Stupid Trek

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD

Star Trek Into Darkness is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. It was flat out insulting my intelligence as I was watching it. If I was not in the middle of the theater, I would have walked out.

Which is a shame because parts of it are pretty good. The music and visuals are great, the cast are excellent, particularly the chemistry between Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, and there are some really funny moments. But it's all dragged down by the stupid fucking script.

So here's a list of all the stupid shit that pissed me off.

The movie starts on some alien planet. Kirk and McCoy are running away from some spear-throwing alien dirt people because Kirk stole their sacred scroll. So first two minutes and they've already violated the Prime Directive.

Meanwhile, Spock is in the middle of an exploding volcano with a science bomb to stop the volcano. See if the volcano explodes all life on the planet will die. But they can't just put the bomb in and beam Spock out or just beam the bomb in. There's something with the planet's magnetic field so they can't beam. Okay....

Kirk and McCoy escape the dirt people by dropping the scroll and diving into ocean where the Enterprise is parked. Yes, the SPACESHIP is parked underwater. Why? They never explain.

Now a submarine apparently

Anyway Spock is stuck in the volcano because they can't beam him out because of the magnetic thing. So what does Kirk do? Bring the Enterprise out of the ocean to rescue Spock in an even bigger violation of the Prime Directive. And Kirk just waves this off like he dented the fender. 

It was here I realized Orci & Kurtzman do not get Kirk. Yeah, he violated the Prime Directive on the show but it was for a good reason, usually because somebody else had already violated it and he had to step in to keep things from getting worse. Here, nah. Fuck Starfleet's literal number one rule. Who cares if we irreversibly fuck up a primitive civilization's development? 

And it turns out the whole thing was pointless anyway. It would one thing if the Enterprise was ordered to save the planet, but they weren't. We go back to Earth and Admiral Pike is chewing out Kirk, it turns out they were only supposed to survey the planet. Kirk interfered basically for shits and giggles, then lied about it in his log. But Spock wrote a report saying what really happened and here we are.

Ha, I accidentally made myself a god.

Pike rightfully busts Kirk's balls and he gets demoted to first officer of the Enterprise under Pike. This lasts about two minutes because Benedict Cumberbatch shows up and blows up a thing in London. So all the head Starfleet guys get together to talk about it and of course Cumberbatch shows up to attack them. He starts shooting the place up and Pike gets killed. Which raises the question, why weren't the head Starfleet guys beamed away immediately when Cumberbatch attacked? They couldn't do it on the dirt people planet because of magnets or something but now they're on Earth. Why don't they beam away?

But yeah, Pike is dead so Kirk is captain again. That was pointless. 

Cumberbatch does beam away though. All the way to the Klingon homeworld. He blew up London to get his hands on a special super-transporter to do that. Here's where I thought this movie might turn out all right. 

Cumberbatch is supposed to be a rogue Starfleet guy getting revenge on them. All that nonsense on the dirt people planet set up that Kirk is an egotistical douche who doesn't listen to anybody but himself. So of course Kirk goes after Cumberbatch. The arc would seem to be that Kirk is full of himself, goes after Cumberbatch who is more than he can handle so Kirk has to be more humble to beat Cumberbatch. 

Too bad that ain't what happens.

Ricardo Not-alban

Things are all right for a while. The Enterprise goes after Cumberbatch, Robocop (Head of Starfleet) gives them some super-torpedoes, they catch Cumberbatch, blah, blah, blah. Cumberbatch is smooth though and he convinces them to open one of the super-torpedoes. And there's a cryo-pod in it.

Yep, Cumberbatch is actually Khan. 

You stupid motherfuckers. You actually did it. You did the one goddamn thing you shouldn't have. You used Khan. Why? WHY!? You can't replicate Wrath of Khan so why even try? Wrath of Khan is perfect. Trying to do it again just makes your work look worse in comparison.

And another thing. Khan is supposed to be Indian. Cumberbatch is British, that's about as White as you can get. And Khan is from before the timelines split so that shouldn't be different. Now he's a terrorist and you can't use a brown-skinned man as a terrorist villain without unfortunate implications so I get why they made him white. But if you're just going to change Khan to use him why even use Khan?

Err. But I was willing to go with it for a little while because it seemed like it was going somewhere interesting. See Robocop is trying to make Starfleet more militaristic after Vulcan went kerblooey in the last movie and he thawed Khan out to help him. He's built a big black evil Enterprise and set up Kirk to help start a war with the Klingons so he could militarize Starfleet. Khan was being used because Robocop still had all Khan's frozen friends.

So Khan is actually an anti-hero this time. He just wants to protect his frozen buddies and Robocop is blackmailing him. That could have been interesting. Too bad that ain't what happens.

Kirk and Khan team up to stop Robocop and Scotty helps them get on the evil Enterprise. Then Khan kills Robocop because he was actually evil the whole time. He takes over the evil Enterprise and the next half-hour of the movie is just a crappier re-do of Wrath of Khan.

This is also pointless.

This last half-hour is full of so much stupid shit and insulting fan pandering that I can't recap it all but I'll mention the thing that broke the camel's back.

So part of Robocop's evil plan was to break the Enterprise's warp core. If they don't fix it the Enterprise will crash. But they can't go in and fix it because the radiation it gives off will kill them. Yep, just like the end of Wrath of Khan. But this time Kirk goes in to fix it, not Spock.

Now, again, this could have been interesting. Kirk dies fixing the Enterprise. It's a logical conclusion to his arc of needing to take responsibility for his actions. And it would have been a huge gutsy move to kill Kirk. If they had stuck with it, I would have been able to forgive most of the movie.

But no, they don't do that. Because Khan has magic healing blood. McCoy learns this because he injected some of Khan's blood into a dead tribble and the tribble came back to life. So They put Kirk into a cryo-pod while Spock goes and gets Khan for his magic blood. Even though all the other frozen guys are genetically engineered like Khan so they should have healing blood too.

So Spock gets Khan and they bring Kirk back to life. You know when Spock died at the end of Wrath of Khan, they devoted the whole next movie to bringing him back. Kirk dies? Fix it in the last ten minutes.

Fuck this movie.