Star Trek Into Darkness
After my reaction to Star Trek (2009), you'd think I'd want nothing to do with a sequel. Indeed, my expectations for Into Darkness were low, but the odds of the movie doing any further damage to the franchise were also low. 2009 had already made it impossible for me to accept this reboot as authentic Star Trek, so I considered Into Darkness more like a sequel to a sci-fi action movie, and less like a canonical continuation of the Star Trek franchise I know and love. Consequently, I ended up enjoying Into Darkness...though not enough to spare it from a scathing writeup. Whereas 2009 has a decent story but falls short because of its incredible inattention to detail, Into Darkness has a borderline incoherent story, but the kind of attention to some details that makes me almost believe it's real Star Trek again. I'll take a bad story that's told well over a good story that's told poorly any day, but the fact remains that Into Darkness is an illogical mess that's made worse when you start to compare it to genuine Trek.
The opening scene sets the tone for the whole movie. On some random planet somewhere, Kirk is on the run from a tribe of angry locals. We quickly learn that Spock is trying to keep a nearby volcano from erupting, Kirk is trying to move these people as far away from the blast radius as possible, and the Enterprise is concealed underwater...uh...because it looks really awesome when she rises up out of the sea. Seriously, aside from the magnificent visual spectacle, what possible need is there to subject a starship to undue salt water and hull pressure when it can do everything from space!? And that's to say nothing about how bonkers it is to park a GIANT SPACESHIP in a primitive culture's backyard and pretend like you're trying to avoid cultural contamination. The scene makes a big deal about not breaking the Prime Directive, but I'm pretty sure nobody actually knows what the Prime Directive is—compare this scene with TNG's "Pen Pals" and see if you can spot the difference. If you're trying to save a race from extinction without interfering with their development, maybe don't go interrupting a holy ritual you don't understand and stealing a sacred relic that might hold their whole culture together. If your "getaway vehicle" is a big scary animal, maybe convey that information to your captain so he's not inclined to shoot it in the face. If the consequence for not stopping the volcanic eruption is that "the planet dies," why bother evacuating to a mile away when the entire planet is in the blast radius? You could've avoided this whole scenario if you'd just dropped Spock into the volcano and let him work in secret; no angry natives, no cultural contamination, no implicating the whole crew in breaking the Prime Directive by landing the ship on the surface so you can interfere. This isn't just a bad plan; this is bad storytelling.
What also bothers me is that this opening scene completely squanders the potential of a reboot. Why not visit one of the hundreds of planets we've already seen on Star Trek and put a different spin on the situation? If you wanted to keep the "angry natives" routine, we could've had a mini-remake of "The Galileo Seven" or "A Private Little War". It would've been so easy to submerge the Enterprise on Azati Prime and have the angry natives be disgruntled Xindi. Heck, we could've done something altogether different and seen a first contact with Betazed or paid a visit to the Dyson Sphere from "Relics" while it was still inhabited. If you've got 50 years of story ideas and hindsight at your disposal, and no accountability to prior continuity, you can do so much better than Random Jungle Planet. Are the natives and their planet visually interesting? Yes. But especially after how divisive the last movie was among fans, kicking off this movie with a thoughtful twist on classic Trek would have been a welcome olive branch to the old guard. Random Jungle Planet is business as usual for Star Trek, but it's too early to go back to business as usual. A reboot is an opportunity to tell stories that never could have happened in the old continuity, and to do things better than before. That is also why Into Darkness is proof positive that the people behind this reboot have no business making Star Trek: when you've thrown away half a century of continuity in order to tell any story you please, it's almost insulting to immediately redo the one film that virtually every Trek fan can agree is in no need of an overhaul.
I am, of course, referring to Wrath of Khan. Oh, sure, the story plays out differently here—and it's more like a conflation of "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan, anyhow, so I give the film points for finally putting more of the legacy at its disposal to creative use—but all the major plot points are still there. Khan, a power-hungry bad guy with a stolen Starfleet vessel, plays a game of cat-and-mouse with the crew of the Enterprise. Carol Marcus shows up unexpectedly. A main character sacrifices himself to save the ship. There's nothing inherently wrong with doing a remake in a reboot universe, but this particular remake was already partially attempted by Nemesis, and that film is half the reason there was a reboot in the first place. Boldly go somewhere else, NuTrek; we've done this story before, and not even real Trek could do it as well a second time.
Ah, but we're not supposed to know that this is Wrath of Khan all over again, at least not at first. We leave Random Jungle Planet to find that there's some mystery man on Earth who can cure disease with his magical blood and make buildings explode with little more than a glass of water. He's known as John Harrison, and if you weren't following all the buzz leading up to the initial release of the movie, you might take him at face value. The thing is, if you're new to Star Trek, the big reveal that Harrison is Khan Noonien Singh means nothing to you. And if you're a Star Trek veteran, you probably saw this coming from a light year away—and even if you didn't, there's not enough of a payoff to justify the subterfuge. The stunning plot twist is that this character was using an alias. The plot is convoluted enough without this extra layer of misdirection.
I also take issue with the casting of Khan. Don't get me wrong—Benedict Cumberbatch turns in a memorable performance and makes the character his own, so there's never any sense that he's acting in the shadow of Ricardo Montalban. But that's part of the problem: I barely see any trace of Montalban's Khan here, and he's yet another character who shouldn't have been impacted so dramatically by Nero's temporal incursion. Khan had been in cryogenic stasis for a couple centuries before being discovered by Starfleet less than a year before the start of the film, so the Khan of Into Darkness should essentially be the Khan of "Space Seed"—smooth, ambitious, forceful, regal. Maybe a glint of unstable fire in his eyes after so much time hating Starfleet for what they did to him, like we see in Wrath of Khan. Into Darkness has a few moments of Khan succumbing to pure rage, but he's generally more dapper than regal, more cool than smooth, more brooding than forceful. Most importantly, he doesn't even look the part—Cumberbatch is a pasty European, resembling neither Montalban's Mexican heritage nor Khan's Indian heritage. This is not a matter of swapping out Kirstie Alley for Robin Curtis; this is a continuity error, and one that unfortunately removes an opportunity for NuTrek to be as diverse as Star Trek should be. One more white guy where there could have been a person of color in a strong role. The Star Trek: Khan comics give an explanation for this apparent discontinuity, but as with the Countdown and Nero comics, there's no reason we couldn't have gotten an explanation in the film itself.
Despite this, I will say that Into Darkness is better than 2009 about including a diverse population of extras in the background. I haven't counted every single extra, but if you look behind the main characters, you'll see plenty of women, people of color, and aliens. There's a bald woman of color filling in for Chekov on the bridge, and there's even an android (who is suspiciously reminiscent of Lobot from Star Wars, but I'll let it slide). However, the security team that escorts Khan around the ship is all male (and 3/4 white); hopefully that's just coincidence and not a subtle message that security is a man's job (lest we forget the MACOs of ENT). While we're talking about diversity and inclusion, we might as well touch on Carol Marcus, who further establishes that the women in the reboot universe are mostly just there to look good, scream a lot, and make a minimal contribution to advancing the plot. I understand that not every character gets to play the hero, and that there are plenty of male characters who are underutilized. But in a reboot universe where women with speaking roles are vastly outnumbered, and in a franchise known for its strong female characters, it's especially important for Carol Marcus to demonstrate that 2009's mishandling of female characters was just a fluke.
Disappointingly, Carol's only contribution of substance is that she knows enough about these mystery torpedoes to disarm one. Except...she needs a man's help to do it. And, when the torpedo activates, she just swears and yanks the detonator mechanism out like a caveman. So much for showing off her knowledge and expertise. She tries to use herself as a bargaining chip to keep her father from destroying the Enterprise...but then she's captured and has to be rescued (by men), and the battle picks up where it left off. At least she hits a guy when Kirk and company take the Vengeance bridge, but that guy probably would've been phasered in another moment if she hadn't been there. Practically anything Carol does, another character could have done instead, and it's only the fact that her father is important that makes her important. Oh, and also the fact that she's got a shapely body under that uniform; not only does Carol serve as a sexy distraction for Kirk and McCoy, but she undresses in front of the audience to raise their attention level. At least on ENT, the men show as much skin as the women; Kirk doesn't even have the courtesy to get his shirt ripped up in this movie.
As a side note, I'd like to point out that Nero's temporal incursion gave Carol a British accent for some reason.
Carol's father, Admiral Crazypants Marcus, is as wishy-washy as she is, but for very different reasons. Just as Spock Prime is the incarnation of the story planning meeting in 2009, Admiral Marcus is the primary conflict made manifest, and is too busy driving the story forward to become a fully developed character. Which is a shame, because Peter Weller makes an excellent respectable madman, and he deserves a character with more depth and clearer motivations.
After Kirk breaks the Prime Directive on Random Jungle Planet, Admiral Marcus convenes a tribunal to remove Kirk from command. Then, in a contrived effort to keep Kirk free from the consequences of his actions, a meeting of Starfleet's captains and first officers ends in the death or injury of every other person qualified to command the Enterprise, and Kirk takes back his chair before it has a chance to get cold. There are so many problems with this scenario, and this sets off a chain of events that make it seem like Marcus was waiting for this specific set of unexpected circumstances before striking the Klingon Empire.
This disastrous meeting of the captains never should have happened. First of all, we're talking about personnel who should be off exploring the far reaches of the galaxy; can you imagine Archer turning around in the middle of the Xindi crisis because some building exploded on Earth? There should've been at least one empty seat with somebody on speakerphone calling from their hotel on Risa. Second of all, this is an incredibly obvious security risk—the protocol even mentions the specific room where the meeting should be held, and it's a room full of windows that aren't even bulletproof! Third of all, Pike says that it was hard to convince Marcus to keep Kirk on as a mere first officer, but it takes almost no convincing at all for Marcus to hand over control of the Enterprise to Kirk after the attack. Kirk's persuasive argument was "Starfleet can't go after [Khan], but I can"—which is nonsense, because Kirk wasn't kicked out of Starfleet; he was merely busted for breaking the Prime Directive, which is exactly what Marcus now wants Kirk to go and do! Unless, of course, Marcus is deliberately written to uphold the "every ranking Starfleet officer other than Kirk is insane" trope we find so often in TOS.
Let's think about how this would've played out under normal circumstances. Marcus worked in secret with Khan to develop the USS Vengeance (which, I might add, is no name for a Starfleet vessel, secret warship or not), so there's a fully operational stealth starship at Marcus's disposal. Given how quick he is to open fire on the Enterprise, and given how his skeleton crew is completely complicit in these clearly illegal operations, Marcus presumably would have flown the Vengeance over to Qo'nos (which is spelled onscreen as "Kronos," another sign that this isn't authentic Star Trek) and started a war himself. Loading the Enterprise up with mystery torpedoes and sending a captain who clearly can't follow directions off to start the war for you is an unnecessary risk. And if the whole point is that Kirk is willing to bend the Prime Directive, and therefore willing to undertake unscrupulous missions, then who was supposed to be the patsy if Kirk wasn't in command? Because Marcus definitely shot himself in the foot by convening a tribunal to remove his perfect patsy from the captain's chair. This would have been more believable if, instead, Marcus had pulled an Emperor Palpatine and buddied up to this misunderstood rebel, sending Kirk off on a secret mission to "redeem himself."
I should also mention that Marcus is the absolute worst at keeping secrets. He's got a model of the Vengeance on his desk, for crying out loud, and he openly tells Kirk about Section 31, an organization so secret that people in Section 31 barely acknowledge it exists. Everything we know about Section 31 is that it's practically invisible and independent of Starfleet, but Marcus talks about it like it's the Obsidian Order and he's Enabran Tain. I also have to question Marcus's judgment in attempting to incite a war immediately after every captain in his fleet has been injured or killed. The Vengeance is powerful, but not omnipresent; you need more than one ship to fight a war. Which is why it also doesn't make sense that Marcus would be so eager to destroy Starfleet's flagship, let alone the talented crew that singlehandedly prevented Nero from annihilating Earth.
If Marcus were profoundly racist or had a deep-seated personal vendetta against the Klingons, I might be able to excuse his irrationality and lack of judgment, but there's no evidence that he should perceive the Klingons as anything other than one threat among many. Marcus says that, since they were discovered 100 years ago, the Klingons have conquered at at least two planets (which means nothing unless it happened recently and unprovoked) and attacked Starfleet vessels six times (which, because ENT was unaffected by Nero's temporal shenanigans, means "Judgment", "Bounty", "The Expanse", and "Affliction" account for all but two of these, a century ago). Apparently, that's enough motivation to collaborate with an incredibly dangerous criminal to secretly build the largest starship in Star Trek history so it can cripple an entire civilization that mostly keeps to itself unless Jonathan Archer annoys them. Overkill, dude. Marcus's choice to use Khan in this plan isn't simply questionable; it's downright dumb. If you're going to conscript a violent superhuman into designing weapons for you, at least pick one of the more subservient ones who doesn't have a history of conquering whole continents (and you're worried about the Klingons?). The least-qualified superhuman in the bunch is still probably better than your best people.
That's one place where Into Darkness actually improves on Wrath of Khan: the portrayal of Khan as a true superhuman. The writers are comic book fans, so they know how to do superheroes. Khan's superior intellect is no laughing matter; he's three steps ahead of everyone else and knows what they're going to say before they say it. Khan is frighteningly intelligent, and it's wonderful. He's also physically intimidating to the extreme. It's one thing to see Khan lift a guy off the ground with one hand; it's another to see the heroes wail on Khan to the point of exhaustion without making a dent. Khan has great depth as well; we get a real sense of the importance of his family, which informs all of his actions—a welcome breath of character-centric air in a story full of "then this happens because it's cool."
I'm also pleased with how Scotty's character informs his actions. Gone is the caricature that called himself Scotty in 2009; here we've got a man who will go as far as resigning his commission to uphold his integrity as a responsible engineer. This is the same Scotty we know from TOS who loves his ship and takes his work seriously, but without as strong a rapport with his colleagues (Keenser notwithstanding). The new haircut helps the believability factor a great deal.
But then you've got the problem of who takes his place in engineering: Chekov, of all people. At best, he's an intern. You're telling me that not one of the hundreds of people on that ship is more qualified than the navigator to run the whole engineering department? When Tom Paris takes on new responsibilities as a medic, it's because sickbay is understaffed; when Chekov takes on new responsibilities as Chief Engineer, it's because the story needs an extra engineer more than it needs a helmsman. Here's another missed opportunity: why not make Chekov the transporter chief and have Charlene Masters from "The Alternative Factor" take over for Scotty? More racial diversity, a strong female, and a subtle reference for the hardcore Trek fans, all in one person.
At least 50 years of Star Trek history aren't completely wasted on this movie. Aside from Khan, Carol, and Section 31, there's a model of the NX-01 in Admiral Marcus's office, a quick mention of Harry Mudd and the Gorn, actual Klingons, a dead tribble, talk of a five-year mission, and new senior personnel uniforms reminiscent of those used in The Motion Picture. Spock and McCoy banter like old times, Sulu gets a taste of commanding a starship, there's a cringefully ham-fisted homage to Wrath of Khan, and, of course, there's a completely unnecessary Spock Prime cameo. OK, so maybe those last two are examples of why referencing the source material isn't always a good idea.
So you want to do a remake of Wrath of Khan, but you switch it up so that Kirk dies instead of Spock. That's fine. Except Kirk and Spock don't have the time-tested friendship here to give the scene any emotional punch, and frankly, this Kirk has a long way to go before he's compelling enough for me to weep over him. Now that would have been a gutsy move: bump off Kirk and replace him with, say, Willard Decker in the next movie. To its credit, the movie does try to provide some buildup to the scene—earlier on, there are moments where Kirk gets chummy with Spock, and where he needs to think about taking responsibility for his crew—but the scene still feels contrived, and the forced Shatner yell at the end doesn't help matters. Khan isn't even really responsible for this mess! You know who could've delivered that line amazingly? Benedict Cumberbatch. I wanted to see Khan on the bridge of the Vengeance, yelling "Kiiiiiiiiirk!!!" as his ship comes crashing down.
It makes perfect sense that Spock Prime is still around, and that someone would eventually ask him for guidance. Considering how lackadaisical he was in the last movie about Nero changing the timeline, how willing he was to help the Enterprise crew, and how much he pressured Kirk and Spock to follow the same path as their TOS counterparts, you'd think he'd be more than happy to share the secrets of the universe with his younger, alternate self. You'd be wrong. Apparently, Spock Prime has vowed never to reveal information that would alter the destiny (there's that word again!) of the reboot crew. Well, he manages to uphold his vow, because everything he ends up divulging about the Khan he knew has no bearing whatsoever on the outcome of the story. I can only assume that Spock Prime summarized the last act of "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan to his junior self while the camera was focused elsewhere, and when the younger Spock said "None of this is at all relevant to our current predicament," Spock Prime came up with the idea to beam over Khan's torpedoes. If that's the case, then the heroes didn't entirely solve their own problems and were saved by a deus ex Spockina. Otherwise, the scene is nothing but fluff and fanservice. Either way, the scene cheapens the story.
I could talk about the ludicrous ramifications of people now being able to beam to planets in distant star systems and come back from the dead with a little Augment blood. I could point out that the Vengeance makes three consecutive movies where the bad guy has an all-powerful warship. I could pick apart the numerous contradictions and inconsistencies in the dialogue. But I've hopefully already made my point: Star Trek Into Darkness is not a very good movie. But you know what? It's a fun movie.
The Enterprise rising out of the sea. Kirk and Khan weaving through space debris at high speed. The final showdown between Spock and Khan. The battle between the Enterprise and the Vengeance, and the Vengeance crashing down into San Francisco. The movie is full of thrilling, memorable scenes, with superb visual effects and some great camera work. Sets, props, and costumes all look great. The characters feel more authentic now that the actors have started to grow into their roles. There's an honest effort to bring in more elements of classic Trek. The story, flawed as it is, strives to be more sophisticated and character-driven than before. I genuinely enjoy this portrayal of Khan, I love the clever twists with the torpedoes, and I'm fascinated by the design of the Vengeance. Into Darkness has just as many problems as 2009, but the worst damage has already been done, so it's easier to enjoy the ride. Into Darkness still isn't Star Trek, but it's an entertaining step in the right direction.
The opening scene sets the tone for the whole movie. On some random planet somewhere, Kirk is on the run from a tribe of angry locals. We quickly learn that Spock is trying to keep a nearby volcano from erupting, Kirk is trying to move these people as far away from the blast radius as possible, and the Enterprise is concealed underwater...uh...because it looks really awesome when she rises up out of the sea. Seriously, aside from the magnificent visual spectacle, what possible need is there to subject a starship to undue salt water and hull pressure when it can do everything from space!? And that's to say nothing about how bonkers it is to park a GIANT SPACESHIP in a primitive culture's backyard and pretend like you're trying to avoid cultural contamination. The scene makes a big deal about not breaking the Prime Directive, but I'm pretty sure nobody actually knows what the Prime Directive is—compare this scene with TNG's "Pen Pals" and see if you can spot the difference. If you're trying to save a race from extinction without interfering with their development, maybe don't go interrupting a holy ritual you don't understand and stealing a sacred relic that might hold their whole culture together. If your "getaway vehicle" is a big scary animal, maybe convey that information to your captain so he's not inclined to shoot it in the face. If the consequence for not stopping the volcanic eruption is that "the planet dies," why bother evacuating to a mile away when the entire planet is in the blast radius? You could've avoided this whole scenario if you'd just dropped Spock into the volcano and let him work in secret; no angry natives, no cultural contamination, no implicating the whole crew in breaking the Prime Directive by landing the ship on the surface so you can interfere. This isn't just a bad plan; this is bad storytelling.
What also bothers me is that this opening scene completely squanders the potential of a reboot. Why not visit one of the hundreds of planets we've already seen on Star Trek and put a different spin on the situation? If you wanted to keep the "angry natives" routine, we could've had a mini-remake of "The Galileo Seven" or "A Private Little War". It would've been so easy to submerge the Enterprise on Azati Prime and have the angry natives be disgruntled Xindi. Heck, we could've done something altogether different and seen a first contact with Betazed or paid a visit to the Dyson Sphere from "Relics" while it was still inhabited. If you've got 50 years of story ideas and hindsight at your disposal, and no accountability to prior continuity, you can do so much better than Random Jungle Planet. Are the natives and their planet visually interesting? Yes. But especially after how divisive the last movie was among fans, kicking off this movie with a thoughtful twist on classic Trek would have been a welcome olive branch to the old guard. Random Jungle Planet is business as usual for Star Trek, but it's too early to go back to business as usual. A reboot is an opportunity to tell stories that never could have happened in the old continuity, and to do things better than before. That is also why Into Darkness is proof positive that the people behind this reboot have no business making Star Trek: when you've thrown away half a century of continuity in order to tell any story you please, it's almost insulting to immediately redo the one film that virtually every Trek fan can agree is in no need of an overhaul.
I am, of course, referring to Wrath of Khan. Oh, sure, the story plays out differently here—and it's more like a conflation of "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan, anyhow, so I give the film points for finally putting more of the legacy at its disposal to creative use—but all the major plot points are still there. Khan, a power-hungry bad guy with a stolen Starfleet vessel, plays a game of cat-and-mouse with the crew of the Enterprise. Carol Marcus shows up unexpectedly. A main character sacrifices himself to save the ship. There's nothing inherently wrong with doing a remake in a reboot universe, but this particular remake was already partially attempted by Nemesis, and that film is half the reason there was a reboot in the first place. Boldly go somewhere else, NuTrek; we've done this story before, and not even real Trek could do it as well a second time.
Ah, but we're not supposed to know that this is Wrath of Khan all over again, at least not at first. We leave Random Jungle Planet to find that there's some mystery man on Earth who can cure disease with his magical blood and make buildings explode with little more than a glass of water. He's known as John Harrison, and if you weren't following all the buzz leading up to the initial release of the movie, you might take him at face value. The thing is, if you're new to Star Trek, the big reveal that Harrison is Khan Noonien Singh means nothing to you. And if you're a Star Trek veteran, you probably saw this coming from a light year away—and even if you didn't, there's not enough of a payoff to justify the subterfuge. The stunning plot twist is that this character was using an alias. The plot is convoluted enough without this extra layer of misdirection.
I also take issue with the casting of Khan. Don't get me wrong—Benedict Cumberbatch turns in a memorable performance and makes the character his own, so there's never any sense that he's acting in the shadow of Ricardo Montalban. But that's part of the problem: I barely see any trace of Montalban's Khan here, and he's yet another character who shouldn't have been impacted so dramatically by Nero's temporal incursion. Khan had been in cryogenic stasis for a couple centuries before being discovered by Starfleet less than a year before the start of the film, so the Khan of Into Darkness should essentially be the Khan of "Space Seed"—smooth, ambitious, forceful, regal. Maybe a glint of unstable fire in his eyes after so much time hating Starfleet for what they did to him, like we see in Wrath of Khan. Into Darkness has a few moments of Khan succumbing to pure rage, but he's generally more dapper than regal, more cool than smooth, more brooding than forceful. Most importantly, he doesn't even look the part—Cumberbatch is a pasty European, resembling neither Montalban's Mexican heritage nor Khan's Indian heritage. This is not a matter of swapping out Kirstie Alley for Robin Curtis; this is a continuity error, and one that unfortunately removes an opportunity for NuTrek to be as diverse as Star Trek should be. One more white guy where there could have been a person of color in a strong role. The Star Trek: Khan comics give an explanation for this apparent discontinuity, but as with the Countdown and Nero comics, there's no reason we couldn't have gotten an explanation in the film itself.
Despite this, I will say that Into Darkness is better than 2009 about including a diverse population of extras in the background. I haven't counted every single extra, but if you look behind the main characters, you'll see plenty of women, people of color, and aliens. There's a bald woman of color filling in for Chekov on the bridge, and there's even an android (who is suspiciously reminiscent of Lobot from Star Wars, but I'll let it slide). However, the security team that escorts Khan around the ship is all male (and 3/4 white); hopefully that's just coincidence and not a subtle message that security is a man's job (lest we forget the MACOs of ENT). While we're talking about diversity and inclusion, we might as well touch on Carol Marcus, who further establishes that the women in the reboot universe are mostly just there to look good, scream a lot, and make a minimal contribution to advancing the plot. I understand that not every character gets to play the hero, and that there are plenty of male characters who are underutilized. But in a reboot universe where women with speaking roles are vastly outnumbered, and in a franchise known for its strong female characters, it's especially important for Carol Marcus to demonstrate that 2009's mishandling of female characters was just a fluke.
Disappointingly, Carol's only contribution of substance is that she knows enough about these mystery torpedoes to disarm one. Except...she needs a man's help to do it. And, when the torpedo activates, she just swears and yanks the detonator mechanism out like a caveman. So much for showing off her knowledge and expertise. She tries to use herself as a bargaining chip to keep her father from destroying the Enterprise...but then she's captured and has to be rescued (by men), and the battle picks up where it left off. At least she hits a guy when Kirk and company take the Vengeance bridge, but that guy probably would've been phasered in another moment if she hadn't been there. Practically anything Carol does, another character could have done instead, and it's only the fact that her father is important that makes her important. Oh, and also the fact that she's got a shapely body under that uniform; not only does Carol serve as a sexy distraction for Kirk and McCoy, but she undresses in front of the audience to raise their attention level. At least on ENT, the men show as much skin as the women; Kirk doesn't even have the courtesy to get his shirt ripped up in this movie.
As a side note, I'd like to point out that Nero's temporal incursion gave Carol a British accent for some reason.
Carol's father, Admiral Crazypants Marcus, is as wishy-washy as she is, but for very different reasons. Just as Spock Prime is the incarnation of the story planning meeting in 2009, Admiral Marcus is the primary conflict made manifest, and is too busy driving the story forward to become a fully developed character. Which is a shame, because Peter Weller makes an excellent respectable madman, and he deserves a character with more depth and clearer motivations.
After Kirk breaks the Prime Directive on Random Jungle Planet, Admiral Marcus convenes a tribunal to remove Kirk from command. Then, in a contrived effort to keep Kirk free from the consequences of his actions, a meeting of Starfleet's captains and first officers ends in the death or injury of every other person qualified to command the Enterprise, and Kirk takes back his chair before it has a chance to get cold. There are so many problems with this scenario, and this sets off a chain of events that make it seem like Marcus was waiting for this specific set of unexpected circumstances before striking the Klingon Empire.
This disastrous meeting of the captains never should have happened. First of all, we're talking about personnel who should be off exploring the far reaches of the galaxy; can you imagine Archer turning around in the middle of the Xindi crisis because some building exploded on Earth? There should've been at least one empty seat with somebody on speakerphone calling from their hotel on Risa. Second of all, this is an incredibly obvious security risk—the protocol even mentions the specific room where the meeting should be held, and it's a room full of windows that aren't even bulletproof! Third of all, Pike says that it was hard to convince Marcus to keep Kirk on as a mere first officer, but it takes almost no convincing at all for Marcus to hand over control of the Enterprise to Kirk after the attack. Kirk's persuasive argument was "Starfleet can't go after [Khan], but I can"—which is nonsense, because Kirk wasn't kicked out of Starfleet; he was merely busted for breaking the Prime Directive, which is exactly what Marcus now wants Kirk to go and do! Unless, of course, Marcus is deliberately written to uphold the "every ranking Starfleet officer other than Kirk is insane" trope we find so often in TOS.
Let's think about how this would've played out under normal circumstances. Marcus worked in secret with Khan to develop the USS Vengeance (which, I might add, is no name for a Starfleet vessel, secret warship or not), so there's a fully operational stealth starship at Marcus's disposal. Given how quick he is to open fire on the Enterprise, and given how his skeleton crew is completely complicit in these clearly illegal operations, Marcus presumably would have flown the Vengeance over to Qo'nos (which is spelled onscreen as "Kronos," another sign that this isn't authentic Star Trek) and started a war himself. Loading the Enterprise up with mystery torpedoes and sending a captain who clearly can't follow directions off to start the war for you is an unnecessary risk. And if the whole point is that Kirk is willing to bend the Prime Directive, and therefore willing to undertake unscrupulous missions, then who was supposed to be the patsy if Kirk wasn't in command? Because Marcus definitely shot himself in the foot by convening a tribunal to remove his perfect patsy from the captain's chair. This would have been more believable if, instead, Marcus had pulled an Emperor Palpatine and buddied up to this misunderstood rebel, sending Kirk off on a secret mission to "redeem himself."
I should also mention that Marcus is the absolute worst at keeping secrets. He's got a model of the Vengeance on his desk, for crying out loud, and he openly tells Kirk about Section 31, an organization so secret that people in Section 31 barely acknowledge it exists. Everything we know about Section 31 is that it's practically invisible and independent of Starfleet, but Marcus talks about it like it's the Obsidian Order and he's Enabran Tain. I also have to question Marcus's judgment in attempting to incite a war immediately after every captain in his fleet has been injured or killed. The Vengeance is powerful, but not omnipresent; you need more than one ship to fight a war. Which is why it also doesn't make sense that Marcus would be so eager to destroy Starfleet's flagship, let alone the talented crew that singlehandedly prevented Nero from annihilating Earth.
If Marcus were profoundly racist or had a deep-seated personal vendetta against the Klingons, I might be able to excuse his irrationality and lack of judgment, but there's no evidence that he should perceive the Klingons as anything other than one threat among many. Marcus says that, since they were discovered 100 years ago, the Klingons have conquered at at least two planets (which means nothing unless it happened recently and unprovoked) and attacked Starfleet vessels six times (which, because ENT was unaffected by Nero's temporal shenanigans, means "Judgment", "Bounty", "The Expanse", and "Affliction" account for all but two of these, a century ago). Apparently, that's enough motivation to collaborate with an incredibly dangerous criminal to secretly build the largest starship in Star Trek history so it can cripple an entire civilization that mostly keeps to itself unless Jonathan Archer annoys them. Overkill, dude. Marcus's choice to use Khan in this plan isn't simply questionable; it's downright dumb. If you're going to conscript a violent superhuman into designing weapons for you, at least pick one of the more subservient ones who doesn't have a history of conquering whole continents (and you're worried about the Klingons?). The least-qualified superhuman in the bunch is still probably better than your best people.
That's one place where Into Darkness actually improves on Wrath of Khan: the portrayal of Khan as a true superhuman. The writers are comic book fans, so they know how to do superheroes. Khan's superior intellect is no laughing matter; he's three steps ahead of everyone else and knows what they're going to say before they say it. Khan is frighteningly intelligent, and it's wonderful. He's also physically intimidating to the extreme. It's one thing to see Khan lift a guy off the ground with one hand; it's another to see the heroes wail on Khan to the point of exhaustion without making a dent. Khan has great depth as well; we get a real sense of the importance of his family, which informs all of his actions—a welcome breath of character-centric air in a story full of "then this happens because it's cool."
I'm also pleased with how Scotty's character informs his actions. Gone is the caricature that called himself Scotty in 2009; here we've got a man who will go as far as resigning his commission to uphold his integrity as a responsible engineer. This is the same Scotty we know from TOS who loves his ship and takes his work seriously, but without as strong a rapport with his colleagues (Keenser notwithstanding). The new haircut helps the believability factor a great deal.
But then you've got the problem of who takes his place in engineering: Chekov, of all people. At best, he's an intern. You're telling me that not one of the hundreds of people on that ship is more qualified than the navigator to run the whole engineering department? When Tom Paris takes on new responsibilities as a medic, it's because sickbay is understaffed; when Chekov takes on new responsibilities as Chief Engineer, it's because the story needs an extra engineer more than it needs a helmsman. Here's another missed opportunity: why not make Chekov the transporter chief and have Charlene Masters from "The Alternative Factor" take over for Scotty? More racial diversity, a strong female, and a subtle reference for the hardcore Trek fans, all in one person.
At least 50 years of Star Trek history aren't completely wasted on this movie. Aside from Khan, Carol, and Section 31, there's a model of the NX-01 in Admiral Marcus's office, a quick mention of Harry Mudd and the Gorn, actual Klingons, a dead tribble, talk of a five-year mission, and new senior personnel uniforms reminiscent of those used in The Motion Picture. Spock and McCoy banter like old times, Sulu gets a taste of commanding a starship, there's a cringefully ham-fisted homage to Wrath of Khan, and, of course, there's a completely unnecessary Spock Prime cameo. OK, so maybe those last two are examples of why referencing the source material isn't always a good idea.
So you want to do a remake of Wrath of Khan, but you switch it up so that Kirk dies instead of Spock. That's fine. Except Kirk and Spock don't have the time-tested friendship here to give the scene any emotional punch, and frankly, this Kirk has a long way to go before he's compelling enough for me to weep over him. Now that would have been a gutsy move: bump off Kirk and replace him with, say, Willard Decker in the next movie. To its credit, the movie does try to provide some buildup to the scene—earlier on, there are moments where Kirk gets chummy with Spock, and where he needs to think about taking responsibility for his crew—but the scene still feels contrived, and the forced Shatner yell at the end doesn't help matters. Khan isn't even really responsible for this mess! You know who could've delivered that line amazingly? Benedict Cumberbatch. I wanted to see Khan on the bridge of the Vengeance, yelling "Kiiiiiiiiirk!!!" as his ship comes crashing down.
It makes perfect sense that Spock Prime is still around, and that someone would eventually ask him for guidance. Considering how lackadaisical he was in the last movie about Nero changing the timeline, how willing he was to help the Enterprise crew, and how much he pressured Kirk and Spock to follow the same path as their TOS counterparts, you'd think he'd be more than happy to share the secrets of the universe with his younger, alternate self. You'd be wrong. Apparently, Spock Prime has vowed never to reveal information that would alter the destiny (there's that word again!) of the reboot crew. Well, he manages to uphold his vow, because everything he ends up divulging about the Khan he knew has no bearing whatsoever on the outcome of the story. I can only assume that Spock Prime summarized the last act of "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan to his junior self while the camera was focused elsewhere, and when the younger Spock said "None of this is at all relevant to our current predicament," Spock Prime came up with the idea to beam over Khan's torpedoes. If that's the case, then the heroes didn't entirely solve their own problems and were saved by a deus ex Spockina. Otherwise, the scene is nothing but fluff and fanservice. Either way, the scene cheapens the story.
I could talk about the ludicrous ramifications of people now being able to beam to planets in distant star systems and come back from the dead with a little Augment blood. I could point out that the Vengeance makes three consecutive movies where the bad guy has an all-powerful warship. I could pick apart the numerous contradictions and inconsistencies in the dialogue. But I've hopefully already made my point: Star Trek Into Darkness is not a very good movie. But you know what? It's a fun movie.
The Enterprise rising out of the sea. Kirk and Khan weaving through space debris at high speed. The final showdown between Spock and Khan. The battle between the Enterprise and the Vengeance, and the Vengeance crashing down into San Francisco. The movie is full of thrilling, memorable scenes, with superb visual effects and some great camera work. Sets, props, and costumes all look great. The characters feel more authentic now that the actors have started to grow into their roles. There's an honest effort to bring in more elements of classic Trek. The story, flawed as it is, strives to be more sophisticated and character-driven than before. I genuinely enjoy this portrayal of Khan, I love the clever twists with the torpedoes, and I'm fascinated by the design of the Vengeance. Into Darkness has just as many problems as 2009, but the worst damage has already been done, so it's easier to enjoy the ride. Into Darkness still isn't Star Trek, but it's an entertaining step in the right direction.
