STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS - Grading & Discussion [SPOILERS]
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I was very entertained by this movie and definitely want more. I thought it was better than the first one and it feels like it's getting better.
The little nitpicks didn't bother me or affect my overall opinion, but I had tons of them. I'll just share one of them as I really don't even feel like it's worth getting into all of them (and this one is easily countered, really). I just couldn't help get this nagging feeling of Uhura reading from dictionaries in Star Trek VI ("We is condemning food and things") while talking to the Klingons in this movie. My rationale was that the TUC version of Uhura is stupid and inept and never should have been that way, and this version is much more preferable. A friend of mine even went further to say that maybe prime Uhura did know Klingon when she was younger, but had forgotten it or become very rusty in her old age. Our discussions after the movie were so incredibly nerdy and fun!
I gave it a B+. What kept it from being an A was the pace of the movie not really seeming to let up. I definitely could have sat through another hour of this movie (well, had I not had that huge Pepsi) if it meant a more even pace. There were some edits that felt weird too, where it would go from something really serious, to something silly. It felt very much like a typical Hollywood blockbuster in many regards.
Lastly, I thought Cumberbatch was really a great actor, but he didn't really remind me of Khan. I absolutely loved his deviousness, his cold calculation, and his general badass qualities, but he seemed more like a robot for the majority of the time. It felt like he was lacking a certain charisma or something. Like when Kirk told Scotty to shoot Khan on the bridge of the Vengeance, I think we were supposed to feel conflicted about it, but I wasn't really.
The little nitpicks didn't bother me or affect my overall opinion, but I had tons of them. I'll just share one of them as I really don't even feel like it's worth getting into all of them (and this one is easily countered, really). I just couldn't help get this nagging feeling of Uhura reading from dictionaries in Star Trek VI ("We is condemning food and things") while talking to the Klingons in this movie. My rationale was that the TUC version of Uhura is stupid and inept and never should have been that way, and this version is much more preferable. A friend of mine even went further to say that maybe prime Uhura did know Klingon when she was younger, but had forgotten it or become very rusty in her old age. Our discussions after the movie were so incredibly nerdy and fun!
I gave it a B+. What kept it from being an A was the pace of the movie not really seeming to let up. I definitely could have sat through another hour of this movie (well, had I not had that huge Pepsi) if it meant a more even pace. There were some edits that felt weird too, where it would go from something really serious, to something silly. It felt very much like a typical Hollywood blockbuster in many regards.
Lastly, I thought Cumberbatch was really a great actor, but he didn't really remind me of Khan. I absolutely loved his deviousness, his cold calculation, and his general badass qualities, but he seemed more like a robot for the majority of the time. It felt like he was lacking a certain charisma or something. Like when Kirk told Scotty to shoot Khan on the bridge of the Vengeance, I think we were supposed to feel conflicted about it, but I wasn't really.
Trust me, back in the 80s the plot holes and inconsistencies of TWOK were discussed by Trek fans ad nauseum. Starting with Space Seed was a season 1 episode and Chekov wasn't even on the ship until season 2.
The internet didn't create fanboys, it just gives them a place to congregate in larger numbers. All the cons had formal and informal discussion groups about the movie, all the zines did as well. There's nothing new under the sun especially when it comes to Trekkies dissecting Trek stories. It is fun and we shall do it forever!!
Yeah, it's possible my expectations were simply getting in the way, and I'll like it more a second time. After years of looking forward to seeing this crew exploring space in a classic, Star Trek-style adventure, I couldn't help but feel let down watching them in what felt like just a... straightforward, run-and-gun military mission to capture a terrorist.
It all just seemed so... humdrum and unimaginative to me.
Well yeah, it's my opinion. Of course it's subjective.
But for me, while it contained all the elements of Star Trek, the movie just didn't have enough of that sense of romance and evolved 23rd century nobility I associate with Trek. The only side we really see of Starfleet is the military side, the characters are all thoroughly modern and feel like they could have come from any modern-day action movie, and there's no time to have a thoughful conversation about anything.I'm certainly not arguing Nemesis is a good Trek movie or better than TWOK, but we at least got to see Picard having a philosophical discussion with somebody, we got some character moments that didn't involve running around and fighting bad guys, and these still felt very much like the same evolved TNG characters we knew and loved.
And plus, frankly, I found the space battle at the end a thousand times cooler, with the Ent-E actually kicking ass and putting up a pretty good fight (unlike a certain other ship).
Yeah, I think we discussed something like that, but then we really nerded out and questioned how something like just the destruction of the Kelvin could change her career path. Butterfly effect and all I guess, but I just chalked it up to reboot and left it at that (nerd cred -1). I definitely prefer nuhura's skill set. You can tack diplomacy on there as well, really.
I don't know what movie you saw, but there was plenty of lens flare in this film. The production design did not budge an inch. And for the ship to get a refit only to change the impulse drive rather than to fix so many of its other obvious flaws like the bow-legged nacelle struts is even more stubborn.
That was similar to my impression. He's very menacing, but... I didn't get that much out of it otherwise.
I kinda had this feeling a little bit too. I get that it's a summer blockbuster and that there's gonna be lots of action. But it almost felt a bit relentless. I wonder if they had made the movie longer if they could have made the pace less frenetic, or if they would have just crammed it with more stuff.
I always accepted that Uhura in the old timeline was trained in the "formal" application of languages. Dialects and colloquialisms vary by region. Unless she had studied and absorbed all of them, there was no way to avoid using the translator. Or in that case, "phrasebooks."
Yeah, I think we discussed something like that, but then we really nerded out and questioned how something like just the destruction of the Kelvin could change her career path. Butterfly effect and all I guess, but I just chalked it up to reboot and left it at that (nerd cred -1). I definitely prefer nuhura's skill set. You can tack diplomacy on there as well, really.
In this new timeline Uhura has specialized in languages and dialects. Big difference.
That would just be stupid and meaningless since Harrison is a made up identity. Having him be Khan carries so much more weight and meaning with it.
The one thing I didn't care for in this movie was the blatant left-wing politics when it came to killing Khan...or Harrison at the time. Ultimately, the crew was right to question Marcus's motives but if they had chance to kill Khan with a missile strike, you take that in a heartbeat. All that damage in San Francisco at the end could have been avoided.
If S31 was really in on it then why would Picard have known ANYTHING about the operation, even if he thought they were only observing the Ba'ku in the same style as they were observing the Mintakans? Why would Data have been involved in the first place? Where did S31 get a prototype holoship with a cloaking device? After all S31 in the Prime Universe seems more like simply a handful of operatives, instead of the more Obsidian Order-esque organization that it became in the JJ-verse. Why would Dougherty have any kind of moral compunctions about killing the Ba'ku altogether? After all, S31 mandate is to place Federation interests above all others, and in the movie he was able to back up his position with the Prime Directive, something I sincerely doubt S31 would give a damn about.
And yes, real Federation officers would stoop that low. After all, regular officers were involved in the assassination of Gorkon in TUC. Are we going to start saying that every Starfleet officer in TUC that was involved in that conspiracy was also a member of S31? Valeris, after all, states that she is "saving Starfleet."
My sister and I (both lifelong Trekkies) were talking about it this morning - what the nuTrek movies lack is anything cerebral. What has distinguished Trek from other space opera has always been its willingness to engage with ideas, whether it be social or philosophical. It doesn't always do it - many of the greatest episodes have been character based, but they always alternate with strong SF concepts.
This is why Trek works better and has a stronger specific identity as a tv series than as movies. All stories, to really work, have to make you care about characters - so doing that doesn't create a specific identity, and the movies have tended to revolve much more around character moments than concepts - as STiD did. People can talk about vengeance as a theme, but that's not the strongest thematic of the movie at all, in fact it is entirely subordinate to the real theme which is - what would you do for your family? From the man who blows up Section 31 for his daughter's life, to Khan going on a rampage of vengeance because he thinks his crew - who he explictly names his family - was killed by Marcus, to Carol thinking her very presence will save the Enterprise from her father, to Kirk embracing the crew as his family - it's all about what will you sacrifice to protect those you love.
This was a fun movie. It had some really good character stuff in it. It had a consistent theme to pull it together, but it lacks an essential element of the best Trek which is an idea at its center. You can't fault it too much for that though, because very few of the movies have managed to do that - really only TMP had a philosophical concept which drove the story action. A couple of other movies - ironically usually the worst ones, managed to shoehorn in some sort of universal philosophical moment, like Kirk's "I need my pain!" in TFF, but I'm not sure any other than TMP have done what episodes like Measure of Man, A Taste of Armageddon, or Children of Time did - told a good story that left you ruminating on something fairly deep - what is the nature of a being's soul and how do you prove they have one? The best way humanity can temper its own savagery for the sake of civilization is to look that savagery in the face. If you discovered that an accident of time had created your own great-great-great-grandchildren and only you or they could go on living now - what would you do?
I doubt we'll ever get that out of any Trek movies, which are by definition action pictures, and ideas like these can rarely by married to action stories.
I think that's because, within the context of the movie - you don't get to know him at all. I mean, we all know who Khan is and what he did in the past, but that doesn't feel like this character's history, and no one tells you what his history is. You know he's genetically engineered to be superior, that he and his people were condemned as criminals for something involving being bad to regular people - but that's kind of it. I think the lack of backstory for Khan in this movie really undercuts him, no matter how good the performance is.
It's hard to talk about this - because many people are either super critical and dismissive of Cumberbatch's casting, or they're "omg I love the film".
I really loved the film, and to me, it ranked up there as one of the best Trek films, but there were certain ways it could've been better. I see a lot of the younger, newer Trekkers having less of a problem.
I have very mixed feelings about Cumberbatch-Khan.
I can appreciate Cumberbatch's portrayal on its own merits, just based on the acting. To me, he was GENUINELY TERRIFYING and he *was* someone I bought as the product of advanced genetic engineering. He was almost inhuman. To me, he IS how Khan would've been written *if he had been written today* as an original character. They took the same backstory but rebuilt him from the ground up, in a way that's more believable today. I can really believe that genetic engineering would be outlawed if it would produce people like him.
This is practically Trek sacrilege, but as a gen X trekker, I always found Khan Prime to be a bit dated, and I never really found him quite as menacing as he seemed to be portrayed to be. He was stronger than the average human, and we're INFORMED that he's smarter. He's an intriguing character because of Montalban's portrayal.
This guy was actually shown to be superior in practically every way except in compassion for anyone but his own crew, and it's probable that someone who was engineered to be superior like that, would just see normal human beings as less evolved.
I really did enjoy Cumberbatch-Khan, but at the same time, he's much more of an inhuman thug than Montalban-Khan was; the latter had an aura of cultured man, enlightened despot, that isn't in Nu-Khan's portrayal.
Neither one is right, or wrong. They're just two different characters.
However, leaving aside politics/social justice issues, the fact that he wasn't at all believably Indian was really distracting and took me out if the film sometimes. Every other character was at least *approximately* recast to look *a little* similar to the original character, except for him.
I was either forced to suspend disbelief about the character being Indian, or forced to suspend disbelief about him not really being Khan. This was incredibly distracting.
The actor at least looking like the original Khan would've been enough of a link to the original character for me. He needed to either LOOK like Khan Prime, or ACT like Khan Prime. Otherwise, he's just an original character with the same name and a similar backstory.
So yes, mixed feelings. I definitely bought him as a genetically engineered superman and in some ways the story was even tighter than "Space Seed". But was he Khan, beyond us being told he was? I don't know.
I know that some of us will be headcanoning like crazy that he's really one of Khan's lackeys (such as Joaquin) acting to protect the real Khan and the rest of them. And in a way, this was more how he behaved.
This probably isn't a problem for younger Trekkers who are not familiar with Trek lore as much; I know a few who came on board because of JJ Abrams' Trek reboot and are only now getting into the universe. They seem happy to see one of their favorite actors (Cumberbatch) excellently portray a really menacing and morally ambiguous villain, and don't have the baggage of previous Trek clouding their judgments.
I still tremendously enjoyed the film. I consider it a successful film, I liked it more than ST (2009) and I liked it considerably more than ANY of the TNG films.
As for the "summer blockbuster" aspect, films these days are different, they must work on multiple levels. People aren't as patient as they used to be. We're an accelerated culture. I'm no different. I need a reason to sit through a film and not be checking Facebook while I'm watching it. The film didnt lack any of the moral questioning or philosophy or exploration, for being as fast paced as it was. It will hold up on multiple watches because it worked on multiple levels.
I agree. The film seems to basically be assuming that I know Khan's back story. It so happens that I do, but it still doesn't feel very connected to this character.
I liked the element of his tenderness toward his own crew, and it still basically works because of the "menacing" part, but there is a lot of "tell" regarding Khan's story in the film.
There was no more backstory in The Wrath of Khan than there was here.
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Agreed. "Space Seed" wasn't referenced. It was assumed that people knew who Khan was.
Well, the events were. But there was no need for referencing Space Seed here because it never happened.
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