I won't bore you with the history that details my long adoration of Star Trek. I am as stereotypical as they come, straight down to having action figures and a tricorder toy when I was growing up. I was the TNG generation, but have since happily extended it to every branch of the franchise save Voyager which just never much connected with me. That being said and you knowing where I come from, let us move on.
I didn't *hate* Star Trek Into Darkness and that's really the most praise I can find for it. I suppose that is a step-up considering everyone alive knows I thought the last film was a train wreck for various reasons both legitimate and not. But yes, I went in expecting it to be the science fiction Ishtar and found a mildly distracting summer movie with no brains in its head.
If you saw the last film, its really more of the same. They minimized the weakest points of the 2009 film (Scotty's alien buddy is mostly absent this time, thank the fuck Christ) and adapted the characters into more formed if not complete figures that have some semblance of their original characters (which leads one to ask why bother rebooting?)
This time around, the caper is that someone has blown up an archive in San Francisco and later kills one of Kirk's friends. Kirk swears vengeance against this man - a traitor named Harrison - and races to the man's hideout first to kill, then changing his mind to arrest him. All is not as it seems, as Harrison reveals himself to be a pawn of Starfleet's brass and is in fact Khan (originally played my Ricardo Montlebon in the original series and Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan) who turns the tables on both Kirk and Starfleet to his own ends.
Its not a particularly clever plot or anything especially convincing past its typical dialogue sequences in an attempt to justify the special effects.
(I will say this one more time: liking the 2009 movie does not make you a Trekkie/Trekker. Stop that! The 2009 movie is to Star Trek what the Peter Cushing films are to Dr Who. In the end, you are a Trek-loving person based only on the time you have put into it, just like every other fandom, which is populated by die hards and fair-weather fans alike.)
The biggest strength I can find with it is that despite the BIG VILLAIN REVEAL (stomps foot three times) half way through the film - the film isn't a Star Trek II remake. It has more to do with my favorite Original Series episode "Obsession", where Kirk hunts down a sentient cloud vapor thats been killing people for years. Its a thin Moby Dick analogy, which the franchise will overuse as the years ago on but unlike the rest of its incarnations, Kirk actually learns something in this film and in that TOS episode. The big moral is basically "your desire for revenge will be what undoes everything else" and its learned by more than one character in this film. And thats something that should be applauded as its actual character growth and less about yet another action scene.
That is... if it was written by anyone else.
The writers on these last two Trek movies are akin to surgeons who opens you up, poke around to find the problem, doesn't fix or change anything and then refuses to stitch you up. Robert Orci, Damon Lindelof and Alex Kurtzman have every idea of what they want to do but no idea how to go about it. The result is an intriguing first half that explosively decompresses in the second half. Once the audience finds out that Harrison is Khan, it comes apart in such a spectacular fashion, I am at a loss to think of an equal. First off, and perhaps most importantly, theres no reason for it to *actually* be Khan, The writers essentially robbed themselves of creating their first "heavy" character (Lets face it, Nero in 2009 was a very bad/stupid foil and is a thinly cloaked attempt to legitimize the reboot by using a TNG bad guy) by making him the most recognized villain in the series (who is suddenly British? Why? ask people with functioning synapses) and thus robbing it of any individuality. There is no reason for Khan in the story except to pander to people who sort of know who he is but not enough to be angry about it (As someone else brilliantly pointed out: see also General Zod in Superman movies). Its the writing equivalent of product promotion.
There is also a 9/11 analogy involved this time around. Basically that the events of the previous movie push Starfleet into being a more military force and later on there is a ship that crashes into a city and so on. Now, how each person deals with this sort of plot point is on them but for me, it doesn't work. Its many years too late and its blundered about as badly as it was in 2006's Superman Returns. The United States no longer self-identifies with the 9/11 events in so much as needing direct analogy; we're in a post-9/11 world, not a current one. And so, as art should be a product of its time, I'm at a loss as to what the meaning was to do this. A good friend of mine suggested this film was about how the events of 9/11 didn't matter as much as our response to it - a point which I agree on - but even then, its a point which is nearly a decade too old. Why are we being told this *now*? And its especially redundant since an entire season of Enterprise dealt with this in 2003. They're ten years too late once again.
(And for those keeping score, the three writers behind this newest film are responsible for the following: Cowboys & Aliens, Prometheus, the Lost TV series, the Michael Bay Transformers series, The Island, The Legend Of Zorro and one of them produced the horrible movie Eagle Eye. Has the human imagination ever before produced such a wasteland of unmitigated shit? Coleman Francis's films are suddenly looking a bit better.)
As to the bad guy in this film, and I realize that I'm against the grain on this but Cumberpatch was awful. He over enunciates every word, acting only with how he moves his mouth. When Hugo Weaving did this for the Matrix movies, it was with a bit of camp in mind but this is played straight and without anything "behind it". This time, it reminded me a lot of Bruce Payne's bad guy in the hilariously awful Dungeons & Dragons movie: overly preening and as threatening as a case of indigestion. I am not threatened because someone has a deep voice, I am threatened by *presence*, which this character (and actor, by proxy) had none of. Kahn in the original incarnation was more about physicality and intellect while Benedict is simply a talking metrosexual head. As a character and as a bit of acting, Into Darkness understands nothing about what Khan is suppose to be - which is telling of the story as a whole. If you can't get the villain right, wheres the jeopardy? (Hollywood: when guys go to an action movie, the villain shouldn't be someone your girlfriend finds attractive. We're not threatened by boyish men whos faces and jawlines look as streamlined as a speedboat. Character actors with years of experience on stage and screen carry way more weight than a thirty-something model beauty. Remember William Sadler in Die Hard 2? Or what about Christopher Walken? )
And I walked out of the theater thinking of that line from Star Trek VI: "Is it possible, that we two, you and I, have become so old and inflexible that we have outlived our usefulness?".
With these last two films defining the series (and directed by someone who has repeatedly said isn't into Star Trek either) I do not know if Star Trek is "my thing" anymore. I don't think I can identify or even agree with the story choices and writing style these films are going in. To borrow from a Chris Hedge's book subtitle, these films seen to be "the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle". Yes, this film did have something to it - something to actually SAY - but it wasn't nearly enough; the movies before 2009 (well, perhaps not Nemesis or First Contact, we can argue about that later) had stronger moral statements. This is more about "lets make things explode in space and if we have time, we can squeeze some moral stuff in". The message is the thing, always - and though it had more message than the last film, that isn't nearly enough to call it Star Trek either.
I'm not as angry as I was when I left the theater in 2009 but maybe I've simply grown so disappointed, anything would look better now?
