It’s hard to say Into Darkness is the worst Trek movie when there are other far shoddier films, boring in ways devoid of ambition, but it’s certainly the Trek film that most thinks Trek is lame and for nerdy losers.
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It had its flaws, but Cumberbatch was terrifying and the score was on-point. I defy you to look up Ode to Harrison and not have that playing in your head reading the news these days.
It's more an unearned Wrath of Khan. The point of WoK is that Khan had a deep, personal reason to hate Kirk. ID should have ended with Khan and Kirk as allies who respected each other with maybe Kirk putting Khan and crew on some nice world (with hidden dangers) to set up actual JJverse WoK.
I remember a parent-teacher evening when I was in elementary school when they put on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (i.e., ST1) in the kids room because "it's a space ship movie and the kids all like that Star Wars" 🤣🤣🤣
How could the movie that gave us, among other things, "Spock would absolutely beat a man to death with his bare hands while in a blind rage" possibly think that Star Trek is lame?
The story doesn't even work unless you go in knowing Space Seed and TWOK.
On a side note, my favorite TWOK moment was watching Wag the Dog, when the producer at the end talked about making Moby Dick "from the point of view of the whale" and I realized that TWOK was *that* movie.
Disagree. The nerds are the ones who can’t get past a reimagined version of that story. I’d even go as far as to say that Into Darkness is one of the best Star Trek movies. Now Beyond… that was pretty lame. Still, fun to watch and not nearly as crappy as Star Trek V, a true disaster.
I disagree. Beyond is the best of the three Kelvin films. Also I don't give a crap about the "re-imagined" element, I don't have some deep childhood love for Wrath of Khan, I didn't see it until I was 30, I take umbrage with Orci's script arguing peace is for cowards and pussies.
I absolutely love the casting for those NuTrek films. I don’t think any of those characters could have been cast better. Likewise the visual aspects of the ships, the tech, and SFX. However, the writing and direction is just so gawdawful that after seeing them each once, I’ve never rewatched them.
Okay I stand corrected. I did not like Cumberbatch in that role. Probably because the writing was atrocious that when it turned out he was Khan my eyes rolled so far back in my head I had to leave the theater and seek an optometrist.
I hate it for being a bleak, pathetic attempt at commentary on post-9/11 militarization. I hate it for its blatant callbacks that are there as scraps fed backhandedly to franchise fans. I hate it because so much of it recycles the action and emotional beats of the first movie.
All the Trek movies since 2009 have the feeling of being actively in-dialog with the fans and the property. The older movies duds and all felt more like stories within a setting. That said Into Darkness certainly is “the most” in a lot of ways.
This was me, as well. I did not want them to do Khan. It felt like the lamest of studio demands. But I still left entertained cause I love this cast. It sucks we’ve only had 3 films with them…
It’s great, especially in context of the other movies. Some of these edge lords need to be forced to watch Star Trek V on a loop, Clockwork Orange style.
For STNG the absolute worst move was Insurrection. Just awful! For STOS it was Undiscovered Country. The effect in this one were as laughable as the plot. For Kelvin it’s Beyond. Dopey characters, ridiculous all around. The Beastie Boys music gimmick is played out!! Please stop.
Funny, that's my favorite Trek film. Tight, smart, nostalgic without being slavish, the action has purpose in the storyline rather than just spectacle, there's narrative tension, and man did they nail the use of lens flares.
Into Darkness isn’t the worst Trek movie by technical standards, but it might be the one most ashamed of Star Trek. It trades wonder for spectacle, philosophy for posturing—like a cover band that knows all the chords but doesn’t understand the music.
What really gets to me, because I initially enjoyed it but am suffering from diminishing returns of enjoyment. What bothers me is there are moments where the actual heart shone through. The few moments when it's about our humanity and the Philo of our own morality.
i have the least patience for stuff that takes the source material and assumes you must hate it, so they made a "cool" version that they can use to sell doritos.
I love the Pine, Quinto cast. I love these movies and do not require them to be anything more. I love TNG, Voyager Discovery, Lower Decks, the OG series, all of it! These movies lift my spirit every watch.
Same. I’ve loved ST since TOS and TAS. The new films are great (well… Beyond? 😂) I can’t believe these films get so much hate with the history of Star Trek.
I was really enjoying SNW (and Disco, for the record) but they moved them both onto Paramount+ and I'm annoyed because I'm not paying for a third streaming service, sorry.
i do agree, but it’s also one of the few films that i walked away from about 45 minutes into, so i dunno. it just didn’t work for me, either as a trek piece or as a film in general.
IMHO, it’s the easiest, because it has Abrams’s traditional ‘do the most fan servicey thing he can imagine even if it makes zero sense, wasn’t earned, and is completely out of left field’ thing. The other terrible Trek movies are just boring. ID is actively hostile to the idea of plot.
Into Darkness wasn't the best plot-wise but at least it was enjoyable, unlike Insurrection which is possibly the only film I've ever fallen asleep while watching for the first time
Even the shoddy Treks still function as *films*. Into Darkness was the result of people trying to combine Wrath of Khan with The Dark Knight while having zero understanding of how either of those films *worked*. Just mashed them together in a "beloved movie + popular movie = Hyperprofitable" belief
I can live with shoddy. Shoddy can still tell a fun story or show some heart. As bad as V was it had a few good characters scenes.
Into Darkness just refused to engage with Star Trek as a concept and replaced it with naked cynicism. It felt like a deliberately edgy early noughties fanfic.
Its hard to say Into Darkness is the worst Star Trek movie in a world where Section 31 exists. Beyond that, I find little to commend it. Its probably worse than Final Frontier, maybe slightly better than Nemesis.
My toxic trait is thinking that if Nemesis was executed differently, it would have been one of the best Trek movies. The building blocks are all there for a thoughtful exploration of nature/nurture, how environment shapes a person, radical empathy, morality, and legacy. But.
Not surprising since one of the writers was Robert Orci aka Alex Jones's bestie. Explains the "WOLF 359 WAS AN INSIDE JOB! WAKE UP TRIBBLES!" nature of the plot.
Hahaha, wait... I never saw this movie, but early Lower Decks had a gag with a one-off conspiracist character who literally says the sentence "Wolf 359 was an inside job". That was funny at face value, but I had no idea there was actual Trek media which seriously argued that. Incredible.
It's a joke I've been making since Into Darkness came out. Not literally the plot of the movie, but it's all about how Starfleet is full of deep state infiltrators using false flags while conspiring with the Federation's enemies. Basically an allegory for all of the Infowars bullshit Jones spews.
Funnily enough, The Undiscovered Country also had those plot elements, but pulled it off so much more elegantly, probably because the false flags they attempted were targeted assassinations instead of space 9/11.
Yeah, they hadn't even finished getting the victims to the hospital after the Boston marathon bombing before Orci was tweeting how it was a false flag. Also, unsurprisingly, accused of sexual harassment.
Ok but hot take: the Frakes and Sirtis's commentary track for it is just two friends catching up and chatting about various Trek memories. It's adorable and more than makes up for that fact that Insurrection is playing at the same time.
I do appreciate how dumb the plot to Into Darkness is:
We're so peaceful now we couldn't figure out warship. So we unfreeze a war criminal who's understanding of technology is 300 years out of date so he can advise us "makes ship bigger, put more gun on!"
Then man escape. Sad.
Shooty time! Weeeeee!
It's also the Trek film that basically went mask off on it's naked nostalgia milking. That and the "hey we cured death with Khan's blood but let's never mention this absolutely amazing medical advancement EVER AGAIN."
In Star Trek people do what they want to for a job, so as soon as they publicly said "this guy's blood can cure death, but we can't Replicate it for some reason" you would have a thousand biology nerds working on making the right proteins etc. to develop a process to artificially reproduce it.
Star Trek as a franchise just got handed to a bunch of preppy rich kids who dont really "love" or "hate" anything, they just want to be 'real writers', so they go into the job their daddy lined up for them and produce scripts that resemble what they have seen others do in a cargo cult way.
Nerdy losers as a target demo? Please! Everyone knows that nerdy winners is where the real money is! Unhinged passion plus untapped large disposable income is a heckuva combo!
The shoddier films still have a sense of star trek’s optimism to an extent, even if they are shoddily made. Into Darkness leans so much into a sense of nihilistic anger that it really feels like it hates the fact that it’s a star trek film
Final Frontier is the most "what could have been" Star Trek film because it probably had the most interesting concept but legally had to be directed by William Shatner during the 1989 writers strike.
It could have been the best one with a competent director and more time on the script.
I’m gonna defend Shatner here, I think the first act shows he actually has a good directors eye for visuals, he just isn’t good at budgeting to make the final two acts or being able to fight his way out of a broad characterised script.
I think his cinematography is fine, yes, but he struggles in the editing room and got very lazy when it came to things like redressing the TNG sets at all.
But it also has the problem of trying to be an action movie with a story that is entirely personally introspective.
I think Nemesis most fits Dan's criteria, as it *was* made by a director who thinks Trek is nerdy bullshit for losers—whereas JJ *is* a nerd... but for things like Star Wars. At least his first Trek film had pulpy fun.
I do have a Nemesis headcanon that sort of fits. If you imagine Sela off camera manipulating events it starts to make sense
- how the Remans obtained power and starships
- why the Romulan senate is assassinated
- where Picards DNA was harvested
- and why the Romans suddenly switched sides
Peter Weller makes it watchable, but I do think it's the worst Star Trek movie. I think it is actually the least ambitious movie, and that's saying a lot, because Insurrection has never even heard of the term.
Not every Star Trek episode was about an angry man with a grudge against the Federation out to specifically destroy the Enterprise and San Francisco. I'm just saying.
Same pattern as Star Wars IX. The same director follows up an energetic if derivative reboot with a sequel that all but remakes earlier glories instead of doing anything remotely new.
I honestly believe that 5 is the worst one. Spock's never before mentioned brother shows up, takes over the Enterprise with a bunch of hippie cultists and takes the ship to meet "God".
ST:TNG should have reconned the movie to that having been an exiled Q and it would've made it better.
I did not, but out of all of them, I think 5 was the worst, followed by Generations. They literally made a movie just to put Kirk and Picard together on screen, but 5 was an honest-to-God (no pun intented) attempt to make a real movie which completely blew balls.
I loved it as an angry teen atheist seeing a Klingon bird of prey blow the shit out of "god," but even setting aside its problems there are some genuinely great moments in there - the command crew trying to camp, and Kirk's rejection of Sybok's healing because "I need my pain." Shame about the rest.
Not to say the movies don't have good parts, but as a whole, the movie was not good. I'll agree with you on those parts. The campsite scenes were the best part of the whole movie.
Nemesis was so forgettable that I forgot it even existed until seeing your comment. Eric Bana as a Romulan, right? That's all I got in the memory bank.
Yes, it's the first of the JJ. Abrams' movies that creates an alternate timeline. Into Darkness was the second, Beyond was the third. They are still talking about making a fourth one, but that's most likely never gonna happen now.
It's got some interesting themes of nurture vs. nature and also Dina Meyer as a Romulan commander, but sadly it was made at the point where Pickard is just a full-on bland action hero.
I thought 2009 Star Trek was so bad I wanted to walk out and the only reason I didn't is because I was preparing to ship out to Iraq and being on a Navy base in San Diego seemed worse than watching a terrible movie
Star Trek V was also, cheesy as it was, a perfectly serviceable original series Star Trek plot. "Enterprise meets godlike being that turns out to be evil".
Into Darkness was a film aimed at people who vaguely remembered Wrath of Khan but otherwise don't like Star Trek.
I think Insurrection is actually the most infuriating Star Trek film, but Into Darkness is the film that most gives me the sensation of "what are we doing here?"
Like even other films that are worse in a variety of ways, I can at least see that there's some idea behind them.
I’ve think Into Darkness could’ve been so much better had the film actually killed Pine’s Kirk, and had ended with Quinton’s Spock in command. This would have been ballsy but would’ve engrossed me for the next film. Instead we got a lame Deux Ex Machina w/ Khan’s blood 😒 & I didn’t care about Beyond
I mean, the decision to make Star Trek an action-comedy was pretty wild, considering if there are two things Star Trek wasn't great at, it was action and comedy. Making it a cozy murder series would have made more sense.
GOD, did i get it backwards? is it that he really wanted to work on star wars so he made a shitty trek movie, and then he made a shitty star wars movie
Into Darkness was one of the first times I left the theater angry. Undoing the entire movie in the last 15 minutes was just a huge "fuck you", far before I had time to process everything else that was wrong with it.
When a franchise lives long enough and spits out enough iterations of itself, it will eventually abandon the sentiments that drew you too it when the sentiments of your era of the franchise spoke to you.
It is certainly the definitive example of why you should never allow JJ to make a follow-up to one of his films, Rise of the Skywalker being the other (though in fairness, that movie also had Disney meddling all over it).
I rewatched FRINGE over the summer. J. J. Abrams reminds me of a SV con man. Lots of promise up front, lots of hype, absolute failure on delivery because the point was never to make something good, it was to make something that makes money.
Fair enough, though Lost also had it's own little disaster (they originally wanted to end it with s4, but then the writer's strike happened).
I think that having JJ do a nostalgic hat-tip and then doing something new with the sequel was the right move. What Last Jedi needed was a proper sequel.
I could possibly have enjoyed the film more as just another Kelvin Timeline Trek film, rather than a clunky, ham-fisted shoe-horning of the "The Wrath of Khan" into Abramstrek behind a veil of "we all agree this is a mystery, right?" Kelvin timeline is already a meh for me, but ST:ID wasn't good.
I still think it’s wild that no one was talking about how Space Quest XII: Vohaul’s Revenge II accurately predicted Star Trek XII: The Wrath of Khan II 20 years prior.
That films most defining moment, is when test audiences clearly told them that Khan was too sympathetic and so they had Kirk phone up Nemoy to tell the audience Khan is definitely a wrongun.
It's awful. The big reveal that Harrison is Khan is meaningless as there is no Khan backstory in this timeline. So the shock is a) entirely for the audience, and b) not very shocking because it was obvious.
And yes, we're all grown up and groovy and mature and here's Alice Eve in her pants.
Don't forget they had to have the whole Old Spock Skype call just so he can set the stakes by saying "oh yeah Khan's a really bad dude, like so bad".
Also tribbles cure death.
The tribble thing is telegraphed so far in advance that even if you somehow made me care about the death scene (which I don’t because this Kirk and Spock have been on screen together for maybe 4 hours, in half of which they hated each other), you already showed me the undo button. It means nothing.
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While it probably is the worst trek movie as far as objective quality, I still like it better than the last two Abramsverse movies.
You have a whole galaxy to explore in this new timeline.
…Let’s (badly) remake Star Trek II!
In hindsight, I think they hated us. And... Fair enough.
The rest of the new Star Trek movies tho are BOOO.
And the role reversal death? 🤮
On a side note, my favorite TWOK moment was watching Wag the Dog, when the producer at the end talked about making Moby Dick "from the point of view of the whale" and I realized that TWOK was *that* movie.
I fucking hate STID.
-Good vfx
-Karl Urban as Bones
-Peter Weller
It didn't bore me as much as The Motion Picture, though. I fell asleep the first time I watched it.
really didn't like was section 31.
Additionally my favourite trek series so far has been SNW ,
cant wait to see next series as it ticks all the boxes for me 💕😊
It being an allegory for 9/11 being an inside job makes me dislike it a lot more.
Into Darkness just refused to engage with Star Trek as a concept and replaced it with naked cynicism. It felt like a deliberately edgy early noughties fanfic.
And it deserved too.
We're so peaceful now we couldn't figure out warship. So we unfreeze a war criminal who's understanding of technology is 300 years out of date so he can advise us "makes ship bigger, put more gun on!"
Then man escape. Sad.
Shooty time! Weeeeee!
"A double dumbass on you!"
You're right, the movie hated it's audience.
Then, we also have to consider Nemesis. This too has rather large built in flaws, and is clearly the worst of the Next Generation series.
But of the Kelvin timeline. Yes its bad.
It could have been the best one with a competent director and more time on the script.
But it also has the problem of trying to be an action movie with a story that is entirely personally introspective.
- how the Remans obtained power and starships
- why the Romulan senate is assassinated
- where Picards DNA was harvested
- and why the Romans suddenly switched sides
Which is the plot to Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan.
Which is the plot to every Star Trek movie since Star Trek III the Search for Spock.
After posting I IMMEDIATELY went, "WAIT! NO! THE VOYAGE HOME!!"
ST:TNG should have reconned the movie to that having been an exiled Q and it would've made it better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLzJAebfEIg&ab_channel=SocraticBass
Abrams clearly wanted to do Star Wars instead so it makes sense his movies were off the mark, even if I did have fun with them.
Star Trek 2009 is great, though.
In Darkness, Spock asks Spock Prime how they beat Khan and Spock Prime answers off-screen but apparently says "someone has to die in the warp core".
Wut?
Into Darkness was a film aimed at people who vaguely remembered Wrath of Khan but otherwise don't like Star Trek.
Like even other films that are worse in a variety of ways, I can at least see that there's some idea behind them.
if you told me he has only watched an abridged TOS that was just whenever a phaser fired i would believe it
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/may/07/jj-abrams-interview-star-trek
It is an eventuality.
He's why hipsters are right to call out sellouts.
I think that having JJ do a nostalgic hat-tip and then doing something new with the sequel was the right move. What Last Jedi needed was a proper sequel.
But Final Frontier? That's not only the worst Star Trek movie. It's the worst movie.
And yes, we're all grown up and groovy and mature and here's Alice Eve in her pants.
Also tribbles cure death.
"Look Mister, so are about 20 million other guys. You're going to have to narrow that down."