1. Wheres the Darkness?
For a film with the word darkness in the title, Star Trek into Darkness isnt all that dark. Sure, people die in this film and people wrestle with killing Khan, but this movie has the same tone as ST09. While its nice to see that someone has realized that everything doesnt have to Battlestar Galactica/Stargate Universe levels of darkness and bickering or Warhammer 40,000 everything is grim, dark, and doomed ridiculousness, its kind of disappointing to see the writers not take things as far as they needed to go. Ironically, the writers set up a pretty dark opening the Enterprise crew is legally obligated to let an entire primitive species die, simply because they are a prewarp society and any intervention might contaminate their culture. Thankfully, the crew decides to ignore the Prime Directive (which is morally reprehensible in most of its showings) and save the primitives, only to get chewed out for basic decency. But instead of crafting the story around whether or not the Federation and Starfleet are morally bankrupt for following this policy, which extends to planets getting subjugated by the Klingons, we get Khans revenge. The writers do try for some darkness in the whole drone warfare/due process conflict metaphor subplot, but it falls apart for several reasons. First, it makes no sense that a plan designed to cause a war would leave
less evidence of Federation involvement than actually going on the planet to get Khan because thered be no one the Klingons could capture and torture. Sure, Marcus did sabotage the Enterprise's warp drive, but Chekhov fixes it (more or less) and Qo'nos' planetary defenses are so pathetic that the Klingons don't even notice
three patrol ships going dark at the same time, so it's not like the plan would guarantee a war. Second, once Khans identity is revealed,
everyone in the audience knows that Kirk is better off killing Khan sooner or later due to our knowledge of the character, making Kirk look dumb for upholding his principles (sort of like Janeway at the end of the Voyager pilot). Third, Kirk
not killing Khan winds up killing thousands of people when the dreadnought crashes into San Francisco, in essence making the hero responsible for their deaths through his negligence. Darkness is not about characters doing dumb things that have bad consequences. At its best, darkness is a human tragedy, where people do bad things for understandable reasons. It is not something that can be invoked by saying by doing X,Y, and Z, we will become as warlike as our enemies. To say that gives the audience Trekkies and casual moviegoers alike no credit and is a disservice to filmmaking and the Star Trek franchise.
What did you think about Star Trek into Darkness? Where do you want the Star Trek reboot to go next? What flaws do you think need to be avoided? Drop them in the comments below?