Lettered, in a very spoilery essay about why Star Trek: Into Darkness left her feeling cold and hollow and not a little bit angry.

(This is my friend Joy, who is also my favorite writer.)

(Above text by Rainbow Rowell. Below text by me, John Callender. You know, lies. Which you’re welcome to interpret as descriptive of the content, not just the author. But this is true for me.)

I saw STID on Friday, and I both very much liked a lot of it and repeatedly felt that something I valued but had a hard time articulating was being violated. I’m not going to bother getting spoiler-y, but having the linked-to post to point to is helpful, because while I mostly had different specific issues of canon-contravention that bothered me, I kind of do agree with much of the underlying sentiment. I’m specifically not going to address the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch; I’ve got some thoughts about that, but I’ll save them for another post.

There is a glibness, for want of a better word, in modern big-budget effects movies. There’s an assumption that things that defy logic and physics but look and sound cool can be thrown at the audience, and the audience will howl and clap and buy more popcorn, and the film makers needn’t worry about explaining or justifying or even lamp-shading the wackiness; they’ve already had their payoff and can whoosh-cut to the next gag. And sure, TOS and Wrath of Khan (for example) were far from perfect in that respect, and for a modern reboot of the series to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of its time, just as earlier Trek reflected its own, is unsurprising.

With both Lord of the Rings and the 2005 Pride and Prejudice I fell into the fandom camp that argued that updated retellings should be free to make bold changes. Fans didn’t lose Tolkien’s Faramir just because Peter Jackson sacrificed him on the altar of injecting cinematic tension into The Two Towers. They didn’t lose the complexity of Austen’s Darcy just because Joe Wright jettisoned him in favor of a simplified romantic lead. By the same token, if JJ Abrams wants to abandon large chunks of the subtle but (at least to lifelong Trek fans) important characteristics of the Trek universe to pursue his (admittedly emotionally powerful) storytelling, in a way that bows to the logic of what a big-budget effects movie is like circa 2013, then he gets to do that, and at least in the eyes of those who put their money at risk I’m sure the numbers are proving him right.

I reached a point toward the end of STID where I had pretty much decided that while this was a good movie, and an enjoyable movie, maybe even a FUCKING AWESOME movie (as one Tumblr review I reblogged characterized it), it wasn’t, at least in my eyes, Star Trek. It had crossed one too many lines, dismissively violated one too many conventions. And not just conventions like “starships don’t enter planetary atmosphere.” Conventions like the one quoted above, about Trek representing “an earnest wish for a better future.”

Then came the movie’s climactic sequence, and Abrams reeled me right back in, and I was immediately emotionally invested, and whatever you might say against some of the choices, the action was too deeply enmeshed in the Trek part of my brain to be denied, and I was in Trek heaven through the end of the movie.

It’s interesting to read the linked-to reviewer’s charges against the way that scene was re-imagined, and I can see the truth of what she’s saying. But I guess it didn’t matter for me. It may not have been completely honest on Abrams’ part, may have been a cheat, appropriating emotions that were earned by a different generation of Trek. But if that’s what it was, the trick worked in my case. I guess I’m predictable that way, and I don’t doubt for a second that at some point in the creative process there was a cynical choice made to manipulate me by those exact means.

I think Trek gets to be its own new, different, thing for the purposes of being a big-budget effects movie in 2013. That’s just reality. I’m happy about it. I’ll probably see it again in the theater.

But it is a different thing. I waited in line in Westwood opening weekend to see one of the first showings of Wrath of Khan. I went in not really knowing what to expect; my expectations were actually pretty low after having done the same thing a few years previously for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. When I walked out of that theater a few hours later I was stunned. Not just by how good the movie was, but by the ending, an ending that at that moment, at least, was unrelieved by the way they ended up walking it back in the next movie.

It was an early afternoon showing of Wrath of Khan that we saw, and when we walked out we passed even longer lines of fans waiting to get into the next showing. And it was a really cool experience to have those people actively engage with us as we left the theater. “How was it? Was it good?” Because this was 1982, pre-Internet, and again, given the debacle that the previous movie had been, for fans obsessive enough to be lining up hours ahead of time, this was a real question.

I remember being locked in quiet, intense conversation with my party about what we’d just seen and what it meant. And then looking up at this line of expectant fans, realizing they were all watching us really intently. Was this movie good? Was it worthy of Trek?

Oh yeah, I remember saying to someone. You’re going to love it. But (shaking my head and chuckling) you have no idea. And then walking off to continue dissecting it, trying to come to grips with what we’d just seen.

Star Trek: Into Darkness is a damn good movie. It may or may not be Trek, and I can’t give it the same unqualified praise I gave those strangers waiting in line back in 1982. Especially if you really love Trek, this is going to be a complicated movie to process. But it’s a damn effective one, whatever it is.