I finally figured out what ticks me off about Star Trek Into Darkness

May 20, 2013 12:39

We went and saw it last night, our final night in Phoenix, so we could see it in a really good theatre. And frankly, I was disappointed. It was good for a summer action movie, and it wasn't bad for science fiction, but some aspects of the story I was very unhappy with. My wife and I talked about it all the way home, well, all the way back to my parent's house. We had some similar complaints.

And since it's a new movie that some may not have seen yet, I'm putting the rest under a cut.

And if you want to read some criticism of the science, take a look at the Bad Astronomy blog: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/05/17/bad_astronomy_review_star_trek_into_darkness.html

And frankly, this diminishes my interest in seeing what Abrams does with Star Wars. I expected a lot more out of his Trek reboot, for me he did not deliver.



First, I HATE IT when an author ret-cons an existing, well-known, story! A classic example is Mike Stackpole's book I, Jedi. A book preceded it called Jedi Academy, a perfectly good story. Mike decided he could make it better, especially if his main character saves the day and Luke Skywalker's life. So he essentially re-wrote Jedi Academy.

In Into Darkness, they re-made Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. The thing that really gets me is that JJ Abrams had a clean slate to work from. He re-started the Star Trek universe, forked it from the original, and he could have done anything. And what does he do? Re-”Imagines” arguably the best movie from the original series franchise. Why didn't he give us something new? Every TOS movie went to new places, some were better and some were worse, and the second movie of the new franchise goes back to the old well.

Cumberbatch was a great villain, but he really deserved a better character. I can't imagine anyone doing Khan as well as Ricardo Montalbon with a really original character that continued the original 1960's story. Here, we're told his name is Khan and we're given very little background to the Eugenics War. Peter Weller was great as the war mongering admiral who will stop at nothing to see his vision through. They had a great story going there, and I would have been quite happy with my vision of Cumberbatch as a superspy gone rogue, but once you found out he was Khan, my hope for the movie just went down and down.

I was very disappointed. Frankly, I'd give the movie a 6 on a 1-10 scale. Aspects of it rated much higher, but overall, a 6.

Things like: tribble blood! That was so heavy-handed that you knew it had to re-appear later in the film as a major deus ex machina. It was obvious when Kirk died that they'd slap him in stasis and use tribble blood somehow to save him.

Abrams et al seem to have a tremendous problem with distance in the movie. Kirk is on the edge of the Klingon Neutral Zone and makes a phone call to Earth to Scotty? With no lag? Granted, the Enterprise is a giant cell tower, but still. They had limitations in the TV show so that Kirk couldn't just whistle up the fleet when he was in trouble and he had to work his own way out of it. It took time to move from point A to point B. In Abrams version, A and B are practically next door to each other. The Klingon home world is an hour's flight time at warp from Earth, seems to me that would make any Klingon attack an automatic surprise. And when they return to our solar system? They're 200something thousand kilometers from Earth. As it happens, that's closer than the moon. Fundamental flaw and fail. All they had to do was say 200something million or trillion kilometers and they would have been fine. Or parsecs. Or AU's. Astronomy has lots of terms for huge units of distance, they don't use thousand kilometers once they're looking at objects much further away than the moon.

My wife was perplexed by Scotty's resignation. As I heard it, he resigned his assignment, not his commission as an officer. So he probably had sufficient authority and connections to borrow the shuttle that ultimately led him to infiltrating the dreadnought. But even there, what? The dreadnought doesn't have internal security sensors? If it's designed to be operated by a small crew, you'd think the ship would notice that there's an extra person running around. And it would have been a lot more dramatic to have Scotty playing cat and mouse with a security detail, improvising non-lethal traps in engineering to thwart them. This would also have been a way to draw down the staff to make it easier to take the bridge.

And let's talk about the warp core. Terribly fragile thing, you'd think they'd beef it up some. So the Enterprise is falling towards Earth, survives atmospheric reentry even though its hull is so badly damaged that people get sucked out in to space. Finally Kirk jump-starts the ship and what happens? What appears to be chemical reaction thrusters fire and lift the ship. They had to have a minimal amount of power prior to the warp core re-start, they had communications, they couldn't get an engineering repair detail to manually man and fire the rockets on command?

I really hope they did some serious re-evaluation when they rebuilt the ship at the end of the movie, it has some pretty bad design flaws.

Good stuff? The rolling corridors when the artificial gravity was out and the ship was tumbling was awesome. They never had the money or tech to gimbal entire corridors like that in the 1960's. Also Kirk getting beat up and almost killed by a Klingon. Captain Pike was a great character, I'm sorry to see him go. The various other races on the bridge of the Enterprise were nicely done. Sick Bay looked pretty cool, and I love Urban's McCoy. I think De Kelly would have been proud. Kirk figuring out Khan's next move was very good, shows that he is a radical thinker who doesn't have to connect the dots, he can see the big picture very quickly.

But another major flaw with the plot: the emergency meeting of Star Fleet command teams. Where is the White House emergency command center, the proverbial war room? If we're to believe movies, it's deep underground. Where are the Presidential and Congressional emergency bunkers? Built in to mountains and mines. Where is Star Fleet's? On a skyway with a really nice view and great windows.

Not just fail, epic fail.

Well, I think I've given sufficient vent to my spleen and need to get on with my day, which includes packing, as we head back to Cloudcroft tonight.

star trek, movies

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