Star Trekking, Across The...

So, yes, it really did take me this long to find the time to see Into The Darkness.

My husband's comment summed it up: "I always thought Dreadnought! would make a good movie. So did J.J. Abrams."

Much of the plot did indeed seem to be cribbed from the Diane Carey novel, except intermingled with Wrath of Khan. This doesn't make it bad - and definitely answers the "But it's not Star Trek" criticism. I found that criticism...ridiculous. The movie is about weapons. It's about the inevitability of war. It's about human inability to let go of anything that might give us an edge in the fight...including Khan, who ends the movie in stasis with his crew.

The "young" crew (actually about the same age as the originals, actor-wise) were as good as ever. Especially Saldana, who has been really impressing me as an actor. Her tiff with Spock ("Do you guys have to do this now?") was absolutely awesome.

However, I did have a number of criticisms:

1. I don't mind fan service, but did we have to shot for shot the sequence in reverse? Anyone who's seen both this movie and Wrath of Khan knows what I mean. And because it was not only fan service but suffered from a Chekov's Assault Rifle foreshadowing situation there was absolutely no emotional tension in the scene at all.
2. If we could have that level of fan service, we might have had "Second star to the left and straight on until morning" in the perfect slot for it at the end of the movie.
3. The shot of the ships falling through the atmosphere? He stole it. From new Battlestar Galactica. Okay, it's a cool shot, but...
4. Abrams just does not seem to have any grasp of time and distance in space travel. A day to the Klingon homeworld? Long distance transporters? It's annoying because so much else is right - the Enterprise's maneuvering thrusters being distributed over the saucer surface was *exactly* how you'd need to do it to avoid damaging torque in a ship that size and I continue to love the Abrams engineering area.
5. Again, if we're going to have massive fan service done badly, how about paralyzing Pike instead of killing him?