Star Trek: Into Darkness
May. 12th, 2013 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeI'm trying to decide where it ranks compared with the other Star Trek movies. I feel like I liked it better than Insurrection, but not as much as I liked Nemesis or The Motion Picture.
...er, my personal ranking system:
1. Wrath of Khan, Undiscovered Country, First Contact (tie)
2. Star Trek
3. The Motion Picture (SHUT UP, it's really good if you just fast forward through the special effects bits and don't think too hard about the sexual politics behind Ilia's creation)
4. Nemesis (would be lower, but there's a Janeway cameo)
5. Into Darkness
6. The Voyage Home (in fairness, I haven't seen this since I was a kid, but it hit my embarrassment squick hard)
7. Insurrection
8. The Final Frontier
Mostly it just felt really pointless. Like, Wrath of Khan is a great movie because it's about growing and aging and letting go, and it works because we know these characters so well, and they know each other so well. It's too soon to try that with this cast. They barely know each other. Spock and Kirk are barely friends here.
And I loathe the casting of Cumberbatch as Khan, although I do note that several Hispanic actors turned the role down before he was picked up. But I can't help but feel like a PoC in the role would have been just as problematic, because this isn't the Khan of the original series. That man was a Cold War villain, as clever and strategic as Kirk. He did terrible things, but he had his own code of honour, however repugnant it was to the Federation.
This Khan is a terrorist, and while, like Montalban!Khan, his primary motivation is revenge for his people, he has no code. Uhura tells the Klingons that he has no honour; shortly after, Khan describes himself as a barbarian and a savage. He's so unstable, he winds up being emotionally manipulated by Spock.
It's just bad characterisation of an established character, and I resent having a situation where, however it's cast, we have fail.
That aside, a lot of it just didn't feel like Star Trek. Like, I don't go into a Star Trek movie to see Spock beating the shit out of a guy, you know? And apparently this is a universe where breaking the Prime Directive gets you actually demoted, and where a terrorist attack means we gather a publicly identifiable group of very senior Starfleet officers in a known location that isn't even shielded in any way. (I get a real kick out of watching pre-9/11 science fiction, like how on Babylon 5, the allegedly paranoid and fascist Garibaldi couldn't hold a candle to the TSA now. But this is not pre-9/11 sci-fi.)
Anyway, there were good things, like Uhura having a significant and proactive role, and Sulu being incredibly amazing (and if, in 15 years time, John Cho isn't headlining a TV series about the Excelsior, with a post-rehab, totally clean Lindsay Lohan as Janice Rand, I shall sulk!), and Scotty having the moral high ground and saving people and stuff. There was a prominent bridge officer who is either a trans woman or a body builder (she doesn't seem to have been credited, although she had one line, and fandom is calling it both ways), but either way she's incredibly androgynous and non-binary and beautiful. The presence of Carol Marcus adds another woman to the regular team, even though I thought Alice Eve was a bit flat and the character wasn't nearly as interesting as her original incarnation.
One thing I hated: that Carol says Christine Chapel as "gone and become a nurse" because Kirk broke her heart, and Kirk doesn't know who she is. It's like an anti shout out! Because:
- McCoy was calling for Nurse Chapel in the last movie, so who the hell was that?
- original!Chapel was always a scientist, and joined Starfleet to find her missing fiance, but she wasn't driven to it by Kirk being a jackass;
- original!Chapel was infatuated with Spock, which doesn't really work except to add a dull love triangle in this timeline, but, you know, not every woman needs to be in Kirk's pants;
- this means we can't pretend she's on the Enterprise right now.
Mostly, what I take from Into Darkness is that I really want to watch "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan again, and also write fic where Spock Prime looks over all the records and goes, "Yeah, no, different Khan. My guy was actually hardcore 'n' shit."
...er, my personal ranking system:
1. Wrath of Khan, Undiscovered Country, First Contact (tie)
2. Star Trek
3. The Motion Picture (SHUT UP, it's really good if you just fast forward through the special effects bits and don't think too hard about the sexual politics behind Ilia's creation)
4. Nemesis (would be lower, but there's a Janeway cameo)
5. Into Darkness
6. The Voyage Home (in fairness, I haven't seen this since I was a kid, but it hit my embarrassment squick hard)
7. Insurrection
8. The Final Frontier
Mostly it just felt really pointless. Like, Wrath of Khan is a great movie because it's about growing and aging and letting go, and it works because we know these characters so well, and they know each other so well. It's too soon to try that with this cast. They barely know each other. Spock and Kirk are barely friends here.
And I loathe the casting of Cumberbatch as Khan, although I do note that several Hispanic actors turned the role down before he was picked up. But I can't help but feel like a PoC in the role would have been just as problematic, because this isn't the Khan of the original series. That man was a Cold War villain, as clever and strategic as Kirk. He did terrible things, but he had his own code of honour, however repugnant it was to the Federation.
This Khan is a terrorist, and while, like Montalban!Khan, his primary motivation is revenge for his people, he has no code. Uhura tells the Klingons that he has no honour; shortly after, Khan describes himself as a barbarian and a savage. He's so unstable, he winds up being emotionally manipulated by Spock.
It's just bad characterisation of an established character, and I resent having a situation where, however it's cast, we have fail.
That aside, a lot of it just didn't feel like Star Trek. Like, I don't go into a Star Trek movie to see Spock beating the shit out of a guy, you know? And apparently this is a universe where breaking the Prime Directive gets you actually demoted, and where a terrorist attack means we gather a publicly identifiable group of very senior Starfleet officers in a known location that isn't even shielded in any way. (I get a real kick out of watching pre-9/11 science fiction, like how on Babylon 5, the allegedly paranoid and fascist Garibaldi couldn't hold a candle to the TSA now. But this is not pre-9/11 sci-fi.)
Anyway, there were good things, like Uhura having a significant and proactive role, and Sulu being incredibly amazing (and if, in 15 years time, John Cho isn't headlining a TV series about the Excelsior, with a post-rehab, totally clean Lindsay Lohan as Janice Rand, I shall sulk!), and Scotty having the moral high ground and saving people and stuff. There was a prominent bridge officer who is either a trans woman or a body builder (she doesn't seem to have been credited, although she had one line, and fandom is calling it both ways), but either way she's incredibly androgynous and non-binary and beautiful. The presence of Carol Marcus adds another woman to the regular team, even though I thought Alice Eve was a bit flat and the character wasn't nearly as interesting as her original incarnation.
One thing I hated: that Carol says Christine Chapel as "gone and become a nurse" because Kirk broke her heart, and Kirk doesn't know who she is. It's like an anti shout out! Because:
- McCoy was calling for Nurse Chapel in the last movie, so who the hell was that?
- original!Chapel was always a scientist, and joined Starfleet to find her missing fiance, but she wasn't driven to it by Kirk being a jackass;
- original!Chapel was infatuated with Spock, which doesn't really work except to add a dull love triangle in this timeline, but, you know, not every woman needs to be in Kirk's pants;
- this means we can't pretend she's on the Enterprise right now.
Mostly, what I take from Into Darkness is that I really want to watch "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan again, and also write fic where Spock Prime looks over all the records and goes, "Yeah, no, different Khan. My guy was actually hardcore 'n' shit."
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no subject
Date: 2013-05-12 04:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-12 04:40 am (UTC)(There's a bit where we see that Khan can resist the Vulcan nerve pinch? But it felt like a cheap trick on the writers' parts.)
no subject
Date: 2013-05-16 09:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-16 09:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-16 09:46 am (UTC)where a terrorist attack means we gather a publicly identifiable group of very senior Starfleet officers in a known location that isn't even shielded in any way.
THIS WAS MY ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE. NEVER CHANGE, STARFLEET. NEVER CHANGE.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-16 09:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-18 02:50 am (UTC)check out the reviews on androzani.com by a group of Doctor Who feminist fans.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-21 11:57 am (UTC)I have so much hate for what they did to her in this movie, and I haven't seen a whole lot of other people talking about it. I get the feeling they wanted a female character to reference that the fans would "get," as an "in joke," but OH MY GOSH REDUCING AN AWESOME CHARACTER TO THE BUTT OF A JOKE ABOUT KIRK'S SEX LIFE IS NOT A HOMAGE OR A SHOUT OUT, it is just insulting! "Anti shout out" is the perfect name for it. :( And I didn't even remember McCoy had called for her in the first movie; you're totally right--they've not only gutted her character, they removed her from the ship!
And I would watch a Sulu-at-the-helm-of-the-Excelsior series LIKE WHOA. Just for the record.
I've linked you in my STID roundup, hope you don't mind? :)
no subject
Date: 2013-05-30 01:46 pm (UTC)