutes were an unpleasant surprise. Was one of the scriptwriters abused by a science teacher? I got a strong impression of dislike for the source material and contempt for the audience. None of the comments above make me regret skipping the rest; I’m rather impressed that so many people were able to sit through it.
I actually really like this movie and largely agree with what ChristopherLBennett said. I knew Khan was rumoured but I didn’t know for sure and I didn’t have a problem with the idea. It doesn’t matter that the diehards know Khan only appeared in one episode and one movie, to most of the audience whose interest in Star Trek has been reignited he IS Kirk’s arch-nemesis, he’s the one they want to see. “My name is…Harry Mudd” wouldn’t have had the same impact. I don’t know if it was deliberate but the trailer with the clip of Benedict Cumberbatch behind a force field telling Kirk and Spock “I am better than you” made him look exactly like Gary Mitchell in WNMHGB, which just increased the lack of certainty. I remember watching it the first time, getting to the point where McCoy discovers there are 200-year-old people in suspended animation in the torpedoes and whispering “Khan” as quietly as possible so no-one else would hear. I hadn’t had a moment like that since I watched The Dark Knight Rises and realised “F***, the love interest is really Talia al Ghul!”
(Incidentally, contrary to the plot summary, we don’t find out Carol Marcus is Admiral Marcus’ daughter until Spock tells Kirk and McCoy. I remember being awfully smug at working that out.)
I actually think Marcus was a very good and very hatable secondary villain. No criminal mastermind, just a contemptible man with a lot of power, both physically and metaphorically, and a refusal to see that he’s wrong. I definitely cheered when Khan crushed his head. And yes, I never once thought “But Benedict Cumberbatch is the wrong race to play Khan!” Khan pretty much looks European in TWOK anyway. And I assume his blood failing to revolutionise everything is because the old man doesn’t have that much blood in him…
But yes, the reversal of the death scene (which it’s impossible to watch without shouting “Ship out of danger? Do not grieve, it is logical!” at the screen) is a real “Are they really doing this..?” When Spock yells “KHHHAAAAANNNNN!”, I genuinely buried my face in my hands in exasperation. And Khan’s storyline should have ended with the torpedoes exploding aboard the Vengeance. The chase and fist fight that follows just leave the audience going “Man, end the film already!”
Noel Clarke, Simon Pegg and Deep Roy: Is that the most former Doctor Who actors assembled in a Star Trek production ever?
Among all its problems, at least Into Darkness gave us this.
This is the film where I realized one of the things that strikes me as “off” about the Abramsverse; these really are new characters with old names slapped onto them, right down to the jobs they’re doing. JJverse Spock never acts like a scientist, but he does make a splendid head of security. JJverse Uhura is more of a general scientist/diplomat than a translator (understandable, since communication technology is one of the areas where the real world has outstripped TOS). JJverse Chekov is never seen as a navigator, but is clearly an engineering wunderkid (just lacking experience).
No need to rehash what everyone has said, but the main thing for me was that they destroyed two of my favorite planets; one in each reality, so that they could have a clean slate and a way to do stories unconstrained by canon.
Only to chose to do a Khan story. *head-desk*
I feared this as I saw it coming (little hints and tidbits add up to present a big picture so writing the news for TrekToday means that I’m not often surprised when a movie comes out as I can see where they’re going for the most part). SURELY they wouldn’t do Khan. If you HAVE to do an old character, do Gary Mitchell. Heck, Alice Eve looked like a good Elizabeth Dehner.
They did Khan.
More negative points for the Spock-Uhura relationship which seemed initially to be a cool idea, but was handled badly in both movies. Really, Uhura? Squabbling with Spock in public. What are you, 15?
As a woman, I could have done without the gratuitous underwear scene. Hey LOOK – a hot woman in her bra and panties. Enjoy, fanboys!
*Sigh* It reminded me of the stupid scenes we often saw in Star Trek: Enterprise.
I liked this more than I did the first movie, but even so – I just count it as alternative Trek. It works, as the first one did, as a popcorn movie, but it’s not really Trek to me. And Kirk is still a jerk, Spock is still emo, and not enough McCoy for my liking.
@62/cap-mjb: I wasn’t bothered by Khan’s ethnicity either. I’ll repeat what I’ve pointed out at other times: Sikhism is a religion, not a race, so there’s no reason Khan has to be Indian. There are Sikhs all over the world. And the name “Khan Noonien Singh” is a total ethnic muddle in any case — a Muslim surname being used as a given name, a middle name that’s allegedly the given name of a Chinese friend of Gene Roddenberry, and a Sikh masculine surname which is only there because the show’s researchers pointed out it was required. (Although their recommended character name was Govind Bahadur Singh.) It stands to reason that the products of a eugenics program using multiethnic stock could be very mixed in their ancestry, and Khan’s multicultural name suggests that’s true of him. So really his ethnicity could be just about anything.
And even if he were Indian by nationality, well, there are some white people in India; after all, it was a British colony for nearly a century. And by the same token, an English accent makes enormously more sense for an Indian character than a Mexican accent does.
“And I assume his blood failing to revolutionise everything is because the old man doesn’t have that much blood in him…”
I see what thou didst there. Heh.
I figure maybe it’s the same answer as “How come everyone didn’t start using kironide to give themselves telekinetic powers?” Maybe further research revealed that it had harmful side effects in many cases.
@63/Cybersnark: Oh, Kelvin Uhura is far more of a translator than Uhura Prime ever was — see The Undiscovered Country and the embarrassing looking-up-Klingon-in-books scene.
As for Chekov, keep in mind that his first 2-3 appearances were as an assistant science officer filling in when Spock was in command or on the planet. He only later became the navigator full-time. And Kelvin Chekov’s role in the first movie is pretty much that of an assistant science officer.
@63 Cybersnark
OMG that tumblr was BRILLIANT
The idea that came to me on my first watching of this was that there are certain important archetypal events that re-occur in similar but different ways in each iteration of the Star Trek universe. TWOK was the Prime universe’s iteration of these events, ST:ID is the reboot universe version. Certain groups of characters are inevitably drawn together in the different alternate universes; Kirk, Spock and Khan are one such example. Maybe their confrontation has happened hundreds of times in different ways throughout different realities.
I agree ST:ID doesn’t really do a great job of telling that story, but it is an idea I like to think about in my headcanon. I guess that’s the fundamental appeal of alternative universe stories: how could the story we know have been told differently?
@67/cosmotiger: But how important are TWOK’s events in the grand scheme of things? So there were these guys who ruled much of the Earth a few centuries ago, but they got kicked out and floated in space for a buncha years, then some ship found them and thawed them out and they tried to take over the ship but were quickly stopped and dumped on a planet next to another planet that blew up, then 15 years later their leader hijacked a ship and went after the guy from the other ship and killed some people, including one Vulcan dude who soon got better, and then he was dead, the end. Okay, the circumstances of his death involved a potentially galaxy-shaking technology to create planets… except it didn’t work and it was forgotten, the end. It’s a story that has impact on a personal scale, but its cosmic and historic significance is pretty slim — just a brief, abortive return of someone who used to be important to history but isn’t anymore. It’s not exactly an event that changes the course of history, since any impact it has is pretty quickly erased. The most historically significant thing in TWOK is Genesis, and if Khan hadn’t been there, the fatal flaw in Genesis would still have manifested itself soon enough anyway.
And the similarities of that to STID’s story are superficial at best. In that version, the guys floating in space get found a decade earlier and Section 31 tries to use them to design superweapons and start a war with the Klingons, but they rebel and it leads to S31 being exposed and dismantled much earlier, with some pretty massive destruction befalling San Francisco along the way. If anything, it’s a much bigger event in the Kelvin history, with much greater long-term ramifications. Okay, Khan does happen to interact with the same Starfleet officers, but in a totally different way aside from a few random details. Why should the cosmos care if certain individual events like two guys on opposite sides of a radiation barrier play out the same way? How are those small-scale elements cosmically important enough to echo through the multiverse when much larger and more historically important events are completely different?
If we’re going by galactic scale, Nero had a bigger impact than Khan in the Kelvin timeline, given his role in destroying Vulcan and pushing the Federation towards militarization.
And going by the Prime Universe, any conflicts with other galactic powers had more relevance to Federation history than Khan, no matter how minor. Even the Maquis – who would be wiped out by the Dominion – caused more problems with ensuing consequences for both Starfleet and the Cardassians.
Granted, there is evidence that personal-scale events do get replicated across timelines — namely, the fact that the same individuals get born and end up living/working in the same places, even in such wildly different histories as the Prime and Mirror Universes. But then we’re not talking about the kind of “important archetypal events” that cosmotiger referenced. Unless one defines an “event” as the entire lifetime of a person who’s involved in significant moments in history. Maybe James Kirk and Spock and the others, individually and in combination, are themselves archetypal events that tend to have a major impact on the history of whatever timeline they live in, even if it’s different in one than in another.
@58. Lisa Conner
Kelvin Timeline Kirk: BRRRRRRAAAAAAAAINNNNNNNNSSS!
Kelvin Timeline Kara: Brain and brain! What is BRAIN?
Never saw this. Never will. Great review, though.
54. ChristopherLBennett – Khan was not a title here. For one thing, it’s not a Sikh title, but rather is one in Mongolian and other Central Asian cultures
From Space Seed – “SPOCK: From 1992 through 1996, absolute ruler of more than a quarter of your world. From Asia through the Middle East. “
There’s nothing to say that he didn’t adopt the title for the very reason that he was running that area. And the only proof we have that he was Sikh was Marla McGivers, who’s proven that she doesn’t know what Sikhs look like in the first place.
MARLA: From the northern India area, I’d guess. Probably a Sikh. They were the most fantastic warriors.
So there’s nothing to say the Khan reminded McGyvers of someone from India although he’s most likely a mix of various genes. When he rose to power, he and his followers took the title of Khan with Noonian Singh being at the top of the chain. He could call them by their names, as seen when he awakens them, but they would still refer to him as Khan since he is at the top of the power structure. Titles are used by those below to refer to those above. Since “John Harrison” is dealing with what he considers inferiors, he would naturally default to them calling him by his title. That is, simply, Khan. As noted above the only time in Into Darkness that Noonian Singh is mentioned is by old Spock. He makes the assumption that history is repeating itself but he’s wrong.
There. Simple as pie.
I have a possible explanation of why Uhura knows Klingon in Abramsverse but not in Roddenberryverse (The Undiscovered Country).
In Roddenberryverse she knew it but it was one of the pieces of knowledge erased by Nomad, and she never relearned it. In Abramsverse that never happened.
Random thoughts bubbling to the surface. Kirk and Spock being chewed out by Pike is the sort of thing that Kirk must have gone through after The Return of the Archons, A Taste of Armageddon, Friday’s Child, A Private Little War, A Piece of the Action, The Paradise Syndrome, FTWIHAIHTTS and goodness knows what else. Kirk Prime’s attitude was always “Don’t interfere unless it’s for their own good” (which is more attractive than Picard and, worryingly, Archer’s tendency to go for the opposite of “Let them die because we’re not meant to be here”) and Spock Prime tended to make a token objection if any and then go along with it, so I think their counterparts’ behaviour here is consistent. I guess Kirk Prime’s experience means he was better at convincing his superiors he made the right choice, rather than trying to cover it up and forgetting to remind his ultra-honest first officer to do the same.
I don’t think Spock has a death wish. It seems more a case of Uhura forgetting that she’s dating a half-Vulcan and being bothered that he had no emotional reaction to the fact he thought he was going to die. Spock’s mind meld with Pike wasn’t an epiphany, it just confirmed his belief: He experienced the fear humans have of death and knows that Vulcan emotion would be even stronger and so he was right to control it. It is half-arsed, amounting to a couple of lines between Kirk and Uhura in a lift and one ill-timed argument on the way to a dangerous mission, but the character moments are apt: It reminds us how truly alien Spock can be at times and that Uhura still hasn’t quite learned how to deal with that, expecting him to react like a full human.
I don’t think Uhura was supposed to be a translator in TOS, she was supposed to be a radio operator. There are several episodes where she monitors a planet’s transmissions, e.g. “Tomorrow is Yesterday” or “Bread and Circuses”. In “A Piece of the Action”, Spock takes advantage of this by sending the Enterprise a message from a local radio station. In “Space Seed”, she recognises “the old Morse code call signal”. In “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, she reports that all frequencies are jammed, Spock orders her to try to break through it, and she comes up with the idea of a subspace bypass circuit and then installs it herself. I first encountered the idea that she was a translator, or a linguist, in the novels.
@76/Jana: You’re right — the idea of Uhura as a linguist was an invention of the novels, to make her something more than just a glorified switchboard operator. The filmmakers followed suit because of their familiarity with the novels, and because they had the same goal of beefing up Uhura’s resume.
They may also have been following the precedent of Enterprise, which established Hoshi Sato as a linguist because they were doing a prequel series and trying to show a crew dealing with elementary problems that hadn’t yet been solved in that era, including the problem of how to communicate with aliens. It’s possible that the novels’ Uhura may have had some influence there as well — considering that “Nyota” and “Hoshi” both mean “star.”
All hail Martin Freeman, not just for his co-prominence in “Sherlock.” Elijah Wood is a fine actor, but his Frodo in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy ranged from “suffering mild nausea” to “about to have a seizure”. Freeman’s Bilbo, on the other hand, grew throughout the Hobbit films in bravery and cunning.
@ChristopherLBennett #32 Apollo capsules did accelerate out of Lunar orbit (called Trans-Earth Injection), which not only gave them escape velocity to break out of orbit, but also countered the effects of the Moon’s orbital speed (the attitude of the CSM during that burn would have been a retro-fire burn in respect to the Moon’s orbital velocity). they were slowed down as the Moon’s gravity tugged on them, then accelerated again as Earth’s gravity took hold, during the Trans-Earth coast. By the time they reached entry interface with Earth, they were going almost as fast as they did during the initial Trans-Lunar Injection after launch. The only time lunar flights (at least the command/service module) actively decelerated was when they fired the main engine on the service module to slow down and be captured by the Moon’s gravity. The only declaration that happened to the CSM other than braking to be captured by the Moon’s gravity, was gravity tugging back on it as it was outbound from Earth and from the Moon, and the deceleration caused by re-entry into the atmosphere at the end of the mission.
Beyond the science primer: This film was an hour of shoot-em-up not worthy of the Star Trek name, an hour of pure parody, ripping off TWOK, and then ten minutes of Trek at its very finest in the form of Kirk’s speech at Starfleet HQ at the very end of the film. DEFINITELY broke the “even-numbered-movies-are-okay” mold. This film reminded me of the Constellation‘s warp drive–a hopeless pile of junk. Barely makes impulse power, imo.
@79/DonRudolphII: Well, of course it depends on what frame of reference you’re measuring in. What I meant was that the Apollo capsules weren’t just sitting still in space relative to the Earth; they were whizzing around the Earth at the same speed as the Moon, because they were orbiting the Moon. So they wouldn’t just fall back to Earth, they had to use thrust to get out of that orbit. By contrast, just because the Enterprise and Vengeance happened to come out of orbit near the Moon, that doesn’t mean they had the Moon’s orbital velocity. They could have come out of warp stationary relative to Earth or even with a trajectory straight toward the Earth. So it’s not necessarily analogous to the Apollo capsules.
I will grant, however, that the visuals showed the ships hanging around near the Moon for a fair amount of time, which implies they came out of warp in Lunar orbit — itself quite a coincidence. So I guess it doesn’t really make sense as shown.
@77/Christopher: It’s an intriguing thought that novel Uhura may have influenced the character of Hoshi. And I didn’t know that “Hoshi” means “star”, too. That’s lovely!
But I didn’t get the impression that TOS Uhura only answers the phone. In some episodes managing communications seems to be demanding work, only of a more technical nature.
@81/Jana: That’s true about Uhura, but I suppose maybe the novelists wanted to give her a wider range of skills that could be useful in the field and get her away from that console from time to time. Making her a linguist and translator would’ve allowed them to do that.
Or maybe it was just part of the fannish tendency to idealize the TOS cast, to make them all the galaxy’s very best at their jobs. Kirk was the most amazing captain ever, Spock was the greatest genius ever, McCoy could cure a rainy day, Sulu could fly anything and pull off the most impossible maneuvers, etc. You see this in a lot of the early novels, even great ones like Diane Duane’s work. So, since Uhura’s specialty was communication, she became a master of all forms of communication, not just technological but linguistic as well.
@80 CLB, What about the regular space traffic between Earth and Moon? Seems to me two Starships suddenly popping out of warp could be a major disaster.
@@@@@81. JanaJansen
Agreed; when one goes back and actually rewatches those old episodes, one of the myths that dissipates is that Uhura is just a glorified receptionist. I’d describe her as a Signals Intelligence Analyst or compare her to a WWII radio operator (which I imagine is what Roddenberry had in mind, with his Army Air Corps experience). She’s constantly listening to radio frequencies, sorting out which signals might be intelligent and which might be noise; and if a signal is intelligent, who is it and where is it coming from (first contact? Klingon patrols?), and if it’s noise is it interesting noise (just the same ol’ CBR or a new phenomena worth investigating)?
I’m perfectly okay with Uhura being a master linguist and all, but I can also imagine her being so specialized in communications, espionage, and radio astronomy that actually translating things is mostly the job of someone else in her department. Though, now that I write this, it suddenly seems more interesting and cool to me to imagine Uhura Prime as a SigInt specialist whose pre-Starfleet Academy education was focused on astrophysics or somesuch. Anyway.
@83/princessroxana: Space is big. Really, really big. The odds of an accidental collision in all that vast emptiness are remote. Sure, in a heavily trafficked area like cislunar space, it would probably happen eventually, like once every few decades, but for the most part it’s like worrying whether two gnats flying somewhere over the Mojave Desert are likely to run into each other. It’s generally not likely to happen except by deliberate effort.
Basically Uhura from the Original Series is doing what would evolve into Worf’s job on DS9 (minus the Klingon stuff) as Strategic Operations. She is the link between the Enterprise and everyone else; dealing with all the activity on the board and bring to the Captain’s attention the stuff he really has to know as opposed to the logged day-to-day stuff which probably isn’t that important and can be dealt with at lower levels. Captains are never expected to do everything and know everything, they rely on their subordinates to know their own specialties enough to only bring the important stuff to them (and to be on the ball enough to know when what is and isn’t important enough changes). It doesn’t make for good television, but most of the job is staff meetings, briefings, and tedious paperwork.
I’d argue that for all the big fuss about her speaking Klingon, JJverse Uhura seems more like the glorified receptionist than Original Uhura ever did.
@@@@@ 85; Everything I know about astrogation I learned from reading Heinlein juveniles. I gather however that ships would choose the most economical routes according to the celestial mechanics at the moment of launch which probably means long strings of ships on almost identical headings carefully spaced by traffic control. Hopefully the Enterprise and Vengeance popped into existence outside these traffic lanes. But I bet there was a whole lot of ‘What the Hell?!’ and ‘Where’d THEY come from?” radio traffic going on.
@87/roxana: Yeah, that’s pretty much my point. Ships navigating intentionally would tend to converge on the most efficient orbital paths, but there’s so much emptiness out there that the odds of a ship randomly coming out of warp just happening to be within one of those lanes are too small to worry about. Heck, it’s a huge enough coincidence that they even came out of warp anywhere near Earth at all. If I’d been writing the script, they wouldn’t have. There was really no reason for them to be there except to set up the gratuitous TWOK rehash and the gratuitous disaster porn. And if they had to keep the former, the suspense could’ve been generated by something else, like the ship being about to blow up. And Spock’s final battle with Khan could’ve been aboard the Vengeance.
Aw, heck, let’s face it, if I could’ve rewritten this script, I would’ve changed the majority of the plot beats. I think there’s merit in the central character arcs, but so many of the specific events just didn’t make a lot of sense or didn’t serve the story. But in particular I would’ve done the third act very differently. So many movies these days fall apart in their third acts, because the pressure to have big action and CGI spectacle overrides considerations of story coherence.
@88 ChristopherLBennett: If you could´ve rewritten the script… oh how I´d love to see that movie! Just the idea of Star Trek movie that makes sense gave me such feels that I realized I´ve actually lost all hope to ever see such thing.
@89/Tessuna: Well, even if I did write a movie script, it’d still be at the mercy of the director and producers and studio execs and would probably end up changed so radically that maybe only a few lines I wrote would still be in it. The problem with movies is that they aren’t writer-driven, although that seems to be starting to change with features adopting a more TV-like model and a lot of TV showrunners becoming feature directors. Abrams is one of those showrunners-turned-directors, of course, but his sensibilities as a writer don’t necessarily align with others’.
It’s a stupid, stupid movie..so bad! Can’t believe it made more money than Beyond. Probably because B.C. Was in it. That Khan scene was ludicrous! What a total waste of all the fine acting talent in the film.
@@@@@2. Crusader75
SOOOOO MUCH THIS!!!!
Geeze. In any case, I pretty much stopped watching the first new trek half way through as the lens flares were hurting my eyes for some reason, I think I was just not doing well that day, in any case, I went to the washroom, splashed some water on my face and said, well, I’d rather watch Voyager than this, which is like, crappy, so I left and definitely have not watched the rest. Glad to have my opinion verified, as always lol
@80 CLB
I doubt we could actually determine Enterprise‘s exact velocity just by watching it near the moon for barely a minute. If it had only a few km/s initial vector towards the earth, then it could fall to earth from that position.
The trajectory would need to be quite precise, though. If it wasn’t aimed directly at earth to begin with, the ship would just trace a long elliptical orbit.
And of-course, even if we assume this coincidence, such a fall would still take many hours, which is definitely not what we see onscreen.
I remember being really annoyed in the theater during the Spock/Khan fight scene. I just rewatched on YouTube and was reminded of just how many things I didn’t like about this movie and these re-boots in general. The action is so Marvel comics, and I dislike movies based on superheroes in general. Hero pursuing bad guy jumps and catches an edge protruding (for no discernible purpose) from some flying thing by his fingernails. Instead of kicking him off right away, thus saving himself a needless altercation, villain waits patiently allowing hero to gain his footing, after which they both kick and punch each other repeatedly in the face resulting in minor abrasions. Seen it a hundred times and it’s never particularly compelling. And this Spock is such an antiVulcan. He loves to get his dander up and beat the shit out of people. Meanwhile, Chekov can’t beam them up because “they’re moving”. Wasn’t it just in the last flick where he snagged Kirk in freefall? Or am I remembering it wrong? Either way, I try not to be too much of a goof-hound, but I just hate lazy writing, and when convenient plot contrivances just keep piling up on top of each other, I get annoyed.
Yeah, they snagged Kirk & Sulu in free fall yet they couldn’t save Amanda because she moved six inches.
I believe Kirk and Sulu were already at terminal velocity when beamed, so their velocity would’ve held pretty steady and would be accounted for in the transporter calculations. But Amanda was stationary when she was locked onto and began to be dematerialized, and she fell while she was already in the beam. So it was too late to recalibrate — and, to be morbid, suddenly being yanked out of a beam that had already partly dematerialized her would probably have done something pretty horrible to her even before she hit the ground.
In this case, first off, the transporter was damaged, which was why they couldn’t beam Khan up in the first case and Spock had to beam down after him. So that damage made it harder to lock on, and it wouldn’t have helped that Spock and Khan were not only constantly changing their velocity, but were in the middle of a city densely packed with other people, vehicles, etc., making it difficult to isolate their signals.
So damaged that they can’t beam up or even locate him but not so damaged as to be able to beam Spock down and get him close to the person they couldn’t locate in the first place?
Don’t forget that in the first movie, this is the scene where Chekov, who has just been left in command, runs through the ship shouting “I can do that! I can do that!” Hardly makes it seem like it’s a simple beam up. Also:
CHEKOV: Don’t move! Hold on! Computating gravitational pull and… gotcha!
Of course, the reason the transporter works in once case and not in the other is that they had to save two stars and kill off Spock’s mother so he can become emotionally compromised and allow Kirk to commit mutiny.
I was kind of enjoying the movie, until it explicitly began to reference The Wrath of Khan. I was fine with it being thematically similar to TWOK. It would have been so much better if they had just let it be its own thing. And the scene where Spock yells “Khan” was just awful.
@98/Alan: Yup. The rest wasn’t too bad, but that whole warp core/death scene sequence just pulled me out of the movie and made me go, “Really?!”
AlanBrown: Yeah. When I first saw this movie in a theatre in Times Square in 2013, the audience was actually going along with everything. They actually cheered when “Harrison” identified himself as Khan, which is the reaction, I’m sure, that the producers were hoping for. But when Spock yelled Khan’s name, people laughed derisively or moaned, which I’m fairly certain was not the reaction they were hoping for…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Another spot-on review, Keith.
Any comments I could add have already been added by other people who post here regularly.
Suffice to say that just reading your SYNOPSIS made my blood boil all over again.
This movie lies at the bottom of the barrel, along with Generations and Nemesis. Even The Final Frontier is more enjoyable than this–at least it’s stupid in a sorta/kinda FUN way.
It’s funny that Khan’s notoriety came up here more than in the TWOK thread. Didn’t mention it there, but I always thought it was a bit odd when Kirk actually recognizes Khan without any prompting. He knew the guy for a couple of days twenty years ago. Khan’s obsession with Kirk makes sense, sort of, but it’s a classic case of a one-sided rivalry. I always thought a much more realistic Kirk reaction would be… “Wait, who the hell are you?” thus further infuriating Khan.
@102/dunsel: I dunno… We know how attached Kirk is to the Enterprise, so I think he’d remember a guy who tried to take it over — not to mention a guy who tried to kill him with a decompression chamber.
Plus, of course, Khan’s not just some random guy — he’s a dictator from history come back to life. That’s something that would stand out in one’s memory, especially for an Earth-history buff like Kirk.
103/CLB– I certainly think he would remember Khan if he was mentioned, but that’s different than recognizing him twenty years later instantly over a viewscreen, when he has no reason to expect seeing him is even a possibility. Still, valid points, and for all we know maybe one of Kirk’s skills is that he also never forgets a face (notwithstanding that it’s aged twenty years). And it certainly feeds into the “arch-enemy” narrative they were going for.
I’m of two minds regarding the fact that no one in the film addresses the fact that Khan is Caucasian and has a British accent. On the one hand, you have that percentage of the audience that may never have seen “Space Seed” and/or The Wrath of Khan and wouldn’t have been aware that Khan had previously been portrayed by a Mexican actor playing him as a man from India (or at least that part of the world). On the other hand, you have the fact that the change to the timeline happened well after Khan and company left Earth, so, in-universe, there should have been an explanation for why he looks different.
The simplest solution would have been for the antagonist to have been someone other than Khan, but since we were given Khan, the scriptwriters should have done what they did in the comic Star Trek: Khan. They explained why Khan looks different than the man in the historical record. In brief, he’s brought before a tribunal and tells his story. He says that Admiral Marcus arranged to have his features and vocal cords altered to keep him off balance and better sell the lie that he was John Harrison (those who found Khan recognized him and knew he’d be too dangerous if he was awakened as himself).
A few lines in the movie could have addressed that. I don’t remember any actual dialogue between Khan and Marcus, because I haven’t seen the film in years, but it could have gone something like this:
Khan: You threatened my family.
Marcus: We needed you on a short leash.
Khan: You changed my appearance, my voice.
Marcus: We needed to keep you off balance, to believe you were John Harrison.
That would have amounted to about 20 seconds of screen time. What’s more, non-fans would have (hopefully) read into such an exchange that Khan was upset not only because of the threats against his “family” but because Marcus had robbed him of his identity, of his sense of self (while not needing to know anything about the previous iteration); while fans would have been given an explanation as to why Khan looked different.
Those few lines would have fixed the entire movie.
Except for that other thing, and that other thing, and that other thing, and that other thing, etc., etc., etc. already brought up in previous comments.
At least we’re aware of one obvious difference in the Kelvin timeline. Q isn’t a member of a near-omnipotent species but a gadget guy who has the skills to convert a starship into a submarine.
A feature that every starship obviously needs. :)
Why couldn’t Benedict Cumberbatch have played Gary Mitchell, as was strongly implied? Alice Eve even had the exact same hairstyle Sally Kellerman wore in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
Alternatively, why couldn’t he have been the Romulan commander? Or Kor? or Kang? Or Garth of Izar? Or a completely original character?
To paraphrase a certain archaeologist, “Khan. Why did it have to be Khan?”
I’m sure the movie has positive points I’ve forgotten, but reading all the comments above has made me wonder why I bothered to buy the DVD in the first place.
Rick.
@105/Rick Keating: Just because an actor looks different, that doesn’t mean the character does. As I’ve pointed out before, in the first movie, Spock Prime recognized Kirk and Scotty on sight. They didn’t look different to him. They were played by different actors, but in-story, they still look the same — just like the two Saaviks or the two Cochranes or the three Ziyals. (Or the three, soon to be four Sareks and the soon to be two Harry Mudds.)
And there’s no reason the same can’t be true of accents. Ben Cross’s Sarek has an English accent even though Mark Lenard’s and James Frain’s do not. It’s just actor interpretation.
Then again, in the Khan tie-in comic from IDW, it’s explained that Admiral Marcus gave Khan cosmetic surgery as part of creating his “John Harrison” identity. So it doesn’t need to be explained, but it’s not at all difficult to explain if you want to.
As for why Cumberbatch didn’t play Gary Mitchell, presumably it’s because Gary Mitchell never had a movie named after him. Trek fans forget that we’re not the majority of the movie audience. Most of the people who see the movies are just general moviegoers who don’t necessarily know that much about Star Trek. Much of what they do know probably comes from earlier movies. So they’re far more likely to be familiar with Khan than with Gary.
Nero never appeared before the reboot but they managed to establish that there was some sort of relationship between him and Spock. Using Khan was simply lazy storytelling, tossing a known character into a movie but not having any good reason why it had to be that particular character.
Once they added him into the mix, they tossed in a few references (the number of torpedos, which people familiar with TWOK wouldn’t know was significant and the KKKKHHHHAAAANNNN!!! scream) to make it seem like that was the plan all along. But, we know from interviews with the writers that he was added relatively late in the process and not everyone agreed he was necessary.
But the reboot folks haven’t been known for innovation. They’re quite content to simply mix things up from what’s gone before without really adding much new to the mix. They destroy Vulcan and make it seem like Spock has this big weight on his shoulders but they basically resolve it in the first few minutes when he melds with the dying Pike.
And, of course, oldSpock’s whole “You must find your own way. I can’t help you” lasts all of two seconds before he does just that. I don’t want to say it’s a good thing that Nimoy died but at least he wasn’t around to give them info in Beyond as well.
#106
It’s doubtful that in 1982 many outside of Trek fandom knew who Khan was either, which is why there’s the scene where Khan and Chekov educate Terrell (and the general audience) who this guy is and what he and his people are doing there. Doesn’t take that much to catch everyone up.
I suppose Gary Mitchell would’ve been an okay alternative, though I prefer them concentrating on new characters. Which brings us to Beyond, though the result was so-so…
Either way, the Star Trek movies have a villain problem. Have had for a long time.
@108/HiWayCafe: Yes, naturally, but the respective filmmakers’ goals were quite different. Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer were just going through the show to see if it had any interesting villains they could use. Damon Lindelof (the one who insisted on using Khan) was trying to play on the audience’s nostalgia (and his own) for the most beloved bits of a legendary franchise. The former were using Star Trek as the basis for making a movie; the latter was using a movie as an excuse to geek out on Star Trek.
This is why the fannish notion that fans of a series can do it better than non-fans is bull. Fans like Lindelof too often let their fondness and nostalgia get in the way of basic, solid storytelling. Non-fans like Bennett and Meyer can easily do the research to learn all the facts and continuity they need, but they’re able to view it more objectively and use it more wisely. Of course, fans can do a good job if they’re able to take off their fan goggles and approach the work more clinically — as with Roberto Orci, who’s the biggest Trek fan in the bunch but had the sense to fight against redoing Khan and push for an original villain. You don’t have to be a non-fan, but the part of you that’s a professional is far more important to the result than the part that’s a fan.
@102/dunsel:
“Wait, who the hell are you?”
………
“I… am…
KHAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!”
KIRK: Wait, have we met?
KHAN: You don’t recognize me, Admiral? Even after I took your ship from you, humiliated you, had you at my mercy?
KIRK: Oh… my… it can’t be… Harry?!
@109/CLB
It’s not “bull”.
Caring for a given sci fi world is a pre-requisite for writing good fiction in that universe. I’m sure that as a prolific Trek author you already know that the first rule of creative writing is “write about the things you care about” and the same rule applies to movies as well.
Simple question: Would you have written all those Trek novels if you didn’t care for Star Trek?
You are right, of-course, that being a fan is not enough. One also needs to be a good writer. And part of being “a good writer” is realizing that fanwonky ideas should be treated with care, because they seldom work.
@112/OThDPh: “Caring for a given sci fi world is a pre-requisite for writing good fiction in that universe. I’m sure that as a prolific Trek author you already know that the first rule of creative writing is “write about the things you care about” and the same rule applies to movies as well.”
But caring for your work doesn’t have to come from fandom. It can come from professional pride. This is the fundamental mistake that fans always make. They assume that what we do as professionals is no different from what they do as a hobby. That’s completely naive. If you have a profession that you’re committed to, then you care about every job you get assigned, whether it’s something you were previously a fan of or not. If you get assigned to work on something you’ve never been a fan of before — as Nicholas Meyer was with TWOK — then you learn about it. You do the work to understand it, and you put your best effort into getting it right. You don’t have to have already cared about the franchise, because you care about the quality of your own work. You care about satisfying your audience. Fans only bother to put effort into the things they already like. Professionals put far more effort into everything they do, because that’s what it means to do something as a career instead of just recreation.
While it’s true that Cumberbatch is a good actor, his portrayal of Khan is a tonal mismatch with the script. Khan says that he was brought back for his savagery, but his emotional tone during the whole movie is very, very cold. When the man who claims to be a savage acts a lot colder than the Vulcan who claims to be emotionless, then somebody screwed up somewhere!
@114/Corylea: He didn’t mean literal savagery on a personal level. He meant that he came from a more warlike era in human history, that he had experience with the kind of violence and cruelty that the humanity of the 23rd century had forgotten. His was a controlled, calculated ruthlessness, but it would appear savage to a 23rd-century human like Marcus.
Besides, the word “savage” doesn’t just mean enraged and frenzied. It means ferocious and cruel like a wild animal — and wild predators can be quite calm, methodical, and calculating in their hunts before closing in ruthlessly for the kill. So savagery and coldness are not incompatible. The word is also used to describe cultures that are seen as uncivilized or primitive compared to one’s own, which would certainly fit how the 20th century appears to Federation-era humans.
Haha, I just realized there’s some similarities between this movie and Demolition Man. Khan is the Simon Phoenix of this story, but not as fun.
Not only the plot doesn’t make sense at all, it’s also boring as hell. I got nothing from the actors this time around, and was really disappointed by this film. Also, the whole “noooo, he’s not Khan!” schtick they did while promoting the film was really, really dumb.
@39 – Sean: Indeed.
@74 – richf: Brilliant.
Man, I’ll just say after reading these reviews, that for all my complaints about the latest Star Wars movie (TFA, I mean – I guess technically Rogue One is the latest Star Wars movie), it’s nice to remember that it could have been worse, haha. (I’ve seen the first two Star Trek Abrams movies and basically agree – they were fun to watch and had gorgeous visuals/acting but to me generally feel like average action movies as opposed to ‘Star Trek’). At least Star Wars still mostly felt like Star Wars to me.
@118/Lisamarie: Wow, I loved The Force Awakens. I think it might be my favorite Star Wars film. I love the new characters and their interplay. And I’ve long felt that Abrams’s filmmaking sensibilities are a much more natural fit for Wars than Trek. The problem with his Trek movies is that they did well with the characters but portrayed the world far too fancifully and implausibly. But Star Wars is pure space fantasy and has never tried to be plausible. (Although I’ll admit that people being able to see the destruction of planets in another star system with the naked eye was pushing it even by SW’s loose standards.)
@119 – eh. :) Actually, I loved his new characters and their chemistry together. I am not super crazy about how he treated the old characters (except for Leia, and it’s also hard to make a final call on the arcs/themes until the trilogy is done) and I think he also banks heavily on the nostalgia aspect. But at least it works a little better in TFA. There was also maybe a little too much intentional ‘mystery setup’ but that in and of itself didn’t bug me too much, although I know it did some others.
And even if SW is space fantasy, I think part of the issue with the Trek movies as how you have outlined them is that even within internal consistency the various motivations/decisions of the characters don’t make sense. Even if the characters are more broadly drawn archetypes at times it’s not quite as glaring as some of the things you’ve pointed out here!
I actually don’t know where I would rank it, to be honest. It’s better than Attack of the Clones, I guess ;)
“Wait, what?”
That about sums up my reaction to the first two Kelvin Timeline films. I agree Benedict Cumberbatch (did I spell that right?) is compelling, and it’s how I got through this movie. Keith, you are right that Cumberbatch acts circles around everyone else. If they had not made him Khan and abandoned the whole Khan idea, written something original with Cumberbatch (man, that name is a mouthful), this could have been a good movie. Instead it’s a terrible mess.
And Spock shouts “KHAN!!” for some inconceivable reason.
I almost saw this one in the cinema and missed it’s run. I think the cosmos was trying to tell me something. I should have listened.
Spock shouts “KHAN!!”
Oh yeah, and Uhura speaking Klingon kicks ass, an awesome character-building moment and a nice nod to Hoshi Sato. It almost erases that embarrassing scene from STVI that Nichelle Nichols didn’t even want to do.
But there’s still Spock shouting “KHAN!!”
Dante: Yeah, you spelled Bandersnatch Cummerbund’s name right…………….
:)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Blunderbuss Cucumberpatch.
122@krad, oh good, you have no idea how hard it wasto remember Benderlamp Cumberlump’s name :)….
Don’t you all mean Bunnykick Cucumberpatch? :P (There’s an X-rated version which I will spare you out of self-preservation)
Wow, I just rewatched this for the first time in 5 years. I didn’t dislike it as much as you, but as other readers have said, like the 2009 film, it doesn’t feel like Star Trek. Star Trek is mainly about exploration and philosophy, and these two films have tried to re-create it into an action series.
Peter Weller is truly terrible in this role, especially in his last two scenes.
There are a lot of plot holes logic flaws that krad mentioned in his review, but the movie is overall very well acted. That’s why I’d give it a 6. There’s much worse out there.
It’s very predictable but there is still enough tension to keep you drawn in.
Additionally, I read the creators of the film were hesitant to cast a person of South Asian descent as Khan because they were afraid of casting that ethnicity in a negative light. Some critics have said this is whitewashing but their intentions were probably good.
@126/RMS81: Name any previous Star Trek movie that has actually been about exploration. We’ve had:
Saving Earth from a space probe
Fighting a vengeful madman
Fighting Klingons to resurrect Spock
Saving Earth from another space probe
Getting hijacked by religious fanatics
Fighting a political conspiracy
Stopping a guy from blowing up stars to get his wife back
Saving Earth’s past from the Borg
Saving a small alien population from a revenge plot and forced relocation
Saving Earth from a vengeful madman
The closest any of those comes to exploration is ST V’s journey to the center of the galaxy, and nobody would hold that up as a definitive Trek film.
A lot of the criticisms people have about the Kelvin films are problems with Trek movies in general, not just those three. As Keith has pointed out on a number of occasions, movies just aren’t the best format for Trek-style storytelling.
And if you end up casting a white actor in a role that could’ve gone to an actor of color, it’s still whitewashing no matter what your excuse. It’s not about abstract principles, because actors are real live people working for a living like anyone else, and excluding someone from a job because of their race is hiring discrimination no matter what excuse you use.
PREACH, BROTHAMAN
@128/Christopher: “The closest any of those comes to exploration is ST V’s journey to the center of the galaxy […].”
There were also tiny bits of exploration in TMP (Spock exploring V’Ger) and TSFS (David Marcus and Saavik exploring the Genesis planet). And in the latest film the characters spent some time walking around on an unknown planet.
Conclusion: Limited amounts of exploration occur, but only in odd-numbered films.
@129/Jana: Yep. There are occasional nods to the idea of exploration, but no more in the original films than in the Kelvin films. And really, how often were the original shows really about exploration, in proportion to stories about combat or politics or rescues or medical crises or the crew’s personal drama or whatever? How often were exploration missions just excuses to get the characters into danger or some sort of political intrigue?
I get so sick of the double standard of people condemning the newest incarnation of Trek for doing the exact same things they excuse in prior incarnations. I saw the same thing happen before with Enterprise and now it’s happening again with Discovery, and you can find examples going back decades. The only difference between the old and the new is that we’ve had more time to rationalize and excuse the flaws in the old stuff.
@130/Christopher: It’s true that the exploration could be the starting point for all kinds of stories, but they were still stories about people exploring the galaxy of their own accord. That counts for something. Although it’s less true of the later shows – VOY explored a lot of unknown space, but not voluntarily, and ENT explored mostly known space.
I’m not sure about the double standard. I have the impression that the people who disliked Nemesis, VOY, ENT, or the reboot films when they were new still do so. They have not started to rationalise and excuse their flaws and moved on to dislike the newest incarnation of Trek. I think it’s rather a case of people seeing TOS and the TOS films, or TNG and the TNG films, as a unified whole. That’s how the films got the reputation of being about philosophy and exploration.
@131/Jana: Over the years, I’ve encountered several people online who still refuse to count anything after ST:TMP as “real” Star Trek. There are always going to be some people who never change their tune. But I’m talking about the overall consensus. Every time a new incarnation of Trek comes along, there are fans who loudly denounce it as wrong and illegitimate and insist that their condemnation is universal among fandom and the new version will never, ever in a million years be accepted as part of the True Canon. But then most fans end up accepting it anyway and future productions treat it as part of the whole.
Case in point: When ENT was new, the purists condemned it for its changes of continuity from prior series, insisting it had to be in an alternate reality from what came before. Now, there are people insisting that Beyond must be in an alternate reality because they believe it’s not perfectly, 100% consistent with what ENT established about warp ship development and the Xindi. ENT is now the accepted baseline that new productions are criticized for diverging from, treated as an integral part of the previous whole, even though it used to be the thing that got criticized for diverging from the baseline. It’s the same process that’s happened over and over again.
“That’s how the films got the reputation of being about philosophy and exploration.”
I don’t think the films per se have ever had that reputation. I think it’s just presumed that the films are part of the same whole as the TV shows. People insist on seeing the separation as being between old Trek and new Trek, when really the more important distinction is between TV-style storytelling and movie-style. Trek movies can never really develop ideas and characters to the same depth as Trek TV, which hampers the Kelvin timeline because it’s nothing but movies. When a new Trek TV series was announced a few years ago, I was hoping it would be in Kelvin, because a TV series set in that continuity would help deepen and enrich it beyond what the movies can really do.
@132/Christopher: I didn’t mean that the films per se have the reputation. I meant what you said, that they are seen as part of the same whole, and this influences how people think about them.
Concerning TV Trek versus film Trek, I’ve been thinking that DSC has added a third version to the mix. A season in a serialised TV show isn’t like a season in an episodic TV show at all. Like a film, it tells one long story. Apart from the fact that these stories tend to be war stories, this easily leads to less diversity and less experimentation in storytelling. And perhaps also to less philosophy.
Well I certainly think Star Trek: Insurrection was largely about exploration. It involved exploring and understanding a new culture that had been discovered, and how the Enterprise crew had to save it from outsiders who wanted to co-opt it. It is the Star Trek film that feels most like Star Trek to me.
I know it’s not a very popular film but it is my favorite of the whole film series so far.
I just re-watched this movie today. I thought the movie was well acted and well produced, but poorly plotted. IMO Cumberbatch was phenomenal as Khan. That said. What I would have really liked to have seen with these TOS reboot movies was the Enterprise and its crew going on missions which occurred between the episodes we saw on TOS with no rehashes of TOS stories already told.
@132 – The problem I have is with the idea of there being a “True Canon”. Much like the idea of a “Prime Universe” which is supposed to be the one, true Star Trek. Nonsense. We’ve had alternate realities since Mirror, Mirror and possibly even earlier if you look at The Naked Time as establishing a reality that has two Enterprises existing side by side for three days.
For me, it’s all Star Trek if TPTB authorize the name of the franchise to be on it. After all, since the Franchise owns the rights to every authorized instance, be it TV, movies, books or even comics, then one can cross pollinate the others. If they want to keep the realities separate, that’s fine, but it can’t be said that they never happened because I’ve got shelves full of books and boxes full of comics that say that they did.
The names of Kirk’s mother and father came from the books. Ditto for Sulu and Uhura.
Paraphrasing the conversation between Bashir and Garak
“Even the contradictory ones?”
“Especially the contradictory ones”
C’mon – we’re Star Fleet – any reference to Chekov’s Gun is surely now Chekov’s Phaser ???
After enjoying the first Kelvin Timeline film (evev if it was mostly empty calories) I was surprised by how silly this one was. The logic of the first film doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny, but the logic of this film doesn’t even hold up from a distance, and the science is even worse than the last time (which is saying something). However, I can still sit through most of it and enjoy myself until we get to the part that is ripping off Spock’s death in TWoK. It’s so awful, and it’s so in your face about it, and it’s reversed before the end of the movie anyway (by more laughable science). It just pisses me off, and it makes it really difficult for me to remember the things I actually liked about this film.
The one good thing about Into Darkness is that it inspired some great spoof content, including one animated bit where Kirk and Spock discover that, since you can transport across the galaxy now and McCoy was able to bring people back to life by synthesizing Khan’s blood, Starfleet’s ships have been mothballed and its staff have been relegated to caring for the elderly, since nobody dies anymore.
Just a couple minor things:
1) Marcus re-promotes Kirk and sends him to Qo’nos instead of the more experienced captains and admirals because he knows the other ones would tell him to go to hell. He expects Kirk to die, to justify his war.
2) No more magic blood because they only had a little bit of it, and anyway the Federation has banned genetic engineering.
Jono: They’ve got 72 Augments in stasis with plenty of magic blood.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@140/krad: The movie only establishes that Khan has healing blood. It never addresses whether the other Augments have the same capability, so it’s speculating beyond the evidence to assume that they do. After all, since they’re the products of an experimental genetic engineering program, it stands to reason that they would all have different experimental augmentations rather than being a uniform “race.” Since Khan was supposedly the greatest and most powerful of them, he presumably has augmentations the others lack.
I thought that this one was the worst Star Trek movie ever made when it came out, so imagine my surprise when I rewatched it after ten years and discovered that, not only had it not improved one iota with age, it actually had a bunch of other stupid little details that made it even worse than I’d remembered. Things like: Jim’s constant micro- (and macro-) aggressions against Spock; Jim beating up on Khan for several minutes after he’d surrendered; Spock not bothering to tell his captain that Carol isn’t actually supposed to be on their top-secret military mission to Qo’NoS; Jim having, presumably, slept with Chapel, made her so uncomfortable that she had to leave the ship, and forgotten about it; just Jim, in general, being a thoroughly unlikeable protagonist.
All of that said, I don’t hate it as much as I used to. I think that ultimately this is just because it’s no longer the bleeding edge of the franchise, but can now just be evaluated as an historical artefact.
@142/jaime: Gotta say, though, after seeing SNW’s version of Chapel around this same time frame, her having a dalliance with this version of Kirk feels very plausible.
@143 Yeah, that’s a character point that’s underappreciated about the SNW Chapel: a very healthy sex life very into casual relationships; a Jim Kirk (particularly on the rebound from a Carol Marcus) would be an appropriate hookup.
(And….I’d speculate Majel Barrett would have LOVED to have a Christine Chapel with those traits).