Escape to the Movies: Star Trek: Into Darkness

[Yoshisummons]

Those references do nothing except make people like you feel like this is the genuine article. It's fool's gold. Mimicking aspects of other movies or episodes or tropes does enough for the people who know OF "Star Trek" and makes them feel like they are part of "the club", but because they mimic without understanding, appreciating, or even caring about the "original", it does a complete disservice to the movie itself by weakening its own integrity while also insulting the actual fans.

Thank you for saying this so eloquently and in better words than I ever could.

 

[irishda]

This movie was everything I wanted it to be.
A fun science-fiction action-romp with a likeable cast, great cinematography, a great score, good performances all-around, some throwbacks to the "original" even complete and utter dolts like me can understand...

And there goes every ounce of credibility you were trying to have. That last bit is exactly the sort of bullshit Bob was talking about. Those references do nothing except make people like you feel like this is the genuine article. It's fool's gold. Mimicking aspects of other movies or episodes or tropes does enough for the people who know OF "Star Trek" and makes them feel like they are part of "the club", but because they mimic without understanding, appreciating, or even caring about the "original", it does a complete disservice to the movie itself by weakening its own integrity while also insulting the actual fans.

SNIP FOR PROMETHEUS COMPLAINING EVEN THOUGH RIDLEY SAID THERE WERE SEVERAL STORIES BETWEEN PROMETHEUS AND ALIEN

So this movie may have been fun, but believe me, sir. This is a BAFFLINGLY stupid movie. It just tricked you into thinking it wasn't.

You know, I sort of compare reactions like this to how I felt about the movie Troy. I loved the mythology and there's some great modernized story versions out there. And I've often wondered if knowing how the story was supposed to unfold made me hate the movie (except for Brad Pitt's stupid "jump attack" of course). But I realized two things.
1: The movie missed one of the central points of the myth, that Paris was a bad person (and indeed the entire war was started) because he broke the sacred bond between host and guest. It tossed it aside and let him live because in today's world we have "anything done in the name of love is good and pure."
2: That's not what this Star Trek is.

This is not just a straight remake of Star Trek 2, unless my memory of what happens in Wrath of Khan is just completely wrong. I have no idea why any nods to the inspiration incite so much anger, except perhaps out of some sort of belief that the new will override the old (although if anyone actually remembers the acting in WoK, you won't find that to be a terrible notion). I especially don't know why the nods to stupid little crap in the Marvel movies give Bob so much joy, causing him to write several articles pointing out everything, but the nods in this one just make him angry and resentful. There is no "genuine" Star Trek. There's just Star Trek movies for better or worse.

Consequently, it never fails how ironic it strikes me that geek culture likes to pretend it's this all inclusive group for people maligned by the more popular, exclusive cliques; only to react with anger that people are trying to get into their "club" without the proper credentials.

 

[Ishal]

Here's what I don't get, but what someone might explain to me:
What was it that was appealing about the first reboot Star Trek movie, that people liked and thought was good?

As a trekkie I personally loathed it, but I've heard one guy say that it was about friendship, like TOS relationship between Spock and Kirk, which I think is a good point.
Other than that though, what do people see in J. J. Abrams' work?


For me, Star Trek has always been about our role in the future. I liked Enterprise because it was for a while, a bit more believable and had some interesting problems and challenges(although most of it was fairly shit, there were things to think about).
I don't get any such sort of vibe from the new reboot. It seems like a shitload of references and action scenes, led by mostly uninteresting actors who have no class, no style and no unique aspects to them.
The original Kirk, Picard, Sisko and even Janeway and Archer all had quirks, flaws, personal style and class to them. You could actually imagine having them as a superior officer or even as a captain. For those who've served or been in shipping, you know what I mean. It takes a strong, capable and charismatic person to be a good captain and you feel that you can put your faith in them almost immediately.

Chris Pine seems to have none of those qualities.

Not a hardcore trekkie here but I think a lot of trekkies wanted to latch onto something in the first reboot that gave them justification to continue investing themselves in the franchise.

Ultimately, I don't see how any "true" trekkie can stomach much of these newer movies. I say this because of genre.

Star Trek was never about firefights and starship battles as big centerpiece events. Its not like Star Wars. Its talky/techy/philosophical. One of the biggest themes in Star Trek is the Federation's Prime Directive. You know you are a trekkie, and more importantly a nerd, when you'd trade one of those big action scenes for a shot of Piccard lecturing his crew on the philosophical and moral implications of the Prime Directive.

But that isn't what you are going to get in one of these movies. What you will get is what will draw in a summer crowd looking for CGI action and machismo dude-bro humor (the furthest thing from what star trek was btw).

The quirks, flaws, and charisma you speak of is fleshed out in all the previous captains numerous encounters with aliens, criminals, and all the other arcs that happened in the Star Trek TV shows. I don't believe there is enough time or effort put forth in a movie to capture that. I don't think it can be carried over into a movie.

 

[Shirokurou]

Not an ST hardcore fan. Actually only ever caught the movies on cable and out of order.

I actually came into this movie totally unspoiled and liked the hell out of it.
I didn't see the references as fanservice, but more of a alt. reality version, an Elseworlds tale.

So I say, screw Bob's fanboy extremism and actually give it a watch. It has action moments, has some slow tension moments. And the characters act pretty intelligently in the tactical ship-to-ship battle.

 

[Daft Time]

Poor delivery of a political discussion and little-to-no character development? I'm not sure why you hate this Bob - it sounds exactly like Star Trek! Next we'll get poor delivery of a philosophical concept to top it all off and we'll be right back where we started.

I didn't actually like the previous movie in the reboot, but it's not exactly got much to live up too. As someone who had seen many, many science fiction films and television series before coming in to watch Star Trek I'm going to let you guys in on something - Star Trek only holds up as the predecessor to shows which would go on to do it better. If this movie is twice as bad as it is, it'll hardly be dragging the series down.

That said, it's not a decent excuse for the movie to execute such idea poorly. As I've said, we've had so many series come in and improve what Star Trek did by leaps and bounds. Why couldn't the reboot do it? Well, it's the man in charge of the affair but that's not quite my point here.

/rant

 

[The Great JT]

Y'know what card they SHOULD have pulled? "Hey, turns out the Klingons are pretty nice and helpful. Those other alien races they conquered? They openly threatened the Klingons, got their asses kicked and are now subservient to the Klingons! Perhaps diplomacy CAN work!"

Wouldn't that have been a better idea than "Let's rip off Star Trek 2 and pray we're even a sliver as good as them even though anyone with a fraction of a brain cell would know we aren't."

 

[RikuoAmero]

I fully agree with Bob here, this movie and the one before it are incredibly stupid. By throwing in all sorts of references to the show, they're trying to appeal to long-time fans, but failing by having everyone act so moronic.
Yes, there have been episodes and movies in the Star Trek franchise that are stupid and moronic (Final Frontier, anyone?) but on the whole, there is a fair degree of intelligence amongst the characters.

SPOILER alert, don't continue to read this if you don't want to spoil the movie.

Below is a list of things that I can recall (it's been 5 days now since I've seen it) that are completely off the wall stupid. As in, if these people were real, and actually did these actions, they would rightly be dragged before some sort of tribunal and discharged.

1)Kirk being captain of the Enteprise. He is far too young and inexperienced to be a captain. He stops one bad guy, and suddenly that means he's fully capable of running a starship of 400+ crewmembers? Of conducting intersteller diplomacy? Shatner-Kirk got the chair at 29, but only after he'd already been an officer and had earned numerous decorations and awards.

2)The Enterprise at the start of the movie is underwater. Why? The Enterprise is a STARShip, as in, a ship that travels through space. No reason is given for why Kirk felt it necessary to submerge his ship, especially given the Prime Directive: he parked it barely a couple miles from a primitive tribe. No, the only reason I can fathom is one that violates cause and effect: Kirk had to park it underwater, so that he could get in trouble for violating the Prime Directive, leading to conflict between him and Admiral Pike, which is unresolved at the time of Pike's death. In other words, the character in universe had no motivation, no reason to do so, only an impetus that comes from beyond the fourth wall.

3)We're told that this new Kirk and Spock are friends, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. In fact, it reminds me a lot of what happened with the Star Wars prequels: Obi-wan in the original trilogy said that he and Anakin were great friends, but the prequels never displayed any evidence of this. The characters say they're friends, but never actually display friendship: they're always bickering and being annoyed with each other.

4)Scotty is either the world's greatest infiltrator or Admiral Marcus has the worst security ever. Scotty is told a set of co-ordinates by Kirk, flies out in a small ship (important point to remember here, is that no-one knows about cloaking technology, since the Romulan cloaking device has not yet been shown in the Abrams-verse) and flies in to Marcus's shipyard by employing the ninja technique...of slipping in amongst a line of similar shuttles. Given that this is a secret shipyard, where Starfleet's biggest bad-ass warship is being built, you'd think that at the very least, Scotty would have had to provide some sort of ID upon disembarking. There is no way for Scotty to have gotten past security like this, as he was not told what he was supposed to have been looking for, therefore he wouldn't have had counterfeit ID set up beforehand.

5)The fact Harrison is Khan doesn't actually mean anything. It's used as a reference to a much better movie, meaning that those who know who Khan is will only be constantly reminded of a much better movie, while for those who don't know...it doesn't actually mean anything to them. Also, the time frame given by Khan is unrealistic to say the least. If I recall the details correctly, Khan says he was woken up by Marcus sometime between the previous movie and this one. Darkness takes place a year after the first movie. In that time, Khan was woken up, learned and mastered sciences and technologies centuries ahead of what he was used to and in fact, improved upon them? What type of genius is he? We're told the Enterprise bridge officers are all geniuses: why is it that they, who have lived with this level of technology all their lives and understand it intimately are unable to provide the same level of advancement that Khan has? Imagine if...today da Vinci or Edison or Tesla woke up today. Would you honestly expect them to learn and master all the advancements in science since their deaths and not only that, but to improve on them, all in less than a year?

6)No-one at Starfleet questioned Marcus's orders to launch 72 missiles onto the Klingon Homeworld (by the way, I noticed that it's moon, Praxis, is already in pieces, even though in the original series, that happened in 2293 due to over-mining. Here, there's no explanation given when we see half a moon). No-one wondered why Marcus basically said to provoke a war. The movie implies that amongst the top brass at Starfleet, it was Marcus alone who was plotting the militarization of Starfleet. No-one says in that emergency meeting "Hey, Marcus, why the torpedoes? Isn't a stealth team enough? Do you, the head of Starfleet in a peaceful and democratic federation, want a war with the Klingons?" Imagine if today, a terrorist bomber well bombs a US military base, flees to say Iran and the President says to a ship captain, send in a squad to apprehend him, but if you fail, bomb him. In fact, uber-bomb him, it's just unpopulated territory of a sovereign nation that is just itching for an excuse to declare war, to say we're the bad guys who launched a massive unprovoked attack on an independent nation.

7)Were Marcus's bridge officers all as insane as he was? Did his first officer not wonder why Marcus is deliberately firing on the Enterprise? Did no-one think to stage a mutiny against a man who has just calmly stated he is going to destroy a ship full of loyal Starfleet officers and start a war? I can understand if the officers believed or were convinced that war with the Klingons was inevitable, so might as well build all this weaponry and attack them first, but that's a far cry from also not caring when your commanding officer shoots a sister ship and kills fellow officers and personnel. In fact, Riker's captain on the Pegasus suffered a mutiny when his crew realized that what he was doing could violate a treaty with the Romulans and provoke a war.

8)The battle between Enterprise and the Vengeance takes place in orbit around Earth. That's right, this film has repeated the now legendary mistakes of certain other movies where it seems that the Enterprise is the only ship in Starfleet. No other ships are dispatched to find out just what is going on. No one on the Enterprise even thinks of attempting to contact Starfleet or the Federation Council or the media or anything. If they had, Starfleet would have sent a group of ships, disabled both the Enterprise and Vengeance and taken both Marcus and Kirk in for questioning.

9)McCoy injecting Khan's blood into a dead tribble. Why? Do doctors, upon finding someone with unusual blood, inject it into dead animals as a standard research procedure? Did he know beforehand that Khan's blood can resurrect the dead? If so, why don't more people use such blood?

That's all I can think about off the top of my head.

 

[irishda]

Here's what I don't get, but what someone might explain to me:
What was it that was appealing about the first reboot Star Trek movie, that people liked and thought was good?

As a trekkie I personally loathed it, but I've heard one guy say that it was about friendship, like TOS relationship between Spock and Kirk, which I think is a good point.
Other than that though, what do people see in J. J. Abrams' work?

Abrams is kind of all over the board in terms of both content and quality. But that says to me that he makes what he cares about, and doesn't pigeon-hole himself into a specific style like Whedon (fast-talking, witty characters...every...single...one of them; and at least one kinda-major-but-still-minor character dies) or Tarantino(grindhouse schlock). Apart from the obvious lens flare jokes, there's not a lot of similarity between all of Abrams projects in terms of themes. He does do good even great work, despite what Bob would have you believe. I haven't seen Alias or Felicity, but there are more than enough fans of both. Super 8 and M:I3 were both fun. And Lost? Despite the rather contrived turns the plot went through, Lost still stands as one of the best character dramas ever on TV. I'll put the individual character arcs on Lost (especially John Locke's) over those on Mad Men, Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, even Game of Thrones.

I think that's really where Abrams shines. He's good at creating great characters, and I certainly felt a lot more personality from the new Star Trek characters (especially the big 4: Spock, Kirk, McCoy, and Scotty) than I ever did with the OG series. Abrams could still stand to benefit from a co-writer though for things like plot structure, of course.

 

[RikuoAmero]

On it's own with a tweak here and there it is a good movie but because it requires an underlying level of original Trek knowledge for 'the big plot twist' to make any sense it is actually an all right movie.

It then wanders off in to being a bad movie when it takes established Trek techlore and starts to not only piss on that but some how manages to piss on Trek lore that the first reboot movie itself had a go at pissing on. If anyone cares I can explain what Trek tech it pisses on but for now I'll skip it.

Has everyone forgotten that the reboot doesn't affect the continuity of the original Star Trek by any means? Alternate timelines have always been present in the Star Trek universe (especially prominent in DS:9), so the original universe with the original Kirk and Spock and Picard and Riker and Janeway and Chakotay and Sisko and Worf is ALL STILL THERE AND UNAFFECTED BY THIS TIMELINE!

It was established in the very opening scene of Star Trek 2009 that this timeline was different, altered by the presence of Nero, so anything and everything different (physics, technology, character traits, how certain races looked) can all be chalked up to "Nero fucked it up."

I don't know why it's so hard for other Trek fans to see this...

If my memory serves me correctly, Nero went back in time, destroyed one ship, caused Kirk to grow up without his real dad, then went, hid and was completely silent for twenty odd years. And somehow, that was enough to alter physics (how does one alter the laws of physics?) and how certain races looked?

 

[DarkhoIlow]

I stopped half way when the spoilers were about to it.

I'm going to watch this movie tomorrow and by God I won't get spoiled by anyone. I will keep the decision to myself although most of the reviews I've seen were positive. We shall see about that...

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

What does NVP stand for? Something something protagonist?

He meant to say MVP=Most valuable player, a colloquialism of sorts that means 'best' or 'most interesting'.

 

[Uri]

hmm, I did not know that the spoiler was a secret, I thought he and the film were advertised a being "hey were are re-doing the one with SPOILER, and we casted the sherlock holmes guy to play him!"

 

[Erttheking]

Eh, whatever. I still thought that it was a pretty enjoyable movie.

 

[JarinArenos]

Transformers will likely stop sucking if it is done by someone other than Michael Bay. Same thing with Star Trek/ Jeffrey Jacob Abrams.

I say hand both to Joss Whedon.

Joss can only handle so many movies and shows at once, man! Otherwise, I'm sure he'd already be handling the entire Marvel-side lineup.

But yeah, god there's a lack of good directors out there for this sort of thing...

 

[Dastardly]

I would opine that this review could have been done spoiler-free and still delivered your message:

This movie attempts a twist that is hardly surprising, and really serves not to "twist" much of any consequence. The big reveal attempts to connect the movie with on of the earlier Trek movies, but not in any significant way. It's less of a "twist" and more of an empty "nod."

Nothing spoiled, but it's made clear that the "big twist" is really not much of a thing. I can understand not wanting to accidentally recommend this movie by inadvertently overplaying the twist (the way the trailers did), but this suitably takes some of the wind out of those sails while still allowing it to remain a review.

Putting a spoiler in the review, even with due warning, leads things to one of two destinations: it's either a "review" that's intended to be read only after viewing (in which case the "see it/don't see it" thing is somewhat moot), or it's a negative review that is openly trying to sway "on-the-fencers" by actually interfering with their enjoyment -- a bit too "meta" for my tastes. (After all, you mentioned the Iron Man spoiler, but you saved the actually spoiling for Big Picture...)

End of the world? Of course not. But it blurs the lines between "review" and "critique," and makes it hard for me, as a viewer, to know the purpose of this show.

 

[chiefohara]

The reason you liked this film is because you're not a Trekkie. Only non-Trekkies could enjoy it because that's what Abrams wanted. You can't make money unless you pander to the larger audience and not a niche, and Abrams is a Jew after all.

Way to be randomly anti-semitic, jackass!

Ya well, if Shakespeare and South Park can do it then so can I. Historical stereotyping is great.

Shakespeare did it to highlight the stupidity of mindless prejudice, the same way south park largely does.

Im guessing you were trying to do something similar with the narrowmindedness of fanboyism here, but it was too much of a reach... instead of highlighting and reinforcing the point you just came across as anti-semitic.

 

[Stabby Joe]

Anyone else knew Bob would really hate this film?

I don't hate it, far from it, overall enjoying it even. HOWEVER I do see where he is coming from in several regards, in summery the fact I know Into Darkness is just constantly shouting out to Wrath of Khan makes it inferior to it's predecessor. You don't need to have even seen Wrath of Khan for that the be an issue.

Although I don't get Bob thinking this film is hanging on political overtone from a decade ago... sometimes it feels like hating for the sake of it.

EDIT: BTW I did slap myself I yell out HE WAS ROBOCOP! THAT'S WHERE I REMEMBER HIM FROM! during this review.