The film begins with a bunch of running around on some backwater planet. Kirk and McCoy are running from the natives. They're running from the natives because Kirk stole some sort of religious document. (I should point out that when I say "backwater planet," I don't mean Mar Sara or Feros or Tatooine. I mean these guys have just invented the wheel. Though they are thoughtful enough to cover up their naughty bits.)
Now, you, the insightful Star Trek viewer (and I guarantee you, unlike the last outing, this film was made for you - I'll get into that later), will be asking yourself: "what the frak happened to the motherfrakking Prime Directive?" Ah, see, Kirk and Bones are interfering in this obviously pre-warp civilization in order to save it. That's perfectly okay, right?
Okay, no it's not, but the movie does this whole rigmarole about how vitally important it is that the Enterprise not be seen. Now, I'm going to skip ahead a bit here, just to get all the what-the-frakery out the the way at once. See, the Enterprise is not on its Five-Year Mission (TM) yet. I'm going to assume that it's not on a deep space assignment (although I guess it could be), but, uh, what was the Enterprise doing anywhere near that planet? Who sent it there? That's question one. Here's question two: how is saving a pre-warp town not a violation of the Prime Directive? You are influencing them. You most certainly cannot deny that their behavior tomorrow (i.e, not being a melted pile of goo) varies drastically based on what Kirk does today, even before his plan goes all Kobayashi Maru on us.
Question three: Why is the Enterprise under the water? Yeah it looks kinda cool in the trailers. But why is it under the water? Remember in First Contact when the Enterprise hid behind a moon? Or The Wrath of Khan where it hid on the other side of the planet?
Okay okay. Point is, Enterprise gets seen and Kirk lies about it in his report so he gets demoted.
One thing you really have to do with JJ Abrams Trek is, as Mr. Plinkett pointed out, treat it like you would a Star Wars film. It's fast, loud, action-y and kinda dumb, whereas classic Trek was slower, more cerebral, and boring. Even Wrath of Khan has virtually nothing happen in the first 45 minutes, and even then it focuses more on character and less on spectacle than Star Wars ever did. We don't ask why the Rebels set up shop on the most inhospitable icy hellhole in the Universe at the beginning of Empire, so why should we bother much with asking why the Enterprise was underwater?
Well, because the attentive viewer is asking too many questions at once. Why is the Enterprise there? What exactly is and is not a violation of the Prime Directive? Why is the Enterprise under the water? These are questions we have to ask within about three minutes of each other. Now to contrast this, all you have to do to enjoy Empire is just accept that there's a base on an inhospitable ice-ball. That's one silly thing instead of three. Nobody heard Citizen Kane's last words, but by the time you realize that, you're too caught up in things to care. There are approximately six major contrivances that lead to the War of the Five Kings in A Song of Ice and Fire, but they happen far enough apart that everything looks like a string of cause-and-effect until you start pulling too hard at the tapestry.
Now in contrast to that, we've got an opening scene that would not be out of place in, say, a Bond movie. If this were like a Bond movie in that the opening scene had no relevance on the rest of the plot, I'd let this go. But it doesn't...
Kirk is demoted and talks to Pike and they have a couple "remember Pike" moments and then
*I'll bet you five dollars this is contradicted later.
I'd like to point out that Admiral RoboCop's plan is this: park the Enterprise in the Neutral Zone, fire the torpedoes at an uninhabited spot on
Kirk is persuaded to capture Sherlock Holmes instead. Before this can happen we meet Dr. Carol Marcus, who is the daughter of Admiral RoboCop, only she lied about both her last name and her transfer to the Enterprise. Spock is onto her ruse shortly after the warp drive is sabotaged, stranding the ship in the Neutral Zone, and so he locks her up. No wait, he doesn't. Nor does he bother telling Kirk.
Anyway on the way down to the planet, Spock and Uhura have a bit of a spat. Oh by the way, in case you didn't watch Star Trek the Star Trek, Spock and Uhura are an item. I'm not the sort of Trekkie purist who considers this a terrible breach of canon - partly because now whenever Spock acts like he has a stick up his ass I can tell him he needs to get laid, and partly because, well, it's like turning Starbuck into a woman; it shakes up the characters' dynamic enough so that NuTrek isn't a stale retread of Classic Trek - like, say, shamelessly ripping off every single iconic scene and line of dialogue from Wrath of Khan.
But first, they have to tell Wrath of Khan's director to go frak himself.
Okay, that one might require a bit of explanation. Nicholas Meyer directed both Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country, and because he liked books so much, there's this scene in Undiscovered Country where Uhura and the rest of the crew have to page through dusty old Klingon dictionaries because a universal translator would somehow be recognized. Nobody really thinks too highly of this scene, and even people who otherwise unabashedly love Undiscovered Country (like your humble reviewer) don't really try to defend it. So in this movie, even though Uhura mentions her Klingon is a little rusty, she still goes out and has a conversation with them without a book in sight. Of course, then Sherlock Holmes slaughters all the Klingons to show what a badass he is, but still. We know why that scene exists.
Having soundly whupped the Klingons, Sherlock Holmes surrenders when he learns that there are 72 torpedoes. Kirk sends Bones and Marcus to a barren planet to perform surgery on a torpedo (because having knocked Undiscovered Country, the film now feels the need to homage it), whereupon they discover that inside the torpedo is a human popsicle.
Who has been frozen for 300 years.
Fortunately, the very next scene reveals what most of us had suspected since the beginning, that Sherlock Holmes is in fact Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan. If they had tried to drag this out any further, having already revealed the 300-year-old human popsicle and the fact that Sherlock was genetically altered, I would have thrown things at the screen. In a movie theater.
Oh, and
It turns out that the base is on a moon of Jupiter, where
Hokay now I'm going to back up a little bit and explain something I mentioned earlier. Unlike the previous film, which was aimed at John Q. Public, this film is full of references (mostly to Khan and Country, but others pop up in various places) that only a diehard Trek nerd like yours truly would pick up on. And I'm going to take this moment to gush about how Section 31 was shoehorned in here. Yes, it's
Turns out that Admiral RoboCop is a bad guy who was trying to get the Enterprise to fire on the Klingon homeworld. The warp drive was sabotaged so the Klingons would find them and then start a war with the Federation. (Again, DS9's Section 31 was more concerned with putting the Federation in the best position to fight a war, not with actually starting one.) Then Admiral RoboCop was going to win the war singlehandedly in his jet-black new ship, the Vengeance. Which has transwarp drive, can be run by a very small number of people, and gets sabotaged by Scotty, all of which are also true of Star Trek III's Excelsior.
By the way, the film treats "War with the Klingons" like some sort of bad thing, but we never see the stakes. The only Klingons we see in this film are effortlessly dispatched by Khan. So... why was Admiral RoboCop's plan bad again?
Speaking of Admiral RoboCop, he shows up. The Enterprise has fixed its warp drive by now and they try to hightail it out of there, but Admiral RoboCop catches them by Earth's moon and shoots the ever-loving shit out of it.
Kirk is forced to team up with Khan in order to take down the Vengeance. There's a re-do of the space-diving sequence from Star Trek the Star Trek only about three times as long with three times the budget because sequel. They get over there and hijack the ship from Admiral RoboCop. Then comes Khan's sudden but inevitable betrayal. The genetically engineered
Which is good because the warp core is out of alignment and the Enterprise, which was last seen duking it out near the moon, is suddenly falling towards the Earth.
Hey have you guys ever seen Apollo 13? It remains the only movie I have ever seen that accurately depicts the size of the Earth from the moon. It would take a hell of a long time for the Enterprise to fall to the Earth from the moon. I guess it's physically possible, but... Dr. Science gives this a thumbs-down.
Anyway, it's Kirk's turn to sacrifice himself by fixing the
**You owe me five dollars.
And then Spock screams "Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!" like William Shatner did in Star Trek II: The Infinitely Better Movie. But when Shatner did it, Kirk was deliberately overacting. He had a plan to get out of there. He screamed for Khan's benefit. Spock screamed for the audience's. And that's just kinda sad.
What else is kinda sad is that the whole point of their dying conversation has changed. In Wrath of Khan, Spock tells Kirk he never took the Kobayashi Maru test (you know, that thing Kirk cheated on in Star Trek the Star Trek) until now. The entire movie has been about Kirk: his midlife crisis, his approach to the no-win scenario, and so on. In this film, we discover that Spock has emotions. Which we already knew. It doesn't have anything to do with Kirk.
Not to worry.
Now you might think that this ties in with the beginning of the film, where Kirk saves Spock his way and then at the end of the film Spock saves Kirk his way. Well, no, not really. This movie can't seem to decide who the protagonist is. It's not Kirk, because he dies before the final showdown and spends the rest of the film as a popsicle. It's not Spock, though, either, because Spock's character arc is over halfway through the film. We already know that while he doesn't have any qualms about his own demise, he can't contemplate the deaths of the people he cares about (Uhura in that conversation they had on the way to the Klingon planet, but Kirk in the finale). Spock has nothing to do with Admiral Marcus or his plot, and he doesn't really learn anything from the whole adventure.
Furthermore, Kirk's death scene has none of the emotional weight of Spock's death scene in Wrath of Khan. First you've got the problem that nobody bothered to slather Chris Pine's face with radioactive makeup like they did to Nimoy back in Star Trek II: Imagine This With Modern Special Effects And Save Some Money. It doesn't have to be over-the-top or anything, but make it actually look like he died.
Secondly, the audience is never given time to let the death sink in. I'm going to cite three examples of an appropriate time-lag between death and resurrection in other fictional works to drive my point home. First, of course, is Spock in Star Trek II and Star Trek III. It took an entire movie and some truly shoddy science (let it never be said that classic Trek was perfect on this score) to bring him back. His funeral scene was the end of Wrath of Khan. When they said Spock was dead, the audience believed it. For my second example, I pick Professor River Song in the Doctor Who episode "Forest of the Dead." River does her heroic sacrifice and we get the traditional end-of-the-episode stuff, with the civilians going back to their lives and the Doctor pontificating a bit... and then the Doctor realizes that he has a way to save her. We actually believed she was dead. Even though we knew that she would meet the Doctor again in her past/his future, her death actually had emotional weight because we believed it was permanent. My third example is Lady Stoneheart in A Song of Ice and Fire. There are thirty chapters between her death and resurrection, and her death is played completely straight (and foreshadowed all to hell, at least in the books - not so much in the show. By the way, if you're watching the show and have no idea who the hell I'm referring to, DO NOT GOOGLE IT).
And finally there's a meta-thing. Back in 1982, we could believe that Spock would stay well and truly dead. Star Trek at that point was three seasons of a failed television show, a movie that sucked, and the movie in which Spock died. It wasn't a franchise; it was a miracle that Wrath of Khan got made. There was no sense that Paramount were killing their sacred cow. Not so today. If you actually thought that Kirk would stay dead, you have no idea how the movie business works.
I would of course be remiss if I didn't point out that even with these shortcomings, Kirk's death scene in this one is a vast improvement over the one in Star Trek Generations. But that should go without saying. Literally the only thing Generations did better was have someone for Kirk to pass the torch to, but his sacrifice was virtually meaningless and he had to say his last words to someone he barely knew and had no connection to. So on that score, at the very least, Into Darkness wins.
The film is not actually bad. It's well-directed, the cast is flawless, and while Benedict Cumberbatch doesn't seem to be playing the same character that Ricardo Montalban did, he's certainly a compelling villain in his own right. It's just not very good either. I appreciate the nods to the better films, and I appreciate the fact that Kirk doesn't outfox Khan using the exact same tactics he used in Wrath of Khan, but during the film's last act I was facepaming repeatedly as the hackneyed re-use of stuff from Wrath of Khan in particular became over-the-top. Basically as soon as Admiral RoboCop died the film lost all pretense of originality, and it frankly only had that pretense of originality because people aren't as familiar with Undiscovered Country as they are with Wrath of Khan. The idea of mashing the two together was nice, but the Khan end could have been handled with considerably more subtlety.
On the plus side, you get to see Alice Eve in her underwear for about three seconds.
Fortunately, the median average of Star Trek films lies somewhere south of "meh," so this one ends up in 5th place. Here's the overall ranking:
- The Wrath of Khan (A+)
- The Undiscovered Country (A)
- First Contact (A-)
- Star Trek (A-)
- Star Trek Into Darkness (B-)
- The Search for Spock (B-)
- The Voyage Home (C)
- The Motion Picture (C-)
- The Final Frontier (D)
- Generations (D)
- Insurrection (F)
- Nemesis (F)
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