Lists are big on the internet these days. Let’s do this.
Spoilers after the jump. You have been warned.
1. It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the publicized
name of Benedict Cumberbatch’s character, John Harrison, is a coy deflection,
much like John Blake in The Dark Knight
Rises. But the reveal achieves so little that everything would have been
more interesting if the audience could have been in on it from the beginning.
Isn’t there room for dramatic irony in a movie like this?
2. There must be room for dramatic irony, because so much of
the movie depends on you already knowing (and loving) what came before. The
fanservice is so thick you could cut it with a knife, and I often wanted to.
3. I have no way of knowing whether you could enjoy this
movie without having done the required reading, but it’s more interesting for
what it does with the preexisting material than for what it does as such. After
paying $12 to watch Into Darkness I
felt like I could have achieved the same effect by falling asleep while
watching The Wrath of Khan.
4. Not nearly enough Klingons.
5. Starfleet’s new grey uniforms were apparently salvaged
from the wreckage of the Death Star. This does not make me confident that J.J.
Abrams’ Star Wars movies will feel different from his Star Trek movies.
6. The word “Khan” does not make my spine tingle, even when
Benedict Cumberbatch takes three whole seconds to say it.
7. Or when Spock takes three whole seconds to scream it. That
was not the place for a laugh line.
8. Khan hides his crew inside missiles. Inside missiles. To keep them safe. Missiles. This is where his “better at everything” shtick starts to
break down.
9. Things Khan is actually better at: medicine, being punched,
jumping, crying, squeezing.
10. Dr. Carol Marcus is the most embarrassing female character
I can recall in a movie produced this century. I was prepared to hate her
much-publicized (much to the chagrin of the producers, I’m sure) gratuitous underwear
scene, but it turns out that a flat stomach is her closest approximation of a
personality, and being mostly naked in front of Captain Kirk is her closest
approximation of sexual chemistry. She apparently exists to do the screaming
the other characters are too cool for, and get Maxim to plug the movie.
11. Also, her dad sounds like he comes from Iowa, so where
the hell did she get her accent?
12. If the Enterprise has 72 more cryogenically frozen
superhumans onboard, why is it so important to capture Khan alive again? Would
one of the other guys’ blood be too… slushy?
13. The truth is that I enjoyed Into Darkness, and there’s no shame in releasing a B- movie in the
summer. But considering all the ordinance deployed in support of the plot—Khan,
the redesign of the Klingons, evil warmongering Federation Robocop, busting
Kirk down, killing Kirk, bringing him back, Spock emoting; about five decent Star Trek movies’ worth of premises—is that
all they could deliver? I feel like I had a pretty
good hamburger and then found out that two
entire cows had been used up to make it.
In regards to 3, I have actually not seen The Wrath of Khan (well, I saw about five minutes of it once) and the movie worked for me. In fact, I suspect that it was more gratifying for me than for someone with an intimate knowledge of Star Trek, because I had just enough information to find the reveals interesting without having the execution not live up to my expectations.
ReplyDeleteWhich may relate to 1 in some aspects. I suspected that Cumberbatch was Khan, because...who else were they going to pull out? But the blind gave me just enough doubt that I ran with their story as it was developing rather than constantly comparing the whole thing to the original.
Ultimately, I think they made an accessible Star Trek, and I don't have a problem with that. I know people do, and we'll if I change my tune when Star Wars comes out, but for the record I am TOTALLY OK with mainstreaming of sci-fi and fantasy. That's no excuse for sloppy writing (and the movie did have plenty of that) but on the whole, for a summer blockbuster I think they did a pretty good job.
Also, can we just give a shout-out to the fact that one of the writers apologized for the gratuitous bra and panties shot? It's not quite as good as, I don't know, not having it in the first place, but at least it's a start.
Truth be told, I got spoiled for the John Harrison thing, so I'll admit I probably got the worst of both worlds on that reveal.
DeleteI will withhold my out-shouting vis a vis Damon Lindelof. At the risk of reading too much into the whole thing, he didn't seem to be apologizing for the titillation, but for making light of it to MTV. And the apology itself, plastered all over the internet, was better advertising than you can buy.
I'm not going to lay the blame at anyone's feet, but I'm not going to praise anyone involved for their enlightenment either.
In fairness, I seem to have failed to do the relevant research when I brought Maxim into the equation. I looked into the matter enough to confirm that she had been on the cover and assumed (incorrectly) that it was in connection with STID. (It was actually in 2010). So I don't know if Paramount actually sent Alice Eve on the Lads Mag circuit. But I might disagree with the characterization of her underwear scene as "gratuitous." It was fundamental to her character's role in the movie, and that's what depresses me.
You know, it's true that the...let's call it a lukewarm admission of regret came after some kind of media pummeling, but it is rare that something like this is even acknowledged as out of place, let alone followed up with a lukewarm admission of regret. So I'm going to take it as a step in the right direction.
DeleteMuch as I would like it to, Hollywood isn't going to change overnight. Little things like this - people getting outraged about an unnecessary strip-down by a female character and a writer actually responding, or people getting outraged about the hypersexualization of a child and Disney hastily backtracking - these are the things that (I hope) herald a shift in the way that women are portrayed in media. And who knows, maybe Damon Lindelof did learn something in this process, and maybe he will have second thoughts next time he writes a female character or before he thoughtlessly dismisses a shot set up solely as eye candy. A minor win, perhaps, but still a win.