“Star Trek Into Darkness” Delivers Conflicting Emotions. Very Un-Vulcan-like.

[Full SPOILERS Below]

After months of waiting, with J.J. Abrams giving out information excruciatingly slowly so as to increase anticipation, Stark Trek Into Darkness finally arrived in theaters this past weekend.  The previous movie in the Trek-reboot universe was hugely successful, and this new installment had the chance to top it and provide an even more entertaining experience.  But did it?

Hoo boy.

Spoilers after the jump!

There are parts of this movie I really loved, but the parts that I didn’t continue to grow, and they are grating on me so much that it’s starting to make me think that this movie was more bad than good.

First off, what did I like? Zachary Quinto provided another great performance as Spock. You’d think no one could be more Spock than Leonard Nimoy, but Quinto delivers the cold logic like he’s been playing the role since the 1960’s.  Karl Urban again is like the reincarnation of DeForest Kelley, as his performance as Bones is so spot-on perfect and never strays into imitation.

The bits of humor were great, especially as you knew this was going to be a dark movie.

Umm….

Okay, honestly, there were parts I really liked about this, but I gotta switch to the other stuff.  The stuff the fanboy Doesn’t Want To Talk About.  But we have to.

Star Trek Into Darkness was lazy writing punctuated by some good character moments in between huge portions dialogue and scenes that jumped over the line of heartfelt homage into blatant rip offs, trying to tug at the Star Trek fans’ heartstrings who fondly remember what some consider the pinnacle of Trek movies: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Look, I get what Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof were going for, and we can probably lump in J.J. into that group as well.  Trek fans almost universally loved The Wrath of Khan (which will abbreviated TWoK), so why not put some of that in the new Star Trek 2?  I can accept that thanks to the new timeline established in the first movie, events may play out differently, and they certainly did — it wasn’t Kirk and crew to discover the Botany Bay; it was Starfleet Admiral Roboco– Marcus who did. And sure, I can buy them wanting to up their military power, so why not tap into the eugenically-enhanced powers of Khan?

Kirk’s death scene, which I admit had me going for a second, mirrored the famous lines we heard in TWoK. And if they had stopped there, we would have been fine.  Quinto’s tears felt genuine, and I actually was so moved I thought they might actually kill Kirk, which would have been one hell of a way to boldly go into the future.  So, I was on the fence here, but I probably would have been okay with these call backs.

(The funny thing is is that I totally geeked out after one of the preview trailers showed the scene of Kirk and Spock trying to touch hands through the glass wall.  I got shivers from the call back to TWoK. Little did I know that 1) they were going to go all out on the call backs and 2) I and others did not need another TWoK.)

But then.  The scene that has been mocked countless times since 1982 and has been part of Internet memes almost since the first meme was published.

Spock yelling “KHAAAAAAAAAAANN!!!!!”

And that was it. That took me right out of the scene, and instantly I figured out how this was going to play out. Earlier in the movie, Bones injected a Tribble – okay, yet another instance of fan service — with Khan’s blood.

Wait.  Since when does Khan’s blood have magical powers?  JJ and Crew are making stuff up.  If you’re going to make Benedict your Khan, if you’re going to say everything  we saw knew about Khan from the Original Series is true, then don’t make that up.

And from there the entire movie starts unraveling   Suddenly, you’ve got too much fan service awkwardly jammed into a movie that’s still trying to do its own thing, a product of sloppy writing and editting. And this haphazard script is now making you aware of even more problems — like why does Carol Marcus have an English accent? How does a spaceship even work underwater?  Why would it be underwater in the first place?

Now, in this new Trek universe, you have magical blood that can bring people back from the dead, all thanks to this guy called Khan.

I don’t buy it.

If we accept magical blood, all they had to do was make him not Khan. Make him some new super soldier that Starfleet was working on, and suddenly, things get better, because it’s a new character, not some hybrid of old/new timeline Trek that the writers are desperately trying to merge together and hope you don’t notice the seams.

Oh, yeah, and even though knowledge of Old Spock’s existence was kind of a secret, Young Spock just dials him up on New Vulcan for the entire Enterprise bridge to see.

Yeah.

“Remember, I said I couldn’t tell you about your future. “Oka–” “Khan’s not a nice guy. Go get him.”

Fan service, once again.  There was no need for Spock (who seemed to have gotten younger since the first movie) to appear, except J.J. and crew wanted him in there.

Oy.

I really wanted to love this movie. I had high hopes for it after all the build-up. I walked out of Iron Man 3 wanting to immediately go see it again (unlike River), but I walked out of Star Trek Into Darkness getting madder the more I thought about it.

Let’s hope the writers for Star Wars: Episode VII do better than Orci, Kurtzman and Lindelof.