Amph JJ Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness

I don't think you even need to come at it by referencing "Space Seed." Marcus knew that Khan was a genocidal maniac and very intelligent, and he decided to wake him up anyway and blackmail him by threatening his crew. That was extremely stupid. Obviously normal Section 31 agents would've been more effective, though I guess they'd have more reason to refuse. And why would the head of Starfleet be running Section 31 anyway? It's a big secret and kept separate from publicly known organizations so people like the head of Starfleet won't be implicated in their activities.

I've always been ambivalent with regards to a Federation/Starfleet CIA, but I'm not sure the organization portrayed in DS9 would kill innocent Federation civilians. The name refers to Article 14, Section 31 of the Federation charter which permits extraordinary actions against external threats.

 

I always thought there had to be at various points somebody in Starfleet had to running Section 31. There's no way that everybody in the Federation could be that ignorant of what was going on with Section 31. Just made sense to me that at least one high ranking person in Starfleet was running the show (and that person trained his/her successor to run the organization accordingly)

 

Well, in DS9 the higher-ups knew about it, but they didn't run it and routinely disavowed knowledge. The latter worked better because they actually didn't know much and weren't involved.

 

If anything it always seemed the other way around, with Admiral Ross looking like he was coerced by 31.

 

Can we analyze the rises thing real quick? the last thing Bruce sees on television is the hanging SF guys, right?

*looks up screenplay*

ok, yes. The last thing we, the audience, and Bruce see on the television in Bruce's (or just outside of Bruce's) cell is when the SF guys are hung from the bridge. In the scene just before that, we are informed that there will be 23 days until the bomb explodes, by Fox. This is the last direct reference to time before Bruce escapes. Bruce escapes. The next we hear about time is when Gordon is meeting with cops and Foley isn't there. He says they have 18 hours left. THAT's when Bruce returns.

So, to everyone who's complained about this.......... THERE IS A 3 WEEK PERIOD DURING WHICH BRUCE HAS TO ESCAPE AND GET BACK TO GOTHAM. LITERALLY 3 WEEKS.

END.

[yet, I will continue, so as to spell:]

Now, obviously, there's at least two days between when he sees that and when he leaves. He climbs once, learns how the child escaped, without the rope, and then climbs again. Realistically, we could throw an extra day in there for recovery time. 19 days.

Tonally, in the movie, it's obvious he didn't JUST escape from the prison.

By observation, he's wearing normal clothes.

By logic, he had to take probably a few days to get IN the city, given recon, etc. He also probably needed at least a few days to find transportation TO Gotham..

But honestly, it doesn't take that long to travel from one part of the world to another, especially if you're Bruce Wayne, who, even without money, has connections everywhere. He only needs a phone.

Now, we see that he has ample EXTRA time- probably two weeks. of time to do ANYTHING. So, let's go ahead and say it took a bit longer to get out than a few days... and let's say he took a little extra time traveling, so as to stay under the radar...

tada.

This is not a plot hole.

edit: my apologies for the slight derail.

 

As I said, I have no issue with that part or the movie in general. It's just one of numerous examples of people trying to find a reason to hate on a movie because they were butthurt by something they decided should be done differently since apparently fans decide what direction something goes in and not the creator or director
They fail to see what merits such movies actually do have.

Peter Jackson's LOTR movies are similar, many fans like to hate on them for not being 100% source accurate or leaving out a character who might have appeared for like 3 pages. Never mind the fact the movies are quality and are generally beloved by audiences and critics, I mean the last one got 11 damn Oscars! Jackson's movies are adaptations, they capture the overall story and the characters very well and are well acted and realised on the screen. These movies should be judged on their own for what they are, not compared to other stuff all the time.

The Harry Potter movies all differ from the books in a number of ways and I think aren't as good, but they are all decent movies in of themselves and I'll happily watch them.


We need less of the "this movie is awful because it didn't do things the way I wanted/they should have been done" and more of the "This movie was good, but I would have preferred if it was done differently"

 

No. Marcus likely had little to no knowledge about Khan as the Prime universe was the same way - records from Khan's era were almost non-existant and they had to do a hell of a lot of research just to pull up one or two bits of data on the guy who they found at random. It strikes me as poor storytelling that Marcus was somehow the only guy with knowledge of Khan, his background, and that he and a bunch of his friends were floating about in some unknown corner of the galaxy when nobody else, even Spock of all people, knew of any this. "Space Seed" makes it abundantly clear that people hardly knew of the guy and that nobody was looking for him as he had slipped into such obscurity that even the Federation records had very little data on the guy. Since that sort of thing would definitely pre-date the first film then it would most definitely be the case in the Abramsverse and would make it seem very unlikely that the head of Starfleet would know who was out there, what he was capable of, and most importantly, where to go looking for him to put his cockamamie plot into motion.

As for Section 31, I wouldn't put it past them to kill innocent civilians if it meant getting the job done. They always had an "ends justify the means" approach and I wouldn't doubt for one second that they would kill an innocent UFP civie if it helped to accomplish their goal. They infected Odo (who had done nothing wrong aside from being the same race as the enemy) with that virus just to get back at the Founders and slowly kill them off. It isn't a huge stretch of the imagination for me that they would be willing to do something similar again.

 

SithLordDarthRichie

I totally agree. People want exactly what they want. It's hysterical that Furious 6 has a 72% on RT and Oblivion got a 55%. The masses, critics included, expect something from FF and it delivered on that, so they liked it. Oblivion is a great film, but it didn't give them what they wanted, I suppose, so they disliked it.

I think the same is for why so many love TDK but not so much for DKR. I think TDK hit that dark vibe so well... I think people like that and are comfortable with that, but I think DKR preached a little too much... it was a little to bright and hopeful.... And it wasn't the SAME as TDK, mostly. People just want MORE of the SAME.

Someone I know complained about Into Darkness that there was too little development, but it spent most of the movie developing Kirk and Spock's characters, individually and together (Scottie's too!). Neither of them were static. And Pike's death was a brilliant scene. Pike, in both movies, brought a lot to the table.

I'm not sure why this movie is getting some backlash, though perhaps it's mostly the vocal minority, as word-of-mouth to me has been mostly quite positive.

Although, when I saw it with a bunch of people opening night, here, in the states, most of the comments were "I liked it, but x." I sat next to someone who CRIED during the kirk death, then tried to play it off like it made mistakes here and there, amongst most everyone doing the same.

The critics are the same. They like what they decide to like.

 

I haven't seen "Space Seed" for a long time, but I seem to remember that the thing Kirk and co. had no knowledge of was that Khan was on a sleeper ship (which makes it odd that Marcus knew; I had assumed before this movie that someone would just stumble upon it like in TOS), not that they didn't know of his existence 200 years in the past. There were no records in Botany Bay and Khan was deliberately vague about the information he gave them.

And Odo was not a citizen of the Federation, but of Bajor. Section 31 didn't use him solely because of his species-- they didn't trust his loyalty, and some of his actions didn't really give them reason to change their minds.

 

There was also the fact that other members of his race where at the head of the enemy that was trying to wipe out the Federation.

 

Then I'd suggest you re-watch Space Seed again when you get a chance. The command staff didn't recognize him at all and the only person who had any inkling of his personality and background was the ship's historian who seemed more fascinated with painting pictures of him than actually telling Kirk that the man was trouble. Since the records from Earth would have been the same in both universes, it seems unlikely that most people 300 years removed from Khan's time would have any recollection of who he is and that he was genetically altered much less floating out there somewhere in deep space ready to be unfrozen and ready to go through with some absurd plot to spark a war with the Klingons.

Never said that Odo was a UFP citizen, what I did say was that if Section 31 used him to get at the Founders then it stands to reason that they wouldn't have any such reservations about doing something similar to a citizen of the UFP, changeling or not. It was implied from the get go that Section 31 is accountable to no one and will do whatever it takes to secure the Federation. In Bashir's first run in with them he noted that they had appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner to which Sloan just sorta shrugged and carried on as if it wasn't unusual. An organization like that wouldn't think twice about killing anyone, citzen or not, if it meant getting the job done.

 

I thought they did end up finding the information in the databanks though, after a search?

Also, in regards to Section 31 -- it was officially a part of the UFP in early incarnations of the structure chart and slowly removed off and became entirely clandestine. So some older members back in Kirk's time probably did know more. It wasn't super duper secret until the Jean-Luc / Sisko days.

 

Yeah, they found bits and pieces about him in the computer, but the computer just had general information about who he was, said nothing about where he'd be in space. I'll have to check the episode, but I seem to recall that they had no record of him and his followers being sent into space to begin with, which then brings me back to my first question: how did Adm Marcus know Khan was out there in stasis and how did he know to go looking for him?

Also, Section 31 was never an official organization, the name just refers to the Federation charter, the organization has always been clandestine and super secret as it was seen as being that way in the 4th season of Enterprise.

 

They never said he knew. He could have just gotten lucky.

 

And again, the discovery of Khan is dubious at best in this story, all that future technology at his hands and he decided to go incognito as a secret agent? Also, Adm Marcus likely wasn't the one doing the exploring, guy was running Starfleet back on Earth, something which doesn't grant quick and easy access to whatever a ship stumbles across, assuming that it doesn't kill them first. As I mentioned earlier, this whole thing smacks of shoddy plotting. The upside being that the characters and their dialogue was totally believeable. Here's hoping that the next film won't involve a super ship/villian which is, yet again, threatening Earth. Perhaps there can be a bit of the philosophical bits in there too, the same kind of stuff which made Star Trek so worth our time in the first place.

 

Naming him John really had nothing to do with Buckaroo Banzai as I doubt the hacks who wrote this ever saw Buckaroo Banzai. They named him John Harrison because John Harrison was a character from Space Seed and it was yet another one of the dumb attempts at hiding Khan's identity, but anyone who ever saw Space Seed will realize that the only episode in hundreds of Star Trek episodes where John Harrison appears just happens to be the only television hour with Khan!

 

The way I see it, Marcus was able to control Khan because he had the leverage of having Khan's people to use as blackmail leverage . In Space Seed, Khan was able to free them.

 

But the Khan of Space Seed would never allow a simple non-augment human to blackmail him. He would've snapped Marcus' neck and then taken back his crew.

 

Khan isn't supernatural. He's a human being, a superior one to be sure, but still human. Now, he snaps Marcus's neck. Marcus's men have standing orders to vaporize his crew in this event.

 

Is Buckaroo Banzai the one where all the villains are named "John"?