Star Trek: Into Darkness stumbles in premise, but not in execution...

Rating: 6/10 (30 May 2013)

Star Trek: Into Darkness stumbles in premise, but not in execution... Let's replay events from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and let's flip them a bit and it'll be cool. Once again, a group of people make a choice because they could, and forgetting to ask if they should.
First off, I really like this film. It's a well made, good film. It's fast paced, it has good character beats, good character interactions, and it's big. Where it goes wrong, is that it's not bold. It fails to be new, to be different. It takes, what should have been homage at most, and turns it into 'new' plot points – just flipped a bit. As a writer/director, and a Star Trek fan, I understand this must have been tantalizing for them, and it clearly felt like the right thing to do. But after a moment of pause, didn't anyone say wait, stop. Anything we do, in the vein of what we're discussing, will only be compared to Wrath of Khan, and we don't want any part of that. Did no one ask, why should we do this? What is the upside? Of course, there is no upside. If you do it badly, you lose. And if you do it well, which they did, you still lose.
The 'prime directive' should have been this Homage moments aside, we need to inhabit this new universe with our own new villains, characters, stories, before we reach back into the past and rely on, in essence, a stunt-plot We're brand new, let's enjoy it.
I, personally, would love to see what Nicholas Meyer would do with all the toys that J.J. Abrams has to play with. Toys, which Meyer did not have when he directed Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country.