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This is inspired my rewatching the first reboot movie from 2009. I haven't seen anyone talking about this recently but - does anyone else remember all the discussions about how it lifted heavily from the Wrath of Khan? The villain with a longstanding personal vendetta? Eric Bana screwing up his pretty tattooed face and screaming "SPOOOOOOOOOOOCK!" at the camera? His all-consuming desire for revenge? No? No one else remembers thinking "Nero is New!Spock's Khan!"?
Khan, and Ricardo Montalban's portrayal of him, lends a lot of the emotional power to the original movie - his desire revenge and anger are believable and even understandable. We get that from Nero, or at least they tried to give it to us that same sense of time depth. They have the same dead wife, they have the same mind-altering brainslugs. They have the same suicidally loyal crew, willing to die to support their leaders revenge, which is meant to stand in for their own revenge. There is a lot of cribbing going on! They lifted a lot of the key elements from the original, but then they made something new with them. I really liked it a lot, although I can also recognize its flaws. It was an interesting way of linking that meta-past with the new direction for the franchise.
In the new movie, they're picking picking the corpse of the Wrath of Khan for whatever else is left. So they give us characters - Khan and Carol Marcus... or they at least give us people with their names. The relationships the characters have with Khan are very different and the character they have created for Cumberbatch is interesting and tricksy (I still am trying to sort out his plans and motivations based on his actions as opposed to what he tells people - I don't think the characters ever really understand what all was going on around them) but without that emotional depth, why bother having him be Khan? It's cheap, espeically since they spend a good portion of the movie telling us he is someone else. But they give us other things as well - the space seeds from the original episode, Bones' torpedo surgery, some other little nods here and there. They give us an inversion of one of the most powerful scenes that the Star Trek franchise has ever produced. But they have already taken so much out of the original movie and used it elsewhere that there isn't enough left there to support what they're presenting. We have a brief Spock Prime cameo to call back to the original sacrifice, but we don't have the same history for the characters, and it didn't work for me: not as an inversion, not as a remix. It isn't *just* that they took the scene and are whoring it out for its emotional cachet, it failed to convince me that the responses of the character they have created in their new universe were resonable or nearly as meaningful for them. My big problem is that I don't see any of Spock's influence in Kirk's actions whatsoever, so the big "I did what you would have done" element falls flat on its face. Lacking that emotional connection, I'm less forgiving of the movie's flaws.
And that's not even getting into the things the second movie cribs from the first. Rewatching the 2009 reboot, I had to facepalm at the dramatic shot of the enterprise rising out of the rings of Saturn. They even acknowledge their repetition in the scene of Kirk and Khan flying over to the Vengeance (please forgive me if I am remebering the name wrong >.>)
This is not to say that I hated the movie, or that everything in it was terrible. I did like Cumberbatch, though it is hard to accept that he was really Khan. I will just go stand in the corner with the other people whose headcanon says otherwise - I know I am not alone! And I will hope that if they make another one, they can maybe try a little harder to stand on their own feet and come up with something more original that Star Trek II IV. For now, I will just grab my console and look over at the original writers to tell them, with my dying breath that "Yours....is....superior."
Khan, and Ricardo Montalban's portrayal of him, lends a lot of the emotional power to the original movie - his desire revenge and anger are believable and even understandable. We get that from Nero, or at least they tried to give it to us that same sense of time depth. They have the same dead wife, they have the same mind-altering brainslugs. They have the same suicidally loyal crew, willing to die to support their leaders revenge, which is meant to stand in for their own revenge. There is a lot of cribbing going on! They lifted a lot of the key elements from the original, but then they made something new with them. I really liked it a lot, although I can also recognize its flaws. It was an interesting way of linking that meta-past with the new direction for the franchise.
In the new movie, they're picking picking the corpse of the Wrath of Khan for whatever else is left. So they give us characters - Khan and Carol Marcus... or they at least give us people with their names. The relationships the characters have with Khan are very different and the character they have created for Cumberbatch is interesting and tricksy (I still am trying to sort out his plans and motivations based on his actions as opposed to what he tells people - I don't think the characters ever really understand what all was going on around them) but without that emotional depth, why bother having him be Khan? It's cheap, espeically since they spend a good portion of the movie telling us he is someone else. But they give us other things as well - the space seeds from the original episode, Bones' torpedo surgery, some other little nods here and there. They give us an inversion of one of the most powerful scenes that the Star Trek franchise has ever produced. But they have already taken so much out of the original movie and used it elsewhere that there isn't enough left there to support what they're presenting. We have a brief Spock Prime cameo to call back to the original sacrifice, but we don't have the same history for the characters, and it didn't work for me: not as an inversion, not as a remix. It isn't *just* that they took the scene and are whoring it out for its emotional cachet, it failed to convince me that the responses of the character they have created in their new universe were resonable or nearly as meaningful for them. My big problem is that I don't see any of Spock's influence in Kirk's actions whatsoever, so the big "I did what you would have done" element falls flat on its face. Lacking that emotional connection, I'm less forgiving of the movie's flaws.
And that's not even getting into the things the second movie cribs from the first. Rewatching the 2009 reboot, I had to facepalm at the dramatic shot of the enterprise rising out of the rings of Saturn. They even acknowledge their repetition in the scene of Kirk and Khan flying over to the Vengeance (please forgive me if I am remebering the name wrong >.>)
This is not to say that I hated the movie, or that everything in it was terrible. I did like Cumberbatch, though it is hard to accept that he was really Khan. I will just go stand in the corner with the other people whose headcanon says otherwise - I know I am not alone! And I will hope that if they make another one, they can maybe try a little harder to stand on their own feet and come up with something more original that Star Trek II IV. For now, I will just grab my console and look over at the original writers to tell them, with my dying breath that "Yours....is....superior."
contemplative
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