So I saw Benedict Cumberbatch Is Mad About Something

[cleolinda]

I saw Star Trek Into Darkness Sunday afternoon but haven't said anything about it because... I just really had no urge to talk about it at all. This perplexes me. I've seen a few episodes of the original series and Next Generation, so I have a decent background on it without being married to canon. I loved the first new movie. I like J.J. Abrams

Comments

[cleolinda]

Yeah, I'm not worried about spoilers in the comments here.

See, I actually like that kind of switching-things-up. It actually think that's where it would have worked better to advertise Khan as the villain, so people would go watch the original movie in advance and expect a certain ending, and then Abrams could play their expectations against them. As it was, there are a lot of people who haven't seen that movie, and as one of those articles I linked says, "have no idea who or what a Khan is." So the reveal and the Old Spock communication fell flat.

I suspect it felt "wrong" to her because it wasn't as well done as the original. If that scene had been equally good or even better, people would cut it a lot more slack.

[sevenmarie]

"advertise Khan as the villain, so people would go watch the original movie in advance and expect a certain ending, and then Abrams could play their expectations against them"

YES! because my husband remembers the original Khan movie (i only remember the earwig part) and he LOVED the kirk dying scene and i was like meh but I now want to watch khan to see how it was originally.

[herdivineshadow]

I think my issue with the reversal radiation thing is that with WoK, we'd had like... 15 years of Kirk and Spock being friends and going through all their wacky hijinks together, then we'd had the part where Kirk talks about totally cheating on the Kobayashi Maru and getting called on the fact he's never faced death, themes of ageing throughout, and then Spock goes and does the thing, telling Kirk as he's dying that he'd never taken the Kobayashi Maru test before and asking what he thought of his solution

[telophase]

I know people whose personal headcanon is that Cumberbatch's character isn't actually Khan, but one of his genetically engineered followers who claimed Khan's name for Reasons. I can go with that.

I also want a Best Parts cut that gets rid of everything but Benedict Cumberbatch doing his Menacing British Villain #1 at me, because he does it so well.

[sarcasticwriter]

As I say in a comment below, my personal headcanon is that Khan is a codename - for Sherlock Holmes. Because Khan is Steven Moffat's Sherlock.

That's why Cumberbatch's performance is the same between the two characters!

[ktbass]

So... you've got 73 people with magical healing blood and you just... put them back in deep freeze?

My husband brought this up, but Bones points out on the moon-thingy earlier that they can't just unfreeze torpedo guy without the real codes or else he could die. I'm a lawyer, not a doctor(!) so I don't know if you can put dead blood in a person, but I'm guessing not?

Overall, I really loved this movie because it was fun and just meta enough for a casual and hardcore Star Trek fan to enjoy without leaving people with no familiarity out in the dark. (If I could have kept poor Dr. Marcus in her uniform the whole movie, I would have loved it more, but that was the only moment I'm still annoyed at now.

[cleolinda]

My husband brought this up, but Bones points out earlier that they can't just unfreeze him without the real codes or else the dude could die. I'm a lawyer, not a doctor(!) so I don't know if you can put dead blood in a person, but I'm guessing not?

Hm, yeah. That was so subtle, though, that I kind of wish they'd had a quick "But we have his crew on the ship!"/"But we don't have the codes!" exchange between Bones and Uhura. But if that's more of a Fridge Logic thing than an actual plot hole, I'll give it to them.

(... why did they have a dead tribble on the ship?)

[cleolinda]

Did he have a tribble in the first movie? I think I'd forgotten that.

[quicksilvermad]

You hit quite a few points right on the nose here about why I didn't enjoy it as much as I should have.

While we're at it, this was a... Weird... Remake of Wrath of Khan. And I did not appreciate having a certain scene aped for drama. Yes, it was well-acted and did make me cry, but in the back of my head all I could think was: "This already worked well in 1982."

Then Spock yells it out and I immediately lost control and laughed. What is meant to be a dramatic moment of loss is reduced to a call-back gag that just falls on the side of "Really? You're really going to put that in this movie and expect people to take it seriously?"

I've seen it twice now (I saw it on opening day and again with my parents on Sunday), but it still left me feeling both parts satisfied and unsatisfied.

I will say, after McCoy's line ("I once performed an emergency cesarean on a pregnant Gorn-octuplets-lemme tell you, those little bastards bite.") I wanted to see just how in the hell that story happened. And, like I said before, there wasn't enough Karl

[herdivineshadow]

And I still want to see more of these characters played by these actors.

Yessssssss. I want to see more of this but maybe written by other people.

[rimrunner]

My sum-up comment walking out of the movie was "Those actors are too good for that script." The husband, a lifelong Trek fan, agreed (and he's usually the first to tell me I'm overthinking things, particularly summer action flicks

[herdivineshadow]

...the film itself actually kinda cheated on the Kobayashi Maru test. My God.

[darthrami]

Yes. This.

I DID like it, though, but accept that it is Not A Good Movie. I enjoyed it, but don't feel strongly about it.

I went a second time, b/c I'd already made plans to do so, and the bad stuff was worse, and the good stuff was better.

I'm bothered by the casting thing in terms of it was a part that could've gone to an actor of color, a, but even more so, b, JJ was being a complete and utter asshole, and yes, of course, we all knew he was going to be Khan, because of how hard he denied it. But not as bothered by it as other people.

In the end, I feel sort of like one review I read (can't remember where now) that was basically like - it's a terrible movie, but the acting won me over. The only characters/actors I felt negatively about were the Marcuses, and that's a whole other rant.

[cleolinda]

Yeah, the Marcuses didn't do much for me, and I'm (sing it with me) not even sure why. I love everyone else, though.

Less cynically, I feel like Abrams cast Cumberbatch--i.e., not an actor of color--so that he could maintain the Totally Not Khan front. Which... like I say upthread, I feel like the movie would have been more suspenseful if he'd admitted it, because we would have been waiting for a particular set of events which he then switched up. If you know it's Khan (and you have time to find out who that is, if you're a newbie), you get to sit there anxiously expecting some shit to go down, but then you're also shocked when different shit goes down. Instead, Abrams bent over backwards to hide something that was less effective when hidden.