STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS - Grading & Discussion [SPOILERS]

No problem. I say a lot of stupid stuff thinking it's clever.

 

The best way for Khan to do something like that is to fool Marcus into thinking the torpedoes are secure and thoroughly tested before giving him reason to think otherwise. If Marcus believes that that part of his security hasn't been compromised, then it might not occur to him to re-scrutinize them at that point. Having characters that make mistakes is more interesting than having characters that never make mistakes, actually. At least the audience can learn something.

Evidently, the weapons lab/"archives" was destroyed in order to hide the fact that the supermen were stolen in the first place.

"Just doesn't make any sense"? Please.

Actually, it's somewhere in between not making any sense at all and making perfect sense. Saying it's at one extreme is just as dishonest as saying it's at the other. STID is nowhere near the worst Trek film offender on the score of not making sense.

 

You can find "a couple of dozen good movies" to find from yesteryears, but lots of people won't watch them. OK, call such people shortsighted, but fact is, tastes change from any generation to another. People thought the majorty of movies from the 30s to be old fashioned in the 60s. So on and so on. I can compare a good drama, action movie, or scif movie from today and they'll hold up well to similar movies from 1965 or 1955 and likely are much better.

On a similar note, many people think the last 5-10 years of TV are better than any "golden age" of television as well.

RAMA

 

Recognizing that people change tastes, and that this change in taste can result in works being lost, individuals and institutions since antiquity have selected works for preservation, so that they wouldn't be lost. The oldest known authoress, Enheduanna, had her works preserved in this manner. In our modern era, the Library of Congress has created the National Film Registry, which has films from 1891 to 1999. Sadly, none of the ST films is on that registry, but two Star Wars films, A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back are on that list.

 

I watched the remake of 'Flight of the Pheonix' the other day and while its OK its nowhere near as good as the 'old fashioned' original.
And I couldn't watch more than 30 minutes of the 'Andromeda Strain' remake.
Still modern audiences may like the better special effects and the more attractive cast better in the remade movies. I can't understand it - probably too old.

 

I feel that the older films had a stronger focus on characterization with special effects used to enhance the story. I feel that this has been lost in the recent films.

I think that sometimes having a small budget forces people to make decisions judiciously. For instance, I was watching Mr. Plinkett's review of the Star Wars prequels. He mentioned that the people who made the original films had to be careful with the light saber effects due to the costs involved with each battle. This kind of constraint forces writers to be creative. Now, with CGI and larger budgets, a film maker can have as many light saber battles as they went, even when the battles don't enhance the story. Now, films I feel are bloated by this excess.

I liked the original "Andromeda Strain" and the "Flight of the Phoenix".

 

'Just as silly and inconsistent' as what? Nu-Khan? What have you proven there? That the person who didn't like it was right?

It is but I'm not sure it means anything. I think it's more meaningful if discussions of the film discuss the film and not lines from an episode in 1968.

Movies are more than the sum of their parts and criticism of certain aspects in isolation will always appear arbitrary and hypocritical. Even the most reasoned arguments will have flaws somewhere if we're allowed to mine 40+ years of material for for that tiny example which backs up our point.

 

Are they insane ? Star Wars is a trilogy !

And genius needs to be restrained. Look at what Spielberg did with Jaws. I don't think the movie would've been so great if everything had gone according to plan.

 

This. Characterisation used to be more thought-out now it works on the most basic level. STID's ending is atypical of this. Spock goes mad when best friend dies, Spock goes on a vengeful rampage to track down Khan, Spock tries to beat the living daylights out of Kahn. I laughed at the end because it half reminded me of Tommy Wiseau's The Room when Johnny smashes everything up in house in a fit of jealous rage.

STID was beating everyone over the head in the ending with 'this is what angry people do'. In those ten or so minutes Spock became fully human, at the very least STID could have tried to do the ST 09 root of Spock becoming 'emotionally compromised', hell then they could have squeezed in a scene with Uhura/Spock that would have been rather meaningful.

Khan uses the Vengeance to beam his crew off of the Enterprise, departs on some sort of shuttle with his crewmen in tow, plus Kahn remotely sets the Vengeance to crash into Starfleet HQ. Then we could wrap it all up with Khan contacting Spock, we could have some meaningful exchange, Spock comes to terms with his loss and feels deeply disillusioned with Starfleet and angry towards admiral Marcus (because it was Marcus who attacked the Enterprise NOT Khan).

And with that you could end it there, there is an obvious sequel in the works and it would have a far more powerful ending. Surely we can all agree that the ending was rather anti-climatic and as Homer Simpson said 'wraps it up in a nice little package'?

 

As no criticism is complete with some obligatory hypocrisy, if we are to look at TOS and all the times that Spock lost his rag wasn't it always a bad thing and shocking? Here, we're expected to cheer along with Spock as he repeatedly punches a dude in the face.

As a stand alone movie, it works within the context but I think more could have been done than a mere fist fight that ends when Uhura just turns up and shoots him anyway.

 

Except possibly for TWOK, "characterization" in oldTrek movies consisted mostly of the traditional cast taking turns doing their familiar schtick. Mac-and-cheese.

 

I strongly disagree. In TOS, Spock, Kirk and McCoy do not have individual full personalities: they complete each other, and form what is basically TOS' main character. With the exception of Scotty, no other character has any amount of development.

In TNG, very few characters are developed: Picard, Data, Worf. The others fall short of anything interesting. Only DS9 makes any real effort with its characters, something Voyager apparently forgot. ENT isn't much better, with only three characters getting any real screen time.

So it isn't new that Trek doesn't put enough focus on character.

Did you mean typical ?

 

nuSpock has jumped the shark. I don't really care what they do with the character now.

 

Jumped the shark in what way ?

 

Comic 22
Spock is a player!
Shame on you Spock! Shame on you!

I'm guessing on the shark thing!

 

For me, one word of dialogue imploded the whole JJ-verse:

nuSpock's "Khan!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

 

It was an explosion of emotion from somebody who, quite literally, lost everything important in his life. Go through half of what he has done and see how you turn out.

 

A few more things...

I think STID has very little going for it and is surprisingly lightweight. There are few consequences, this altered universe isn't really explored at all save for one scene where Spock addresses his emotional state with Uhura (that really worked in my opinion and was unquestionably the movie's strongest scene and the most relevant). But this film is all about emotion, but it doesn't hold up to well with the character set-ups and the muddled plot throughout. It's so muddled I was seeing contradictions and holes everywhere, and that has never happened when I've watched a Star Trek film before for the first couple of times.


I don't even go out of my way to look for plotholes, I just instead follow the story's flow of logic. Kirk so passionately going out of his way to break the rules and cover-up his rule-breaking was the first red flag. Put it this way, when I watched ST 09 for the first time there was a logic to it all, and only a couple of times did I think to myself that something didn't make any sense. With STID that has been multiplied several times!


There's implausible (the sort you can overlook cos its fiction) and really implausible. ST 09 was a better movie because it did crazy things, it had the balls to destroy Vulcan and Romulus, it had the balls to pair up old Spock with the new one. In ST 09 there were real consequences and it was a bold story and sure it had its OTT moments, but it didn't rely on them so much unlike STID. Though Spock/Uhura was probably the first warning sign that contrived scenes would be used for the sake of eliciting an emotion regardless of continuity or logical character development.


I don't really care if STID is just a remake of TWOK, but I do feel STID had such wasted potential and it should have played to this universe's strengths by building on what happened in ST 09. Heck they could have made two additional films or even a trilogy concerning perhaps a war between the Klingons and the Federation, and how with the loss of Vulcan the Federation isn't in such a good shape. Or something along those lines.


Did JJ and his teams of writers really spend two or three years trying to find the best possible script, or the one which was the most rife with emotion and soap-operas?