We skipped out on another show last night, another unfortunate victim of the Boom Operator being an actual movie-person this month. In addition, parts of Oklahoma a scant 2 hours away from us were liquified by a tornado, so we wouldn't have been able to get in the studio anyway. Too bad, but I wanted to vent my spleen on Star Trek: Into Darkness.
Sometimes a followup reveals just how weak the first film, the premise, the franchise ballast, was as a whole. Into Darkness was straight-up lazy and gutless, offering no new dilemmas or important conflicts, merely mimicking the plot of the first run of films. Remember how one of the interesting tenets of the 2009 film was its acknowledgement and alleged separation from the original films via some malrkey about a different timeline? That came into play again here. But the whole: "THIS VERSION IS TOTES DIFFERENT" rings pretty hollow when you outright mimic scenes/characters/events from the other films. I don't like the interplay there, because it gambles nothing that would create tension around the plot or actual characters who occupy an independent space. It wasn't a bad film at all, but it was ordinary - which in a way is much, much worse.
