Review: Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Once again, J.J. Abrams takes us into the world of Star Trek, the world that he has, courtesy of a time-space device, completely rebooted.  This time around, it’s Star Trek Into Darkness a movie that many Trekkies are going to have some mixed feelings about.  Me, I thought it was better than the first one and probably the best Star Trek film since Wrath of Khan.  Warning, to read on it to experience spoilers, including the “big one” that they’ve been trying to keep secret for no good reason.

The story begins on a note of action, pretty standard fare for movies like this.  Kirk and crew are trying to save an undeveloped planet from certain doom by shutting down an erupting volcano.  Naturally, they have to worry about the Prime Directive and not being seen by civilizations that have no business knowing about space travel.  And, as can be expected, Kirk doesn’t really care about that.  That out of the way, the real story begins.

Kirk’s little escapade of saving the planet gets him demoted, putting Pike back in charge of the Enterprise.  This is short-lived, however, when a man by the name of John Harrison declares war on Starfleet.  He blows up a library and then takes some shots at the top-ranking officers.  When Pike bites the dust, Kirk gets his ship back and must head out into Klingon space, where the rebel is hiding, to throw some torpedoes his way.  Spock of all people convinces him that summary execution is a bad idea and so they instead opt to go bring him in in person.  A firefight with Klingons ensues.

Once they finally have the criminal, they discover that there’s a lot more going on than they first though.  He is a genetic super-soldier (and yes, he is Khan, though why they felt the need to keep this a secret is beyond me) with a grudge against Starfleet.  As it turns out, another Admiral is looking to start a war and was using Khan, Kirk and everyone else on the Enterprise as a tool to get the Klingons to fight.  The Admiral comes in, shoots up the Enterprise and then Kirk and Khan must make a daring lunge through space to board the enemy ship and bring them down.  Once the ship is captured, however, things are just getting started.  Khan has plans of his own.

People are going to compare this one to Wrath of Khan, simply because they use the same character.  Those people must also remember that Khan had a back-story set up in the original Star Trek series.  In this new incarnation, he must be reintroduced and does not have the luxury of being an established character (at least not within this continuity).  Thus, you have to ignore that little fact or risk being mired down in it.

The movie also has many similarities to Wrath of Khan, though Abrams and his scriptwriters play with them in fun ways.  This was one of the highlights of the film for me, watching them dip towards the original story by playing out scenes that are similar, yet different.  They used some of the same lines, mixed characters from the roles they held in Wrath of Khan to new roles and snuck in dozens of nods to both Trekkies and the original movie.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen the older film, so I’m pretty sure I missed a lot of these Easter eggs, but it was fun to spot the ones I did know.

The action was well-done for the most part, though there are some things that got confusing.  The camerawork during some of the fight scenes was so erratic that I had no idea what was going on other than the fact that some people were shooting at each other and that one side or the other was winning.  This style of shooting action is cop-out, in my opinion, a lazy way for people who don’t want to hire proper choreographers.  It’s distracting and ugly and looks amateur.  Still, movies continue to use it and unfortunately, Star Trek Into Darkness was one of those.  The action scenes were also a bit too long, another common Hollywood failing.  There was so much story to explore, that they could have spent more of that time fleshing it out instead of just trying to use up every bit of footage they had for the action.

Aside from these few annoyances, the movie was amazing.  The actors have really sunk into their roles and the banter was natural and humorous, levels above the first movie.  At last we can really get a sense of Kirk and Spock and McCoy beneath the new faces.  If they were to be put into a television show to continue the story, I would watch it and be happy.  And, as usual, everything looked very, very pretty.  Abrams certainly knows how to make things shiny while keeping them realistic at the same time.

This is one of those movies that I loved while I was watching it and would love to go back and see again just to pick out all the smaller stuff that I may have missed.  As I said before, probably the second-best Star Trek movie ever made.  The folks at Rotten Tomatoes seem to agree somewhat, and it holds an 87% with critics and 92% with viewers, comparable to 95/91 for the first Abrams Star Trek and a 91/86 for the original Wrath of Khan.

Star Trek Into Darkness promo courtesy of nerdlikeyou.com