Star Trek: Into Darkness

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Weird, I thought 1 was meh, 2 was incoherent and insulting, 3 was actually creative and clever and I liked how the characters finally acted like they were from the Federation, not from Generic White People Anonymous.

I can understand why 3 got a good reception. The pacing at the crash site and the lead up to the villain stacked nicely.

And with 2 I didn't really care for the initial plot with them running into klingons and Khan. The whole thing with Marcus and his giant ass executor ship was badass. That's not really the meat of the movie though. Kirk's conflict in the first movie is pretty clear. I really felt him going from an ambitious potential to a capable officer. It's dumb how he had all that arrogance, and also that he just became captain. I don't resent his arrogance or anything, I just didn't think it meshed with his sensibilities that great. Anyways seen through his lens it goes from a to b to c to d, etc... I liked all the different set pieces.

I would've appreciated the themes of 2 a lot more if it hadn't been saturated in an incoherent plot and actual 9/11 truther BS (and yes, Charles, it WAS almost certainly 9/11 truther BS, Orci is a "truther" and has pretty openly put his batshit crazy beliefs into his writing before). If you want to do that "government ain't always trustworthy" thing, DS9 already did it far better with Leyton.

How necessary is it to actually equate the story significantly to truther nonsense? I doubt that's what they were going for.

[Rocketboy1313]

Charles, guy, you and I are on opposite sides when it comes to "Beyond".
The only thing I disliked about that movie was Krall. I did not think that character worked at all. Even if I do agree with the idea of "Old Warrior wants to rip down everything because he can't stand peace".

[CharlesPhipps]

Now that I am aware that you are that Phipps, as I have read the synopses of a few of your books and am planing to get a couple audio books soon, I can see why you would weight that as an important part of a movie and why this one would slide up the rankings for you. You are big on theme and I respect that.

I hope you enjoy them and yes, I like my Star Trek to have messages and ideas even if I don't necessarily agree with the messages themselves. Weirdly enough, it's why I love THE VOYAGE HOME as while it's a ridiculous movie (and a FUN one because of it), it's at least trying to say something and says it loudly.

But I have real problems with how the numerous plots and schemes in this movie do not hold up to scrutiny, I dislike how many of the characters act SUPER out of character, and even if it has a message about government grabbing power could be a good one, I do not care for how that message came across.

Speaking as an author, I generally agree there's nothing particularly Khan-like about the story and it hurts for the result. If he was just John Harrison and John Harrison was attempting to prevent a war with the Klingons by assassinating Marcus (and got innocents killed in the process) you have a far more interesting story there.

Mind you, I found the most interesting thing in the movie Khan-wise to be the fight with Khan and Spock because it made me realize those two would be FASCINATING to have as antagonists. Kirk is interesting as a foe for Khan but how does Khan feel about Spock who is objectively both smarter as well as physically more powerful and longer-lived than humans (i.e. superior) but chooses to take orders from Kirk.

The "9/11 was an inside job stuff" seems more obvious to me and it makes me dislike the movie on that level too.

I completely agree any Truther BS is complete shit but the simple fact is that by its very nature of being set in a fictional setting, a certain level of Death of the Author settles in. There's also the fact, again, the Federation has changed in the movie's continuity by already having a 9/11 event take place.

YMMV.

In simple terms, regardless of author intent, the movie's central message is to avoid warmongering and preemptive or retaliatory strikes on flimsy information.

[CharlesPhipps]

Charles, guy, you and I are on opposite sides when it comes to "Beyond".
The only thing I disliked about that movie was Krall. I did not think that character worked at all. Even if I do agree with the idea of "Old Warrior wants to rip down everything because he can't stand peace".

My issues with the movie more or less result from the fact they wanted to quietly sweep the first two under the rug to an extent.

Pine is old enough to be an actual Federation Captain now and none of the plot elements from previous movies are maintained so the criticisms from previous works no longer apply. It could just be a high budget modernized version of the original series which is what many fans wanted in the first place. It's also not a Wrath of Khan remake per se so it does honestly feel like a better movie individually for people who, well, hated the previous two.

The problem is that if you want it to be a trilogy that follows from the previous movies, it's disappointing.

No Louise Marcus, no follow up, just "oh, now we have a new threat!"

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Well there's this thing about movies either being a motion picture or a glorified episode. I feel like they went for both.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

Charles, guy, you and I are on opposite sides when it comes to "Beyond".
The only thing I disliked about that movie was Krall. I did not think that character worked at all. Even if I do agree with the idea of "Old Warrior wants to rip down everything because he can't stand peace".

My issues with the movie more or less result from the fact they wanted to quietly sweep the first two under the rug to an extent.

Pine is old enough to be an actual Federation Captain now and none of the plot elements from previous movies are maintained so the criticisms from previous works no longer apply. It could just be a high budget modernized version of the original series which is what many fans wanted in the first place. It's also not a Wrath of Khan remake per se so it does honestly feel like a better movie individually for people who, well, hated the previous two.

That comes pretty close to expressing why Beyond worked better for me. I didn't hate the other two, at least not '09, but I really disliked how Kirk's rise to the captaincy was handled. Knowing that the number of actual stories we would get from this crew would be very limited, all I wanted was to see mature, adult characters go out and explore the universe. Beyond actually delivered that, the characters felt more recognizable, and I found it to be generally fun and engaging. It wasn't a great movie by any means, but forgetting the previous two movies was a plus.

[Admiral X]

I've never bothered watching the other two Abrams Trek movies, and the only reason why I watched the first one is that a friend had a Rifftrax for it. I so called it when the first movie came out though, because everyone defending it was all like "clean slate," and I was all like, "yes, now they can boldly go where the franchise has already gone before." Part of the reason for this is because a large number of the fans themselves were getting excited at the thought of a rebooted version of TWoK. I also totally called it when they lied about who Benedict Cumberbatch was. I remember being stunned at the time given how much people liked to poke fun at the fact Ricardo Montalbán was playing someone described as being from northern India, only for them to be casting a British actor this time around. As I recall, initially they wanted Benicio del Toro, which had me wondering if Abrams actually thought Khan was supposed to be Hispanic. Still, it makes the "John Harriman" cover out to be a lame band-aid either way, as well as making it obvious that no one making the first two Abrams Trek movies ever bothered to even look shit up in Memory Alpha, let alone actually watching TOS the way Nicholas Meyer did before he made TWoK. At best maybe one of them watched TWoK and that's why they ripped off the famous Khan scene.

[Worffan101]

I MUCH prefer the way Beyond tells the previous two movies to take a hike. I like to pretend Into Whiteness never happened, too.

[Mindworm]

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!

They're doing the same kind of thing in computer games with DLC, holding back central part of game mechanics and only releasing them in drips and drabs to increase revenue streams.

[Orel]

I'd like to jump on the bandwagon of bashing "Into Darkness" for squandering the opportunity to tell a really new Star Trek story. They had a galaxy full of open doors, and they picked a walk-in trophy closet. I look forward to hearing Chuck's take on it. Personally, I enjoyed it as an action film when viewing it but my opinion of it grew worse as I thought about it more. I particularly dislike the scene where Spock yells "Khan!" There's no reason for that scene to exist--in the original, Kirk yelled "Khaaaan!" as part of his big ruse--to persuade Khan that he had indeed won and buried Kirk alive. But here, it just seems forced.

I will dispute the idea that Into Darkness is the only one with social commentary. I haven't actually read much about Beyond, but I view Krall as a metaphor for the injection of (potentially traumatized) war veterans into fields for which they seem superficially a good fit, but not necessarily. In the film, space exploration. IRL, law enforcement. I have read some commentary on the militarization of police that has attributed increases in police brutality to the funneling of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans into law enforcement, and I see some reflection of that in Krall--a guy who got funneled into a job for which he really wasn't suited, who couldn't cope with these fundamentally different responsibilities.

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.

Now that is a very interesting idea! It raises questions about genetic determinism (Khan, of course, has the same background and genome as Original Khan--is it right to punish him for crimes that, effectively, his identical twin committed?) and profiling, and from a more sci-fi perspective it points out one of the great problems with time-travel foreknowledge. That would have been a great way to actually use this alternate timeline premise as a means of generating story possibilities.