Star Trek Into Darkness - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still writing about Star Trek Into Darkness! If you missed the first part of my review you can find it -> HERE <- and there's still one more part to go after this. It's a long movie.

Speaking of second parts, this was the second of the Kelvin Timeline trilogy kicked off with Star Trek 2009. But it's the last movie by the Star Trek 2009 team, as director J.J. Abrams had to go off and do the Star Wars: The Force Awakens afterwards. Trek 09 writers Alex Kurtzman (current overlord of TV Trek) and Roberto Orci also returned, and were joined this time by Damon Lindelof, who had a bit of experience writing sci-fi himself as he'd just finished working on the movie Prometheus. Oh plus he'd been co-showrunner on Lost for six seasons (which is considerably longer than J.J. Abrams worked on the show).

Anyway, this review contains SPOILERS for Into Darkness, Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons, and probably other episodes and movies too. It didn't seem right to spoil anything from Star Trek Beyond though, so I didn't.

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Previously, on Star Trek Into Darkness:

The legendary Admiral Christopher Pike, the one that all the medals are named after, has just been gunned down in a terrorist attack by rogue Starfleet agent John Harrison. Pike was Kirk's mentor so he's a little bit pissed off about this, and has convinced Admiral Marcus to send the Enterprise on a mission of revenge to the Klingon homeworld Qo'nos to kill the son of a bitch.

Spock thinks assassinating someone on foreign soil is a bit dodgy, Scotty was stubborn enough to quit over it, but Kirk is absolutely single-mindedly determined to carry out their orders: park the ship on the border and fire off lots and lots of long range torpedoes.

And now, the continuation:

Kirk gets on the PA system and tells the crew their mission: John Harrison thinks he's escaped to Qo'noS, they're going to prove him wrong... by capturing him alive! I figured it'd take Kirk longer than 10 minutes to get over his bloodlust and realise his orders were immoral, but I'm glad I was wrong. Of course he may just have gotten sick of Spock glaring at him.

The Enterprise breaks down 20 minutes from Qo'noS for mysterious reasons, but that's fine as Kirk, Spock and Uhura will be taking a different ship down to apprehend Harrison, a vessel that's not covered in Starfleet insignia.

And Cupcake from the first movie's coming along with them! This means we get the opposite of the Chekov scene earlier as they have to take their red shirts off before going. When are we going to see Prime Timeline Cupcake anyway? No reason he can't show up in Discovery, in fact he could've been on the ship all along.

They'll be using the ship from the 'Mudd Incident', which was a tale told in the comic book Countdown to Darkness. Apparently in the comic the ship belongs to Harry Mudd's half-Bajoran daughter, not Mudd himself. There's got to be a rule where if you go past a certain number of references to other Trek stories your movie is officially classified as being a fan film.

Oh, before they go Spock catches Carol Wallace scanning the torpedoes and reveals that he knows that she's not supposed to be there. Also she's actually Dr Carol Marcus, daughter of Admiral Marcus! That's so clever of the production crew, to hire someone so different to Bibi Besch that viewers would never guess her true identity! She's even got an English accent so we definitely won't suspect she's related to Admiral Marcus, who sounds like Peter Weller.

Carol Marcus is a pretty important character in Trek movies as she's the mother of Kirk's son David, who was born before the Original Series started. So that means this movie's going to tell the story of their romance right? (Nope)

Hang on, I've just realised that Admiral Marcus must be David Marcus's grandfather in the Prime Timeline! Man, the guy gave Kirk a lot of crap for being in Starfleet in Wrath of Khan, when his mother had also been an officer and his grandad was the head of the whole organisation.

The Kelvin Timeline movies like to have their cake and eat it sometimes, so right now pre-Original Series Kirk, Spock and Uhura are flying to a Qo'noS that's already suffering from the destruction of Praxis that happened in Star Trek VI. Not a great sign for the Klingons, seeing as it's happened at a time when no one on their side is trying to make peace and the Federation has no interest in helping them out. Though the movie doesn't mention any of this, it just wants a cool visual.

Also I'm not entirely sure, but I think that they can see the planet from the Enterprise... which is parked on the Klingon border. The time it takes them to get places in these movies, they can probably see Earth right now as well by looking the other way.

Sulu's got the conn at this point, his first time in the captain's chair, which means he's the one who gets to send a message to Harrison informing him of the torpedoes aimed at his head. They're hoping that he'll see sense and surrender so they can take him back without incident. Spock thinks the chances of him actually giving up are slim, but that's why they're loading the torpedoes!

Wait, why are they loading the torpedoes? Sulu was bluffing, Kirk's not going to use them!

So now Kirk's stuck in tiny spaceship together with Spock and Uhura, who are going through a bit of a rough patch in their relationship due to his eagerness to get blown up in a volcano earlier. You know things are bad when Kirk's the one being professional... though it doesn't last as he soon joins in.

Oh incidentally, Kirk, Spock and Uhura out on a mission while one of the bridge crew stays behind to pretend to be the captain, that's right out of Final Frontier. No fan dance this time though.

The plan goes wrong when a Klingon patrol shows up to intercept the alien ship trespassing in their air space. Then the movie turns into Independence Day for a bit, as they try to lose them by flying through a narrow tunnel. 

Can't say that this is the most exciting spaceship chase in movie history, but it's alright.

I guess I'd be more into it they weren't endangering the people who live here to capture a fugitive who trapped himself in the ass-end of nowhere. Plus the whole action scene turns out to be pointless, as their attempt to escape fails and they're surrounded by the Klingons. I love the shot of Uhura standing in the doorway as the ship lands though, it looks so real.

Shame the effect doesn't come across so well in a screencap.

Uhura has a plan: she's going to go out there and... speak Klingon. I'm glad that these movies have been finding ways to make Uhura more useful, as Uhura Prime had forgotten all her Klingon by the time it became handy, but what happened to the universal translator?

Star Trek 09 was going to feature Nero's escape from a Klingon prison, and when that got cut so did all the Klingons. So this is the first reveal of what the Klingon makeup looks like in the Kelvin Timeline.

It's alright. I think I was more bothered by it at the time, but after watching Discovery it doesn't seem so bad. They've swerved well away from the 'blackface and sinister eyebrows' look of the Original Series, but give him some hair and a beard and he'd look Klingon enough.

Uhura tells him about the criminal hiding in the ruins, but he's actually not all that concerned about a human killing humans (see the shiny metal subtitles above). Weird, I don't recall her mentioning that Harrison was human. She points out that Harrison has no honour, and the Klingon picks her up by the face and pulls his dagger. I guess there's a shortage of honour here in general.

Though the Klingons aren't really characters in the movie so we never learn much about them, except they're a real threat to their lives, and Uhura's in particular. So now Spock gets to be the one in the spaceship worrying about his girlfriend outside.

Fortunately Harrison jumps in to the rescue, murdering all the Klingons and their spaceships with a giant gun he found somewhere. I mean it's not that unbelievable, if anywhere's going to have giant guns lying around it's going to be Qo'noS, but it's definitely convenient. Not sure what the giant yellow circles lying around are about though.

Uhura salvages what she can from what was supposed to be her hero moment in the movie by grabbing the guy's knife and shoving it between his dicks, and then the others rush out into the fray to give her backup. So that's Captain Kirk, Commander Spock, Redshirt #1 and Redshirt #2. I wonder what will happen next.

Funnily enough it's Kirk who gets his ass kicked, and has to be dragged to safety by Spock and Uhura. After that they basically just watch as Harrison kills all the remaining Klingons like a superhero, shooting guns and throwing knives and generally being unstoppable.

Though I'm not sure we're supposed to know it's Harrison until he removes his mask. It's a bit like how Khan revealed his identity by taking off his mask in Wrath of Khan, but everyone in the audience already knew who it was, because the movie's called 'Wrath of Khan' and he was on the poster. Though I'm not saying Harrison is Khan! He is 100% not Khan.

Kirk's not going to kill Harrison, but he does want to do that thing in movies where you sucker punch the guy to the floor and make a quip afterwards. Doesn't work though, as Harrison's too tough, and Kirk just makes a fool out of himself, trying to knee an unarmed prisoner in the gut in front of his friends. Kirk failed to escape the patrol ships, he failed to deal with the Klingons, now the only reason he's going back with Harrison is because the man's surrendering willingly after rescuing them. Overall, Kirk's been a bit of a complete failure today.

Weirdly Harrison only surrenders after hearing that the Enterprise has 72 torpedoes aimed at him. The weird part of that is they have 72 torpedoes. Were they supposed to use all of them on Harrison? Seems like overkill even for him.

Kirk hasn't cheered up any by the time they get their prisoner back to the ship, but Spock and Uhura share a kiss so they're doing better at least.

Harrison is marched into their classy looking brig and McCoy uses a portable hole to take a blood sample to determine where he gets his super powers from. It's just occurred to me how strange it is for the brig to have a transparent window instead of a forcefield. Starfleet has been using forcefields to contain its prisoners since the first aired pilot episode in 1966.

Speaking of old episodes, it's unclear whether Harrison was wearing that Starfleet uniform under his coat from the start, or if they gave it him because Khan Prime borrowed one for two minutes in Space Seed. Not that Harrison is in any way related to Khan.

By the way, if you're trying to remember if 'cunning villain deliberately gets himself locked up to carry out the next phase of his plan' was a movie cliché at this point, yeah it was. I can think of at least three huge films that had already done it a couple of years earlier.

Harrison wonders out loud why the ship's not moving, suspecting that it might be an unexplained warp core malfunction. Spock recommends that they ignore the person who clearly knows something about their situation they don't, but Harrison's piqued Kirk's curiosity. Actually Kirk just walks over to shout at him, but Harrison still gives some coordinates near Earth for him to check out and suggests they also open up a torpedo.

By some miracle Kirk is able to relay the mysterious coordinates to Scotty, despite the fact that one of them's on the Klingon border and the other is angry and drunk. You'd think he'd call up someone who didn't hate him for ruining his career and kicking him off his beloved ship, but either Kirk really respects Scotty's skills, or he just doesn't have anyone else to call on Earth with access to a shuttle. Kirk actually admits that he may have been wrong about the torpedoes, which is a big step for him, and then Keenser stares at Scotty until he finally decides to stop making himself more drunk and go investigate.

By the way, I love how future retro this club is. It looks like the good version of something you'd see in Buck Rogers or the original Battlestar Galactica.

I also like the place Kirk's carrying out his side of the conversation from. It's the giant atrium that's taken the bridge's traditional place at the centre of the bridge dome. It seems to span the entire height of the of the saucer section in fact. The green screen set extension really helps give an idea of the scale of the ship, with corridors on top of corridors, and all the people around hints at how many officers Kirk has under his command. The bridge set's pretty crowded these days as well I've noticed.

After Scotty hangs up, Kirk decides to further ignore Spock's advice, and McCoy's too, and get one of those top secret torpedoes opened up. Spock does find a way to make himself useful though, pointing out that the admiral's daughter seems interested in the torpedoes as well. By that he of course means Carol Marcus. He'd been keeping her identity a secret until the point where he could be the most smug about revealing it, which would logically be now.

Kirk goes to confront Carol and she admits that she stowed away on the ship to investigate the torpedoes, as they'd disappeared from all official records. Their conversation eventually reveals two important facts: Christine Chapel is much happier now that she's away from Kirk, and Kirk can't even remember who she is.

Then Kirk gets caught spying on a woman getting changed.

To be fair, an officer leading her captain into a shuttle, telling him to turn around, and then getting her kit off mid-conversation is a bit weird, especially as she refused to tell him why. It's very possible he had no idea what his subordinate was doing back there and felt that he'd been ordered around by her long enough. Staring at her after turning around is kind of indefensible though; are we ever supposed to like this guy?

Plus I know J.J. Abrams really needed another shot of a woman in her underwear for the trailer, but this is pretty forced. Still, at least they're not rubbing decontamination gel on each other.

The reason she needs a shuttle is because she wants to take the torpedo to a nearby planetoid, to minimise the casualties if opening it up leads to bad consequences. And the reason she's stripping off is because she's getting into her landing party uniform. Planetoids are cold! Or sometimes hot, I suppose. It depends.

She needs to bring a main character along on her mission, so McCoy comes along too. He may be a doctor, but he once performed surgery on a torpedo years from now in Star Trek VI and this trip gives him an opportunity to flirt with her while the entire bridge crew listens in. They had to give Karl Urban something to do or else he would've been miserable and wouldn't have signed up for the next movie.

The Klingons will find the Enterprise hanging around their border sooner or later, but there's no need for them to rush with the torpedo because the ship's engines are still broken. Though the situation becomes more urgent when McCoy manages to activate the warhead and gets the hatch to close on his arm. They can't beam him out while his hand's stuck, and if they beam Carol out she won't be able to deactivate the bomb! Not that she's been having much luck with that so far. Maybe she could shoot his arm off. It's not the best outcome but it's better than them both dying.

With seconds to go Carol yanks out a bunch of wires and that seems to do the job. Seems a bit convenient, but then they look inside and realise it's not a bomb, it's a cryo chamber! McCoy has one of those "You're going to want to see this," lines that gets said often in Star Trek when a crew member doesn't want to spoil the surprise for their senior officer, but this time I don't think he expects Kirk to actually come all the way down there to see what he's talking about.

Meanwhile Scotty's ditched Keenser and has taken a shuttle to the coordinates Kirk gave him, finding a mysterious construction hangar in space near scenic Jupiter. Also the music gets very Star Wars for a moment.

He's feeling brave so he follows some other shuttles into the drydock and finds... something. We don't quite see what it is, but it was clearly impressive as he says "Holy sh-" and then he's cut off by the 'shhh' sound of a door opening on the Enterprise. Nice joke, but kind of undercut by the way Carol just said "Shit!" a minute ago in the torpedo scene.

Speaking of the torpedo, they've discovered that it's the fuel tank that's been removed from the torpedo, not the warhead, so if these things had been fired at Qo'noS, they wouldn't have gotten very far. At least that's the impression I get. Also the cryo tube is ancient and so is the occupant.

Kirk feels compelled to have another chat with Harrison, who divulges that there are men and women in all 72 torpedoes, and he was the one who put them there. Which is why he surrendered when Sulu threatened to fire them.

Then we get the big reveal, the one that taught filmmakers that lying to fans about who your villain is in a futile attempt to put the secret back into the mystery box doesn't actually enhance their experience. Harrison is a genetically engineered superman from the past, and he's not actually called Harrison, he's called Khan. A whole new universe to explore and we're going back to this guy.

There are two problems with this shocking revelation that I can see: first, if you're a new fan who came on board Star Trek with the first Kelvin movie you're left thinking 'is that supposed to mean something to me?', and second, if you're an old school Trek fan you're left thinking 'you're joking, right?'

Khan is genetically engineered so they didn't necessarily have to cast an Indian actor, I know their first choice was Benicio Del Toro, which would've been... interesting, but Benedict Cumberbatch is nothing at all like Ricardo Montalbán.

I know a lot of people are fine with the idea of recasting roles with actors who don't resemble or act like the established character, but if it's going to be in the same continuity like this I think you really have to try harder to make them match up. I've seen a couple of really good 'you thought I was person X but actually I'm person Y!' reveals lately and they worked because after the reveal they started acting like person Y! Otherwise what does it matter that he's Khan? You might as well tell me he's Captain Janeway.

Star Trek 09 had very good casting, with each of the characters being recognisable without going too far and becoming a parody, but Carol Marcus and Khan Noonien Singh are so unrecognisable in personality and appearance that my brain rejects them.

Funny thing is, in Space Seed Khan was also trying to hide his identity, but he was so obviously a genetically engineered superman from the 90s that the crew were onto him. In this Khan himself has to explain his backstory, revealing that he's 300 years old. At first I thought 'Hey they've kept his 1990s Eugenics War origin even though we're 20 years past when it was supposed to happen!' Then I realised something that never occurred to me before. Khan's story didn't fit our reality even back in Space Seed, as he would've been genetically engineered in the 50s-60s! He was born before Star Trek aired.

Anyway Khan was found much earlier than in Space Seed in this timeline because the destruction of Vulcan got Starfleet out searching more thoroughly, and he explains that Admiral Marcus recruited him because he's better than them. He's not just talking about humans; less than a year in our century and he was designing weapons and warships more advanced than the entire Federation had managed to come up with. He's already got Spock's number, saying that his intellect and strength aren't much good in a fight when he can't break rules, never mind bones.

Khan's on a roll here so he keeps the exposition coming, explaining that Marcus has a vision of a militarised Starfleet. He wanted them to fire the torpedoes knowing that it would piss off the Klingons, and he crippled their engines so that the flagship of the Federation would be destroyed in their furious counter attack, starting a war. (Starfleet conspiracy to cause hostilities with the Klingons, that's an Undiscovered Country reference!)

Also it turns out that the reason Khan did all that terrorism at the start of the film was because Marcus took his crew from him and it made him sad. He'd tried to smuggle them to safety in the torpedoes, but he had to escape without them and assumed Marcus had killed them all. He's crying during this bit with his back turned, so I guess we're supposed to believe him. Here's a question though: why didn't he just wake them up? If one unstoppable superman can do all this damage imagine what 73 of them could do.

So Kirk started the movie risking his crew to save strangers and Khan started off killing strangers in revenge for his crew. But they don't have time to dwell on that, because Admiral Marcus himself has turned up!

And he's in that mysterious ship from his desk!

It's a lot bigger in real life: twice as long as the Kelvin Enterprise, which itself is twice as long as the Original Series Enterprise. It's about 1400 meters from bow to stern I think, around the size of Deep Space Nine, which makes it the biggest Starfleet vessel we've ever seen. It's even longer than the Scimitar from Star Trek: Nemesis. Still tiny compared to a 3 kilometre Borg cube, the 9 kilometre Narada from Star Trek 09, and the almost 100 kilometre V'Ger though.

So we've got the third unstoppable black super-ship in three movies. I have to give Starfleet some credit for being the ones to develop it this time though. It seems like a believable response to the incident where an unstoppable black super-ship nearly destroyed the Federation.

But the trouble with the USS Vengeance, apart from the way it's named like a Star Destroyer, is that it's an ugly mess. I realise it's a nasty weapon of war, but nasty weapons typically look awesome.

Somehow when the people designing real life ships and aircraft take the most effective shape for the job, with all the curves and angles in all the correct places to minimise drag and radar cross-section, then stick the necessary equipment on it, the end result is always something that sells model kits and posters.

Fighter jets, helicopter gunships, aircraft carriers... they all look so much better than the Vengeance. I think Discovery did a much better job with its Section 31 ships to be honest.

Discovery also had better Section 31 costumes, but that wasn't exactly a challenge as this are the worst uniforms in this movie, or any movie. I hate them so much!

This isn't a great situation for the Enterprise to be in, but Kirk at least had the sense to have Khan moved to med bay, get his shields raised to prevent beaming, and broadcast their on-screen video chat to maximise witnesses. Kirk also says all the right words to Marcus, acting like he's surprised to see his ship and he's assuming they're here to help with repairs, but his tone says "I'm on to you, you son of a bitch," and Marcus barely seems interested in playing along anyway.

We get another 'shit' here when Marcus realises that Kirk knows who Harrison really is. And it seems Marcus knows about the people in the torpedoes. So his plan really was for Kirk to fire Khan's own crew at him, all 72 of them, without fuel in the torpedoes? What? I'm not a diabolical mastermind, but it seems to me that it'd be more sensible for him to have killed Khan's crew first and then equipped the Enterprise with working torpedoes.


Marcus would really like Kirk to lower his shields so that he can take Khan and kill him already, and he's the head of Starfleet so Kirk's kind of in a tough spot here. He decides to feed Marcus a line of bullshit and warp back to Earth with a broken warp core.

Unfortunately it turns out that the Vengeance is ridiculously fast and is able to catch up to the Enterprise at warp. It's also able to wreck their engines with phaser fire and send a bunch of the crew out on a horrifying warp speed trip without a spacesuit. Kirk's first casualties since taking command.

This is like a glimpse of what the Excelsior could've done to the Enterprise in Star Trek III, if the ship hadn't been sabotaged by Scotty and Captain Styles had been a lunatic. It's also a repeat of a scene from Star Trek: Nemesis!

The Enterprise is flung out of warp 237,000 kilometres from Earth, which I believe is about 6 milliseconds away from the planet at warp 5. If they'd just stayed in warp for a fraction of a second they'd be home! In fact they must have been travelling a lot faster than warp 5 or else it would've taken them days to get back from the neutral zone.

Hey, you know what else is 237,000 kilometres from Earth?

It's the USS Vengeance! The Moon on the other hand is typically 237,000 miles away, so it's a bit weird to see it dominate the background like that. Actually it's a bit weird in general as I imagine the chances of coming out of warp right next to the Moon are a bit like the chances of throwing a dart from the Moon and it landing in your pint back on Earth. Except with more zeroes.

They do one of those scenes with the camera flying around between everyone on the bridge as Kirk's crew takes turns to relay exactly how screwed they are, and it turns out they've already lost their weapons and shields. Meanwhile in the Prime Timeline, the classic Enterprise managed to survive a sustained beating from an entire Section 31 fleet! But then TV starships have to be tougher as they've got to last seven seasons.

It's a shame the Kelvin Enterprise isn't even allowed to shoot back though. I realise you don't want your heroes winning a fight against increased militarisation by using their phasers, but the Enterprise is supposed to be the second most powerful and advanced ship in the Federation, and instead it's like the Millennium Falcon going up against a Star Destroyer. Every Trek sequel wants to rip off Wrath of Khan except for the part where the ships are evenly matched.

Kirk's also told about a bulkhead breach, but when he asks where the damage is the reply is "Major hull damage captain." Man, this is even worse than that time in Wrath of Khan when Kirk asked for a damage report, and Spock pointed at the damage report screen and said "They hit us here."

Then the Vengeance shoots them some more! Fortunately Carol has a plan: if she tells her dad that she's on the Enterprise, then he won't blow it up!

So Marcus just beams her away and gets right back to murdering them. She made a good effort to outrun the transporter beam though.

Kirk gives a speech where he offers to give himself up so that Marcus will spare the others, but the admiral's got a false flag attack to stage and he's not really interested in sparing a ship full of witnesses.

Back near the start of the movie, Pike mentioned that Kirk didn't have an ounce of humility, didn't think he could make mistakes and didn't realise how often his success was down to blind luck, and predicted this would eventually get him and his crew killed. Turns out he was right! Storming into Marcus's office and requesting a chance for revenge is what got them all into this situation and now Kirk can't get them out of it. All he can do is apologise to his crew for leading them here.

Fortunately their inevitable doom is delayed by a bit of sabotage on the Vengeance, thanks to a stowaway Scotty and some blind luck! So there's a Star Trek III reference for you.

The Vengeance is temporarily disabled, but the Enterprise can't fire on it or run away, and their communications are being jammed. So there's only one logical option left: get Khan on a shuttle and take him to Earth. In fact they could all get on shuttles, as Earth's only a couple of minutes away and Scotty's bought them enough time.

Actually Kirk's got another plan in mind and Spock's figured out what it is. So he follows him through a one-take turbolift ride and across another nice shot of the atrium to tell him that teaming up with Khan so they can seize control of the Vengeance together is a really dumb idea!

He doesn't say it in these exact words, but he believes that Kirk's emotionally compromised and making a bad decision. This is the first time that Kirk's lost a crew member, in fact he came close to losing everyone, and he is genuinely shaken.

Kirk admits that the plan that just Spock deduced logically isn't logical, but he doesn't know what else to do. This whole experience has shown him that being cocky and clever isn't a substitute for being competent, and right now he's on the verge of just handing command over to Spock instead. But first, they're doing his stupid plan, and that's final.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART THREE

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COMING SOON

My three part Star Trek Into Darkness review concludes tomorrow.

But while you're waiting for that why not leave a comment? You could discuss how ugly the USS Vengeance is, or I dunno... Cupcake.