by Chelsea Doyle, Editor

WARNING: THIS REVIEW HAS MANY SPOILERS.

I came out of Star Trek Into Darkness with mixed feelings, and there were a few things I could say right up front I didn’t like. And things I could say right up front I did like. I think more of both have ended up coming to me after time musing over it. All of the criticisms I had are hilariously summarized in this article here . Matt Sernaker wrote a more positive review that I feel did bring in some of the best parts of the movie right here . So I was left wondering if I really wanted to review it at all. Would it just be parroting what others have said? Maybe, maybe not, but I love Star Trek and I’m a reviewer, so this is happening. The 2009 reboot of the famous series was a great success, and I am definitely a huge fan of that movie. I thought it was clever of director J.J. Abrams to make it clear this was an alternate universe so they would have more freedom going in new directions without rehashing the same stories. You can probably see right by that sentence where my problems with this movie are going to start. So I loved the first movie. I love this cast. They were great in both films, and I cannot say enough good things about their portrayals. I was skeptical going into this one because I was spoiled for the identity of the villain, and it wasn’t so much of a spoiler considering it was “DUH OF COURSE.” I’ll get into that later. First a summary. Keep in mind this is personal opinion!

We’re not told how long the Enterprise has been working together at this point, but they have a little more experience under their belt for sure. They are sent to a planet to observe, the Prime Directive saying not to interfere with the species, but they see that a volcano is about to erupt and destroy all the natives. Kirk can’t stand the thought so he sends Spock to stop the volcano from erupting while he and Bones distract the population from what’s happening. Of course everything goes horribly wrong and Spock is ready to die in the lava, but Kirk ignores the rules and saves his first officer. He deliberately does not report that situation to his superiors, leading him to be confronted by Christopher Pike. Spock had reported the incident since he follows the rules, and Kirk is relieved from duty. He is no longer Captain of the Enterprise. He does however become Pike’s first officer, because Pike believes in him. Somewhere else, a suicide bomber destroys part of Starfleet archives. He is convinced to do so by a mysterious man known only as John Harrison in exchange for saving his daughter’s life. All the Captains meet about it in a really, really non-secure location, and Harrison attacks. Seriously guys, where is your security? It’s really that easy to just blow up the most important section of Starfleet? Getting ahead of myself there. In the middle of this, Pike is unfortunately killed.

Kirk is infuriated since his only father figure is now dead, and he wants revenge. He begs Admiral Marcus to send him after Harrison. The Admiral agrees to put him on a top secret assassination attempt after they figure out Harrison is hiding on a Klingon moon. Kirk is told to send 72 missiles at the moon to destroy Harrison. For some completely unknown reason, Kirk is so blinded by his anger that his common sense is severely lacking. Spock and Scotty both point out this is an insane plan, and completely against everything Starfleet stands for. Scotty argues that they aren’t letting him look in the missiles and he refuses to let the Enterprise leave with them on board. So he resigns his commission and that still doesn’t wake Kirk up. Chekov is sent to the engine room to take over. Kirk. Chekov is not a chief engineer. Ship navigator is in no way the same thing as chief engineer. There are probably other engineers down there. MOVIE STOP BEING STUPID. Moving on.  They have to be careful because they don’t want to start a war with the Klingons. Ha ha ha. It was around here I facepalmed because this was a pretty obvious set up for a plot and I knew I wasn’t going to be surprised by anything from here on. Carol Marcus, the Admiral’s daughter, sneaks on board as a new science officer.

Instead of sending 72 missiles at the moon (WHY 72? WHY DO YOU NOT QUESTION THIS?) Kirk decides to try and arrest him instead. They get tracked by the Klingons and when everything is certain to go bad, Harrison shows up and saves them instead. He then voluntarily offers himself over after being positive the missiles are there. He introduces himself as Khan Noonien Singh (*sigh*) and does several minutes of exposition. He is a super soldier who was found early thanks to Vulcan’s untimely demise. Admiral Marcus found him and in the 72 missiles are his crew. He put them there when he stopped wanting to help Marcus, who wanted to use Khan’s super genius to create superior technology. Marcus is convinced war with the Klingons is going to happen either way, so he wanted the edge. But this was all secret because it’s probably war crimes and conspiracy. Really him being evil was kind of obvious from the beginning considering he sent out a Starfleet ship to assassinate a guy, and gave them mysterious missiles no one could look inside, but whatever. Kirk does look inside the missiles thanks to help from Carol Marcus, and they see that Khan’s people are inside. Not long after Marcus uses his super badass ship to come looking for them. Sidenote, Kirk calls Scotty when he starts to get that there’s fishy stuff going on, and asks him to go check out coordinates Khan gave him. It’s the secret giant ship, so Scotty’s on board.

Marcus basically destroys the hell out of the Enterprise. Carol tries to beg her father to stop, but he just beams her onto his ship. Well. That was easy. Khan and Kirk team up to put on space suits and apparently jet themselves toward the other ship. Scotty has shut down their engines temporarily and will let them into the plane. Of course this is absolutely beyond stupid and impossible, but it’s one of those things you have to accept in movies like this so I let it go. It did look cool! Khan very quickly started to kick enough ass Kirk gets nervous, and he tells Scotty to stun him first chance he gets. This proves useless since Khan is a super human and a villain so you know he has to die at least three times before he’s down for the count. He kills Marcus and threatens the Enterprise. Spock bluffs him and sends his 72 missiles armed so they all explode, destroying the ship. In exchange for their people of course, who Khan agrees to send back. With him out of the picture they’re still in trouble as the warp engine was messed up by Marcus, and they go hurtling toward Earth. Kirk has to expose himself to radiation (*sigh*) to save the ship and dies with Spock on the other side. Of course at this point I knew it wasn’t going to stick because earlier in the movie out of freaking no where Bones is like ‘hey I’m going to use Khan’s blood to experiment on a dead Tribble, this makes complete sense. I always waste my time on projects when everyone’s about to die around me.’ I facepalmed so hard at that. I also facepalmed because Spock and Kirk have not known each other a very long time and a lot of that they spent hating each other, so I’m not exactly buying this best friend thing.

So Kirk is “dead” and the ship is saved, but Khan isn’t dead of course so he crashes his ship into the city. And then survives that too. So that’s the two possible deaths right there, third time could be the charm. Spock goes after him and they have a fight. Bones figures out that the Tribble came to life so he can save Jim. Oh and the other super humans were saved, of course Bones didn’t intentionally murder them, the explosives were empty by that point. How the hell did they have the time to do that? How did they have the right machines waiting to keep these people alive and not wake them up? Okay whatever. Anyway Uhura beams down to stop Spock and tell him Khan’s blood can save Jim. Can’t the blood of the other superhumans do that? Maybe not because they’re not awake. Who knows. Kirk’s in one of their containment places to preserve him. Apparently it works, he’s alive, huzzah, and they get the five year contract to explore the world together. And obviously Khan and all of his people are tried and/or woken up not put in containment for—oh they are. Well surely they want to know more about their blood because it cures death … maybe. Huh. LOOK AT ABRAMS’ SHINY LIGHTS! SQUIRREL!

Clearly I couldn’t hold in my sarcasm a lot when writing this, so you already have a picture of my general feelings. But I do want to say all the things I loved about this movie first. I’ve definitely looked the other way in Star Trek before when they did ridiculous things, because that’s how it is. The originals were no stranger to walking a line between silly and serious, so I can look past a lot. I think the actors are fantastic. Seriously. A few of them had only a few lines, but they did their best with it, and I really love the cast. They have great chemistry together, and even if I wasn’t sold on some of the scenes, they sold it. I thought some of it was clever and funny, especially anything involving Scotty (which was probably why they gave him more to do). The bickering with Spock and Uhura and Kirk was all fun. I’d probably watch the cast together no matter what, they seem to really enjoy what they’re doing and that’s fun to watch as a viewer. The movie looked great outside of those freaking lens flares. It’s sleek and beautiful and I thought all the special effects were top notch. I should mention that I’m a big fan of Benedict Cumberbatch. He’s a fantastic actor. While I may not like Khan being in the movie, he did excellent with what he was given. He has a real gravity to his performance.

I think this plot was much more convoluted than the first one, or at least it was presented in a more confusing way. It was both confusing and completely predictable at the same time, somehow. While I do think Benedict did a good job with the material he was given, he wasn’t given much outside of exposition and then aggression. He had one really good scene in the beginning when he talked about his people and how he’d do anything for them. But after that he went full out evil and didn’t have much from there on to do. This is where being a huge fan of the original Star Trek makes it fuzzy, because Khan Noonien Singh is a great character and it doesn’t have a huge amount to do with how lethal he is. It was his presence, one that Ricardo Montalbán presented, that made him a great villain. There was this compelling elegance to him, a strength of will that made you believe he was once an emperor on Earth. I think Benedict has presence and gravitas, but he wasn’t able to stretch his wings much in that sense because he only served the action in the story. Khan wasn’t given much of a chance to be three dimensional. Of course the original was able to use the TV show and the movie to sink this in, but that was only three hours to build a character, and it was done far better I think. I’d like to state that for this movie, for the plot they wrote, it worked. But it was shallow and popcorn-y and I wouldn’t mind that if I didn’t think they were capable of a lot more. If I didn’t think they believe they did more. There’s a lot too much of a pat on the back going on with this movie that I don’t think is deserved. It was good but they seem to think it was great. I don’t agree.

Of course I’d also like to comment here on how unnecessary I think bringing Khan was. And yes, I’m a fan, so there’s that portion of it. But I already mentioned I thought for the movie they were doing, it fit. That being said, I get frustrated that Abrams and co. like to claim they’re trying something new and different without actually doing anything new and different. If they want to retread old Star Trek stories, that’s fine, but don’t pretend you’re doing anything original. Maybe I’m saying that the attitude of the director and writers is what’s bugging me, not the movie itself. The original story of Khan was told, and it was told well, and you don’t get points for being clever because you swapped Kirk and Spock’s death around. A death that didn’t even stick longer than ten minutes, by the way. Because Spock and Kirk didn’t have a great deal of background, the death didn’t work as well as the original. They had years of friendship before The Wrath of Khan, so the loss of Spock was devastating to the crew and fans alike. We weren’t entirely certain if he was coming back either, so there was a great deal of emotion and tension attached. It was well acted, but overall I didn’t feel much about it. I think all the shade I’d like to throw the way of this movie involving the whitewashing of Khan can be summed up by the sarcasm of John Cho right here. That’s all I’m going to say about that. I think reusing a well tread plot is lazy writing, and considering the fact that Abrams has openly admitted he didn’t like Star Trek before he got the job, I’m not sure he respects the material very much.

I liked the movie. I thought the actors were great. I thought it looked great. I enjoyed watching, and despite the nitpicks I’m talking about, I could mostly shrug it off and enjoy. On reflection though I was dissatisfied. I’d call it a B movie, and I think I just wanted an A. But I am very aware that my bias as an old Trek fan informed this review, and I’m glad so many other people enjoyed it. If it gets people excited about Star Trek, something I used to get teased about liking, I’m really happy. More Star Trek fans! Join us!

Rating:
Chelsea gives Star Trek Into Darkness 3.5 out of 5 magically revived dead Tribbles.

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