If you know me, I am an huge Star Trek fan, have been for as long as i can remember. I was always a fan of the Original Series (you know, Kirk and Spock) and as I got older grew into TNG and Voyager. Hell, I even like alot of stuff about Enterprise, the show everyone hates. Just take a listen to the theme song, it is not good and completely out of place within the Trek universe.
Wasn't that bad? Don't worry, the show is actually pretty good, they were just trying to reinvent Trek for the 21st century, hey speaking of reinventing Trek, STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS WAS A PIECE OF CRAP!
A lot of things Into Darkness tried to do ended up not working. Khan in the movie... just wasn't Khan. He played a fine villain (I live Benedict Cumberbatch in so many ways) and they could have made it work just fine by keeping him John Harrison the whole movie. Instead they make a ham-fisted effort to connect to one of the most popular of the original movies.
Which is about what the entire film feels like: a shallow effort to capitalize on stuff that worked before, without ever realizing what made it good. Everything from Carol Marcus to Section 31. Scenes that should have been powerful felt like a joke, supposedly big reveals were telegraphed well in advance, things from earlier Trek were called in without cause.
Which seems to be another trend in the movie, ethical questions are completely ignored. Where we have the chance to question whether Kirk is persuing vengeance or justice, we don't. No one questions his decision to violate treaty and his orders, no one suggests that Kirk is too close to the problem. Scotty is the only one to object, and only to having an unkown weapon near his engines. Kirk gets a get-out-of-quandry-free card, he doesn't kill Khan because Khan saves his ass and surrenders.
It's a lazy story that avoids complexity as much as it avoids moral uncertainty. How does Khan get to the one place Kirk can't follow? Why does he go there? Why did he do anything? How did Marcus get funding for such a ridiculous expenditure? The Enterprise is their flagship, their most impressive ship. So why do they suddenly have the capacity to build something twice its size? How does Khan know so damned much about ship design 200 year after his area of expertise? How can Khan's blood magically save Kirk from death? Why doesn't Bones, who has always played Kirk's conscience, have any signigicant part in this movie? Why? Because lazy writing, that's why.
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