Khan Job
The thing I disliked most about Star Trek Into Darkness is that it exemplified all the stuff people point to as bad game writing. We had a series of action sequences devoid of context (but with jumping puzzles), strung together by static expository speeches. We get profound logic gaps that demonstrate a disconnect between the world and the narrative. And we get, perhaps most obnoxious of all, the deliberate outsourcing of any character development to audience nostalgia. When it comes time for the audience to learn who Khan really is, the film literally phones it in, asking the viewer to remember all the stuff Khan did in Star Trek II. We never learn about the Eugenics Wars. We never learn a single thing Khan did, bad or otherwise, except for a throwaway comment from Admiral Robocop that the 300 year old guy he thawed out was a bad dude. And to be fair, Admiral Robocop isn't exactly the most reliable witness.
Consider, too, the reactor scene, an inversion of the one from Wrath of Khan. It's Kirk who "dies", Spock who shouts "Khaaaaan!" and the whole thing gets turned on its head so that the audience can nod along and get its nostalgia centers stimulated. Except when we first saw that scene, it was genuinely moving. Long before franchises took over the multiplexes, we witnessed the death of a beloved character, one that we honestly thought was going to stick. There was no context for Spock to come back, and so his sacrifice felt genuine. With Into Darkness, we know the cast is signed for a few more flicks. We know that there's no way they're killing off Kirk because this thing's a cash cow. We aren't moved, we're manipulated, and not well.
And then there's the lack of context. Other people have gone over the repercussions of the way in which Kirk gets resurrected, but it's symptomatic. In every scene, in every sequence, there's a profound disdain for what was done and said as recently as the last shot. Khan rides a spaceship into a many-times-9/11 destruction of San Francisco and people are calmly getting onto trolleys three blocks away. Two massive Starfleet ships duke it out inside lunar orbit and nobody bothers to check it out. Kirk's supposed to fire a bunch of torpedoes at the Klingon homeworld from the Neutral Zone, except, hey, we find out later that instead of fuel they'll full of frozen dudes and wouldn't have been able to go anywhere. Starfleet communicators that offer less functionality than my antique Blackberry. On and on and on. But hey, who cares when we can have an action sequence of Sherlock and Sylar jumping from oddly shaped flyer to oddly shaped flyer (and is it just me, or did those things look like they came out of someone's Warhammer 40K models box?) zipping around a should-have-been devastated San Francisco, or a Wow Moment of the Enterprise rising from the oceans of a planet that's about to blow the living shit out of itself in a way that would certainly take out the Enterprise, or a far-future government on the brink of war that doesn't bother with the sort of basic security measures (like helicopter no-fly zones near VIPs) that we've got now.
So I didn't like the film. I wanted to like the film. I wanted to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the carefully crafted fanservice of the first Abrams Star Trek. I wanted to enjoy Benedict Cumberbatch chewing scenery and possibly turning into a space otter. I wanted very much not to have to write this. But having shelled out IMAX prices to watch someone indulge in the supposed worst excesses of my industry - again, lack of context, lack of consequence, meaningless action sequences, offshoring character development to franchise history, and long expository speeches that fill in backstory, poorly. And no, I don't think this is what game writing is - it's what we get accused of. And it's bad writing, and to see it in a film I had high hopes for was saddening.
Consider, too, the reactor scene, an inversion of the one from Wrath of Khan. It's Kirk who "dies", Spock who shouts "Khaaaaan!" and the whole thing gets turned on its head so that the audience can nod along and get its nostalgia centers stimulated. Except when we first saw that scene, it was genuinely moving. Long before franchises took over the multiplexes, we witnessed the death of a beloved character, one that we honestly thought was going to stick. There was no context for Spock to come back, and so his sacrifice felt genuine. With Into Darkness, we know the cast is signed for a few more flicks. We know that there's no way they're killing off Kirk because this thing's a cash cow. We aren't moved, we're manipulated, and not well.
And then there's the lack of context. Other people have gone over the repercussions of the way in which Kirk gets resurrected, but it's symptomatic. In every scene, in every sequence, there's a profound disdain for what was done and said as recently as the last shot. Khan rides a spaceship into a many-times-9/11 destruction of San Francisco and people are calmly getting onto trolleys three blocks away. Two massive Starfleet ships duke it out inside lunar orbit and nobody bothers to check it out. Kirk's supposed to fire a bunch of torpedoes at the Klingon homeworld from the Neutral Zone, except, hey, we find out later that instead of fuel they'll full of frozen dudes and wouldn't have been able to go anywhere. Starfleet communicators that offer less functionality than my antique Blackberry. On and on and on. But hey, who cares when we can have an action sequence of Sherlock and Sylar jumping from oddly shaped flyer to oddly shaped flyer (and is it just me, or did those things look like they came out of someone's Warhammer 40K models box?) zipping around a should-have-been devastated San Francisco, or a Wow Moment of the Enterprise rising from the oceans of a planet that's about to blow the living shit out of itself in a way that would certainly take out the Enterprise, or a far-future government on the brink of war that doesn't bother with the sort of basic security measures (like helicopter no-fly zones near VIPs) that we've got now.
So I didn't like the film. I wanted to like the film. I wanted to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the carefully crafted fanservice of the first Abrams Star Trek. I wanted to enjoy Benedict Cumberbatch chewing scenery and possibly turning into a space otter. I wanted very much not to have to write this. But having shelled out IMAX prices to watch someone indulge in the supposed worst excesses of my industry - again, lack of context, lack of consequence, meaningless action sequences, offshoring character development to franchise history, and long expository speeches that fill in backstory, poorly. And no, I don't think this is what game writing is - it's what we get accused of. And it's bad writing, and to see it in a film I had high hopes for was saddening.
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