Star Trek: Into Darkness

[psocoptera]

So, my big reaction: I cannot believe they went there. I can't believe they *went there* and made me *like* it - not love it, but at least think it was interesting, at least respect the audacity. Which, in retrospect, hell yeah, if you're remaking Star Trek, why hold back? Of course you want to revisit those iconic moments, of course you want to get to spin them. Fingers crossed for some motherfucking whales in a future movie.

Plus it totally speaks to my interest in mythology, in narrative, in fanfiction, in what it means to say a character is the same character, to see the AU as a string of essential defining moments which can be resequenced and reinterpreted but ultimately have to happen somehow. Maybe we can't have Kirk and Spock without The Glass.

... that said, I can't imagine how that scene reads to someone who *doesn't* know Wrath of Khan. I mean, I didn't find it particularly affecting in itself - I'm pretty sure I have cried more than once over Spock's death, although maybe more when Scotty plays Amazing Grace at the funeral, but here I was kind of like, okay then. And I think there's something significant in the fact that Spock's resurrection was *hard* - taking two movies to complete - while Kirk's is easy-peasy to the extent that there is never even a moment of doubt about it.

What else. Should not be taking time to write a full review, dangit. Very quickly:

- I liked the red-planet shenanigans at the beginning, felt like a shout-out to classic Trek, but with pretty 2013 production values.

- I enjoyed pretty much all of the character stuff, the Spock-Uhura-Kirk interaction, the Kirk-Spock-McCoy interaction, Scotty being principled, Sulu finding his inner captain rather earlier in this timeline.

- I made this comment in Q10's lj but will copy it here: " It gets points for political allegory. But my experience watching it still had too much "why am I watching them fly the Millennium Falcon through metal canyons? Wrong franchise!" and "oh god, are they punching each other *again*?" I mean, sure, Star Trek has a long and honorable tradition of punching, but I think part of what made it feel to me like too much of just an action film was the rather generic and gratuitous nature of the action sequences. I think it's very possible for action scenes to be clever and well-integrated into the plot and themes of the movie - I thought Iron Man 3 did a great job of this, for a recent example - but these just weren't. I want to see Klingons fight *like Klingons* - I want that to look different than Starfleet officers, or "private security" (I thought Scotty's line there was interesting, and I would have loved to see more made of that.) The action bit I liked best was Spock chasing Khan, I thought the parallels of their superhuman strength/speed were interesting, Khan's skullcrushing move, Spock's willingness to use the meld in combat.

Like Chaos said, I did enjoy the 3D, I thought there was some very good usage of it with pretty hovering spaceships and such."

- My entry for the Who Should Have Played Khan sweepstakes: Naveen Andrews! Proven abilities to play creepy, work with J.J. Abrams, be so sexy as to be plausibly superhuman; simultaneously British (which everyone knows means bad guy) and *actually Indian*. A few inches shorter than B.C. but that's what lifts and camera angles are for, yeah?

- I was profoundly annoyed by the utter collapse of time and space in the Rebootiverse. In classic Trek it took *time* to get from place to place - that's why they were on a 5-year mission - here it's like, ok, you leave Earth, it takes a few minutes to get to the Neutral Zone, you're fighting in Klingon space, but Abrams wants to crash a ship onto San Francisco so now we're back in Earth orbit, and hey, it's no problem at all to make a cellphone call in real time to your ex on Earth from Qonos, if the plot demands. I mean, no, Trek has never taken physics *too* seriously, but could you at least pretend that there is some rhyme or reason to locations/travel times other than "it's time to set our next set piece in front of this scenery"?

- I got really excited when Carol Marcus came on board with mysteeeeerious torpedoes and thought Kirk might be being tricked into launching an unprovoked Genesis strike on the Klingon homeworld, continuing the themes of planetary destruction and genocide from Reboot 1. Again when they were on the extremely barren planetoid opening the torpedo, I was like, wow, this is ripe for a Genesis fx sequence...

- I really wish the Klingon interaction had played out with Uhura instead of devolving into a fight scene. That could have been *so much more interesting*. I'm still not really sure why Klingons at all, like, that didn't really seem to pay off? Maybe the next movie is The Klingon Movie?