Star Trek Into Darkness, in theaters May 17, 2013

[Bri]

I thought it was fun. The characters and their banter work for me. The plot was decent for a blockbuster and I'm happy Trek is slowly moving out of it's grim dark phase. A positive view of the future and humanity is at the core of the franchise.

Edited May 18, 2013 by Bri

[Fly4victory]

You may as well just give McCoy a sonic screwdriver and call it a day.

Now that is an idea worth watching!

[renegadeleader1]

I just want to say two things...

1.Concerning the rank issue. The person we are talking about didn't get demoted He was relieved of his command, and was intended to serve as first officer under an admiral.

2.Kronos is the official english spelling of klingonese Qo'noS both in universe and out. This dates back to The Undiscovered Country film. A similar concept would be in english Germany with it in German Deutchland.

[Hikuro]

Just came out of the theater from it. It wasn't bad but I did think it took a big crap on 40 years of history. I was NOT expecting Peter Weller in this film at all or Noel Clarke to that matter.

[Duke Togo]

Just came back from seeing it (in 2D, of course, as it was not filmed in 3D). I enjoyed it, was a good time and an exciting ride. It felt a lot like Skyfall for the Trek reboot. Also, I really enjoy the cast and their take on the characters. That said, did anyone else feel like this was a 4 hour movie edited down into 2?

I have a few nitpicks which I'll throw in spoiler tags:

The plot feels terribly rushed. For instance, within a 10 minute span Kirk loses and the captain's chair and then gets it back again. It's an unneeded convolution. And yes, there are plenty of convolutions in the story; I mean, it is a Bad Robot production, this is what they do. Trust me when I say I am thankful that J.J. Abrams' usual team isn't working on the SW sequels.

Why does Nimoy appear in the film? He passed the torch in the first movie, let this cast make its own mark. On top of that, it robs these characters of the chance to stand on their own feet and solve the Khan dilemma on their own.

The Kirk death has absolutely zero impact because they've already set up Khan's miracle blood. Yes, I do like that "time" seems to want to flow along a certain path, mirroring what came in the original Trek universe, but the heavy handedness with which it was handled crossed a bit into fanservice territory.

The Spock/Khan fist fight on the... garbage trucks?.. was completely unnecessary.

Oh, and Kirk is a total pimp. Just sayin'.

Just came out of the theater from it. It wasn't bad but I did think it took a big crap on 40 years of history. I was NOT expecting Peter Weller in this film at all or Noel Clarke to that matter.

Peter Weller was good, and it's a reboot--your timeline exists elsewhere. Let it go and move on.

Yeah, it's not so much a "Get off of my lawn!" thing as it is a "Stop ripping out my lawn to replace it with astro turf!" moment.

Except the lawn was dead, and this isn't AstroTurf.

Edited May 18, 2013 by Duke Togo

[Hikuro]

Just came back from seeing it (in 2D, of course, as it was not filmed in 3D). I enjoyed it, was a good time and an exciting ride. It felt a lot like Skyfall for the Trek reboot. Also, I really enjoy the cast and their take on the characters. That said, did anyone else feel like this was a 4 hour movie edited down into 2?

I have a few nitpicks which I'll throw in spoiler tags:

The plot feels terribly rushed. For instance, within a 10 minute span Kirk loses and the captain's chair and then gets it back again. It's an unneeded convolution. And yes, there are plenty of convolutions in the story; I mean, it is a Bad Robot production, this is what they do. Trust me when I say I am thankful that J.J. Abrams' usual team isn't working on the SW sequels.

Why does Nimoy appear in the film? He passed the torch in the first movie, let this cast make its own mark. On top of that, it robs these characters of the chance to stand on their own feet and solve the Khan dilemma on their own.

The Kirk death has absolutely zero impact because they've already set up Khan's miracle blood. Yes, I do like that "time" seems to want to flow along a certain path, mirroring what came in the original Trek universe, but the heavy handedness with which it was handled crossed a bit into fanservice territory.

The Spock/Khan fist fight on the... garbage trucks?.. was completely unnecessary.

Peter Weller was good, and it's a reboot--your timeline exists elsewhere. Let it go and move on.

Except the lawn was dead, and this isn't AstroTurf.

Doesn't matter if it's a reboot, it just makes me feel like Roddenberry pretty much worked his ass off for nothing and that's something I feel leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. As far as the movies concern they're good, but I'm not big on the number of toes it tries to step on to claim "REBOOT!"

I don't think the lawn is dead either. I just think it needs something or someone to continue it, and try to improve it, not rip it out by the roots and put something else over it. We're talking about some fine kentucky grass that's been left unwatered or cared for and you're gonna patch it up with astro turf and forget anything is wrong by saying it's fixed.

[Duke Togo]

Doesn't matter if it's a reboot, it just makes me feel like Roddenberry pretty much worked his ass off for nothing and that's something I feel leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Have any of you die-hards actually read ANYTHING about Roddenberry and what he wanted? Do you have ANY idea how lucky you are the franchise survived the 1980's?

And trust me when I say the lawn was dead. No one under the age of thirty gave a damn about it, and there wasn't exactly a massive fanbase to begin with.

Edited May 18, 2013 by Duke Togo

[Chronocidal]

As a person still under thirty, but still loving the original franchise, I resemble that remark!

I will agree it's been dead, but honestly, I'd blame that on how ridiculously convoluted the original timeline got once they got into all the nonsense in Enterprise. Well, that, and the amazing pile of feces Nemesis turned out to be.

I guess that I'm sad that they took some of the best material in the older movies, and twisted it around into an homage that would only make sense to the same people it'd piss off. The whole thing just goes right along with our current "instant gratification" mentality.

Why wait a few years to find out of the guy who sacrificed himself to save everyone lives, when we can invent a magical healing shiv that'll bring him back in time for the finale?

I'm glad it's enjoyable, but it's still two movies in a row where the entire plot winds up hinging on some horribly contrived plot device.

[Duke Togo]

Oh, I agree--it's certainly convoluted, contrived mash-up. Lets be honest here: the best work that comes out of Bad Robot are the characters, not the plots.

Edited May 18, 2013 by Duke Togo

[Dynaman]

> I guess that I'm sad that they took some of the best material in the older movies, and twisted it around into an homage that would only make sense to the same people it'd piss off

Not all of them by any stretch, there is a VERY vocal minority of fans of the old I must admit, but I've never actually met one in the flesh - every one of the old Trek crowd I'm with love the new movies. We also agree that Rodenberry was going off the deep end - early TNG was terrible and it didn't get better till Rodenberry was basically muscled aside. Trek 2 is another example of that in action.

[CoreyD]

Alright, I just saw it this afternoon.

When all the rumors about them doing Khan again started
floating around last year, all I could think was "ugh, I hope not." The
Wrath of Khan is so iconic in everyone's mind that no matter how good
the film is, people are inevitably going to compare the two.

So...great...it turns out that the villan is Khan. I guess most people
expected that at this point. If it wasn't for the continual hamfisted
references to The Wrath of Khan [spock: KHAAAAANNN!!], I probably
would've liked the film a lot more. The last film I remember doing
something similar was Predators and I had the same groanworthy feeling
watching that as I did watching Into Darkness.

The short of it: I didn't really like it. Maybe a "C" overall. For the
record, I'm not a hardcore trekkie, but yeah, I would consider myself a
fan. Also, I really enjoyed the first Abrams Star Trek film and ended up
seeing it several times in the theater. I even bought the dvd and
watched that a bunch of times. I definitely can't see myself seeing
this again or buying the dvd once it comes out.

[eugimon]

saw it. I'm an old timer fan of TOS and I really enjoyed it. Not as much as the 2009 reboot, but it's easily in my top 5 of trek movies.

[myk]

Have any of you die-hards actually read ANYTHING about Roddenberry and what he wanted? Do you have ANY idea how lucky you are the franchise survived the 1980's?

And trust me when I say the lawn was dead. No one under the age of thirty gave a damn about it, and there wasn't exactly a massive fanbase to begin with.

Agree with that; I used to wear a TNG communicator-pin on my shirts on a daily basis; that stopped right around the time Enterprise came out as I felt the franchise was out of gas.

Star Trek has been one lucky franchise, if you take a look at its history or do any background reading on Roddenberry. Then again, as someone else here mentioned, TNG didn't get interesting until Roddenberry lost control of it, more or less. I feel if he were alive today that he would cringe in agony in regards to anything DS9 and beyond and up to Abram's films, but quite frankly, Star Trek needed it. I didn't like the homage/twist/whatever but overall I think they've done a great job...

[Duke Togo]

Oh, and the whole trans-warp beaming nonsense has to go. It's "magic" that only comes into play when the writers can't figure out how to make something work. Sure, it can beam someone across the bloody galaxy, but they can't seem to beam anyone anywhere who is moving or in a cluttered space. Unimaginative nonsense.

[CoreyD]

I agree with you there.

[Chronocidal]

Yeaahhh... I really wanted to hit someone over that nonsense in the first movie. Really disappointed to hear they brought it back again. And considering they used it in the first movie to beam someone directly onto a ship that should have been light years away, and moving at warp speed, apparently they're not even being consistent between movies in how it's used. Though.. given how they treat time travel differently for each instance it appears, I suppose that's pretty standard.

Far as I recall, "trans-warp" was just a reworking of the warp scale due to technology advances. The Excelsior tested a trans-warp drive. I never read up much on it, because I wasn't that interested, but it wasn't a freaking teleporter, it was an engine.

[Duke Togo]

Yeaahhh... I really wanted to hit someone over that nonsense in the first movie. Really disappointed to hear they brought it back again.

You don't know the half of it. It's one of the worst abuses of "magic" that I've ever seen.

[CoreyD]

It does sort of negate the need for a ship for traveling.

[Duke Togo]

Just a thought:

Trek movies have been (largely) focused on facing that one foe since Wrath found success three decades ago. Abrams comes and deals with Khan and all that entails, and then ends the movie with the beginning of the "five-year mission" of exploration. I wonder if he didn't make this movie to put to bed the burden Trek has been saddled with for 30 years.

[eugimon]

meh. transporters in the regular continuity have been used to:
make clones
combine two different people
turn people into holograms
time travel
travel to different dimensions

star trek has never been consistant about their use of technology. It's pretty ridiculous to let it slide for 40 years and then get mad because some guy name JJ does it too.

[Chronocidal]

Well, those were always glitches that you could technically duplicate under the right situation. This isn't really that.. it's more like, because we solved this equation, now we can use a transporter, which from what I recall is actually a point-to-point, line-of-sight transmission like radar, to send things beyond line-of-sight, beyond the range of the transporter itself, and even beyond the range of where we should even be able to detect a ship.

It's like saying because you can do math, now you can instantly send giant data files to somewhere in Siberia, where they don't even have internet. It's kinda like the trek universe equivalent of fold quartz, I guess.

I suppose it's not that much of a stretch overall, but they make it seem like this was something that existed in the original trek universe. It didn't, because trans-warp was never what they seem to think it is. If it was, Voyager would never have even happened, because they could have beamed themselves back to the Alpha Quadrant.

[eugimon]

Since transporter tech doesn't require platforms at both ends, it actually is like saying that now you can transfer much larger files because you have a better compression algorithm. It's perfectly consistent to what has been shown previously in trek

also, even in voyager they were using "transwarp" as a means of communication. If they can send one kind of information that way, why wouldn't they be able to send another?

[Chewie]

Duke, I am fairly certain you and I would be the best of friends under "real life" circumstances. Lol

[Chronocidal]

Since transporter tech doesn't require platforms at both ends, it actually is like saying that now you can transfer much larger files because you have a better compression algorithm. It's perfectly consistent to what has been shown previously in trek

also, even in voyager they were using "transwarp" as a means of communication. If they can send one kind of information that way, why wouldn't they be able to send another?

Ah, k, so they did use it that way. I never watched enough of Voyager to see that, and only knew of it as a higher powered propulsion method. Reason Scotty was associated with it in the first place was because he was the original engineer overseeing the prototype system tests on the Excelsior in ST:III.

[Fly4victory]

Have any of you die-hards actually read ANYTHING about Roddenberry and what he wanted? Do you have ANY idea how lucky you are the franchise survived the 1980's?

And trust me when I say the lawn was dead. No one under the age of thirty gave a damn about it, and there wasn't exactly a massive fanbase to begin with.

Duke is correct and I do know how lucky we are. How can people forget the Crew Uniform Kilt?

Roddenberry gave us the Motion Picture, worlds longest TV episode but I liked it, and he hated what saved the movie franchise.... Wrath of Khan.

[karmajay]

As probably one of the few (or only!) people in this thread that has actually seen the inside of a reactor compartment, I thought the Engineering room design was pretty good!

I enjoyed the movie. I saw it at IMAX 3d and it was very well done. I'm a fan of sci-fi so a fan of Trek but I don't know much outside of the shows and series (i.e. crazy canon stuff).

I called the superblood right away and I do wish maybe they could have saved him a seperate way. I do think a good comment from above was maybe this was a way to put to bed all the old stuff and the next movie will be new ground plot wise.

The parts I really enjoyed was all the space shots. Man, I just really love how they make it look when ships are flying around and shooting stuff. Can't wait to see similar SW scenes from Bad Robot!

[Beltane70]

I think pretty much everyone

figured out the super blood. It was pretty obvious.

That was the only real problem that i had with the film. Other than that, I really enjoyed it.

The biggest surprise for me was noticing

Noel Clarke (Mickey Smith) from Doctor Who in the film.

I know, lame that I'm mentioning something so trivial.

[Knight26]

Aside from making the film take place over a longer time frame, fixing the physics glitches, and some minor dialogue tweaks to make the whole thing better I think the way the movie could have been vastly improved is if instead of

it being rehash of Wrath of Kahn is if it went more along the lines of space seed.Instead of having Kahn full on betray them, have Kahn realize that no matter what he can't win after giving a real fight between Kirk & Co against corrupt Admiral Marcus, and have Kahn give the noble sacrifice. Imagine Kahn saving the big E instead so now Kirk feels an obligation to him, and Kahn's "final request" is that Kirk find his people a new home and let them bury him there. So then Kirk refreezes Kahn, and delivers the augmentcicles to Seti-Alpha-V, then you show them after some period of time and Kahn is alive, or just home him wake up right as they refreeze him to link back to the superblood thing. In that way you can have the timelines reconverge to have Wrath of Kahn still occur, and it eliminates the stupid garbage truck scene. Honesty the whole script felt rushed to me ruining what could have been a great movie.

edit: fixed spoiler tags

Edited May 20, 2013 by Knight26

[Duke Togo]

Nice spoilers there, Knight. Why even use tags for the rest? lol

[UN Spacy]

Yet again the Enterprise was

the ONLY ship in the vicinity of Earth

.

Overall it's in my top three Trek flicks...will see again asap.

[myk]

Yet again the Enterprise was

the ONLY ship in the vicinity of Earth

.

Overall it's in my top three Trek flicks...will see again asap.

Right? But only when there's a major battle to be had. Every other time the Enterprise is in orbit there's PLENTY of other little ships flitting about, space docks, etc...

[Dynaman]

Saw it yesterday and loved it. Characters and plot and pacing were spot on. Plot holes, of course, but they didn't take me out of the flow of the movie. Wife and I are going to go see it in Imax next week.

As for some of the complaints, some of the Trekkies really need to take Shatner's advice and "get a life!"

Especially whoever complained about the Tribble (hate to put a spoiler around this.





Since I have the tag, the big E was not the only ship around Earth this time - at least 3 others were there, Big E just go the nod.

[raptormesh]

It's about 5x better in IMAX, especially if yours has an enormous screen. Sit the middle and cackle with gleeeeeeee. It's almost like you're in space. I might just watch the Pacific Rim in IMAX too.

[ErikElvis]

You F'ers go see it again so they dont skimp on the next one!!! 70 some million c'mon!!

[Dynaman]

It's about 5x better in IMAX, especially if yours has an enormous screen. Sit the middle and cackle with gleeeeeeee. It's almost like you're in space. I might just watch the Pacific Rim in IMAX too.

My wife hates 3D, and I HATE when it looks dodgy. Is the 3D on Imax decent looking, as in not darkening the scenes too much and not muddying up the picture? (last movie shot in 2D and shown in 3D I saw was Clash of the Titans and the 3D process was a muddled mess in that one)