Movie Review! Star Trek Into Darkness
Took myself down to the new Harper Theater to see this today. I have to say, for a $6 matinee, it wasn't bad. I'm glad I went, and I'm glad I saw it. I also have to say, having seen it, that I'm perfectly happy with J.J. Abrams going on to reboot Star Wars.
Star Trek Into Darkness is a weird movie. The first weird thing about it is the title, which doesn't appear to actually mean anything, but does give me an earworm. Because I'm just such a wonderful person, let me pass that earworm along to you:
Okay. That out of the way, what about Into Darkness?
Well, I thought it was kind of a mixed bag. It was a highly entertaining space opera, and it was basically fun to watch. The performances are uniformly high-quality; the cast is highly skilled and bringing their best game to this film, whether it's Chris Pine trying to channel only the best of William Shatner and Zachary Quinto doing his tenor best to channel Leonard Nimoy's bass, or Anton Yelchin milking every moment of his role as Pavel "Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Film" Chekov. (If this cast ends up making a third movie, it might well be instructive to hear how Yelchin interprets the classic bit of Chekov dialogue: "AAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!")
Visually . . . it's okay. It's a very twinkly movie. Abrams likes to use lens flares, reflections, and lots of blinking lights, so it's actually kind of hard to see the movie. But when the camera does calm down, there are some impressive visuals. I wasn't in love with the fascist-style uniforms and caps of Starfleet-on-earth, but I do kind of like the updating of the tri-colored on-ship outfits. I was impressed at the sheer variety of random aliens, and I liked seeing each new alien design crop up. That kind of attention to background detail tends to score points with me. The chase scene on the Planet Whatchamahoozie at the very beginning looked fabulous as well; the planet looked very alien, and I wish we'd had more time to spend with the natives, because their makeup jobs were amazing.
With some caveats, the storyline was generally pretty entertaining, even with the plot holes big enough to drive the starship Enterprise through. (This is one of those movies that could have been cut in half by the smallest application of common sense.) The pacing was pretty good; the movie never felt like it dragged, and some of the action set-pieces were very well timed. I was entertained the whole way through.
That being said . . .
This isn't a Star Trek movie.
It's a movie about an outfit called Starfleet, and it has characters named Kirk and Spock and McCoy and Uhura and Scotty and Sulu running around. It takes place in outer space, and some of it is set aboard a starship called the Enterprise. And that is where all similarity to Star Trek as we know it screeches to a halt.
The characters have not gotten any more like themselves since the first movie. They're all a bit . . . off. The broadest and worst of their qualities have been dialed up to eleven, and the character nuances that made the original versions so interesting to watch have been mostly ironed out. At one point, Scotty asks Kirk if Starfleet is a scientific organization with military organization, or a military outfit that does science on the side. It's a penetrating question, because the answer says a lot about whether we're in Roddenberry's vision of the future or Abrams's. Roddenberry would have chosen option A. Abrams goes for B, and it doesn't help the movie any. Admiral Marcus comes across as a heavy-handed parody of Dubya Bush, who was already a heavy-handed parody of himself by the time he left office. It's also telling that Admiral Marcus doesn't appear to have anyone overseeing him; he's free to think up a highly dangerous and, frankly, evil scheme with absolutely no checks on his behavior from anyone. The Federation does not appear to exist in Abrams's universe.
Lieutenant Uhura, who in her original incarnation is one of my favorite female characters of all time, is diminished in this movie. She's not just diminished from her stature in Abrams's previous movie -- she's diminished from her stature in the 1967 original, and that's . . . not a good thing. Uhura's entire role in this movie is to be Spock's Bitchy Girlfriend, which is first of all a waste of a perfectly good performance by Zoe Saldana, and second of all an insult to the grace and wisdom that Nichelle Nichols gave the character in the first place. Carol Marcus, who had a complicated and vital role in The Wrath of Khan, is here reduced to a blonde bob, a vaguely British accent, and a matching black bra-and-panties set.
Why Dr. McCoy is anyone's first choice to be noodling around with the insides of engines is anyone's guess, as is the question of why Chekov, who is the navigator and not yet old enough to drink, should be put in charge of Engineering. On the other hand, that reassignment did allow a rather nicely self-aware reaction shot from Anton Yelchin. Upon being told to go put on a red shirt, he stared at the camera with this bug-eyed "oh, shit" expression. This movie may take place in a different leg of the Trousers of Time than the original, but the danger of the red shirt is ever present.
And now, the Big Spoiler, oooo. Benedict Cumberbatch's much-ballyhooed villain role was referred to as "John Harrison," but he was actually . . . KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
Except he wasn't.
It's not that he wasn't good. Benedict Cumberbatch is a very good actor, and his performance was entirely up to snuff in this film. It's just . . . he wasn't Khan. Frankly, it would have improved the movie if his character had actually been "John Harrison," an Osama-bin-Laden-esque terrorist come to Earth to challenge the moral, intellectual, and physical capacities of Starfleet itself.
I know what Abrams wanted with this role. He wanted to catch and ride the wake of the most charismatic individual villain Star Trek had, the only one who had an entire feature film devoted to his return. In and of itself, that's not a bad idea. But the thing is, if you're going to do that sort of thing, you have to do it. Khan wasn't memorable because he was Ye Olde Genetically Engineered Superman. He was memorable because he had personality. Ricardo Montalban's performance oozed regal grace and leadership and vision along with an insatiable lust for power and a heavy dose of the Ax Crazy. He was intelligent and crafty, equally at home having drinks with Kirk or beating the bejeezus out of him. The thing that made "Space Seed" such a memorable episode was the sense that Captain Kirk wasn't in control. Khan was dangerous, and it was mostly his charisma and only secondarily his physical strength. In The Wrath of Khan, these qualities only intensified. He was a worthy and dangerous opponent, and he required the greatest sacrifice in order to defeat him. And even then, he went down quoting Moby Dick.
As fantastic an actor as he is, Benedict Cumberbatch does not have that kind of charisma. It's not a personal failing; it's just a personality thing. Khan is a role eminently suited to the particular talents of Ricardo Montalban and not so well suited to the talents of Benedict Cumberbatch. Cumberbatch's long story about how Starfleet opened up his cryo-tube and held his crew hostage to force him to work for them is touching, and he delivers it well, with just the right amount of photogenic crying, and it's a fine character moment . . . but it's not anything that would happen to Khan Noonien Singh. I could totally see it happening to an entirely different character named, oh, John Harrison. And Harrison would have been a wonderfully tragic and ambivalent villain, possibly as memorable and defining to this series as Khan was to the original. But Cumberbatch is not Khan, his performance does not evoke any memory of Montalban, and there is nothing about his character as written that is in any way reminiscent of either the velvet-covered steel of Khan in "Space Seed" or the grand, tragic, obsessed Khan of The Wrath.
One of the things that was missing from the Khan role -- and from the movie as a whole, although this role was a particularly good example -- was a sense of relationship. Original Flavor Khan and Kirk had a real relationship, right from the get-go. They recognized each other as equals, as rivals, and there was a real simpatico between them that made their ultimate enmity that much more epic. The titular Wrath of Khan in the movie wasn't at all a generally pissed-off attitude aimed at Starfleet in general -- it was a focused, maddened obsession with Kirk and with revenge, and that was exactly what made it so compelling to watch. Take all that away, as Abrams does, and you're left with nothing. You're left with Benedict Cumberbatch applying his considerable talent to a shoddily written role. It's almost too much of a cliche for actors to ask "What's my motivation?" but one does have to wonder what kind of answer Cumberbatch might have received had he asked it.
Because the relationships that made all of these characters memorable in the first place were either caricatured or completely absent, many of the more referential set-pieces came across as awkward and forced rather than organic and clever. There's a whole homage to the end of The Wrath of Khan that aims for a sense of The Doom Of Inevitable Tragedy, misses completely, and hits Witless Aping with a loud smack. Part of it is that there's no twenty-year relationship to earn the tears, and part of it is that there are no stakes; there's no possible risk that the dead character is permanently dead, as there was back in 1982. Absent risk and relationship, there is no meaning.
In general, this movie felt like a particular type of mediocre fanfiction, the sort that exaggerates the characters, flattens nuance, retreads scenes from canon hoping to coast by on the audience's memories of the canon scene's emotion rather than the fic's own merits, and tells a story that is more oriented toward action than any real depth or insight. The movie also felt weirdly at odds with itself. It was certainly trying to be a Star Trek movie, but it kept bogging down into awkwardness at those points. There were several moments when a scene was either trying to be emotional and insightful or trying to reference The Wrath of Khan or both, and it would sort of peter out into awkward pauses. And then something random would blow up, just as a way of extracting everyone from the bog.
There were a number of little details that were worrisome -- why do all of the weapons suddenly shoot bullets, when Star Trek is a canon of phaser beam weapons? -- and the logic of the opening scene is nonexistent. The Enterprise is hiding underwater in the ocean of a planet whose inhabitants are not to be contacted because of the Prime Directive . . . but how did they manage to sneak a ship that size into the ocean to begin with? Seriously, it'd be like trying to hide the Titanic in the Chicago River. The Enterprise is not a planetary vessel. She does not belong in the atmosphere of a planet, much less in the ocean of one.
So it's not that much of a Star Trek movie. On the other hand, it's a fun space adventure, and Benedict Cumberbatch's character is very much a compelling presence, whoever he is. The cast do the absolute best they can with what they have to work with, and Simon Pegg brings some much-appreciated and much-needed comedy with his portrayal of Scotty. It is true that the two-count-them-two female characters are reduced to appendages of male characters (Spock's Bitchy Girlfriend and The Admiral's Useless Daughter), but on the other hand, Kirk does get dressed down for some of his more caddish behavior. He's also starting to develop a real relationship with Spock, and there are hints that, given time and more competent screenwriters, it could blossom into the famously epic friendship that we all know and love.
I don't know if there are any plans to make more movies in this version of the franchise. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, although replacing Abrams as director with someone who actually cared about Star Trek would be a wise move. I missed the optimism and the spirit of adventure and the humanism of Roddenberry's vision. The Great Bird of the Galaxy hasn't quite made it to bless this planet, but it's possible to see it circling overhead.
Star Trek Into Darkness is a weird movie. The first weird thing about it is the title, which doesn't appear to actually mean anything, but does give me an earworm. Because I'm just such a wonderful person, let me pass that earworm along to you:
Click to viewOkay. That out of the way, what about Into Darkness?
Well, I thought it was kind of a mixed bag. It was a highly entertaining space opera, and it was basically fun to watch. The performances are uniformly high-quality; the cast is highly skilled and bringing their best game to this film, whether it's Chris Pine trying to channel only the best of William Shatner and Zachary Quinto doing his tenor best to channel Leonard Nimoy's bass, or Anton Yelchin milking every moment of his role as Pavel "Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Film" Chekov. (If this cast ends up making a third movie, it might well be instructive to hear how Yelchin interprets the classic bit of Chekov dialogue: "AAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!")
Visually . . . it's okay. It's a very twinkly movie. Abrams likes to use lens flares, reflections, and lots of blinking lights, so it's actually kind of hard to see the movie. But when the camera does calm down, there are some impressive visuals. I wasn't in love with the fascist-style uniforms and caps of Starfleet-on-earth, but I do kind of like the updating of the tri-colored on-ship outfits. I was impressed at the sheer variety of random aliens, and I liked seeing each new alien design crop up. That kind of attention to background detail tends to score points with me. The chase scene on the Planet Whatchamahoozie at the very beginning looked fabulous as well; the planet looked very alien, and I wish we'd had more time to spend with the natives, because their makeup jobs were amazing.
With some caveats, the storyline was generally pretty entertaining, even with the plot holes big enough to drive the starship Enterprise through. (This is one of those movies that could have been cut in half by the smallest application of common sense.) The pacing was pretty good; the movie never felt like it dragged, and some of the action set-pieces were very well timed. I was entertained the whole way through.
That being said . . .
This isn't a Star Trek movie.
It's a movie about an outfit called Starfleet, and it has characters named Kirk and Spock and McCoy and Uhura and Scotty and Sulu running around. It takes place in outer space, and some of it is set aboard a starship called the Enterprise. And that is where all similarity to Star Trek as we know it screeches to a halt.
The characters have not gotten any more like themselves since the first movie. They're all a bit . . . off. The broadest and worst of their qualities have been dialed up to eleven, and the character nuances that made the original versions so interesting to watch have been mostly ironed out. At one point, Scotty asks Kirk if Starfleet is a scientific organization with military organization, or a military outfit that does science on the side. It's a penetrating question, because the answer says a lot about whether we're in Roddenberry's vision of the future or Abrams's. Roddenberry would have chosen option A. Abrams goes for B, and it doesn't help the movie any. Admiral Marcus comes across as a heavy-handed parody of Dubya Bush, who was already a heavy-handed parody of himself by the time he left office. It's also telling that Admiral Marcus doesn't appear to have anyone overseeing him; he's free to think up a highly dangerous and, frankly, evil scheme with absolutely no checks on his behavior from anyone. The Federation does not appear to exist in Abrams's universe.
Lieutenant Uhura, who in her original incarnation is one of my favorite female characters of all time, is diminished in this movie. She's not just diminished from her stature in Abrams's previous movie -- she's diminished from her stature in the 1967 original, and that's . . . not a good thing. Uhura's entire role in this movie is to be Spock's Bitchy Girlfriend, which is first of all a waste of a perfectly good performance by Zoe Saldana, and second of all an insult to the grace and wisdom that Nichelle Nichols gave the character in the first place. Carol Marcus, who had a complicated and vital role in The Wrath of Khan, is here reduced to a blonde bob, a vaguely British accent, and a matching black bra-and-panties set.
Why Dr. McCoy is anyone's first choice to be noodling around with the insides of engines is anyone's guess, as is the question of why Chekov, who is the navigator and not yet old enough to drink, should be put in charge of Engineering. On the other hand, that reassignment did allow a rather nicely self-aware reaction shot from Anton Yelchin. Upon being told to go put on a red shirt, he stared at the camera with this bug-eyed "oh, shit" expression. This movie may take place in a different leg of the Trousers of Time than the original, but the danger of the red shirt is ever present.
And now, the Big Spoiler, oooo. Benedict Cumberbatch's much-ballyhooed villain role was referred to as "John Harrison," but he was actually . . . KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
Except he wasn't.
It's not that he wasn't good. Benedict Cumberbatch is a very good actor, and his performance was entirely up to snuff in this film. It's just . . . he wasn't Khan. Frankly, it would have improved the movie if his character had actually been "John Harrison," an Osama-bin-Laden-esque terrorist come to Earth to challenge the moral, intellectual, and physical capacities of Starfleet itself.
I know what Abrams wanted with this role. He wanted to catch and ride the wake of the most charismatic individual villain Star Trek had, the only one who had an entire feature film devoted to his return. In and of itself, that's not a bad idea. But the thing is, if you're going to do that sort of thing, you have to do it. Khan wasn't memorable because he was Ye Olde Genetically Engineered Superman. He was memorable because he had personality. Ricardo Montalban's performance oozed regal grace and leadership and vision along with an insatiable lust for power and a heavy dose of the Ax Crazy. He was intelligent and crafty, equally at home having drinks with Kirk or beating the bejeezus out of him. The thing that made "Space Seed" such a memorable episode was the sense that Captain Kirk wasn't in control. Khan was dangerous, and it was mostly his charisma and only secondarily his physical strength. In The Wrath of Khan, these qualities only intensified. He was a worthy and dangerous opponent, and he required the greatest sacrifice in order to defeat him. And even then, he went down quoting Moby Dick.
As fantastic an actor as he is, Benedict Cumberbatch does not have that kind of charisma. It's not a personal failing; it's just a personality thing. Khan is a role eminently suited to the particular talents of Ricardo Montalban and not so well suited to the talents of Benedict Cumberbatch. Cumberbatch's long story about how Starfleet opened up his cryo-tube and held his crew hostage to force him to work for them is touching, and he delivers it well, with just the right amount of photogenic crying, and it's a fine character moment . . . but it's not anything that would happen to Khan Noonien Singh. I could totally see it happening to an entirely different character named, oh, John Harrison. And Harrison would have been a wonderfully tragic and ambivalent villain, possibly as memorable and defining to this series as Khan was to the original. But Cumberbatch is not Khan, his performance does not evoke any memory of Montalban, and there is nothing about his character as written that is in any way reminiscent of either the velvet-covered steel of Khan in "Space Seed" or the grand, tragic, obsessed Khan of The Wrath.
One of the things that was missing from the Khan role -- and from the movie as a whole, although this role was a particularly good example -- was a sense of relationship. Original Flavor Khan and Kirk had a real relationship, right from the get-go. They recognized each other as equals, as rivals, and there was a real simpatico between them that made their ultimate enmity that much more epic. The titular Wrath of Khan in the movie wasn't at all a generally pissed-off attitude aimed at Starfleet in general -- it was a focused, maddened obsession with Kirk and with revenge, and that was exactly what made it so compelling to watch. Take all that away, as Abrams does, and you're left with nothing. You're left with Benedict Cumberbatch applying his considerable talent to a shoddily written role. It's almost too much of a cliche for actors to ask "What's my motivation?" but one does have to wonder what kind of answer Cumberbatch might have received had he asked it.
Because the relationships that made all of these characters memorable in the first place were either caricatured or completely absent, many of the more referential set-pieces came across as awkward and forced rather than organic and clever. There's a whole homage to the end of The Wrath of Khan that aims for a sense of The Doom Of Inevitable Tragedy, misses completely, and hits Witless Aping with a loud smack. Part of it is that there's no twenty-year relationship to earn the tears, and part of it is that there are no stakes; there's no possible risk that the dead character is permanently dead, as there was back in 1982. Absent risk and relationship, there is no meaning.
In general, this movie felt like a particular type of mediocre fanfiction, the sort that exaggerates the characters, flattens nuance, retreads scenes from canon hoping to coast by on the audience's memories of the canon scene's emotion rather than the fic's own merits, and tells a story that is more oriented toward action than any real depth or insight. The movie also felt weirdly at odds with itself. It was certainly trying to be a Star Trek movie, but it kept bogging down into awkwardness at those points. There were several moments when a scene was either trying to be emotional and insightful or trying to reference The Wrath of Khan or both, and it would sort of peter out into awkward pauses. And then something random would blow up, just as a way of extracting everyone from the bog.
There were a number of little details that were worrisome -- why do all of the weapons suddenly shoot bullets, when Star Trek is a canon of phaser beam weapons? -- and the logic of the opening scene is nonexistent. The Enterprise is hiding underwater in the ocean of a planet whose inhabitants are not to be contacted because of the Prime Directive . . . but how did they manage to sneak a ship that size into the ocean to begin with? Seriously, it'd be like trying to hide the Titanic in the Chicago River. The Enterprise is not a planetary vessel. She does not belong in the atmosphere of a planet, much less in the ocean of one.
So it's not that much of a Star Trek movie. On the other hand, it's a fun space adventure, and Benedict Cumberbatch's character is very much a compelling presence, whoever he is. The cast do the absolute best they can with what they have to work with, and Simon Pegg brings some much-appreciated and much-needed comedy with his portrayal of Scotty. It is true that the two-count-them-two female characters are reduced to appendages of male characters (Spock's Bitchy Girlfriend and The Admiral's Useless Daughter), but on the other hand, Kirk does get dressed down for some of his more caddish behavior. He's also starting to develop a real relationship with Spock, and there are hints that, given time and more competent screenwriters, it could blossom into the famously epic friendship that we all know and love.
I don't know if there are any plans to make more movies in this version of the franchise. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, although replacing Abrams as director with someone who actually cared about Star Trek would be a wise move. I missed the optimism and the spirit of adventure and the humanism of Roddenberry's vision. The Great Bird of the Galaxy hasn't quite made it to bless this planet, but it's possible to see it circling overhead.