Into Darkness
Star Trek Loses Its Soul
Wow, That Looks Cool
Abrams repeatedly trades in well-established
Trek lore for a great effects shot. There is not
even a single moment of genuine humanity in this
film. There is not even a single moment where
the audience is in any way concerned about the
health and well-being of the film’s main
characters. Bruce Greenwood’s Christopher Pike
continues to be the best and most watchable
actor in this mess, so of course they kill him
off in exchange for an extremely minor plot
point and, presumably, as Kirk’s motivation for
chasing the bad guy. Only, Pine’s dreadful high
school drama club acting fills each moment with
lead and makes the audience—or maybe it’s just
me—deeply despair Pike’s death not because of
the story but because now all we have is Pine at
center stage. Bereft of Greenwood, Pine’s
terrible acting comes into much sharper focus,
sharpened even more by Benedict Cumberbatch’s
nuanced and commanding minimalism as The Bad
Guy; a much more interesting character to watch
even though he does little and says even less.
We never buy the enmity between Kirk and The Bad
Guy, not for a second, and Pike is all but
forgotten moments after Greenwood leaves the
soundstage.
Abrams introduces Dr. Carol Marcus for no
apparent reason that makes any sense to the plot
or character development. She could have been
named Molly Gumball and it would make absolutely
no difference. The performance is not memorable
enough to endear her to the franchise, so,
unless Abrams is planning on bringing her back
to play a role as significant as the character
of the same name from the original franchise, I
don’t get it. The late Bibi Besch, who
originated the Marcus character on Star Trek II:
Wrath of Khan, simply owned every scene she was
in. An actor of incredible power playing a
character who had even William Shatner’s
bombastic Kirk tied in knots, Dr. Carol Marcus
was immediately credible, believable, and
endowed with obvious power over Kirk. Here, the
character is a cupie doll who serves but one
minor plot point, but otherwise just runs around
the ship (everyone on the ship is always running
somewhere) and is, at several points, rightly
dismissed as the only reason she is there is
obvious: to hang around until her single plot
point arrives.
I have some personal gripes about the plot which
steals two concepts from a Star Trek comic book
script I wrote back in 2010: (1) a Federation
starship operating underwater and, (2) an evil
“Black Pearl” version of the Enterprise. These
are not quite spoilers as Abrams’ film goes
different ways with these ideas and, honestly,
they are broad ideas and likely others thought
of them and used them as well, but I was annoyed
nonetheless because I know all Trek comic book
scripts are vetted through Abrams’ office.
Live From Saturday Night: Abrams and cast.
Catching Up
The film, once again, introduces a boring villain who looks and
sounds exactly like the boring villain in Abrams’ Star Trek and
the boring villain in Star Trek: Nemesis, the franchise-killing
film which preceded it. Yawn. …Darkness also has the Enterprise
in a hapless battle with A Much Bigger Ship, exactly the same
way she was hunted by the Much Bigger Ship in Abrams’ Star Trek
which looked almost exactly like the Much Bigger Ship that
nearly destroyed the Enterprise-E in the franchise-killing Star
Trek: Nemesis. To his credit, Abrams, with a bigger budget and
more evolved technology, puts together a hum-dinger of a fight
here, but we’ve seen this before. I can’t imagine why these men,
who make so very much money, I mean gobs and gobs of money,
cheddar stacked high, can’t think of anything else but The
Massive Ship Much Bigger Than The Enterprise, which completely
misses the point that the Enterprise is *huge,* an amazing feat
of engineering and the flagship of the Federation fleet.
Constantly, in every damned film, dwarfing the Enterprise with
these idiotic, stupid-looking Much Bigger Ships is sheer
laziness. In its best tradition, the Enterprise was threatened
not by something bigger but by a problem that needed to be
solved; the rapid aging of her crew, the destabilizing of her
hull because organic creatures are eating her for breakfast and
killing the species would violate the Prime Directive.
Ever since Paramount prematurely retired the old cast (and the
far superior production team behind them led by Harve Bennett
and Nicholas Meyer) way back in 1991, Star Trek has been about
conflict resolution by violence and threatening the Enterprise
by having, yawn, The Much Bigger Ship emerge from the nebula, as
if the size of the ship actually matters. This is the point of
science fiction: to know something about science. The sheer
tonnage of a vessel may play some role here in our actual
universe where these things float on water and therefore size
impacts their mobility. In the weightlessness of outer space,
the size and weight of the enemy vessel are absolutely
meaningless. The sheer stupidity of the bad guy’s ship being
able to catch up to or overtake the Enterprise when Kirk’s ship
is traveling at maximum warp is insultingly stupid. Maximum Warp
means *maximum warp;* the strongest warp field possible to
create without shattering the vessel into trillions of Chiclets.
And the ship is not moving, *space* is moving *around* the ship.
There simply is no “pursuit” and “catching up,” that’s all
nonsense to entertain people who don’t understand these
concepts. Abrams *kind* of got this right in the opening
sequence of his first Trek film, where the Enterprise is
practically flying blind when it is at warp; you plot your
course from A to B, punch it, and you’re there. You don’t fly at
warp like a fighter jet, looking out your windshield at the bad
guy coming after you. You wouldn’t be able to see him until you
dropped the warp field (or subspace envelope) around your ship
and everything came back into focus.
Oh, my, I’m letting my inner geek out, here.
Into Darkness is a fun ride, more fun for non-Trekkies, but the
movie is So Full of Stupid that it makes it tough to sit through
for most any high school graduate. It continues Trek’s
now-very-sad new tradition of having the bland villain and the
Much Bigger Ship attacking Enterprise and adds absolutely no new
ideas, concepts or resonances to the franchise. It asks very
little of us; there is absolutely no thinking required to enjoy
this film. We learn nothing about ourselves or about these
characters. Chase the bad guy, shoot-‘em-up, can the Enterprise
survive the attack from the Much Bigger Ship that breaks every
rule (can transport through shields, can “overtake” the
Enterprise at warp)? The film is ghastly disappointing in the
sense these notable, creative and insanely rich people in charge
of the franchise can’t take the time to educate themselves as to
what Trek is actually about beyond the most basic, surface
elements. And, as with Abrams’ previous Trek endeavor, Into
Darkness, bizarrely, spanks not only William Shatner but Captain
Kirk by leaving a giant hole in the center of the film where
Kirk belongs. Chris Pine is a fun and engaging actor, but he’s
no Kirk. He’s not even trying to be Kirk (or Shatner). Forget
Shatner’s classic and easily imitable performance, Pine just
gives us nothin.’ Nothin’ at all. He recites his lines. He runs.
He fights. He cracks wise. But there is absolutely none of the
cunning resourcefulness of Shatner’s Kirk, the actor’s take on
Horatio Hornblower, and Pine’s Kirk does not drive the story so
much as he is run over by it, ending up having to be saved not
once but, if I recall correctly, three different times in this
film.
John Cho’s wonderfully disconnected and delightful Mr. Sulu from
Star Trek is absolutely wasted here. In a bizarre and
inexplicable plot choice, Abrams strands Sulu in the captain’s
chair as Kirk and Spock go off to fight the bad guy. One of the
few shining moments of Abrams’ first Trek was the re-imagining
of Sulu as an incredible fighter. It made no sense to leave the
kick-ass guy lounging on the bridge. Uhura gets lots of play,
here, but mostly as a pouty and stupid woman that bore
absolutely no resemblance to the disciplined communications
officer created by Nichelle Nichols. At least Uhura got to keep
her clothes on this time (Alice Eve’s Dr. Marcus does not), but
she was relegated to acting like a girl, wide-eyed with concern
and alternately bitchy while the men did all of the work.
We can see every plot twist coming. From Mars. We know, long
before he speaks it, what The Villain’s real name is. We know
everything will be all right. We know, by the time the credits
roll, they will put everything back where they found it. If
you’re not a Star Trek fan, you’ll probably love Star Trek: Into
Darkness. If you are a Star Trek fan, you will, I assure you,
feel the impulse to walk out somewhere around the close of Act
Two. Follow it. You’ll thank me later
Missing The Point:
Conflict resolution by violence. Roddenberry would never have approved.
Memo to J.J. Abrams: Spock abhors violence.
The Final Frontier
Into Darkness’s dreary, flat and ill-advised climax requires a
complete abandonment of even reasonable intelligence. The
Enterprise, crippled and now completely powerless, cannot
sustain orbit for some reason which is never made clear, and
plummets into Earth’s atmosphere as the crew scrambles to solve
the problem. Exciting, tense, but insulting to anyone who
graduated high school. First: there are tens of thousands of
pieces of space junk floating in orbit above our planet.
Entering the earth’s atmosphere require propulsion. In other
words, if you’re on a surfboard in orbit above the earth and you
lose power, you will continue to orbit the earth for weeks if
not years before finally spiraling into the atmosphere. It takes
a *very* long time for an orbit to decay, stuff doesn’t just
fall down. This is how NASA can track and predict when some old
piece of junk is about to hit us: they’d been watching it all long
time.
The Enterprise, presumably moving at a very high rate of speed,
loses power. All that would actually mean is the ship would fly
around the planet, in aimless orbit, likely knocking into space
restaurants and space bowling alleys—which obviously *must*
exist by that time in our future—until Starfleet sent a space
tugboat out to tow her to a higher orbit where the ship would be
repaired. The notion that any object, let alone an object moving
as fast as the Enterprise, would somehow be sucked into the
planet’s atmosphere is just stupid and insulting.
All of which is besides the fact that, it’s been established
there’s all manner of ships and docks and automated things in
earth orbit at the time of Trek, making such a catastrophe
virtually impossible as some vessel, some automatron, would come
to the Enterprise’s rescue almost immediately. And, even if they
didn’t, even if the bad guy shot down such repair barges or what
have you, and were the Enterprise to, for whatever reason,
suffer an uncontrolled planetary reentry, it would burn up.
Neither of these concerns were adequately addressed, Abrams just
chose to treat us like idiots.
Even worse, in both of his Trek films, Abrams has chosen to
continue the worst of Star Trek traditions: forgetting that
these adventures take place in outer space. This is the main
failure of Trek: the failure to make outer space real to the
audience. Space travel is incredibly dangerous. In its 48-year
history, Star Trek seems to keep forgetting that, making little
use of outer space itself as a key plot element. Abrams
completely ignores outer space as the crippled Enterprise is
presented in the climax as being essentially dead in space but,
whoa, the life support systems are not threatened at all. There
is absolutely no worry about freezing to death or
suffocating--two things constantly on the agenda of any actual
space explorer. How much better and more credible would this
sequence have been had Kirk been forced to choose between the
propulsion and the life support? Or, even better, if he gambles
away the life support--as Tom Hanks does in the imminently
superior Apollo 13--and loses, as Hanks did, crippling his ship?
Since every single character (with the notable exception of
Greenwood's Admiral Pike) is made of cardboard, the investment
in Abrams' climax is in the ship, not her crew. No one thinks to
launch the (presumably self-powered) escape pods or jettison the
warp nacelles. They just run, run, run around the halls, through
main engineering (which, amusingly, is actually a Budweiser
brewery), and hang out on the Enterprise bridge/dentist office,
which is now, distractingly, draped in pink--yes pink--in some
misguided effort to better reflect the ship's Red Alert status,
chewing their fingernails with worry.
Kirk's ultimate solution to the problem is simply insane. Abrams
again abandons all established Trek doctrine by placing a human
being less than two meters from a dead warp field generator.
Kirk should have, would have, been vaporized the moment he got
the thing back online. The solution is not interesting or even
remotely suspenseful: of course Kirk will save the ship. But the
plot device is unbearable. Actual fans of actual Star Trek will
want to throw rocks at the screen.
The other big set piece is a bad guy’s ship plowing into San
Francisco skyscrapers, evoking a terrible and childish, stupid
and deeply disturbing evocation of 9/11 as a tossed-off bit
that’s served absolutely no purpose in this story. It
accomplished nothing, taught us nothing, and what must have been
tens of thousands of lost lives played absolutely no role in the
narrative, as the happy crew of the Enterprise were back
cracking jokes on the bridge in no time. This was Abrams, once
again, betraying the franchise in exchange for a cool special
effects shot. Had this occurred at the beginning of the film and
not the end, and had Abrams given this event real meaning and
used it to propel Kirk’s vengeful pursuit of justice, the bit
would at least make sense and would only be stupid instead of
deeply insulting. Stupid in the sense that it is inconceivable
that our civilization could be so advanced as to have a fleet of
interstellar starships, each equipped with shields and
structural integrity fields, and that no one would think of
installing such defenses around cities on earth. The bit looked
impressive but, like a great deal in this film and new
franchise, it insults the very fan it was intended to entertain.
Does Abrams have *that* much contempt for Trek and its fans?
Aren’t we worth even a *little* brain power to develop an actual
script?
All we get is warmed over rehash: The Much Bigger Evil Ship, The
Rogue Admiral. An alternate promo poster depicts the key players
all brandishing weapons, including Uhura and Spock, which is
gratingly wrong; Roddenberry would never have approved. Spock
abhors violence. Uhura is not a combat officer. Okay, maybe
Kirk.
Into Darkness is a film that starts amazingly well and then
begins insulting its own audience, becoming progressively less
fun with each passing scene. If you’re a Trek fan, you will feel
much better about the movie and about yourself if you follow
that instinct to walk out when it hits you. Up until that point,
it’s a fun ride, but peril—not for Kirk but for the
audience—lies ahead. Red alert. As for Director Abrams, who
gushed about Star Wars all through the director's commentary on
his first Trek film. seriously, dude: if you're not interested
in Star Trek, please do something else.
Christopher J. Priest
9 June 2013
editor@praisenet.org
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