With the benefit of 11 years of hindsight, lets talk about Star Trek Into Darkness. Cards on the table: I don’t like this movie at all. It’s probably my least favorite Star Trek story across the entire canon.
While this movie was being promoted, no one would confirm that Cumberbatch was Khan despite rampant speculation. He’s not even introduced as Khan, for the first half of the movie he’s “John Harrison,” and the Khan reveal is played as a big dramatic moment.
JJ Abrams’ entire shtick is that he crafts “mystery boxes.” So… is that it? Is Star Trek Into Darkness just a mystery box where the identity of the villain is the mystery, and Abrams & co. just worked backwards from there?
Lets be generous and say that’s not it: Into Darkness had something to say. We have a conspiracy, a rogue admiral, an automated super-warship, the death of a mentor… it seems like we can pull something out of here, right?
… right?
Yeah Abrams’ mystery box method only “works” while watching a show for the first time. But it inevitably leads to a poor conclusion, and thus a negative re-evaluation after the fact. Because the key aspect of how Abrams does it is that he doesn’t care what the resolution to the mystery is. So it hasn’t done the legwork to make the mystery feel satisfying after-the-fact. The best mysteries have reveals that in hindsight seem inevitable, which means there’s evidence that could have been used to infer it earlier, as well as red herrings which end up having adequate alternate explanations. If you decide the answer to the mystery after the fact, that’s never going to happen. Especially if you pick your answer—as he is known to have done—based on what audiences didn’t guess.