Star Trek: Into Darkness

 Floro's Late to the Party Reviews - Star Trek: Into Darkness

I have to admit, I really wanted to see this in the theater. I had a better offer (birth of my son), so it didn't really work out. I had been waiting for this to hit DVDs because I enjoyed Abrams' reboot. It put the world through a plausible sci-fi reset button that allowed for a mountain of potential fan service, while still providing room to re-interpret and make changes to the source material. Pine was a believable Young Kirk. Quinto did a great Spock impression. Urban was Bones, and fantastic.

Then they announced and started advertising the sequel. It included Benedict "Sherlock" Cumberbatch as a mysterious villain, possibly with super powers! It had enough bits and pieces of what looked to be a great action movie, but stayed vague enough to let the fanboys speculate wildly. And we did! I was convinced this was going to be a remake of the first Star Trek episode "Where no man has gone before", which is a fantastic idea! Reboot the universe? Start the sequel with the first episode retold, but with J.J. Abrams' personal style of one-upsmanship? Get a British accent leading villain that can play calmly devastating? YES! SIGN ME UP TWICE!

Then the rumor mill started trying to spin Cumberbatch as Khan. The Khan from The Wrath Of Khan. The movie that resulted in this piece of film history:

 

I didn't want to believe it. The blond girl in the trailer had the same haircut as the blond girl from the episode. Super powers seem to be happening in the trailer. They easily could've been found in deep space (another piece of info that was floating around) I wasn't so much worried about the idea of rebooting Khaaaaaan, I just wanted to win at nerd guessing.

The movie came and went. It sounded like it did well from a money and hype standpoint. Fast forward to this week. My Bengals beat the Steelers for just the second time since I've been married, and I have the movie on a one night rental. I am already in a great mood and figured Star Trek: Into Darkness would be the icing on the cake. I was wrong.

Star Trek: Into Darkness takes place in the future after the first movie's future, but not by much. Our heroes open the movie by running away from a volcano, nearly killing Spock, ruining a civilization, and swimming faster than sharks somehow. Writing it out here, I feel like it should've been more exciting. I expected Abrams to one-up the volcano to be the planet splitting in half, and then re-one-up himself by making the solar system about to explode. When this didn't happen, I took it as a warning sign.

Warning sign number 2 was the need to constantly re-introduce the location via caption in any scenery set up shot. They start with a random looking stardate, and then realize only the super nerds know what that is and cut it down to just location. We should be able to recognize the location based on the environment and camera work if the location matters. Or, in this case, the specific location truly has no impact. Why did it have to be London, and why did we need to be reminded, save for maybe a clause in Sherlock's contract?

Maybe he really hates London, but no one believes him for some strange, hypnotic reason.

Warning sign number 3 was the extremely heavy handed nature of every shot and piece of dialogue. Every thing that happens in this movie is told or shown minutes before it happens. For example: Admiral Pike (whom everyone seems fine just calling Chris), is given command of the Enterprise shortly after Kirk is removed for being too heroic. Pike asks Kirk to be his First Officer and then they are both called to an emergency meeting. He might as well have said "I want you to replace me when I'm gone and this father figure metaphor is wrapped up, son. Now excuse me while I put on this red shirt."

Into Darkness might have been a step up. It might have been the other half of a cornerstone franchise reboot that brought the newest generations years of sci-fi imagination, TV shows, and a returned a common and public touchstone in nerd culture to prominence, for hardcore nerds to love and norms to mock alike. Sadly, even the title doesn't make any sense.

Into Darkness could have meant the journey into deep space, trying to make discoveries in the vast emptiness of the universe. We are off Earth and the ship for maybe 15 minutes total throughout the movie. We discover nothing new.

Into Darkness could have meant the journey into the depths of human emotion. A great battle of the inner conflict between good and evil, right and wrong, Into Darkness could have been alluding to a decent into madness to combat an unstoppable madman in Khan. Khan is barely present. Character development is (nearly) entirely absent across the entire cast. When there is any development, it's done from two places. The first is Spock reading his emotions out loud, so that we can understand them. The second is Kirk reading what just happened out loud, and then giving the audience a line or two of far too cheeky insight, as if the writers were sitting on either side of you saying "Did we really just make that character say that?" "Yes we did!" and high-fiving over your popcorn.

Let's make the red shirt thing a joke while we're at it!

Maybe Into Darkness was in reference to all the plot points  that were dropped, as if into a black hole? Why does Khan have the ability to teleport across the galaxy with technology that is apparently secret government research, and why aren't we using it more? No one knows or cares by the next scene change. Or how about Khan's super blood that brings people back from the near-dead? We've apparently just cured all diseases in humans and tribbles, assuming anyone remembers.

What Into Darkness probably meant was in regards to the damage it was trying to do to your retinas via the barrage of BLINDING LENS FLARES throughout the entire movie. Do you remember when you discovered the sepia tone filter on Photoshop, and suddenly the next 300 pictures you had on your PC needed to be olde-timey? Abrams found the LENS FLARE filter. There's LENS FLARE on objects that don't have eve a LIGHT SOURCE TO FLARE. Here are my notes from the last sequence of shots:

LENS FLARE STORAGE FACILITY

Those words aren't the captains oath. It doesn't vow anything. If that is the oath, it's stupid.
LENS FLARE CAPTAIN CHAIR LENS FLARE SCOTTY LENS FLARE BLOND LENS FLARE BRIDGE

LENS FLARE LENSFLARE CREDITS.

He interrupted a lens flare with another lens flare and then the credits rolled.

A sad day for "Pimp My Movie"

I was stunned by how much the female characters were reduced to irrelevancy. Uhura is around just enough to act tough, and then need to be rescued and forgotten. The blond daughter of the other admiral is brought in for really, only one scene, in which she is in her underwear, flexing and saying "don't look!" There was no reason for this to happen. She just starts stripping, so she can...get into her planet gear? Look, she earned that shot and clearly put in a lot of work, so kudos to her. But this was shoehorned in, much like her entire character.

Even with all the negatives, there are some redeeming qualities. There are some good one-liners, particularly from Urban as Bones. The music is surprisingly well put together, considering the visuals were not. Several of the knowing winks made me grin, and I was comfortable with the (extremely predictable) choice to flip that classic "Kirk/Spock separated by glass" scene around. I think it worked at least as well as the movie itself.

I understand there is a fair amount of nerdrage from all of the hat-tips to (and changes from) the source material. For the most part, I'd say "get over it, nerd". Instead, be mad at how poorly it was done. Khan doesn't mean anything to the last twenty years of new Trekkies, so when Sherlock announces himself gravely as "Khannnnnn", no one cares. Abrams then has to break his own Timecop-esque rules and have Leonard Nemoy show up to try and make it mean anything.

In summary, Star Trek: Into Darkness is a slapdash collection of pre-boot Trek iconography held together by an abundance of lens flare and a quick pace unhindered by plot or character development. It almost does a handful of things well. The actors tried their best with what they were given. Into Darkness was at best meaningless and at worst disappointing nonsense. Clearly, Abrams either didn't care about this movie, or he tried to hold on to and fit too many things into it. What worries me the most is the more Abrams tightened his grip, the more this movie slipped through his fingers. I hope he's learned his lesson.

He's thinking about how bright the lens flare will be when Abrams blows up Endor