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chronotrek · 7 years ago

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759. [MOV] Star Trek Into Darkness

SCORE:

(3/5 stars)

The Enterprise, in surveying the planet Nibiru, has discovered that a volcano is due to erupt that will likely wipe out most life on the planet, Yellowstone caldera style. There is a primitive village at the base of the volcano, and Kirk lures them away from the initial blast zone by stealing one of their sacred scrolls, causing them all to chase him and McCoy until they jump off a cliff and swim to the Enterprise, stupidly hidden underwater. Meanwhile, Sulu, Uhura and Spock are flying inside the caldera to lower Spock down on a line to deploy a device that will freeze the eruption in its tracks. The ash intake is damaging the shuttle's engines and when Spock's tether accidentally severs, Sulu is forced to leave him behind on a small rock surrounded by lava or the shuttle will crash. The only way to get Spock out of there is with a direct line of sight transport, but they'd need to come out of the ocean to do that, exposing the ship to the view of the natives and violating the Prime Directive. Spock tells them to leave him behind, but Kirk ignores his protest and does it anyway, beaming Spock aboard just before the bomb goes off and freezes the eruption. He shrugs off the Prime Directive implications even as the natives begin drawing silhouettes of the Enterprise in the sand.

Back at Earth, Kirk and Spock have been called to report to Admiral Pike, who asks about the Nibiru survey mission. Kirk calls it uneventful, which doesn't mesh with the report Spock filed regarding their violation of the Prime Directive. Kirk is angry that Spock went behind his back to tell on him for saving his life, and Pike dismisses Spock from the room to dress Kirk down for filing a false report, violating the Prime Directive, and furthermore failing to even understand what he did wrong. He says that there was already a hearing convened and they've decided to strip Kirk of his command and boot him all the way down to cadet.

Pike finds Kirk at a bar and cockblocks him to share a drink. He tells Kirk that they gave the Enterprise back to him, and he was able to lessen Kirk's punishment. He'll serve as Pike's first officer with Spock transferred to the Bradbury. They're called in to an emergency meeting at Starfleet Headquarters, where Admiral "Robocop" Marcus informs them he got an email from Mickey before he 9-11'd Section 31 that he was coerced into doing it by Michaelvick Dogfightmatch. Admiral Marcus is declaring a manhunt for the dude, but it doesn't add up to Kirk, especially because he doesn't know it was a Section 31 facility and on its face appears to just be a library. He realizes that once said terror attack would happen, all the captains and first officers would convene in this very room.

Sure enough, Obamadict Cumbarack shows up in a small craft to Godfather 3 the room, killing pretty much everyone except Marcus, Spock and Kirk. Pike gets hit in the chest and Spock melds with him as he passes. Kirk ties a rifle to a wall-mounted firehose and throws it through a broken window into the engine of the shuttle, crippling it. He sees Wimbledon Tennismatch beam out as his craft breaks apart around him. Scotty is able to locate the transwarp beaming device he had aboard and has found its coordinates: "Not Khan" beamed himself to Qo'noS, the one place they can't go.

Kirk requests Marcus reinstate him as Captain of the Enterprise and reassign Spock back as his first officer so he can enter Klingon space and pursue Frumious Bandersnatch to bring him to justice. Marcus grants him his request with specific orders. He'll arm the Enterprise with experimental torpedoes that can be fired from long range and will be undetectable by the Klingons. They'll warp in to the edge of Klingon space and fire on Buttonwillow McKittrick's location. Along with the torpedoes comes a weapons expert, Dr. Carol Wallace, which everyone going into the film already knew was actually Carol Marcus, but the filmmakers sure know how to insult their fans by pretending they pulled one over on them. Spock is also suspicious of her and looks into it. Scotty has a serious problem allowing the torpedoes on board because he doesn't know their composition or how they might interfere with the Enterprise engines, and when Kirk orders him to approve them despite his objections, he resigns. Kirk assigns Chekov to replace him as Chief Engineer, saying "Go put on a red shirt," which is a little less funny now considering Anton Yelchin died shortly after filming Star Trek Beyond.

Before Scotty leaves the Enterprise, he implores Kirk not to use the torpedoes, advice that Kirk takes to heart. As they warp to Qo'noS, he announces that they will be seeking to arrest "John Harrison" and only use the torpedoes as a last resort. Spock discovers that Carol Wallace is Carol Marcus, the daughter of Admiral Marcus, and she forged her transfer papers to get aboard. Before she can explain what she's doing here, the Enterprise violently drops out of warp in the Klingon neutral zone due to a coolant leak Chekov discovers. Kirk, Spock, Uhura and two redshirts take a ship confiscated from Harry Mudd and dress in civilian clothes so as not to tie their mission to Starfleet, while Sulu is given the conn and sends a transmission to "Khan't" warning him to surrender or get BTFO. Chekov will try to get the engines up and running before they return.

It looks like the Klingons overmined Praxis a little earlier in this timeline, as Qo'noS has a moon that's breaking apart. The transporter coordinates lead to an uninhabited section of Qo'noS, and en route to its location, Uhura decides to start up an argument with Spock over his rash actions on Nibiru, his seeming lack of care for her feelings when he chose to die, and she tries to bring Kirk into the argument. Spock counters that he's felt grief and despair before, when he melded with Pike, and knew it was the same feeling he felt magnified when Vulcan died, and so he chooses not to feel it again, but it does not affect his feelings for Uhura.

Even though it's an abandoned area of Qo'noS, they have the luck to encounter a random patrol and despite putting on a good chase are completely surrounded. Kirk is ready for a fight, but Uhura opts to use her Klingon to attempt to negotiate instead. She meets face to face with the patrol leader and tells him they are here to hunt down a human criminal with no honor. The Klingon is not moved by her calls to his sensibility, and begins throttling her. But of course, Trenchadict Matrixbatch shows up in a long coat and a bunch of guns to blow up the Klingons. Once the patrol is eradicated, he demands to know the number of torpedoes the Enterprise is armed with. Spock says they have 72, and "Harrison" immediately surrenders. Kirk accepts his surrender, then punches him a bunch. It doesn't seem to phase his prisoner one bit.

On the Enterprise brig, "Harrison" notes they haven't gone to warp yet, suggesting he suspects sabotage. He gives Kirk coordinates to investigate, saying there will be answers to his war on Starfleet there, and he suggests they open a torpedo to see what's inside. Spock warns that he's trying to get into Kirk's head, but Kirk listens anyway because something doesn't add up. He calls Scotty back on Earth and asks him to do him a favor and investigate the coordinates, which take Scotty to a secret shipyard orbiting Jupiter. Speaking with Carol Marcus, she explains that she forged her credentials because she had full access to Section 31's weapons programs except for these torpedoes which disappeared off the books, and she wanted to investigate. They take the ship to a nearby planetoid where Doctors McCoy and Marcus perform surgery on a torpedo and discover it's housing a cryotube with a 300-year-old man inside.

Kirk returns to the brig to find out what's going on, where Bunchacrunch Creamsicle hams it up to reveal that his name... is... KHAN. As if that means anything to Kirk, but maybe Khan was playing it up for the fourth wall. I should point out that Khan was previously played by a Mexican actor portraying an Indian man and now he's suddenly Whitey McLondon. The only thing I can think is that in this timeline, Khan, being of South Asian descent, was likely engineered with the British colonialism gene, turning him into the Englishest Englishman who ever Britted. He explains that Admiral Marcus has a goal of a militarized Starfleet, particularly after the Narada incident, and went and found the Botany Bay to get insight from genetic augments on building new weapons and ships. He held Khan's crew hostage to force him to do the work. Khan hid his crew's cryotubes in the torpedoes he was developing, but apparently Marcus found them. Khan assumed they had been killed, which is why he started waging war on Starfleet. He believes Marcus sabotaged the Enterprise so that it would be found when it launched the torpedoes, sparking a war against the Klingons that Marcus wants.

Proving his point, Admiral Marcus warps in on a big scary new Dreadnought-class vessel called the USS Vengeance. (Who calls it that? The script, apparently. It's never mentioned in the film.) Marcus and Kirk briefly pretend like they don't know that the other person knows that they know, but Khan was pretty much right. Marcus demands Khan be killed and asks him handed over. Kirk lies and says their transporters are down, and then tells Marcus Khan is in Engineering and they'll lower shields to let the Vengeance beam him over. He's really just buying time to make sure that Chekov has warp back online. Shields are never dropped, and they warp back to Earth.

Kirk figures they're safe, doubting the Vengeance can catch up to them, but Carol says the Vengeance has an advanced warp drive and will definitely catch up to them, which it does, firing weapons on the Enterprise and knocking it out of warp in orbit of the Moon. Marcus beams Carol over to the Vengeance and declares the Enterprise crew in league with Khan. He'll execute them all as traitors, even as Kirk begs to be solely held responsible. But before the Vengeance can fire again, all systems reboot. Scotty snuck aboard the Vengeance when he found it in the Jupiter shipyard, and is actively sabotaging it as he can.

Since it will take some time for the Vengeance to restore systems, Kirk sees an opportunity despite the Enterprise's own weapons being offline. Khan knows the Vengeance inside and out, being one of its developers. They turn the ship to align with a cargo bay airlock port on the Vengeance, and Kirk and Khan launch themselves out of an Enterprise airlock in EVA suits to traverse the gap in space. Scotty is accosted by a security officer while manning the airlock port and tries to stall for time, apologizing to him right before he opens the airlock and the guard is blown out into space as Kirk and Khan fly in. Kirk gives Khan a phaser locked to stun, and they head for the bridge.

Spock, meanwhile, gives his old buddy Spock Prime a call and asks him about Khan. Spock Prime warns him that Khan Noonien Singh was one of their most formidable foes and was only defeated at great cost. This scene really didn't need to be in here as it added nothing other than giving Spock Prime another scene when we got a wonderful sendoff for him last film. We all already know Khan is bad, he's the bad guy in the trailers. And since this situation is completely different from Wrath of Khan other than Khan is the bad guy, any advice Spock Prime gives is going to be generic at best and ultimately no payoff comes from it other than to remind people about Wrath of Khan, a much better movie.

Kirk also doesn't trust Khan and tells Scotty to drop him as soon as they hit the bridge. They take the bridge and Scotty stuns Khan, but his superior genetics let him shrug off the stun early and he starts kicking everyone's ass before going full Mountain vs Oberyn, crushing Admiral Marcus's skull between his bare hands. He demands Spock beam the torpedoes to the Vengeance, pointing out that if he doesn't comply, he'll just knock out their life support system since his crew will be unaffected in their cryotubes. Spock beams them over and beams back Kirk, Scotty and Carol. Khan resumes firing on the Enterprise anyway, but Spock had set the torpedoes for timed detonation, and the Vengeance gets fucked up. Kirk worries that they killed Khan's crew, but they removed the tubes beforehand and have them stored in sickbay.

But the damage the Enterprise suffered causes main power to go down and despite it being in orbit of the Moon five minutes ago it starts falling into the Earth's atmosphere. Kirk and Scotty head to Engineering in an Inception-inspired gravity tumbling scene. They can't reinitialize the warp core because an injector is misaligned, and there's no time to clear the chamber of radiation to fix it. Gee, that sounds a little familiar. Kirk is going to go in to do it anyway, and knocks Scotty out to stop his protestations. He manages to kick the injector back in place, and the ship restores power, rising out of the clouds.

In the most offensively derivative scene, Scotty calls Spock down to Engineering as they steal half the lines from Wrath of Khan while Spock and Kirk have a tearful conversation through a pane of glass. Kirk succumbs to his radiation exposure and dies. But, c'mon, we know it's not going to take, because Kirk's only weakness is shoddy bridge construction. Spock, in sadness and anger, yells "KHAAAAAN!" and I, in anger, yell "ABRAAAMS!!!!"

This brings me to a recurring point of contention with the JJverse films. There are plenty of human characters with emotions in these movies that don't cry, yet the stoic Spock has to be made compelling once a film by turning into a blubbering mess. Look, we get it, we all saw "The Naked Time" (or I did) and remembered him crying that he couldn't confess his love for his mother. It was a great moment. And it was made possible because he was intoxicated, not because he was in an emotional situation, and it was an incredibly rare moment in the series. Spock can be somber without resorting to tears. To be clear, I am not hating on characters crying in movies. I think that is perfectly fine. I am hating on the choice to rob Spock of his primary characteristic every movie to service lazy storytelling.

Khan and the Vengeance are not quite dead yet, and he decides to take his ship on a collision course for San Fransisco, first smashing into Alcatraz (what is this, a Roland Emmerich film?) then colliding with several skyscrapers. Khan survives this crash. They can't beam Khan up, but they can beam Spock down, who chases Khan through the panicked streets of San Fran, ending up on a flying car-top battle. Meanwhile, McCoy discovers that Khan's blood injected into a dead tribble restored it to life, and realizes that death no longer holds meaning in the Star Trek universe because they can just harvest Khan's platelets forever. Uhura beams down to stop Spock from killing Khan (though, as just established, wouldn't his superblood prevent that anyway?) and Spock just delivers a no-holds-barred beatdown instead.

Kirk wakes up in the hospital a few weeks later, neutering his heroic sacrifice for the Enterprise. Khan has been stuck back in a cryotube with the rest of the Botany Bay crew. A year passes and San Franscisco and the Enterprise have been fixed up. Kirk gives a speech about not letting enemies of the Federation pull Starfleet into militarization and they should focus instead on exploration. Boy, that sure would have been a nice message to tell Paramount at the start of this project. The crew boards the Enterprise and prepares to embark on a 5-year deep space mission. About time. It's only taken them two movies to get to a point where they can do the movies they should have been doing all along.

NITPICKS

Hey you know what would be better than lowering yourself into an active volcano to place a suitcase bomb then waiting for a starship to leave an ocean and expose itself to the natives so it can line-of-sight beam you? Staying in fucking orbit where nobody can see you and beaming the suitcase bomb down.

They could have called that bomb anything. They chose to call it a cold fusion bomb. That is not at all what cold fusion means.

What really bugs me about the violation of the Prime Directive is that Kirk never actually learns his lesson. He's only thrust back into the captain's chair out of necessity. At no point does he express regret for how he handled the Nibiru mission, nor does he even seem to comprehend the purpose of Starfleet's number 1 rule.

They make a big deal about giving Sulu the bridge like it's never happened. Sulu has, in fact, commanded the Enterprise before, last film, when Kirk and Spock were aboard the Narada.

The on-screen text identifies the Klingon homeworld as Kronos. It is, in fact, Qo'noS.

The Enterprise is in orbit of the Moon when it starts to careen towards the Earth. A quarter million miles is, in fact, pretty dang far, and the Moon would have had the stronger local gravity well.

Between two cuts of Kirk and Spock's hands against the window, in the first cut they are both making the Vulcan salute, and the next they are both holding their hands normally, with no transition out of said salute.

Why didn't McCoy test the blood of any of the other 72 augments to see if maybe they had the same magical superblood? They might not have needed Khan at all.

FAVORITE QUOTES

Spock: Had the mission had gone according to plan, Admiral, the indigenous species would never have been aware of our interference. Pike: That's a technicality. Spock: I am Vulcan, sir. We embrace technicality. Pike: Are you giving me attitude, Spock? Spock: I am expressing multiple attitudes simultaneously, sir.

Kirk: Why the archive? All that information is public record, and if he really wanted to damage Starfleet, this could just be the beginning. Marcus: The beginning of what, Mister Kirk? Kirk: Sir, in the event of an attack, protocol mandates that senior command gather captains and first officers at Starfleet HQ, right here. In this room.

Spock: Regulations aside, this action is morally wrong. Kirk: Regulations aside, pulling your ass out of a volcano was morally right. And I didn't win any points for that.

Kirk: We have our orders, Scotty. Scott: That's what scares me. This is clearly a military operation. ls that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers.

Kirk: Are you guys fighting? Uhura: I'd rather not talk about it, sir. Kirk: Oh, my God. What is that even like?

Kirk: This isn't going to be a problem, is it, you two working together? Uhura: Absolutely not. Spock: Unclear.

McCoy: You just sat that man down at a high stakes poker game with no cards and told him to bluff. Now Sulu's a good man, but he is no captain. Kirk: For the next two hours, he is. And enough with the metaphors, all right? That's an order.

Uhura: At that volcano, you didn't give a thought to us. What it would do to me if you died, Spock. You didn't feel anything. You didn't care. And I'm not the only one who's upset with you. The Captain is too. Kirk: No. No, no. Don't drag me into this. ...She is right.

Spock: It is true I chose not to feel anything upon realizing that my own life was ending. As Admiral Pike was dying, I joined with his consciousness and experienced what he felt at the moment of his passing. Anger. Confusion. Loneliness. Fear. I had experienced those feelings before, multiplied exponentially on the day my planet was destroyed. Such a feeling is something I choose never to experience again. Nyota, you mistake my choice not to feel as a reflection of my not caring. Well, I assure you, the truth is precisely the opposite.

McCoy: You know, when I dreamt about being stuck on a deserted planet with a gorgeous woman, there was no torpedo.

Khan: Intellect alone is useless in a fight, Mister Spock. You, you can't even break a rule. How would you be expected to break bone?

Kirk: I'm not aligning with him, I'm using him. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Spock: An Arabic proverb attributed to a prince who was betrayed and decapitated by his own subjects.

#star trek #star trek into darkness #movie #chronotrek #chronological #review #jj abrams #benedict cumberbatch #noel clarke #peter weller #alice eve #bruce greenwood #john cho #simon pegg #chris pine #zachary quinto #zoe saldana #karl urban #anton yelchin

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