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Rating: Null/10 (21 October 2014)

I didn't hate the first movie in this reboot, when the Abrams franchise had fewer ambitions. The first film literally never left the solar system. This time around, we get to meet the new old CGI rendition of the Klingons, who seem like the enemies from a first-person shooter on PS3. Out of the melee emerges Khan, the abandoned genetically-engineered superman with a Shelley-esque vendetta against starfleet. Anyone involved in the writing, casting, direction, and final cut of this film was complicit in the cardinal sin of adaptations or remakes, taking something that people originally loved and changing it into something radically inferior. This Khan is not the charismatic Ricardo Montalban, transported from Fantasy Island with his worldly, narcissistic charm, but the phlegmatic Benedict Cumberbatch of Sherlock Holmes fame, rendering Khan as a humorless and notably boring villain bent on vengeance without the verve, sexuality, and nihilistic laughter at death that made Montalban's Khan such an interesting antagonist. The writing is comic-book franchise quality, which seems to be what the producers of the pre-branded 'reboot' are going for. Sans comic. I imagine that real Trekkies are as chagrined as true comic book purists when a studio favors the vague cultural familiarity and approval among the uninitiated masses. Here is my beer. Bubbly. Bitter. There is an impending catastrophe! I don't care! Benedict Cumberbatch could not have accomplished this. A Benedict Cumberbatch is only capable of quiet evil on the level of, say, a Juian Assange. This review has me planning to revisit the old franchise before I take aim at the next installment in the reboot. JJ Abrams won't make a dime, but the Trekkies can thank him for a piece of flashy advertising.