True, but this movie showed us the answer they’ve shown before, to the question “What happens when you give a new captain a starship?”
“Let’s see what this baby can do” and vooom they’re gone. Those ships were halfway to Romulus by the time anybody realized they’re missing.
I enjoyed it. Yeah yeah, plot holes, raped the franchise blah blah. I get all that but couldn’t bring myself to care. It was a fast paced action thriller that is the best fantasy action movie of the summer so far (IMO). I liked it a lot better than the first movie, since I don’t like time travel in movies (Outside of Dr Who). A lot of movies have what I call “piss moments” where your watching it and think “OK it’s going to slow down now, good chance to drain the bladder,” but this movie didn’t really have any. Really well paced, something none of the pre re-boot movies were, including the first Star Trek two.
Regarding leap-frogged character development, I understand there was a video game and a comic book that also filled in the blanks for the intervening time.
I got around to seeing it today. Not bad, but not that memorable. I was pleased that I somehow was able to avoid learning beforehand that Cumberbatch was indeed playing Khan. Of course, I’m not overly attached to the Trek movie series – I haven’t even seen four of them – so it’s not as though I was combing websites for info about the subject.
The laborious way that it was arranged for Kirk and Spock to trade places in the whole dying-of-radiation-after-saving-the-ship thing didn’t work for me, nor did giving the “KHAAAAAAN!” shout to Spock. One thing that I did rather like was how the Enterprise was able to take a licking and keep on ticking during the big battle with the Vengeance. One thing that the franchise has long been guilty of is tissue-paper-strength shields, so seeing that the Vengeance did have to fire and fire and fire in order to do some damage was nice. The sheer amount of running some of the characters did was downright comical. I started to wonder if a better title would have been Star Trek: Chariots of Fire.
I confess I have only skimmed this thread, but did anybody else think that if Abrams had made this movie from Khan’s POV it would be a classic Rambo-style abused-underdog-takes-highly-enjoyable-revenge-on-those-who-imprisoned-him-and-threatened-his-family movie? Hollywood has trained us so well to really like that kind of character and movie that I found myself constantly wondering who I was actually supposed to be rooting for. Didn’t help that Kirk was really being an unforgivable dick, what with beating up an unarmed prisoner while his friend held a weapon on the guy, then later shooting him in the back.
Me - see post 230. 
Ha, and this was the page I thought I had read - I knew I’d be late to the party. Shows why I shouldn’t be playing on the Dope during work hours.
Agreed. “Laborious” is the right word for how that was handled.
I finally got to see this last night. I agree with a lot of people here; I enjoyed it while I was watching, but taken out a few times by things that didn’t make sense. And it gets worse the more I think about it.
I’m not a huge Star Trek fan, I’ve only seen this movie and the 2009 movie, and I wasn’t too bothered by a white guy being Khan. Benedict Cumberbatch is a great actor, and I thought he did a good job. But it seems stupid to cast a white guy instead of an Indian guy to keep people from guessing it was Khan. This was a hugely anticipated movie, with a lot of fans of the franchise, as well as new fans from seeing the previous movie. Some leaks are pretty much inevitable with the big nerdy movies nowadays.
Also, as a casual fan who didn’t know much about Khan other than the famous “KHAAAAN!” scream, I wish they had told us a little more about him. I could see/figure out he was genetically superior, but I missed if it was explained why or how. Also, I understand he’s super smart and violent, but why would he be better at designing weapons/helping to militarize the fleet than some just regular smart guy from the current time? I know that the movie is set in a peaceful period, and probably a lot of people don’t understand or want war. But technology has obviously improved a lot over the years. I would think the Admiral would have had better luck getting some smart graduates of MIT (or the future equivalent) who’d just graduated with knowledge about something like lasers or construction and demolition, and get them to use that knowledge to militarize the fleet.
I wasn’t too bothered by that, since the movie ended shortly afterwards. It would have been nice if someone mentioned it, since it is a big deal. I will be very bothered if it’s not mentioned in the next movie. If someone dies from anything other than decapitation or being sucked out into space, or even if someone is just seriously injured, they better be injected quickly.
A lot of the Admiral’s motivation and actions didn’t make sense to me. Also, it does feel like there have been way too many movies recently where there’s a twist and one of the good guys turns out to be really bad, and needs to be defeated.
That was the thing that maybe bothered me the most. No one notices Scotty sneak on? And why did Scotty sneak on? I don’t remember if he had any reason to suspect that the Vengeance would go to where his friends were. Also it was helpful for Scotty to shut things down before they were about to shoot the big guns, but it would’ve been nice if he could have done it a little earlier before the Enterprise had major hull damage and they lost some people that way.
The torpedoes thing confused me too. Did the Admiral expect Kirk to shoot all 72 torpedoes? Khan put the people in the torpedoes right? That seems like the most dangerous place to hide his friends. But the Admiral knew that the people were in the torpedoes, so why didn’t he just kill the people?
Both Khan’s and the Admiral’s plans seem unnecessarily complicated while also being somewhat stupid. Khan is supposed to be a super genius, but can’t think of a better way to kill the Admiral than by shooting up the Starfleet headquarters?
I know Vulcans are supposed to be emotionless, but I would still think they’d dislike unnecessary death. And Kirk and Spock have been working together closely for at least a year. And Spock has been through some trauma. I can definitely understand him being sad in the immediate aftermath of seeing someone die right in front of his eyes.
Was my attention wandering when Robocop explained his motivation to start a war with the Klingons?
Because war is inevitable. Tautology uber alles.
Basically, he figured they were going to attack us pretty soon, so better to start it ourselves and catch them off-guard.
Which was still really stupid. They already have their war fleet, but we’re only just starting on ours, and have but a single actual warship. We’re building more (at least, I assume so). Time is on our side.
Whoever throws the first punch has a huge advantage, particularly if you can blame it on somebody else (rogue captain going directly against orders). You get to ramp up your war production while the other guy’s still reeling from the stunning blow of a torpedo hitting an uninhabited part of the Klingon homeworld.
Okay, that doesn’t make too much sense when you look at it that way…
Just got back from seeing it; thought it was terrible, or at best laughable. Detailed deconstruction to follow.
You are technically correct, but in a way which entirely misses the point of what I said and what it was in response to.
The Klingons and the Federation tend to be depicted as long-time regional rivals, so they presumably had some kind of ongoing thing.
In the first film, the Klingons lost 40+ warships fighting against the Narada (offscreen, only mentioned a couple of times in passing by Uhura and Kirk), which must have been like Wolf 359 to them. In this film, it looks like Praxis has already been destroyed, so they probably cranked up their heavy industry to try and make up the difference and play catch-up (similarly to how Starfleet has been beefing up since the loss of the Kelvin 20-something years earlier).
So presumably some combination of their regional rivalry and everybody trying to crank up their technology and weapons designs due to seeing how far behind the game they were is leading to something akin to the pre-WWI naval arms race (caused, appropriately enough, by the construction of the HMS Dreadnought).
Admiral Marcus predicts that the two powers will inevitably come to blows, and he wants to take the first swing before the Klingons can finish recovering from their losses a year or two before. Send Kirk out to fire on Q’onos, sabotage Enterprise so that she is helpless to escape before a Klingon fleet arrives to clean their chronometers, then champion Kirk and Company as heroic victims who were attacked on the Federation side of the Neutral Zone without cause by the treacherous Klingons (forget to mention that Kirk fired on their homeworld, naturally).
Actually, the plan sort of stops making sense once Robocop rolls in, but presumably he was able to tell somehow that Kirk hadn’t fired the torpedoes like he was supposed to (either he has the Big E sending him telemetry, or he simply picked up Sulu’s message announcing that a commando team was going in after him). Actually, that message is probably why the Klingons shows up to begin with.
One last edit: My biggest regret with this movie was that Marcus never declared to anyone that “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”
I’ve mulled it over and I’ll read the thread only after posting, since I want to get my honest impressions down and I cheerfully admit that some (possibly all) of my notes have already been addressed and analyzed.
That movie sucked donkey dick.
The chaotic opening scene with the cast of Apolcaypto is something I’m prepared to write off (as the movie’s writers apparently did, since it has no connection to subsequent events) except to note the absurd lengths needed to explain why transports either don’t work or don’t work until the very nick of time, a challenge the heroes will have to face repeatedly throughout the film.
I see Bruce Greenwood’s Christopher Pike fulfilled his function, again, to “believe” in Kirk, establish him as second-in-command and then conveniently getting taken out of story. He may as well have been played by Morgan Freeman or Laurence Fishburne, because he’s effectively a “magical negro” character, in place to help the main character fulfill his destiny.
So Vulcans cannot lie? AARGH, OF COURSE THEY CAN, YOU IDIOTS! THE EPISODE WHERE THE CONCEPT WAS INTRODUCED WAS ENTIRELY BASED ON DECEPTION! In the early episodes of Enterprise it was clear that Vulcans can and do lie when it suits them. But anyway, Spock won’t “massage” his report to downplay Kirk’s first-act fuckup (though it wasn’t really a fuckup since Kirk BROKE THE RULES BUT DID THE RIGHT THING - the same argument Oliver North used) because Vulcans cannot lie, not that it matters since there’s magical albino-negro Pike to save Kirk anyway.
I did chuckle when they said Kirk was going to be sent “back to the Academy”. Quite a career path - third-year cadet to Captain to fourth-year cadet…
So the archive was actually A SECRET BASE CALLED SECTION 31, huh? Talk about it a little louder, why don’t you? In fact, this movie features several occasions where characters discuss or reveal ostensibly sensitive information out loud and/or in public and/or directly to the person most likely to negatively exploit said information. In any case, since it turns out Admiral Robocop was a villain all along (a rogue Admiral… what are the odds?), he doesn’t gain anything by telling Kirk about Section 31 in the first place. In fact, telling him is only likely to cause more problems for him. But that’s okay, since Admiral Robocop is apparently a complete idiot. Why else equip the Enterprise with 72 torpedoes (the number is convenient, for reasons I’ll get to shortly) that are little more than coffins? Why would he assume he and he alone could lead Starfleet in the inevitable Klingon war, which apparently only becomes inevitable when he tries to start it? Is there no civilian authority he has to submit to, or was he just going to stage a coup? Also, he must be pulling down the serious bucks if he could privately and quietly build and staff a much larger starship which, I guess, he was going to use to fight the Klingons single-handed. His motivation and plan don’t really make sense, do they? It’s like MacArthur, sensing he was about to be replaced, deciding to win the Korean War by challenging China to an arm-wrestling match.
Anyway, Khan surrenders immediately when he figures the 72 torpedoes must mean his 72 compatriots. Which means Admiral Robocop didn’t hold back any of them, not a single one, as insurance. He didn’t just give up his trump card - he gave away the whole deck. If Khan manages to take over the Enterprise, and Admiral Robocop must know this is a possibility, what will keep him from reviving his crew, all of whom have conveniently delivered to him?
And… just a moment… isn’t that pretty much exactly what happened in the original Space Seed episode? Khan-Montalban knocked out One Inept Guard, and before that one guy woke up or was discovered, he’d thawed his entire gang.
Anyway, Khan escapes by transwarp-beaming to Kronos, and a conveniently deserted part of Kronos. Why can’t a commando team do the same - beam to Kronos, capture or kill him, beam back? I dunno, it apparently didn’t occur to anyone to even consider the possibility. So let’s send the Enterprise. And while we’re ion our way, we’ll broadcast to… Khan, I guess, though it’s not clear how he (and only he) is going to receive the message… and tell him we’re coming, since, y’know, just finding him and beaming him up and into a cell would be rude or something. Plus the transporters don’t work, I guess. They’re surprisingly finicky.
So Scotty gets the coordinates (and repeats them loudly in a crowded nightclub) and with no other information, traces them accurately to the Jovian system, and to a specific part of the Jovian system (Jupiter has 67 known significant natural satellites, the furthest of which orbits about 30 million kilometers from Jupiter). Even if Scotty knew to look in the vicinity of Jupiter, an eight-digit coordinate set isn’t nearly precise enough. But I’ll let that go on the assumption that there’s some kind of ZIP code setup in place for the Solar System, where each major body has it’s own eight-digit code. What I’m less forgiving about is how Scotty’s shuttle happens across this ultra-top-secret project (and nobody notices), sees a bunch of other shuttles and just casually cuts into line (and nobody notices), then sneaks around the ship using his communicator (and nobody notices). Later on, he’ll have his own encounter with a One Inept Guard, who won’t shoot him or call for backup but will just ask dumb questions until the very nick of time.
Why are Kirk and Khan jetpacking over instead of transporting? The transporters don’t work, duh. Why are they coming in at barely-manageable speeds (well, barely manageable for Kirk - Khan can manage because he’s so awesomely awesome)? To keep things exciting, duh.
Admiral Robocop gets subjected to Khan’s Mortal Kombat-style finishing move. I half expected to see the words FINISH HIM and FATALITY on the screen.
Anyway, Leonard Nimoy gets a cameo. First thing he says, like a crazy old person whose first and foremost thought it to remind everyone that stuff is too expensive these days, is that he took an oath not to reveal the future, or something. It’s a little late for that, don’t you think? And why is he concerned about messing up the future when the present is so utterly unlike what he experienced when he was science officer on the Enterprise? It’s like going back in time, killing Hitler (or watching him win, or something else that radically alters everything) and still clinging to the idea that your “original” timeline is the right one and that it will all work out as it should because these things are destined. That’s a pretty sad and pathetic delusion for Spock-Nimoy to embrace, especially as he now lives on “New” Vulcan, because the old one got destroyed. It’s like refusing to recognize that the president is black, because the idea was inconceivable in the 1950s when life made sense, dammit!
Spock-Nimoy evidently still believes that Spock-Quinto and Kirk-Pine have a destiny, but here’s the problem, apparently unrecognized by the writers of this and the previous film - destiny destroys drama. What’s the point of a gritty reboot where supposedly everything familiar is subject to revision, if we’re inevitably drawn (indeed, forced) back to familiar paths? The character of Kirk-Pine is completely different than Kirk-Shatner, yet Spock-Nimoy pushes Spock-Quinto toward Kirk-Pine like a old matchmaker who insists “you’ll be good together, I promise”, because the matchmaker remembers her own marriage and figures that’s how things have to be.
Anyway… Spock-Nimoy says right off the bat that the Khan he met was the most dangerous opponent the Enterprise ever faced. Of course he wasn’t. He wasn’t even in the top twenty. During what we saw of the original five-year mission, the Enterprise routinely squared off against aliens that could trash entire planets. Khan is just an arrogant douchebag sociopath who got knocked senseless by Kirk-Shatner with the futuristic equivalent of a belaying pin. But anyway, despite his “oath”, Spock-Nimoy apparently tells Spock-Quinto that it’ll take some desperate individual suicidal act to defeat Khan, like he’s an Aztec god waiting for a sacrifice. Kirk realizes this independently, I guess we’re to assume, and we get a retread of the climax of Wrath of Khan, with Scotty knocked unconscious and the heroic individual sacrifice…
But as the scene unfolded, it occurred to me to wonder what the hell kinda Doctor Seussian architecture went into designing this ship? To get to the crucial component (and kick it into alignment :rolleyes:), Kirk has to Cirque-du-Soleil his way though the cavern of complicated catwalks. The necessary task itself is pretty banal, the scene’s drama ostensibly comes from the difficulty of just getting there. Then it occurred to me - this is straight out of Galaxy Quest - in order to push the button, you have to get past a bunch of chompy crushy things that are in the middle of a hallway. This movie is badly written! What was intended as a parody is now being played straight!
I thought about the comparable scenes in Wrath of Khan and a few TOS episodes. Spock or Scotty entered a chamber or a Jeffries Tube or whatever that was obviously intended for maintenance access - the chamber from Wrath of Khan appears earlier in the film with cadets casually working in it - even though what they do to save the day is obviously meant to be improvised (and probably sharply contraindicated) emergency repairs. In contrast, the “reaction alignment gizmotrons”, or whatever they were, are housed in a temple designed by H.R. Giger. I half-expected Kirk to have to fight past xenomorphs.
Anyway, Kirk dies, but he gets better. Duh. We’re treated to a scene of McCoy zapping a tribble with Khan-blood, and we know that its inevitable revival will demonstrate that Kirk can be revived as well. Why do they need Khan specifically when they have 72 others in frozen standby (and even thaw one out)? Duh.
Spock’s “KHAAAN” yell… I admit it, I laughed. By that stage of the movie, I found myself saying “really?” every time I was presented with yet another absurdity, as they were coming fast and furious by then.
And here’s how it should have ended, the ending that would have redeemed the entire movie for me, that would have let me tolerate two hours of spoon-fed crap:
Spock: KHAAAAN! [beams down to Earth in pursuit, not only matches Khan’s speed but actually catches up to him, knocks him down] It pleases me that you regenerate quickly, human. It means I get to hurt you, and I wish to go on hurting you. [smiles broadly and cruelly. For the first time in the movie, Khan shows fear]
Khan and Spock fight, and it is a vicious brawl between two very strong men who will not allow themselves to feel pain. They are both bloodied, in red and green, but it ends with Spock standing over a defeated and broken Khan. Uhura shows up at this point to listen in.
Spock: Did you think yourself superior, human? We Vulcans have also dabbled in genetic engineering. Two thousand years ago, we made ourselves better, and we nearly destroyed ourselves in newfound arrogance. If you woke your 72 companions, you would also fight among yourselves. It is the way of the universe. We were saved when a man Surak taught us that logic above all would let us survive, that we would have to give up our passions. One faction would not hear of it, and they left to become the Romulans. [Spock’s face twinges, tear falls] And one of their descendants destroyed my world after all. No more. No more. [smashes fist into injured struggling-to-rise Khan, knocking him down again]
Uhura: Spock, stop!
Spock: [looks at her] You, Kirk, McCoy… you all wish to see Vulcan passion? Let me show you what Vulcan passion looks like. [picks up steel bar, draws back, grits teeth in cruel smile, in slow motion brings a full-strength blow, his entire body behind it, down on Khan. Khan’s eyes widen - he’s about to be killed, raises a quivering hand in a futile defensive attempt. Uhura shoots Spock with her phaser, holds the trigger down for four or five seconds before Spock succumbs to the stun, screaming in fury the entire time. Spock collapses across Khan, both men unconscious]
In final scenes, Khan is packed away and Kirk and Uhura (her especially) realize just how utterly alien some parts of Spock will always be to them, even more so than Khan.
But instead of that movie, we got this one. And there wasn’t even a post-credit scene of a bunch of Klingons swearing revenge. I shoulda watched Iron Man 3 instead.
This is something I call the “straight to videogame” phenomenon.
A thought occurs in hindsight - Spock saw bringing Khan to trial as the “moral” thing to do, right? Yet at the end, Khan just gets tossed back into suspended animation… no imprisonment, no exile… is that normal 23rd century justice or was a big exception made for the guy that half-trashed a major city and likely caused ten to twenty times as many deaths (at a bare and unlikely minimum) as Osama Bin Laden?
Or, more likely, the deaths in San Francisco are like the deaths of all the nameless Enterprise crew we see getting killed throughout the movie. They don’t matter - they’re little people.
Well seriously, they are all just standing around like sheep going “look, an enormous explosive heading for the city - I can almost bring myself to care”, and then you see them wandering vaguely in it’s direction after it has crashed. The Federation must really put something in the water to keep everyone this relaxed about imminent, horrible death. Hard to muster up too much concern for them.