Thinky, spoilery Star Trek thoughts.
Okay, so you all know I love me a good villain, and Benedict Cumberbatch delivered. I adored my Ricardo as KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!--so cultured, so refined, so commanding--but I never saw him as anything but a man who killed out of necessity. With Benedict, I finally saw Khan Noonien Singh as the single-minded, genocidal super-soldier so dangerous his race was nearly destroyed (HOW???), while he and a few others managed to escape and survive in stasis, doomed to float in deep space until rescued.
No wonder he's protective of his people. Seriously. KIRK, THIS IS WHY YOU NEED A HISTORIAN ON BOARD. Oh, wait. You used to. Back in that other universe. Betcha Admiral Marcus did his homework. (And how great was Peter Weller? The man was terrifying! Really, the perfect opponent for Khan, militaristic and single-minded, and suddenly graced with the ultimate living weapon. I wish we could have seen the full story of what happened between them.)
The more I think about the story, though, the more I side with Khan. Not in my usual yay-hot-villain way, but in a genuinely moral sense. I don't agree with his methods (though the man's got style, and when is driving a ship into a planet not fun?), but his motivation is some of the purest and most heartfelt I've ever seen portrayed. Yes, he wants revenge. However, he wants revenge because Marcus is holding the last of his people hostage in order to use him and them as top secret genocidal weapons. (He probably wants to take over the world, but just find them a nice, uninhabited planet with clean air, arable soil, fresh water, and no brain slugs, give them zero means of communication with the outside or ways of leaving, put warning beacons in orbit, and let them build their own society. Then monitor it to make sure they never develop past a certain level of technology.)
As for torpedoing the Dreadnought, Kirk & Co. had no idea what the ship could take. Yes, sending over armed warheads was a clever move, but their sniggering and grinning was a nasty attitude, and making Khan think they'd killed his people? That's just a dick move. It was the final straw for me, and I went straight to the dark side. Fuck Starfleet. Fuck them with a Dreadnought right up their self-righteous asses. That was simply cruel.
The end was morally uncomfortable for me, too. Yes, it's ironic that this terrible killing machine could give such a great gift of life. But now they've got 73 immortality machines sitting in the freezer, just waiting to be partially thawed, bled, given a cookie, and put back on ice for the sake of high-ranking officers and Federation politicians. How is this justifiable? In what way can such intelligent beings be turned into medical cattle? It's possible to argue a life for a life, but one of the tenets of the Federation is that humanity has evolved beyond that. So why not simply exile them? Take some blood. Try to synthesize the factor. But don't turn Khan and his people into property again. That's what started this whole mess. Or do you want to risk 73 of them coming for revenge at once?
Other than that, I totally got the most amazing idea for a sewing or knitting project from Harrison's costume. :D And I love the ground uniforms, the gray suits with the colored plastic triangles at the shoulders. Why can't those be the on-ship uniforms, too? And why can't women wear pants? And who was the gorgeous, muscular black woman on the bridge, the one with just the barest dusting of hair? :D