Benedict Cumberbatch is the man. That's all there is to it.
Benedict Cumberbatch is the man. That's all there is to it.
He is indeed.
Thought that just occurred to me while watching BC be all gravitas and growly in that clip: "Holy shit, that is how Smaug is going to sound."
Alternate universe. Nothing sacred.Originally Posted by Captain Untouchable
Considering the role Carol Marcus plays in the larger Star Trek universe... yeah, she's pretty much immortal as far as this movie goes.
Sure, provided that JJ Abrams can afford enough security to protect him from a hordes of raging Trek fans with pitchforks for the rest of his life.Alternate universe. Nothing sacred.Considering the role Carol Marcus plays in the larger Star Trek universe... yeah, she's pretty much immortal as far as this movie goes.
Edit:
io9 has an exclusive little interview-plus-clips featurette thing, which has some stuff of Simon Pegg being awesome again.
Edit again:
Just found this - Benedict Cumberbatch talking about Uhura. I'm not sure if it's dialogue for the movie, or if they just got BC to record the most amazing character summaries ever. All I know is that I need audio books recorded by that man.
Last edited by Captain Untouchable; May 2nd, 2013 at 08:46:27 PM.
It's like that, and that's the way it is.
Went to see this on Thursday with Droo as well as my little sister. I thought it was bloody fantastic!
I really think I will like Star Wars Episode 7.
We're within striking distance of the movie premiering here in the US...a few days ago, Paramount moved the opening date from May 17th to May 16th. I'd already asked for the 17th off from work about 6 weeks ago, so I'll be seeing it at the first show on that date.
Everything I've heard about it so far gives me great hope that I'm going to have one hell of a time. I've also managed to avoid major spoilers so far, from what I can tell.
If you haven't checked iTunes or Audible yet, he has done some audiobooks. For people like me, the best one is Casanova's autobiography, which is almost like soft-core porn at points. (Hearing Benedict purr the word "dildo" is especially delightful.) Plus there's one Sherlock Holmes audiobook, and he's also read some Ngaio Marsh mysteries.All I know is that I need audio books recorded by that man.
If they made made an audiobook of him reading the dictionary, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
I have to wait until Sunday night at the earliest to watch it.
At least you get to go. By the time I've got enough mobility to trek to my nearest cinema, they'll have stopped showing it. I'm not even sure I'll be able to make it to Man of Steel, and that doesn't come out for another month.I have to wait until Sunday night at the earliest to watch it.
So yeah, waiting until Sunday beats waiting for the DVD.
I just checked the movie's score at Rotten Tomatoes.
88 freakin' percent.
Just saw it with my mom, dad, and brother. I have to say, after growing up with The Next Generation, devotedly following Deep Space Nine, growing gradually more frustrated with Voyager, and overwhelmingly going "meh" at Enterprise, it's really special to share in a great new Star Trek experience with my family!
Let's start with the good, and there's a lot of it. Visuals continue to be stupendous. I love the retro-futuristic styling the art department has created, and this movie treats us to some fantastic new locales that are as diverse as they are gorgeous. I saw the movie in 2D, but I'd actually like to try seeing it in 3D as well just to ramp up the eye candy - I have a feeling it'll be worth it.
Next, the script and performances. The dialogue is taut and clever, and the characters sparkle throughout. Karl Urban is still brilliant as McCoy and manages to steal every scene he's in. Cumberbatch's villain is formidable and captivating and fully lives up to his billing. But I found myself most surprised by the depth added to Kirk through the course of this story. Chris Pine made me like the character a lot more in this installment - not that I disliked him in Star Trek 2009, but it never felt to me like he really earned the captain's chair. That changes in this film.
My primary complaint is that by the end the movie feels like something slightly less than the sum of its parts. The climax is predictable and somehow smaller than the events leading up to it, while a seemingly larger and more monumental conflict goes unresolved. In fact, a lot of storytelling capital built in the first one and a half hours is left in limbo in favor of a fairly by-the-numbers showdown.
I'll probably chip in with more specifics later on as we get more discussion in this thread. Suffice it to say, this movie shows Abrams's weaknesses as well as his strengths - don't ask him for airtight plot, or you'll be disappointed - but it's an incredibly enjoyable ride with plenty more references that'll make longtime Trek fans smile. It's a case where what I love about a movie makes me willing to forgive its flaws and enjoy it anyway, because what it does well, it does brilliantly.
Managed to see this after all.
I laughed. I cried. At times I literally flailed and punched the air in fanboyish glee. There were moments I saw coming, particularly towards the ending: but that only filled me with more dread and more hope. There were a lot of moments that totally surprised me, and a fair number of my predictions were lightyears wide of the mark. There were a lot of familiar themes and parallels, as well as things being flipped on their head - even more so than in the first movie - and I thoroughly enjoyed that. Also, the characters in this - not just their individual portrayals, but also the interactions between them - were superb. After two movies, we already have a much deeper, more complex, and more nuanced understanding of the characters and the crew than the The Original Series ever managed to provide.
All I'll say regarding Andrew's primary complaint is that most of the original Star Trek movies were a continuous story. I personally didn't feel that the unanswered questions detracted from anything, and I'd speculate that any plot points that were left in limbo or unresolved may well have been left that way deliberately, so that Star Trek 3 can build on them. Also, since Star Wars pretty much rules out JJ Abrams' availability being a factor in when the next movie gets made (ie. he won't be directing it), it sounds like we can expect a much shorter interval before the next instalment.
After some discussion, I've got my thoughts more in order here. Major huge devastating spoilers follow, you guys!
I feel like Abrams lost sight of the fact that the climax of a movie is not simply the big action sequence at the end that ends the conflict. It should also be the focal point of the themes developed throughout the movie. No, not everything has to be fully resolved, but nothing can be simply forgotten.
One loose thread people are complaining about is Kirk's actions on Kronos, which Admiral Marcus rightly says could very well cause a war. Once the focus shifts to stopping the Admiral, the Klingons are never mentioned again. I could potentially accept this as sequel bait, though I have problems with that as well - more on that later.
A bigger problem in the context of this movie is that the Admiral's campaign to turn Starfleet into a war machine is never mentioned again after his death. This represents an existential threat to the Federation's very soul, far more so than anything Khan does in the film. It doesn't die with Marcus - the construction of the Vengeance had to be an enormous project consuming incredible resources. Those elements, including Section 31, are still out there within the Federation, seemingly forgotten. Again, it could be sequel bait, but how much of this movie's central plot points can we commit to a hypothetical sequel?
When the movie separates Khan from these sweeping, galactic plot threads, the conflict becomes exponentially smaller, but it lacks the intimate focus and obsession that made The Wrath of Khan so compelling. Kirk has given up his vendetta against Khan for the greater good, and Spock's rage-bender at the end is horribly contrived. It's very hard to say Khan was the one to kill Kirk when the Enterprise had already been crippled by Admiral Marcus.
Spock beaming over the torpedoes and detonating them was, admittedly, a stroke of genius, and a great callback to Kirk's "Here it comes" from Wrath of Khan. The prospect of Khan enraged by the belief that all his people have been killed, with nothing to restrain his retribution, is pretty terrifying. But the crew is so focused on saving Kirk that no attention is paid to the horrible destruction Khan wreaked by crashing the Vengeance into San Francisco. It's disaster porn without consequence. Khan has essentially won - he's accomplished his revenge and murdered thousands - but all the heroes seem to care about is saving Kirk.
So, here's my proposed vision of the ending. I would much rather have seen more made of the Admiral's plot, and the threat it presents to Starfleet's role in the galaxy. I loved the idea that he turned to Khan specifically because he needed 20th-century savagery to realize his goals, and I could very easily see Khan usurping the Admiral's role in the plot to recreate the Federation in his own image.
So rather than bringing the conflict back to earth, let Khan take the Vengeance, with his crew, back to the Neutral Zone to start the war with the Klingons that the Admiral wanted, and force the Enterprise to chase after him and stop him. The stakes are so much clearer now, the threat much better realized, and Khan far more effective and menacing as a tyrant and warlord. And what's more, with more than the barest lip service given to Section 31 and Klingon hostilities, we end in a much better position to start the Enterprise's five-year mission into deep space.
And now we come to my objection to pushing all this into a possible sequel. Frankly, I don't want the next movie to be about uncovering corruption in the Federation or about war with the Klingons. What I want to see is the Enterprise's mission into deep space. I want to see them uncover something wonderful and terrifying, something that makes the galaxy seem vast and mysterious, not a tightly packed star cluster where you can jump from earth to Kronos in a matter of hours. I want the Doomsday Machine, the First Federation, the Tholians, the Guardian of Forever. I want to see the crew exploring. I loved the opening sequence of the movie because it was a believable original Star Trek adventure, and it was brilliant. Don't get me wrong, I love the vision of the Federation that Abrams has developed. But if we never get out of the center of civilized space, never deal with anything but threats of war and military actions, then it's not really Star Trek, is it? It's simply Star Wars without lightsabers.
This concludes my rant. Please understand I'm being so hard on the movie not because I disliked it, but because I loved so much of it, and I felt that it could have been much more. I will eagerly go see it again, probably more than once, and I will continue to enjoy this captivating version of the crew and the spectacular art design. Meanwhile I'll continue to develop my own head-canon version of how things really went down at the end.
Last edited by Kale; May 17th, 2013 at 12:03:36 PM.
I loved it. Just loved it. I really can't be any more coherent than that right now.
@Andrew:
Unlike most Star Trek fans, I don't regard The Wrath of Khan with any kind of reverence: it may be iconic and memorable, but it is a bad movie with an iffy plot.
Worse, Khan is a bad villain: or at least, he's a bad nemesis. The problem with Khan is that for all his talk of being superior, he doesn't deliver the goods. He claims to have a superior intellect, but he is outsmarted by vertical movement and by saying days instead of hours. His arrogance and emotions consistently cloud his judgement, and ultimately prove to be his downfall. Khan has this deeply personal rage against Kirk (mostly because of his wife dying, which wasn't Kirk's fault but Khan's "superior intellect" couldn't seem to grasp that), but all Kirk has to go on is Khan getting the upper hand a couple of times, and maybe killing a couple of people: the nemesis relationship doesn't make sense. And ultimately, for all his claims of being superior, it's the fact that Khan represents the worst of humanity - emotions and arrogance - that proves to be his downfall. Khan only has any success at all because of a string of coincidences and flukes.
Harrison was a drastic improvement on that. As was the theme with most of the movie (I'll get onto that later), the roles were reversed. Instead of Khan being the one with the personal vendetta, it was Kirk who let his emotions dictate his actions: much more in keeping with the characters. Not only did Harrison commit acts of terror, he killed Kirk's pseudo-father. Kirk got to represent the worst of humanity - just like he did in both of the new movies - while Harrison got to show us that he was better, outsmarting the crew (and Section 31) several times, and then beating the living shit out of Kirk. Instead of being outsmarted by a normal man, it took the superior intellect of a Vulcan (with a little insider information from a parallel timeline) to outsmart him, and it took superior Vulcan strength married by blinding rage to beat him in an actual fight. Harrison was a better Khan than the original Khan was.
It's not just Khan and Kirk that had their roles reversed: the same happened with Kirk and Spock. As they both put it, the idea that "It's what you would have done" governed much of their actions, and I think it perfectly explains Spock's "contrived" bender. The idea of Spock embracing his human side started right at the beginning: Kirk directly appealed to it at one point. We saw Spock struggling to understand why Kirk risked everything to come back for him, and then as Kirk died he finally got it: "Because you're my friend." Confronted with the death of his best friend, unable to push aside his emotions because of it, and already in a What Would Kirk Do mindset, having Spock go on an emotion-fuelled quest for revenge makes perfect sense to me. It's also significant that it took Uhura, the only other meaningful emotional connection that Spock has, to ultimately get through to him.
I will concede that the Vengeance crashing into San Francisco was disaster porn to some degree: but just like the scene from Nemesis where the the Enterprise rams the Scimitar, it also set the stage for the showdown between Spock/Data and Khan/Shinzon. Personally I would have added a five-minute scene where Spock is debriefed, just to draw a line under the San Fran casualties and to perhaps lead into Kirk being alive a little better... but I think that's a relatively small niggle on the face of things.
As for the sequel, you act like the Five Year Mission, conflicts with the Klingons, and the return of Section 31 are mutually exclusive as plot points. On the contrary, I would argue that they go hand in hand perfectly. For starters, the Five Year Mission is the first of it's kind; Section 31 may have lost their headquarters and their battleship, but as you point out they have more resources, and getting an agent aboard the Enterprise for that iconic mission is well within the scope of their abilities. The Klingons meanwhile were the main recurring antagonist for the Enterprise crew during their Five Year Mission, and they've already been painted as expansionist: the Enterprise crossing paths with them makes plenty of sense for a 5YM movie, and having the incident on Kronos/Qo'noS as a Cuban Missile Crisis type event as part of an ongoing Klingon Civil War (which was the state of affairs during The Original Series)... it falls into place. Also, it's worth noting that The Undiscovered Country, which heavily features the Klingons and a much better Kirk nemesis (General Chang) also features a Federation conspiracy that the Star Trek novels certainly think is tied to Section 31. A slightly younger Chang, Cold War tensions with the Klingons, and a Starfleet that the Enterprise can't entirely trust because they don't know who is in on the conspiracy sounds like the makings of a great movie... perhaps an opening scene on Organa, since the Organian Treaty is one of the most important points in Kirk's career?
I won't address your proposed ending, since I think that's a dangerous tangent to wander down (an alternate, alternate timeline?)... but honestly, I don't think the ending needs fixing. I was perfectly happy with what happened, the way that I personally interpreted it.
@Jace:
Oh, I thoroughly enjoyed the role reversals, as well as the delightful reversal of Kirk and Khan working together to stop the Vengeance. I thought the scene between Kirk and Spock at the warp core was one of the best-written in the entire movie, allowing for a few brief spots ofplagiarismhomage. And I understood the reasons for sending Spock mano-a-mano against Khan at the very end. But I felt it was sloppily handled, and for the crew to focus all their efforts on revenge/saving Kirk in the midst of the destruction wrought on San Francisco seems horribly selfish and out of character.
Anyway, enough on that, since we can agree to disagree. What I want to know is, considering the Admiral's slight Texas drawl, where did Carol Marcus get her English accent?
And at the risk of alternating alternate timelines, I had the mental image of the Enterprise defeating the Vengeance at great cost on the edge of Klingon space, only to be left drifting as a dozen Klingon battlecruisers descend on them... forcing Kirk to find a new solution to the Kobayashi Maru scenario!
@Andrew:
I would argue that chasing Khan was the only thing the Enterprise could have done in that situation.
It's easy to forget that Earth is a planet inhabited by billions of people. The instant the Vengeance hit the ground, all eyes would be on San Francisco. The city's emergency services, not to mention those from neighbouring cities, relief efforts from Starfleet facilities elsewhere in the world, and so on... all of that would leap into action. Meanwhile, the Enterprise is shot to hell and barely keeping itself aloft; they struggled to beam down a couple of people, let alone emergency responders. Not only do they not need to act (because Earth is already handling it), they aren't actually capable of helping.
However, what they can do is hunt down Khan, the man responsible. Spock may have been motivated by revenge, but catching Khan - and "neutralising" him if necessary - is a pretty logical thing to do in that scenario. McCoy meanwhile acts independently, out of a mix of medical obligation and the desire to stop his friend from being dead. He isn't selfishly ignoring San Francisco, because he's down in sickbay without a damned clue of what just went down: all he can do is try to save the patient that's in front of him, like any good doctor would.
Were they being selfish? Maybe... but I wouldn't call it out of character.
I'll admit though, there is one thing that does bug me. That ship was clearly this timeline's sexed-up version of the Excelsior. The size, the shape, the speed... hell, they even stated that she was a transwarp ship. Why then did you have to go and give it a shitty name like Vengeance, when Excelsior is a bajillion times cooler?
Okay, I thought 2009 Star Trek was a good, even well done pop corn flick that was pretty forgettable. Which to a person who pretty much distains Trek is I think actually about as good as it was going to get - so I was hoping for at least the same.
I got it.
Again, it's forgettable but the truth is, it's a good, even very good pop corn flick that is worth the money. I'm not going to be chewing over the nuances for hours like Iron Man3 because the movie didnt make me notice or care. I'm not going to be bothered watching again but if this sounds like damning with faint praise... no it's not. It's just to a non Trekkie not deeply compelling but it is a good movie.
I've just been part of a discussion about Alice Eve's character.
The main crux of the discussion was that Carol Marcus is only there as a token love interest for Kirk, she got abducted and needed to be rescued, and then during that rescue she screamed like a girl. People are calling her a terrible character, an obligatory damsel in distress, and while I can understand where they're coming from, I disagree.
When we first see Carol, she's lying about her identity and presents Kirk with fake documents in order to get aboard the Enterprise because she's smart enough to be suspicious of what her father is up to, and has a strong enough sense of morality to want to be in a position to intervene if necessary. She does most of the flirting, and while Kirk certainly gives her an "I'm attracted" look, he seems most impressed by her qualifications and academic achievements... and by the fact that her being there seems to irk Spock. We do have an obligatory underwear shot (it's worth bearing in mind that we saw Uhura in her underwear in the first movie, and we've seen Kirk in the same state of undress in both films), but instead of it being a flirtatious / seduction scene, she tells him off for looking; and it takes place in the middle of her offering to shuttle down to a planet with the Star Trek equivalent of a pretty sizeable nuke, risking her own life in order to protect the crew. McCoy flirts throughout the torpedo scene, and she completely ignores it.
Being kidnapped by her father is a little bit of a damsel moment, but her rescue isn't actually what motivates Kirk to act. They have much bigger fish to fry, and instead of swooping in to rescue the damsel Kirk instead gets the living shit beaten out of her. Yes, she freaks out and screams: but only after watching Khan crush her father's head until it exploded, with his bare hands. Even Kirk seems pretty rattled by this, in between the beatings. It's also worth noting that despite the fact that she gets injured by Khan herself, as soon as she's back on the ship she gets straight on with her duties without any muss or fuss: she wasn't "struggling to cope" when she was helping McCoy, she was just being a professional, as one might expect.
She's certainly a love interest / damsel in distress kind of character... but personally I thought she was a better-than-usual example of that. That said, I'm pretty terrible when it comes to conceiving female characters... did you guys think she was bad / good / okay?
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