Star Trek Into Darkness
(2013 review)

5 outta 5

Some may pontificate as to what exactly constitutes Star Trek, this is right, that is not, but any and all genres can and do exist in Star Trek.  What J.J. Abrams and his “Bad Robot” production company have done is take Star Trek and reinvent it as a chase movie, but there is still a bunch of Star Trek themes amidst the chaos.  Star Trek Into Darkness is spectacularly wide-screen action entertainment with great performances, neat twists and fun dialogue, Abrams’ direction is consistently fantastic and the movie’s pace is relentless.  Also, like the best of the original Trek series, it really is Captain Kirk’s story and a very dramatic one.

In the future, the Starfleet ship Enterprise is recalled to Earth after Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) violated the Prime Directive to save his commander Spock (Zachary Quinto).  While there, Starfleet is attacked by one of their former operatives, John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), and Kirk is assigned by Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) to kill Harrison who is hiding at the home planet of the Klingons, sworn enemies of Starfleet.  Kirk and Spock go on the hunt with their crew including science officer Carol (Alice Eve), Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban), helmsman Sulu (John Cho), communications officer and Spock’s girlfriend Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and newly appointed engineer Chekov (Anton Yelchin), who gets the job after the original engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg) resigns in objection to their mission of vengeance.  But Harrison may be even more dangerous than they believed, leading to a wider conspiracy inside of Starfleet and Kirk having to lead his crew into almost certain death. 

The last movie was more about two characters, Kirk and Spock, but this one is really Pine’s show as we follow Kirk’s determination to see his mission through.  Pine gets some solid scenes, his reaction where Scotty resigns is disbelief but he goes along with protocol, and we see him start to crack.  A key to Kirk’s character is that he doesn’t like to lose, and here we see him both pull off the impossible and also lose often, which pulls you closer.

Quinto’s Spock is a great foil for Kirk’s brashness, and he gets most of the movie’s dryly funniest lines, and one of the most heart-wrenching scenes.  There is a delicate, precision usage of each of the rest of the Enterprise crew, with the most secondary character action going to Scotty, which Pegg is amazing at.  As for the new cast additions, Eve is an interesting (and very pretty) puzzle piece to the plot, and Weller gets to play another shady Admiral in Trek‘s long history of shady Admirals.  Cumberbatch is very slowly revealed, and he has a methodical, unnerving, superior efficiency to his actions.  Just about every line he has sounds really nasty, like a fantastic speech where he tells Spock to analyse the situation logically. When Harrison cuts loose by the end he’s a vicious dog let off its leash.   

Director Abrams tones down on handheld and lens flares that have become his trademark, favouring steadier shots that befit the 3D format, and a few sequences shot in vivid IMAX.  Into Darkness opens with a thrilling, funny, and intense sequence of what the Prime Directive is all about.  The big attack that Harrison throws at Starfleet headquarters features some inventive staging by incorporating pieces of the set into the action.  The Enterprise gets beaten to a pulp in some heavy ship to ship warfare and it’s a broken bird by the end. It all moves at a fantastic clip that still manages to provide humour, drama and character interplay.  

Like all great sequels, this is self-contained save for an extremely fun fan-service cameo of a previous Trek alum.  However, there are lots of inside baseball Trek references.  Uhura gets to bust out some Klingon as we get a look at the Abrams-verse interpretation of Trek’s well-known aliens. Hanging over the orbit of the Klingon homeworld is a destroyed moon, a reference to Parxis that went ka-blewy in Undiscovered Country.  Even Starfleet black ops Section 31 gets a shout out, something that was barely mentioned in a dozen Trek episodes. The big pull comes when one of the most iconic scenes in Trek is flipped around for Into Darkness.  This may be sacrilege to some Trekkies but it’s a very gutsy move that pays off emotionally.  Also, since this is an alternate reality in the Trek universe, things that happened the first time around get to be reconfigured.  The movie also features a few moral questions that are Trek’s trademark, the big one being Kirk’s mission of vengeance and the more evolved sensibility of what people in Starfleet are supposed to be.  A question of “what you would do to protect paradise?” is a constant recurring theme throughout all of Trek so it’s great to see that revisited here. 

If Abrams first Trek foray was about how the crew came together, then Star Trek Into Darkness is about the first true mission they have and nearly breaks the unshakable Kirk.  It’s an entertaining ride and great Trek with a level of spectacle the series hasn’t seen with philosophical underpinnings underneath the explosions.   This Star Trek put together for all audiences, Trekkie or not.