Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) (2 Viewers)

[Colin Jacobson]

Saw this a second time yesterday - real IMAX 3D - and felt about the same as I did the first time: fun but not great.

Wasn't wild about the 3D - preferred it 2D.

Question: was Chris Hemsworth in this movie somewhere and I missed him? He gets a credit as George Kirk but I don't recall seeing that character in "Darkness"...

 

[TravisR]

Question: was Chris Hemsworth in this movie somewhere and I missed him? He gets a credit as George Kirk but I don't recall seeing that character in "Darkness"...

Me neither. Maybe he 'appeared' as a voice over?

 

[Colin Jacobson]

Me neither. Maybe he 'appeared' as a voice over?

I don't remember that either - I'd think a "voice from the grave" related to Kirk's dad would be memorable!I wonder if Hemsworth shot something for the movie that got cut but they gave him the credit anyway. Hopefully we'll know the answer when the Blu-ray comes out!

 

[Sam Favate]

I think we heard his voice at one point with audio from the '09 movie.

 

[PaulDA]

I read part of his review. He lost me when he started talking about Abrams's ST: ID as a "recap" of the 'war on terrorism". That is exactly why I hate this film as a STAR TREK movie. You want to make a movie diatribe about the "war on terror" then make a movie about it set in our day and age when it would have some impact. I don't need to see a thinly disguised screed on the "war on terror" in my ST films. I want to see a ST film where we have outgrown our petty jealousies, racism, and barbarism just like the original series, for all its "cheesiness", used to depict.

The Star Trek where "we have outgrown our petty jealousies…" was not the original series, but the TNG era. The TOS era still struggled with those frailties (as noted in the second pilot "Where No Man Has Gone Before"). They were an improvement over the present (1960s) but they had hardly "outgrown" them altogether. The reason TNG-era Trek has always, to me, been less compelling than TOS is precisely because humanity had seemingly "outgrown" its foibles. I still liked it, but not nearly as much as TOS. Humanity without its frailties is dramatically less interesting. I was quite happy to see the new iteration was not full of humans with "evolved sensibilities". And TOS, as several others have pointed out here and elsewhere, in both the TV series and the movies, frequently had "thinly disguised screed"(s) on topics of the day--in that respect, STiD was quite in keeping with the original in spirit.

As for the basic story, I'm okay with it. I bought into the premise just fine. While I understood the overall terrorism parallel, the specifics outlined in that linked review kind of got lost on me. But basically, the parallel very much was how Star Trek always was. They always spotlighted contemporary issues in TOS with varying degrees of subtly and bluntness (including ST:6 with the fall of communism in Russia - and continuing prejudices to overcome there, too). The events of the 2009 movie basically set up a deviation from the utopian ideal that they should have been at, but this film was supposed to show how they would self-correct.

Where do people get the idea that TOS Trek was a utopian world? I think TNG-era Trek tried very hard to make that argument (and likely people are conflating the two eras), but TOS Trek, while certainly more "comfortable" than the present, did not depict anything I would consider especially utopian. Moreover, in reference to the Abrams films, I see no logic for having the second film "self-correct" the first one's premise--especially since it is not too far into the future from the first film. Instead, it offered something that was far more plausible in concept (we can certainly argue plausibility of details in a separate debate)--a faction in Starfleet that viewed the events of the first film as a reason to militarize in a fashion hitherto highly unlikely. The destruction of a founding world of the Federation was bound, if there is any internal consistency to the story's universe, to generate a reaction grounded in fear. Far less plausible would have been a "well, that threat is over, let's return to our "evolved sensibilities" and chalk it up to a lesson learned" attitude. Perhaps that would fit in the TNG-era mould, but it would have been rather dull.

 

[Gary Seven]

It was pretty clear that it was a utopia of sorts...

racial and sexual equality, BIG issue in the 60s... I remember the race riots in DC in the 60s.
spending money on life rather than death.
the federation itself

Just a few off the top of my head...I'm sure others here can site other examples.

WNMHGB demonstrated we did have frailties sure, but subsequent episodes showed a philosophy of overcoming them.. we will not kill... today.

TNG took it to another level.

I find it rather amusing that the time line alteration was to avoid cannon conflicts and yet ST:ID still managed to muck it up since the time line shift happened in the 23rd century, not in the 20th.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

I think we heard his voice at one point with audio from the '09 movie.

Maybe. When the Blu-ray arrives, I'll have to pay closer attention. I wasn't thinking about it until AFTER the movie so I didn't listen for Hemsworth!

Kinda funny how with all the young actors in the 2009 "Trek", the one with a small role as Kirk's daddy became the biggest star of them all (so far)!

 

[RobertR]

It was pretty clear that it was a utopia of sorts...

racial and sexual equality, BIG issue in the 60s... I remember the race riots in DC in the 60s.
spending money on life rather than death.
the federation itself

Just a few off the top of my head...I'm sure others here can site other examples.

WNMHGB demonstrated we did have frailties sure, but subsequent episodes showed a philosophy of overcoming them.. we will not kill... today.

TNG took it to another level.

I find it rather amusing that the time line alteration was to avoid cannon conflicts and yet ST:ID still managed to muck it up since the time line shift happened in the 23rd century, not in the 20th.

In "Whom Gods Destroy", Kirk states that the handful of prisoners are the only remaining criminally insane individuals in the entire Federation (!).

 

[Bryan^H]

I watched this for the first time earlier this week. I loved it. One of my favorite Star Trek films.

 

[Kevin EK]

Looking over the box office mojo summary as of today:

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
Total Lifetime grosses
Domestic: 225,744,027 50.1%
Foreign: 224,600,000 49.9%
= Worldwide: 450,344,027

The movie has yet to open in Japan, but we can look at how the first movie did there - it grossed 5.8 million in 2009. Looking at other big movies this year, it looks like Monsters University and Ted are at the top with Japanese grosses equaling between 43.9 and 46.9 million. Iron Man 3 did 25 million there, A Good Day to Die Hard did 21 million, Fast & Furious 6 did 17 million. If I had to guess, the new movie may be able to hit 10 million, depending on the competition, but we'll have to see.

We should also look at the 2009 movie for comparison:

Star Trek (2009)
Total Lifetime grosses
Domestic: 257,730,019 66.8%
Foreign: 127,950,427 33.2%
= Worldwide 385,680,446


What we can see is that the sequel actually grossed 30+ million less than the 2009 movie in the U.S., but it grossed 100+million more in the world market. What makes this odd is that the higher 3D ticket prices should have resulted in a higher overall domestic gross if the number of tickets sold was constant. Which means they actually sold even less tickets in the U.S. than I had thought they would.

Given how its momentum has pretty much finished, it feels like the final theatrical numbers will be in this neighborhood of 450 million, give or take. So as we discussed, it's going to be up to the home video sales to get them to the break-even point of roughly 600 million dollars. Meaning they need to sell 150 million dollars worth of Blu-rays and DVDs, as well as Netflix downloads. I believe they'll make it without too much trouble, but I continue to doubt that Paramount is going to spend 200+ million on the next one. I also doubt that they'll go 3D again, but they could prove me wrong on that one.

What's really unfortunate this summer is that we've seen a larger glut than I've ever seen before of horrifyingly expensive movies, most of which have either disappointed in their performance or have outright bombed. How many big animation extravaganzas did they think people wanted to see in one summer? How many overblown action/fantasy spectacles could anyone sit through in a single year, let alone one summer? One can only hope that the studios will learn from this.

It looks like Universal and Disney did the best overall, with Disney scoring the big hits with Iron Man 3 and Monsters University hopefully taking the sting out of The Lone Ranger, and Universal having several big hits and solid performers aside from RIPD. Paramount looks like its movies will break even on home video. Sony is the one studio that really looks like they took the worst beating this year.

 

[Chris Will]

I think the next one will be in 3D, a conversion like Into Darkness, but IMAX will be out to save some money.

 

[Kevin EK]

You may well be right on that score. But we should note that Into Darkness wasn't just a post conversion. Abrams actually shot elements specifically for 3D - he just didn't do it using 3D cameras. Someone was clearly thinking that this would be a money-saving proposition. I think it may have wound up costing them more than they thought. For the next one, if they even use 3D, I would expect it to be something like the Thor conversion, where they just try to digitally tweak the 2D footage.

 

[Nelson Au]

Thought I'd toss in something different for a change of pace. With the Star Trek films on Blu Ray thread arguing about the validity of the new films, and this discussing how financially well or not the film has done, here's something different.Apparently someone did something that got a lot of notice on Reddit. While I know it's been done already on Star Trek sites, this link goes to a site showing how one guy took images of the TOS actors and morphing them with images of the new actors. He did pretty good job morphing the actors. All I gotta say is looks isn't everything! http://petapixel.com/2013/10/04/star-trek-face-morphs-blend-original-series-actors-modern-counterparts/

 

[Colin Jacobson]

Cool! Apparently if the two Chekovs had a son, he'd look like Tobey Maguire!

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

All this is to say that I am one of probably very few people in the world who went to see Into Darkness without ever having seen The Wrath of Khan. I still haven't seen The Wrath of Khan. So, when I saw it, I thought it was great because I didn't realize how much of it was being lifted from the other movie. I believe you that it is, and I've certainly heard the complaints online since then, but none of that was a factor for me when I was watching Into Darkness. I knew that there was a famous Star Trek villain named Khan and that he had been in the name of The Wrath of Khan, but I had absolutely no other context for it. So I was responding to the choices that I have since been informed were lifted from The Wrath of Khan as if they were new choices being made for the first time by Abrams and his team, and I thought they were good. I assume this is actually a credit to the first one, because the structure that it built still works even in a revamp.

Into Darkness is actually a mishmash of the Original Series episode that introduced Khan, "Space Seed", and Wrath of Khan with a bunch of other stuff thrown in. The first half of the movie is largely original content. It's the back half of the movie that gets derivative.

The bigger problem than the rehashing, though, is that every time this movie does something Wrath of Khan did, it doesn't do it nearly as well.

Wrath of Khan had a relatively clean structure, with two main narrative through lines:

1. Kirk is deeply unsatisfied with his role in upper management and needs to find his way back to being a starship captain again.
2. Khan, furious at Kirk for stranding him and his people on a inhospitable world and blaming him for the death of his wife, seeks revenge.

Everything else in the movie builds off of one or the other.

By contrast, Into Darkness has a whole lot going on that doesn't really feel cohesive at all. In Into Darkness, Khan doesn't really have a problem with Kirk or the Enterprise at all; instead his vendetta is against Admiral Marcus, who is also secretly a villain. Kirk and Spock spend most of the movie at odds with one another, so that their heartfelt goodbye from opposite sides of the glass at the end doesn't play nearly as well as the parallel scene (with Kirk and Spock on opposite sides of the glass) in Wrath of Khan. Likewise, Spock's resurrection takes an entire other motion picture to accomplish, whereas Into Darkness turns Khan's blood in a magic deus ex machina. In Wrath of Khan, Kirk's defeat of Khan feels earned, because it is built on a careful study of Khan's nature; he doesn't so much overpower Khan as goad Khan into defeating himself. In Into Darkness, Spock's defeat of Khan doesn't feel earned, because Spock Prime basically just told him what to do. The ending of Wrath of Khan was built around the spectacle of bringing new life into the universe, with all of the questions and moral implications that implies. The ending of Into Darkness devolves into running and jumping and explosions, the kind of cookie cutter climax that has become all too common the last couple decades. There is nothing about the climax that inspires awe.

Nicholas Meyer had to make Wrath of Khan on a shoestring, so the writing had to be good; if it wasn't, a movie that spends 90 percent of the running time on the same standing set would be unbearable. J.J. Abrams puts his much larger budget on the screen, but a lot of the extra spectacle goes toward distracting the audience from how unwieldy and inelegant the fundamentals are.

The reason I liked it in the first one was because it freed the creative team form having to be beholden to previous storylines. They could just do whatever felt right to send the characters on a new journey. Instead of doing that, they chose to do an unofficial remake of an old movie that was (apparently) full of winks and nods to the other one which went over my head. I would have rather had something new.

I think this was my biggest issue with Into Darkness when I originally saw it in theaters. The 2009 reboot left things in a place where they could do anything they wanted to do. To revisit already well-trod ground seemed like a real missed opportunity.

The thing is, they could have stripped Khan out of this altogether, with Peter Weller as Admiral Marcus being the only villain, and I think it would have worked a lot better. Then it's a story about a clash of ideals: Marcus's bloodthirsty pragmatism versus the more enlightened principles that Starfleet was founded on. It would have also clarified Kirk's arc, telling the story of how the reckless hotshot who considered himself above the rules at the beginning of the movie learns how to value and work within the system.

The "I am Khan" reveal is 100% for the audience, not for Kirk or Spock, which makes it ineffective for them on an emotional level.

And if you're a Star Trek fan, it's not exactly a shocking reveal either because there are so many clues ahead of the reveal.

 

[Joel Fontenot]

Wow, talk about waking up a dead thread... but who am I to judge... I'm going to add to it

And if you're a Star Trek fan, it's not exactly a shocking reveal either because there are so many clues ahead of the reveal.

Not only that, but right after ST 2009 came out, every entertainment magazine, blog, show, whatever, started shouting "Do Khan, do Khan..."

I'm thinking all that time... "No, no... do something original"

And, they did Khan.

Even though Abrams kept lying to us prior to release "It's not Khan", everyone already knew it was.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I’m conflicted about this film but I come down on the side of liking it.

I have a conceptual issue with a writing choice that Kurtzman and Orci made here and in several other projects they did in the same time period. The first film in this series involves Kirk being told he’s too young, too inexperienced and too reckless for command. Events conspire to allow him to demonstrate his abilities while also letting him mature as part of his character arc. By the time the film ends, he’s become ready. And then Into Darkness begins and that entire character development is negated with Kirk being told that he’s too young, inexperienced and reckless, and he spends the film repeating the same arc that had already been completed in the prior film. As a viewer, that kind of thing is just obnoxious to me.

Storywise, my big issue was that John Harrison is a more interesting character than reboot Khan is. I think they would have been better sticking with Harrison as Harrison, without the reveal twist. I think “Starfleet experienced a terrible tragedy with the destruction of Vulcan and the fallout resulted in Starfleet abandoning its principles, which Kirk must defend” is compelling in and of itself. The addition of Khan not only seems beside the point but also shortchanges that Marcus is the real villain here.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot to like, and it also came out during the worst year of my life and gave me a welcome escape from what I was dealing with and I will always remember that when I watch the movie. In a year when everything sucked, I still got a Star Trek movie, and that was an awesome thing.

 

[Tino]

I loved it and have no issues with it at all. A terrific Star Trek film imo.

 

[Tommy R]

I saw it ONCE in 2013 and hated it. My wife has been bugging that we should watch “the Chris Pine Star Wars” movies so I guess I’m going to have to watch it again soon. Who knows, maybe it’ll be good...

 

[Osato]

Into Darkness is actually a mishmash of the Original Series episode that introduced Khan, "Space Seed", and Wrath of Khan with a bunch of other stuff thrown in. The first half of the movie is largely original content. It's the back half of the movie that gets derivative.

The bigger problem than the rehashing, though, is that every time this movie does something Wrath of Khan did, it doesn't do it nearly as well.

Wrath of Khan had a relatively clean structure, with two main narrative through lines:

1. Kirk is deeply unsatisfied with his role in upper management and needs to find his way back to being a starship captain again.
2. Khan, furious at Kirk for stranding him and his people on a inhospitable world and blaming him for the death of his wife, seeks revenge.

Everything else in the movie builds off of one or the other.

By contrast, Into Darkness has a whole lot going on that doesn't really feel cohesive at all. In Into Darkness, Khan doesn't really have a problem with Kirk or the Enterprise at all; instead his vendetta is against Admiral Marcus, who is also secretly a villain. Kirk and Spock spend most of the movie at odds with one another, so that their heartfelt goodbye from opposite sides of the glass at the end doesn't play nearly as well as the parallel scene (with Kirk and Spock on opposite sides of the glass) in Wrath of Khan. Likewise, Spock's resurrection takes an entire other motion picture to accomplish, whereas Into Darkness turns Khan's blood in a magic deus ex machina. In Wrath of Khan, Kirk's defeat of Khan feels earned, because it is built on a careful study of Khan's nature; he doesn't so much overpower Khan as goad Khan into defeating himself. In Into Darkness, Spock's defeat of Khan doesn't feel earned, because Spock Prime basically just told him what to do. The ending of Wrath of Khan was built around the spectacle of bringing new life into the universe, with all of the questions and moral implications that implies. The ending of Into Darkness devolves into running and jumping and explosions, the kind of cookie cutter climax that has become all too common the last couple decades. There is nothing about the climax that inspires awe.

Nicholas Meyer had to make Wrath of Khan on a shoestring, so the writing had to be good; if it wasn't, a movie that spends 90 percent of the running time on the same standing set would be unbearable. J.J. Abrams puts his much larger budget on the screen, but a lot of the extra spectacle goes toward distracting the audience from how unwieldy and inelegant the fundamentals are.


I think this was my biggest issue with Into Darkness when I originally saw it in theaters. The 2009 reboot left things in a place where they could do anything they wanted to do. To revisit already well-trod ground seemed like a real missed opportunity.

The thing is, they could have stripped Khan out of this altogether, with Peter Weller as Admiral Marcus being the only villain, and I think it would have worked a lot better. Then it's a story about a clash of ideals: Marcus's bloodthirsty pragmatism versus the more enlightened principles that Starfleet was founded on. It would have also clarified Kirk's arc, telling the story of how the reckless hotshot who considered himself above the rules at the beginning of the movie learns how to value and work within the system.


And if you're a Star Trek fan, it's not exactly a shocking reveal either because there are so many clues ahead of the reveal.

Great post. This is a trek film that I don’t care for. I did watch it again this year though.

One thing that doesn’t make sense is the reveal itself. How are we supposed to know the character khan? We only know him from the other timeline. it doesn’t make sense. It would’ve been better to just introduce him as a villain right away.

I have also thought for years thAt admiral Marcus was enough of a villain for this film too.

I found this interesting too:

J.J. Abrams Opens Up About 'Star Trek Into Darkness' Problems - SlashFilm

Star Trek Into Darkness is frustrating for many Star Trek fans. Two years later, J.J. Abrams opens up about some of the Star Trek Into Darkness problems.

www.slashfilm.com