Nice action with terrible plot, as usual nowadays

Rating: 4/10 (17 June 2013)

I can't really say I'm disappointed by Star Trek Into Darkness. I already expected the story to be weak. I just didn't expect it so be so bad. I get the impression most scriptwriters nowadays have never read a book in their lives, and all they can do is copy ideas from other similar movies and patch them together to make their own. There are TONS of good science fiction stories out there they could adapt to the big screen, but I'm afraid they have never read them or even heard about their authors, so they keep serving us the same reheated bad dishes over and over again. Take the opening sequence: in a good story, they would have sent a probe down there, made at least of the same material Spock's suit is made of, with the cold fusion (forgive me for repeating this absolutely nonsensical name for what is obviously a freezing device. Apparently just because "cold fusion" has the adjective "cold" in its name, the writers believe it to be something that freezes things, and not a hypothetical nuclear reactor that would operate at room temperature (which is what the term actually means - if you're going to invent a futuristic device, don't give it a name that already exists! Learn from the Original Series: that's why they came up with "phaser", instead of "laser". Then we have Star Fleet command meeting in a top staff meeting room that is on top of a building, all enclosed in glass windows. Anyone who knows what the actual meeting room of the chiefs of staff in the Pentagon or NORAD look like will know this is complete imbecility. Also, the city that is the headquarters of Star Fleet has no security whatsoever. And let's not bring up the idea that they have gone complacent: even the most peaceful society would need urban police, not to mention city and planetary defenses, since the Federation has enemies, and not just the Klingons. These are all plot devices made to create the situations that move the story forward. But they are all absurd and nonsensical. Apparently, no one can think of a reasonable and acceptable way of moving the story forward anymore. Like, Kahn could easily have teleported himself to the middle of the conference room and, considering his abilities, killed most people there before they could react, and then beaming out to Q'ono'oS when Kirk found a way to put him in a jam. Of course, Khan saying that Admiral Marcus wanted him because of his savagery, since "wars are not won by logic" (actually, they are - if you are a better strategist and has better equipment, you will win a war), they needed him because he "can kill". Of course humans are 100% peaceful: the brutality of the cadets that beat up Kirk in the first movie and the fact that the Enterprise and other Federation exporation starships are loaded with photon torpedoes and phasers prove that! Come on! All Admiral Marcus had to do was to get people to improve the weapons they already had. He had no need for Khan. He had no problems finding people to help him build the weapons designed for Kahn, so he should be able to find engineers to help him design them. And the list goes on: Kahn needs them to lower the shields so he could beam his people off the Enterprise, but Admiral Marcus had no problem beaming his daughter off with the shields up. They only needed Khan's blood to save Kirk. That could as easily have been gotten out of his corpse. You don't leave superdangerous and superpowerful insane mass murderers alive. And they had already been condemned as war criminals, as the Admiral points out. Dozens of Klingons and 3 birds of pray can't get one single shot on a man? Also, J. J. Adams said that, and I quote, "the time travel-alternate reality concept used in the previous film was a deliberate ploy to enable a reboot for new sagas/films: 'The idea, now that we are in an independent timeline, allows us to use any of the ingredients from the past - or come up with brand-new ones - to make potential stories.' " And all they can come up is a ripoff of The Wrath of Khan?? I'm really afraid that, unless a new generation of scriptwriters comes along, TV is going to take away all good stories and just leave bad plots like this one to Cinema. And that is something that saddens me very much.