So I saw Benedict Cumberbatch Is Mad About Something

[cleolinda]

I saw Star Trek Into Darkness Sunday afternoon but haven't said anything about it because... I just really had no urge to talk about it at all. This perplexes me. I've seen a few episodes of the original series and Next Generation, so I have a decent background on it without being married to canon. I loved the first new movie. I like J.J. Abrams

Comments

[executivehpfan]

This is kind of how I feel. This film had all the ingredients to really wow me but it fell really short. I actually thought it was dull in some places. It didn't give me much of anything, and I can't even summon up the energy to be angry at it (as a Trekkie, mind). It's just meh.

[cleolinda]

Yeah, it actually did feel kind of dull in places. I don't know why! I felt exactly the way I did while seeing the third Star Wars prequel, oddly. "Too loud, too busy, occasionally boring but I don't understand why." I tend to think it has something to do with the pacing of the story, somehow, not an actual lack of things happening. Like, I felt like we were hurtling pell-mell through ALL THE THINGS HAPPENING with no real sense of rising and falling action. I guess that's how I would describe it in retrospect, anyway--it's not something I consciously try to diagnose while I'm watching. But... like... it felt like it was rushing along in a straight line instead of a more effective, measured sense of pacing. So you get this paradoxically bored sense of "Well, we're still doing all the things because reasons, I guess."

[executivehpfan]

I think this is really accurate. The pacing was completely wrong for the sequence of events.

[cleolinda]

I didn't even really have a problem with Uhura being like SPOCK LET'S TALK ABOUT OUR FEELINGS. The problem was WHEN they chose to do it--right in the middle of an action/suspense sequence when NO ONE wanted to hear it, rather than, like, a quiet moment paced later on. That's basically it in a nutshell, I guess.

[mysticowl]

Aaugh! I wanted to like this movie and it was enjoyable enough, but there was just too many things wrong with the writing

[quicksilvermad]

"Chapel is a nurse now" - she was a nurse in the first film! You called her name and Majel Roddenberry answered off-screen!

THIS. I would have been all "okay that makes sense" with it if she'd been off studying to be a doctor like she planned to in TOS. She was already a nurse by 2260 and Roger Korby went missing on Exo III in 2261. They could have had her working with him-ANYTHING BUT "she's studying to be a nurse" SINCE SHE ALREADY WAS ONE IN THE FIRST MOVIE.

*scrubs both hands across her face*

I'm sorry. I was just really excited for this movie because I was so certain that Christine Chapel would be in it somewhere and all we get is this inaccurate throwaway gag.

[herdivineshadow]

YES. THE THING ABOUT CHAPEL. So they decided to retcon and turn it into a joke about how Kirk is somehow kind of into...sexual harassment. Oh.

[gladdecease]

Given the way Spock sprints for Engineering when Scotty calls him up to vaguely tell him to come watch Kirk die in a glass tube of radiation, I assumed that Spock Prime told him about his own glass tube of radiation death. (Not that I know what that has to do with defeating Khan, but it's the only parallel to the end of Wrath of Khan that I can recall appearing in Into Darkness.)

[cleolinda]

Ahhhhh, that's true. Although I don't know what that has to do with defeating Khan, either.

[andelku]

(Don't lie, you know he would wreck everyone's shit just to get to Spock.)

Yes, this was basically the plot of Star Trek III.

Star Trek IV richly demonstrated that Kirk fell upwards in the original canon too, although they worked harder at it.

[halfmoon_mollie]

Well. I wondered if I was the only one who thought...No, wait. There are all those people back in the photon torpedoes

[eruvadhril]

I have just started DS9 in my Big Trek Marathon and every time Doctor Bashir is on screen I just want to squeeze his face and go "OH YOU PRECIOUS BABY".

I fully expect something terrible to happen to him by the end of the first season.

[herdivineshadow]

I WANT TO SAY SO MANY THINGS BUT I CANNOT.

I <3 Dr Bashir.

[halfmoon_mollie]

He showed up in Syrianna. Imagine, not expecting it, the camera pans across that face and then dollies back to show him in his white robes.

I think George Clooney was in that movie...