Star Trek Into Backlash

Spoilers: Star Trek Into Darkness, Star Trek: Generations, Iron Man Three, The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Boy did I not see that coming.

Last summer, there was a picture called Star Trek Into Darkness.  I was in the UK when it opened a week before opening in the US, before there was much of an advance word on it from American critics.  I didn’t really have any particular expectations for it, having enjoyed but not loved the previous J.J. Abrams Trek film.  Upon seeing it, my response was what you might call ecstatic.  And I saw this as an opportunity to practice an aspect of film criticism that I had never before experienced: putting out my opinion of a film before knowing what other people think about it.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that many people did not share my opinion.  True, the general critical consensus on it was fairly positive, but a major part of my review was the opinion that unlike the 2009 film, Into Darkness was true to the spirit of Star Trek by combining an action-adventure with the kind of moral debate that usually defines the best of Star Trek.  Yet, a conference of Trek fans declared it to be the worst Star Trek film.  Yes, worse than Final Frontier and Generations (the one that killed Captain Kirk by having him fall off one of those standard movie rickety metal bridges; spoilers, I guess, for perhaps the lamest of all movie deaths).  Despite the positive critical opinion upon release, I think the general opinion on this film, particularly in the fan/nerd community, is negative.  Not just negative.  I get the sense that a lot of people really hate this movie.

Matt Singer already has a really good piece at The Dissolve revisiting this picture and charting the initial praise and backlash, so in some ways this piece might be a little redundant.  But this is as much about revisiting my own opinion as it is about revisiting the film.  I gave four stars to a film that so many people hate.  Essentially, the question is: did I blow it?

I would say: not really.  Looking at the picture again, I would not change my positive opinion of the film, but there definitely are parts of my review that I would change.  I think I was correct in assessing the picture’s quality as an entertainment, but thematically, I saw more in it than was really there.

Let’s start with what I got right: for about 90% of its running time, Star Trek Into Darkness is an exhilarating entertainment.  Much of this is probably due to the direction and Abrams’ constantly moving camera, which in the tumbling to the Earth set piece actually has a reason for all the tilting and whirling.  But loathe as most people are to giving credit to Orci, Kurtzman and Lindelof, their script gives the film a constant sense of mounting jeopardy and tension, something that definitely registered for me when it was released.

You see, another movie by the name of Iron Man Three came out just before Into Darkness, a movie with a celebrated/infamous twist.  At around two-thirds of the way through that film, the supposed villain known as the Mandarin, played by Ben Kingsley, is revealed to actually be an actor playing a character at the behest of a businessman played by Guy Pearce.  I feel pretty confident in saying that literally zero people in the world saw this twist coming.  In a time when we seem to know everything about a movie long before we see it, a lot of people celebrated the fact that Iron Man Three was able to pull off a twist like this.  And a lot of other people really hated it.

To be fair, most of this hate was kind of dumb, mostly along the lines of the old they-changed-it-from-the-source-material-it-sucks kind of thing.  But the thing is, I didn’t really care for the twist either.  In fact, I think it may have ruined the movie for me.  I have never read an Iron Man comic, so I could not care less about fidelity to the source material, and I like that Marvel took a big risk when it could have just coasted on fan adoration.  And the twist itself is fine: it’s a clever, funny moment that really did take me by surprise.

But the question that I want to ask people who really like the twist is this: did you enjoy the last third of Iron Man Three more than the first two-thirds?  Because I really did not.  There are lots of problems with that last section of the picture.  Everything feels rushed and perfunctory.  Tony Stark does not seem particularly concerned about Pepper: he knows that she’s in danger, but he’s still making all of his usual quippy remarks.  Even the celebrated airplane rescue happens so quickly that it lacks the sense of jeopardy that it could have had.  And the overarching problem is that there is a real lack of tension throughout this last act of the picture, which is disappointing considering how much tension and threat there is in most of the film.  And I do think the moment when the tension drops out of the picture was when the film replaced a villain who was generating a palpable sense of threat for most of the running time (the rest of the movie would not have functioned otherwise) with a character who was kind of boring.  I don’t really care about the twist.  What I care about is that the twist sucked all of the tension out of the film.

The other interesting thing about Iron Man Three’s twist is that it became a kind of rallying point against the J.J. Abrams Mystery Box.  Iron Man pulled off a big twist about its villain by not drawing a lot of attention to it in the marketing.  Whereas most of the marketing for Star Trek Into Darkness was centered around the mystery of who the villain was.  “Who is he?”  “We can’t tell you.”  “Is he Khan?”  “No.  Maybe.  We’re not telling.”  “It’s Khan, isn’t it?”  And so many people, myself included, went into Into Darkness knowing that the villain would be Khan.  To be fair, this may be indicative of the echo chamber of online film writing.  Just about everyone who writes or is obsessed with online film journalism knew that the villain would be Khan, but I know many people who were genuinely surprised in the theater.

The other oft-cited criticism of the Khan twist is that it has meaning for the audience, but not for the characters.  They have no reaction because his name has no meaning for them.  Fair enough.  And even though the reveal of Peter Weller’s Admiral Marcus as a villain does have meaning for the characters, it’s not exactly the most surprising twist.

But the key for me is that while Iron Man’s unexpected twist sucked the tension out of the film, the less unexpected twists in Star Trek Into Darkness almost always increased the tension and the sense of threat.  When Admiral Marcus arrives, when Kirk aligns with Khan, when Khan betrays Kirk, those may make the story convoluted, but they also raise the tension.  For an action-thriller, the sense of rising tension is paramount and I think it makes Star Trek Into Darkness a superior entertainment experience.

Now, there’s the question of whether or not the movie is something more than that.  Is it really a four-star movie worthy of comparison with the best of Star Trek?  Probably not as much as I thought at the time.

Again, I’ll start with what I think the film does well.  Since I decided that revealing Khan’s presence in the film would constitute a spoiler, I did not discuss the film’s relationship with The Wrath of Khan in my review.  The first thing to say is that no one is disputing that Wrath of Khan is a better film.  There are certain things that are just facts: the Earth revolves around the sun, William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, and Wrath of Khan is the best Star Trek movie.

And now that’s out of the way, I will argue that the reuse of much of Wrath of Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness is not actually a bad thing.  I get the sense that this is the primary reason that Into Darkness gets so much hate, particularly from Star Trek fans angered at the new series reusing some of the iconic moments from the best Trek film.  And when I heard that Khan would be the villain, I thought I would end up in agreement with everyone who objected.

But I don’t agree.  I think that the way Into Darkness uses these moments from Wrath of Khan is pretty interesting and actually introduces some science-fiction ideas into this space opera.  Recall that this new series is the result of time travel and that everything in this film takes place after time travel has already altered the past in the Star Trek canon.  Since Khan’s crew was already frozen before the events of the previous film, it would be reasonable to expect that the crew of the Enterprise would still encounter him.  Obviously, that is not reason enough to use the character again, but that’s not what I find interesting.  Originally, when the Enterprise encountered Khan, Spock ended up sacrificing his life to save the ship.  When they encounter Khan under different circumstances in this film, with the ship facing a problem that is similar but not exactly the same, Kirk is the one to sacrifice his life.

The key question that time travel stories almost always ask is: can you change the past?  In Harry Potter, you can’t change the past because everything that you do when you go back in time has already happened (Does that make sense?  No.  But I don’t think flyiiiiiinnnggg…).  The answer in Star Trek has always been that the past can be changed (as evidenced in “City on the Edge of Forever,” Voyage Home and First Contact), though usually it involves the past changing the future to something bad that the crew has to go back and fix.  Clearly the past changed in Star Trek (2009), but Into Darkness has what I think is a more interesting answer: you can change the past, but the past resists being changed.  Left to its own devices after a shift in time, the past will try to bring things back to the way they were before.  So when the crew of the Enterprise encounters Khan this time, Carol Marcus will still be there, the ship will still have a crippling problem with the warp drive and someone will still have to sacrifice himself to save everyone.  Things won’t be completely the same or completely different, but rather a strange, twisted version of the way things were supposed to be.

Continuing on this trajectory doesn’t exactly bode well for the future of the series.  I don’t particularly want all of the next ones to be reworkings of previous films or episodes (maybe Bones will be the new Gary Marshall or Spock will fight Scotty in the new “Amok Time”).  But on its own, I think Into Darkness presents an interesting idea of fate and time travel that makes it a worthy entry into the Star Trek canon.

But I do think the idea that I had of this film as an interesting political commentary is a bit of a stretch.  When I first saw it, I liked that it included a moral debate about how to respond to an act of terrorism and about the nature of Starfleet.  I love the moment when Scotty says that he’s scared about Starfleet becoming militaristic, and I like that Kirk’s decision to disobey the Admiral’s orders and not kill Khan is not just because Kirk likes breaking the rules but is instead an act of conscience.  It feels like the franchise is wrestling with itself after the militarism of the previous installment, which ends with Kirk and Spock murdering their first villain and his entire crew while they are helpless and defeated.  For Kirk and Spock, that is an act of revenge for the deaths of a father and a mother (and a planet), but the position of Into Darkness is that revenge is not worthy of a civilized society.

The film intends that position to be relevant for a modern American audience, and this is where things get tricky.  There are elements of the film that clearly stand out as allegorical.  The idea of using long range weapons to execute a suspected terrorist on foreign soil without a trial has a clear parallel with drone warfare.  And there is a dedication in the credits that I did not see the first time to “our post-9/11 veterans.”  Clearly, the film is supposed to be a commentary on 9/11 and the post-9/11 world.

I picked up on much of the allegorical aspects of the film on the first viewing, mainly the parallels with drone warfare, but after repeated viewings, I am finding myself less impressed.  Again, the sense of tension in the film is key here.  The highest point of tension is when Kirk enters the warp core as the ship is plummeting to Earth.  This is a moment when the marketing for this film actually aided the experience, as we had seen shots of a ship that looked like the Enterprise crashing into the bay.  The tension is released when the ship rises out of the clouds in a moment that I still think is terrific.  The movie keeps going, but from that point on, the rollercoaster ride is basically over.  You could say that the rest is icing on the cake, except in this case, icing means the destruction of San Francisco and the deaths of thousands of people.

I’ll be honest: I got really caught up in the rollercoaster ride of this movie.  Like I said above, I thought and still think that this is a really exciting entertainment, one of the most exhilarating that I saw last year.  So, after the Enterprise rose up from the clouds, I was in a kind of daze from the experience of the previous hour and forty-five minutes.  And because of that, I didn’t really notice the problems in the end of the film.

Let’s get something out of the way first.  A lot has been made of the fact (which I did not know when first seeing the film) that Roberto Orci (one of the screenwriters) is a 9/11 Truther, someone who thinks 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush Administration designed to start a war with Iraq (at least I think that’s what their beliefs are).  I don’t think the idea that the film is specifically a Truther allegory really holds up.  There are elements that sound like that and were probably the result of Orci’s involvement (the government doing secret, evil things in preparation for a war), but the details don’t quite match up.  If it was a Truther allegory, Admiral Marcus would have found a way to blame the Klingons for Khan’s actions rather than try to “inadvertently” start a war with them.  And the ending, where a hijacked flying object crashes into a city, was not deliberately designed by Admiral Marcus, but rather a result of Marcus aligning with an eventual terrorist in order to fight a superpower.  I don’t deny that the metaphor and the conspiratorial elements around it are probably due to Orci’s beliefs, but the ending functions as a metaphor for 9/11, not really for 9/11 as an inside job.  At least, I don’t really see it onscreen.

All that said, the ending of Star Trek Into Darkness is still problematic.  Quite simply, all of this should not be happening in the last 15 minutes of the picture.  A big 9/11 metaphor can’t be the icing on the cake.  When I first saw it, this scene didn’t really have an impact to it.  It was just another big spectacle on the screen.  That’s a problem.  Is that because we’re now desensitized to this kind of destruction, as so many of last year’s think pieces would have us believe?  Maybe, but for me, I think the problem was that it came after almost two hours of non-stop excitement that I felt had reached its peak and was nearly at the conclusion.  And it was nearly at the conclusion.  The film wants to have 9/11 happen and then have a calm, mature response to it all in its last fifteen minutes.  That doesn’t really work.

In Film Crit Hulk’s (I’m not going to bother explaining, but if you’re not reading him yet, get on it) epic analysis of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (another Orci and Kurtzman script, though I haven’t seen this one), he describes a similar problem with that film’s climax (spoilers for a decades-old comic that everyone knew was getting adapted this summer).  Apparently, Gwen Stacy’s death is the climax of the film, and that is followed by a short sequence in which Peter mourns her, considers quitting, and then decides to still be Spider-Man.  I haven’t seen the film, so I can’t judge it, but Hulk argues that this tries to provide a tidy resolution but doesn’t actually deal with her death in a meaningful way.  The same could be said for Star Trek Into Darkness, which wants to have a devastating climax and a resolution that deals with that climax in about 15 minutes.  It’s just not enough time to really do that.  Is this an Orci and Kurtzman thing, or is it indicative of a general belief that a big moment like Gwen Stacy’s death or the destruction of San Francisco needs to happen right at the end of the picture?  I think most of us would probably say that a film’s biggest moment should be the climax, but clearly there are instances where it should not be.

What happens in Star Trek Into Darkness is that the filmmakers try to cram all the themes into a speech at the very end: that Starfleet and the Star Trek series should not be so militaristic and that revenge is not the right response to tragedy.  I like that the film ends with those sentiments, but this where we come to the part that I do think I was wrong about.  I don’t really think that this film is optimistic anymore.  The main characters are people who don’t believe in taking revenge, and the film is meant to be an argument against vengeance (after all, that is the name of Marcus’ ship).  But that isn’t really borne out in the drama.  It’s meant to be, I’m sure.  Khan’s “superblood” is a way to allow Kirk to sacrifice himself and be resurrected, but it also engineers a way for the audience to root against the villain’s death, to root against taking revenge.  But when I was explaining to my dad why I like this movie, why I think that there is thematic resonance here, he made a very good point: they don’t take revenge by killing Khan, but they sure do like beating the crap out of him.  I think the film wants to be optimistic.  It wants to examine itself and come out with an idea of what Starfleet, the Star Trek series, America and the world should be.  But that doesn’t really work.

So the movie fumbles in its last 15 to 20 minutes.  That doesn’t make it a bad movie.  There are problems, but for the most part, it’s a very good picture.  There is some terrific filmmaking (the way the sweeping camera work and music combine in the fall to Earth scene is really thrilling and stirring), some gorgeous images of space (that hopefully promise good things for Star Wars Episode VII), and hints of some interesting ideas.  So what if it isn’t actually a great, four-star movie?  Why have I written more than three thousand words on this already?

Because I’ve really been thinking that I need to change the way I view blockbuster cinema.  You see, I believe in popular art.  I believe in the category that includes Dante, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, and Christopher Nolan.  I believe in the idea that art can have a profound emotional effect on a wide audience of people.  But it’s taken me a bit too long to realize that I don’t believe in the blockbuster.

So what is this about?  It’s about understanding that most blockbusters are not going to be great movies, that The Fellowship of the Ring, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Empire Strikes Back and Jaws are the exceptions, not the rule.  This isn’t about lowering my standards, but rather about raising them.  I think that expecting too much of blockbusters has also allowed me to be too impressed by ones that have elements of greatness, but don’t quite follow through on those elements.  This is about making sure that I still maintain my standards, but also recognize that it might not be fair for me to demand that Star Trek Into Darkness be a great movie, to put it on a pedestal where it doesn’t belong just because part of me is very ready to believe that a mainstream action/adventure movie can be that good.  You see, that high of experiencing a truly great work of popular art is really something.  I think it’s because popular art is more focused on emotions, so when an entertainment picture achieves an extraordinary emotional power, and is also thought-provoking or challenging or thematically overwhelming, there’s nothing better.  That’s something extraordinary, and it’s not something that happens all the time, but sometimes, I probably allow myself to think it has happened when it actually hasn’t.

And I found myself thinking about this when Cannes was happening a few weeks ago.  I saw that Winter Sleep won the Palme D’Or, and I remembered how much I loved Once Upon a Time in Anatolia a few years ago.  And then I thought about how this blog that I named “Esoteric” has been sitting here for a year with an overly enthusiastic piece about a big blockbuster sitting at the top.  So I thought about this piece, and I watched some movies, and I realized that I shouldn’t be demanding that blockbusters be like The Dark Knight.  I should be demanding that they be like Edge of Tomorrow.  They should be compelling.  They should be exciting.  They should have characters I care about.  They should have interesting ideas.  Really, that should be what I demand from all films.  All films are worthy of analysis, and all films have the potential to be great.  Most won’t be great, and that shouldn’t stop us from analyzing their problems.  But simple as it may sound, sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s ok for a movie to just be very good.  Star Trek Into Darkness is not actually a great movie.  But it is very good.