Star Trek Into Darkness (spoiler review)

if you didn't pick up on the properties of Khan's blood in the SECOND scene of the whole movie, and the fact that McCoy specifically said he wanted some of it because of it's "incredible regenerative properties" and then commented on it again when he injected the tribble...


Well, as evenflow implied, that's telegraphing writ in huge glowing neon -thus the device was neither unexpected, or new, nor was it at odds with what had been previously displayed on the screen.

If you didn't pick up on it, then you need to pay better fucking attention. if you DID pick up on it, then by definition it's not a deus ex machina

I would agree with that comment on the first one, but not this one. This movie is Star Trek, for good and bad, through and through. Yes, there are some minor inconsistencies, most notably Scotty being more of a comic relief than he was before, but nothing that makes it"not star trek"

See Diacanu's post, and then also consider what Khan actually said about this. To paraphrase, 23rd century man had lost the killer instinct. They may have had technology but didn't know how to be brutally lethal with it. Khan was supplying tactical ideas that could be incorporated in to new weaponry.

So, it doesn't conform to the definition that you managed to pull up on the Internet. Fine. Still, it's quite obvious that they wrote themselves into a corner, thought up Khan's magical blood and placed a few references for it into the movie. It's still a laughable and lazy concept.

Except that it's only 200 years, not 3000.
I think grabbing Edison or Einstein and updating him would be closer.

Edison is not a valid example, Tesla would be a better choice.

As an aside, I've always wondered what Spock based that on.

What specifically caused Spock to believe that Khan would only process things along two planes?

Given the context, I'd say he based that on the search pattern Khan had started.

It's Star Trek. If you think about it too much, you won't enjoy it.

You would think Sheridan's long-winded speeches would've drawn Khan to some Babylon 5. Too busy with the conquering and genocide to witness the early days of CGI and 3D maneuvering, I guess.

io9's hysterical, spoiler filled nuTrek FAQ.

Lots more in that vein.

[spoilers]
No defending the cold fusion thing, but even though the Ent crew's plan did more or less succeed, the village appeared to be destroyed. Leading the natives to the coast was a precaution that turned out to be a wise one, and it looked to me like the elder/medicine man/chief realized they'd been guided out of danger. [/spoilers]

I don't think the plan was to get the villagers out of danger, and I don't think the village itself was destroyed.

The plan seemed to be to distract the villagers so that the Enterprise crew could do stuff without being spotted, thus keeping trying to keep as close to the Prime Directive as possible without just saying "Let them die" (as the Prime Directive would mandate).

So Kirk and McCoy steal a sacred scroll and the villagers follow them so singlemindedly they don't see the shuttlecraft manuevering around.

Ultimately, the "cold fusion bomb" stopped the volcano from erupting, so no destroyed village.

But the villagers saw the Enterprise manuevering around and began worshiping it as a god.

I thought something had already gone when we join and Kirk and McCoy fleeing from the villagers. If this was supposed to have been a plan, it clearly stems from the "What could possibly go wrong?" department of professional idiocy.

"We'll take a scroll and run; that way, we can be sure that the whole village, as a group, all genders and ages and functions and states of health, without exception, and at pretty much identical speed, will run after us. There will be two of us, and we know we'll be just fast enough to reach the mile-high cliff at the coast minutes before we're caught, at which point we'll jump into the water, narrowly avoiding the rocks at the bottom, hold our breaths and dive down without air supply to the ship we've cleverly placed under the sea for this very purpose."

I did, in fact, end up loving the movie and it's almost entirely because the fears I expressed above turned out to be mostly unfounded.

It's true that other than a few brief moments (Pike's office, Spock's explanation of his experience with death) there's no leisurely dialogue moment, BUT the interpersonal exchanges ring true each and every time.

no, not quite. they were supposed to ride away on the beast Kirk stunned, remember?

Do a lot of fiction writing?

You would probably be staggered at the number of stories/books/scripts/plays/whatever wherein the author gets into a particular twist and has to modify the foregoing material to make the climax work out properly.

THAT is what writing IS. almost nothing is written straight through without the need for such revisions and those that are sure as fuck are not shooting scripts.

Lazy writing is when you do and ACTUAL DEM andhave some guy you've never seen before suddenly appear with a solution or whatever...WITHOUT going back and adding in the necessary foreshadowing.

It might well be a twist you don't like or think could have been done better, but it's not evidence of LAZY writing, just a choice you wouldn't have made.

Would you prefer they let Kirk stay dead?
Do you have another emotional climax in mind that would have been as effective?

How would you have done it differently?

Frankly, that's a pretty bad definition of the deus ex machina anyway. The deus ex machina is a common device in Greek drama, thus not at all unexpected, and involving a member of the Pantheon, and usually one referenced in the tragedy's plot, so not a new element. What it is, when used badly and named derogatively, is unconnected to those elements of the plot that immediately play into the problem it solves.

In this case, the point of the death scene was about Kirk growing up, accepting mortality, sacrificing himself for his crewmates, Spock and Kirk learning from each other, and friendship. Khan's blood is only very vaguely if at all connected to any of those topics.

Compare that to TSFS: The death scene is again about friendship, it is about duty and the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the one, and it is also about facing mortality, incorporated by the Kobayashi Maru as opposed to Genesis, which creates life from lifelessness. Here, Spock's resurrection happens partially on the living planet created during his death by the Genesis weapon that killed him, and partially because his friends, whom he trusted to safeguard his soul, sacrificed their careers, ship, and -- inadvertently -- Kirk's son in order to save their friend in turn after he saved them: Because the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many to them, even as the needs of the many outweighed his own needs to him.

The first is a deus ex machina; the second is Chekov's gun.

TWOK/TSFS did it differently, see above.

There's an old conceit that asks the critic to do better; I don't buy into that. I'm not saying I could do better; I don't earn my money making this kind of product. But I do pay for it, and I get to say what I require for my satisfaction.

You're right that many things are often glossed over even in great literature and drama. That's fine. A plot hole isn't a problem because it's there, but because you had the time to notice it -- because something else was missing, because there wasn't anything else to bind the elements together coherently as storytelling.

In this case, the storytellers are giving us Kirk's death as his and their solution to his ark. If so, he either needs to stay dead, or be resurrected in accordance with the themes of that same plot. If you don't want to do either, don't tell a story that gets resolved by Kirk's death.

By that definition, I don't have a problem with the said plot device. So what if this incidental bit of something-something we picked up happens to have the properties we need to solve this problem?

For me it's simple.

You have a team on a planet, they find this interesting bit of ore and keep it for study...later, someone studying it says "gosh, this is a neat rock, it can do X"...still later, they have a problem which they could only solve if they had something that could do X.

I'm FINE with that.

on the other hand, no mention is made of any rock until the latter scene when they need to do X, and then Lt. Smith says "Hey, you guys remember that bit of rock we found last month that can do X?"

THAT is, on the other hand, quite bullshit storytelling.

YMMV.

I do remember that and have to assume it was a spur-of-the-moment decision during an unexpected escape. Otherwise, my advice to the crew would have been to discuss that part of the plan beforehand, lest one of them stun the beast the other wants to ride; to consider whether the beast would carry them faster than it would the natives used to these animals; whether riding a fast animal is truly the best way to cross a field of densely growing plants, much akin to a forest (a concern apparently shared by the natives, who refrain from riding these beasts in pursuit); and whether the planned jump from a mile-high cliff onto a bunch of sharp rocks with a subsequent unassisted deep dive to the spaceship below would be substantially improved by riding over said cliff on a fast beast of alien physiology and unknown behaviour.

the level of obsessing over details tends to have an inverse relationship to the level of enjoyment of a film.

I'm not sure that that is true. I know and have considered many of the details of TWOK and TSFS precisely because I enjoyed those movies (the former especially). And I certainly enjoyed writing the last two posts more than I did watching the sequence alone.

But I will agree on this larger point, which is something I've said before: If you're criticizing every last plothole, the problem isn't that the plotholes are there. The problem is that there isn't enough good plot elsewhere to keep you occupied.

One of two ways:

1. Either not write in Kirk's death, or -- and here's a big leap, but that's supposed to be what the whole point of the reboot was...

2. Have Kirk stay dead.

Go forward with Spock as Captain. The whole alleged point of the reboot was to free the creative team from canon. They had the balls to do it by destroying Vulcan in the first film. Why not kill off one of the main characters permanently in the second?

Don't forget that torpedo also brought back to life a dead man as a baby and then aged him right back to his proper age in time to be rescued by Kirk.

And people who don't like regenerative blood have no problem with this.

I think people are more soured by the "copying" of TWOK and Spocks death then they are the blood thing.

No one expected them to keep Kirk dead forever.

They should have killed Kirk some other way then having him go fix the engines.

I agree, and said as much in my review (in the other thread). Although the scene still worked, I would have preferred a different death scene.

Why bother "killing" a character in science fiction anyway if as people say "nobody dies in science fiction"?

Isn't the drama in the death of a main character supposed to be its permanence? If it is reversible then why bother?