Gaffer Tape said:
The Meyers films, especially The Undiscovered Country (which I love) were military thrillers. This... again, I just can't understand how the comparison could possibly exist. The Meyers films actually were about the ethics of militarism. This movie is just an excuse to have a big, Texan-drawling, black hat admiral with a big ship to fire at the Enterprise. There's no moral quandary. Okay, well, that's not entirely true. It's presented in a completely black and white way, given the tiniest bit of lip service when it's first introduced, and then completely done away with to make room for more space battles and then never, ever, EVER touched on again.
I will agree with you that Undiscovered Country was more complex--it's the most complex film in the whole franchise, and in my opinion the best--but is WOK not black and white? Is it not an excuse to have a superhuman mastermind blasting the shit out of the Enterprise? A chess game played with photon torpedoes and weapons of mass destruction?
Yes. It is.
But it does it SO WELL.
So does this film. And this is what I mean about the double standard. Plus, UNLIKE WOK, this film raises moral questions about whether it is right to kill the threat or have him face due process, whereas WOK was mainly about "how soon can we kill Khan?", and even though WOK raised the issues of "the needs of the many" at the very end, the whole concept of "what would you do to save your family, however you define that term", or "what do you do when your friend could die", or "at what point do you disobey orders" and "how far would you protect the system you serve, even when you think it is wrong", and what are the responsibilities of a captain--these are central issues in Into Darkness but either marginally touched upon in WOK or not touched upon at all. The most profound aspect of WOK was the realization of aging, that you really can't cheat death, and that's reflected in all the ways Into Darkness philosophizes about morality in the ways that WOK chose to do it in another manner. They are equally profound--if any of them are profound at all--but they go about it in slightly different ways. In WOK, they are expressed in slower, conversational scenes mainly, whereas in Into Darkness they are expressed through action scenes (or much tenser, edge of your seat conversational scenes), but in equal depth, and I think the fact that they are tied into action and violence gives the misleading impression that WOK is somehow more intellectual.