Star Trek Into Darkness is the twelfth Star Trek movie, and the second that features the recast original crew of the Enterprise in their alternate reality. J.J. Abrams was once again the director of this film, but can it live up to the hype following the last film? Not quite, but it is still pretty darn good.
Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is forced to brake the Prime Directive of not interfering with primitive cultures to save Commander Spock (Zachary Quinto) from a volcano, and has his command taken away from him, but only to get it back again to go after the terrorist John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch). That is about as much of the story as I can tell you without spoiling anything, and trying not spoil things is also why it will be hard for me to explain why this movie wasn’t as good as the last one, but I will do my best.
The main problem I have with this movie is that script makes us believe that a very dumb chain of events happened to kick off the plot of this movie, and you don’t get see how dumb they are until the end of the film, and this seems to be something that writer Damon Lindelof struggles with since he was charged with the same offence with Prometheus. But he did get the character interaction right.
Despite the lens flares, I think J.J. Abrams does a great job directing this film, and he keeps the pace up so you never get to sit and think about the dumbness of Lindelof’s script until after the movie is over, and everything looks and feels great.
The actors once again prove that they were selected to fill their roles well. The swagger of Chris Pine as Jim Kirk, the irritating logic of Quinto as Spock, and the bromance they develop is great. Karl Urban is excellent as the Bones we have all come to know and love, and they way the crew interacts with one another is pitch perfect. Cumberbatch as the villain does his job, but I wish they the would have used him better.
I liked this movie, and without a doubt Star Trek, and Star Trek Into Darkness are the best back to back Star Trek movies yet, but I wish in the four years it took to bring this movie to theaters that they would have tightened up the story a bit, but as it is it is still well worth watching.
My same impressions, it reminds me of a mediocre episode made great by the characters. They got too preachy and therefore overlooked major plot holes as necessary to “the story”. Also Carol Marcus was stupid.
Yes Marcus was very stupid. I don’t think they got too preachy, I am not sure they knew what message that they were trying to send, but yes the characters did indeed save the movie.
Especially Karl Urban as Bones, he’s fantastic