Star Trek Into Darkness

venray said:

Damn you J J Abrams....Damn you to hell....

And now he gets to screw Star Wars up too......

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c7_assassin said:

They should have called it Star Trek: Fan Service.

The plot is so strange and incoherent that it constantly lifted me out of the movie to ask "Wait, what? Why are they doing that? That doesn't make sense...are they playing the reels out of order?" A movie like Transformers or Battleship might conceivably be forgiven for being incredibly stupid: no one goes to those movies expecting to be told an engaging story. It's just CGI-porn; you go there to watch $200 million burn up before your eyes.

But Star Trek is not like that. And this isn't just me rejecting the new direction J.J. Abrams has taken the series; this very film is written in such a way that understanding the plot is actually important to appreciating the movie. All the cat-and-mouse between Kirk and Khan, Khan and the evil Admiral, the evil Admiral and Kirk, and understanding everyone's motivation... that's the entire movie. If you fuck that up, your movie fails.

But Abrams and Lindelof were obviously counting on the fans overlooking how horrible the film is as long as there was enough self-referential humour and inside jokes for them to squee over. And, for the most part, I guess they were right. But that doesn't make this a successful movie. It barely makes it a movie at all. It's two and a half hours of patronizing bullshit (oh wow, they made another Star Trek reference... in a Star Trek movie! What the fuck were the odds?), suitable only for nerds who enjoy being patronized, and teenage girls who cream themselves over the implied gay chemistry between all the male leads.

Here are just a few of the questions I had while watching:

-After Khan blows up the secret anti-Klingon project, and then assassinates a bunch of Starfleet officers, and then flees to the Klingon homeworld... how does anyone not conclude that he was secretly working for the Klingons? How is that possibility never even discussed?

-For that matter, why the hell did Khan go there? It sure wasn't to hide... he knows Starfleet has long-range torpedoes that can reach him there. He knows because he fucking built them.

-Also, is fleeing to a distant planet really a good option when all your friends are hidden inside Starfleet's special long-range torpedoes?

-What was the Admiral's plan? He needed the Enterprise to fire on the Klingon homeworld... and he somehow knew that the Enterprise would do exactly that... even though it was illegal... and Kirk has a history of violating orders... and in fact they don't do it, so it was really a terrible assumption to make on his part.

-But say they had: then what? Did he want the Klingons to blow up the Enterprise? His sabotage didn't kill the engines until they were only 20 minutes away from the Klingon homeworld... if the Enterprise had just fired the torpedoes and flown away, they would have been well-within Federation space and probably within range of help by the time the engines failed...and actually the Klingons would never have caught up with them anyway, since apparently there is no Klingon fleet protecting their space, seeing as how the Enterprise could fly right up to the planet without incident...

-So he must have planned to destroy the Enterprise himself... Do Starships have a black box? Wouldn't there be some kind of evidence that he had done that? Oh, but this was about provoking a war with the Klingons... but if that was the case, blowing up the Enterprise would be an attempt to prevent a war, since you have to pretend that Kirk was acting alone, and then you can say to the Klingons 'see, he was a renegade, we blew him up ourselves...'

-So he was going to blow up the Enterprise, not tell the Klingons, tell the Federation Council that the Klingons blew up the Enterprise, but not tell them about Khan or how the Enterprise fired torpedoes at the Klingons... This plan kind of depends on nobody in Starfleet knowing anything, or saying anything to each other... If anyone up top were comparing notes I think this Admiral would get arrested pretty quickly... And how can you depend on your secrets not getting out when apparently communicators work all the way from Earth to the heart of the Klingon Empire? One message and your cover is blown.

-Actually, why did the Admiral even need the Enterprise to do anything? He already has a faster, more powerful ship, which nobody knows about and is crewed by space-pirates... He could have killed Khan, bombed the Klingons, started his war and nobody would know except him and the space-pirates.

-Come to think of it, isn't the terrorism and assassination in the first act already a pretty good pretext for war? Especially when all available evidence points to Klingon involvement anyway? Why the fuck did any of this need to happen?

-Smuggling people inside live torpedoes is a really, really terrible idea.

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