I went to Feed Toledo's Jam City event last night, a fundraiser where local chefs produced riffs on the classic cheap lunch fare. Other than wondering how much the fire marshall had been paid to ignore occupancy limits, I had a good time. Some of the dishes were pretty tasty, but half of them suffered the flaw: They tasted mostly like peanut butter and jelly.
Now, in spite of what you're thinking, I'm only slightly illiterate. Yes, this was the basis of the event. But I was hoping for more dishes inspired by PB&J than dumped into the middle of a PB&J.
You see, I recognize getting those very distinct ingredients into a dish is tricky. And I supposed putting peanut butter on a hot dog is uncommon, and--close you ears Thomas Edison--maybe even inventive. But when something is so on-the-nose, the discussion dries up after "Yep, there was peanut butter and jelly in that." Nerdery is novel, but most of all, I just wanted something that tasted good.
And this is my gripe with Star Trek: Into Darkness.
Joss Whedon's The Avengers signaled the end of the revolution, I was told. The mainstream theatrical bio-engineering of beloved geeky seeds was now in the hands of the fan boys, the people we could trust because they were brave enough to admit they liked these franchises during their original runs. (Note: The spell to cast when artificially searching for this kind of courage is called "millions and millions of dollars.")
But Into Darkness is a 'tweener, a movie that attempts to service the deep fans with otherwise unexplained allusions while putting on an otherwise freestanding show. Like the Enterprise gaudily plummeting toward San Francisco, it nosedives in the territory squarely between, but nowhere near, either.
As a mainstream attraction, the movie is pretty bland, but it's big and it's loud and it's shiny, which at this point passes for summer entertainment. (It's frightening how close we're getting to the gluttonous sloths of WALL-E).
But my concern is what was supposed to be in it for me. As a kid of the '80s, I respect more than revere TOS and that cast's movies. Still, even as someone who experienced those characters after their pop-iest days, I found Into Darkness's "nods" insulting.
Forget the whole Khan-denying campaign Abrams and co. went on. They had a movie to promote and a mystery to protect as part of that process; I can live with that.
No, my issues are that they seemed to think invoking Khan's name was enough.
The Khan character (and let's be honest, we're really talking about the theatrical version) was not wholly interesting. Sure, he's superhuman and charming, but it's a big enough universe to find more of that. Instead, it was Ricardo Montalban's slick portrayal of the quasi-cult leader that made Khan memorable.
What made Abram's Khan so frustrating is that it wastes a potentially great performance from an actor, Benedict Cumberbatch, who has great performances on his resume. In fact, if you were casting a scene-for-scene remake of Wrath of Khan, Cumberbatch would be an outstanding choice.
There are many kinds of power in the galaxy. Wrath of Khan's title character was so dangerous because he could generate an advantage from seemingly nothing. That Khan was like a great poker play reduced to a small chip stack in a tournament, unable to get action from the rest of the table because they fear what he could do with more chips.
Sure, this Khan had a plan and seemed to accept accept extreme disadvantages in the course of executing it, but he was more of a brute. He killed a horde of Klingons. He navigated his body through a debris field. And he crushed a skull.
Even the scene at the end of Into Darkness that is a reprisal of one from Wrath of Khan fails to respect even a superficial understanding of the characters. Probably the most famous word from the original movie is Kirk's red-faced exclamation of the villain's name for the death of his good friend. Of course, Kirk is human and in his relationship with Spock, we are reminded frequently that this makes him "the emotional one."
So there is something glaringly wrong with seeing Spock rage and growl Khan's name to the heavens. Yes, dumbass, I know that sequence is scene-for-scene from Wrath of Khan, and no, it isn't cool that you switched the characters. You might as well have put Jack Shepherd and an Ewok in those two positions for as much sense as this makes.
Like some of the chefs last night, Abrams seemed to think getting the required ingredients into a plausible plate was the majority of the battle. But on some level, and frankly it's a pretty low rung, food and movies are supposed to just be good, dammit. When concept trumps quality, you're no longer making art. You're making love to your own genius because, consciously or not, you know nobody else will.
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