Benedict Cumberbatch is very good as the villain in Star Trek Into Darkness.
There’s an adage in the critical community — and it seems to become more relevant each summer, as audiences are bombarded by a parade of mediocre but spectacular effects-driven sequels — that movies can no longer be good, they can only be awesome.
Star Trek Into Darkness, the second film in director J.J. Abrams’ (Super 8) Star Trek franchise, is not very good, but it is most certainly awesome. It’s exciting, epic and as dumb as a box of rocks. It will leave your knuckles white and your brain numb. It will satisfy your inner child: the part of you that wants to watch Kirk (Chris Pine, Rise of the Guardians) and Spock (Zachary Quinto, American Horror Story) blow stuff up real good while doing very little for the adult in you.
Set in an alternate timeline that includes all your favorite Enterprise crew members but allows them to meet wildly different fates than they did in the original, Gene Rodenberry-approved story line — Spock and Uhura (Zoe Zaldana, The Words) are hooking up; Vulcan was destroyed by Romulans — Into Darkness often plays like the most expensive piece of fan-fiction ever produced.
There’s plenty for super fans to chew on; I wouldn’t be surprised if Into Darkness became the most hotly debated Star Trek film among fanboys. It’s hard to get into specifics without spoiling anything, but let it be known that Abrams has no qualms about delving into the most sacrosanct parts of the Star Trek mythology and modifying them heavily for his own designs.
That is, perhaps, a step up over the original Abrams Star Trek, which often felt like a generic space opera that happened to star people named Kirk and Spock and McCoy (Dredd‘s Karl Urban, who does a very good DeForest Kelley impersonation). Abrams is, by his own admission, more a fan of Star Wars than Star Trek. Into Darkness, on the other hand, is tailor-made for people who get excited just to hear sly references to obscure Star Trek characters.
Well, that’s only half true. If this movie is tailor-made for anyone, it’s for people who cheer wildly when big things go boom. Written by the unholy duo of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (the writers responsible for such atrocities as Cowboys & Aliens and Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise) along with former Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof (Prometheus), it is first and foremost an action-thriller.
The plot involves the Enterprise chasing down a rogue Starfleet officer (Benedict Cumberbatch, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey) who, after blowing up a building and killing much of the senior brass, hightails it to the Klingon home world.
The manhunt for officer-turned-terrorist John Harrison (Cumberbatch) turns the first half of the film into something like Star Trek Into Zero Dark Thirty (or maybe Fahrenheit 2259), with lots of stupefying debates about drone strikes and extrajudicial assassinations. As far as allegories go, it’s not exactly Animal Farm, but the plot is propulsive enough and the goals clear enough that it’s easy enough to put intellect aside and enjoy the ride.
It’s in the back half that things get really wacky. Again, it’s impossible to get into specifics without giving too much away, especially because the film’s twists aren’t actually very interesting beyond their capacity for shock, relying heavily on the “oh s—!” factor. A good movie can hook you even if you know what’s coming; the twists in Star Trek Into Darkness are only interesting if you’re completely unaware of what’s about to happen.
Needless to say, true identities are revealed, dark secrets uncovered and allegiances swapped every few minutes.
Abrams remains, at best, an average director of action (not to mention criminally over-reliant on lens flares and Dutch angles) and the ending is among the most poorly structured sequences you’re likely to see in a major Hollywood film, involving nearly a dozen false climaxes, each less satisfying than the last. Good films leave you wanting more. By the time the third possible ending rolled around, I was begging for it to just pick a conclusion already.
Worst of all, the movie quickly backs away from the most interesting of its many possible resolutions. It appears to commit to a truly brave move, embracing the kind of plot point that would permanently alter (and perhaps kill) the franchise. (Apologies for talking around “it,” but “it” is a major plot point that I can neither spoil nor write a complete review without mentioning.) But just as you’re starting to believe that they actually seriously did “it,” the film caves and hits the undo button. It’s the equivalent of Houdini, after performing his most impressive stunt, stopping his act to explain how he faked it.
Still, for all its problems — and they are legion — Star Trek Into Darkness is far from a bad way to spend two hours. It’s stupid as hell and frequently frustrating, but it’s also a lot of fun. The explosions are big. The action is fluid. The one-liners are sharp. You’ll enjoy yourself.
In short, it’s a pretty awesome movie. If only it were any good.
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