Re-writing the climax of STiD

[The Wormhole]

Kirk, Khan, and Marcus all meet up on the Vengeance bridge and eat ice cream. Marcus laughs and jokes about how he nearly killed the two of them and Kirk, forgetting who he's talking to, talks about seeing Carol in her underwear. After thirty seconds awkward silence, Khan crushes Marcus's skull simply so he can steal Marcus's ice cream and then asks Kirk more questions about Carol.

 

[Franklin]

Kirk, Khan, and Marcus all meet up on the Vengeance bridge and eat ice cream. Marcus laughs and jokes about how he nearly killed the two of them and Kirk, forgetting who he's talking to, talks about seeing Carol in her underwear. After thirty seconds awkward silence, Khan crushes Marcus's skull simply so he can steal Marcus's ice cream and then asks Kirk more questions about Carol.

This is good. It would've worked. If I could suggest any tweak at all to carry it over the top, they should be sitting on the floor of the bridge around a holographic campfire. Kirk whispers something in Khan's ear and Khan looks over at Carol with a knowing grin. As the camera pans out, they all break out singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat or a Gilbert and Sullivan tune (either would work). Cue fanfare and closing credits.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Kirk, Khan, Marcus and a Klingon.

 

[Opus]

Kirk, Khan, Marcus and a Klingon.

And a pizza place.

 

[TheMurph]

Kirk, Khan, Marcus and a Klingon.

And a pizza place.

Sounds like the start to a bad joke.

As far as changes, the only thing I would change is Khan's magical blood and shorten the ending a bit.

 

[Kemaiku]

The giant Constitution Class model of the Biddeford over Marcus' desk drops on him during his meeting with Kirk and Spock, impaling him with a crappy quality model nacelle.

Khan dies a few days later from a dodgy batch of Gahk he bought from a flee market.

Starfleet finds the Vengeance and detonates her to prevent war with the Klingons, vapourising the "experimental torpedoes" onboard.

Then they all have a good laugh, shrug off all the horrible things that just happened and warp away to the strains of bad stock music.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

I never found the plummeting ships scene very interesting. Just didn't excite me. By the same token, in 09, once Nero is destroyed, there is a bit more tacked on where the Enterprise has to escape the black hole. While the cracks in the bridge and view screen look great on screen, I just felt like this is all extra, and that the action/ plot elements had already peaked prior to this moment. In STiD this "extra" action takes a looong time to play out, despite the guts of the story having been previously resolved.

By comparison, I think (even with it's flaws) First Contact is one of the best-paced blockbuster-style films I've ever seen. They are constantly moving the story forward. And guess what? Both the A and B story climax at exactly the same time, and there isn't an "extra action denouement just for the sake of it. The Borg Queen dies at the same time the first warp flight happens. It's great stuff.

Endings to action movies are tricky, and this kind of thing happens a lot. Lethal Weapon is a fantastic movie, but the fight scene at the end in the rain between Riggs and Mr. Joshua is superfluous, but we had to see these two guys have it out because of their rivalry. I wish they made this fight necessary to the story. And what makes it worse is that Donner can't really stage an easy-to-follow fight in the dark when it's raining.

I just felt that the "plunging ships into the atmosphere wasn't very interesting." Then again, although I can see why they did it, and (one some level I can appreciate the purpose of the Kirk/ Spock role reversal) I just didn't like them quoting from a better film. Plus, the technical aspects are a bit unclear. In TWOK, Spock was repairing the warp engines so the ship could go to warp! In STiD, Kirk was repairing to warp core sop... the ship could activate shields and ignite a shit-ton of stupid little rockets located all over the hull? T

 

[Amaris]

Ocri asked if we could do it better. So, here's my shot. A little editing would have sufficed.

Kirk et al. have captured Khan on the edge of Klingon space, and the Vengeance intercepts. The confrontation scene plays out as it does, until the Enterprise tries to warp away. At this point, the Vengeance lays some whoop-ass on them and temporarily disables their warp drive (they're already scanning the ship, so they obviously see the warp drive powering up, and also Marcus is expecting deception -- you don't become an Evil Admiral without that distrust). Carol Marcus interrupts the attack, and Scotty intervenes and cuts the Vengeance weapons systems, as we saw. Pretty much everything happens as in the movie, except instead of being between the Earth and Moon, they're in deep space.

Fast forward to Khan taking over the Vengeance, demanding the torpedoes, etc... Kirk et al. get beamed back ("No ship should go down without her captain!"), and just as Khan is about to destroy them, Chekov gets the warp drive back online and they flee to Earth.

Khan transwarps after them, catches up, pummels the ship. Just before the Enterprise is destroyed, the torpedoes explode. Both ships fall out of warp hurdling toward Earth, without power.

At this point, the rest of the movie can take place as shown. Seems pretty much the same, preserves all of the action scenes, without the plot fails. It circumvents the bad physics of the "fall" (except for the ship gravity bit), and the nonsensical idea that no one would even fly by to see why two starfleet vessels were attacking each other. I mean - if two US Navy vessels started shelling each other in New York Harbor, no one would ask 'what's up?'.

Comments welcome.

Nah. It doesn't really add anything to the movie, at least not enough to justify calling it "better."

That would be like me watching you spend hours building a house of cards to where you're nearly finished, at which point I say "you should put that last one on the top." I then place a sign in front of it that says "J. Allen's house of cards - do not touch."

 

[Commishsleer]

I said from the outset that all it needed was a bit of tender loving editing.

Is it too early to pull an Ocri?

Nevermind I'll put up another suggestion to take the heat off you:

Someone said that the writers originally had planned for Khan to be an ally of Kirk.
I think they should have run with that. I don't think that Khan should have tried to destroy the Enterprise just for the sake of it at the end. Just to get away.
Then after Spock chased him, Khan should have stopped him by 'saving' Kirk with his blood.
Then at the end Kirk should have let him and his buddies go with a promise 'that they'll behave themselves'. Of course Spock gives Kirk the eyebrow saying 'bloody idiot'.
Then Khan is free to be Kirk's enemy or friend in the next movie.
Feel free to lob your criticisms. Don't be too cruel.

I don't care all that much about the physics either just so that its not that obviously bad that I notice (on my own)

 

[anh165]

I never found the plummeting ships scene very interesting. Just didn't excite me. By the same token, in 09, once Nero is destroyed, there is a bit more tacked on where the Enterprise has to escape the black hole. While the cracks in the bridge and view screen look great on screen, I just felt like this is all extra, and that the action/ plot elements had already peaked prior to this moment. In STiD this "extra" action takes a looong time to play out, despite the guts of the story having been previously resolved.

By comparison, I think (even with it's flaws) First Contact is one of the best-paced blockbuster-style films I've ever seen. They are constantly moving the story forward. And guess what? Both the A and B story climax at exactly the same time, and there isn't an "extra action denouement just for the sake of it. The Borg Queen dies at the same time the first warp flight happens. It's great stuff.

Endings to action movies are tricky, and this kind of thing happens a lot. Lethal Weapon is a fantastic movie, but the fight scene at the end in the rain between Riggs and Mr. Joshua is superfluous, but we had to see these two guys have it out because of their rivalry. I wish they made this fight necessary to the story. And what makes it worse is that Donner can't really stage an easy-to-follow fight in the dark when it's raining.

I just felt that the "plunging ships into the atmosphere wasn't very interesting." Then again, although I can see why they did it, and (one some level I can appreciate the purpose of the Kirk/ Spock role reversal) I just didn't like them quoting from a better film. Plus, the technical aspects are a bit unclear. In TWOK, Spock was repairing the warp engines so the ship could go to warp! In STiD, Kirk was repairing to warp core sop... the ship could activate shields and ignite a shit-ton of stupid little rockets located all over the hull? T

OK,you have established that you are in the minority of people who still limits themselves to mid-90's TV episodic story progression.

The pacing, the action scenes and effects in ST09 and ID works very well, and its right up there with it's MODERN peers which is the standard for today's global audience.

 

[ichab]

My biggest change would be to just keep cumberbach as John harrison and make him the one that was awakened by admiral marcus.Everything else in the movie stays the same ecxept for the prime spock cameo and Khan in freeze being the motive for Harrison.Let the new crew figure things out on their own.

 

[OpenMaw]

My biggest change would be to just keep cumberbach as John harrison and make him the one that was awakened by admiral marcus.Everything else in the movie stays the same ecxept for the prime spock cameo and Khan in freeze being the motive for Harrison.Let the new crew figure things out on their own.

Pretty much agreed.

 

[SeerSGB]

Some thing I just thought of:

While Kirk is giving his speech, we could have had a shot of a beautiful, wild, alien planet. The cryo tubes sitting in the field. A seal pops open, and Khan rises out of his tube, around him the other waken too. Khan and his kind are exiled, cut off from the rest of the universe, but no matter: Khan has a world to conquer.

Don't know. Something about refreezing him just seems wrong, to much like sequel bait.

My biggest change would be to just keep cumberbach as John harrison and make him the one that was awakened by admiral marcus.Everything else in the movie stays the same ecxept for the prime spock cameo and Khan in freeze being the motive for Harrison.Let the new crew figure things out on their own.

Agreed. But do even need to wake him up? Just make him a new breed of augment based of Khan's DNA or the research the created Khan. If you had to have a Khan reference, have Harrison obsessed with Khan, modeling his life on Khan's teaching.

 

[JarodRussell]

Bah, the climax in STD is horrible. A three minute trip from Klingon space to Earth, nobody in the solar system cares when two Starfleet ships shoot at each other, the completely useless Nimoy cameo, the rehash of "Kirk's Explosive Reply" from TWOK with the torpedoes, then that utterly horrible gravity fall (the VFX shots are horrendous, they show the ship on an orbit where no such thing could ever happen), the rehash of Spock's death from TWOK, the horrible KHAN, the destruction of half the city with possible hundred thousand of deaths (which nobody cares about after it) and of course the stupid reset button with magic blood.

Gnaah.

I hate to say it, but Trek 2009 was miles above that piece of crap.

 

[BillJ]

Some thing I just thought of:

While Kirk is giving his speech, we could have had a shot of a beautiful, wild, alien planet. The cryo tubes sitting in the field. A seal pops open, and Khan rises out of his tube, around him the other waken too. Khan and his kind are exiled, cut off from the rest of the universe, but no matter: Khan has a world to conquer.

I like this idea, but you'd have some screaming that they remade Space Seed because of those thirty seconds. Not sure if it would've been worth the headache.

 

[SeerSGB]

Some thing I just thought of:

While Kirk is giving his speech, we could have had a shot of a beautiful, wild, alien planet. The cryo tubes sitting in the field. A seal pops open, and Khan rises out of his tube, around him the other waken too. Khan and his kind are exiled, cut off from the rest of the universe, but no matter: Khan has a world to conquer.

I like this idea, but you'd have some screaming that they remade Space Seed because of those thirty seconds. Not sure if it would've been worth the headache.

Sort of what I had in mind. Felt sorry for Khan at the end. And the end was so much sequel bait, they should have had a big question mark appear on the screen.

I've thought of taking Orci up on his challenge to rewrite STID; just to see if I can take the tinker-toys he used and tell the same story but in a different way.

 

[Franklin]

Some thing I just thought of:

While Kirk is giving his speech, we could have had a shot of a beautiful, wild, alien planet. The cryo tubes sitting in the field. A seal pops open, and Khan rises out of his tube, around him the other waken too. Khan and his kind are exiled, cut off from the rest of the universe, but no matter: Khan has a world to conquer.

Khan yelling, "You should've let me sleep!" foreshadowed the ending, so I kind of liked it.

However, your ending resolves the ethical issue of what to do with the other 72 people. Will they stay frozen forever? No due process? It makes you wonder how much of what really happened was actually made public, including Khan's real identity. Is the presence of these people still a Starfleet secret?

If I'd have changed anything at the end, I'd have made the chase between Spock and Khan a little shorter.

 

[SeerSGB]

I should not feel bad for Khan. It's fucking Khan, I shouldn't feel bad for him and his people. STID made me feel bad for Khan. Space Seed, TWOK, neither one made me feel sorry for the bastard. STID--especially the "should had let me sleep" line--had me cheering for the son of a bitch.

Fine, he's a genocidal war criminal, but they didn't sell that to me; they sold me a man that was centuries out of his time, viewed as being primitive and savage (why Marcus needed him, cause he thought different from the current people in Starfleet), and had his people used against him. He was someone that you felt sorry for, cause of what Marcus did to him.

I think having Marcus as the villain and trying to make Khan the villain too--based on his rep alone--might have been a mistake.

 

[M'Sharak]

... they sold me a man that was centuries out of his time, viewed as being primitive and savage (why Marcus needed him, cause he thought different from the current people in Starfleet), ...

Focusing on this bit, just for a moment: Marcus... thought Khan was different from the current people in Starfleet. Could that have been intentionally mirroring what Pike said in the 2009 movie's bar talk: that he thought Kirk possessed something which Starfleet had lost?

 

[Set Harth]

the destruction of half the city

A bit of an exaggeration, I think.