[Poetic] Star Trek: Into Darkness Vs. The Wrath of Khan
Star Trek: Into Darkness Vs. The Wrath of Khan
I enjoyed the 2009 reboot of Star Trek. I thought the writing was mostly clever (more on the non-clever scenes in a bit), and it was a good re-introduction to the characters. It allowed the writers to continue with the mythology, while not shackling themselves to 43 years of canon. It had some powerful and memorable scenes (the birth of Kirk, "I dare you to do better", Spock's induction into the Vulcan Science Academy.) It had a few clunkers for scenes, the biggest of which was so sloppily written it damned near ruined then entire movie for me. Specifically, those scenes leading up to the meeting of Kirk and Spock Prime. Seriously, there must have been a hundred other ways in which that meeting could have been accomplished without resorting to total blind chance. Kirk is banished to a planet. He just happens to land a few kilometres from a cave wherein Spock Prime is hiding. Kirk stumbles upon this cave after getting chased by monsters and falling down a cliff. Don't get me started on the monsters either, that was some bizarre George Lucas' homage cribbed from one of the worst scenes in The Phantom Menace. When watching new Star Trek now, I put those initial icy world scenes out of my head and imagine much better writing that leads to the Kirk/Spock Prime meeting.
So, now that you know I'm a fan of the Star Trek reboot, and that I'm not a bitter Trek nerd, we can move on to the 2013 sequel.
Is Into Darkness worth seeing? Definitely. It's a fun film. It's well-crafted and the special effects are arresting. My problem is that this is not a memorable film. It's a lot of sound and fury signifying, well, not a whole lot. I can't think of a single scene that will stick with me a month from now, much less thirty years.
Which brings us to the inevitable comparisons to its predecessor, 1982's The Wrath of Khan. The new Into Darkness is a loose remake of Khan. Whereas the new Star Trek sequel is not trying to be a faithful remake of the original, it certainly tries hard to be a spiritual successor. There's no question about that. Which is the better film?
Into Darkness fails in so many areas where The Wrath of Khan succeeded.
Let's get canon out of the way first. It's the most minor of complaints. Khan Noonien Singh is Indian. This is canon for the new Star Trek as much as it is canon for the old Star Trek. The timelines only diverged twenty-five or so years ago. The 1990s, when Khan reigned, this is history for both timelines. No divergence. Yet, new Star Trek chooses to hire the very whitest of white actors to play an Indian. Seems a decision more born in a desire to keep their plot secret, because knowing an Indian actor had been hired, the plot would have been a giveaway well before the film was released. For whatever strange reasons J.J. Abrams had, he really wanted the Khan reveal to be a well-kept secret. Granted, The Wrath of Khan did not have an Indian playing Khan either, but at least Ricardo Montalban was swarthy.
Memorability. I highly doubt that a single scene from Into Darkness will ever be considered memorable. The word classic will never attach itself to anything in Darkness. Yet, more than a handful of scenes from The Wrath of Khan are still remembered to this day, thirty years on from its release. You have the classic "Khaaaan" scene. The Khan monologue that pays homage to a scene from Melville's Moby Dick: "I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round Perdition's flames before I give him up!" That moment when Kirk drops the shields of the Reliant. The death of Spock. There are no such moments in Darkness.
What makes a scene memorable? Resonance. Often an emotional resonance. The death of Spock, for instance. That was a series shaking moment. Spock was truly dead. There was no guarantee he could be returned to the series, there was no obvious way to bring him back. As we know now, the writers did plant seeds for his revival, but they were very subtly executed. Not so much with the death of Kirk in Darkness. His eventual revival was telegraphed much earlier in the film in a ridiculous scene with a tribble. Thus any impact Kirk's death might have had was entirely wasted because we knew exactly how McCoy would bring him back.
Motivations. I bought into everything that Khan did in Wrath. His need for revenge and his need to prove himself superior made sense. Every bad decision that Khan made was built up from previous antecedents. Such as Kirk constantly playing to Khan's hubris. We got a sense that Khan was not only a physical threat, but also an intellectual threat. What did we get from Khan in Darkness? Certainly a physical threat. I saw nothing of the intellectual. And what of his motivations? It was pretty murky stuff. I certainly didn't buy Khan's need to kill Kirk near the end of Darkness, that seemed to be motivated purely by a writer's need to insert the line "A captain must go down with his ship" into the script. Other than phaser stunning him, Kirk did nothing to get under the skin of new Khan. There was next to no animosity between the two. Sure sure, Khan thought all his people were dead when the torpedoes exploded, but Khan had already resolved to kill Kirk and crew before that happened.
Anything clever the Enterprise crew did to undermine Khan was all off-screen (apparently intellectual gamesmanship is pretty boring stuff for Abrams, because only fisticuffs made it to the screen.) Which is odd, because some of the most exciting scenes in The Wrath of Khan revolved around intellectual gamesmanship from both sides. 2013 audiences apparently need a constant string of action sequences, lest they fall into a catatonic state.
One of the hallmarks of Trek is to give the audience something to think about. Certainly The Wrath of Khan is more action-adventure than anything particularly thought-provoking, but it did offer up a militarization of science theme. Exactly what thought nugget did Into Darkness present us with?
Characterizations. New Kirk is pretty one-note. Cocky is about the only way to describe Christopher Pine's Kirk. New Spock is has far more dimensionality, and seems the closest in spirit to the original character. The old triumvirate -- Kirk, Spock, McCoy -- is shuffled off in favour of a biumvirate. McCoy is relegated to a supporting role. Which is my problem with all of the other characters. They've become caricatures. Kirk and Spock are there to propel the story, to be all serious business. Every other character exists only for chuckles. Occasionally they do something important, but only to propel the story forward, not in service to actual character development. Chekov is there to be flustered. Scotty is there as comic relief. McCoy is there to crack wise on Spock. Uhura is there to be a love interest. Sulu ... I'm not even sure what Sulu did in Darkness.
On its own Into Darkness was enjoyable. It had spectacle. It was exciting. As a Trek film, it falls a tad short of the mark. As a remake of The Wrath of Khan, it doesn't hold a candle to the original.
I'm not going to start doing movie reviews on a regular basis here. If and when I'm in the mood for one, it will be kept to sci-fi films only. I'm not going to bother people with reviews for Man of Steel or Iron Man 3. There isn't much interesting sci-fi on the horizon. Maybe Elysium, but even that I doubt I could be bothered reviewing. I have no idea when I might review something else, but not likely very soon.
Source: Star Trek: Into Darkness Vs. The Wrath of Khan