Star Trek Into Deeply Mixed Feelings, a review

[usernamenumber]

(no spoilers until you're warned about them further down...)

There seem to be a lot of strongly mixed feelings about Star Trek Into Darkness (man, I still wince a little every time I say that title...). A lot of people really liked it, even loved it, and a lot of people seem to have left the theater reeling in a "wtf was that?" sort  of way, and not the good kind. Me, I'm embracing the power of "and": I thought Star Trek Into Darkness was a deeply, sometimes insultingly stupid movie... that I enjoyed despite all that, and kinda wouldn't mind seeing again, which frankly confuses me.

I think it's the cast. I love this cast. My main take-away from the first movie was that I would love to see that cast in a better movie, and I felt double that after this movie. A co-worker mentioned how she'd love to see the weekly TV series adventures of this crew and yes. That. Also, while it does nothing to address the issues with Benedict Cumberbatch's character (which I won't get into here because spoilers, but about which everything has already been said for those who care to look), he does do a damn fine job of it. I still haven't seen Sherlock, but I'm told that his characterization in this movie is not that different from his characterization there... which means I'm kind of afraid to watch Sherlock now. But I digress.

Basically, why did I not like this movie? Why might I go so far as to say I hated it? It's not nerd rage; they actually had a lot of nice callbacks to the original series that I thoroughly enjoyed. No, it's because I'm pretty sure J.J. Abrams thinks I'm an idiot. To talk about why I think that, along with some other reasons why overall I liked the movie despite myself, we need to take a Star Trek Into Spoilers, so from here on you've been warned.








....








Let me (attempt to) count the ways...

• I touched on this last night, but seriously, during the entire production process for this movie nobody once said "umm... by the way, 'cold fusion' is actually already a term, and it doesn't mean 'thing you can throw into a volcano to make everything instantly freeze". I mean, someone must have said that... right? And yet, there it is. I can only conclude that J.J. Abrams thinks I'm an idiot.


• I know it's a peaceful utopia and all, but  this means not only can you fly a gunship into the heart of the capital and open fire on the equivalent of the Pentagon with nary a sign of prior detection, let alone response, but a friggin space battle can happen 1000km from earth, causing not one but two ships to go plummeting into the atmosphere again with no intervention and apparently first being noticed by people on the ground who proceed to stare at one of them as it hurtles toward them? J.J. Abrams must think I'm an idiot.


• Oh, and speaking of Kahn's attack on Federation HQ, he can turn a building into a crater a mile wide with a ring and a glass of water, but when he wants to kill a room full of people he doesn't just have an explosive he can lob in there instead of haphazardly trying to shoot everyone individually? But hey who cares about character when EXTENDED GUNFIGHT SEQUENCE! AMIRITE?! ...is what I would say if I was an idiot.


• That super-secret dreadnought that the secretive admiral has been secretly working on in secret for the past several super-secret years? There's a model of it on his desk. This isn't a thing I noticed on a second viewing or anything, J.J. Arbams is just way less subtle than he seems to think he is, and/or thinks I'm an idiot.


• ...but then apparently security is not really their strong suit, since it seems you can also just waltz up to their Super Secret Space Facility For Doing Secret Things and not only poke around, but join a convoy going into it by casually inserting your shuttle between two other ships without anyone so much as batting an eye. But hey, who notices minor details like that? J.J. Abrams must think I'm an... eh, you get the idea.


• ...and let's talk about the admiral's daughter for a moment. Imagine you grew up in the shadow of a father whom you loved and regarded as a role model (and who apparently made a policy of giving his daughter access to all the projects on which he worked-- wtf?). Then, in the course of just a few hours, you not only learn that he is a deeply flawed, even evil and homicidal man, but then watch him be brutally murdered just a few feet away from you. What a crushing, life-changing experience! Imagine the trauma, the months and years of slowly piecing back together your shattered sense of self, the-- oh wait, nevermind; she's back to flirting with Kirk, and doesn't even wince when he says "welcome to the family". But hey, we got to see her in her underwear for no particular reason, so it's all good, right idiotsmen? In a way this makes me sadder than all the other ones. There could have been a whole movie's worth of drama there, of character. But no, from the moment she first appeared on screen I was afraid she'd be mainly there because boobs, and she was.

Aaand I could go on, but you get the idea. It seems like Abrams' big lithmus test for whether something should happen is "hey, wouldn't it be awesome if...", with whether or not it actually makes any damn sense a secondary concern. Maybe this seems like nit picking, and maybe it is; but there are so many nits, and some of them are so mind bogglingly, even insultingly, dumb that the whole movie gets pulled down, nibbled to death by cats, to borrow a phrase from another series.

And yet somehow I came out having really enjoyed the experience. I think part of it is that, as I said above, I really do love this cast, and I don't just mean my mancrush on Simon Pegg (which was, I must admit, redoubled by this movie). Everyone seems to have grown into their roles even more than the last time, particularly Kirk and Spock. I was a bit lukewarm about them in the first movie, but their characterization and chemistry in this one was just perfect, plus Uhura gets to be more of a badass, Karl Urban seems to still be dabbling in the occult, which is the only way I can account for his ability to channel the ghost of DeForest Kelley, and I just want to pat poor Chekov on the head and tell him everything's gonna be ok. I would love to see what would happen if, say, you had this cast in a movie with dialogue by Abrams and everything else (plot, consistency, etc) by JMS. Bonus points if it involves the Indiana Jones stunt from the beginning of this movie coming back to bite them in the ass in interesting ways.

There were also little bits of fan service that I enjoyed, like what appeared to be a Deltan on the bridge (even seated where Ilia sat in the original movie, iirc), references to "the Mudd incident" (which I would lovelovelove to have actually seen), etc. Oh, and the fact that the movie, in another example of "J.J. Abrams is not as subtle as he thinks he is", gave me a reason to talk about "Chekov's Tribble" being fired at the end of the play, for which I will be forever grateful. EDIT: Can't believe I forgot to mention this bit, but ok, I was dubious when I realized what they were doing with the big nod to the end of the original Trek II (which I'll be vague about because even if you don't care about spoilers I think it will be more fun as a surprise), but... yeah, I actually rather liked it.

Plus, the movie was fun, despite everything.


A co-worker characterized Star Trek Into Darkness by saying "hey, you like all these puppets, now watch them dance!!", which I think is pretty much spot on. The characters are sufficiently well acted and well written (convenient lapses when "wouldn't it be cool if..." called for it aside) that I found myself satisfied just to watch them do stuff, even when the stuff in question was insultingly dumb.

I kinda hated this movie, but I also kinda loved hating it. If you go see it, it's probably worth seeing in the theater, but if you can do a matinee or something to avoid paying full price, that's probably for the best.

Comments

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I have no opinions on ST-ID (except an old one, namely that as much of a Trek fan as I was growing up, I became done with any of the new stuff when I gave up halfway through Voyager and have not seen/no interest in seeing the reboots. I would like to finish DS9 some day though).

But what I came here to say is that Sherlock is amazing :)

[stormsdotter.livejournal.com]

I also had Issues with the Frozen!Volcano, noticed the mini-ship, and actually yelled at the screen about re-entry burn-up.

I really wish Star Trek wasn't so Science Fiction Lite.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

I remember thinking during the previews, which were obviously tailored for the Star Trek audience, that I would really, really, really like to see just one sci fi movie where the genre was more than an excuse to have an action movie with bigger guns. I think the last one I saw was Moon in 2009. :(

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

Alphonso Cuáron's forthcoming Gravity looks like it might be another entrant in the same genre as Moon.

[contradictacat.livejournal.com]

So...I've noticed that I've started gesturing in theaters when I can't just lean over to my friend and whisper incredulous profanity. Were I not in a crowded theater where flailing about like a muppet on meth would be disapproved of, my arms would still be sore.

Though I do have one last thing to say in "praise" of the movie. Imagine if Sisko et. al. got the Sooper Seekrit Dreadnought instead of the Defiant. <3 the Defiant, but imagine how badass it would have been if the Dreadnought had been its ancestor.

[tpau]

i foudn the reversed-role scene to be... ghoulish

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

Can you elaborate on that?

[tpau]

not sure... with kirk and spock's roles reversed from what they were in Wrath of Khan... it was like watching someone sucking a body dry and then i dunno wearing it as a sick parody. it was just like... wrong and i felt like a bad person watching :P

[taerowyn.livejournal.com]

Agreed. This part in particular felt like JJ Abrams' pointy elbow hitting you in the side with a "*wink wink* did you see what I did there? Cause it's a separate timeline....remember? Did you get that? Huh? Huh? Did you get it?

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

I was with it up until the "KHAAAAN!" bit. Prior to that, I felt like it actually worked with the story and characters enough that, while I can see the "nuge nuge"-ness of it being annoying, the fact that it actually did work made my response to the nudging be one of "hey, yeah, that is kinda cool what you did there". Well, ok, at the time it was "ok, I see what you're doing here. Please don't fuck this up", which I didn't feel like they did, until we got to the very end, and Spock was all like this. :\

(...well, ok, maybe literally kicking the ship into submission was a bit much, too. ;)

[juldea.livejournal.com]

STID was a horrible Trek film and a reasonably good dumb-action-movie. It had great amounts of Star Trek fanservice and little to no Star Trek "heart". (See JJA's interview on Colbert for more of this.) I had a good time watching it, enjoyed myself even, but really do not want the Star Trek name on it. (Though Chekov's Tribble, yes yes.)

I know you want to not talk about the nod at the end, but can I? I have many thoughts about it.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

"STID was a horrible Trek film and a reasonably good dumb-action-movie"

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

...unfortunately, I remember saying almost exactly that about First Contact, and have for just about every Trek movie since. :(

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

STID was a horrible Trek film and a reasonably good dumb-action-movie. It had great amounts of Star Trek fanservice and little to no Star Trek "heart".

Yeah. All through the movie I kept feeling that I'd seen it before, just with different actors and different special effects. Who needs character development when you can blow something up to move the plot along, and who needs that plot to make sense when those explosions are big enough?

I diagnosed the first Trek reboot movie as a little bit too in love with the series's mythology, although I still liked it, and I had hoped that the second movie would move further away and take the series in a new direction while retaining the original's essential themes. Sadly it appears that hope was misplaced.

[audioboy.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I'm simple-minded, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, warts and all.

As to the cold fusion weapon, I have seen this same term used for similar devices in other SF. In name only, it's an accurate description. You could also make the argument that Photon Torpedo is also wildly unscientific, but we let it go.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

But... but... it's an actual thing.

I'm not as hung up on it as I might sound, but... I mean, if multiple scifi books for some reason used... idunno, "microscope", not just in a dubious or unrealistic way, but to mean "bomb that makes everything get smaller when it explodes", to me it wouldn't legitimize that meaning of the word, it would just mean that there are a lot of authors using that it in an embarrassingly ignorant way.

Spot on!

[stever777.livejournal.com]

I was so engrossed in the cast and their dynamics that I didn't really scan that hard for plot realism (though the "cold fusion" were extreme enough that it suspended my suspension of disbelief, I was outraged, then I re-instated my suspension of disbelief).

I found the excessive callbacks to earlier movies fun at first, but by the end, it was too much. I would like to have seen more original plot.

In short, I agree with your assessment, though I don't know that I expect anything approaching plot from a Star Trek movie. But you're right--how awesome would it be if they actually provided some plot!?!?!

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Just chiming in to say "yes".

Also, I'm really intrigued by how emotional the men all were. Crying--Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty...did I miss anyone?--and talking about their feelings whenever they weren't wailing away on each other. And Khan as a homicidal Mama Bear. Comparing them to the original version of their characters is fascinating.

There were a lot of fun moments, but the stoopid was rampant and the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

You know, that's a really good point about the emotionality of the men. Maybe that's another reason why the characters and characterizations did so much to make up for the... rest, for me.

[taerowyn.livejournal.com]

Saw it this afternoon (matinee per your advisement) and had discussed with friends that I'd heard it was "Stupid but enjoyable" (at that point I hadn't read your spoilers...gotta say that's a pretty spot on review. I was mostly glossing over the smaller stupids, sneaking into convoys and the like, but the last 40 minutes or so was pure stupid-engine, full speed ahead. I just...really?

And, as mentioned above, the heavy-handed "see, it's the same...but DIFFERENT!" of the one scene set-up was just beyond ridiculous. Almost the definition of you're trying too hard. If he's all that enamored of a separate timeline, he should go with a separate frickin timeline and be done with it. I'm fine with the main plot point/character overlap, but the winking references were getting old and that one scene especially was just aggravating to the extreme.

End result = glad I went, but unlike the first one, I don't see me owning this.

Also, OMG watch Sherlock. So good.

Also, also...you know Dylan Moran is coming to town, y/y? http://www.thewilburtheatre.com/content/press-release-dylan-moran-wilbur

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

I did! I actually have one of his standup routines on DVD. I'm not sure I liked it enough to want to go see him live, but if you ever want to lose any illusions you might have had the Moran was just acting on Black Books, go watch his standup. Apparently he and Bernard are basically the same person. ;)

[manana.livejournal.com]

I know it's a peaceful utopia and all, but this means not only can you fly a gunship into the heart of the capital and open fire on the equivalent of the Pentagon with nary a sign of prior detection, let alone response, but a friggin space battle can happen 1000km from earth, causing not one but two ships to go plummeting into the atmosphere again with no intervention and apparently first being noticed by people on the ground who proceed to stare at one of them as it hurtles toward them? J.J. Abrams must think I'm an idiot.

In fairness, this is arguably more realistic. We have to imagine that security of this type is largely automated, and all ships involved would have been transmitting appropriate authorization codes, as it were. Remember, it's not that the military failed to respond to civilian spaceships; the enterprise and the other ship are the (types of) military ships that would be sent to respond.

Khan's gunship escapades are arguably less believable, but between "having the access codes" and "he's a supergenius with top military clearance" (because remember he did work with the general), I think it's basically defensible, if somewhat tenuously.


Oh, and speaking of Kahn's attack on Federation HQ, he can turn a building into a crater a mile wide with a ring and a glass of water, but when he wants to kill a room full of people he doesn't just have an explosive he can lob in there instead of haphazardly trying to shoot everyone individually?

Given what we know of Khan's character, though, doesn't this actually make pretty decent sense? He seems like the personally-pull-the-trigger type on a vendetta, especially if it involves having to jump through ludicrously improbable hoops first (thereby demonstrating his vast superiority). Blowing up the library was strategic, so a bomb made the most sense; but going after HQ was personal, hence the personal touch. At least that's what I thought.

The part that didn't make so much sense to me was that the guns on the ship he used had manual targeting in the first place, but that's a tech problem, and we already knew that Abrams is no tech buff.

Also speaking of tech problems, GRAVITY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. GOODNIGHT. "Orbit" doesn't mean "tenuously suspended from plummeting toward Earth by active tech dependent on the ship's power systems." That descent would have taken hours at least, and more likely weeks.

[shadowravyn.livejournal.com]

...Why did they need Khan's blood for Jim? THERE WERE 72 POPSICLES ALL RIGHT THERE. THEY COULDN'T HAVE TAKEN SOME BLOOD FROM ANYONE OF THEM?

At first, I assumed that Abrams thought I was an idiot, and then I realized that Khan was the only one whose midichlorians had had sufficient time to wake up and be magic. *Nodnodnod*