Leonard Nimoy has a fun cameo in the new Star Trek movie, wherein Spock calls him up asking for advice on how to deal with Khan. Spock the Elder confirms to Spock 2.0 that there is a way to kill Khan. But it comes "with a great cost."
Such is the new Star Trek movie. Technically speaking, it is an excellent action scifi movie...but it is also a Star Trek movie, which carries additional weight. Not that this movie was expected to be cerebral (go see Star Trek: TMP and Star Trek 5 as examples), or not fun (see Star Trek IV for an example of how Star Trek genuinely can be fun). It is not bad, certainly not horrendous, and immeasurably preferable to the sorry run of the TNG movies, and several of the TOS ones.
But it is not going to be in the top tier of Star Trek movies, along with Wrath of Khan, Voyage Home, Undiscovered Country and (to an extent) First Contact. It is not a terrible movie, let me stress that. I got my money's worth. It was an excellent space opera---but it did not live up to Star Trek's pedigree, not one bit.
It achieved what it set out to do, but at the cost of having a weighty story to it. It is the proverbial step forward, and also two steps back.
What I Disliked
Shallow characters and motivation
We don't know what drives Admiral Marcus, aside from a belief that war is inevitable with the Klingons. Why? Has there been some recent event necessitating a harder line with the Klingons? If so, what? I found him to be a textbook bad guy, which is always a major disappointment.
Similarly, we only know Khan is a genetically superior human who aims to destroy all that is not as perfect as he is. Now, in the original series we knew him from the episode Space Speed; and in Wrath of Khan you did not need to know who he was in detail to enjoy the movie. Here he comes out of nowhere, and you know he's a bad guy, but I feel disappointed that we did not know more about him in tremendous detail, other than he is evil.
Lifting so much of the movie from The Wrath of Khan, and completely missing the point.
Wrath of Khan is deservedly regarded as the best of the Star Trek movies. It deals with themes of life, death and sacrifice, themes picked up by Into Darkness, carefully examined and ultimately discarded. The movie apes the actions and borrow the characters, but fails to build a meaningful story to really arrange the proceedings. Ripping everything off of this movie except the theme makes ripping off Khan abjectly pointless.
This movie is too derivative of The Dark Knight's post-9/11 plot system: bad guy does something bad, good guy goes after him, bad guy gets captured, bad guy escapes (although they were a tad more clever this time around by turning Khan's release into a necessary evil), final confrontation. Fini. That too precedence over the themes of the movie, which was a major mistake.
Khan now has Wolverine-esque healing powers, you see. The use of his blood to save Kirk's life was predictable (I saw it coming from a mile away), though it rendered the importance of Kirk's "sacrifice" meaningless. Spock's death in Khan had importance because it was permanent; it could not be turned back. Doing so would have cheapened the movie's principal theme of the no-win scenario, and "how we deal with death is as importance as how we deal with life." Into Darkness completely invalidates that theme so recklessly its actually jaw dropping for those who love and cherish Wrath of Khan.
The fact that Kirk was willing to go to great lengths to save his crew as much as possible was excellent, and him dying for good (hey, Khan killed off Spock, after all!) would have carried some major dramatic weight (the inversion of the ending of Khan, with Spock racing to meet Kirk in the radiation chamber, while derivative, was a nice touch, I thought). Kirk would truly have learned the importance of sacrifice, of saving so many lives...yet not being able to save himself. But hey! He's all better now!
Hey, I hope Spock didn't bogart Khan's blood, seeing as how now there's a city full of dead people following the crash of the Vengeance into San Francisco. Strange that it gets glossed over so quickly---perhaps that was why the ending had the recommissioning of the Enterprise rather than any indication of the human loss.
Random moments of illogic
Why was the very important captain's meeting held ontop of a skyscraper where they could be attacked instead of a secure underground location? Why was the Enterprise hiding underwater in the beginning of the movie instead of space (y'know, being a space ship and all)? Why were the rescue shuttles arranged in such a fashion that they keeled over when the gravity got all wonky?
What I Liked
Khan played by the Cumberbatch, natch.
Khan here is formidable: a deadly warrior, a canny intellect, someone who cannot be left off of his leash for a second (and yet Kirk is forced to). Cumberbatch even manages to elicit a moment of sympathy for him, since he is fundamentally caring about his people...who like him are genetically engineered super beings incapable of coexisting with what they consider to be inferior lifeforms. He is pretty much invincible you can't kill him, all you can do is buy yourself a few moments to think while he is down.
The culture of the future Earth.
Earth does not feature as prominently in Star Trek as it really should. We don't see alot of the world outside of the Federation and Starfleet. I nodded approvingly when I saw the British flag flutter next to the Federation banner, because it reminded me that there is a culture here (especially a pop culture) that Star Trek usually sanitizes to within an inch of it's life.
I liked seeing scenes of Earth of people driving, or walking underneath the towering structures that now dominate Earth's landscape. I also liked the look of the uniforms. The uniforms no longer had the baggy, cheap look of the original series, and carried the proper authority of command that Starfleet deserved.
The look and feel of the Enterprise.
Granted, the iPod-y look of the Enterprise did get excessive. But I liked the way the warp core looked, because it screamed, "This is a warp core!" It looked like it had purpose and a function, that if you took every piece of it apart, you could determine what each component did. It was functional, and I really give the movie credit for that instead of using some plastic prop.
What this means for Star Trek
Well, the franchise lived to see another day, which ain't a bad thing at all. If Star Trek is going to survive, butts need to get into seats, and this movie will certainly deliver that. The needs of the shareholders outweighs the needs of the fans.
What Star Trek needs desperately is a weighty story, which we cannot get right now, since the important thing is to show that the Star Trek brand has not gotten stale. That means necessary concessions to the needs of the mass-market movie consumer. I do not believe we are doomed to stupid Trek movies from here on out, but while Abrams is at the helm, we're going to get slick, enjoyable, albeit weightless, movies. This is not the worst possible fate Trek deserves, but it does deserve better, and I do hope that the movies Abrams makes are the foundation for a Trek renaissance.
The next movie, hopefully, will boldly go where no man has gone before. Until then, we have the not enjoyable but not completely satisfactory either Into Darkness to tide us over.
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