Star Trek: Into Dumb
Yeah, yeah, old news. What can I say, I have a family, so I only get to watch movies once in a while, after they’ve been on on-demand TV for a long time.
“Star Trek: Into Darkness”: wow. What a dumb, dumb movie.
“Star Trek” has a big place in my life, and I don’t care who knows. I learned English by watching Star Trek. Star Trek, to me, will always be one of our greatest pop cultural sensations, because it is, as best as I can tell, the only space adventure show for a popular audience that takes ideas seriously; and, starting with TNG, characters.
The first Star Trek reboot movie made it clear that this was all going down the hatch. It was just a fun action-adventure romp, and very consciously and publicly made no effort at grasping what makes Star Trek great.
But boy, is Into Darkness dumb. The plot makes no sense. Whatsoever. The plot holes are big enough to fly the Enterprise through, and I use a cliché phrase like this to honor a movie made up of clichés a bunch of stitched-together clichés. The Klingons are just dumb-ass space thugs. The scrawny, charisma-free British guy they cast as Khan has zero credibility as a genetically-enhanced superwarrior. Starfleet us utterly clueless and ineffective as an organization.
And there is that supremely odd anesthetic quality to big-budget Hollywood action scenes where there is so much CG pyrotechnics that it all adds up to something distinctly underwhelming, and you find yourself unable to care because you know that you’re one hour into the movie and so the main characters are in zero danger.
I have to write this now because I know tomorrow I’ll have forgotten everything about the movie.
