Star Trek (2009)

Written at the film's engagement. Some thoughts follow after.

"I Dare You To Do Better"

I got a call from the Captain about 5 o'clock (that'd be 2000 hours for him) on Friday, and when I saw who it was, I called him back and said "I know what this is about."

The Captain is a life-long Trekker. He knows the arcana of "Star Trek" in its canon, that being the television series—both broadcast and syndicated—and film. Plus, he's a little "inside," having drinks with the late Majel Barrett Roddenberry, introducing Patrick Stewart to "Buzz" Aldrin, and calling up Jonathan Frakes the day show creator Gene Roddenberry died to talk about "what it all meant."

The Captain knows from "Trek." So I was particularly interested in his take on "The New Version" of J.J. Abrams, or "Star Trek Begins" (a version of which producer Harve Bennett had proposed away back in the time-space continuum before Star Trek V—you know, the Shatner-directed one best forgotten). I'd watched the trailers warily, noting the emphasis on disrobing cadets and slam-bang action (not mutually exclusive), but noting a certain underlying devotion, not entirely slavish, to the original. They weren't trying to re-invent the warp-drive, which was a good thing.

"So..." I said, "what'd ya think?"

"This is the way they should have always done it.." he began.

Yeah. It is.

Star Trek is a rollicking world-and-expectations-shattering version of the Gene Roddenberry original, and most niftily, done in a way that fits within its science-fiction-y concepts. The whole movie is its plot-point and one watches in wonder how the deconstruction happens before one's eyes, while simultaneously nodding acquaintance with the tropes, concepts, and characterizations of the original. One gets the feeling of happy ebullience watching a favorite building imploded with the added delight of seeing it rise simultaneously from its own ashes to be sleeker, shinier and un-compromising.

Part of it is due to budget. Abrams was given a fat check to re-launch Paramount's key franchise (which it had nickeled and dimed into the ground the first time around), so the limitations the creators always had to contend with aren't so apparent. The Enterprise corridors no longer look like motel hallways, Engineering isn't a big space with a back-lit perspective painting behind it, and the aliens restricted to stereo-eyed bipeds with varying head-ridges. No, there's a lot of imagineering going on here in the Enterprise's brave new world of industrial-strength space-faring (at one point the new Captain Kirk sprints—of which he does...a lot—through what I swear was a brewery standing in for some section of the Enterprise's inner workings). 

The creatures have evolved differently* with nonhuman proportions, sometimes tossing out the human baggage entirely. It's a messy universe, but a full one with good ideas and concepts tossed amid the dialogue. It's a "Star Trek" Universe so full of potential, that there's no chance of coming across a creatively bankrupt parallel Earth, although the film manages to do exactly that in its own clever way.

That's the big picture. The question is the actors; the franchise will live or die on how "the New Kids" can portray the old characters. Fortunately, it's where this Star Trek shines. Everyone will have their favorites—mine are Karl Urban's note-perfect blustering McCoy and Simon Pegg's hyper-driven Scotty—but Chris Pine is a genuine find for Captain James Tiberius Kirk, employing none of the Shatnerisms (well, there's one deliberate vocal steal that made me laugh), but supplying the one thing that Shatner always brought to the table—energy. John Cho's Sulu is terrific and it's a hoot to see Russian actor Anton Yelchin employing the wretched "wessels" accent of the original Chekov. 

Zoe Saldana is given much more to do as Lt. Uhura, and given that he had Leonard Nimoy on-set for inspiration, Zachary Quinto might have taken the easy way out with a direct imitation, but his Mr. Spock is far less serene, more volatile and haughty, betraying that human half far more subtly than Nimoy did—and I believe saying that might be a court-martial offense in my house.

Where the other "Trek" movies have fallen down have been the secondary characters, but here they're just as important—Ben Cross and Winona Ryder play the star-crossed parents of Spock, while Bruce Greenwood is a superb Captain Christopher Pike. And Eric Bana, who can be on or off depending on the movie, is terrific as the long-suffering, revenge-driven Romulan Nero.

There will be a lot of sniping from the "Trekkies" who want things their way, or no way—that's to be expected with any "Trek" movie. But in the words of the former Captain Kirk: "Get a life."

Star Trek certainly got a new one.

After-thought: My, my. I did a lot of dancing around on this one because it was imperative not to give too much away (although I was doing some "punning" references to it just to amuse myself). What was wonderful about Abrams' re-boot—far better than his "Star Wars" sequels (although they're entertaining)—was his and the writers pushing "Re-set" on the entire franchise and wiping out the whole old Star Trek Universe in an ingenious time-travel story where another alien goes back in time to kill his version of Hitler, who happens to be Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock.

That's just clever and daring and enough to put the fear of interfering with time into anybody. But, it also wiped the creative slate clean. The Vulcans, on whom the Star Trek Universe became so dependent, became a Universal diaspora. Time-lines could be cleaned up—like the "Eugenics War"—and a better Star Trek could be rebuilt without having to necessarily wipe out "Next Generation" and its successors. And if anybody gripes about it, it's just a parallel timeline; the other one still exists, Ramada-In hallways and all.

It was thrilling—in fact, I did a couple of "Sunday Scenes" around this movie—about aspects that just made me smile.

But, it didn't last. The next Abrams Trek (Into Darkness) did the "Khan" story-line a little too soon and a little too derivatively. As I said in that review, with a new Universe to play with, it was too soon to go back to the well. And the third "Kelvin Universe" story, Star Trek Beyond, attempted to do something a bit different, along the lines of the Original Series, but its dependence on a "movie-villain" and its subsequent disappointment (even Idris Elba couldn't do anything with it) was a let-down, and the film under-performed, perhaps because it was less an "event" film than an "episodic" one.

That was four years ago and everybody's getting older. A new Trek movie was stalled when Chris Pine—and Chris Hemsworth (who played "Daddy" Kirk in the first one, indicating it was another time-travel story and a dull one at that)—had contract demands (money or credit) and it stalled. There's talk of two Treks in the works: one a new production and Quentin Tarantino production of a "Star Trek" movie, which—because QT can't keep himself from talking—was revealed to be merely be his version of a Trek story about the Eugenics War. More time-travel? Tarantino seems to be no longer interested (and I never was).

Whatever the future of "Star Trek" in the movies, one hopes that it will "go boldly"...which means that a bolder studio should take control of it as Paramount seems to be fresh out of ideas.

* There is a wickedly funny bar scene where Kirk tries to pick up the comely Lt. Uhura, while between them sits an alien seemingly modeled on the "Spitting Image" version of Leonard Nimoy, when it suddenly dawned on me what it was doing there: "Why the long face?"

Margin Call

The Economy and how it grinds up people has been on my mind of late. Here are some movies I've written about in that subject matter. 

Written at the time of the film's release.

"When The Music's Over (...And the Band Plays On)"
or
"Momma, There's Wolves in the House"

Margin Call begins like The Company Men and Up in the Air—in the midst of a corporate slaughter—people being fired from jobs they've held a long time. Cut-backs. "Generous" severance. Thanks for your service.  Security will escort you out.

Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) listens to it all, a little stunned, but tentative. "Uh, listen," he says in the middle of the administering of Last Rights, "I was working on something and I'm not finished yet." Doesn't matter. Go to your office. Empty your desk. Proprietary information. Your losing your phone, e-mail, etc."No, really..." he says.

Doesn't matter. He's out. On the way to the elevator, he runs into two of his turks, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) and Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley). "Am I safe?" asks Seth (as Seth is wont to do). But Peter walks him to the elevator to tell him how much his mentorship meant to him. Dale cuts him off. "I know. I was working on something. They won't let me finish it," says Dale as he hands him a USB drive. And as the elevator doors shut, he has just enough time to say "Be careful."

Fwump. 

It's the "be careful" that gets everybody's attention. "He said that?"

Sullivan begs off the traditional drinks for the battle survivors and takes a look at Dale's figures. Then he sees something. Digs, does some calculations and then stares at his projections screen. Over the next twelve hours, the world will go to Hell and he's the only one who sees the gate.

Margin Call is a boardroom thriller about our recent financial crisis, but its played like a mystery story. Everybody speaks in code. The night is dark and no one is betraying secrets. No one knows what's around the corner and everybody's looking behind them for the knife. Written and directed by J.C. Chandor (Who? This is his first film and it is an impressive debut*), it plays out like a conspiracy—it is—and if so much of it didn't anticipate the dawn, one would be tempted to call it a film noir; there is a palpable air of organized evil, built of greed and self-interest, that hangs over the film, for what is being planned is the crime of the century.

The cast is uniformly superb—how could it not be with the likes of Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, and Tucci?—but those performances depend on the great dialog generated by Chandor and the way he presents what should be dry material as drama and intrigue.  These are gangsters in Gucci, cold-blooded, playing the long odds and the fast kill, but instead of "going to the mattresses" they are isolated in fancy cars and well-appointed high-rise board-rooms, their views of the world their actions are affecting armored by safety glass. There isn't much soul-searching (they're business-people, so why look in a dry hole?) about what devastation their actions will bring, except for the immediate future and what it will do "for business."  Even then, loyalty to the corporate mantra of "be first, be smarter or cheat" trumps conscience. That would make a hell of a slogan wouldn't it?

If one could gripe (and there is little to gripe about), one could argue that, if anything, this reverse "Godfather"—where business-people are gangsters, rather than gangsters as business-people—is heavily romanticized. There are no "Masters of the Universe" statements coming from these mortgage titans (as one heard from Wall Street bar-recordings on "This American Life," where these mavens crowed about deserving bonuses from bail-outs because "they're smarter than everybody else"), but, rather, short-term hedges about "dog-eat-dog" survival. No cynical betting against failure schemes, but merely making the best out of a bad situation before everyone else does.  

As bad as Margin Call makes its protagonists, the truth is even worse—there were folks betting on things coming crashing down and profiting from it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that a fix was in and that analysts saw it coming, not, suddenly, seeing it and going "Garsh, this looks bad." And the worst thing that's happened to these people is a little traffic congestion on Wall Street.

That is, if they're working at all.

* Hey, there. James from 2018 here.  Chandor was no fluke nor a flash in the pan. He followed up Margin Call with the Robert Redford masterclass All is Lost in 2013 and the woefully unappreciated A Most Violent Year in 2014.

Heroes and Villains, Part 2: Snowden

"When one is young it seems so very easy to distinguish between right and wrong. But as one gets older it becomes more difficult, the villains and the heroes get all mixed up." 

 Rene Mathis, Quantum of Solace 

The wisdom of the mob plays tricks with reality. You see it a lot, especially as age gives you longevity and experience. You remember incidents that time glosses over in pertinent detail. On the other hand, the demands of the "24 hour news cycle" creates an urgency for happenstance when the "tube" needs to be filled, often with speculation and mis-information that gets refuted later with the clarity of time. Information and time yin and yang separating truth from fiction—but not everybody gets the message. And depending on when the hearing happens, people tend to hear something and believe it, even if it gets refuted. People believe what it is easier to believe...or merely what they want, never mind the facts.

Over the next couple of days, recent movies about individuals who are judged by single acts, and whether they are heroes or villains, depends on your point of view in the audience.

Epic Shelter
or
...a Very Frustrating Individual

It's always difficult to say that an Oliver Stone film is "based on a true story." Every subject he makes a film about goes through "The Stone Filter," injecting his views, his "Daddy issues," his prejudices, whether they're called for or not. It's tough to separate the man from his movies, like Howard Hawks or John Ford (but even those film veterans changed over time). Stone is stuck in his mind-set and screenplay-template, and he will tailor the facts to meet his own expectations. Film-makers do this all the time, compressing characters into one, juggling time, and even inventing incidents and people to help drive home a dramatic point. But Stone is egregious about it and unapologetic. He is an auteur, and so, rather than serve the story or the material, he serves himself. And so, his films, be they fiction or non-fiction, biography or fantasy, whatever genre they're in, feel much the same.

Snowden, his latest, follows the same pattern,* showing the transformation of the young tech-savvy, politically-conservative** veteran (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to eventual whistle-blower, after serving time in the military to timing servers in the CIA, working on intricate hacking scenarios and data collection, but running afoul of inter-agency politics and becoming paranoid and disenchanted with the breadth and depth of intelligence gathering and interpretation.

Stone starts the film in Tokyo, where Snowden has flown from his job in Hawaii after smuggling NSA files using a rigged Rubick's cube (wonder how high that is on the TSA lists these days). Snowden is in limbo. He's taken files, but that activity has not yet been discovered, and that won't happen until the contents have been published. To accomplish this, he needs documentation and verification. He meets documentary film-maker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo), who will eventually make the film Citizenfour and Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto). Once they're informed, it's a race against time. He'll be tracked, investigated and hunted. There will be no room for error.

In the down-time waiting for confirmations before transmitting the files, he goes into his back-story negotiating his military service, discharge for injuries, his entree into the CIA. Why any of this back-story involves meeting his eventual girlfriend (Shailene Woodley), it's tough to say, but I'm sure it serves some journalistic function and might demonstrate some level of sacrifice for going into hiding. 

During the course of the story, we meet some influences: Professor Hank Forrester (Nicolas Cage), who, himself, has worked in the intelligence community and found the experience dispiriting and demoralizing. At the CIA, he meets another mentor, Corbin O'Brian  (Rhys Ifans, a wonderfully creepy performance without much effort), who, impressed with Snowden's skills, champions his course through intelligence. For Stone's by-the-book story-telling, the protagonist must choose between two opposed father-figures, each serving a role as angel or devil on the protagonist's shoulders. Lately, Stone has gotten subtler in his dependence on the "Daddy" trope—he even managed to undersell the huge one in W. But, in his early films, like Platoon and Wall Street, those conflicts form the very basis of the films. In such scenario's, you need to have the conflicting world-views in order for the guy in the middle to reach his own path, and Stone returns to the formula to tell Snowden's story. It isn't enough that he's frightened by the cavalier way his fellow intel-minders collect data. Any back-door, any un-shaded camera, anything can give them access into people's private lives. Snowden goes from disenchanted to paranoid, beginning to cover his laptop's camera aperture with tape, questioning motivations for the details, while also beginning to question "The Big Picture."

The special effects crew get their cameo's.

Pretty soon, he begins to magically morph with Stone's world-view: the intel-gathering is not, as it's portrayed, "to fight the terrorists," it's to protect "the Military-Industrial Complex," Stone's multi-tentacled monster (not that he's wrong, particularly, it's just that everything in his "non-fiction" films usually circle around to involving the preservation of the MIC as a conspiracy and underlying motivation for almost everything). He does pound on it as much as he has previously, but the man can't make a movie without a mention of it.

Back in Tokyo, the trio are joined by The Guardian's Ewen McAskill (Tom Wilkinson) and the four send the data to The Guardian's offices, where the managing editor (Joely Richardson) is being ultra-careful in deciding to publish. Greenwald finally loses it under the pressure and threatens other avenues of dissemination, post-scripted with a mention of The Guardian's reluctance. They get assurance that it will be published at a certain time and plans are made to book Snowden out of the hotel and to the next "undisclosed location."

"My name's O'Brien...oh, sorry...it's spelled O'Brian....what year is this?"

Stone bounces back and forth in time-lines using casual conversation as a segue, some of which works, some of which is merely contrivance, and he hauls out some special effects to represent "Internet-land," probably for those who can't grasp the concept of connectivity—which might approach absolute zero. He touches on Snowden's health issues perfunctorily, dabbles with "the girlfriend" issue, but, mostly, it seems  the warring fathers aspect is what he's concentrating on, expanding the two characters' importance beyond what they would appear...for two characters that are actually fictional. Just what part of this movie are we supposed to believe? And if we're being led down the Stone path, it would be nice to believe in something. The Tokyo sequences recall Citizenfour and the flashbacks could all be fever-dream or epilepsy-haze, but we're not given any indication that it might be anything less than rock-solid reality. 

Dramatization

So...hero or villain? Stone provides no perspective other than his own. Oh, there's a moment of negativity, but it's mostly from topical higher-up's like Clinton and Trump ("...they used to execute people like this...")—in other words, no perspective. And one's opinions will be informed by whatever political leanings one might have—whether they see Snowden as a hero for exposing domestic surveillance among cell-carriers*** or a villain for showing how extensive the data collection techniques are (in which case you might think him a hero for having something to do with hacking the DNC). The choice is in ourselves...and, like most controversial figures, he is judged for that one act in a lifetime (in much the same way as the protagonist of Sully). 

Reality

* Stone was reportedly reluctant to take on another contemporary subject, wanting to make a film about Martin Luther King. He took the project on after the King movie fell behind and after meeting with Snowden in Moscow.

** Just HOW conservative Snowden is/was, Stone keeps a little nebulous. During his first date with his soon-to-be girlfriend, she makes a crack about the government under Bush, and Stone has him say "I just don't like people bashing our government." Okay. It fits the "Stone Filter" that Snowden have a hero's journey from one extreme to another, ala Born on the Fourth of July, or JFK, while keeping an idealism that fuels both ends of the spectrum. 

*** I've always loved Steven Colbert's analysis: "Of course, they're checking personal phone records looking for terrorists. If you've ever called Verizon Wireless for customer service, pretty soon you're GOING to become a terrorist!"

Star Trek Beyond

This is Where the Frontier Pushes Back
or
"Let's Hope This Doesn't Get Messy"

Simon Pegg's character Tim Bisely in "Spaced" once stated: "... as sure as day follows night, sure as eggs is eggs, sure as every odd-numbered Star Trek is shit."

Irony time. Star Trek Beyond is an odd-numbered "Star Trek" film...and he wrote it (along with Doug Jung).

Of course, J.J. Abrams busted that track record with the odd-(un-)numbered Star Trek reboot (2009), recast the entire original crew and managed to survive the potential solar shit-storm from some of the most vocal of pop-culture's fan-maniacs. The reason was that movie did everything differently while still reminding you of what was so damn good about the original series. There was a bit of a let-down with the second (at least for me) because the first one warped Star Trek-space so ingeniously that one was expecting something more than mere future history-re-writing, by cribbing the plots of two of the original cast's movies so soon into this new, re-booted series.

Which is why it's so damn funny when Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), 966 days into the Enterprise's five year mission, and after a diplomatic first contact that does not go very well, saws into his Captain's Log that things are beginning "to feel...episodic." Even exploring new worlds gets to be a drag (ask Lewis and Clark) and the crew is definitely feeling the lethargy. A stop back to Earth's new orbiting city in space, Yorktown (nobody's thought of this before? Just the field-offices in space?) and the crew can't wait to get away from each other—even the Enterprise's "power-coupling" is fraying: Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is wanting to break up with Spock (Zachary Quinto). Kirk is being pulled other directions, so is his Science Officer. 

It's almost Kirk's birthday and over a drink he and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) hash out Kirk's issues—he's lived longer than his Dad (who died on his birthday) and Kirk's motivations were not the same as his. Now, the job just isn't fun anymore. It's routine and Kirk is thinking of applying for a Vice-Admiralty position with Starfleet (Lord knows he has enough vices to qualify for the job).

But, a distress signal from an uncharted nebula pulls him back into the chair—he and the crew warp out together, maybe for the last time for a rescue mission. They're given coordinates by a returning Starfleet officer Kalara (Lydia Wilson) and find the nebula is not that tough a commute—sure, it's blocking signals from Starfleet, but...hey, what's that on the view-screen? And before Star Wars' Admiral Ackbar can make a cameo saying "it's a trap!" they're being bombarded by so many projectiles, they don't have the weaponry capable of taking out everything and they get boarded, the warp-nacelles of the Enterprise cut off from the ship (no one has thought of this before?) and the ship goes powerless. Time for Scotty (Pegg) to do a little re-routing to the impulse engines and the ship is underway, albeit slowly, with the crew together, but being picked off one by one.

Then, things really go down. In the same type of swarm attack that took out the nacelles, the ship starts to get eviscerated to knock out all power to the ship. Kirk orders the crew to evacuate and their capsules start jettisoning into space. But, they're soon hi-jacked and taken to a planet in the nearby system. With the Enterprise crippled and heading to the planet's surface, Kirk has no choice but to abandon ship and take his chances on the planet.

With no ship, the crew scattered, the mission becomes one of survival and making do the best they can. It's a great way to find out out just what your crew-mates mean to you and cure that contempt that too much familiarity breeds.

The film-makers do shake things up a bit and despite throwing in as much action as they can possibly muster, they manage to give to this Star Trek what has been skimped on a bit in the past films—interaction. What works in the Star Trek movies is what worked on the television show, which is the characters and Pegg, Jung and director Justin Lin take pains to pair off the crew-members unusually—Kirk with Chekhov, Spock with McCoy (well, naturally), Uhura with Sulu and Scott with a denizen of the planet named Jaylah (Sofia Boutella, who played the lethal kick-master Gazelle in Kingsmen) that manages to play to everybody's strengths.

One is drawn in because it's a situation that one has seen before on the original series, but never like this, and one's attention is focused because you're not exactly sure what will happen next—something Into Darkness, retreading tried and true territory, never accomplished. The story seems fresh and full of surprises, except that sometimes things are a bit too convenient in resolution, but that may be that things are withheld in back-story that might be telling.

One gets the feeling that quite a bit has been chopped out of Star Trek Beyond, as some transitions are rough, at times confusing, and for a scrupulous refusal to not go into too much detail about the film's chief villain Krall (Idris Elba). It's a bit refreshing, that, actually, because ultimately who cares what the guy's backstory is—his motivations are a bit confused and his actions way too extreme to make any sense whatsoever. Basically, who cares? He's a bad guy. Stop him. The same goes for the McGuffin in the movie. Everybody says it's dangerous, but not too willing to explain how. Without that, you're not sure what the rules are or what the stakes might be, and that undercuts the suspense factor somewhat. But suspense is not what the director is after. What he wants is visceral.

Director Lin is an action-movie guy and he does a lot of story-length swoops and camera tilts to keep you disoriented through those sequences...too much so, actually. He's less concerned with the build-up to something as long as he gets the "money-shot" in. That grows tiresome after awhile, and the final action furor seems like one too many (and relies on what you think the gravity issues on a globe-shaped city in space would be like). A space-battle would be just as familiar, I guess, and maybe Pine thought he was robbed of a big climax last movie (Spock had to do all the running and punching), but with all the hand-to-hand combat, one wonders what they have phasers for.

Still, bumps in the warp-drive not withstanding, Star Trek Beyond is a good use of material and a reminder of why the thing has lasted 50 years...almost. It premiered in September, 1966. 

And they keep making ships.

Bob Peak's poster for the original Star Trek: the Motion Picture

next to "The Director's Edition" which featured the original key photographs.

Star Trek Into Darkness

It's Ongoing Mission:
To Explore Strange New Worlds, 
To Seek Out New Life and New Civilizations, 
And to Shamelessly Retread Where the Old Series Has Already Gone Before.
(Oh, and Lens Flares.  Lots of Lens Flares)

I'm disappointed.

The first Star Trek (Beta Two) did a great job of re-imagining the '60's sci-fi mythos of a 23rd century, and dragging it, shouting and flaring and shaking the camera, into the 21st Century. It shook the faithful, too, reinforced what was great about the series (the characters, frankly) and what wasn't (a little too Hornblower and "Wagon Train to the Stars," too-vintage TV concepts, and the Enterprise corridors always seemed like a circular Ramada Inn). 

The 2009 Star Trek of J.J. Abrams was a game-changer. It completely exploded (and sometimes imploded) the Star Trek Universe that was starting to harden (the way it did with the Star Wars Universe) with continuity. That's the way it goes with science fiction series: everything that seemed fresh in the first go-'round, becomes rote and repeatable and formulaic, given a timeline and a structure, and the creativity becomes more about stretching the budget as opposed to stretching the possibilities, or the minds of the audience.

Star Trek Into Darkness remains true to the Roddenberry vision of over-sexualizing female crew-people.

It was ever thus, with "Star Trek." After its first season and a half, that saw scripts by some of science-fiction's best and brightest, "Star Trek" (the original series) was becoming rote, concentrating on relationships (there was a rotating "crewman-in-love" every week with the exceptions, significantly, of Sulu and Lt. Uhura) and planets that had remarkable resemblances to Earth. When the movies came along, all of them (including the "Next Generation" movies, which had strictly prohibited the habit in its TV run) settled into the "Khan" pattern of having a central antagonist, rather than dealing with a cosmic crisis or ethical problem dictated by a planet's sociological peculiarities.*

Haven't I seen this somewhere before?

But the Star Trek retro-fit changed the rules. By altering the Trek timeline, the series could literally "go" anywhere to the "strange new worlds"—or old ones—of the mission statement from the "series bible." So, for me, it's something of a lost opportunity that the first adventure out of the space-dock is a re-visit, tinkering with a too-obvious choice of what to "fix" and particularly re-writing one of the films to mixed results.

Not that Star Trek Into Darkness isn't fun—let's say that upfront—and never short of entertaining, taking full advantage of the shifted relationships of the Enterprise's new-old complement, but never straying from them that much to incorporate anyone new.  

Maybe there's a rip in the space-time continuum?

This crew is more squabbly than the one from the Shatner-Nimoy-Kelley days. Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto) have an uneasy truce, still getting to know each other, and wondering why they should take a mutual mentor's advice that their alliance is mutually beneficial. Kirk and Scotty (Simon Pegg, still delightful) are at odds over Kirk's motivations for a trip into Klingon territory and Mr. Scott takes a leave of absence from the crew, briefly, to be replaced by Mr. Chekhov (Anton Yelchin, who is underutilized, and frankly needed the job) as Chief Engineer. And the unlikely romance between Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Spock is going through some warp-turbulence**—seems she thinks Spock is a little too aggressive in doing his duty and passive in accepting death, a nice little argument against the events of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which is further touched on throughout the movie.

Oh, that mission across the Klingon Neutral Zone mentioned earlier is to take out a terrorist, John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch, quite brilliant in this), who seems to be on a personal revenge campaign against Star Fleet, blowing up a London facility, and seeking asylum among the newly imagined bumpy-headed warriors on Kronos. Kirk is charged by the hawkish Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) to find Harrison and fire some specially designed photon torpedoes at him with extreme prejudice. 

...or the writer's room is in a chronal loop...wait, is that a tribble?

To say anything more in the way of plot would be to spoil all sorts of little surprises and one big surprise in the film, which would be some sort of violation of the Movie Prime Directive. I say that with some irony as once things start being revealed, the movie doesn't go off the rails, but rather travels a little too closely on them. Oh, it has its own spin, and one that makes a shade more sense than ... Damn. I can't even say that. Let's merely say that for an alternate universe, this one sure provokes a sense of deja vu.*** For me, it seems a bit like the franchise is playing it very, very safe, which is particularly sad after its terrific (and risky) relaunch. Not a good sign, especially as Abrams is moving on (to helm the first Disney "Star Wars" film).  

We need to go a bit more boldly next time.

I said "boldly", not "quickly"

* Even Star Trek: First Contact took the brilliant conceit of a collective-mind tribe like the Borg, and created a never-before-seen "Borg Queen" as its antagonist, diluting the very neat "Borg" concept, in favor of a singular "Bad Guy," who could be defeated. Yeah, but...

** Small trekkie annoyance: Throughout the movie, she calls him "Spock." Aren't they intimate enough that she can use his first name? He has one, and the joke in the series was "You couldn't pronounce it." Okay. But she's an alien linguist.  So, if anyone could... Oh! And another thing—at one point Kirk accuses Spock of "throwing me under the bus."  How archaic a reference is that? Especially considering that seemingly everything floats in this universe. Go ahead, throw him under a bus, it's going to sail right over him! Now, if he'd said, "throw me into the warp-core"...heh, that would have been more appropriate. 

 *** Unrelated to those thoughts, but along the same lines: Cumberbatch's villain is the latest in a recent line of what should now be considered a new movie trope—the villain who lets himself be captured, following in the heels of The Joker in The Dark Knight, Loki in The Avengers, and Silva in Skyfall.  Okay, screen-writers, "you just don't get it, do you?"