Matt,

I appreciate the remark and may put some perspective on things. However, I do not recall at any point prior seeing a visual reference to Spock's strength. Your comments are valid but not shown on screen. And that scene in particular was after much much foolishness.

I liked STiD a lot. I have no major knowledge of love of anything pre-JJ in the star trek universe so that part doesn't bug me and the general ridiculousness of things like the Enterprise being under water in the first place doesn't stretch my belief any further than almost everything else about the universe. The Spock hand to hand Thing doesn't strike me as an inconsistency either - it is clear to me from that scene that Spock has tricks that involve some ridiculous pressure point neural whoziwhatsis which would obviously work more in his favor in a man to man situation than a one vs. many situation. I know very little about ass kicking but I know that different fighting styles are involved.

There was definitely gratuitous eye candy of both human and CGI variety but I thought the movie kept enough intelligence and humor to make it feel worthwhile. And never boring. Two prehensile tails up!

Before I go back and read the whitefont, I think that Star Trek should have been named Star Trek: Lens Flare! or possibly Star Trek: It's All About the Coat.

Now to read the whitefont.

Oh, but I did keep muttering "Not the face! Not the face!"

Okay, whitefont has been read. Yes, I laughed out loud when Khan grabbed the coat as he was hauling ass through San Francisco, and it just happened to fit. CUE DRAMATIC COAT MOMENT!

I think that flipping the Wrath of Khan death scene was a calculated risk that didn't work for me. It was like killing Buffy -- obviously Kirk was going to be brought back. If you introduce a Tribble in act 1, it has to go off in act 3. (Okay, so that's not a perfect comparison, since the acts are off, but you get the idea.)

Also, having Spock bellow "KHAAAAAAAAAAN" just made me laugh, and I know it wasn't supposed to. I was supposed to be all teary and moved, but putting that moment in was a HUGE risk, and maybe it's just the people I'm friends with, but that particular bellowed name gets invoked as a joke too much for that scene to work in the movie.

Benedict Cumberbatch still looks like a Siamese cat. And he officially is a creepy motherfucker. But I could eat his voice with a spoon.

Karl Urban is damn fine. As is Chris Pine.

I assume there is a metric crapload of Kirk/Spock/Uhura fanfic out there.

Worldbuilding minutia that I loved: seeing St. Paul's Cathedral in the London scenes and the Golden Gate Bridge in the San Francisco scenes. Especially St. Paul's -- I just love the idea that, a couple-few hundred years in the future, St. Paul's is still hanging about, because that's just what it does. That tickled me.

t edit I'm glad I wasn't spoiled that Cumberbatch was Khan -- I remember the speculation when he was first cast, but then the "John Harrison" character name was released, and I figured, hey, he's still Benedict Cumberbatch, so I'll see it. And yet, when he was revealed to really be Khan, I wasn't surprised. Except for how the character is -- I think -- a Sikh, but clearly Ricardo Montalban isn't, and clearly Cumberbatch isn't, either. So lots of handwaving there.

At least they put makeup on Montalban to make his skin darker in TOS, and back then a non-Caucasian superman was pretty damn progressive even if they didn't actually get an actor of the right ethnic background. In 2013 when Naveen Andrews is a household name that's worked for Abrams, there's just no excuse

Yeah, that makes me pretty angry.

So, they tried to cast Benicio Del Toro in the role and he pulled out. I forgot who replaced him, who also pulled out. So at that point, I think they were just hoping to get a name star who could do it. Not an excuse, but how I remember casting at the time.

I have read hte whitefont for Into Darkness, and I'm glad I didn't plan to watch the movie in the first place. Well, I'll probably sepnd a dollar on it later in the summer. I am annoyed that they've co-opted Khan, becasue that whole storyline in the original movies was a gutpunch of a payoff from the original series, and it felt earned. You knew why Khan was pissed, and you had the weight of actual years--for the Trekkies, at least--between the stories to imagine how Khan felt at being abandoned.

Seeing this now, it feel likes Abrams was going through the story closet and going "Oh, this looks pretty, let's add that to the outfit."

One of the reasons it didn't feel like a Star Trek movie is that the alien worlds actually look alien more than artificial. Okay, as well at. And I do also get the feeling that land, at least, extends further than I can see it, where as on TV, it mostly feels no more than one meter wider than the widest pan--it would have been a dream for some pretty funky matte paintings even back in the day, but normally it feels more like a spaceship show than a space exploration show.

If you could inject a sense of scale into the terrestrial encounters on TV, well, it would be over budget before you've signed a single actor.

As far as the yell of Khaaaaaan--they got all the required lines, right? No matter who said them.

It was fun, there were a few bits of "oh, so that's how that's going to be addressed in the third act" which really make me impatient, as well as deflating the emotion.

Mah emotion point was Hobbity--when Chekov popped (weird to talk about "Chekov's [insert apropos device here]" when Chekov's on board) did his day-saving bit in Engineering and appearing from nowhwere with his pre-teen face and everything..

Some shots reminded me of shots in Inception, but less cool. Way less cool. I got more of a sense of continual destruction than I did of lives lost in any battle--ratings, maybe?

I've seen every Trek episode other than Enterprise, but most of the things I like, the executions I like, are TNG and later.

It's unfortunate, PR-wise that Gene Roddenberry said his epitome of humanity would not be a white guy.

Hmmph. I fairly well enjoyed it, definitely worth the price of admission. My largest issue of the move was the screaming. Not the unintentionally funny yell of a word by Spock, but both Uhura and the other chick scream a couple times. Can we do that less?

Yeah, I don't think the required line was necessary at all. But I don't think the scene in which that yell occur should have occurred at all.