Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Reed Solomon reviews and spoilers: KHAN TREK INTO DARKHAN I mean STAR KHAN INTO KHANESS I mean KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN

 I'm warning you

There are

spoilers

Anyways It's not as if people didn't already know who Sherlock Holmes was playing.  I mean Benedict Cumberbatch. I did say spoilers in very tiny letters. 

Khan is the villain of this movie!! OH NOES!!   KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNN!

Here is a movie that Star Trek fans have been waiting for a long time.  I enjoyed it for the most part, but here is my review and an overly informative outline of the plot because that's how I roll.

Anyways, The story begins as the parallel earth cast of the NCC-1701, including Captain Kirk and Spock, have not yet begun their 5 year mission to seek out new life as shown in the original series.  BUT.  Someone else has.  And they have found Khan and his people floating in space.  An Admiral of Starfleet decided it would be useful to hold Khan's compatriots hostage and make Khan work for him under a false name.  I assume everything else about the origin of Khan remains true.  They don't go into it aside from him being a 300 year old genetically enhanced warlord frozen in stasis.

And so Khan decides to get revenge on this Admiral, and kills a number of people and Kirk manages to stop him as usual.  But Khan transports away somehow over great distance to the Klingon homeworld, which for some reason is desolate  This all seems far fetched, but whatever.  This is Star Trek not Star Wars.

After this, Kirk takes the Enterprise to the Klingon world and takes a special shuttle, anyways a bunch of stuff happens, they take Khan into custody, and Kirk and the Enterprise are set to be destroyed by the Admiral who is on a battleship class starship ready to cover up everything.  But some luck gets Kirk out of it and he hesitantly teams up with Khan to disable the battleship.  Kirk doesn't trust him, Khan knows it and who can blame him cause Khan will use any means at his disposal to stay on top.


Anyways, the daughter of this admiral is a young Carol Marcus, who Star Trek fans know later goes on to create the Genesis device (along with her and Kirk's son David), has falsified her way onto the Enterprise.  Yet another call out to the Wrath Of Khan storyline.  There are a lot of them.  It's actually overkill now, JJ Abrams.

A while later, Khan takes control of the battleship.  It and the Enterprise for some unknown reason are now in orbit and descending upon Earth.  YOU WOULD THINK Starfleet would have some sort of EARTH DEFENSES to stop this, but hey, its a major motion picture, you gotta have a spaceship crashing into the Earth!  Of course you do!  NO YOU DON'T!!!  Captain Kirk saves the ship by doing what Spock did in Wrath of Khan.  Call backs again?  10 fucking minutes of call backs.  I saw this scene, I don't need 10 minutes of it reversed when we fucking well know you aren't killing off Captain Kirk.  But yeah, Kirk is dead OMG.  Spock yells KHAAAAAAAAAAAN and goes after Khan on Earth.

Anyways, after some more jumping around and around on flying cars, Spock recaptures Khan and Bones says oh hey we can use his superman genetic blood to save Kirk with a blood transfusion.  How convenient and surprising.  Also they use tribbles as lab animals.  Space PETA is gonna be pissed.

And go figure, Khan's blood works, Kirk lives.  Now he has superhuman blood.  Khan goes back into cold storage but is he really?  WHO KNOWS.  Now begins Kirk's 5 year mission to seek out new life and so forth.

Any way you slice it this movie could have been done without the heavy handed callbacks to Wrath of Khan.  Some of it was cute, but c'mon someone needs to reign it in.

All things considered, Khan was well done.  Can't get Ricardo Montalban cause he's sadly dead, but Benedict Cumberbatch is almost as good and convincing, and even channels the accent subtly at some points.

Anyways, all in all it was a decent movie.  It could have been a bit less actiony and call backy.  Hopefully the next movie stands on its own a bit.  Perhaps something with the Klingons I'm guessing. It's amusing to think that the Klingons probably didn't think starfleet was much of a threat until they kept losing to Kirk.  Hope that continues.

No idea if Abrams directing Star Wars will affect another Star Trek film.  I wonder if a different director could take the helm.

Now go back and read the first letter in every paragraph.

No comments: