"Star Trek" Into Derivativeness (With Spoilers)

Spoilers for "Star Trek Into Darkness" ahead. Lots of them. I mean it.

Whatever happened to boldly going where no one has gone before?

Now, I understand wanting to bring back one of the most infamous villains of the "Star Trek" series. I understand all the song-and-dance about trying to keep him out of the marketing, and J.J. Abrams prevaricating around the bush about who Benedict Cumberbatch was actually playing. However, I cannot for the life of me understand why you wouldn't use the opportunity of the alternate timeline to do something different with Khan. I don't understand why we had to have such a shameless rehash of the ending of "Wrath of Khan," especially one that never had any hope of having remotely as much emotional impact as the original.

I have to wonder what viewers unfamiliar with "Wrath of Khan" thought of these developments, whether they bought Kirk's sacrifice instead of being distracted by the parallels to the previous film like I was. It was hard to watch what I consider one of the most iconic moments of the "Star Trek" films essentially turned into a cheap fake-out death akin to too many others in modern action films. Was the reversal of Kirk and Spock's roles clever? Not very, since that was a pretty obvious way to play it. I'd have been much more impressed if Khan switched sides and was the one who made the sacrifice, as he seems far more morally ambiguous in this timeline. Or if they really had been gutsy enough to kill off Captain Kirk and left Spock or Sulu in charge. However, the moment I saw that dead tribble, I knew they were just going through the motions. And there was way too much of the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, aren't-we-being-clever attitude, plus a totally unearned "KHAAAAAAAN!" callback.

I've heard the charge that J.J. Abrams and the team of writers he's working with do not understand "Star Trek," and I don't agree with that. I think they have a perfectly good grasp on the themes and the ideas at the heart of this franchise. The new versions of the characters are perfectly fine and worthy creations. The trouble is that "Star Trek Into Darkness" was obligated to be a summer blockbuster tentpole aimed at a mainstream audience. To that end, they seem to have banished all the brainier, more conceptually challenging ideas that make "Star Trek" distinctive. In the 2009 reboot, Abrams managed to introduce all these new characters and ideas at a breakneck pace, and that worked because it was a first outing, and you could get away with substituting potential for substance. Trying to repeat that trick failed, because it revealed that the creators weren't willing to explore any of these ideas that they were evoking in any real depth.

What really boggles me is that "Into Darkness" follows nearly the same beats as the first movie. You have Kirk introduced as a rebel, a massive crisis gives him a chance to prove himself, and then Spock and Kirk do some bonding. The difference is that this time Khan is the threat, reimagined as yet another in a long line of recent terrorist villains. I was also very aware that other than the fairly simple concepts of super-soldiers and cryogenics, there's nothing in "Into Darkness" that doesn't have obvious analogs to a typical non-science-fiction action movie, like "Mission: Impossible" or "James Bond." The 2009 reboot at least had parallel universes and time travel for us geeks, but "Into Darkness" takes special pains to avoid anything remotely complicated or nerdy.

Instead, it was lots of big action sequences, lots of fantastic eye-candy, and the obvious villains: Khan and a quick glimpse of the Klingons. I get that the writers were trying to pay homage to the series' roots, but this time out they leaned far too heavily on the mythology and didn't take the kind of creative chances that would have pushed the franchise forward. When you have this kind of talent involved, the possibilities are endless, and I thought that the success of the 2009 movie would have given Abrams and company the clout to do something more ambitious, instead of another generic action picture grafted to a replay of the last half of "Wrath of Khan."

I appreciate that the new "Star Trek" is a series of movies that can't operate the way that the old ones did, but tribbles and namedropping do not make a "Star Trek" movie, and I needed to see more effort. In the end, I found myself wishing for a new "Star Trek" series or miniseries featuring these versions of the characters, just so they could stop running and yelling and fighting long enough to have real conversations with each other, and maybe go on the kind of cheesy, but inspiring adventures that the old crew of the Enterprise used to.
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