on Star Trek: Into Nitpicks
May. 31st, 2013 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xparrotRanting is good for the soul! Extensive babbling about plot holes to follow; warnings for anti-squee.
Maybe the most impressive thing about ST:Into Darkness is just how many plotholes it crammed into a couple hours. IO9's spoiler FAQ covered a lot of them, as did this delving into the superblood issue, and this intriguing re-interpretation of Cumberbatch's "Khan".
Even after reading those, I still have some questions, however. Some of these the sibs and I tried to answer, but failed out on.
It's worth noting that plotholes do not mean a movie is bad. They're practically a staple in scifi and action! But the sheer number of nonsensical elements in the new Star Treks (the plot of the first is even worse, really) feels to me like Abrams doesn't care - that he thinks that writing scifi means you get to ignore any logic or consistency for the sake of cool action sequences. Which is okay for some movies, but for Star Trek I want to leave the theater asking things like "So when are we going to be colonizing Mars?", not...
--Why was the Enterprise in the ocean at the beginning?
The brother came up with an explanation - that whatever it was interfering with beaming also interfered with their sensors, so they had to lower the ship to contact the planetary crust to get proper readings. No answer to why they parked in front of the native tribe instead of behind the volcano, totally out of sight. Or how the starship managed atmospheric maneuvers or the water pressure.
--How did Khan sneak a gunship up to the windows of a top-secret Starfleet meeting?
What sorry excuse for security misses an armed ship taking position in front of the conference windows?
--Why did Khan go to Kronos?
As opposed to anywhere else in the galaxy? He obviously wasn't working with the Klingons. But why would he go exactly where Admiral Marcus wanted him to go? The only explanation we can come up with is that Khan's actions in the first part of the movie were actually in conspiracy with Admiral Marcus - that the admiral maybe blackmailed Khan into the terrorism to provide extra motivation. But then why the heck did the admiral show up to the Starfleet meeting instead of attending remotely? (...Why were any of them attending in person, instead of over viewscreens? Seriously, just how bad IS Starfleet security?)
--Why didn't someone rewrite or cut the scene of Kirk beating the crap out of Khan?
One punch would've had the same effect (showed how uncontrollably angry Kirk was, showed how resilient Khan was) without assassinating Kirk's character (beyond the point of no return for at least a couple people I know, who found it impossible to sympathize with a "hero" who beats up a prisoner who has willingly surrendered.) And Spock and Uhura watching and not intervening seems vastly OOC for both of them.
--What is up with JJ Abram's very specific underwear kink?
It seems like every Abrams' production includes a scene of a woman stripping down to her underwear, often while speaking about a professional topic, and a man unintentionally getting an eyeful. In Fringe Olivia strips in the pilot to get in the tank, with Peter having to help. In the first Star Trek Uhura changes while discussing the radio analysis, and Kirk under the bed sees her without meaning to peep. We're pretty sure in one of the first eps of Lost Kate needed to strip for Jack to doctor her. And now in ST:ID Carol Marcus changes and tells Kirk not to look, without actually telling him why - why couldn't she just say, "Dude, I need to change, avert the eyes"? Because Abrams needed her in underwear...
--The torpedos. Why? Why? WHY?
Khan hiding his people in the torpedoes actually makes sense - presumably his plan was to sneak them aboard the dreadnaught, and then steal the dreadnaught. But how did he get them into the torpedoes? Why didn't anyone notice his torpedo plans had 25% of unaccounted space that mysteriously drew enough energy to power a cryochamber? Why did he put ACTIVE WARHEADS on the torpedoes holding the people whose lives were his entire motivation? Why did Admiral Marcus, having found out about the torpedoes, give them all to Kirk? Why not keep some for himself as leverage? Or, if he was trying to clean up his mess, why did he leave the cryochambers active, rather than taking out Khan's people by simply flipping the switch?
Those torpedoes are like 72 plot vortexes, warping the entire movie out of sense.
--Was Admiral Marcus meant to be Rumsfeld, Cheney, or someone else?
The neo-con political subtext runs throughout the whole movie (from the obvious critique on drone warfare to using a terrorist act to start a war with a potentially hostile but unrelated power), but it's not so much subtle as confusingly erratic. I kind of wonder if there was an earlier version of the film that was more explicit about it - perhaps trying to be in keeping with Star Trek's well-known liberal agenda? But if that was ever the case, enough was cut so that any message was lost in a baffling tangle of nonsensical motivations and pointless schemes. Marcus makes no sense as a villain - he's trying to start a war with the Klingons, but we don't know why. His stated motivation, that it's for the good of Starfleet and the Federation, is denied when he shows zero remorse when preparing to blow the Enterprise out of the sky - a "I'm sorry you have to make this sacrifice" or somesuch would've done it, instead of smirking and gloating. Is he making money off arms deals? Did the Klingons kill his wife? If he really just wants to start a war, why doesn't he just take the dreadnaught over to Kronos or a Klingon colony and open fire? Or order another starship to do it on some pretext less complicated than chasing down a fleeing fugitive with torpedoes stocked with said fugitive's crew?
--How does a starship in orbit simply drop out of the sky when its engines are cut?
This is such a standard issue in scifi that it's almost not worth mentioning, but it's SO egregious in Into Darkness. Kirk and Khan have to fly through a debris field floating in orbit. NONE OF THAT DEBRIS HAS ENGINES. So even ignoring actual physics and looking only at physics as presented in the movie, either that debris should have all plummeted to Earth; or else the Enterprise, upon losing engines, should have just stayed in place in an orbit that would probably take months to decay.
There's also the matter of the Enterprise falling. As in, it's in freefall. So why does everyone have to deal with rotating gravity rather than just floating? Or was the ship's artificial gravity broken? In which case why couldn't it just be turned off?
--All the questions about Khan's superblood--
Have been explored in detail elsewhere. The sibs speculated that it wasn't a property of the genetic engineering but a mutation unique to Khan, which was unknown (except to Khan, apparently). But unless they're now tapping Khan like a Canadian maple tree, Starfleet Medical is just stupid.
--Not a plot hole, but why is the movie called Into Darkness?
Really, I don't get it. Is it because Starfleet is metaphorically getting darker...? Or what?
--Most importantly - why did this have to be a Star Trek movie?
I've been a Trekkie for most of my life, with my love pretty evenly split between TOS and TNG (with a soft spot for DS9, though I've never seen the last couple seasons.) To me, Star Trek at its core has always been about showing a future we can to look forward to - the Federation isn't perfect, but it's far more positive than most scifi. It glorifies science and exploration, diplomacy and cooperation, and how much humans - all sentient life - can accomplish when we work together, when we appreciate everything everyone has to offer. It makes us want to go to space to meet what's out there, motivates us to strive to expand our universe and our understanding of it.
While TNG's Picard is pretty famously a diplomat over an action hero, the original Original Series's Kirk was also more brains than brawn. For all the hilariously bad brawls of TOS, more times than not the problems were solved in the end by quick thinking and smart talking, not fists. The physical action was often tangential, if not actively detrimental. Heck, in Wrath of Khan, Kirk and Khan never meet face-to-face; all their posturing is over comms, with not a single punch exchanged. Kirk is a nerd hero - he was the youngest starship captain, not because he was super-lucky or his father had admirers, but because he studied his ass off and proved himself to be Starfleet's best and brightest. The original Star Trek wasn't really Kirk's story; it was the story of Starfleet and the Federation, as exemplified by Kirk and his crew. They're not perfect; they're humans beings, not paragons. But they're putting our best foot forward.
The new Kirk isn't the best of Starfleet. Nor would we want him to be, because this Starfleet doesn't seem like anything worthy of admiration. That he's rebellious and anti-authority is a heroic trait because the authority over him is corrupt and incompetent. He doesn't represent Starfleet; rather he's changing Starfleet to his own code - except that he has so many flaws himself that it's hard to see how he'll improve it, rather than exchanging one set of problems for another.
I know that utopias don't play well right now, that positive depictions of authority and bright socialist futures are at odds with current American politics, with global economics. But that just makes me long for a better system even more. So Abrams' Starfleet, with its evil admirals and incompetent policies and impotent leaders, with its women in mini-skirts and preponderance of white male leaders, is that much more depressing than if it were an original universe. We're so hopeless that we can't have a functional society even in our fantasies; one of the most hopeful, uplifting, encouraging futures in contemporary fiction has been transformed into another exciting, implausible action set where no one in their right mind would ever want to live.
Even with all its plot holes and racism and sexism and other issues, I don't know if I'd say Star Trek: Into Darkness is a bad movie. But as a Star Trek movie, it's so depressing that I have a hard time enjoying the elements of character and relationships which I did like.
Maybe the most impressive thing about ST:Into Darkness is just how many plotholes it crammed into a couple hours. IO9's spoiler FAQ covered a lot of them, as did this delving into the superblood issue, and this intriguing re-interpretation of Cumberbatch's "Khan".
Even after reading those, I still have some questions, however. Some of these the sibs and I tried to answer, but failed out on.
It's worth noting that plotholes do not mean a movie is bad. They're practically a staple in scifi and action! But the sheer number of nonsensical elements in the new Star Treks (the plot of the first is even worse, really) feels to me like Abrams doesn't care - that he thinks that writing scifi means you get to ignore any logic or consistency for the sake of cool action sequences. Which is okay for some movies, but for Star Trek I want to leave the theater asking things like "So when are we going to be colonizing Mars?", not...
--Why was the Enterprise in the ocean at the beginning?
The brother came up with an explanation - that whatever it was interfering with beaming also interfered with their sensors, so they had to lower the ship to contact the planetary crust to get proper readings. No answer to why they parked in front of the native tribe instead of behind the volcano, totally out of sight. Or how the starship managed atmospheric maneuvers or the water pressure.
--How did Khan sneak a gunship up to the windows of a top-secret Starfleet meeting?
What sorry excuse for security misses an armed ship taking position in front of the conference windows?
--Why did Khan go to Kronos?
As opposed to anywhere else in the galaxy? He obviously wasn't working with the Klingons. But why would he go exactly where Admiral Marcus wanted him to go? The only explanation we can come up with is that Khan's actions in the first part of the movie were actually in conspiracy with Admiral Marcus - that the admiral maybe blackmailed Khan into the terrorism to provide extra motivation. But then why the heck did the admiral show up to the Starfleet meeting instead of attending remotely? (...Why were any of them attending in person, instead of over viewscreens? Seriously, just how bad IS Starfleet security?)
--Why didn't someone rewrite or cut the scene of Kirk beating the crap out of Khan?
One punch would've had the same effect (showed how uncontrollably angry Kirk was, showed how resilient Khan was) without assassinating Kirk's character (beyond the point of no return for at least a couple people I know, who found it impossible to sympathize with a "hero" who beats up a prisoner who has willingly surrendered.) And Spock and Uhura watching and not intervening seems vastly OOC for both of them.
--What is up with JJ Abram's very specific underwear kink?
It seems like every Abrams' production includes a scene of a woman stripping down to her underwear, often while speaking about a professional topic, and a man unintentionally getting an eyeful. In Fringe Olivia strips in the pilot to get in the tank, with Peter having to help. In the first Star Trek Uhura changes while discussing the radio analysis, and Kirk under the bed sees her without meaning to peep. We're pretty sure in one of the first eps of Lost Kate needed to strip for Jack to doctor her. And now in ST:ID Carol Marcus changes and tells Kirk not to look, without actually telling him why - why couldn't she just say, "Dude, I need to change, avert the eyes"? Because Abrams needed her in underwear...
--The torpedos. Why? Why? WHY?
Khan hiding his people in the torpedoes actually makes sense - presumably his plan was to sneak them aboard the dreadnaught, and then steal the dreadnaught. But how did he get them into the torpedoes? Why didn't anyone notice his torpedo plans had 25% of unaccounted space that mysteriously drew enough energy to power a cryochamber? Why did he put ACTIVE WARHEADS on the torpedoes holding the people whose lives were his entire motivation? Why did Admiral Marcus, having found out about the torpedoes, give them all to Kirk? Why not keep some for himself as leverage? Or, if he was trying to clean up his mess, why did he leave the cryochambers active, rather than taking out Khan's people by simply flipping the switch?
Those torpedoes are like 72 plot vortexes, warping the entire movie out of sense.
--Was Admiral Marcus meant to be Rumsfeld, Cheney, or someone else?
The neo-con political subtext runs throughout the whole movie (from the obvious critique on drone warfare to using a terrorist act to start a war with a potentially hostile but unrelated power), but it's not so much subtle as confusingly erratic. I kind of wonder if there was an earlier version of the film that was more explicit about it - perhaps trying to be in keeping with Star Trek's well-known liberal agenda? But if that was ever the case, enough was cut so that any message was lost in a baffling tangle of nonsensical motivations and pointless schemes. Marcus makes no sense as a villain - he's trying to start a war with the Klingons, but we don't know why. His stated motivation, that it's for the good of Starfleet and the Federation, is denied when he shows zero remorse when preparing to blow the Enterprise out of the sky - a "I'm sorry you have to make this sacrifice" or somesuch would've done it, instead of smirking and gloating. Is he making money off arms deals? Did the Klingons kill his wife? If he really just wants to start a war, why doesn't he just take the dreadnaught over to Kronos or a Klingon colony and open fire? Or order another starship to do it on some pretext less complicated than chasing down a fleeing fugitive with torpedoes stocked with said fugitive's crew?
--How does a starship in orbit simply drop out of the sky when its engines are cut?
This is such a standard issue in scifi that it's almost not worth mentioning, but it's SO egregious in Into Darkness. Kirk and Khan have to fly through a debris field floating in orbit. NONE OF THAT DEBRIS HAS ENGINES. So even ignoring actual physics and looking only at physics as presented in the movie, either that debris should have all plummeted to Earth; or else the Enterprise, upon losing engines, should have just stayed in place in an orbit that would probably take months to decay.
There's also the matter of the Enterprise falling. As in, it's in freefall. So why does everyone have to deal with rotating gravity rather than just floating? Or was the ship's artificial gravity broken? In which case why couldn't it just be turned off?
--All the questions about Khan's superblood--
Have been explored in detail elsewhere. The sibs speculated that it wasn't a property of the genetic engineering but a mutation unique to Khan, which was unknown (except to Khan, apparently). But unless they're now tapping Khan like a Canadian maple tree, Starfleet Medical is just stupid.
--Not a plot hole, but why is the movie called Into Darkness?
Really, I don't get it. Is it because Starfleet is metaphorically getting darker...? Or what?
--Most importantly - why did this have to be a Star Trek movie?
I've been a Trekkie for most of my life, with my love pretty evenly split between TOS and TNG (with a soft spot for DS9, though I've never seen the last couple seasons.) To me, Star Trek at its core has always been about showing a future we can to look forward to - the Federation isn't perfect, but it's far more positive than most scifi. It glorifies science and exploration, diplomacy and cooperation, and how much humans - all sentient life - can accomplish when we work together, when we appreciate everything everyone has to offer. It makes us want to go to space to meet what's out there, motivates us to strive to expand our universe and our understanding of it.
While TNG's Picard is pretty famously a diplomat over an action hero, the original Original Series's Kirk was also more brains than brawn. For all the hilariously bad brawls of TOS, more times than not the problems were solved in the end by quick thinking and smart talking, not fists. The physical action was often tangential, if not actively detrimental. Heck, in Wrath of Khan, Kirk and Khan never meet face-to-face; all their posturing is over comms, with not a single punch exchanged. Kirk is a nerd hero - he was the youngest starship captain, not because he was super-lucky or his father had admirers, but because he studied his ass off and proved himself to be Starfleet's best and brightest. The original Star Trek wasn't really Kirk's story; it was the story of Starfleet and the Federation, as exemplified by Kirk and his crew. They're not perfect; they're humans beings, not paragons. But they're putting our best foot forward.
The new Kirk isn't the best of Starfleet. Nor would we want him to be, because this Starfleet doesn't seem like anything worthy of admiration. That he's rebellious and anti-authority is a heroic trait because the authority over him is corrupt and incompetent. He doesn't represent Starfleet; rather he's changing Starfleet to his own code - except that he has so many flaws himself that it's hard to see how he'll improve it, rather than exchanging one set of problems for another.
I know that utopias don't play well right now, that positive depictions of authority and bright socialist futures are at odds with current American politics, with global economics. But that just makes me long for a better system even more. So Abrams' Starfleet, with its evil admirals and incompetent policies and impotent leaders, with its women in mini-skirts and preponderance of white male leaders, is that much more depressing than if it were an original universe. We're so hopeless that we can't have a functional society even in our fantasies; one of the most hopeful, uplifting, encouraging futures in contemporary fiction has been transformed into another exciting, implausible action set where no one in their right mind would ever want to live.
Even with all its plot holes and racism and sexism and other issues, I don't know if I'd say Star Trek: Into Darkness is a bad movie. But as a Star Trek movie, it's so depressing that I have a hard time enjoying the elements of character and relationships which I did like.
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Thank you!
Date: 2013-06-01 04:24 am (UTC)Re: Thank you!
Date: 2013-06-01 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-01 05:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-01 10:39 pm (UTC)Yes.
Date: 2013-06-02 02:58 am (UTC)On the upside though, I feel like Abrams will make a hell of a Star Wars movie.
Re: Yes.
Date: 2013-06-03 12:37 am (UTC)Am curious about how his Star Wars will be - in spirit his ST movies are more like SW, so it might work out, though I doubt his sexism will improve and that disappoints me >.>
no subject
Date: 2013-06-02 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-03 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-03 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-05 06:49 pm (UTC)Otherwise, yeah...the lack of effort goes beyond obnoxious and into baffling! Would it really have been so hard to spend a couple hours figuring out the worst plot holes?
no subject
Date: 2013-06-05 07:04 pm (UTC)Me and Skuld spent what honestly could have been an hour JUST bitching about Bones' "science" of injecting a dead tribble with stuff. Because who does that? (Answer: not scientists!) He does it randomly because... maybe that's Bones thing now? He injects tribbles with stuff? What does his lab notebook look like? (Day 14 - Injected dead tribble with mustard. No result as of yet. Day 15 - Injected dead tribble with Io-water. No result as of yet. Day 16 - Injected dead tribble with cheeze whiz. No result as of yet. Day 17 - went to inject dead tribble with some vodka, but found tribble missing. A result! Must procure more cheeze whiz. Day 18 - found dead tribble in hazmat bin. Retrieved dead tribble, was promptly scolded by several loud medical officers. Have had to abandon dead tribble experiments until a fresh one can be obtained, or medical officers sufficiently distracted.)
I know Starfleet health & safety is a joke (no emergency bays/seats/handles in case of gravity loss?), but really. Dead tribbles just lying around your work surface? GOOD SCIENCE, BONES! Skuld totally doesn't disapprove or anything.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-05 04:02 am (UTC)Stuff like revenge, like putting yourself and your feelings above everyone else, so many things that made Star Trek amazing are lost in these new movies.
I was always to put off by how they did this revamp. They could have just said, hey everyone, we're revamping Star Trek like they did with Batman Begins. But instead they destroyed, in one moment, 75+ years of Star Trek history. They do it with time travel, which is such an overused, trite way of doing anything really but it done right, it might have been something awesome. It's not.
There's no respect of anything. Not opinions, not authority, not race and not the prime directive. People had voices and here is like, I don't want to hear it. And I'm so with you about Star Fleet. And Abrams wonders why people are just put off by the movies? We need new writers, new directors. We need someone like you, X-Parrot writing this verse! Sigh. I liked it well enough, but I felt no emotional connection to anyone. If they all would have been killed, I wouldn't have really cared.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-05 06:45 pm (UTC)And yeah, I'm really hoping that with Abrams on Star Wars, they'll give Star Trek to a Trekkie (if they decide to go ahead with a sequel...)
no subject
Date: 2013-06-05 08:22 pm (UTC)But there were things that I liked about ITD. Like the fact that everyone got their moment to shine. It wasn't just about Kirk. I liked the fact that they were going to die and that Kirk died, but with the whole thing with Khan's blood I knew where it was going, which was kind of a disappointment. The whole volcano thing I just didn't get. And also I wanted Khan to get away, to be a looming threat for them into the future.
I do have a question, though, didn't the Klingons have the illness that took away their ridges? That confused me, as did the fact that there were very few aliens as part of Starfleet Command.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-07 10:42 pm (UTC)Another plot hole, what exactly was Khan's plan on Kronos? Every other captain sent after him would have followed orders and fired the torpedos, leaving both him and his people dead.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-19 11:07 pm (UTC)And Khan's whole plan baffled me! Even the parts I could sort of figure out reasons for (like putting his people aboard torpedoes to smuggle them onto the ship he was intending to steal) it didn't actually explain (since it didn't ever say his original plan had been to steal the ship...)
no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 07:38 pm (UTC)Yeah, I thought that although the first movie had its flaws, those could have been corrected in the second movie. Instead they just got worse. Kirk is pretty much unrecognisable at this point.
Cold Fusion
Date: 2013-06-19 07:02 pm (UTC)Re: Cold Fusion
Date: 2013-06-19 11:14 pm (UTC)