Star Trek: Into Darkness (spoilers)
Posted: Sun May 26, 2013 11:51 am
Star Trek: Into Darkness
Loud, fun, another J.J. Abrams continued rebooting of the ST franchise. Sort of.
Unfortunately, somewhere in his past, Abrams saw Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.
And consequently, decided to ape most of it in another reboot, which unfortunately looks more like a remake. And even more unfortunately, without ever seeing the original series episode “Space Seed”, or noting what a decent actor Ricardo Montalban could be.
Unlike the original ensemble, where there was Kirk, Spock, & McCoy, a second tier of everyone else, and a third tier of disposable red shirts, Abrams has decided to go with a first tier of Spock, and a second tier of Kirk and everyone else. Which gets the other partners in the ensemble more face time, but pretty much sucks on every other level. Not least of which is reinventing Carol Marcus as a hot blonde, introducing her and Kirk, and then after leaving that fat pitch hanging over the plate for the entire movie, never going there again.
And at every outing, it becomes more apparent what magic ensued because of Nimoy and Shatner is not repeatable by Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine. They’re good, but playing somebody else while somebody else is just one degree of acting more than anybody can sustain for an entire series of films, and this outing shows the weakness of walking on that crutch forever.
Abrams has also seen fit, rather than taking a golden opportunity to fill in the blanks of Kirk, Spock, and Star Fleet’s prehistory for the waiting audience, with following all the backstory of each by rote. And compounding that error by flushing the essence of what made Roddenberry’s vision of the human future enjoyable and hopeful, and instead substituting the absolute worst representations of current human behavior into the story, and featuring them as plot points. It's like watching a Rob Reiner movie about the military, or an Oliver Stone movie dealing with actual historical events.
To be fair ST:ID has done phenomenally well in box office at this point, primarily because there’s a dearth of people puking anything up on the screen lately worth shelling out ten bucks to go and see. On that level, the movie is worth watching. But all ST:ID does from where I was sitting, is to rub our noses into the fact that Quinto and Pine are not Shatner and Nimoy, and that Abrams isn’t Gene Roddenberry. And the sum of those parts was greater than the whole Abrams & company provide. Maybe even greater than they’re able to provide, which doubtless has some exec at Paramount up awake nights.
Perhaps, and hopefully, Abrams will drop forever the slavish need to re-invent the Star Trek movies, one by one, and instead rediscover the universe Roddenberry left us, decide to explore strange new worlds, and boldly go where no man has ever gone before. Instead of making every trip to this franchise another whirl on the Star Trek merry-go-round, where no matter which horse you sit on, you’re destined to keep going around in circles until you’re just tired of the ride, and trying not to hurl.
Rating:
Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life here.
Loud, fun, another J.J. Abrams continued rebooting of the ST franchise. Sort of.
Unfortunately, somewhere in his past, Abrams saw Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.
And consequently, decided to ape most of it in another reboot, which unfortunately looks more like a remake. And even more unfortunately, without ever seeing the original series episode “Space Seed”, or noting what a decent actor Ricardo Montalban could be.
Unlike the original ensemble, where there was Kirk, Spock, & McCoy, a second tier of everyone else, and a third tier of disposable red shirts, Abrams has decided to go with a first tier of Spock, and a second tier of Kirk and everyone else. Which gets the other partners in the ensemble more face time, but pretty much sucks on every other level. Not least of which is reinventing Carol Marcus as a hot blonde, introducing her and Kirk, and then after leaving that fat pitch hanging over the plate for the entire movie, never going there again.
And at every outing, it becomes more apparent what magic ensued because of Nimoy and Shatner is not repeatable by Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine. They’re good, but playing somebody else while somebody else is just one degree of acting more than anybody can sustain for an entire series of films, and this outing shows the weakness of walking on that crutch forever.
Abrams has also seen fit, rather than taking a golden opportunity to fill in the blanks of Kirk, Spock, and Star Fleet’s prehistory for the waiting audience, with following all the backstory of each by rote. And compounding that error by flushing the essence of what made Roddenberry’s vision of the human future enjoyable and hopeful, and instead substituting the absolute worst representations of current human behavior into the story, and featuring them as plot points. It's like watching a Rob Reiner movie about the military, or an Oliver Stone movie dealing with actual historical events.
To be fair ST:ID has done phenomenally well in box office at this point, primarily because there’s a dearth of people puking anything up on the screen lately worth shelling out ten bucks to go and see. On that level, the movie is worth watching. But all ST:ID does from where I was sitting, is to rub our noses into the fact that Quinto and Pine are not Shatner and Nimoy, and that Abrams isn’t Gene Roddenberry. And the sum of those parts was greater than the whole Abrams & company provide. Maybe even greater than they’re able to provide, which doubtless has some exec at Paramount up awake nights.
Perhaps, and hopefully, Abrams will drop forever the slavish need to re-invent the Star Trek movies, one by one, and instead rediscover the universe Roddenberry left us, decide to explore strange new worlds, and boldly go where no man has ever gone before. Instead of making every trip to this franchise another whirl on the Star Trek merry-go-round, where no matter which horse you sit on, you’re destined to keep going around in circles until you’re just tired of the ride, and trying not to hurl.
Rating:
Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life here.