MINIMAL SPOILERS: Star Trek Into Darkness Review
Originally published at Radio Free Tomorrow. Please leave any comments there.
I will likely have a more spoiler-filled discussion of my thoughts about this movie after the weekend, when everyone has had a chance to see it (and I’ve probably seen it at least one more time). But for now, here are my initial thoughts.
First thing to know is, I enjoyed it immensely. I will be seeing it again, probably many times. There is a lot to like in this movie, and most of it comes down to character. For good or ill, we’re in an era where bringing strong characters to life is overriding crafting strong plots (Doctor Who is suffering from this as well), and this movie shines at bringing its characters to life. Even Sulu and Chekov, who, as always, are not given as much screen time as we might like, get some excellent moments, and the actors make the most of them. Uhura shines in a way that might actually make Nichelle Nichols a little envious, and Simon Pegg’s Scotty goes well beyond the comic relief character he was in most of Star Trek (2009). He’s still funny; it’s just that now, there’s more to him than that.
Kirk and Spock? To say too much about them would delve into spoilerville. Suffice it to say for now that Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto thoroughly own their parts.
I have one character complaint, but it’s the Big Spoiler, so I won’t delve too deeply. Suffice it to say that my complaint is with whom the character turns out to be, not how he’s portrayed. The actor does an amazing job with the material. It’s just the exact direction I did not want this character to go, and I’m still processing my disappointment that they went there anyway. However, I will say that, in the end, they contrived a way for it to make sense.
The plot, as I say, suffers. It’s not terrible, and some of its holes can be be explained by saying, “Yes, the writers probably know this; the actor probably knows this; we know it; that doesn’t mean the characters know this or are thinking about it right now, and hence, they just did something really ill advised.” And some - like the rapid travel time between two very distant star systems - can be excused, as travel time in Star Trek is always excused - by dramatic necessity.
As with the best Star Trek, the themes are actually contemporary rather than futuristic. I’ll admit I might be starting to get tired, or at least jaded, of 9/11 / terrorism related themes, but it’s certainly going to play in Peoria.
The film is peppered - almost overly so - with references that long time fans of not just Classic Trek but the entire Trek sub-genre will catch. Surprisingly, almost all of these actually make sense in context, although some of them require you to remember (and may well be there to specifically remind us) that this is a different timeline, that the arrival of Narada in the 2009 film was a butterfly’s jet engine, and a lot of things will not happen the way we expect. There’s a Gorn reference, for example, that would be impossible for the same year in the Original time line…
There are lots of implications in this story for the future of the franchise; lots of hooks on which one could hang the next movie. There are situations brewing, and technology that’s been unleashed, that are completely different from the same period of time in the original timeline, now, and there’s a lot of story that could be mined from that. I just hope that they pick up the pace of how often they make these films…or else, find some way to make a new television series with this cast. It will be frustrating to have so much potential wasted by too slow a movie-making cycle!
All in all, 7 out of 10.