Star Trek Into Darkness

A note before you begin reading this review. I'm going to say some stuff about this movie that isn't particularly kind. I'll list stuff I liked about it afterwards, so I'd encourage you to read that part as well before you cast judgement on whether I'm right or wrong. But the fact is, this is my opinion. It's based on my personal preferences. And while I think I provide a pretty clear set of logical reasons for not liking the stuff I don't like, I'm a huge fan of Pacific Rim, so I can accept that there doesn't need to be logic to like something. And I understand that I have some friends that like this movie just because Benedict Cumberbatch is in it, and since I'll watch anything with a superhero in it at least once, I'm not judging that motivation. That being said, you can refer to the end of the article for my thoughts on Cumberbatch and the ranking for where this movie falls overall. You can skip right to that part if you literally don't care about the rest of the movie. Now, shall we begin?

I think I've figured it out.

The reason why I liked this so much when it came out. It's actually the same reason why I liked the 2009 Star Trek when it came out as well. It's all so simple that I can't believe I didn't see it before.

It's fan service.

There's no other explanation that makes sense. Why else would I have liked the 2009 movie enough to watch it a dozen times within a few weeks and yet grow to hate it within a few months? It's because the movie was loaded with fan service, but did literally nothing else right. And here's the honest truth. Into Darkness is exactly the same way, though once the fan service has been removed, the movie underneath isn't nearly as abysmal as the 2009 movie was. So there's that crucial difference.

But I need to say something before I go any further. I am upset with this movie. Almost offended. Or at the very least disappointed, and it's all because of fan service. One of the big moments of fan service is a clever reversal of roles between Kirk and Spock from The Wrath of Khan. This of course means that Kirk dies instead of Spock, and Spock now has to deal with the emotional impacts of that moment. If you read my review of The Wrath of Khan, you'll see that the moment when Spock dies in that film is a biggie. It's one of the most powerful moments I've ever seen in a film, and when you start thinking about it, there's a lot of depth to learn from in that moment. There is no reason that Into Darkness can't have that same emotional depth, or teach that same valuable lesson.

But Into Darkness kills Kirk because "Hey! It's like that really good Star Trek movie except Kirk instead of Spock! The fans will LOVE that!" There is no message. There is no depth. There is no emotion. Spock reacts stupidly, and then it turns out that Kirk isn't dead anyways! They take the greatest moment in sci-fi cinema history and turn it into a GAG!

"Abraaaaaaaaaaaaams!"

I, as a fan, am not pleased.

So yeah, that moment is the worst moment of the movie for me, because of that. But that's not to say that there's not plenty of terrible moments throughout. I think it's fair to say that the writers that worked on Into Darkness shouldn't be allowed near the premise of a sci-fi story ever again. Ever ever ever. Honestly, they shouldn't be allowed near anything more complicated than a sitcom. Frankly, they should never be allowed to write again. But especially that sci-fi thing. Because they have no clue how to craft a sci-fi story, they don't have the imaginative capacity to see how technology changes the world their story takes place in, they have no concern for the consequences of characters actions, and they can't handle motive at all.

"We have teleportation technology, but there's literally no better way we could have handled this!"

And while we're on the subject of this being a sci-fi movie, everyone involved in the decision making processes associated with this production should probably go retake their high-school physics class, because even by the loose standards of Star Trek, the physics in this movie suck. Then, of course, there's JJ Abram's style of... I hesitate to call it directing. Film-making, I guess. That's more general. Oh, and of course there's more. If you want more, I'm more than happy to talk about it with you personally. But I did want to talk about the things I liked in this movie as well. So we'll just touch on why I don't like those three things.

They call the device that freezes all of this lava a "cold fusion" device. So, you know, a fusion reaction with no radioactive elements involved. So basically an enormous bomb. Apparently our writers forgot to do some basic research before making themselves look like idiots.

Let's start with Abrams. He's pathetic. I officially hate the way his movies look. Lens flares, pastels, blurs... I'm not watching Star Wars 7. At least, not until my little boy is nine and insisting that he wants to watch it. Does it make the movie unwatchable? Not strictly speaking, no. You can watch it. It does go a long way toward making it unenjoyable, though, and it's all the same when you come right down to it. But here's the key. I can look around that issue. I did when I first saw it. I knew it was coming, and I chose to ignore it. And because it isn't so overdone that it can be ignored, this is actually probably the least bothersome issue. So JJ, you're getting better. I'm still not watching Star Wars 7, but you're getting better. Maybe by number 8 or 9 I'll consider it, assuming you continue this trend. After all, Star Wars is fantasy, not sci-fi. Maybe that'll help.

WHYYYYYYYYY???

Next, the physics. You know, because it's sci-fi. So, science. There should be some. And I'll be the first to admit that Star Trek is full of bad science. Packed. Even major plot points. But when you're watching a show that presents teleportation and faster-than-light travel as normal things, your suspension of disbelief has to be pretty powerful, and as such a certain extent of bad science doesn't bother me.

Dude inside active volcano not being fried to a crisp, I can handle.

But when you've got two ships parked a couple hundred kilometers above the moon get disabled and then crash into... The Earth? With a total elapsed travel time between the two distant bodies of approximately two minutes? If they had engine power and were flying as fast as they could directly at the planet, sure. But they weren't. They were parked in stationary orbits around the moon and they lost power. Even if they had been caught in Earth's gravity instead of the moon's, and even if their orbits had started to decay really really badly immediately, it would have taken months, if not YEARS for them to actually hit the planet. It's almost as if JJ Abrams thinks that the Moon is closer to earth than the Hubble Space Telescope.

In about ten minutes, this thing is going to destroy most of San Francisco with its face.

Another thing. When you design a spaceship, there's a very specific type of pressure you want it to be able to handle. They aren't designed for in-atmosphere operation, so that pressure would, of course, be internal. I can buy that a ship designed to withstand weapons fire would handle an atmosphere's worth of pressure okay, especially since it was at least partially built on the ground. But parking that same ship at the bottom of an ocean? That's stupid. Even if the hull didn't buckle, because you know, it's not a submarine, there's no way all of the vital bits on the outside of that thing are water-tight. Why would they need to be? It was designed to operate in space! The fact is, submarines are about as far from a good spaceship as you can get, design-wise. Any starship sitting in the water would be called a crash, and evacuated.

Pictured: A salvage operation.

And just... don't even get me started on Khan's "super blood." Reanimating necrotic tissue would result in zombies, not bringing people back from the dead. Zombie Kirk. That's what this movie should have ended with.

To be fair, that might have been where they were headed originally.

Of course, all of the other sins of this movie (outside of JJ's obsession with glare) can be explained by lazy writing. I'll name a few examples.

First! Transporter technology that can beam you across the galaxy. Because that's what Khan uses to beam himself from a shuttle on earth to the Klingon home-world of Kronos. They're not neighbors. They're not even in the same quadrant. This technology, supposedly based on Scotty's magic transporter from the 2009 movie, renders space travel completely irrelevant. Instantaneous travel across huge swaths of space without a ship? Star TREK very suddenly becomes StarGATE, and the need for space travel changes drastically. Starfleet is now unnecessary when they can just beam personnel and supplies wherever they want whenever they want. Kirk, Spock and the gang are now out of a job, or at least responsible for a very different set of duties, like... I don't even know. Ground troops, I guess? The entire universe would change the instant this technology became available, but for some reason the writers thought it would be okay to just pretend that things would go on like normal at the end of the movie. I'm interested to see if they even try to explain that away in the sequel. My bet is their explanation would hold water about as well as a sieve.

Pictured: the iPhone of interstellar travel. The only starships left after this point would be made by Blackberry.

Second! Magical serums that cure death (and by extension literally everything else). This is, of course, assuming that medical technology that "reanimated necrotic tissue" would result in a restoration of life, as opposed to the walking dead. And for my purposes here, I'm going to ignore the fact that "magical serum that CURES DEATH" is literally the worst plot device in the history of writing. With this technology, humanity (and presumably everyone else in the Federation) becomes functionally immortal. How It Should Have Ended tells us that makes Starfleet's new job elderly care, due to a sudden spike in population caused by this. And while this is hilarious (and seriously it's hilarious go watch that video), I don't think it's accurate. These people wouldn't need care, since the magic serum would probably also remove the generally accepted effects of aging. So, you know. The Federation is now growing faster than ever because A: people can't die and B: they can beam themselves pretty much anywhere to set up colonies in an instant. Everything about this society would change practically overnight. And the writers just gloss over it.

The term "superblood" really distracts from the fact that this guy is supposed to be a doctor.

Third! Motivations. Khan is motivated to attack Starfleet because he wanted to save his friends. Kirk is motivated to hunt down Khan because Pike was collateral damage when Khan tried to kill Marcus. Marcus wants to Kill Khan and Kirk on Kronos to start a Khanflict with the Klingons (love that alliteration). Of all of these people, who is the villain? That's right, it's Marcus. So why is Khan depicted as the bad guy all the time? What happens with him at the end of the movie is like, not even part of the same storyline. It's almost like the writers got three quarters of the way through the script, realized "holy crap, we put Khan Noonien Singh in this movie and he hasn't done anything evil yet," and then decided to have him try to blow up the Enterprise so they would have an excuse to use that Kirk-Spock reversal and then bring zombies into the 23rd century. This is what happens when you start writing a story with a premise that consists entirely of "fan service, inciting incident, fan service, conflict, fan service, fan service, climax, fan service. Ooh, let's put some tribbles in there!"

I'm pretty sure that resurrecting tribbles is a capital offense.

Fourth! There's a Star Wars-esque fight on random flying vehicles, very much after the tradition of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. I mean, if you're going to rip off an action sequence, at least rip one off from a movie that wasn't garbage.

Yeah, I hate pretty much everything about this sequence.

Lazy writing, terrible story. That's all there is to it.

Now, don't get the impression that I hate this movie. I don't like it a whole lot, but I certainly don't hate it either. I'll watch it again, I'm sure, just like a lot of the other movies on this list. There's a few things amidst the stupidity that make it mildly worthwhile. Those things are as follows.

Fan service. Let's face it. The movie is terrible because the writers put fan service in at the expense of a coherent universe and a well told story. But that doesn't mean that the fan service isn't fun to watch. I still hate the Kirk-dies thing, but the rest of it is pretty good.

They were smart not to bring in a breeding pair.

Acting. This movie is quite well cast. Sure some of the characters have really stupid moments (like, I know that Chekov is kinda a main character but isn't there probably somebody, I don't know, on the ENGINEERING STAFF that might have a better idea of how to take care of the ENGINEERING stuff than the dang ops officer? Just a thought), but that's really all the fault of the writers. As far as the performances go, everyone does a pretty bang up job. Kirk is appropriately retarded, chauvinistic, and blind to the obvious, yet somehow I still like him for some reason, just like in The Original Series. Spock is appropriately infuriating, cold, and logical (up until the badly-written end of the movie). Scotty is hilarious, but not stupid, which is a better treatment of the character than was typical in ye-olden-times. Bones is perfect. Like, Carl Urban IS DeForest Kelly, I swear. Uhura... Well, she sure tries. But can I just say that the way the writers treated women in this movie is embarrassing? Like, for humanity as a whole?

If you're still pretending she was in this movie for any reason other than this shot, quit lying to yourself.

Action sequences. There's some good ones. I like the fight with the Klingons, that was fun. And the attack on Starfleet, and a few other odd moments. Up until that last chase across Coruscant there at the end, the action is all pretty good.

Though apparently Khan is a ninja now.

And now, the big one. Everyone's favorite dragon (Still my favorite role of his), Benedict Cumberbatch (cumberpatch? cummerbund?). I want to be clear, here. I don't have anything against Benedict Arnold. He's a fine actor. But I do not love him the way some of you do. So how did he do in this role?

Frankly, I really quite liked him as John Harrison. The character wasn't amazingly well developed, but I liked the performance. He was showy, he was arrogant, more than a little flamboyant, and inefficient in kinda an awesome villain way. I liked him as the bad guy. But then they go ahead and do what I was really hoping they wouldn't, and make him Khan. Unfortunately, that reveal is followed immediately by a reveal of his motivations, and suddenly he's not the villain anymore. I've already complained about that, though. My real complaint with the performance is that as soon as it's revealed that he's Khan, I couldn't help but compare him to the original. And this is where fan service can stab you in the back, folks.

Cumberbatch just isn't as good as Montalban.

Don't worry, he's as surprised as you are.

I mean, his Khan isn't as good as Montalban's, I guess. Like I said, Cumberbatch is a fine actor, and he does voice work particularly well. But I found his flamboyance, loud arrogance and showmanship to be less satisfying than the calm, cool and collected arrogance of Montalban's Khan. He felt a little like a child throwing a tantrum, reacting to things around him instead of controlling them like you would expect a genius of Khan's caliber to do. He just doesn't feel as smart as Khan should be. Stronger? Sure. You barely get to see anything of Khan's strength or personal combat prowess in The Wrath of Khan. But strength and beating people up isn't all that great. Spock does that. Kirk does that. So Khan is stronger than Kirk and about even with Spock. So what? Montalban's Khan was smarter than both of them, and that's what made him truly devious.

Transporting torpedoes onto your ship without checking to see if they're armed? That's right, it's Khan the Easily Bamboozled!

So maybe part of that problem is the way the character was written, but at the very least, Cumberbatch's performance, while good, pales in comparison with Montalban's. And that's the crux of the whole issue. If they hadn't called this guy Khan, that comparison would never have existed, and Cumberbatch's performance would have probably seemed much better. But sadly, once that comparison is made, it cannot be unmade, and as such Into Darkness will never have the villain it could have had.

Especially considering that Khan isn't actually the villain until the last fifteen minutes. I mean, seriously. Him turning into the bad guy is basically an afterthought.

So, there it is. The good and the bad of Into Darkness. The only thing left is to give it a ranking. So, without further delay, this is my list of all of the Star Trek movies in order from best to worst. Hope you enjoyed the ride, I sure did!

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Star Trek Into Darkness

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