Well, J.J. Abrams has quite possibly killed the Star Trek franchise. Good for him! I always knew he could do it!
In a sentence: Star Trek Into Darkness is a pastiche of previous, far-better Star Trek films, that will anger Star Trek fans and befuddle laymen.
Here, have a bullet list of me nitpicking of things I didn’t like about Star Trek Into Darkness:
- There is no chemistry between Zachary Quinto’s Spock and Chris Pine’s Kirk. They seem like they should hate eachother, but the plot demands that should be friends and so they are.
- At one point, Bones says that Kirk’s vitals are way off and then nothing comes of it. That’s like someone coughing blood into a handkerchief in a movie and then never mentioning it again.
- During the lead-up to this movie everyone working on it said that there was no way that the villain was going to be Khan and it was going to be a completely new film, not a rehash. Then the villain turned out to be Khan anyway, and every other line is stolen from a previous Star Trek film.
- Khan is Khan it name only. Instead of being a charming, egotistical hothead, Khan is now some weird, cold, Hannibal Lecter-esque, terminator robot-man. Also, British.
- Transwarp transporting is now completely universe breaking. Before, it needed an entire huge facility with an entire ice planet to cool it, now, apparently, it’s a handheld technology. There’s no reason to use starships anymore.
- Khan, despite coming from 300 years in the past, when people were still nuking eachother and weren’t capable of faster than light travel, is woken up to make to make advanced weapons, because, apparently, Khan’s genetic augmentation gives him the ability to learn 300 years of technology quickly and then make it better and junk.
- Yes, give Khan, the crazy guy that ruled part of Asia for a while, access to advanced weapons technology. Good plan.
- They already have the greatest weapon, transwarp transporting. They could just sit on their couches on Earth all day beaming torpedoes to Qo’noS.
- This is a very dark, militaristic film and the campy miniskirts on the women seem especially out of place in it. They even have a special grey dress uniform with a miniskirt for funerals and it just seems so wrong. If they were going to do a rehash of Wrath of Khan, they should have done an update on those sweet, red uniforms from it.
- Khan’s blood is magic. It brings things back to life. This is stupid. Bones injects the magic blood into a dead tribble, because that’s how science works. You just keep injecting things into random things, until you learn a new science.
- Starfleet solves all its problems by punching them now.
- The Enterprise hangs out right about Qo’noS for like a year and no Klingons come by and shoot them, even though Khan murdered, like, 5 of their ships with a hand canon. Wouldn’t someone get suspicious when those ships didn’t report back? They weren’t in communication with anyone when they were blown up?
- They do a reversal of the warp core reactor scene from Wrath of Khan with Kirk fixing the core this time. The only reason that Spock was able to fix the core in Wrath of Khan was because he was half Vulcan and could withstand the radiation better than a human. Kirk should have just died right away. Also, despite receiving a massive dose of radiation, Kirk still looks gorgeous, not a hair out of place.
- They’ve added a bunch of aliens to Starfleet, but only on the periphery. None of the admirals or other important people, except for Spock, are alien. I think only one of them even has a line.
- Khan stuck all his buddies in dangerous torpedoes, in the hopes that deus ex machina would get them out somehow. It did. Good for him.
- They decided that Khan’s new thing is crushing people’s heads.
- There’s a scene, near the end, where Khan steals a jacket for no reason. Maybe, he needed to look cool?
- So, is the Federation at war with the Klingons now, or what? You guys probably wanted to leave that open-ended, so that you could have a focus group make the decision for you on the next film, right?
- This horrible, stupid movie is dedicated to the victims of 9/11? That’s dumb and insulting and I hate you. (Is Khan supposed to be an Osama Bin Laden analogue? If so, whoever decided that should be so should be viciously flogged.)
- Really? The terrible, nonsensical script for this film overran its deadline and took, like, an extra 2 years to write? Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof, you’re awful. Hitting the cut & paste buttons must have really tuckered you out. Lost was stupid. Please stop writing, because you’re hurting the world.
Anyhoo, Star Trek Into Darkness is way under-performing at the box office and the Star Trek franchise’s future is in jeopardy. Well, here’s hoping that J.J. Abrams kills Star Wars too (wait, didn’t George Lucas already do that? HAR HAR HAR). Methinks we need a new science fiction franchise that isn’t based off of what we thought the future would be like in the 60s and 70s, but what we think the future will be like now.