Montalban at least is Mexican-American. In fact, his nickname was “The Mexican Tyrone Power” so some would argue he was a person of Color and in “Space Seed” they did try to make him look South Asian.
A perfectly fair criticism, but since most of the B-story characters (Riker, Troi, Geordi) are ones I found the most useless on the show, the fact that I walked away from those sequences not hating them like I usually do was itself an incredible surprise. So yeah, the tone-jumping is a bit inelegant, but I still think the movie works as a whole. 
No, it’s a really bad movie that made very little sense. Take the ‘trek’ off and we have an Admiral who is opposed to the what the Federation wants. He believes that war with the Klingons is inevitable and the Federation must prepare.
Fine
He also finds the sleeper ship and thaws out ONE guy and has that guy work for him. Kahn is smart but he is about 200 years behind technically. So a few perusals of our tech manuals and together they design and build a ship that is about 10 times larger than the largest ship in the fleet oh and it only needs a very small crew.
This makes no sense what so ever.
How did they get the materials to even build such a ship is just something we’re supposed to accept.
That’s just one of the stupid elements of the plot.
How about, we must line up the ships so when we open this hatch Kahn and Kirk will shoot into the open hatch on the other ship. Good we’re going to a little physics in our science fiction movie. (things travel in a straight line unless acted upon by another force) But then we see Kirk and Kahn steering themselves. Clearly what they writers set up not 3 minutes before was wrong.
The list goes on and on. I’m sorry but when I ‘watch’ something it goes into my brain and I think about it. If an entertainment requires me to turn off my brain to enjoy it, it’s not a good entertainment.
There are big plot problems and little plot problems.
Roddenberry had a vision about his little show. This was a rapping of that vision. No doubt.
ST II TWOK is a movie about old guys looking back on their lives and wondering if they made good life choices. Then several of his life choices come back and try to bite Kirk on his fat ageing ass. He gets out of it but not without cost.
Mining TWOK for the Into Darkness was just a bad idea. This crew has no past to come back and bite them on their sweet firm asses.
Curing DEATH? Then putting the cure for death in a deep freeze? Really? That’s ‘good science fiction’?
REALLY!?
I wouldn’t say that “Into Darkness” raped anything, mostly because that’s a seriously horrible word to use in the context of entertainment products. Abrams didn’t rape my childhood, or rape the memory of Harve Bennett, or rape all of our old Khan videotapes, or whatever. Nor did George Lucas do anything of the sort to the original Star Wars trilogy.
That doesn’t mean that “Episode I” wasn’t a spectacularly shitty film, though.
“Into Darkness”… ehh, not so much. It’s not spectacularly shitty. It isn’t even shitty per se, at least on the scale of blockbusters, where we’re measuring on the scale of “how many Transformerses is it?” when we’re measuring badness. But, oh my, is it not good. And it’s a damn shame, because the idea of a modern take on boldly going where no man has gone before is one that has such potential, and in our current world of uberdark grim 'n gritty remakes, one that I’d argue would have been a refreshing breath of fresh air.
Now, did “Into Darkness” have some fun 'splosions? Sure. Did it have some snarky dialogue that elicited a quirked grin or two, even to me? I’ll cop to it. But did it have any resonance beyond that? Did it even bother to try?
No, it really, really didn’t.
And worse, on top of that already lazy lack of effort, Abrams decided to crib all the good stuff from a genuinely brilliant past film, apparently without consideration to why all that good stuff ever mattered to anyone in the first place.
Did it “rape” anything? God, no. That’s an awful bit of hyperbole that makes all of geek culture poorer every time someone uses it. Does it even effect the legacy of “Wrath of Khan” in the most miniscule way? I’d argue not. But it was a gigantic wasted opportunity, one that had the potential of breathing new life into one of modern Western culture’s great creations, and instead turned it into a terrible “remember that time X happened?” Family Guy skit.
Actually, this reminds me that this is essentially the same plot as several of the decades-old Star Trek novels I used to read by the bucketful. Dreadnought with the incredibly Mary Sue-ish genderflipped Kirk stand-in ensign. And others… they weren’t really that memorable. But that plot is actually classic Trek.
Heck, TOS had that episode where they installed computers to run Constellation-class ships, so those were ridiculously large battleships needing no crew that some random Admiral thought was a good idea.
And, for the love of God, man:
I’m sorry my FUCKING TYPO bothers people so much. (no I not)
I’m sorry my use of the word rape as a metaphor bothers the PC crowd soooo much.
Gene Roddenberry had a vision of the future, he showed it to us in Star Trek. Labeling something ‘Star Trek’ but not following that vision is a (hold on to your butts, I’m going to use a metaphor) rape of that vision.
Did you guys know that the screen writer of Into Darkness is a 9/11 truther?
Slow down cowboy, some of us are still trying to process the fact that Being and Time was written by a Nazi.
I liked it, and I’ve been a Trekkie since before I could tell the difference between Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation (I was pretty young).
To me it seems to be mostly a reboot of STII. While the original film was made in the Cold War context of the looming threat of nuclear annihilation (they create this amazing new technology, one with great potential benefits, and everybody immediately leaps to possibilities for its use as a weapon of mass destruction), the new film was made in the context of the War on Terror with suicide bombers and people seeking revenge and what not.
TVTropes made the interesting comparison that both movies are also spins on Moby Dick, with the original film casting Kirk in the metaphorical role of the whale, while the latter film instead switches Kirk and Khan around, making Kirk into the film’s Ahab (much in the style of Star Trek: First Contact). And of course, all three films in question quote the original book to make the parallel clear.
I thought the movie was good. Yes, a lot of things didn’t make since (Hello, Star Trek V anyone?) But it was good. Different tone than the past Trek movies, but a good update on the ideas.
JUST IN CASE - SPOILERS
Don’t have Kirk actually dead. Have it be that he suffered irreparable damage and is on the verge of death and Bones can’t save him. Thats why they need Khan’s blood. Being able to cure death is BS.
But at least it precluded waiting another five years and suffering through “The Search for Kirk” and then another five year wait for a decent movie about whales developing space travel and slingshoting around the sun to go back in time to save the Klingon Empire from the Harlem Globetrotters.
Whales didn’t develop space travel, they stole it!
Is it EVER explained, ANYWHERE, why the Sikh Khan Noonien Singh is clean-shaven?
IIRC, there was a book that explained that he shaved his beard off when he lost his faith or something along those lines.
“Pitiful basketball players of Qo’noS, I am Ethan “Bubblegum” Tate, commander of the Harlem Globetrotters. For generations, your puny planet has lived in peace with the Globetrotter homeworld. But now, for no reason, we challenge you to defend your honor on the basketball court. Will no one meet our challenge? Have none of you pathetic Klingons game?”
I’d pay to see that. Especially if the Klingon players were allowed to use Bath’lehts.
I mentally edit my movies to correct their defects. But sometimes it’s just really hard.
[Spoilers]
- How was the father sufficiently convinced by Khan to trust that some serum (Khan’s blood) would indeed save his child? He would have to have demonstrated it on someone with the child’s same illness. I wouldn’t believe him if it wasn’t demonstrated or was demonstrated on another illness.
- How could a father sacrifice a building full of people and just trust that Khan would save his child? Why would he think Khan would follow through? A Parent/Child bond is STRONG, but can he really think “the life of the one outweighs the lives of the many?” I can see fighting through obstacles and people to acquire a life-saving cure. But plain murder?
- Why was Khan de-ethnisized? Because they wanted a rising star in the part. While continuity has changed, that universe would still have the Sikh Khan. It makes sense that Section 31 mind-altered him - to remove Khan’s own plans and ambitions, but why change him? I mentally edit that mind-wiping him required that his appearance change or such a basic reminder of his past would have undone the mind-wipe more easily.
- “Khan Noonien Singh is the most dangerous adversary the Enterprise ever faced.” - Spock. I disagree. There are more powerful, more advanced, and more devious enemies. That’s just a trick to make the villian sound better in the script.
- Making a giant starship manned with a small crew and it go unnoticed within starfleet, even by an admiral and Section 31, is stretching.
- Space-diving ship to ship and they tumble across the entire deck and not even get bruised.
- Khan transported out of the jumpship and appeared to go straight to Qo’noS. Scotty mentioned how mad he was that Section 31 let Khan get the transwarp formula that would make that possible. It just seems lazy and too much of a stretch for a hovering shuttle to transport Khan to a distant planet. Better that he had to use jump pads and they filmed a “chase” (to replace the car to car hopping chase) and then have him get to a ship and leave. He could then have transwarped later from that ship to Qo’noS and residual sensor scans could help locate his destination.
There are other details. The problem is that it gets exhausting trying to edit the movie in real-time with so many details to fix.
on 1 and 2 - the father injected the blood into the machine working on his daughter (why didn’t the machine detect foreign stuff???) - saw the immediate improvement in the vitals - then went and blew up the building.
What I read, (and I forget where) is that Khan actually used the transwarp formula to beam to a number of transwarp devices he had set up in ships and on planets/moons at the right distances and he actually made “jumps” through those points on his way to the Klingon homeworld. The downside of doing this is that it could really screw with a living creature if it is done wrong, and the creature being transported isn’t hearty enough to withstand the stress placed on the body.
You can disagree with McCoy or Sulu or whoever saying that. But surely Spock has the right to say, seriously, hit that guy until he stops moving, and then keep hitting him.
I liked that Kirk was in no small amount of pain when he stopped, but Khan still looked fresh as a daisy.