Star Trek: Into Darkness

[Darth Wedgius]

This is the only Trek movie I regret seeing. I saw ST:TMP, ST:V, Nemesis, Insurrection, and I enjoyed those to some degree. I enjoyed ST(2009) as a sci-fi/action film. I think Nemesis had the best space battle seen in a Trek movie, for example.

I hear that Abrams regretted a lot of Into Darkness and if it helped him to leave the franchise, I can't think of a better reason.

I can't add to everyone else's talk of this being a pale, nay, fetid imitation of Wrath of Khan -- coals to Newcastle and all that. And I'll ignore the anti-drone-strike message that may have been there or specifically looking for a white Khan, because there are threads for politics already, and those threads are 99.999% useless anyhow.

Just look at the "revenge is wrong" part. You know, the supposed message of the film. I don't like message movies where the circumstances prove the message right because of some unexpected side effect, and this movie aims for that... and then does worse.

If, after they took the battleship bridge, Kirk had shot Khan on kill and kept shooting until even super-Khan is dead (Kirk is "emotionally compromised"), they would have saved Admiral Marcus and tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives in San Francisco. Kirk's speech at the end would be, "Revenge isn't the Starfleet way, but it really should be because it's teh awesome."

If your message movie fails that badly in its central message, it's really not a good sign. And that wasn't the worst part of this movie, just one not covered much. Hiding a cruiser vs. battleship fight just outside lunar orbit would be like hiding a cruiser vs. battleship fight nowadays because it's a few miles off the coast of D.C. WTF writers? Did you take “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" as a challenge?

I won't cover others because Chuck might cover them, but I don't think he has enough time to list all of them. Given the average human lifespan, that is. If you add all the various ways this movie sucked you could turn Vulcan into a black hole all over again. I wouldn't use this script as toilet paper because that would do a disservice to my ass. Digital copies of this movie are one comparison operator short of being the anti-life equation. Did I mention that I did not like this movie? I might be being too subtle.

That said, sincerely, there must be good parts to this movie, and some people enjoy it, and that's great. Everyone's different, and, even when we all see the same positives and negatives, we weigh them differently.

[Makeshift Python]

Roberto Orci is a pretty outspoken 9/11 truther, so seeing that bleed into his writing wasn't too much of a surprise. This is why Kirk was written to be very insubordinate in the first two movies because there was an anti-authority trend in a lot of post-9/11 films, with heroes defying the corrupt government, like the Jason Bourne series (ULTIMATUM being a huge hit at the time ST09 was written and filmed).

I recall Chuck’s reaction over this film when it initially came out being “it’s fine” in a neutral way. Not terrible, but not great either. I look forward to seeing how he feels about it after all these years.

I thought it was better than ST09 just for addressing Kirk’s promotion to captain being questioned alone and taking him down a peg. It didn’t execute that idea in a way that I thought was satisfactory, but it at least had something more substantial to it than ST09. Even though Cumberbatch was a terrible miscast, he was more fun to watch than the boring Nero.

I am curious what he thinks of the potential of this story if it was much less of a homage.

No Kirk death scene and KHAAAAAAAAANNNNNN!!!!!!!!!

No Deus Ex Nimoy Spock.

When I was watching the scene in theaters for the first time, I was actually going with it by the strength of Pine and Quinto's performances, especially once they veered away from familiar dialogue to "I'm scared, Spock" as Kirk dies. For that brief moment, the film actually had me... and then the filmmakers made Quinto scream "KHAN" and ruined whatever good that scene had going.

[Worffan101]

If you add all the various ways this movie sucked you could turn Vulcan into a black hole all over again. I wouldn't use this script as toilet paper because that would do a disservice to my ass. Digital copies of this movie are one comparison operator short of being the anti-life equation.

You're being unfair to the anti-life equation. It's better than Into Whiteness, a movie with a "subtle" message of "9/11 was an inside job and while it's good to nuke the Hell out of anyone who happens to live on the same planet as the people who did 9/11, only since it was an inside job that means we shouldn't do that and should instead reveal the TRUTH!!!!!1! to the world, which everybody will instantly believe because the government is made up entirely of cartoon villains".

My god I fucking hate this movie. I hate this movie more than I hate Donald Trump. Watching Into Whiteness is like giving myself an enema with liquid nitrogen. Thinking about Into Whiteness is like scouring my eye sockets with a Brillo pad. Watching the "spock shouts khaaaaaan" scene is like feeding my dick into a sausage grinder.

And the scene with Alice Eve in her underwear is so bad, if you could remove it from the movie, refine its essence, and send it to Russia as a weapon, every person on the entire Eurasian continent would go violently insane and kill themselves like in that new Sandra Bullock movie on Netflix where if you see the monsters you go insane.

[Rocketboy1313]

When I was watching the scene in theaters for the first time, I was actually going with it by the strength of Pine and Quinto's performances, especially once they veered away from familiar dialogue to "I'm scared, Spock" as Kirk dies. For that brief moment, the film actually had me... and then the filmmakers made Quinto scream "KHAN" and ruined whatever good that scene had going.

It is also out of character for Spock. I don't mind him saying "Khan", but it would have been better to show how Spock gets mad is different from how Kirk gets mad.
Kirk yelled "Khan".
Spock should have seethed while quietly saying, "Khan". You know, like a vulcan. Showing that he has done a lot to focus his emotions and anger since the first movie.

[Sir Will]

Huh, I was certain Chuck was going to do The Orville's "Cupid's Arrow". Guess that's next week.

Well with only 1 episode done so far and that being episode 9, there hasn't been enough Orville yet to get to that episode. Depending on how many he does in the marathon and what happens next year, it may get done before that. But I do imagine it'll be his least favorite episode and we'll get another talk about it. Then again, he's covered it so thoroughly I'm not sure what else he'll say but I'm sure he can put a new twist on it. Especially when you have acts where both participants are really victims.

[Enterprising]

In general I thought that the Abrams universe was great on paper but terribly executed. A chance to tell whole new stories with the original characters is not a bad thing, and because this is a separate timeline and not a reboot, nothing from what we loved is lost. We have the old, and we have the new side by side. And if the new fails, hey, you've still got the old there and waiting to love. And that is where *cough* STD failed. But I am not here to talk about that, I am here to talk about how this film KILLED the Abramsverse in retrospect.

Because all of that potential I spoke of about telling new stories with the old characters? They chose a fan favourite who predates Nero's incursion (so already controversial in a controversial series), they gave him a race swap, they cast an actor that could not possibly be more different from Ricardo Montleban,they gave him a different personality, and then they gave him superpowers. The original Khan was stronger and smarter, but believably so...

NO ONE was asking for a reboot of The Wrath of Khan. And where Wrath of Khan was a deeply sentimental journey for characters that we had been following for years; Into Darkness to quote Chuck is ''and they fight, and they fight, and they fight, and they fight...''

I agree the Kelvin timeline had potential, but in the end I don't like any of them, not as Star Trek films anyway. It's now a "popcorn" series of flicks that one watches for a couple of hours, and quickly forgets about it after they leave the movies. The depth, and even charm of it is gone, and all in the name of money and "causal appeal". Now even forgetting that for a minute, the first big mistake this movie made was releasing over 4 years after the last film, long after the buzz fell away. Which always surprised me since it was by far the most successful Star Trek picture at the box office by some distance.

Technically, Cumberbatch wasn't "miscast" as Khan, because to shield his identity he had surgery to change his appearance, voice, and got the name John Harrison to top it off. How do I know this? It's in the comic of course! That's another trend I really don't like these days, in putting vital plot information about a movie into another medium that's not the movie. Which Chuck quite rightly trashes them for doing this with Nero's character in the last film, and I'm sure he will again. It's not the job of the audience to read the comic/book/twitter feed or whatever as a preset for the movie. If it's important, then it needs to be IN the move!

As already has been said, it didn't need to be Khan, it could have indeed just been a guy going rogue. Make it Gary Mitchell at least! If there was going to be an insistence of Khan, they could have at least made a twist were he was genuinely helping out Kirk & Spock, but they actually stab him in the back at the last minute off the word of Spock Prime, and that's what triggers his grudge against Kirk in the Kelvin timeline, and you could use him again in another movie since he's back in an icebox.

It also feels as well they don't really want to harkin back to classic Trek, and are more grudgingly doing it for the sake of reeling in the original fans to pay and watch the thing. It almost seems like they hate doing it and treat it as a ball & chain.

[Makeshift Python]

I don't mind the Trek films veering more into popcorn territory, I just wished the first two films were actually written GOOD. It's very feasible to make a popcorn film smartly written. The one improvement that I thought was a vital component and was what briefly revived Trek in cinema was the jovial energy Abrams brought back. The Star Trek franchise had missed that quality for too long prior to 2009. I just wish they were better written. Imagine if ENTERPRISE had that kind of energy with better defined characters. It wouldn't have bored so many viewers away.

[Yukaphile]

Independence Day is a smart popcorn film. I don't care what Nostalgia Critic says.

[Makeshift Python]

Smartly made, perhaps.

Actually smart? Ehhhhhhhhhhhh...

[SabreMau]

When I was watching the scene in theaters for the first time, I was actually going with it by the strength of Pine and Quinto's performances, especially once they veered away from familiar dialogue to "I'm scared, Spock" as Kirk dies. For that brief moment, the film actually had me... and then the filmmakers made Quinto scream "KHAN" and ruined whatever good that scene had going.

It is also out of character for Spock. I don't mind him saying "Khan", but it would have been better to show how Spock gets mad is different from how Kirk gets mad.
Kirk yelled "Khan".
Spock should have seethed while quietly saying, "Khan". You know, like a vulcan. Showing that he has done a lot to focus his emotions and anger since the first movie.

youtu.be/LUkx26eo7oA