2. Superhuman Spock Battles Khan In Star Trek Into Darkness
Star Trek Into Darkness is a bad film. Starting with a terrible title, the film features ham-fisted dramatics, clunky plot devices, lazy screenwriting, ill-fitting action scenes, and a pretty awful, scenery-chewing performance from Benedict Cumberbatch as Trek's greatest villain. Even with all of those flaws, the film's most egregious mistake is stealing and inverting the ending to Star Trek's best film, The Wrath of Khan. After almost nothing happens for 1.5 hours, the Enterprise finds itself falling into Earth's atmosphere without any power. In a direct theft from Wrath of Khan, Kirk breaks into the reactor core and realigns it to restore power (it's a pretty silly-looking sequence by itself) while sacrificing himself for the good of the crew (Spock did the exact same thing in Wrath of Khan, of course). What follows is an inverted imitation of the classic exchange from the 1982 film, with Kirk falling dead after saying goodbye to his friend Spock. Then Spock screams "KHAAAAAN!" But the film isn't finished being dumb yet. Dr. McCoy figures that they can use Khan's super-blood to revive Kirk (thanks to some shoehorned, wink-wink experiments involving a Tribble). This leads to a protracted and incredibly idiotic chase scene between Spock and Khan that ends with a hovercraft-jumping fight that unpleasantly recalls the silliest action moments of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. During the fight, we see Khan's apparent invincibility (I thought he was just genetically superior, not indestructible), which underscores his earlier boasts about his superiority. However, we also learn something else new to the Trek franchise: Spock is apparently superhuman, too. He leaps hundreds of feet through the air, easily rips a metal part from the hull of a spacecraft, and repeatedly punches an indestructible man until he is rendered unconscious even though stun weapons have already been shown to have little effect on him. I thought Spock was Vulcan, not Kryptonian. All of this action nonsense is rendered pointless because the Enterprise already had 72 other superhuman specimens just like Khan with the modified blood they needed to revive Kirk. The bodies of Khan's crewmembers were established earlier in the film as genetically-modified superbeings just like him, so the pursuit and pulverization of Khan by Super Spock is simply a ruse for another stupid Abrams action sequence! So they revive Kirk, thereby eliminating the dramatic resonance of his sacrifice. In true Abrams fashion, the film imitates the surfaces of better films without retaining any of their power or depth. For me, this is the worst film in the Star Trek canon, and I've already established myself as someone who doesn't care for Trek anyway. This is sloppy, referential, thoughtless summer filmmaking at its worst.