I just wanted to say I absolutely love this movie. Now, I am not old enough to have seen TOS back in it's glory days, so what I am about to say may be about ready to crash the servers with angry responses, but whatever: I do not think the original series was not very good. It had several good classic episodes, but the rest were all Abraham Lincoln floating through space and haunted houses. The original acting was sub-par, and the way they always had Kirk give his big ethics speech at the end of most episodes made the script writing about as high quality as that of those stupid kids educational shows they run on PBS.
THAT BEING SAID, the reason that Start Trek has survived for half a century is because it moved forward with the redeeming qualities of the original series: great character relationships that are more powerful than the characters themselves, plot lines that may not be the height of creativity but pull you along with them anyway, and visuals so powerful you feel like what you are watching might just be real. I think that Into Darkness perfectly harnesses these immortal qualities.
Yes, Khan is an old villain that has been defeated before, but he served a brand new purpose in this movie by making us confront the issues of defining and confronting terrorism. Using old villains does not make a director lazy. By that definition we should never see the Romulans, Borg, or Klingons make another appearance again. By that definition Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was lazily written because Darth Vader was back.
Yes, there are some technical inconsistencies and convent plot devices, but there always have been in Star Trek. In the original series they did not care just how big the Enterprise was, they kept adding rooms to it as needed to advance their stories along. So what if Abrams had to face the same problem in his movies. And if you want to talk about lazy plot devices, that's all that The Search For Spock was. "Hey everybody Spock's not really dead, the Genesis device repaired him. Except he is an infant now. And has no brain. And everything else made by Genesis is falling apart except him."
The point is that there are some imperfections in Into Darkness, just like in all Star Trek shows and movies, and any other universe for that matter, but it did expertly use all of the immortal features that have always sustained Star Trek.
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It did bother me a little that Admiral Marcus's accent suggested he was an admiral in the Confederate Navy, and yet his daughter had a prim and proper British accent.
