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article: was Cumberbatch supposed to be Gary Mitchell?

Khan 2.0

Khan 2.0

Commodore
Commodore
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That article is just speculation on the part of the author, with interviews/quotes of other speculative stories having no connection to the production...
 
Less than ideal casting to my mind. They decided to ride a bandwagon of known actor, with a huge burgeoning following, and it was purely Cumberbatch's acting coupled with some avoidance of certain characteristics that made it serviceable. Focus on his quest for vengeance - in this case against Admiral Marcus and not Kirk - and replace the fierce passion Ricardo had under control, with a cold and creepy aloofness brought by Benedict. It could equally have been Benicio Del Toro and worked in a vein closer to the original.

Personally I would've been super politically correct, and I don't know, cast an actor of actual middle-eastern decent, or an unknown Bollywood actor, or anybody capable of more convincingly being connected with the character's background established. Ben Kingsley maybe? Anybody but Cumberbatch. You start with what is established onscreen in the two previous encounters. The surname is Singh. He speaks of having been a Prince. An historian paints a picture of him in a Turban, which the character sees and approves of. Then there's the costume design from "Space Seed". I'm thinking of the gold suit Ricardo wears to dinner, which resembles something from an Indian wedding. There's the headgear he fashions to wear to protect him from the wild winds of Ceti Alpha V.

I enjoyed Into Darkness despite myself, but those underlying issues bother me deeply. I can't seem to get past the fact this casting wasn't as carefully considered as any of the original crew, which involved their approval or their relatives in the case of deceased. Which brings me back to De Toro whose name was in the frame early on, and has subsequently proven he clearly didn't mind dabbling with sci-fi if Guardians of the Galaxy and upcoming Star Wars VIII are anything to go by. His agent asked for too much money I assume, and got realistic in time for Guardians.

Anyway, I don't see how this plot works with anybody else but Khan Noonien Singh.

Had it been Gary Mitchell, what's his motivation in regards to the torpedoes or assisting Admiral Marcus for instance?
 
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I liked Into Darkness with Cumberbatch as Khan. Albeit if Cumberbatch had played Gary Mitchell of WNMHGB that would have been interesting too.
 
the top comment in the article comments is probably the best way they could've done khan
I think it was a mistake having Benedict as Khan. They could have avoided all sorts of eye-rolling and non-sensical casting if they had kept John Harrison as John Harrison - a member of the Botany Bay and therefore a genetically superior being – who was defrosted instead of Khan, and desperate to liberate his captain and crew. For fan service, one of the stasis chambers the crew examined later in the film could have had a CGI Montalban look-a-like in it.

The threat would have been the same, the motivations the same, and Spock Prime could have reacted to "Botany Bay" rather than the name Khan in delivering his warning.
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ChristopherPike said:
Anyway, I don't see how this plot works with anybody else but Khan Noonien Singh.
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Orci & Kurtzman have said in interviews that they originally crafted a not-Khan script that Lindelhof insisted needed to be tweaked to be Khan. Once it was Khan, the various homages to ST II were grafted into the story.

EDITED: Lindelhof, not Burk.
 
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From the linked article:
The following contains spoilers for Star Trek Into Darkness.
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Great, now the movie has been ruined for us all.

As for the Gary Mitchell concept, I suppose they could have named the character Gary Mitchell instead of John Harrison/Khan, but what would have been the point? It makes better sense to use Gary if there was already an established backstory for him as Kirk's friend and first officer, which there wasn't.

Kor
 
I don't think it needed to be Gary Mitchell. Heck, I don't even think it needed to be Khan. Cumberbatch would've been perfectly serviceable playing a rogue super-agent named John Harrison, with little or no difference to either his performance or to the character's motivations. If anything, the moment they do the 'reveal' was the moment that took me out of the movie, up to that point I thought the plot was intriguing and the character perfectly self-sufficient. Adding that layer of extra continuity to him just messed things up IMO.

Khan 2.0 said:
Mitchell was never on the cards due to the IDW kicking off 'Ongoing' with WNMHGB.
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I don't think anything that IDW does has any real impact on the movies. Sure, it's nice that they tie these things in, but if the team wanted to over-ride something mentioned in a comic book read by a small fraction of the number of people out there who might buy a movie ticket, then they'd have no real hesitation in doing so.
 
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I would have LOVED to see how a Kelvinverse film would have handled Gary Mitchell but I highly doubt that Cumby was ever supposed to be Gary.
 
Therin of Andor said:
Orci & Kurtzman have said in interviews that they originally crafted a not-Khan script that Bryan Burk insisted needed to be tweaked to be Khan. Once it was Khan, the various homages to ST II were grafted into the story.
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I thought it was Kurtzman who insisted on Khan for the villain.
 
Lance said:
I don't think anything that IDW does has any real impact on the movies. Sure, it's nice that they tie these things in, but if the team wanted to over-ride something mentioned in a comic book read by a small fraction of the number of people out there who might buy a movie ticket, then they'd have no real hesitation in doing so.
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That's not the point. Orci supervised the comics for a variety of reasons, one of them being so that they wouldn't do storylines that were being planned for the movies. And indeed, that's why so many of the comics are just adaptations of TOS episodes. The fact that a WNMHGB adaptation was approved by Orci (and for the first issue no less) is proof that at no point was Bad Robot considering using Gary Mitchell in the movie. And that's the one fact that negate everything in that click-bait of an article.

At times fandom truly confounds me. At the outset of IDW announcing the Ongoing series Orci's supervision and what it meant for the comics was included and everyone forgot it when Karl Urban made his Gary Mitchell joke. Yet, Orci gets goaded and manipulated into calling the comics canon, and everyone jumps at that, only to conveniently miss it when he recanted the statement. Talk about selective attention.
M'Sharak said:
I thought it was Lindelof.
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It was.
 
Therin of Andor said:
Orci & Kurtzman have said in interviews that they originally crafted a not-Khan script that Bryan Burk insisted needed to be tweaked to be Khan. Once it was Khan, the various homages to ST II were grafted into the story.
Click to expand...

KirkusOveractus said:
I thought it was Kurtzman who insisted on Khan for the villain.
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M'Sharak said:
I thought it was Lindelof.
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I thought so as well.

The Wormhole said:
That's not the point. Orci supervised the comics for a variety of reasons, one of them being so that they wouldn't do storylines that were being planned for the movies. And indeed, that's why so many of the comics are just adaptations of TOS episodes. The fact that a WNMHGB adaptation was approved by Orci (and for the first issue no less) is proof that at no point was Bad Robot considering using Gary Mitchell in the movie. And that's the one fact that negate everything in that click-bait of an article.

At times fandom truly confounds me. At the outset of IDW announcing the Ongoing series Orci's supervision and what it meant for the comics was included and everyone forgot it when Karl Urban made his Gary Mitchell joke. Yet, Orci gets goaded and manipulated into calling the comics canon, and everyone jumps at that, only to conveniently miss it when he recanted the statement. Talk about selective attention.

It was.
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Thank you. I'm pretty sure that the writers originally crafted the story with Harrison as the villain, working to create someone that didn't have ties to canon. Then Lindelof asked if they could make it work with a TOS villain.

Regardless, I'm generally of the opinion that John Harrison was a fine villain on his own. Khan was ok, but I think Harrison was a missed opportunity.
 
Sorry, yes, Lindelhof insisted on Khan.

A friend recently mentioned how cool it would have been if the camera panned from Cumberbatch's frosty face panel at the end to another cubicle containing a CGI of... Ricardo Montalban's face.

Lance said:
I don't think anything that IDW does has any real impact on the movies. Sure, it's nice that they tie these things in, but if the team wanted to over-ride something mentioned in a comic book read by a small fraction of the number of people out there who might buy a movie ticket, then they'd have no real hesitation in doing so.
Click to expand...

And they did. But Orci & Kurtzman made a point of giving IDW's writers a list of suggested TOS episodes that could be tweaked with a Kelvin-era flavour and would thus lead in to the then-next movie. If they'd been keen to reintroduce Gary in a movie, they wouldn't have put WNMHGB on the list, especially not as issues #1 & 2.
 
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Therin of Andor said:
A friend recently mentioned how cool it would have been if the camera panned from Cumberbatch's frosty face panel at the end to another cubicle containing a CGI of... Ricardo Montalban's face.
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There's only one Khan and Cumberbatch got picked to portrayal the Kelvin timeline version of him. Although I don't really buy into Simon Pegg's theory about the past being altered by Nero's arrival - so for me they're one and the same as far back as Khan's origins. Different universes aren't required to explain recasting. I accept perfectly well multiple actors having played the same role... Saavik, Zefram Cochrane, Captain Braxton during Voyager...

The way I would like to have seen Khan reintroduced, does involve either some FX recreating Montalban for a shot though. Or even just having had another actor more reminiscent of him briefly in the film... indicating how deep the cover-story Section 31 created went.

It all centres around the moment John Harrison reveals who he is for me. That prolonged shot of Cumberbatch in the brig, tearing up, explaining who he is could have been broken up with a montage to illustrate HOW he is Khan. Similar to the 2009 reboot and the way a mind-meld, gave us the destruction of Romulus, Spock Prime and Nero's backstory... slap bang in the middle of the film's narrative. Again, exposition we had already heard from Nero while torturing Pike. But the second time more explicitly shown and narration by Nimoy.

And like that, the Harrison reveal could've better handled, with quickly glimpsed sequences lifted right out of IDW Khan graphic novel. The Botany Bay being found by a different starship. A wide angle shot of that room containing the cryo-pods shown again at the end of the movie. Focus in on CG Montalban in one of those canisters. Starfleet medics standing around a patient in an operating bay. Monitor screens above them showing Marcus the procedure and time-lapse morph of Khan's face from one actor to another. Cumberbatch confused. A shot of him in one of those Section 31 uniforms underneath Kelvin archive, studying schematic diagrams of starships and weaponary like the long-range torpedoes. Finally a shot of him appearing to take orders from Marcus, but after he's left, some sense he may not be carrying them out. A look from him, crossfading back into Cumberbatch and then Kirk staring at his reflection on the glass, listening to "Is there anything you would not do for your crew?"
 
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Therin of Andor said:
Orci & Kurtzman have said in interviews that they originally crafted a not-Khan script that Lindelhof insisted needed to be tweaked to be Khan.
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Yeah, good old Lindelof. Boy has he got his finger far from the pulse of the audience. I believe he's also the one most responsible for de-Alien-ing Prometheus.
 
Tosk said:
Yeah, good old Lindelof. Boy has he got his finger far from the pulse of the audience. I believe he's also the one most responsible for de-Alien-ing Prometheus.
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He was but that was at studio request after John Spaits draft contained overt Alien references.
 
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