The Trouble with Transporters: Star Trek Into Darkness

STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS (or The Transporter is One More Reason You're Not Supposed to Be Making Action Movies Out of Star Trek)

I got some news for Damon Lindelof and J.J. Abrams. You know that transporter thing in Star Trek that you can't figure out what to do with? You know, that thing in Star Trek: Into Darkness that you keep having problems with. This is a two hour movie, where most of the dialogue is about explaining why the transporter doesn't work in this scene, because you want to do an action scene, or it would be too easy to just beam someone out of trouble. There's a reason for all this. There's a reason why hacks like Lindelof can't figure out how to get around it.

Let me explain to you why it exists in the first place. No, it's not because somebody like Gene Roddenberry thought it would be cool to have a teleporter on board, but because they were making a television show which focused on a story, and they had neither the money nor the time to show people getting in and out of little shuttles all the time. It helped them get on with their story. It wasn't about action battles in spaceships. The transporter beam helps you get your characters where you want them to be quicker, so you can move forward with your "plot." Do you guys know what a plot is? 

You see, you keep having this problem with having to make shit up and explain to the audience all the time why you don't want to use the transporter all the time because you have no plot, you have no story, everything is focused on space battles, action, people shooting and blowing shit up. They didn't have transporters in Star Wars, there was no need for them.  In Star Trek, it was in fact invented as a convenience, but it worked so well that people now just assume that one day we'll invent such a thing... 

You have characters doing shit all the time in Star Trek movies that they probably shouldn't be doing in a Star Trek movie, and since you have nothing to say, you have no plot, you have no story to tell, you end up with this severe issue around the transporter beam. You're simply not thinking straight because not only do you not understand "Star Trek" and how it works, you make it look even dumber when you come up with more bad excuses throughout the movie of just why they can't use the transporter at that particular moment, you waste screen time with characters having to explain it, and you make yourselves look stupid because you're thinking only about action and stupid shit that YOU want to see in a Star Trek movie. If you had simply come up with a great story, you wouldn't have this problem. There are so many instances in this stupid movie that require you to have to explain to the audience who you obviously KNOW are going to be wondering what the fuck--why don't they just use the transporter--because they're smart, and yet you treat them like they're dumb, and they're not going to notice that you have to fucking explain it every five minutes to them why you can't use the transporter in this scene. You're idiots. You did it to yourselves.

When I think back of the clever uses of the transporter in the movies, I have to say, those people knew what they were doing with Star Trek, it would seem the more you deviate from what Star Trek is, the catch is, the more you have to waste time trying to explain stupid shit to the audience as to why stupid shit is happening in your movie. That's a waste. It shows you don't know what the fuck you're doing. By continuing to point out to the audience all the time why you can't use the transporter also shows how insecure you are in your writing, you could have just invented one simple excuse at the beginning of your movie, and all your problems would be solved, but you're not that clever, and you might have to use that transporter at some point because in fact you're lazy, and you don't want to have a space-battle action scene at that point. You're dumb. 

The transporter beam works in Star Trek because while it may seem that an actual story is boring to you, in fact, it's not, while it seems to be operating slowly, it really isn't, it progresses faster than your action heavy garbage because not only is it going somewhere, it's engaging the audience in their minds, in their emotions, it doesn't have to work as hard. It uses the transporter because in fact its moving so fast, it doesn't have time for space-battle action scenes and fist fights every five minutes. It has a direction, it knows where it's going, and has a point to make. You have nothing to say, you have no point to make. 

The Transporter Beam Problem is indicative of how poorly written your movie is, think back, how many other Star Trek movies can you think of, or even episodes which had this problem? When you look at it, you can start backwards and see that the movies starting with Into Darkness, "2009", Nemesis, etc, go from bad to good, and get better, the further back you go. Which means these movies keep getting worse and worse, and the worse they get the more you see this babble-shit to explain why stupid shit is happening on screen like transporter problems. The further you get away from real Star Trek, you start having these issues. They didn't have this problem back in the day.  This last movie here is the worst of all of them, I don't think I've seen such a stupid Star Trek movie in my life. You continue to wonder why the hell it's such a problem, this 'transporter' thing, and yet it is so simple.