star trek:into darkness (WARNING: SPOILERS as of 4/23/13)

Well, they're getting better at this.

Really the only way I was even going to partially forgive the terribly unlikeable Kirk in the first movie was for that to serve as a starter for a proper character arc/growth, and whaddayaknow, they actually did something I was hoping for.

Patches (just patches) of actually feeling like Star Trek, the movie actually tried to be about something (even if it had to spell it out at the end) (also see toward the end of this post), the blatant stupidities felt farther in-between (and some were standard Star Trek stupidities anyway). And there were a lot of little things that could and should have been smoothed over in rewrites.

If this were a grading thread I might give this a C. For effort.

Usually wrecking large parts of a beloved universe/Earth will get me riled up, but I just don't care enough about this one to mind much. Even the preview for Titan A.E. made my stomach twist, back in the day. But they could just about blow up or enslave the entire Federation at this point and I'd be all, that wasn't very nice but whatever.

At the beginning, running through the red fields -- some nerd ought to fansplice that to where Kirk(?) takes off the very obvious, very large hood and bam! it's the Doctor! Cut to Doctor Who theme. They've been doing that so much this season . . . .

Uh, anyway, I see they traded in the circular lens flares for bizarre fade-away flat ones. Next I expect they'll be insignia-shaped.

I liked the Klingon ships well enough.

Lifting a large, emotionally heavy chunk of dialogue from a much better movie does not make your movie better; it only points up how much less good your movie, actors, and character relationships are.

Spock continues to be about 3/4 human. I mostly don't blame the actor, though.

Nimoy's appearance, sadly, was strangely placed -- shouldn't this be a call to Starfleet, to warn them that their Admiral has gone around the bend? -- and did little other than to pound it into the audience's head that maybe they should take Harrison seriously. Tell, don't show.

The transporters are really getting bipolar. We can transport light-years but we can't transport a few miles if we don't have line-of-sight . . . which is to say, our super-sweet futuristic sensors can't see through a few miles of dirt.

That little mission at the start was classic Trek, though.

Marcus was kinda rockin' the Dehner look up top. Deliberate? That's simply what looked best/most charactery on her? Or somebody actually believed that it went well with her body shape down below?

As we left the theater, my mother-in-law, who needed to be reminded what a tribble was called, nevertheless pointed out: How do they only have one of those? I guess they've already figured out tribbles (and encountered Gorn) in the comics?

Brother-in-law was drawing parallels to the Taliban afterwards.


So, in summary, some badly needed steps make the future (real and in-movie) seem a little more promising, but there's still a ways to go before this thing truly regains the Star Trek spirit. You'll notice I don't complain about being daaark, because life is light and shadow and dark and it's all fair game. The Star Trek spirit is, in part, that there is hope to get through that dark, hope that we will overcome external and internal darkness, and there was that hope in Kirk's speech at the end even if the parts before were off at times.

I thought this was 'splained away by the emotion he experienced when Vulcan was destroyed.

The thing is, I feel very much like I've seen it before. Two characters hash out their romantic issues during a deadly situation where everyone needs to be focused. Third wheel pleads "Can we do this some other time?" And it is played for laughs!

Oh, I think I know where I've seen this before. This season's first episode of Doctor Who. At least.

The locals' culture is heavily based on Calvinball, and one of the current rules is that whenever someone unrolls a Holy Scroll, everyone else must drop and worship until a priest has finished reading it aloud.

So that emotion warped his brain a little? Or something?

I dunno. If they want to write him as being very open about his emotions, so be it. I'm sure he'll explain the whole pon farr thing in great detail on the bridge, with the intercom left open, when they get around to that soon. It's hard to write or play Vulcans well. It's their call. I'm just used to a more closed-off Spock.

[edit]And yes, the lack of McCoy was disappointing after the fact.

Saw it again this afternoon and realized I must've been really groggy at that first midnight showing: most of the problems I thought existed with the plot were reasonably well-explained, just as several posters here suggested. (I still have some plausibility nitpicks--Carol Marcus not being thrown in the brig for sneaking on board, the Enterprise being forced out of warp less than a couple of hundred thousand miles from Earth...and then falling almost all the way to the Earth's surface in minutes, Scotty getting near and then into the secret starship spacedock undetected, etc.--but these are relatively minor.)

No, it's still not as "meaningful" as I would like a Trek movie to be--although the case could be made that it's a decent morality play about revenge and a warning against becoming evil when fighting it--but STID is one of the best, if not the best, Trek movie to date.

8/10

Oh, and to actormike: I was initially bothered by Kirk talking on a communicator to Scotty even though they were light years apart, but I realized: when you call someone on a communicator from a ship and they're not in range of your communicator's signal, you are automatically connected to the ship's communication system, they are located (a la cellphones), and you are connected transparently. So Kirk's communicator was interfacing to a receiver on the ship, Scotty's to a receiver on Earth, and communications between them were routed via subspace radio. Just a bigger version of how we do cellphones today.

There is a precedent for that one. In "The Conscience of the King" Captain Kirk has Uhura contact the captain of the Astral Queen and has her pipe it down to him on the planet.

I could've done without Spock screaming "KHAAAAAAAAN!!!" after Kirk bit it. It was overkill, especially with him crying and visibly shaken already. Less is more, especially where Spock is concerned.

I wondered about that, too. But damn, JJ Abrams even supersized those. The one in the movie looked as big as friggin' Garfield!

A friend of mine made the same comment about Vader at the end of ROTS. It would have made more sense for him to just crush the lab table, rather than screaming, "Nooooo!"

They have encountered the Gorn. The video game is, we're told, canon and it is set, we're told, between the movies. In the game, they fight Gorn.

Well, movie made 164 million by now so we can start speculating about part 3. 84 million domestic over the weekend since 'foreign' money and home cinema sales still don't seem to count in Hollywood. However, production cost was about 190 million and we can only guess how much they spent on marketing (a lot).

Oh, with the way accounting is done in Hollywood, it's likely the movie is already turning a significant profit, and it hasn't even been a week since it's release. They're going to make money hand over fist on this movie regardless of whether it exceeds ST09's numbers or not.

Personally, I already want the DVD.
Also, I want the new movie. Where is it? I demand satisfaction!

Tribbles can get pretty large. Remember the one in the Captain's chair?

Well it is a complete impossibility for it to be better than TWoK so I'm not sure what you are smoking...

What are YOU smoking? TWOK was a damn solid Trek movie, but it's not as good as it could have been. The pacing was very uneven, there were incredible leaps of logic in the script, and the film's dramatically slashed budget was painfully evident with cheap-looking sets and recycled SFX.

TWOK is not the best Trek could be, but it set the bar high for future films to try to beat. From the sound of it, STID comes damn close. I will finally see it this weekend.

I think you're being unfair. I can come up with characters for both Geordi and Tasha. Crusher is a bit more difficult, as she's pretty much defined by Wesley, Picard, and her job.

Balls.

Oh c'mon.. great as the whole thing combined may be, the most believable effect is Shat's hair piece.

Finally saw this yesterday. I was fairly entertained, though I still enjoy the first JJTrek more. My two biggest problems were Carol Marcus (she felt shoehorned in) and Spock yelling "KHAAAAAAAAAN!". I was fine with the scene being changed from Spock dying to Kirk dying and some of the dialogue being an homage to Wrath of Khan, but Spock's "KHAAAAAAAAN!" took me out of the movie.

Another minor problem I had with the movie was how many times the captain of the Enterprise rotated around. By my count, the captain changed 5 times (not counting acting Captain Sulu, which is an understandable thing since it's established as a temporary measure and Sulu is awesome). It went Kirk-->Pike-->Kirk-->Spock-->Kirk. The first movie had 3 changes of captain (Pike-->Spock-->Kirk). I just hope they don't continue to rely on that as a dramatic device, because it left the realm of plausability in this movie.

But otherwise, I was fairly entertained. Loved the Klingons, loved Khan, loved Peter Weller, loved Scotty, and I loved Uhura's bigger role.

Also: forgot to mention that I really liked the costumes and set designs. I really liked the grey dress uniforms that were worn at Starfleet HQ (especially Spock's hat), as well as the general set design on Earth. I also really loved that they made the Enterprise feel bigger with the shuttle bay, engineering, some of the corridors, and even Sick Bay felt big. Especially that one section of the ship where it was opened up and you could see the decks above and below you from the catwalk.

Did it have show tunes?

Close:

[yt=Something even gayer than show tunes]zzeLoa1gwCU[/yt]

I thought it was an odd choice.

Media Central. Knock it off.

Saw it again (3rd time) today.

Yeah, this is easily one of the most watchable and enjoyable of Treks to date.

Here's my current ranking of the prior films. I know, I'm weird for putting TMP at the top.

The Motion Picture
The Wrath of Khan
First Contact
The Undiscovered Country
The Voyage Home
The Search for Spock
Insurrection
Nemesis
Generations
The Final Frontier

Where would I put ST and STID? I think like so...

The Motion Picture
Star Trek Into Darkness
The Wrath of Khan
First Contact
Star Trek
The Undiscovered Country
The Voyage Home
The Search for Spock
Insurrection
Nemesis
Generations
The Final Frontier

This was not better than Wrath of Khan, and it was certainly better than The Motion Picture. Then again, watching dishes dry is better than The Motion Picture.

Just because movies drag in many places do not make them bad movies.

when TMP was made the director had in mind making something along the lines of "2001: A Space Odyssey" which was out only 10 years before. Given that the OS was SUPPOSED to be about "space exploration" then that idea was reasonable at the time.

And TMP was the first and (until the Abramsverse) ONLY Star Trek movie that was meant to "feel" like a major motion picture. All the rest both OS and TNG were by their own admissions made to be "like a television episode".

I ask myself: which film would I prefer to watch again, TWoK or STID? The answer is the latter.

As for TMP, Dayton covered the main points: it's the most cinematic and closest to the heart of Star Trek. 2001, considered by many to be among the best films of all time, is a very high bar to clear and, if TMP falls a little short of clearing it, that's okay.

No, TMP isn't the most entertaining of the films (STID, in my opinion, EASILY takes that spot) but it is the one that combines a mission of space exploration with an inquiry into the human condition.

I can't help but wonder just how The Wrath of Khan or The Undiscovered Country might've been different if they had 100 million dollar budgets.

They'd more or less be the same, except all of a sudden, you'd hate them.

If a movie drags on in enough places, that makes it a bad movie. For example, Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Yeah, and if my dick had wheels it would be a bus.

"By their own admissions"? Yes, I clearly remember Khan proclaiming in a lengthy monologue that TWOK is just one big television episode.

The JJ Abrams Trek films are far more cinematic and far closer to the heart of Star Trek than that self-indulgent ripoff of 2001.

Unsuccessfully ripping off a classic movie does not make it a good movie. It fails as a movie, it fails as a Star Trek movie, and it fails as entertainment. The only thing it succeeds in doing is curing insomnia.

Only if you like parodies.