--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 011
+title: J.J. Abrams tried to pull a Wrath of Khan and failed
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+excerpt: An analysis of Star Trek: Into Darkness.
+date: October 6, 2013
+tags: video
+---
+
+The Star Trek series have been a milking cow for almost half a century now,
+which if we rest on the thought for a moment, is a pretty amazing thing. And
+all the credit for that goes to the fans, many of them maybe in their sixties
+or more now; none due for producers, writers, or whatever, with the notable
+exception of the late Gene Roddenberry.
+
+As you probably already know, earlier this year Paramount launched the motion
+picture called *Star Trek: Into Darkness*, directed and produced by the same
+guy who directed and produced the prequel *Star Trek*, namely J.J. Abrams, who,
+by the way, will also produce Star Wars films soon, further adding to the
+confusion of the science-fiction illiterates. The actors from the previous
+movie are also back, so the viewer is expected to be familiar with the
+characters, setting and whatnot. Basically, Into Darkness is a movie for the
+fans, new or old.
+
+I'll be blunt and state that Into Darkness is in my humble opinion mostly a
+piece of crap, which was to be expected after seeing the 2009 Star Trek, also
+bad, which I saw immediately after Star Trek Enterprise, which well, let's just
+not get into any more details. I will, for the record, share with you the
+reasons behind my firm belief.
+
+## The Federation-USA analogy
+
+The tale starts with an obvious TOS copycat scenario as an exposition. Then, as
+the plot unfolds, Abrams starts pissing on basically everything that Star Trek
+was in Roddenberry's vision. Strong, proud, Federation, principled from admiral
+to simple citizen? To hell with that. Trying to reason with the enemy? Fuck
+that, kill the bastard. Cultural diversity? Humans are zee best, who cares
+about the rest[^1].
+
+What especially bothers me is that today's mainstream political bullshit is
+brought knee-deep into the story: a significant part of the movie is about
+terrorism and the American hypocrisy[^2], something which one might think the
+human race would have surpassed until 2200. The only reason, I suppose, for
+making this the basis for a story is the topic's rising popularity in the
+United States, something the rest of the world doesn't really give a damn
+about. In fact, the more "terrorism" becomes a part of American (pop) culture,
+the more uninteresting and irrelevant said culture becomes. Well, that's their
+problem.
+
+Another purely American trait is the sheer antagonism concerning the enemy,
+"John Harrison", turning the whole terrorism thing into a personal vendetta.
+Again, Abrams tries to illustrate how Starfleet/USA heads will simply disregard
+every rule, regulation and principle to catch a guy they won't like, that
+immediately after lecturing poor young Jim Kirk on the importance of such
+rules, regulations and principles. At the same time Kirk, who's once again
+portrayed as a brilliant guy, pisses once again on regulations by pursuing the
+vendetta despite his health (at least that's what Bones says), a fact motivated
+by the death of his mentor. I don't know, if I were his superior, I would have
+suggested him a week of vacation or something.
+
+Finally, Abrams jumps the shark one more time by hitting a ship into Starfleet
+headquarters (I think). Basically, what he means to say is that at least two
+hundred years from 9/11[^3], bad people will enjoy crashing stuff into
+important American buildings. Looks like simple-minded paranoia to me, and
+what's worse is that many US citizens are buying it.
+
+## Plot devices
+
+Abrams attempted, as I was saying, to pull a Wrath of Khan. I'm not saying that
+he tried to make a movie as successful as Star Trek II; well, he did try, but
+that's not the point. He wanted to make a movie that is also very similar to
+the old one, and the first and most obvious sign of that is the movie's main
+antagonist, John Harrison, also known as Khan.
+
+Other copied characteristics are more subtle. For example, in many Star Trek
+episodes, regardless of the serie, one of the characters breaks or bends some
+rule or another, because well, rules are not perfect and sometimes the greater
+good is above them. Sure, unlike Into Darkness, classical Star Trek has no
+"good guys" and "bad guys", and unlike Into Darkness, the "greater good" is
+some obvious moral and ethical virtue, not mindless reciprocation or sheer
+stupidity. But Into Darkness writers integrated the small-but-not-so-small
+mistakes into their characters anyway, maybe in the hope that they'll bring
+some of the humanity of the original Star Trek shows and films into this one.
+
+The rest of the plot devices are more or less stupid, or just not thought out
+very well. For example, Kirk, among all the Starfleet's big guys, figures out
+that someone's going for Starfleet people, and by some weird coincidence he
+does that too late and almost everyone else dies. After killing almost
+everyone, bad guy Khan teleports to Qo'noS, but there's no explanation given as
+to *how* he pulls out that rabbit out of the hat, since long-range
+teleportation wasn't possible in Star Trek settings as far as I can
+remember[^4] [^5].
+
+Then Kirk is sent to find the bad guy, who, by the way, saves them, because he
+actually wanted to save his genetically-enhanced buddies. All's nice and good,
+but all this charade was meant to start a war with the Klingons, and from that
+point to the end of the film (and after it), I didn't understand the point
+behind all this. Ok, so what was Marcus trying to achieve there? Except killing
+Khan, I mean.
+
+So then it becomes apparent that one of the good guys, Marcus, is actually a
+bad guy. The problem with this is, the viewer is never given a clear reason
+why; all we know is he comes in a big bad ship (USS Vengeance), and then when
+the Enterprise enters warp, manages to follow it and *magically* pull it out of
+warp. Seems legit.
+
+At some point in the movie, after sending Kirk to certain death, Spock decides
+that it would be a good idea to have a discussion with himself (his
+alternate-universe self, that is) about this Khan guy, which is, you know,
+fairly stupid and definitely illogical, as he could have done that way earlier.
+And then he finds out that Khan is indeed the bad guy and that he must kill him
+or something, only near the final he finds out from Uhura that he mustn't.
+
+Finally, Kirk dies. Really. The way of dying and the actual death scene are
+copied piece by piece from Wrath of Khan, only the roles are reversed, which
+was somehow supposed to create a parallel between this movie and that one. Only
+I'm not sure it did; I don't feel like it did. Do you?
+
+## Jim grows up, and maybe J.J. will too
+
+At the end, James Kirk is another man. Which means that Into Darkness was not
+only a tale of swashbuckling adventures in space, but also Kirk's
+Bildungsmovie. And that's pretty sweet, I'm not kidding.
+
+The actors are pretty damn good, with the exception of Yelchin (Chekov) and
+Pegg (Scotty), who are mostly there for comic relief. I still can't figure out
+why they chose Yelchin, since he speaks an [impecable US English][2]; Pegg's
+got a pretty good personality, but he overdoes it. Pine is good, although he's
+no Shatner, while Cho and Saldana are from the small number of actors who seem
+to make absolutely no effort to immitate the ones from the original series.
+
+I was pleasantly impressed by Quinto's Spock; he seems to get into it better
+than in the previous movie. My favourite was however Benedict Cumberbatch, who
+does a mean Khan, one that, in my opinion, at times manages to get at the same
+level with Montalban's.
+
+## Hollywood and The Problem™
+
+Despite it being mostly a piece of crap, I enjoyed Into Darkness. What I mean
+is, I enjoyed the action, the 3D stuff. I also enjoyed the comic relief, some
+of the witty replies coming from the more or less stereotypical portrayal of
+some characters (Bones, for example).
+
+However, while the funny moments were welcome, I wasn't there for the action,
+and while viewers don't really express it, I'm fairly sure many of them weren't
+there for that either; and no, I am not speaking *solely* of die hard Star Trek
+fans. This, I think, manages to expose the underlying problem of the American
+film industry.
+
+If you ask me, this movie isn't worth buying, despite it being Star Trek and
+despite the millions of dollars spent to make it happen. If you ask me again, I
+think that Hollywood should be grateful of the fact that people are even
+pirating the movie and watching it. It's not good, even by Star Trek movie
+standards[^6], which makes Abrams' effort almost useless.
+
+[^1]: Seriously, as far as I could tell all the leading positions in Starfleet
+are occupied by humans, like the ethically-superior Vulcans never existed.
+Which reminds me: only one Vulcan appears in the movie; Spock, obviously. It
+might have something to do with the destruction of Vulcan in the previous
+movie, I'm not quite sure.
+
+[^2]: At least they got one thing right. America trains guys, guys become
+enemies, hit America's ass; Starfleet trains guy, guy becomes enemy, kicks
+Starfleet's ass. Yep, there's your pattern.
+
+[^3]: Americans refer so much to 9/11 simply because they haven't had that many
+important events in their history. I mean, Romans subdued the entire Europe,
+Germans under Hitler killed millions of people, Soviets under Stalin even more,
+and suddenly Americans come with this particular piece, which supposedly
+"rocked the western world". I'm not sure whether it's in reference to the event
+itself or the invasion of middle-eastern countries, or justifying it to impose
+absurd laws and spy on people. Only history will tell.
+
+[^4]: Most of them? All of them? I don't remember, but I do remember that this
+transportation thing was furiously debated by Star Trek nerds, so the show
+producers usually tried to make them seem at least remotely plausible. Well,
+not in this case, it seems.
+
+[^5]: [Memory Alpha][1] says that it's a "Portable transwarp beaming device".
+This screams "bad plot device" all along, since there would have been much more
+advanced stuff that the Federation could have done with it. Rather than letting
+it slip in the hands of a criminal, I mean.
+
+[^6]: The reader might probably feel inclined to argue this, but I don't think
+any of the Star Trek movies were particularly good, mostly due to them being
+Hollywoodized versions of the series. Integration with "action" and harsh plots
+never went well for a story so... settled, as Star Trek's is.
+
+[1]: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Portable_transwarp_beaming_device
+[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LsFdM9Xipg
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