Movie review: Star Trek Into Darkness

The largely unsuccessful - but rather good - Star Trek: The Motion Picture

For a certain value of 'good' I guess

John Harrison, you say ?

Him of navigation clock fame ? Doesn't look all that bad for his age.

Optional

Sadly*, once I knew Benedict Cumberbatch was in the movie and playing the bad guy, I guessed who his character might be - correctly.

Despite this, and despite everything that's so obviously going to be wrong about this film, I'll still go and see it, sad git that I am.

* For guessing correctly, and for guessing correctly.

"Spock Senior’s appearance to provide his junior with data that could easily be found within the ship’s computer databank - and would have been in the original series - is just another example of the obsessive compulsive fan behaviour shown by Abrams, Orci, Kurtzman and new co-writer (and film Producer) Damon Lindelof. "

Yeah but they gotta get SOMEBODY to see the fukken movie - and OCD fans are the most likely audience..

I might have thought this was a good review until I got to this bit:

following the largely unsuccessful - but rather good - Star Trek: The Motion Picture. and it disqualified anything else written.

As I recall it was the reverse: largely successful because it made loads of cash and that's all Hollywood cares about (Oscar contests not withstanding) and rather bad Trek as the plot was far better done in an hour on tv with it's original villain and far cheaper special effects. I grant them a pass on it only because it produced the only really good Trek film out of the lot: The Wrath of Khan. I was rather disappointed with the subsequent Search for Schlock and it's sequel We Found It. I still don't know why I bothered to check in on the fifth movie, but it was pretty much the last one I watched in a theater until my roomie drug me to the reboot. Roomie and friends will probably drag me to this sequel as well.

Cumberbatch's imdb does indeed give it away, as it lists his character by name. Although it is easy to guess because there aren't that many baddies to choose from.

The first movie of the reboot did it for me....

The first movie of the reboot did it for me - I decided that Star Trek was officially over. I'd almost reached that conclusion with the last of the STTNG movies, and with the disappointing final season of the TV show "Enterprise", but the movie drove the last nail into the coffin.

The pilot for any series sets not only the tone for the series, but greatly defines the scope of what you can expect - what is "possible", in a science fiction series. If the pilot has people eating magic pills and growing 6 times more massive with no matter input, you know that you can expect that sort of thing later on, and can throw that whole "conservation of mass" out the window.

Both the series "Enterprise" and the movie introduced, right off the bat, time travel and altering the time stream. However, unlike Doctor Who, the rest of the basic premise of the show wasn't built around that idea, so it feels very kludged on. It means that at any point in the show, if things get dicey for the characters, you could see a magic deus ex machina from the future/past/alternate time stream to pop in and fix things (something that you rarely see on Doctor Who precisely because the "rules" of the series strongly discourage Doctor[n+m] from coming back to help Doctor[n].

Then there is the whole "younger, edgier characters" of the movie. OK, so Kirk's dad died as Kirk was born, and that changed Kirk. OK, but why is Spock so different? How did the destruction of Kirk's dad's ship alter Spock so much?

Lastly, there are the McGuffins of the plot - like, WTF is this "red matter" crap? And if a drop will implode a planet, WTF does Old Spock have what seems to be several tens of litres of the stuff when all he needs is a drop? And how can there be an ice world close enough to Vulcan that you can see the destruction in the sky? It cannot be a sister planet - they'd both get the same amount of sunlight and you'd expect them to be similar in surface temperature.

Yes, I'm nitpicking, but: when I go into a movie, I have a certain number of "suspension of disbelief" tokens I'm willing to give the movie. It gets one big one right up front: if you want to have dragons and magic, OK, you have dragons and magic. You want FTL spacecraft and aliens that can never-the-less breed with humans, OK. But there's only so much the movie can charge on that first token. After that, every token the movie asks for jars me out of the enjoyment of the movie. Make the movie good enough, and I can get back into the swing fairly quickly, but it's better to not do so in the first place. ST-ETM (Enterprise the movie) wasn't good enough to survive the number of tokens they wanted.

Which is a crying shame. The characters were interesting, and had the producers just put a bit more thought into the movie - just removed the need for some of those suspension-of-disbelief tokens - I could really have enjoyed it. Hell, a simple "There are a multiplicity of timelines, these are the adventures in another timeline, deal with it" could have easily been covered by that first "token", and they could have told the rest of the story without any BS (No magical red matter - you want to destroy Vulcan, go Footfall on it and hit it with a large asteroid moving at .7c - ditch old Spock, have young Spock' watch it on a long-range sensor readout. Have the bad guy be from that timeline - hell, keep him a Romulan but don't let the characters know what that is.)