Star Trek: 8 Things The Kelvin Timeline Movies Got Wrong
Good films, terrible Klingons...
The three Bad Robot produced Kelvin Timeline movies are the highest grossing and among the best reviewed movies in the Star Trek pantheon. They arguably paved the way for the Star Trek franchises' current television rennaisance.
Nevertheless, Trek fans are always going to pull apart the newest installment in their favorite fictional universe for the fun of seeing how it stacks up against what came before and if it can stand the test of time. That was no different in 2009, 2013, or 2016 when Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Star Trek Beyond were released respectively.
In a 2009 headline, the Onion joked "Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'" and they weren't wrong. We previously argued the Kelvin Timeline movies are actually good, but there's still a lot here to nitpick, criticize, and just plain be unfair to.
8. The Villains
Taken in isolation, each one of the baddies of the Kelvin Timeline holds their own. Eric Bana's "particularly troubled Romulan" Nero chewed the scenery in Star Trek (2009) in a way few Trek villains had. His line reading of "Hi Christopher, I'm Nero" is still one of the best, silliest lines uttered by one of Star Trek's many genocidal madmen. He served his function in Star Trek (2009), a simple and straightforward antagonist to get the story going and our heroes into place to continue on in their adventures.
But then we get to Benedict Cumberbatch's Khan (aka John Harrison) and things start to get a little dicey. Cumberbatch puts in a brilliant, Sherlock-y performance as the renegade Starfleet officer with unknown motives. But the moment he utters his real name, the movie comes to a screeching halt and the character is forced to stack up to the standard set by Ricardo Montalbán's original Khan.
In Star Trek Into Darkness, Commander John Harrison (a loose stand-in for Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness) is a far more compelling adversary than the version of Khan depicted here. Probably the greatest example of a good(-ish) movie getting far too bad a rap, Star Trek Into Darkness is nevertheless one of those movies that you have to put blinders on to fully enjoy. Just pretend Cumberbatch didn't say "Khan", he said "John". "My name is Johhhhn."
And then there's Krall, another villain with an alias: Captain Balthazar M. Edison of the USS Franklin circa the 22nd century. Star Trek Beyond makes the bizarre choice of burying one of the sexiest, most compelling actors of our time under heaps of Oscar-nominated (but Suicide Squad losing-to, ugh) make up. You could argue the beautifully designed alien mask allows Elba to let lose and do something totally whacko, but the broken English and fairly static performance fail to make Krall an interesting evil dude.
His backstory as a disgruntled Starfleet officer who found a way to keep himself alive by sucking the life force out of innocent aliens is more compelling than the character as he appears on screen.
And each of these characters' motivations can be distilled to a single word: revenge. Is that a totally accurate, fair reading of what drives Nero, Khan, and Krall? Not really. Nero's pretty upfront about his revenge plot, but both Khan and Krall are driven by more than simple revenge... it's just that they're still all basically just out for revenge. Khan steals a ship called the USS Vengeance, it doesn't get any more revenge-y than that.