Star Trek Into Darkness (spoiler review)

I thought it was great how nu-Uhura spoke fluent Klingon...

Was that a reference to the scene where the original Uhura couldn't speak Klingon worth a damn and had to consult a dictionary?

The new version of Uhura is so much more competent than old Uhura. She knows multiple languages and she can even fight hand-to-hand.

And she has a more well-defined personality in two movies than old Uhura had in three seasons and six movies...

She even has a first name!

She even stops to discuss her love life during important missions.

That would have been easy to do, but the script goes out of its way to have Bones say he has already managed to synthesise the stuff.

Now, having an actual limited supply of immortality serum would be a great SF plot. Think Howard families. That could be the basis for a movie rather than a reason to ignore this.

Synthesize the blood? or synthesize a serum BASED on the blood (i.e. needing the blood as a key component)?

I can't sear by the exact wording but it could be spun either way, i expect, depending on your point of view.

Trans Warp Serum, convenient plot device with dramatic societal implications, that will be conveniently disregarded in the next movie.

highly classified S31 stuff. Not for the common everyday emergency donchaknow!

Didn't Scotty say he came up with the transwarp formula?

I have no problem with JJ, but he seems to think his job is to cram an entire season of Lost/Fringe into one movie.

Yeah...as hilarious and well-played as that scene was, this was the closest I came to being taken out by the film. A lot of that has to do with me being in the military and knowing the RL effects of such a situation, and try as I might, I just couldn't quite turn my brain off to that.

But then, Trek's always played fast and loose on dating, the vast majority of moviegoes have never been in the military and really won't know or care about frat rules, and it was more about showing the way Spock sees the world...and looking at it from that angle, the scene works.

Considering a season of Lost is a regular movie worth of plot smeared out thin, that's probably not so bad.

"based on my calculations"

I unapologetically am a fan of NuTrek. You have to just look at it as a reboot and forget the million little details and enjoy it. I went and saw this with Robotech Master yesterday. Other than the 3D I liked it. I had a headache after 2 hours of 3D glasses. I wish that fad would go away.

At the theater waiting for it to start in a few minutes, looking forward to enjoying another Star Trek adventure. Glad I waited til today, only 6 people including myself. Decided to go foe 3D since with a student discount it's a dollar less than the 2D without a student discount.

And what the fuck is it with all these non movie ads?

Short answer: Money.

Long answer: Movie theaters get very little of the profit from a movie...I forgot the exact percentage, but it's less than ten percent. The ever-growing price of a ticket barely covers operations cost... hence the outrageously expensive concession stands and the fuck ton of ads that play before the film (especially in the Brendan Theaters chain....good God, those previews can last damn near a half-hour! )

Which of course is why most theatres do not really care what movie you see when you buy a ticket.

I remember a huge multiplex telling my wife and I to just "hang around, go watch another movie while you wait" after we bought tickets to a movie but after going in realized it didn't start for another two hours.

the studios well and truly fuck theater owners.

It's a sliding scale.
IIRC the opening week, the studio gets 90% and the theater 10....next week, when usually half as many tickets are sold, it's 80-20, next week 70-30 and so forth.

You guys are still surprised by that? We have had those since I first set foot in a cinema at the tender age of 6 to watch ET. It's weird that pre-movie ads seem to catch on so slowly in America.

It's been here for about a decade now. No one should still be surprised by it. I agree with you, it's amazing that it took so long to get here.

I've had ads in one form or another since I can remember (the early-mid 80s) but it's only been the last 10-15 years that they've shown TV style ads (longform at that).

Which would be like the US government finding a frozen Alexander The Great and asking him to create the next generation of stealth aircraft.

And don't even get me started with the Deus Ex Machina blood.

JJ Abrams took Star Trek, covered it in cinnamon and black pepper, devoured it, crapped it out, put it in a bag, put it on our porch, lit it on fire, knocked on our door and ran.

If Alexander the great could speed-read and process the latest technical journals, and physics theory(the way Khan can), then yes, he probably could build us a stealth aircraft.

I guess the comparison would be closer to a revived Archimedes. And I for one would love to see what he'd come up with after spending a year or three studying at MIT.

"He’s intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking." - Spock

Eeeexcellleeeennnt. Your hate makes me strong.

Star Trek was turned to crap long before JJ Abrams ever came along.

He was able to take that crap, use it as compost, and grow something far more tastier than the rubbish that geeks had been chowing down on for decades.

On this, we can agree.

Tastier? Sure. More substantive? Definitely not.

That is just another flaw in the original. You really think Khan could be hyperintelligent yet be oblivious to the fact that one can move in all directions in space? Don't be a Dayton.

I don't think Khan is hyper intelligent. That's the point. Intelligent, sure, but but not hyper-intelligent and certainly not to the point where anyone would want to use him to make advanced weapons.

The magical Deus Ex Machina blood sure comes in handy, though. Great for healing tribbles AND humans!

Better than being a Soma

Khan had just watched a lot of sci-fi TV back in the 20th Century, where the ships do seem to move in only two dimensions...

I'm not even going to bother with yet another example of the "I'm too sophisticated and refined to dirty myself liking what the unwashed masses like" mentality.

Well, I think one has to admit that JJ & Co were aiming for the lowest common denominator here. What is it that people KNOW about Star Trek? Kirk is the leader and a lady's man. Spock is logical and unemotional. Bones is sarcastic. Scotty has an accent. What else? Khan and Tribbles and Klingons. So, JJ put all the recognizable elements in, made an action flick and people like it. And that's not a bad thing. Movies exist to make money. JJ has made Star Trek highly profitable again which is exactly what Paramount hired him to do.

I don't think it's a bad movie. It's a good action movie, sure. It's great as a popcorn flick. I just don't think it's a good Star Trek flick.