Ironically, I was planning to bump this thread myself. Earlier today, I wrote a long rant about the film. Actually, it was less of a rant, more a deconstruction, but it ended up being so long, so ornate, that there were two problems: 1) it was taking too long to say too little, and 2) if posted, it would have obscured the idea that I actually have *some* admiration for the film. Still, maybe I'll rewrite and condense what I was planning to say.
The problem with trying to talk about TWOK is that, for me, at the least, it's basically a cluster-fuck of failings, from the set (re)design, to the costumes, to the editing, to the writing, to the whatever. It's all such a tangled mess of shit. On the other hand, I now risk derailing myself again, since, as I've said, I don't consider it all bad, and the good, in some sense, emerges directly from the bad; is tied to it, bound to it, shackled by it, almost. In the most contrite terms possible, TWOK is what it is. But that's not very helpful.
One thing I *did* notice on my recent viewings, and I'm not sure this has been talked about before, is the staggering set of similarities between the space battle scenes (Ent vs. Reliant) in TWOK and the space battle scene (Ent Vs Cloaked Bird of Prey) in TUC. Let me go into some detail . . .
The first, and perhaps most conspicuous, detail, is that they both feature an antagonist with a fondness for literature, vainly reflecting Meyer's own antagonistic attitude (from a certain point-of-view) for ST itself. I mean, everyone sees that one. But it may have escaped attention that Meyer basically uses the same tropes and theatrics in both.
For example, the "Red Alert" graphic is deployed in BOTH of TWOK's big face-off scenes (first encounter with Khan and right before going into the nebula), rather clumsily, I must say -- especially in the latter, where the Enterprise is clearly at Red Alert, as seen in lighting choices and set displays, before Meyer pointlessly cuts to the Red Alert graphic to bridge two shots of people running down a corridor. In TUC, he doesn't technically cut to the graphic in isolation as in TWOK, but he has Scotty (for no in-narrative reason whatsoever) looking -- and not just looking, but damn-near clutching -- at a monitor displaying the animation.
Another example is of a ship being hit and people on the Bridge flying from left to right (from the camera's POV). In TWOK, it's the Enterprise; in TUC, the Excelsior. It seems tacky and ripe for spoofing (and I believe I've seen such spoofs before). Of course, you've also got the requisite explosions and smoke, which Meyer does almost to death in TWOK, since he has the Enterprise and a pulverised Reliant to play with, but TUC still receives more than its share.
What else? In TWOK, Kirk orders Scotty to "try auxiliary power", and in TUC, we get a line from Spock, "auxiliary circuits destroyed, Captain". I mean, this link could almost be cute, but I don't see it that way. It makes the Enterprise A look feebler than its predecessor, although the difference might be academic, not least because auxiliary power is too feeble to survive the Reliant with when it is activated (supposedly) in TWOK.
As if that weren't bad enough, both films then use a lame deus-ex-machina to get the Enterprise out of trouble. In TWOK, Kirk relies on the extreme stupidity of Khan to transmit a convenient "prefix code" (which, in the 23rd Century, is nothing more than a five-digit integer), taking advantage of Khan's lust for Genesis. In TUC, Spock posits that the cloaked Bird-of-Prey emits ionised gas and can therefore be traced, and Uhura gives Spock the idea that he can perform "surgery" on a torpedo because the Enterprise has the proper instrumentation (evidence suggests that this was a mistake and that she meant the Excelsior), and we see that the torpedo is stashed with printed circuit boards (!!), and can be modified in seconds.
What's really funny about those ideas is how long the characters have to talk about them. In TWOK, Khan says he's giving Kirk "sixty seconds", but he actually gives him just over two minutes, even after stating, in typical cartoon character style, "time is a luxury you don't have" (!!). This scene has always struck me as especially unbelievable, since the characters actually talk openly about what they're planning to do while Khan has an open com-link to the Bridge! In TUC, it's a little less transparently silly, but Meyer still stops the action long enough to let the characters explain the solution, and the action conveniently (and somewhat comically) resumes the instant Spock and McCoy head off. I guess Khan and Chang are patient guys.
I've deliberately saved this one till last. In both films, it also looks like the Engineering section is being sealed, and both use lame sleight-of-hands (or shitty visuals) to depict this. In TWOK, a blast door descends and actually bisects (!!) the matter-antimatter piping (can someone explain THAT to me?), while in TUC, we're made to believe that a blast door is descending to the floor (not over the matter-antimatter piping this time, however), because of both the oblique camera angle and a slam sound that implies it has impacted the ground, but if you look carefully, you can clearly see it's actually come to a stand-still in mid-air before the scene cuts away. I love this one because cinema is a visual medium, yet the implementation of the same basic concept, executed in two different ways, is faulty in both. What's better than one fail? Two fails!
In my opinion, you have to laugh at this stuff. Unfortunately, it looks like I've turned this into another rant. Oh, well. I guess it's too easy.
