Have you seen Star Trek Into Darkness yet? Though its first weekend was considered a bit of a financial disappointment, it still pulled in $86.7 million during its extended opening weekend, which means the odds are high that at least some Slog readers saw it. So what did you think? After the video below, I'm going to talk about all the spoiler-y stuff I couldn't discuss in my review last week.

Here be spoilers:

I need to contextualize this by saying that I'm not a Trek purist. I like the Original Series, I'm not a huge Next Generation fan, and I just haven't had time for the other spin-offs. I've seen all the movies, and I liked quite a few of them. And I enjoyed the 2009 Star Trek reboot, even though it suffered from a few lapses in logic. It was fun, and it had a good sense of humor, and it laid a nice groundwork for what I thought would be a series of exciting new adventures. I didn't hate Star Trek into Darkness, but it was bad enough that I think it's caused me to reevaluate my appreciation of the first Trek. What looked like sacrifices for the sake of story the first time around now seem like warning signs that this Trek simply doesn't give a fuck about logic, internal or otherwise.

I'm not talking about Trek-nerd errors, like the fact that the Enterprise has never been capable of atmospheric flight. That bothered me for a minute, but I was willing to wave it away for the sake of the story. (So, in this new timeline, Federation vessels can fly in and out of atmosphere? All right.) But there are storytelling problems in this movie that simply don't work. They're not little things you pick apart as you leave the theater. They're problems that slap you in the face as you're watching the movie. For instance: What are the rules for transporters? Sometimes transporters work, and sometimes they don't. The first scene alone seemed to argue with itself repeatedly about what transporters can and can't do. Then Khan gets a transporting device that sends him to practically the other side of the universe, but he never uses it again, and then we're back to transporters barely ever working correctly at all. Except when they do. At this point, you're dealing with magic, not science. And why the fuck was Bones injecting a dead tribble with Khan's blood? Outside of the fact that the plot needed him to do it, there was no meaningful reason for it to happen.

And while I enjoyed Benedict Cumberbatch's performance, I thought Khan was a stupid choice for a second film's villain. You can spend one Trek movie more or less messing around Earth's orbit, and I thought the first movie did that quite well. But you can't spend two Trek movies in a row doing that; a good Trek movie should include lots of shit we haven't seen before. Instead, we get internecine struggles in a Federation that doesn't seem to have any sort of an internal structure, a lot of pointless bullshit about the War on Terror, and a My Evil Enterprise Is Bigger and Darker Than Your Good Enterprise battle. Without a really great reason, a Star Trek movie simply shouldn't end with a foot chase through the streets of San Francisco. A good Star Trek movie wouldn't tease at a war with the Klingons and then immediately forget about that plot thread, with no reference made to it as soon as the plot moves along.

And you can't set a movie in a mostly optimistic future and still treat women the way the franchise treated women in the 1950s. The female characters are simply awful in STiD. They react to the actions of men, they look pretty in their miniskirts and (presumably Federation-issued) Victoria's Secret underwear sets, and they need a whole lot of saving. Unacceptable! So there were barely any strong women in the Original Series? Add some. It's a reboot. Some changes are to be expected. Gene Roddenberry would approve of those changes. Stop apologizing after the fact and make some fucking changes. (It's interesting that STiD follows closely on the heels of Iron Man 3, which managed to skillfully handle several issues that STiD fumbles. Not only does Iron Man 3 pass the Bechdel Test, its take on the War on Terror, with the culture of fear surrounding the Mandarin's threat, feels like a critique of the shameful way Kirk initially responds to Khan's library bombing.)

Look: There were some neat aspects of STiD. I really enjoyed the visuals in the opening scene. The acting, on the whole, was pretty great. The scene where Kirk and Khan boarded the Evil Enterprise was nice and tense. It didn't make me mad the way some truly bad movies have made me mad. But the ending of the film, with the Enterprise prepared to explore uncharted space, and with Kirk learning valuable lessons about friendship and leadership, and with Spock learning to live as both a human and a Vulcan? That's exactly where the first movie ended off. There was absolutely no trekking in this Star Trek, and that's why it was a bad movie; it was all about running in place for a couple hours.