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Star Trek Into Darkness
05-18-2013, 04:52 PM
Welp, it is out & having seen a late show at the local Alamo (an experience I highly recommend if there's one nearby btw; instead of the usual dopey trivia cards and adverts they showed a mash-up reel of old fan films and cartoons) here's a quick and dirty capsule review.
* The plot's pretty straightforward; once you get past the big twist (recommend not going into this one spoiled fwiw) it's not very complicated. But it moves fast and doesn't waste a lot of time on explaining shit. Think of it like an expanded TOS storyline.
* And like a TOS story, it's got a Message and it's about as subtle as a bag of hammers with it. Be prepared to roll with it.
* Acting's stepped up a couple notches from the last movie. God's honest truth, Chris Pine has a couple scenes that I didn't think he was capable of pulling off period, let alone as well as he did.
* Into Darkness does a surprisingly good job of making the future look like a place where people live in, not just starships and the occasional alien.
* That said, the Enterprise is a sexy beast and Abrams knows it, considering how many (glorious!) fanservice shots there are of her.
All in all, I would recommend it. How much you'll enjoy it probably depends on how much you like Trek '09 or how tightly you cling to the original canon.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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Well, I though Trek '09 was a decent Star Wars movie... but I like both ST and SW. This is a long weekend in Canada; I suspect I'll find a couple of hours somewhere to go see the movie.
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New Spock has a moment so hammy I couldn't help but last. It's a nudge, it's a wink, but it just comes across as completely awkward. Any drama they were going for is sort of blown out the window. You know the moment I'm talking about.
The ret of the movie came across very much as Star Trek 9/11 in a way that was both modern, but just a little bit awkward.
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I dunno, it worked for me. I had a couple problems with some stuff right before that moment; it was pretty plainly intended as homage but came off more like parroting. Took me out of the scene for a minute, then that moment happened and I was right back in.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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I can only disagree. I couldn't stop laughing...
Then again, I also laughed at Chekov's expression when Kirk told him to change his shirt.
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Well, to be honest I'm pretty sure that part was supposed to be funny. If there's one running joke about Star Trek after all...
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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Does the Enterprise still look like an oil refinery on the inside?
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I saw it last weekend.
It was definitely fun, but there were some gaping plot holes I won't list here (spoilers!).
Am I glad I saw it? yes.
Would I pay to see it again in theaters? no.
-Terry
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Quote:Does the Enterprise still look like an oil refinery on the inside?
Sort of. They ditched the brewery set for something a bit more upscale. Still mostly science pipes, but now they're real SCIENCE PIPES.
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It actually looks like a brewery crossed with an inertial confinement fusion reactor.
Took me a while to spot the plotholes, though.... but when you really think about it, they're pretty silly. Other elements of the film are clearly more for the 'awesome' feeling rather than the makes snese feeling.
I went back and watched the relevent original Star Trek movie and found it much tighter plotted and more intense preciseley because it wasn't hung up on just moving between one budget-sucking slam-bang and shine sequence to the next one, that this one was. Star Trek is always at its best when it's stuffed into a bottle and forced to spend time on writing rather than money on effects. Only a few times has it ever managed to get both right.
It is enjoyable in the cinema - the energy makes it good on a big screen, but not so much on reflection when you look back and realise it's a shell of action.
There was some bones of a good film in there, with some interesting concepts. It's no more heavy handed about its message than some of the earlier TOS episodes but it smacks you in the face with it for 2 hours rather than 45 minutes.
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I really enjoyed the movie myself. But I have to agree - it did come off as maybe trying too hard a few times. I did like that every member of "the classic 7" gets at least one moment to really shine in their own particular way or specialty. But a couple of them did almost feel like "let's make sure this checkbox is ticked".
Gotta say I really think Chris Pine firmly sold his version of Kirk. Knocked it out of the park, even. Same with Quinto's Spock. And it's a good thing, too, because their friendship is what makes the whole thing work at all.
Cumberbuntch's Khan (and c'mon, it's not as if that's a spoiler at this late date) is interesting. Not really what I expected. But the backstory makes sense for that universe. And I'm glad they didn't try to force him to sell the character as anything close to Montalban's Khan. Because that simply was NOT going to happen no matter what you did. Better to just go in a largely different direction anyway than force a comparison. (They already have that risk to a degree with still having Old Spock in the film, even as a cameo. Why invite more trouble in that regard?)
New Spock hammy moment - yeah. That was... at least a LITTLE over the top. But it's interrupted so quickly and spectacularly that it doesn't have a chance to detract.
Yeah - the industrial elements of the Enterprise's engineering spaces still have some elements that are clearly lifted from other spaces, but that Warp core area is NOT one of them. That was really well done!
The only part of the film that had me scratching my head in terms of wonky physics was "the big fall". I'm sorry guys, but for such a major part of the film, they based that on some SERIOUS misunderstandings of how gravity and orbital mechanics works. It would take WEEKS not minutes to reach the top of the atmosphere from where they were. And why is the internal gravity going haywire like that instead of just going to zero G outright? (Oh right - because a) it's more dramatic and b) As big a budget as we have, zero-g stunt effects would outright KILL it.)
So yeah - it's not a classic like ST-II. But it's definitely not a waste of 2+ hours. I was highly entertained by it. My nitpicks above are "fridge moments".
I've now seen Iron Man 3 and Star Trek: Into Darkness. And I'll probably go see both of them at least once more in the theators. But if I only could see ONE of them one more time, I'd choose IM3. Just by a slight margin.
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More than "the big fall" -- why the hell weren't there other Star Fleet vessels out there, halfway between the moon and earth, within minutes to investigate a shootout between one of the premiere ships of the fleet and monstrous black ship of similar design? The way things went -- particularly that "conference of captains" -- implied that the Federation navy is no more than ten or a dozen ships, max, which is just stupid.
And might I also just mention the fact that it appears top cruising speed for warp ships is now something a hair under infinite? Scotty's comment about everything happening in the last day or so suggests that we actually watched the entire travel to and from Kronos in real time...
And no political fallout from Marcus' disastrous "black project"? Although it's difficult to extrapolate from the rededication "epilogue", it seems like there've been no real changes to Star Fleet in the wake of that oopsie.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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