Today I saw Star Trek Into Darkness, the second of J. J. Abrams' series of, as I've heard them referred to, "reborquels." Make no mistake, it's a fun movie, with enjoyable, banter-y dialogue, some cool actions scenes, and a heaping helping of fanservice. Yes, Benedict Cumberbatch is great (as he tends to be.) But I think some of the same criticisms I had of the 2009 Star Trek film apply here as well. It's an action movie, first and foremost, and things will not slow down for any long period of time.
Spoilers will follow, so if that's something you care about, stop reading now. Yes, I'm going to tell you who Cumberbatch's character really is, and a bunch of other stuff.
Right, so spoilers:
He's Khan, people. Khan. This revelation was hardly surprising, as we had all suspected it the moment we saw a charismatic badass who would threaten the Federation way of life. It seems the fate of Khan is never to be portrayed by an actual Sikh, but I think they do have a hand-wavy explanation for this - as a genetically engineered super man, he's not really any race. They just slapped a name on him and sent him out to conquer and destroy.
I don't really find this to be such a glaring flaw. My only disappointment is that Khan was such an obvious answer. The moment the movie was announced, people expected Khan to show up, and I would have liked to see that expectation confounded (they could have even kept him as a genetically engineered super soldier guy, but just a different one. Khan was one of many.)
But this is actually one of those movies with two main villains, and Khan shares that position with one Admiral Marcus, the latest in a long tradition of Starfleet Admirals who are secretly evil. Marcus used Khan to help design a new badass war ship, the Vengeance, which he intends to use to fight the Klingons when the war inevitably begins (sequel hook, maybe? I'd watch it. Can we have Michael Dorn?) But this team-up is not a consensual one, and much of Khan's motivation is to take revenge on Marcus, whom he believes to have killed all the other Augments frozen in cryo-stasis.
Marcus' motivation? Well, that all brings things back to Section 31 - a group of Star Trek villains I was happy to see get some time on the big screen, even if we only see one tiny facet of it. Section 31 is the dark underbelly of the Federation. The Federation is all about peaceful co-existence, making contact with other species for the benefit of both parties. Section 31 is a super-secretive quasi-governmental organization that treats that way of looking at things as a wonderful fantasy that they will lie, manipulate, and murder to maintain. Marcus sees a war with the Klingons as inevitable, so he tries to use Khan to start the war on the Federation's terms.
Given how important the Klingons are to the plot, we actually only see a brief glimpse of them, when, rather than firing some very McGuffin-y torpedoes at Khan (who is at that point known as "John Harrison,") Kirk leads an away team to apprehend him down on Kronos (it was probably a good decision to change the spelling from "Qon'oS," which never made all that much sense anyway.) Most of them have helmets, but we do get to see one of them. I actually thought the make-up design worked. It's pretty similar to what TNG-era Klingons looked like but without the big hair (news to me: Klingons DO have ears!) and some contact lenses.
Anyway, while I found the film enjoyable, I do think that it has fallen victim to what just about every blockbuster movie does these days: Action over Plot.
Unlike, say, Indiana Jones 4 (I was fine with aliens in that, it was this that bothered me,) there are a few quiet, character-building scenes here. But they were pretty much overwhelmed by numerous action set pieces, and while it's great to see how Spock has been affected by the destruction of Vulcan (not good,) it would have been nice to have some time to delve deeper into how Khan was operating. One of the big problems that this creates is that a villain like Khan doesn't have the time to demonstrate his brilliance. We get that the guy is indestructible and, as my friend Tim put it, really good at punching. But Khan is not simply billed as a monster - the Dragon to General Marcus. He's supposed to be a mastermind and genius. Sure, we get early on that he manipulates Star Fleet command into gathering at the Getty Center so he can kill them all at once, but in the later sequences, either he's somehow psychic and can know exactly what Marcus is going to do, or he's purely in reaction mode. Now, admittedly, his reactions are pretty clever (and he is only undone by Spock's clever loophole abuse involving the Vulcan inability to lie,) but I don't see him as much as a chessmaster than as an animal operating on instinct. Rather than manipulating circumstances to put him on top, he mainly uses his insane physical strength and endurance to weather them, like when he takes a phaser blast and then just gets up a minute or two later.
That's a fine way to play him, but if that was the intention, I think they got the signals crossed a little in setting him up.
I think that, in general, I wish more of these blockbusters would cut one or two action sequences and replace them with good character moments and real plot development. Today's action-stuffed blockbusters often feel oddly small in scope, largely due to the fact that with so much time spent on action, there's little time to demonstrate the stakes.
All this grumbling aside, I did like the movie. I even think there were some thematic shots for timely relevance - Marcus advocates what equates to a drone strike on Kronos in order to prevent the Klingons from going to war, but does so in a way that will likely only push them toward a confrontation. What Marcus represents is a fatalistic philosophy that sees war and darkness as an inevitability, and is quick to cast aside idealism in the name of tactical advantage.
Obviously, both of Abrams' Star Trek films are post-9/11 (frankly, I'd say we're kind of in a post-post-9/11 era, after the previous one ended with the Bush Administration,) but I think that Into Darkness does actually have something to say about the times in which we live.
Star Trek has always been hailed as one of the most optimistic visions of the future that science-fiction has given us. A united Earth, whose military's first objective is peaceful exploration, and who has managed not only to secure a lasting peace on our planet, but has also made firm, unbreakable alliances and cultural ties with aliens (the fact that San Francisco has plenty of aliens who clearly live there is a sign of that idealism.) In many ways, America has faced a similar "trek into darkness" over the last twelve years - one that has tested our values and put us in a position where our status as "the good guys" has been called into question.
Star Trek Into Darkness climaxes with a horrific catastrophe as the starship Khan built for Marcus crashes into San Francisco, presumably killing thousands and thousands of people. Yet when the film ends, Starfleet chooses not to mobilize for a Great War. Instead, it launches the Enterprise's five-year mission, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. For all the destruction that Marcus and Khan wrought, ultimately good has prevailed, and the Enterprise and her crew can now go do what they were meant to all along.
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