...Where Somebody Else Has Gone Before (A Star Trek Into Darkness review)

Poster by Matt Ferguson.

I don't go into films looking for problems. Really, I don't. When you go into a cinema, you're making a pact with whatever's on the silver screen - "I will suspend my disbelief, I will give you the time of day, but only if you give me something truly worthwhile". It's only fair. It's like deliberately looking for the moment when the magician slips something up his sleeve - where's the fun in that? It's better to enjoy the show.

So I went into Star Trek Into Darkness prepared to meet it halfway. I was beyond annoyed by the marketing constantly teasing the identity of Benedict Cumberbatch's villain, even though everyone and their mother and their mother's friend Jean knew who it was. But then I remembered how much I liked the previous film from 2009, which managed to soar despite a shoddy script, purely through the strength of its cast and JJ Abrams being a pretty damn fine action director. I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, I just wanted a fun little popcorn movie.

I got that movie only on the most superficial level. Star Trek Into Darkness is a film that just flat out doesn't work anywhere else.

(WARNING: This review will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen the film, I'm sorry, but turn back now. There's no way of discussing all the bullshit that happens without doing so; it's vacuum-packed bullshit. They're clever like that.)

A secret Starfleet intelligence facility in London is bombed, prompting an emergency meeting by the commanders to find the culprit, suspecting Klingon involvement. The perpetrator, rogue agent "John Harrison" (Cumberbatch), takes this opportunity to strafe the place, killing most of the officers, including Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood), and escaping to the Klingon homeworld Qo'noS Kronos. Fortunately, James Kirk (Chris Pine) and his first officer Spock (Zachary Quinto) survive, and are dispatched by Starfleet to find Harrison and eliminate him.

Let's focus on the positives first - the cast is still pretty great. They play off each other well, have fun, and suit their roles pretty well, even if some of them (Karl Urban's Bones springs to mind) get neglected in terms of screen time. Pine and Quinto in particular seem to be more comfortable as Kirk and Spock, and while Quinto proves an able successor to Leonard Nimoy, Pine's striking out as a different Captain to William Shatner, which is fine - new franchise, new blood, after all. It's well-shot, particularly the action scenes: some are annoyed by Abrams' hyperkinetic style, but I'm not one of them. The man knows how to shoot a chase sequence and make it exciting, although once you see the lens flare, you'll never not notice it. It's a slick, polished looking blockbuster.

Here's the problem - these are all holdovers from the 2009 film. It's still good, but it's the same good, reheated and reused for the sequel rather than trying anything new. This is the major crippling flaw with STID as a whole. It's coasting on past glories, both within its own rebooted franchise, and from the most iconic Star Trek film of all time, the one everyone will identify: 1982's The Wrath of Khan.

If you saw that first teaser trailer of Cumberbatch jumping about smashing dudes and thought "He's Khan", give yourself a gold medal. Marketing and promotion desperately tried to downplay this, with Cumberbatch joking in interviews about how he was sworn to secrecy, and trying to make the "revelation" an incentive for audiences to see it. No magician worth their salt makes the mystery box the focus of the act, showing it off with extravagant lighting and talking about how what's in it will absolutely blow your mind; they misdirect, call your attention to something else, make the actual box as plain as possible. You don't do this:

"Ooh, who could the villain be? You'll never gue-

"It's Khan."

"Um... you'll never guess who it is! Once you know who he is-

"It's so obviously Khan."

"As I was saying, once you know who he is, it will rock you to the very core! It's something nobody was ever expect-

"IT'S FUCKING KHAN." 

The reveal that John Harrison is a false identity is framed as this big shock, a twist in the tale, but it falls completely flat because a) non-Trekkies have no idea what this means; b) anyone slightly in the know about Star Trek figured that out ages ago; and c) anyone who is in the know can tell you that, contrary to what Cumberbatch tells you, he's not Khan. As played by Ricardo Montalbán, he was eerily polite and gentlemanly, supremely confident, and obscenely patient. He was prepared to wait for years if it meant getting his revenge. Khan was a superman, but not physically; Kirk took him down no problem. What made him superior was his own self-assurance and determination, greater even than Kirk's.

Khanberbatch is just Hannibal Lecter with the ability to smash things. He's one of those vaguely anarchic Joker clones the film industry seems to love so much: he's physically dangerous yet intellectually brilliant, he lets himself get caught as part of a master plan, and his weakness is that he's obsessed with only one goal and will stop at nothing to achieve that. Khanberbatch's personality begins and ends with "ruthless", and while that might be enough for the Sherlock fandom on Tumblr to gasp over and analyse every twitch in that serpentine face of his, he isn't terribly interesting. The only way he's established as a threat is through physical strength - he gets Starfleet's attention by blowing up a building, he kills most of Starfleet High Command, he takes out Klingons with no problem jumping about like Spider-Man, and he's beaten by Spock chasing him down and smacking him around the head. Khan's people are meant to be beyond the mental and physical limits humanity normally has, and while they make the latter very clear, the former is woefully underdeveloped.

But that's not why Khan's the villain. Khan's in this film because the name alone is recognisable to a layman. How many times have you heard William Shatner bark "KHAN!!!", even without seeing the film it's from? STID cribs its notes from what's come before. The villain's motivation is revenge, but explained in such a convoluted way it just crumbles like a biscuit in tea. Dr Carol Marcus appears from The Wrath of Khan, but her big role is stripping down to her underwear for absolutely no reason and serving as what Kelly Sue DeConnick calls a sexy lamp for the rest of the film. The Klingons appear because people know that Klingons exist and just stand around making faces and dying a whole lot. Christ, even Kirk's character arc - "You need to play well with others, Jim!" - is borrowed from the 2009 film. I don't mind people ripping things off as long as they use it well or in different ways, but this is just torn whole cloth with a clumsy bit of trimming to make it fit.

The worst, most shameless act of recycling, when STID veers into greatest hits territory, is towards the end, when Kirk dies of radiation poisoning trying to restart the warp core, and utters his last words to Spock, who shouts out in fury - sing along everyone - "KHAN!!" That really hit hard in The Wrath of Khan because Kirk and Spock had been friends and brothers-in-arms for years; in the sixteen years between the original show's beginning and Spock breathing out about the needs of the many, their relationship had been solidified, they were iconic. Kirk and Spock in this film have known each other for about a year, and constantly bicker and argue with each other. Even better? Not ten minutes later, Kirk is literally brought back from the dead, completely undoing whatever dramatic weight they managed to get out of that. It's imitating a classic moment on surface level; dramatically, contextually, it's utterly worthless.

This is a film dedicated to telling things to the audience. Exposition is garbled out by characters to get the plot moving, stopping the momentum between the set pieces. Pike tells Kirk what he's like, and what he needs to learn. They even call up Nimoy as Spock Prime to let the people at the back know that Khanberbatch is The Biggest Villain Ever in Star Trek, even though he explicitly says "I can't tell you anything about the future". Oh, but this isn't just limited to dialogue: the Enterprise is pursued by a gigantic Federation warship called the Vengeance. Geddit? Because the theme of the movie is about revenge! I SAID GEDDIT?!

As should come as no surprise from a film co-written by Damon Lindelof, of Lost and Prometheus fame, the plot is far more convoluted than it needs to be. See if you can keep up with this:

• Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) anticipates war with the Klingons and wants to militarise Starfleet.
• He awakens Khanberbatch, and just Khanberbatch, from 300 years of suspended animation to build weapons and starships for the oncoming war, and to attack a top-secret Starfleet base to militarise the Federation.
• (Because if you have a military genius on your team, you would have them just blow things up, right?)
• (Actually, if Khanberbatch's been frozen for 300 years, how would he know how to build a supership?)
• (And why just one? Why not hedge your bets and get an entire crew of super-geniuses to build your future army?)
• Marcus has also managed to build, entirely in secret, a Dreadnought-class starship, concealed entirely from the Federation despite the billions of dollars and years of manpower it would take to just build one, but that Scotty can find and sneak onto no problem.
• He ensures Khanberbatch's compliance by holding the 72 members of his crew hostage, apparently frozen inside experimental photon torpedoes.
• (Um...)
• (It's never really clear who put them in the torpedoes, Khanberbatch or Marcus.)
• Khanberbatch does this by promising the father of a sickly child he can heal them with his magical healing blood - because supermen totally have that now - if he blows up this top-secret base in London.
• (OK, already this is sounding like Truther bullshit about how 9/11 was an inside job.)
• (Co-writer Roberto Orci is a Truther.)
• Starfleet High Command gathers at the San Francisco HQ to discuss the situation. Khanberbatch ambushes the meeting, either on Marcus's orders or on his own volition, then flees to the Klingon homeworld.
• (He shouldn't be able to just beam himself over there because Kronos is sixteen light years away from Earth.)
• The Enterprise warps to Kronos and are instructed to use all 72 torpedoes to blow Khanberbatch up, and nobody seems to question why they need those 72. Scotty only questions why he's not allowed to look inside them.
• (What's wrong with regular torpedoes or missiles?)
• (If you wanted to get rid of the evidence, turn off the suspended animation and shoot them in the head. PROBLEM SOLVED.)
• Khanberbatch turns himself in after learning about the torpedoes, and wants revenge on Marcus because...
• Uh...
• Um...
• For...not restoring his crew? Or for trying to blow them up?

I've been sat here for a good hour trying to figure this out, and I just can't, not without overclocking my brain and having to chug coolant every five minutes. I've never seen a story that's this extremely complicated, while also being as dumb as a sack of comatose rocks. I don't even know when Khanberbatch goes rogue - is it before he gets Mickey from Doctor Who to blow himself up, or when he hears about the torpedoes? This isn't something I reflected on in hindsight, either; I was wondering about this in the cinema. Like I said, I don't go into a film looking to nitpick, but around the time Bones told Spock to capture Khanberbatch so they could use his magic blood, even though there are 72 other sources of blood on the Enterprise right there, it was like asking not to notice the ominous trails of black smoke coming off a car engine. I couldn't not notice it.

Amazingly, STID portends to have a theme. As explained by Orci and Alex Kurtzmann, the theme is revenge, and about how far one can go on the pursuit of it before being consumed by darkness. The answer is apparently "not very": Kirk gives up his vengeful desire to see Khanberbatch pay after about fifteen minutes, when he announces to Marcus he will take him in and let him plead his case in court. I actually really liked this: it called to mind classic Star Trek, where Kirk would follow the Starfleet code and play by the rules, and it was a nice bit of development. Sadly, the climax involves Spock chasing Khanberbatch on foot and beating him senseless, giving in to vengeance, and the film apparently accepts this as a legitimate way of getting goals. But Spock doesn't actually kill him, even though he had to be told not to, so...yay?

Like with Man of Steel, I don't know how Abrams, Orci and Kurtzmann plan to follow this one up. By the end of the film, Starfleet has managed to cure death itself. You can't step down from that; any explanation you can possibly give is going to be weak. What really concerns me, though, is how safe Star Trek Into Darkness has played it. By the end of the 2009 film, it felt like the crew of the Enterprise could go anywhere, that they could go on new adventures and create their own iconic moments. But no, instead they're just going to relive the classics. The franchise isn't ruined forever; it's the highest rated summer blockbuster on Rotten Tomatoes, and it turned a healthy budget. But the price is steep. They won't explore strange new worlds, they won't seek out new life and new civilisations.

They will not boldly go where no man has gone before.