Star Trek: 8 Things The Kelvin Timeline Movies Got Wrong

First off, these films aren't hard sci-fi, they're fun, diverting action adventure romps. But they do dabble in some pretty intense sci-fi concepts and mostly retreat from them. Most films like these devote entire scenes to exposition dumps or create characters solely to spout off explanatory dialogue. The Kelvin Timeline movies suffer the opposite issue, handwaving or straight up ignoring the complicated conceptual story elements they introduce.

The entire premise that the Kelvin Timeline is a new offshoot from the original Star Trek continuity or Prime Universe is a major development. It's given exactly two lines of expository dialogue before Star Trek (2009) moves on to more pew pew.

According to co-writer Roberto Orci, that's just the half of it... after Nero's incursion in the 2230s, the universe is mending itself by the time we meet up with our heroes at Starfleet Academy in the 2250s. Kirk, McCoy, Spock, Sulu, Chekov, Uhura, even Scotty who's serving on a remote starbase are all being willed by the spacetime continuum (or something) to be together as they were "meant to be".

Spock Prime comes close to commenting on this when he's surprised to find Scotty on the very same planet he and Kirk were both separately, coincidentally marooned on, but the film settles for a raised eyebrow. Maybe it's too much for mainstream audiences to get too deep into the timey-wimey mechanics of red matter and black holes, but Star Trek (2009) especially suffers from "hey wait a minute" syndrome because of it.

Same goes for the sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, when we're introduced to a very Caucasian version of a traditionally non-white character, Khan. In the run up to the film's release in 2013, IDW published Star Trek: Countdown to Darkness (much like 2009's Star Trek: Countdown) to fill in the backstory of Into Darkness.

That comic explains in detail Khan's recovery by Section 31 and his physical and mental transformation into Benedict Cumberbatch's John Harrison. This is all further motivation for the character and a nice acknowledgement that yes they recast a brown actor with a white one (ouch) and maybe should've been in the film? Problematic either way, but it might've helped.