Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) Reviews

• Dumbed down from a highly intelligent and thoughtful franchise.

  cdettlinger2013-05-17

  Star Trek Into Darkness should be renamed Star Trek In Name Only. What has always distinguished Star Trek from other sci-fi is the thoughtful and nuanced way that philosophical and sociological commentary was woven into the stories. Star Trek is not just a lot of sci-fi nonsense but a meaningful exploration of what it means to be human. In the past, Star Trek has been intelligent and character driven. Now it is all fancy CGI and snappy one-liners. Abram's Star Trek is an action-for-action's sake Kirk and Spock buddy flick. The "surprises" Abrams plants aren't surprises if you're familiar with the Star Trek universe. His preference for violence and political intrigue makes Abrams' vision more Star Wars than Star Trek. The fill-in-the-blanks plot is a repetitive onslaught of video-game like CGI sequences separated by brief breaks used to set up the next CGI spectacle. The first half begins with a scene taken from Raiders of the Lost Ark and quickly moves to The Return of the King's Mount Doom. Cumberbatch's attack on Starfleet HQ is a scene stolen from Godfather 3. When Cumberbatch is captured, he and Pine briefly become caricatures of Hannibal Lecter and Agent Starling from Silence of the Lambs. The second half attempts to remake The Wrath of Khan but is backwards and upside down. Instead it is practically a beat-for-beat repeat of the identically plotted Star Trek Nemesis. The cast was the best thing about the last movie but not this time. The other familiar crew members each get a brief moment in the spotlight but for the most part they fixate on comedic asides. The romance between Uhura and Spock is unnecessary and actually diminishes Uhura's character. Alice Eve is little more than eye candy. Peter Weller's Admiral Marcus is a disappointment. Karl Urban was eerily good as McCoy last time but stays in the background this time, a third wheel on the Kirk/Spock bicycle. Pine's beefy frat-boy Kirk is an exaggeration of Shatner's Kirk. When he is angry he sounds like a bratty child. Cuberbatch's performance is the best thing this time and overshadows everyone else. I left the theater thinking that my free passes were over-priced.

• We need Star Trek Into DEEPNESS, not darkness.

  dillydrop2013-08-08

  We need Star Trek Into DEEPNESS, not darkness. In the movie theatre I heard a complaint from an old school Trekkie that the second installment of the Star Trek reboot had too many "Little Archie and Veronica" moments. This is true and it would be OK if that were just the icing on the cake. The real problem with the movie is that it runs like a typical SciFi action plot inserted under a Star Trek banner. This movie is missing the hallmark epiphany moments Star Trek is famous for. Mainly, it is missing the philosophical "WOW" factors that don't just blow your mind but rather expands it, making you realise that everything you thought you knew is wrong and that everything you thought the Federation had figured out is also wrong. These expansions used to pave the way for the audience to mentally and emotionally take that next step to, "Boldly go where no man has gone before..." This movie has no epiphany. Where is the deepness that Star Trek is synonymous with? This movie gives us what? A federation struggling with internal corruption and terrorism, a la the typical disgruntled ex employee, who in this case was cryogenics frozen for 300 years, as is the plot. Big deal. These are familiar themes we've all seen in movies before. Just trade the Federation for any corrupt financial, medical, educational, government and or religious institution. Trade the "John Harrison" character for any Bond villain and you have a movie that sounds like a bunch of other movies or what the news broadcasts. Boring. To me the Federation meant a time in the future when Humanity had finally gotten its act together and to a certain extent had rooted out all this corruption and terrorism. Unless a Klingon or Romulan shows up, things are supposed to be refreshingly illuminating. Not something that degrades into ordinary, mainstream, average caveman fist fight showdowns. How can we boldly go where no man has gone before in the future unless we have thrown off the shackles of the past? What a sad/shamey day it is when a Star Trek movie presents a not so optimistic future just as dark as today's headlines. I can read/watch the news/The Matrix if I want that. IS THERE NO ESCAPE?!!! IS THERE NO HOPE?!!! Obviously, Gene Roddenberry's spirit could not find a way to keep the franchise on track. Will, (Vulcan fingers crossed) Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike know the difference between the wealth of deepness and the poverty of darkness?

• Garbage

  robertjastrow2013-05-18

  JJ, you really are destroying a large piece of scifi history. Star Trek was never an action based show/movie. It was always a story that had supporting action elements. This movie is completely devoid of any cohesive story and is an action junkies dream come true. Kirk in the original series was confident, capable, intelligent, suave, etc.... The new and improved JJ version of the character is a moron. Don't get me wrong, I really like the choice of actor, but the character portrayal which is dictated by the writers and directors is everything the original Kirk was not. Space ships crush under pressure....its physics dumba**es...the Enterprise is not a submarine. I could go on and on, but I find it all a bit depressing. Star Trek is after all just a piece of fiction. ...now lost to time to only be remembered by a new generation as bad fiction.

• The movie got Trek cannon wrong, got basic 21st century science wrong and in no way contributed to Gene Roddenberry's dream of a better world

  fish15342013-05-20

  The film was horrible. With that said I'll start with the good. Karl Urban's Dr. McCoy was the one shining star in the film. His deadpan line, "He'd let you die Jim" was perfect. It showed the struggle between compassion and logic that was so well portrayed by Kelly and Nimoy in the original series. First, the film completely disregards Star Trek cannon. Christopher Pike does not live through the movie to end up as a quadriplegic on Talos IV. The Klingon home world, Kronos, appears to have a moon, Praxis, that has exploded, except this doesn't happen until Star Trek VI. All this is forgivable however; new movies for a new generation that knows nothing about Star Trek Second, what isn't forgivable is that basic Newtonian physics and science is so poorly understood by the film makers that it distracts from the movie. Some examples of plainly not understand that the world around you is governed by science and not magic are: the heat from the volcano is attributed to damaging shuttle craft Galileo yet the heat caused by de-orbiting the shuttle craft would far exceed any heat caused by a volcano. In the same sequence, the Enterprise is parked underwater. Are we to believe that a star ship that must be constructed in space and is designed to be used for interstellar travel also doubles as a submarine? When was the last time that you boarded a 747 to go on an undersea adventure? And why in the hell would they park the Enterprise underwater when they could be invisible in orbit directly above the volcano and use sensors and transporters? Other big issues are that the crew of the starship Enterprise does not know the distance of the moon's orbit. Ask Neil Armstrong, I bet he figured it out 300 years earlier. I think the first question on starship helmsman's exam should be, "Where is the moon and so you don't hit it?" Next when the ship can no longer hold orbit, it falls back to earth in a few minutes like a stone dropped into a pond. Newton? Never heard of him! What laws of motion? I think movies reflect a lot upon a generation. This new generation claims nerds are cool, but has no manned space program. Your parents' generation actually walked on the moon. Third, when the script however fails to make common sense, it throws you outside the movie and this makes the movie 'unfun'. After a secure, secret Starfleet facility is attacked, Starfleet Command decides to meet in an unprotected high rise. I guess in the 23rd century, rank isn't correlated with intelligence or experience. Next, the Klingons are a war like race equally as advanced as humans that have developed space travel but they don't bother to guard their entire home world. They actually sound pretty easy to conquer. That's okay because humans are just as dumb; two Federation ships appear in earth orbit to duke it out and there are no other Federation ships around. Please, will one ship randomly fall on San Francisco? We sound pretty easy to conquer too. Let's not forget about the unnecessary, obligatory, giant tittied girl in skimpy underwear to make all the 14 year old boys have happy wet dreams. I love nude women as much as the next guy but porn has it's time and place and this wasn't it… Unless you are a 14 year old boy with $10.50 for a movie and no other access to porn. When Kirk died, why did Dr. McCoy need Kahn's blood to save him? He had 72 genetically engineered humans from the eugenics war frozen in front of him. The Eugenics Wars are well documented. He actually had to thaw one of those guys out to put Kirk in the life support tube. Why not use his blood or one of the other 71 samples of super blood? Fourth, I remember when Spock died in Star Trek II, people cried, it was debated if he could really be dead. It was an emotional heartfelt moment that asked the audience to way, "the needs of the many, versus the needs of the few." Did anyone really think Jim was dead in this movie? He was dead for all of five minutes! It was a completely wasted scene because it was devoid of emotional connection. I believe it was 30 seconds wedged in the middle of two action sequences. This may be because modern movie audiences lack the social skills such as empathy which are necessary for bonding with others. So the film makers simply recreate a scene from the past devoid of emotion and the audience believes it has the received the same spellbinding moment that their parents received. The only emotion portrayed in the whole film is the Caulfield like teenage angst of Captain Kirk. Great men are no longer portrayed as being challenged with great responsibility or moral questions but now face the pubescent problems of spoiled teenagers. This is the greatest reason why this new Star Trek movie fails. Gene Roddenberry created a future where men had moved beyond many of humanities vices. He created a series of moral plays in his "Wagon train to the sky"; the original series is more like twilight zone episodes than anything else. Where in this movie did you feel good about humanity? Did this movie make you feel like we could end the Iraq War? That's how the old series made you feel about Vietnam and the Cold War. Did it make you feel that bigotry toward gays would end? That's how the original series made you feel about racism. The movie is an epic fail that reflects a generation that is an epic failure.

• Star Trek for the masses? More like Star Trek for morons.

  Hudsons_Skull2013-05-17

  Where do I start? I'm a huge fan of the original movies and I admit, I enjoyed the 2009 film. Why? Because the well got dry and it seemed there wasn't anywhere left to go with the franchise. So, seeing as Abrams alluded to everyone that by taking the franchise back to where it all began and altering the time line, it was his intention to re-tell stories from the original "series" and breathe new life into them. Naturally, I thought he was talking about the original "TV series" from the 60's. Fine by me, because the original TV series was cool, but it's pretty much outdated. This latest movie has shown me that it's obvious he just wants to do the "films" of the 80's and 90's all over again, but in his own image, which is... an abundance of lens flares and people who are only good at looking pretty on screen. And that, in my opinion, is not what Star Trek is about. He even stated in an interview with Jon Stewart recently on The Daily Show, that he never was a fan of Star Trek as a child because he didn't get "the philosophy" of Star Trek. This movie is proof that he still doesn't get it. If he wants to make flashy sci-fi movies with no depth or substance, fine, there are plenty of scripts out there for him to make this kind of bland movie that attracts dimwitted people. So please Mr. Abrams, leave Star Trek alone, you are only making it worse. Abrams might be trying to get "non-Trekkers" to enjoy the franchise, but in order to do so, he is replacing everything that made Star Trek what it was in the first place. I'd love for more people to get into Star Trek, but not at the expense of my enjoyment of it. This movie has nothing more to offer than Transformers did, snazzy special effects and a story line riddled with plot holes and love/hate relationships between the characters that seem forced and unauthentic. Which brings me to my next point. Orci, Kurtzman and Lindelof. Where did these men learn to write? They use the technology of Star Trek only to advance the plot or create tension when needed. For instance, a transporter that the enemy uses can transport him light years to another planet, but the transporters on the Enterprise have a hard job locking onto a person on the planet they are orbiting, a hand-held communicator that can call someone in a bar on Earth from the Klingon home world light years away, infiltrating a top secret military base with a shuttle craft without being spotted by sensors, and the list goes on. The last part of the movie they just got so lazy that they re-created the whole death scene at the end of Wrath of Khan, but mirrored it by reversing the roles. And if that's not enough, the writers blatantly do a copy/paste of most of the dialogue like "If we go in there we'll die, the radiation will kill us" and "The decontamination process is not complete, you'll flood the whole compartment." Later on they even forget that the attributes that makes Khan's blood special, and which is needed to revive Kirk, also flows through the veins of the other 72 augments sitting in cryogenic tubes in McCoy's sick bay, the same cryogenic tubes that McCoy himself says earlier in the movie he could not risk opening without possibly killing the person inside, which could have been a solid reason to send Spock chasing after Khan in a foot- chase through downtown San-Francisco to retrieve a sample of Khan's blood, but instead, they have McCoy open a cryogenic tube and remove it's occupant in order to freeze Kirk so he can preserve his brain functions, I believe his exact words were "Get this guy out of the cryo-tube, keep him in an induced coma." but still, poor McCoy doesn't realize he could use that person's blood to revive Kirk. So now we are led to believe that McCoy, the same McCoy who based most of his arguments on ethics throughout the series and movies, is perfectly capable of opening one of the tubes, risking another being's life in the process, all to save another man? A little unethical if you ask me. These guys obviously don't know what the hell they are doing when it comes to writing Star Trek movies. This movie is, in my opinion, the worst in the entire series. Yes even "The Final Frontier", because at least Shatner had the guts to go where no other writer or director had gone before or since with that movie, by doing a story about God.