Star Trek: Into Darkness

[Karha of Honor]

Honestly do you equate the context of the two scenes?

Are you seriously contending that Kirk in his underwear was not meant to titillate anyone?

Maybe it was meant as an attempt to solve global warming by putting people off sex for ever.


No, wait. That was Profit & Lace

I don't know if it was shown but Chris Pine has a great ass.

[Actarus]

I really didn't like what they did with Khan in that movie. Just the way the crew reacts to the revelation that Harrisson is really Khan. " My real name is... Khan!" "Who?" And then you have Kelvin Spock calling Prime Spock to know if he has ever heard of some guy named Khan... That's ridiculous. In the tv show, everyone knew exactly who Khan was. Scotty even said that he was his favorite tyrant, to Spock's dismay. He is known to be the main protagonist of the Eugenic Wars. It is as if today someone would say "Napoleon Bonaparte? Never heard of him."

I have seen Space Seed and am watching it right now (2018 is when we're supposed to figure out space travel without cryosleep by the way), and you are wrong- they don't know who Khan is and they note that records from the time of the Eugenics Wars are incomplete. They also note that the fact that Khan and his crew were missing was covered up by the governments of the world in order to avoid a panic.

Yes, they recognise him when they bring up the records, but they don't recognise him on sight and they don't recognise him even when he tells them that his name is Khan- it's really a plot hole that Scotty admired him all along yet didn't recognise him on sight, nor did anyone else. ST:ID is consistent with the episode and how he's revealed.

I didn't mean that the crew recognized Khan and his crew on the spot when they found them on the SS Botany Bay. But they knew indeed who Khan was. Scotty tells he has a "sneaking admiration" for Khan during the meeting after Khan reveals himself as "the" Khan Noonian Singh of the Eugenic Wars. McCoy and Kirk even say that his rule has not been as bloody as other tyrants. Maria McGivers was already painting a portrait of Khan when they discovered him. So yes, Khan was known. What was not known is that he and some of his men survived the Eugenic Wars and fled Earth in a sleeping ship.

Spock needing Prime Spock to know that Khan was bad news was unneeded and ridiculous. Even more with all the massacres he had just caused on Earth, in London and San Francisco.

[Jonathan101]

I really didn't like what they did with Khan in that movie. Just the way the crew reacts to the revelation that Harrisson is really Khan. " My real name is... Khan!" "Who?" And then you have Kelvin Spock calling Prime Spock to know if he has ever heard of some guy named Khan... That's ridiculous. In the tv show, everyone knew exactly who Khan was. Scotty even said that he was his favorite tyrant, to Spock's dismay. He is known to be the main protagonist of the Eugenic Wars. It is as if today someone would say "Napoleon Bonaparte? Never heard of him."

I have seen Space Seed and am watching it right now (2018 is when we're supposed to figure out space travel without cryosleep by the way), and you are wrong- they don't know who Khan is and they note that records from the time of the Eugenics Wars are incomplete. They also note that the fact that Khan and his crew were missing was covered up by the governments of the world in order to avoid a panic.

Yes, they recognise him when they bring up the records, but they don't recognise him on sight and they don't recognise him even when he tells them that his name is Khan- it's really a plot hole that Scotty admired him all along yet didn't recognise him on sight, nor did anyone else. ST:ID is consistent with the episode and how he's revealed.

I didn't mean that the crew recognized Khan and his crew on the spot when they found them on the SS Botany Bay. But they knew indeed who Khan was. Scotty tells he has a "sneaking admiration" for Khan during the meeting after Khan reveals himself as "the" Khan Noonian Singh of the Eugenic Wars. McCoy and Kirk even say that his rule has not been as bloody as other tyrants. Maria McGivers was already painting a portrait of Khan when they discovered him. So yes, Khan was known. What was not known is that he and some of his men survived the Eugenic Wars and fled Earth in a sleeping ship.

Spock needing Prime Spock to know that Khan was bad news was unneeded and ridiculous. Even more with all the massacres he had just caused on Earth, in London and San Francisco.

I think she started painting that portrait after discovering him, not before.

But my point is that in both the film and the episode, they did not recognise Khan on sight, even when he told them his name was Khan. It's more of a plot hole in the episode than it is in this movie.

And Prime Spock wasn't needed to tell them that Khan was "bad news" so much as assessing whether or not he could be trusted (at least, this is why Kelvin Spock called him); obviously Prime Spock didn't know the details of their meeting with Khan and was just telling them what he knew, and what he knew convinced Kelvin Spock that his suspicions about not trusting Khan - whose heinous actions at least had some justification or rationale to them- were correct, and that he needed to act. Admittedly I can't really hate that scene since I like seeing Leonard Nimoy again, and it was the last Star Trek scene he ever filmed, but I do think it at least makes more sense than you make it sound.

[Makeshift Python]

Very nice review. However, I'm a bit sadden that Chuck didn't touch on the 3 huge plot holes that I feel they break the film (though given how much stupid shit there was in the film, I can't blame him):

1. So Khan flees Earth using a backpack-sized transwarp beaming device, which was made by the Starfleet after they took Scotty's transwarp beaming tech (in the comics he uses it to go to undercover missions), so no doubt they have/can make more of it. However, in the film, right after they find the device, Kirk tells Marcus that he wants to go after Khan, even though he's, and I quote "he's gone to the one place we... we just can't go", aka Kronos, with the idea that, well, since it's the friggin' Klingon home world, you just can't go there with a ship. So since they have a portable transwarp beaming device, which given the events of the last film, allows you to go to any place undetected, then Kirk will try to use the transwarp device (or at least ask Scotty to modify a standard transporter into a transwarp one, which shouldn't be hard since PrimeSpock did that just by writing a few equations in a shitty outpost transporter system, and there's no way the Starfleet could have just took Scotty's equation completely like he said in the film, unless they erased his mind), or at least ask Marcus to give him more transwarp beaming devices, right? Cause you know, going with a Starfleet ship in enemy space is stupid, so it'd make sense to use the already proven and effective transwarp beaming?
Nope. Instead, they completely forget about it. Even HISHE pointed out how that tech is a worldbreaker, and make most (obviously not all, but still most) of the ST ships obsolete especially since it's something you could make in a portable form, you wouldn't even need large and resource-intensive ships for most activities (makes you wonder why did Marcus even built such a huge ship). Hell, in an episode of Enterprise, which is set 100 years before, the inventor of the transporter has the idea of an interstellar transporter which he claims that it could make most of the Starfleet obsolete! The entire plot of the next part of the film is how they must sneak into no man's land undetected with a ship, the Enterprise, since that's the only possibility... except it's not, cause you know... TRANSWARP BEAMING!
They don't even bother to explain why they can't use transwarp beaming and instead they have to rely on ships. A simple line by Admiral Marcus, or Scotty, or anyone, would have been enough to close this plot hole. Hell, not even Kirk, Spock or hell, even Scotty doesn't point that out, since, you know, he objected to getting those top-secret torpedoes, he could have asked Kirk why not just ask Marcus to use the beaming tech and not bother risking a war with the Klingons, they both used it in the last movie very effectively and Khan did that as well here. In fact everyone just accepts the fact that they have to risk the Federation by going behind enemy lines, like they don't have other alternatives.... you know... like beaming device that could teleport them to another star system... if only they had those... especially if they came in a portable version... pity they don't have anything like that, amrite. But then again, if Marcus would reject that idea, it would appear very suspicious that he would risk a war with the Klingons by sending the Enterprise close to the Klingon space when he has a better and safer alternative. Guess the transwarp beaming tech also breaks the plot of the film.
And if they really wanted to handwave the fact that they couldn't use the transwarp beaming tech and had to rely on ships, we saw in the film that Praxis already exploded, so why not change that, have the Praxis moon explode right after Khan beamed on Kronos (and have it seen exploding in the sky in the scene with Khan on Kronos) and say that the explosion of Praxis is blocking any further transwarp beaming to Kronos, so they have to rely on ships to get there, with the bonus of having the radiation from the explosion masking any ships, so Enterprise could get in planet's orbit undetected (apparently the edge of the Neutral Zone is in Kronos's orbit now), while Klingons are busy repairing their infrastructure, to explain why there was almost no Klingon reinforcements to capture the Enterprise crew... even though they were on their damn home planet!

2. After Marcus knocks them out of warp, they arrive in Earth's orbit, more exactly 237,000 km from Earth, and near the Moon. So if Marcus hadn't shot them down, they would have zipped past Earth? Or does ST warp work on the Achilles and the tortoise principle? Anyway, that's not the problem. The issue happens after Khan attacks the Enterprise and the Enterprise blows up the Vengeance with the 72 torpedoes, while they're still near the Moon. Both ships lose power and fall towards Earth... even though they're still at 237,000 km away from it, and they're near the Moon, meaning that at best they should fall towards the Moon. But no, they fall towards Earth, and 6 minutes later the Enterprise is already entering Earth's atmosphere. Now, back in 2013 when I first watched the film, I saw the camrip version, so apart from the terrible quality, I was under the impression that the guy who recorded the film, somehow skipped some clips during the freefall scene. But later, when I rewatched the film in BluRay, well... turns out nothing was missing, yes, the Enterprise traveled 237,000 km in 6 minutes. Do writers know how far away the Moon is compared to Earth? There's no way in hell the Enterprise could reach low relativistic speeds just by falling towards Earth, and then all of the sudden it slows down when it touches the atmosphere, no matter how ridiculous the science is in Star Trek. This is just absurd. They weren't even accelerating or breaking, they were just falling, cause you know, they lost power. Hell, both the Enterprise and the Vengeance should have slammed into the Earth's atmosphere and explode Holdo-style, especially since the Vengeance's engines were compromised. Everything about that scene is just super contrived.

3. After Bones determines that Khan's blood can resurrect dead organisms, he demands that Kirk be put in a cryotube (I guess they don't have stasis technology during Kirk's), but in order for that to happen, they first have to remove one of the augments from the tube, and place him in a coma, and then put Kirk in the cryotube. He also tells Carol that he used up all of Khan's blood, so they have none. Wait a minute... they know that Khan's blood can do that, because he's genetically engineered, he's an augment... like his crew... since Bones was going to thaw out another augment, and he just got the medical scans of the resurrected tribble (we see it on screen), couldn't he just test that guy's blood while Kirk was kept frozen, to see if it was like Khan's? Federation sensors are very good, so they should know what exactly they need to look in the man's blood to see if it would work. I mean, the only rush there was to get Kirk into a cryotube before his brain degrades too much, and after that the only matter is when they capture Khan. And if they couldn't do that, couldn't they just throw a couple of lines, like Khan is a different breed from his crew and only his blood works, they don't have time to test every single augment to see if anyone else has Khan's superblood thingy? Now this plot hole isn't as serious like he other two, but still, it breaks the suspense of the final scene, since without an explanation, it feels like they could have just use the blood of any other augment, and thus chasing Khan won't have been so important, as they can track him so he's not going anywhere.

P.S. I also remembered another dumb moment from the film that none of the characters even bothered to question it. Marcus ordered Kirk to bomb Khan with 72 high tech torpedoes, essentially big-ass nukes. OK, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that like super overkill? We're talking about 72, SEVENTY-TWO nuclear bombs to kill ONE man... Any sane person would find killing anyone with so many nuclear warheads excessive and odd. I'd like to think that even the most bloodthirsty Kirk would find that a bit excessive. Hell, just 10 torpedoes for one man is a lot. I mean, this is something I'd expect Kylemo Renge to do, not Kirk or any of his crew. I know that Marcus told Kirk to bomb the entire uninhabited area, which is why he wanted to use all the torpedoes, but no one in Starfleet, not even Spock, would consider the idea that maybe Khan would have just left the area to another? He knows they have his transwarp beaming tech, so they can trace him. They have sensors. Why would they just blindly bomb an entire deserted city? More importantly, how would they even confirm they got him? We know that Marcus is lying, but Kirk and Spock don't know that, why don't they question the admiral's plan later on? Nobody has any doubts about anything, everybody just follows orders blindly. They barely even talk about it later in the film. Even after Scotty resigns, nothing changes.

I'll add another. Not so much as a plot hole, but the geography is bizarre. The Enterprise is parked right outside the border of Klingon space... which just happens to be within Kronos' solar system??? Add that Khan later takes out an entire squad of warriors single handedly, and this film effectively made the Klingons of the Kelvinverse look like a bunch of chumps. I wonder if Klingons really are as big of a threat as Marcus makes them out to be, or he's just looking for an excuse to invade them so he can take their oil.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Honestly do you equate the context of the two scenes?

Are you seriously contending that Kirk in his underwear was not meant to titillate anyone?

Maybe it was meant as an attempt to solve global warming by putting people off sex for ever.


No, wait. That was Profit & Lace

I don't know if it was shown but Chris Pine has a great ass.

He'd probably call it above average.

[TheLibrarian]

Well, on my end, this remains my favorite of the three movies for multiple reasons:

1. The movie nicely corrects some of my issues of the first film. Kirk is not the same man that he was in the original timeline due to lacking his father's influence. His delinquent side never gets polished off and he seriously screws up multiple times. The ending results in Spock and he achieving more of a balance.

He's NOT ready for the chair he's been given and we see him having to go through a lot of humiliations and failures before he becomes worthy at the end.

2. It does have a fairly anti-War on Terror perspective and while the Truther matter is bullshit, the fact is I view the three movies as a continuing series. The Federation has had its 9/11 in Nero's attack on Vulcan and has created a darker more malevolent Federation. The fact they choose to use Section 31 as a massive operation is good storytelling to that effect...<snip>

So I agree with you about 50%, and strenuously disagree 50%. I'll explain, but first:

My thoughts. So many missed opportunities. I don't need to go into why this movie disappointed me...Points I liked. Someone violating the prime directive for moral reasons. Kirk calling out Pike that his attitude is why he got the Enterprise in the first place. It kinda was. And Kirk examining the evidence and following the villain's plot moments before the ambush. This was Kirk showing the tactical genius he is supposed to have. Let his brief foresight allow him to save Marcus. Let him reason out why the villain went to Qonos. (Steal a ship to fake an attack on the Federation to begin a war.)
Sorry I got off on a disappointment there.
Other thing I liked. SEATBELTS!

Mostly this. I was totally onboard with this film for the first half or so. Up to the scene where Khan ambushes the Klingons on Cronos. It was far from flawless, but Trek was guilty of plenty of dumb moments long before this film. There wasn't much that couldn't be ignored or handwaved away in future installments (e.g., Khan's magic healing blood is dumb, but using the transporter to restore Pulaski back to her physiological state of two weeks prior while she kept all the memories she'd made during that time in TNG's "Unnatural Selection" should also have been a cure-all for all medical afflictions going forward, but it never came up again).

Anytime members of the core cast were having a dialogue on screen, it was working, because if Abrams can do one thing right, it's cast good actors in the right parts and direct them well. Even the Spock/Uhura argument in the shuttle, as misplaced as it was, was still well-performed and poignant (But Abrams can't leave well enough alone and has to interrupt a great dialogue or character moment with some kind of action beat that might feel exciting in the moment, but fails to leave a lasting impression--whatever, focusing on good stuff.) They set up some great themes like "Is the Prime Directive worth breaking to save a life? Or a civilization?" and "Is Starfleet's mission primarily diplomatic and exploratory, or military?". And I despise Truther bullshit too, but like most non-Americans and a significant number of Americans who were paying attention in the weeks and years after 9/11, it was pretty clear that Iraq was invaded under false pretenses and that parallel was obvious with Admiral Robocop's agenda. The Naruda in Trek '09 was the justification for Admiral Marcus' militarization program, and the London bombing was the 9/11 excuse he needed to pre-emptively strike at the Klingons. Already this film was working with bigger and more interesting ideas than most of the other Trek films and aiming to be in my personal top 3.

But after Khan pops up on Cronos, all the interesting ideas and themes introduced in the first half just seem to be thrown out of the window so they can do Remix of Khan, but without any of the groundwork to make that work. Chuck alludes to this in his review, but the reason Khan works in STII isn't because he was Kirk's Joker or Moriarty. He was a villain of the week who was maybe more threatening and definitely more charismatic than most. But that's all he was. IIRC Nicholas Meyer said about the two leads in STII: "Khan spent every day of his exile thinking of Kirk. But Kirk had completely forgotten about Khan until he saw him on the bridge of the Reliant." There's a lot of history and lot of passion from the actors and director in that film that comes across even if you're not a dyed in the wool Trekkie who has the whole picture. You can't just drop characters or scenes from WOK and expect the same magic without doing anything to earn it.

And that's why STID disappoints me so much. I don't mind a Trek film being an action-thrill ride. But you can do those with some brains. It doesn't have to be 2001 or Gattaca, but it could at least aspire to be Die Hard. But STID drops all the really promising themes and ideas set up in the first half so it can be all action scene/info dump/fanservice callback/info dump/action scene/fanservice/action scene/info dump/fanservice/info dump/action scene/blow up a city and the Enterprise yet again. From the beginning the Kelvin timeline was torn between being a clean reboot and an in-continuity bit of fanwank, to its detriment. It should have either committed to being its own thing and redefined Star Trek for the 21st century, or kept the faith with the original property. But this serving two masters just divided and confused the existing fanbase and left the wider audience with a fun confection they completely forgot about the next summer.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I feel like Die Hard is a reverse Wrath of Khan. Not sure who to reflect off of, but instead of intellectual prowess in Wrath of Khan, you have wit and resilience in Die Hard. Both films as far as I can tell involve the respective character nipping at the heels gradually as they unravel their counterpart's operation. They're both very distinctively paced.

[RobbyB1982]

Khan's magic healing blood is dumb, but using the transporter to restore Pulaski back to her physiological state of two weeks prior while she kept all the memories she'd made during that time in TNG's "Unnatural Selection" should also have been a cure-all for all medical afflictions going forward, but it never came up again).

Off the top of my head you have TAS episode The Lorelei Signal, Rascals where four members of the crew turning into children, Thomas Riker, and Tuvix, as examples of times where they used an old transporter patterns to fix the issue of the week. (Or in Riker's case, split two beams as a backup.) They used the transporter as a fix for lots of medical problems.... though generally problems the transporters created in the first place.

In the TAS episode, spock says the odds of it working are 99.7 to 1, and when Obrien does it he says there's a risk of losing the pattern entirely.

There was also the episode where the team being beamed up got their bodies stuck in the holodeck while their minds were in the ship eating up ALL the memory on the ship.

It's also established that the transporter DOES screen for diseases that it knows of and filters those out, so that's something.

I think it boils down to the idea that transporting and reconstituting every atom in someone's body is a hugely complicated process, no matter how the tech proceeds, and generally the system only works to directly move it from where it was. Whenever it has to hold the pattern or try to change any subtle thing, it carries huge risk of complete failure. We've seen failed transports a couple times, and it's not pretty. Worth trying against bizarre alien life transformed you and you're going to die in 10 minutes scenatios, but otherwise generally riskier than just doing surgery considering how advanced their medical stuff is.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I thought that transporters phase you into some sort of subspace, and it wasn't a matter of dematerialization and rematerialisation. Barclay's episode involved some being in the intermediate realm that required the crew to keep the transporter phase open so they could lock on to it. I thought that that intermediate phase was part of the explanation.

[Cheerilee]

Regarding Orci as a 9/11 truther and it's relation to STID, I would point to Orci's posts on the previously mentioned trekmovie.com.

Chuck mentioned at the start of part two that he doesn't care about Orci's personal beliefs, he just cares about the movie. And in his final summation said that Orci might be arrogant and a condescending asshole (based on his trekmovie posts), but that his movie made bank, which is why they let him make it. That it's just a shame that he made a mere popcorn movie full of explosions and lens flare. He could've engaged more than the eyes and ears, he could've tried to engage the brain and heart as well.

Someone in that trekmovie thread accused him of the very same thing though. They cited Raiders of the Lost Ark as a fine example of action-adventure with brains, and Orci responded that STID had infinitely more social commentary than Raiders.

"You think action and thinking are mutually exclusive. Ok, then. Pitch me Into Darkness. Pitch me the plot, and let’s comapre it to other pitches. Go ahead. Let’s see if you actually understood the movie."

Orci is flat-out saying that STID *is* a smart movie. A very smart one. The problem is that it's so much smarter than you, so you can't understand how smart it really is.

To understand STID, you have to figure out what Orci was trying to say about the modern world ("social commentary") using this movie.

Section 31 is the CIA. Khan is Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden used to work for the CIA. The 72 torpedoes are the 72 virgins Bin Laden expected to be rewarded with in the afterlife. The Klingons are the Middle East. Kirk isn't Captain Jock Beerpong, he's George W Bush. Cold fusion can't freeze a volcano.

Is your brain vomiting yet? Now consider that you're not supposed to be mapping these characters to their real life counterparts, you're supposed to be matching them to the bullshit combination of offensive+stupid that makes up the headcanon version of reality that exists in Orci's sick mind.

This is "smart" (from Orci's point of view). This is "the smartest Trek movie that has ever been made" (from Orci's point of view). Which makes it very difficult to divorce Orci's personal views from the final product, and makes it inaccurate to say that he didn't at least try to make a smart movie.