its really interesting seeing your perspective on wrath of khan as someone who got into aos first i grew up on tos and i cant see the warp core scene in into darkness as anything other than jj abrams worst tendencies to all out rip off other stories in embarrassing ways it took me right out of the movie but im genuinely fascinated seeing someone who watched into darkness on its own and felt it as its own emotional moment and seeing that perspective!! i mean this like totally seriously i know you have gotten a lot of bad messages about wok and it:d
Thank you for the kind message anon! I do appreciate it.
Now if you'll forgive me being rude I am going to vent a bit, some of it being somewhat tangential to what you actually said, although I swear I have a point.
So I'm not 100% sure how the narrative on this blog has become "fractal baby thinks ST:ID is better than WoK" and/or "fractal baby thinks ST:ID is good" because I have never said either and in fact have said many times that the JJ movies are quite bad. They're badly paced, the sound editing is a nightmare, there's unnecessary action scenes in both, the acting in ST:ID is truly atrocious in places, and they're misogynistic.
All I've said, and believe to be true, is that JJ and his writing team constructed a tighter thematic through line in ST:ID than exists in WoK. Now here's the thing: I suspect that this is partially because they are derivative, as you pointed out. Moving around pieces to build a narrative is a lot easier when you already have them in hand and don't have to invent them out of whole cloth. I think the most creative thing JJ did in AOS was make Starfleet explicitly fascist, and I suspect that was an accident.
