Well, I guess one good thing I can say about this movie that they didn’t come up with a third universe-shattering plot device that has to be handwaved away in the future. (Although apparently, cloaking devices are simple enough that Jayla could jury-rig one from scrap parts without, apparently, any formal training or proper tools—so really, we should in the next film see ships with full cloaking devices manned by immortals, that however never get used because you can just transwarp transport anywhere… OK, that might be a minor exaggeration.)
There were a couple of things I liked. For once, the fact that aliens don’t just speak English is addressed, and it’s shown that the universal translator doesn’t just magically translate in real time, and must be trained. Also, I’ve often thought that a force of small, fast ships could be quite effective in the Star Trek universe, against capital ships that maneuver slowly and still keep missing each other with their weapons, so it was nice to see that.
Why they couldn’t just set the photon torpedoes to explode right in the center of the swarm wasn’t clear to me—one might argue that there’s not much of a pressure wave in space, but we also see the Enterprise surfing a pressure wave from an explosion to escape the black hole from the first film of the reboot, so there seems to be some effect from distant explosions in space.
Also, I liked some of the character interactions, particularly Spock and McCoy really clicked, as did Kirk and McCoy during the scene where they drank the scotch McCoy stole from Chekhov; however, the scenes with Kirk and Spock seemed positively awkward at times, like on a first date where you don’t know what to say. Loved the nod to Kirk’s habit of ripping his uniform.
But all in all, it just doesn’t come together. The villain’s motivation is completely nebulous, and I just don’t get how they got from being stranded on that nebula planet with only a couple of officers surviving, to commanding a military force capable of ripping the Enterprise to shreds in like half a minute. Were those ships just left there by whoever were the original inhabitants of the planet? Were they supposed to be the ‘mining equipment’ left behind? How did they work—ram them into places you suspect have some significant resources, and then you collect the debris?
And moreover, if they were on the planet from the start, then why didn’t they just use them to leave after the crash? Why wait around for a hundred years, attacking ships that happen to do a flyby?
Otherwise, if they weren’t around originally, then where did they come from? How do like three guys stranded on a planet build up an armada of like a thousand ships? And moreover where did they get the pilots for them? Are they just random travelers that also crashed on the planet, or maybe were crashed? If so, how did Krall rally them to his cause of, um, really liking war or being peeved that none of the people who hadn’t got a fucking clue as to where he ended up in the galaxy come rescue him? To the point where they apparently were loyal enough to kamikaze themselves into the enemy?
Or were some (perhaps the brunt) of the ships just on autopilot, following the orders of those dictating the movement patterns?
Seriously, what exactly was Krall’s plan? He had an army capable of effortlessly shredding the flagship of the Federation, and apparently had it for the past hundred years (or at least quite some time by now), which probably would have been enough to rip through the whole Federation, say, fifty years before Kirk’s time—and yet, he waited for the second half of some ancient weapon to come to him. And that’s apparently all that he did—he waited, for the laughably, ludicrously improbably event that a thing the size of a baseball just coincidentally finds its way back to the planet it originated from in the first place, out of all the planets in the galaxy. Which, of course, it does.
And then this doomsday device (for a moment there, I was hoping that it would turn out to be the doomsday machine from TOS, with the artifact just being, I don’t know, the ignition key or something) turns out to do—what, exactly? Kill a person slightly slower than a phaser would? But OK, we’ve only seen it act on a single person—maybe, if it had been dispersed through the ventilation of the starbase, it would’ve indeed have a devastating effect.
Also, while it was clear that they’d eventually magic up some technobabble to get rid of the swarm, because as everybody knows, it all has to come down to fisticuffs in the end—but stealing the solution from Mars Attacks, really? OK, so let’s believe the handwave science for the moment—somehow, they emit a shortwave radio signal that disrupts the swarm’s synchronization. And then, the ships just blow up? Or did they all instantly collide? But we’ve seen the ships break through starship hulls unscathed, and they were still mostly going in the same direction, so there couldn’t have been much lateral velocity…
And oh yeah, we start the film with Captain Kirk, now a whooping five or six years out of the academy, getting tired of always flying through space and stuff, and ready to exchange his command for the excitement of—a space station desk job?
And who builds a space station, and apparently one central to the Federation, right next to some unexplored nebula, anyway? Who then builds it without even a padlock on its central ventilation system? And I thought for sure that the use of the public transporter booth, shown very conspicuously in the beginning, signaled its importance at some point in the plot—but no, the transporter capacities of the station are completely forgotten, so instead of teleporting ahead of the villain to the ventilation system, of course Kirk has to go on a chase on foot. Nevermind that there’s not too much sense to having the ventilation system of a space station connected to a fan that apparently just leads out into space…
Anyway. In the end, it’s just another big dumb blockbuster. Explosions and fisticuffs and stuff. But what I really don’t get is how these movies come to be so critically acclaimed—this one is currently at a ‘certified fresh’ rating of 83% at Rotten Tomatoes, Into Darkness boasts 86%, and 2009’s Star Trek is at 95%, making it the highest-rated of all Trek movies, and no. 15 on RT’s list of best science-fiction/fantasy movies! I mean, am I just not getting it anymore? Is this what getting old feels like?
