Thoughts on Star Trek Into Darkness

Labels: , , , , , , · Posted by Anonymous at
I've been a Star Trek fan since I was ten years old, and I've had mixed feelings about the reboot ever since the first film came out. I liked it when I saw it in theaters but my opinion degraded over time. It just didn't feel like a Star Trek film. A great Hollywood sci-fi action film? Yes. A great Star Trek movie? Hardly.

So, after dragging my feet for two years, I finally saw Star Trek Into Darkness. And you know what? I actually really liked it, against all expectations. I thought it had good humor, good action, and a complex, cohesive character-driven plot. The characters in particular have evolved from what felt like shadows of their former selves who just threw around catchphrases to make the fans happy to being truer to the crew we know and love. Even if the characterizations are not perfect, the creators' hearts are clearly in the right place. Perhaps most importantly, Into Darkness has a rather relevant (and extremely important, in my humble opinion) "Star Trek message" that the first reboot film sorely lacked.

So now to the rebuttals of common criticisms of the film:

Khan's whiteness makes more than perfect sense in context (apparently they even clarified it in a tie-in comic). I adored the characterization of Khan and Cumberbatch's performance and found myself rooting for him for most of the movie (he really only does one thing that is entirely inexcusable). I still don't see a reason why the villain of this film couldn't have been a contemporary of Khan's (another warlord from the Eugenics Wars) instead of Khan himself, but whatever.

After seeing the film, I may not fully agree with making Khan white, but I certainly understand why that choice was made. Back when TOS was airing, the idea of the perfect human being brown was novel and groundbreaking. But we now live in a world where showing a brown man perform acts of terrorism just perpetrates negative stereotypes, no matter the history of the franchise or the character.

Even the ending both made sense (people say it came out of nowhere but there was another huge piece of foreshadowing I think everyone missed...) and was emotionally resonant, if not original.

Pretty much the only thing I didn't like was the lack of originality - it did feel like they were trying to remake Wrath of Khan. But that was pretty much it - I now have much higher hopes for the next film.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)