Yes, I’m still digging through the festival — The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby is fantastic, by the way — but hey, I’m a multi-tasker. So on Monday, between my interviews with Steven Soderbergh and Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass and Alfonso Cuaron and Steve Coogan and Richard Ayoade, I banged out my MSN DVD column, which tries to make sense of the weird backlash against Star Trek Into Darkness this past summer.
Oh, and elsewhere on the DVD/BD release circuit: I had a quick chat with Susanne Bier, director of Love Is All You Need, last week. Enjoy!
The backlash against Star Trek into Darkness is that it’s just not a very good movie. It’s a shallow, mindless action spectacle plagued by lousy writting that tries to evoke a far better movie by simply regurgitating its climax without a trace of the original’s depth or meaning.
Honestly, does Kirk make even one single correct decision in the film? From start to finish, every decision he makes is wrong. Yet he never learns anything from his mistakes. His infallibility is repeatedly validated by success through blind luck no matter how stupidly he behaves. Even death is meaningless to him. He’ll just wake up from it a couple days later, like Space Jesus.
And the plot contrivance of Khan’s magic blood is perhaps the lamest deus ex machina in the entire history of lameness.
Into Darkness is a huge step down from the last Abrams Trek, which had its own share of sloppy writing but generally held together better than this.
It did have, IMHO, the best sarcastic Spock line ever after Pike tells him to stop giving him attitude…
“I am exhibiting several attitudes simultaneously. To which do you refer?”*
* Aside from the awesome sarcasm there, given that part of my job involves correcting people’s grammar, the grammatical correctness of his phrasing sent a pleasant shiver up my spine.
Norm, to better understand the backlash against Star Trek Into Darkness you can refer to your review of Man of Steel. The more emotionally attached you are to the source material the greater chance the new version will offend your sensibilities. All the people I know who enjoyed the new film have either never seen Star Trek II or are not really attached to it. For those who cherish Star Trek II, found the new film offensive, especially because of its awful ending.