Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) ***/*****
The 2009 reboot of classic Star Trek that was spear-headed by director JJ Abrams wasn’t a perfect film. Its story relied on a few too many coincidences to move itself along, it presented our heroes with a villain who was too easily defeated, and generally its writing was just too flimsy for it to be fully satisfying. The main conceit that it introduced, however, some alternate reality shenanigans that explained away how we could be once again seeing the early adventures of all the Original Series Star Trek characters, but played by new actors, was a particularly clever piece of work that allowed a fresh start that would please new fans and old alike. And the look of the film, all shiny and polished like the latest gadget to be released by Apple, made Star Trek appear to be more hip and modern than it had in ages. Plus, the principal cast, down to the actor, was a talented and charismatic bunch who managed to embody their characters without living in the shadows of the actors who originally played the roles.
Abrams put all of the necessary pieces in place to restart a franchise that had been going strong for nearly half a century, and to build a foundation that might allow it to go on for at least another few decades. So, given that Star Trek Into Darkness is the second step in what Paramount surely hopes is going to be a lengthy next phase in their long-running property, how well does it build upon the foundation laid in order to move things forward? Not too well, unfortunately. But it does manage to be a fun action movie, regardless.
When we pick back up with the Starship Enterprise, things are generally as you would expect them to be, with the ship’s hothead Captain, Kirk (Chris Pine), acting like a hothead, its First Officer, Spock (Zachary Quinto), acting as his even-tempered foil, and their mission being to monitor and explore new planets. But once the action kicks off, it isn’t long before there’s tension between the Enterprise crew, doubt is being cast on Kirk’s ability to captain a ship, and a new threat to Starfleet is introduced in the form of one of their old allies gone rogue. Said ally is a dangerous guy named John Harrison (Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch) who’s taken to attacking Starfleet where they live through terrorist tactics. Once Harrison’s plans not only cross the paths of Kirk and his crew, but result in the death of Kirk’s mentor, Pike (Bruce Greenwood), the continuing adventures of the Starship Enterprise are well underway, and we’re in the thick of things.
The sturdy rock of this new phase for the franchise is the young cast that’s been assembled to crew the Enterprise, so there’s no question that the acting is one of this film’s strong suits. There is some disappointment to be had in the way in which many of the main players get pushed to the background though. There’s plenty in this film for Kirk, Spock, and Scotty (Simon Pegg) to do, but many of the others get short shrift — especially John Cho’s Sulu, who showed some promise as an action hero in the 2009 Star Trek and got next to nothing here. In addition to Cumberbatch, there are a couple of other notable new additions to the cast as well, and their inclusion in the formula provides mixed results. Peter Weller is a lot of fun in a B-movie way as a hard-headed, aggressive military higher up, but Alice Eve is generally wasted as a new crew member who doesn’t have much reason to exist other than to look great in her underwear for a few brief seconds.
Not everything here is hit or miss though. As an adventure film, STID actually works quite well. The first scene of the film is a pretty worthy homage to the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, so how can you complain about that? Then, once the establishing stuff gets out of the way, the exciting action scenarios keep coming at you at a fairly steady pace. There’s a scene where the crew has to land on the home planet of the warlike Klingons that gets pretty tense, one in which Pine and Cumberbatch’s characters are human cannonballed through a meteor field and have to avoid going splat that’s a lot of fun, and even a space battle sequence where the Enterprise goes all Poseidon Adventure that proves to be high stakes and high spectacle. STID goes as far as to include a scene where an experimental new kind of torpedo gets investigated by some crew members and it manages to arm itself for no reason other than to create the big, dumb action movie cliche of a ticking time bomb scene. This may sound like a bad thing, but it’s really not, because action movie cliches can be a lot of fun, and the thing STID does best is be dumb fun.
Unfortunately, there are things here that just flat out don’t work, and generally they’re the same things that didn’t work about the 2009 Star Trek. The script has plot holes so big you could fly a starship through them, especially in the third act when everything is supposed to be coming together for the big climax. They’re not so very important that they ruin all the fun, but they are so glaring and stupid that you’re not going to be able to get them out of your mind when you’re supposed to be taking in all of the bright colors and loud noises with wide eyes and plugged ears.
Like in that first film, the villain doesn’t prove to be as dangerous an opponent as you would hope, either. He’s never developed past being generically evil, so Cumberbatch has to do some heavy lifting when it comes to maniacal delivery in order to get you invested in him as a threat. He’s a strong enough actor that he somewhat pulls it off, but in general he’s working from behind the entire movie, because his motivations and the level of threat he presents are never clearly established for us. We just hear about who he is and what he’s capable of, and then he ends up being beaten too quickly by a plan that someone of his intelligence should have seen coming, so all of the hype about what an unbeatable opponent he is ends up being empty talk.
STID isn’t smart enough or honest enough to rise above being anything other than a disposable action movie. The heart of the film — the emotional stuff that we’re supposed to latch on to — all comes from the Kirk/Spock relationship, and like how the threat of the villain is told to us rather than shown to us, we’re expected to care about the Kirk/Spock relationship mostly because of what we know about it from watching the Original Series. In this continuity we’re just in the beginning stages of Kirk and Spock’s career together, when they should still be feeling each other out, but instead of honoring that, Abrams and his writers try to tap into the close bond they shared in the first batch of feature films, which came after an entire series of television episodes, so their big moments here ring false and play as melodrama. The filmmakers are trying to have their cake and eat it too in regards to whether this is a fresh start for the Star Trek franchise or whether it’s a continuation of what has come before, and riding the fence like that proves to be ineffective.
Actually, that’s a criticism that can be lobbied at the whole of STID. It relies too much on callbacks to things from past Star Trek movies and television episodes instead of creating its own stuff that might become memorable to a new generation of science fiction fans. Fan service like that may work in the moment, but as a long term plan it kind of sucks. If this new Star Trek continuity that Abrams has created is going to do nothing more than give us warmed over presentations of things that we’ve already seen, then it’s going to be a product with a limited shelf life rather than a jumping off point that’s going to lead to another half century of Star Trek material being developed. Perhaps Abrams moving on to making Star Wars movies will prove to be a blessing in disguise for this franchise, as a new team of filmmakers with some original ideas can now take the strong foundation he created and use it to tell new stories in Star Trek 3. Or perhaps this will be the last hurrah for Chris Pine and crew. But that would be a shame.
