Star Trek Into Darkness

Just hitting Blu-Ray this week, Star Trek Into Darkness is perfect title to launch the concept of this blog off of.  A healthy amount of the of the trailer that came out for the first ten minutes of the movie, even the above poster were for this segment.  While the segment is referenced heavily throughout the film, it's handled with much the same tact as the prior Star Trek movie, making it even more encapsulated.  It's a mini movie, more concise and complete than even a James Bond opening.  And it's almost exactly ten minutes.  Yes, my first post is for a movie that by the ten minute point...  just got to the title.

This segment has been the root of some consternation it seems among fans...  and there have been (possibly) thousands of words of commentary on just the Enterprise being under water.  It makes no real world scientific sense... Nope, but if movies HAD to make everything comply with our current depth of knowledge of the universe, there would be no sc-fi genre.  It's not pulling a Dark Knight Rises with real world tech and being laughably ignorant.  No it says the Enterprise is underwater.

Which brings us to the complaint that it makes no sense 'in universe' that it defies the logic of Star Trek... Yeah, So does Voyager and Deep Space Nine. 

This emblem is also on the
side of the TOS Enterprise's
secondary hull, near the dish.

Star Trek the Next Generation is a bit different in logic and solutions, methods and execution that even TOS, so We're not in the United Earth Space Probe Agency anymore, with the emblem at the right, we're in a different... timeline, universe, canon, who gives a fuck?  Trek wasn't born out of a master plan.  It's not Tolkien or Herbert.  It changed and grew along the way, a pot luck of sci-fi with multiple authors, not a prophetic vision singularly handed down by Gene Roddenberry.

Wait... where were we...  Oh, Planet... Volcano...  Star Trek into Darkness!  I fear if I were to give a defense of point by point complaints fans have of this, it'd be longer than a dictionary.  This blog isn't to snarkily piss on movies from the cheap seats, it examining a question;

Do the first ten minutes of a movie make or break it?

By the Ten Minute Point; Into Darkness both makes the movie for the people who are going to love it, the characters are back and this is going to be a fun and energy filled movie.  And it's utterly destroyed the movie for those who... want to hate it.  It's pissing on old Star Trek while wearing it's clothes, throwing science out the window and really the one valid problem I have with it is it, and the rest of the movie's sacrifice of logic and reason for plot convenience.  Sure, They should have stayed in orbit, beamed the ignorantly named device down into the volcano and called it a day... but there's no scene, no tension, no fun and thusly no point.

I loved this movie coming out of the theater, and by the time we were done talking about it, I hated the thing.  Now... It's currently my second favorite movie of the year so far.  And the opening is one of the best parts!