Thoughts on Star Trek Into Darkness
It's not just normal trekking into darkness. You trek starly.
Star Trek Into Darkness, starring Sherlock Holmes, Sylar, Judge Dredd, Mr Sin, Robocop, Batman, Batman, John Connor's dad, Mickey off Doctor Who and...Simon Pegg.
Short version? I like it. Some of the Stop Having Fun fans hate what the new film series has done to Star Trek (ie, made it comprehensible, accessible, popular and successful), but I love them. If were still as mad a Star Trek fan as I was before, would I also be put off? Can't say, but I hope not. I like to think that I enjoy these because they're actually good...
Spoilers follow!
- Let's get this out of the way: yes, there is lens flare. Not nearly as much as last time, thank goodness, but JJ Abrams is apparently all 'look, if you don't like lens flare, make your own multimillion dollar movie'.
- There are some lovely visual effects. The Enterprise rising out of the ocean was beautiful, and even though it represented loads and loads of death, the Vengeance crashing into the San Francisco was incredible well done. The Vengeance itself, too. The design told us immediately: Yes, this is a Starfleet ship, but it's one that will just charge in, mess you up and not give it a second thought.
- OK, the scope of the Prime Directive I don't think I can get behind. Without referring to TV, what with this being an alternate reality and everything, it sounds like it has three main parts: (1) don't affect non-spacefaring peoples' cultural development, (2) don't get involved in non-spacefarers' local affairs, (3) don't affect a non-spacefaring folk's planet's 'destiny'. (1) you could have ethical and philosophical debates about til the cows come home, but there's a case to be made for it. (2) is as much practical - it's messy enough getting involved in other individuals' affairs, let alone whole civilisations. And the Federation doesn't want to spend all its time fending off requests to torpedo the next village or whatever. But (3)...even in the movie, Admiral Pike even calls Kirk out for trying to save a primitive planet (whose end was not due to the locals' actions) in a way that, had it worked, would have left the local development and culture untouched. (Of course, they completely blew the 'secrecy' part, and that impressed Pike even less!) Does it really help that civilisation's culture and self-development if their planet just blows up from under them? Is there an acceptance of a Divine Plan in Starfleet's charter? ('In God We Trust...so if She wants to blow up planets, let Her.')
- Of course, what this really gets to is deconstructing the Big Moment from the end of the previous movie. Maybe it isn't really such a good idea to advance someone from unfinished cadet to starship captain overnight? (I'd thought this applied to everyone, but when I rewatched the 2009 film before seeing this, Jim's the only one who gets so significantly advanced. The only other actual cadets are Uhura (ahead in training) and McCoy (who is on the medical path and already a doctor).) It probably sucks for Kirk, but being bumped down to Pike's first officer for a while probably isn't the worst idea for him.
- See, it looks like he's learnt his lesson when he tells Alexander that he takes responsibility for everything that's happened. But as the next thing is Alexander dismissing that and saying he'll kill the rest of the crew anyway, the lesson becomes 'If you take responsiblity, it won't make any difference.'
- I like those new flight suits.
- Not so much the big officer hats. Did the milliner think the cast all had much larger heads?
- But the real fashion treat is Scotty's off-duty wear. Oh yes. Lounge lizard Scotty. Disco Scotty. Hawaiian Friday Scotty.
- Dr McCoy, he of the multiple metaphor, is probably my favourite performance of the recast crew. Karl Urban has great onscreen chemistry with Chris Pine, and his performance seems the most natural of the bunch. The DVD of the first movie has some special features with clips of the DeForest Kelley McCoy, and in comparison, it's him that looks like the parody of Urban.
- And who else should return from the first movie but Lieutenant Cupcake! Kirk calls him by his real name in the movie, and I guess they've buried the hatchet, but the person who made the credits isn't fooled: the character is credited not as 'Security Officer' or 'Lt Hendorff', but 'Cupcake'.
- (You know something else about him in that first film? He calls Kirk 'Cupcake' to take him down a peg after Jim called him the same thing. Now, it's fifteen minutes or so for us, but the scenes are set either side of Kirk's time at the Academy. That means that this guy took the insult to heart so much, that he stored it up waiting for that callback for over three years. That's dedication to the bit!)
- I'm not sure Harrison actually needed Harewood to kill himself at the same time he blew up the Archive, but on the other hand, he's kind a bad man, so it's understandable.
- Speaking of things we probably didn't need, the scene with Leonard Nimoy. Don't get me wrong, I liked seeing him again, and the deadpan way the Spocks greeted each other. But the actual scene...it does make sense. It is, dare I say it, logical. But I think it takes something away from the 'new' Spock and the idea of the movies' story going forward if Spock is in the habit of calling up his other self for tips from the future whenever he's in a jam.
- And just to cap off this threefer of the unnecessary... I'm sure that Alice Eve has a lovely body and nice underwear to put it in, but did we need to shoe-horn a big shot of the first inside the second? I know Carol had to put on her flightsuit, but so did Dr McCoy, and we didn't see him poncing about in his underwear.
- Spock, you so jealous! There's hundreds of people on that ship. I'm sure they'll find enough work for two scientists.
- Scotty, you did the right thing. Don't sign for torpedoes if they won't tell or show you what's in them. (Though if Alexander's going to lie about so much other stuff, why not just fake up some specs?)
- Hey, maybe that was part of Alexander's plan. Scotty's quite the engineer. If he'd stayed, he might have found and fixed the engine problem, getting the Enterprise out of there a lot faster, and that's not what Alexander wanted...
- Good bit for Uhura when she tells Kirk that since he brought her along to speak Klingon, let her speak Klingon. Zoë Saldaña gives it just the right delivery to mean not just 'let me use the same syntax as them', but 'let me talk to them in their terms, on their level'. It's almost a shame Harrison started shooting the place up - I thought she was that close to convincing the Klingon guy. (Yes, he had her by the throat, but I thought that was leading to a 'Ha! You have impressed me!' lowering. And in Klingon culture, you probably grab people by the throat a lot more often than most Earth people. It's probably like shaking hands.)
- I guessed parts of Harrison's backstory, but not all of it, so they did a good job with that piece of surprise.
- Did I also mention I love the engineering set/location in these? Because I do.
- I guess we've been spoiled by the transporters on the 'later' series, where they can do pretty much anything you want. In these films, they take time, it's difficult to locate people properly, you can't mess around during the beaming...for some reason, that works for me. I guess that if we're going to accept that you can transmit someone particle by particle across space and put them back together with no ill effects, it should at least be a bit difficult.
- See, one of the advantages of re-starting the series is that you can re-use the endings of old movies! I'm sure they were playing with the audience more than a bit. The people watching who remember Star Trek II will get a bit of fun out of the role-reversal, Kirk and Spock effectively saying each other's other selves' lines (er?) in that scene. Simon Pegg even gets to tell them not to flood the compartment! When I saw this, a woman a few seats up from me just burst into tears! I, of course, couldn't, because there was something in my eye. That said, who couldn't choke at least a little with a dying man saying 'I'm scared...help me not to be.'
- That said, I think many saw the 'solution' to Kirk's death with the enhanced platelets coming. ('You were only barely dead' = the writers telling us that this won't always work so there's still tension, OK?) It is perfectly reasonable for McCoy, having seen the blood's healing power, to test it on the dead tissue of the tribble. I'm not sure why he has dead tribbles in sickbay in the first place, though. Is there a fridge full of them? And let's hope the blood didn't heal its reproductive organs, otherwise the ship will be filled with the little buggers. Though if the serum doesn't work on reproductive organs, that's probably going to come as pretty bad news for someone like James T Kirk.