Five minutes before entering Pike's office, Kirk had been skipping along after Spock saying, "Yeah, we're cool. I haven't lost a single man. Pike's gonna give us the five year mission" and the meeting with Pike completely bursts his bubble. When Spock is dismissed from Pike's office and he talks to Kirk alone, he really rips into him, in a different take to the one we saw in the trailers. He's really angry, but you realise that Pike sees Kirk almost as a son and feels he can do much better. Kirk's command is ripped away, they give the Enterprise back to Pike, Spock is assigned to the USS Bradbury. Kirk leaves with his tail between his legs. Greenwood was fantastic in this scene. The movie really started here for me.
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Er, yes, it's Kirk and Spock's hands on the glass. Yes, BC is Khan. Yes, Marcus is Section 31 Black ops.
There's another fantastic scene between Pike and Kirk the bar. Kirk is completely gutted an Pike tells him he asked for him as first officer aboard the Enterprisr, because he believes in him. Apparently he really had to go to bat with Admiral Marcus for the appointment.
Back in London, we all know Khan's blood saves the dying child and he enlists the father to bomb the Starfleet Data Archive. All the captains and first officers meet at Starfleet headquarters to plan strategy. Marcus reports that it was Harrison, and ex Sect 31 black ops specialist. Kirk is looking at vids from the bombing, and in a very cool extreme Google Earth kind of thing, he zooms in on Harrison. Kirk starts to ask why Harrison would bother to bomb a Data Archive when he knows all th material is n public record and starts to question the real motive, but for once he's unsure of himself and shuts up. Marcus has to wheedle it out of him.
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Kirk realises its just a ploy to get everyone together in the one room just as Harrison shows up to blow them all to Kingdom Come. Pike is badly injured, Spock runs to help him while Kirk picks up a gun and starts firing away at Harrison's ship, then throws some sort of piece of metal on the end of a fire hose thing into the ships vent, sending it crashing down, but not before they get a look at each other. As Pike gasps his last Breath, Spock melds with him. Kirk runs over and sees Pike is dead and bursts into tears, literally sobbing uncontrollably with Spock looking on. It's a very Powerful scene. It feels like that is Kirk experiencing the loss of his father.
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They find out that Harrison has fled to Kronos, in Klingon space, "The one place we cannot go." But Kirk insists on being allowed to go after him. So they devise a plan to travel to the edge of the Neutral Zone and Marcus organises for Kirk to carry a payload of advanced torpedoes that they have been developing. They beam them all aboard Enterprise, but Scotty won't sign off on the manifest because their shielding means he can't scan them to see what's inside. Therefore he refuses to have them aboard his ship because he doesn't know what danger they present. He also has a philosophical problem with the torpedoes and challenges Kirk. He doesn't like the military op. He wants to know if they are still explorers. Kirk orders him and he refuses, saying Kirk will have to fire him. So he does. Kirk appoints Chekov as Chief engineer and tells him to go get a red shirt. We all squeal. Scotty leaves the ship
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Spock/Uhura are fighting. It's almost like a teenage spat. Spock is seriously having girl trouble. Uhura's mad at him because she thinks he doesn't feel. That he endangers his life without a thought about how it affects him. It's not unlike the accusations Kirk was hurling at Spock earlier. Calling him a traitor and a robot. She's pretty snitty and they have a bit of an argument on the way to Kronos with Kirk reluctantly in the middle. Then Spock suddenly reveals that he does feel. He recounts feeling Pike's death - the pain, the fear, the loneliness. He says he felt a similar thing at the death of Vulcan. He never wants to have to feel like that again. We see Kirk and Uhura both rect, chagrined. They have been unfair on Spock. On a side note, Uhura seems to really like Kirk now. She worries about him a lot. There is also a lot of touching. Everyone is always caressing everyone else. Lots of closeups of hands on arms or shoulders. Fanfic, here we come.
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Sorry, just trying to say things the way they happened because it's more engaging that way. Just a fact dump is not going to be very fair to the movie.
In Engineering, Chekov discovers some weird fault or anomaly with the engines and Kirk instructs him to work on it. He leaves Sulu in command, and Sulu broadcasts to the surface that he has a whole pile of high-powered torpedoes pointing at them. Uhura goes with Kirk and Spock in the shuttle to find Harrison. She speaks Klingon, so this actually makes sense. After a StarWars-esque chase, the Klingons outnumber our galant trio but then Harrison shows up and starts wiping the floor with them all. He then walks up to Kirk and Kirk just lays into him (very neanderthal) and the blows just bounce off Harrison. Then Kirk decides he's not going to kill him, but take him into custody so he can stand trial on behalf of Admiral Pike.
I forgot to mention, a weapons specialist called Carol Wallace has joined the Enterprise to look after the torpedoes. Spock is suspicious and runs her data. Discovers Wallace is her mother's name. She's Marcus' daughter. I am getting a little confused about the scene order, but they decide to beam one of the torpedoes down to some planet to see what's inside. McCoy goes with Carol, but when the torpedo arms and catches McCoys arm in it, he screams at them to beam Carol up to save her, but she bravely stays to try and disarm it, sort of winning their trust. She yanks loose some big component, the outer casing slides open, and of course inside is a cryotube with a frozen body. Back on the ship, Harrison asks Kirk how many torpedoes they have and they tell him, they have a payload of 72. Isn't that how many cryotube turns were aboard the Botany Bay?
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Kirk asks Harrison who he is really. He replies that he was a product of genetic engineeriing from 300 years ago and says his name is Khan (audience whoops, groans, cheers). He starts to cleverly bait Kirk, saying that Marcus scanned space for their vessel then revived Khan and held his crews' lives over his head, forcing him to work for them, develop superior weaponry etc. He asks, is there nothing you wouldn't do for your crew, Captain? This gets Kirk in his Achilles heel. He obviously has separation issues and doesn't want to lose a single member of his little family. Bones takes some of Khan's blood and injects it into a dead Tribble.
Then Marcus shows up in a huge Dreadnaught-class ship. He tells Kirk that Khan is manipulating him and is surprised that Kirk didn't kill him. Kirk is suspicious of Marcus and won't hand Khan over. Says he's gonna take him back to Earth to stand trial. Marcus targets Enterprise and starts blowing them out of the sky. Kirk pleads for the lives of his crew, offers his life in their place, but Marcus just wants to destroy them. Carol jumps in so her father knows she's aboard, hoping that will stop the slaughter, but he just beams her aboard, then just as the Enterprise is about to be blown away, the Dreadnaught's weapons go offline. Scotty has smuggled himself aboard and is in control of the engineering deck. By communicator, Kirk decides to space jump aross with Khan with Scotty opening the port at his end. I the meantime Spock calls New Vulcan...
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Spock Prime appears on the view screen. Young Spock asks if, in his travels, they ever encountered a character called Khan? Spock Prime replies that Spock knows he swore he would never reveal details of their lives, but Khan was the most dangerous foe they ever faced and would kill them all without a thought. Spock asks whether they were able to defeat him and Spock Prime replies, "at great cost".
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Just as Spock is hearing of Khan's treachery on the Enterprise, Khan escapes from Kirk on the Dreadnaught. To cut a long story short... A big space batltle ensues, with Khan demanding that the cryotubes be beamed aboard the Dreadnaught, but Spock is a step ahead of him and Bones has removed the Cryotubes and Spock has armed the torpedoes, so they blow a hole in the Dreadnaught and as Khan plummets towards Earth (did I mention he had pursued them at Warp back to Earth? ) he aims the dying ship at Starfleet Academy to wipe them out. But the Enterprise is also in trouble. The Warp core is offline and the area is irradiated with no way to fix it. So begins the final scenes of TWOK, in reverse, even with most of the same dialogue. Kirk goes into the chamber / giant beer factory, with Scotty screaming after him, gets the core back on line, Spock defeats Khan then gets a frantic message from Scott that he'd better get down there.
It's a lovely death scene, really. Poor Spock/Quinto is inconsolable. There is a lot of crying in this movie. Kirk dies.
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Now you can guess what happens after that, can't you? We certainly did. And it did.
I'm getting pretty punchy. Might go and have a look at some of the other reviews and head to bed.
My impression was that, at first I thought all the Kirk/Spock Logic vs Feeling argument was a bit simplistic, but over the course of the movie, it played out beautifully with some great lines, and lots of emotion/tears. Similarly, the Kirk/Pike scenes are all wonderful.I think people will find the emotional component of this movie satisfying.
The effects are often brilliant, but I wasn't a fan of the 3D at all. At first it was cumbersome and distracting and after that I got used to it, but it doesn't really bring anything extra to the movie.
As for the parts of the plot that are rehashed from TOS prime universe. For a moment there, we got a bit excited that they were going to put a whole different twist on them, but it just wasn't enough of a twist, which left the end of the movie a bit predictable and flat. They perhaps should have branched into more unknown territory.
But as a movie about family, arguing and fighting but getting to know and trust and value each other, it was really lovely. It was certainly action-packed. If TWOK was a 9/10 and ST09 was an 8/10, I'd probably give this a 7, mostly for the raw emotion of the performances.
I hope that satisfies the hunger for this evening.
