9. Stop Stealing From Classic Trek
There's an homage, and then there's flat out pilfering from the source material. Star Trek Into Darkness walks this line so finely that audiences seem rather divided on it so far. The 2009 Trek cleverly envisioned this new scenario as an alternate timeline, allowing Leonard Nimoy to appear as "classic Spock", while Zachary Quinto and co. were contemporary, alternate takes on the characters. In Into Darkness, however, this is taken to more dubious extremes, as new Spock literally calls up old Spock to ask him for help with defeating John Harrison, given that he has, of course, already worked through this scenario. Thus, we end up with a situation echoing the radiation chamber finale from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Instead of Spock dying while Kirk watches on in horror on the other side of the glass, the roles are reversed, and Kirk dies (albeit temporarily). Because these characters are still relatively new to us in these forms, it felt like jumping the gun emotionally, whereas in the original Trek we had gotten to know the characters over the course of an entire series, on top of two movies. Plus, the fact that we all knew Kirk was
not going to die sucked all the tension out of it. Hopefully for Star Trek 3 they will simply employ existing characters in a wholly original way.