Amy Hennig and Naughty Dog Part Ways

[Merus]

For what it's worth, I recall that Black was seen as a left-field choice at the time.

[Architecture]

I do not have the energy to address your write-up wholesale but suffice it to say that I essentially disagree with everything your wrote.

 

The opening scene is meant to be awesome. It's meant to get you pumped. Awesome people doing stuff in space, yeah. It's also meant to efficiently set up the strained morale of the Enterprise's crew. Kirk is painted as a cocksure captain with an unearned swagger. His crew is insubordinate. Personal relations are clouding professional ones. If the first film was getting the band together, then the sequel is about earning trust and building lasting relationships.

 

Pike's death is there for gravitas: the sudden loss of the father Kirk never had. It gives our hero purpose, and it gives our narrative a spine--Kirk will catch Pike's assassin, regardless of cost.

 

Khan is meant to be sympathetic--he's an enigmatic terrorist with a hidden malevolence. Admiral Marcus is a stand-in for General McChrystal, hawkish Cold War politicking and the Military Industrial Complex at large. Scotty isn't on the Enterprise because Kurtzman & Orci needed him aboard the Vengeance at the start of the third act.

 

There are plenty of criticisms you can levy at this film--what happened to the science in my Trek?--and I agree that the ending is a bit bloated, but this is a smartly-constructed script. I'm sure Syd Field, rest his soul, would agree.

[Gormongous]

Khan is meant to be sympathetic--he's an enigmatic terrorist with a hidden malevolence.

 

Khan's plan makes no sense, though. He attacks Starfleet headquarters and then flees into enemy territory under the assumption that a ship, captained by someone he's never met, will load itself with the long-range torpedoes that contain his people and then choose to violate orders in order to travel to the enemy planet itself so he can allow himself to be captured, gain control of his people, and then take over Admiral Robocop's ship? It is a very bad thing for the script if I as the audience never fully know, let alone understand, all of the villain's plan at any point in the movie.

 

Really, this is the problem with all of Lindelof's scripts, they churn out this enigmatic fog that allows everything to happen exactly how it has to happen for the movie to go from awesome setpiece to awesome setpiece with as little audience backfill as possible. I think Chris Pine gets too much flak, because his Kirk is quite competent, but it's laughable how much gravitas the penultimate scene with Kirk in the reactor asks us to credit it, because the callbacks to The Wrath of Khan are totally unearned. We've spent the entire movie watching characters, even Spock, make sudden, uninformed decisions that don't coalesce into any sort of distinctive character for anyone. Kirk is brash and impulsive, Spock is cold and impulsive, Scotty is goofy and impulsive, Bones is grumpy and impulsive, Uhura is clever and impulsive. Without cowboys charging around doing dumb shit, Lindelof's script doesn't hold together, so since this is nominally an ensemble piece, everyone has to be a cowboy charging around doing dumb shit. I found the entire movie almost unwatchable, up to the point that Spock won by punching the bad guy (how is this a satisfying conclusion to his character arc) and then saving Kirk with the superblood (but not anyone else, of course).

 

Anyway, we have a Movies/TV thread for this conversation.

[Frenetic Pony]

I do not have the energy to address your write-up wholesale but suffice it to say that I essentially disagree with everything your wrote.

 

The opening scene is meant to be awesome. It's meant to get you pumped. Awesome people doing stuff in space, yeah. It's also meant to efficiently set up the strained morale of the Enterprise's crew. Kirk is painted as a cocksure captain with an unearned swagger. His crew is insubordinate. Personal relations are clouding professional ones. If the first film was getting the band together, then the sequel is about earning trust and building lasting relationships.

 

Pike's death is there for gravitas: the sudden loss of the father Kirk never had. It gives our hero purpose, and it gives our narrative a spine--Kirk will catch Pike's assassin, regardless of cost.

 

Khan is meant to be sympathetic--he's an enigmatic terrorist with a hidden malevolence. Admiral Marcus is a stand-in for General McChrystal, hawkish Cold War politicking and the Military Industrial Complex at large. Scotty isn't on the Enterprise because Kurtzman & Orci needed him aboard the Vengeance at the start of the third act.

 

There are plenty of criticisms you can levy at this film--what happened to the science in my Trek?--and I agree that the ending is a bit bloated, but this is a smartly-constructed script. I'm sure Syd Field, rest his soul, would agree.

 

The opening isn't a huge deal either to me. It's silly enough and whatever.

 

The problem with Pike's death is that he's barely in the movie at all. I know what its there for, but it's a really badly done Obi Wan. Obi Wan was with you for a long time in A New Hope, he was a badass and likeable and a main character. So when he dies it really means something to the audience, it means that we feel bad for Luke and that Vader is established as a credible threat and a guy we don't like.

 

Here Pike's barely onscreen before he's dead, and that's the problem. The only reason he's there, the only thing he does, is die.

 

I also know why Scotty isn't on the Enterprise, but that's my point. He's not on it because Deus Ex Machina, he needs to be somewhere else for the plot. They literally couldn't come up with an actual reason for him to go off, which I would've been fine with if they had, they just kinda wave him away.

 

I also get that the Admiral is supposed to be an archetype, but he never DOES anything. He shows up to gloat for a few minutes, blows up half the enterprise (again, how many times do they rebuild the damned ship?) and then promptly dies. The audience needs a more emotional connection to all of this. They need to see him go out and do evil things in general to root against him.

 

I'll give an example, classic one. Hans Gruber in Die Hard. He gets to be in charge of murderers and casually waves away the deaths he causes, so we don't like him. The he shoots Mr. Takagi in the head, and just for money! So he's a direct murderer, and a thief, and the audience knows not to like this guy. Then he proves how smart he is "I read about them in Times magazine." And outwits the FBI. This shows that he's damned smart too, so when McClane encounters him on the roof we see him as a smart murderer, a guy we are both rooting against and who we can believe is a credible threat to McClane's joe average cop trying to be a hero.

 

In the end he also captures McClane's wife, a personal connection to our main hero, just re-enforcing that he's a prick and making sure that the stakes are high, as McClane has had to run away from this guy (and get glass in his foot for it) before. By the end we want him to die, but are allowed to suspend our disbelief and wonder if he might get away with it. That is a classic bad guy. In Into Darkness the Admiral does none of these things. Until he immediately starts shooting up the Enterprise he does nothing directly evil that the audience is presented with. We know tangentially that he disabled the Enterprise, but by then he's pretty much shooting it anyway. He also doesn't present a credible threat. He's got a bigger ship, but if you watched the first Star Trek you know Kirk can take bigger ships anyway. So we don't have reason to suspend our disbelief and think he's going to win, and we don't really have a huge reason to want him dead. So he's not really an interesting character.

 

The problem with Khan is exactly as you described. If we were supposed to think about him in a deeper manner then emotionally connecting him to his crew, actually showing him interacting and caring with them directly at some point, would've been smart. Drawing a parallel to Kirk and his own crew. Similarly if we want to see him as a villain you don't just "say" that he's a crazy eugenics mass murderer. No, you've got to show him being a crazy eugenics mass murderer, you've got to show him lording over death camps or... or something. Otherwise it's a plot point that just doesn't mean anything or go anywhere. It's likes saying in the middle of a movie "Oh by the way, that guys Hitler." And then having nothing come of it.

[Bjorn]

It honestly felt like they were going for an enigmatic "Joker" with Khan, even down to the convoluted plot to get himself captured to further his evil plan.  The whole idea to use Khan was a mess.  The character has a history with audiences, but no history inside the new ST universe, which creates a dissonance that's simply not pleasant. 

 

And that's not even getting into the whitewashing of Khan as character and totally cocking up one of the best villains in all of sci-fi. 

[Merus]

I just want to address one specific point: the "smart construction" of the script. Into Darkness is clearly patterned off the Save the Cat template, but following a template doesn't make for a good film, and Into Darkness hammers its story into that mould until it feels weird and misshapen. A movie that manages to bomb San Francisco and make it feel completely dehumanised is a movie that's poorly constructed - a lot of that can be laid at the feet of Save the Cat, which prescribes a climax scene with cataclysmic stakes whether or not the story deserves it.

 

This is just the latest in a long line of writers who treat anthropological research as a formula, mind - plenty of writers have abused the Campbell monomyth by treating it as a prescription instead of, essentially, TV Tropes.