10 Movies Totally Ruined By Fan Service

2. Star Trek Into Darkness

J.J. Abrams gets plenty of flak for making Star Wars: The Force Awakens a transparent reprise of A New Hope, but that's nothing compared to his work on Star Trek Into Darkness a few years prior.

Though his 2009 Trek reboot was a major critical and commercial success, core Trek fans complained that it no longer felt like Star Trek, but rather a more generic and mainstream-skewing sci-fi action film.

Perhaps in an attempt to combat that, and certainly to curry favour with legacy fans, the sequel was shaped as a spiritual remake-of-sorts of 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, undeniably the consensus fan favourite Trek movie.

While not a beat-for-beat copy, it does see the Enterprise crew facing off against Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch), this time disguised in the movie's marketing and half of the movie itself as Commander John Harrison.

Except, Cumberbatch's Khan is neither a sharp reprise of the original character nor a clever reinvention: he bares so little resemblance to Ricardo Montalbán's original that slapping the Khan label on him feels itself like an act of cynical calculation.

The direct fan service ramps up significantly in the film's third act, with Spock's (Leonard Nimoy) sacrificial death in The Wrath of Khan being swapped out for Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), leading to the new Spock (Zachary Quinto) letting out a staggeringly lame-brained take on the classic William Shatner "Khaaan!" scream.

And let's not forget about the embarrassing scene where Carol Marcus (Alice Eve), strips down to her underwear for no discernible narrative reason, shot with an embarrassing gratuity by Abrams no less.

This is a movie that wanted to appeal to younger audiences while luring old Trek fans back into the fold, but for most, it just pissed them off more, insulting their intelligence with a laughably surface-level facsimile of the best Trek movie. No dice.