Review for Star Trek Into Darkness

Introduction

So I finally got STiD! I feel like I should have got a course of penicillin along with it. You can thank the Trekkie penchant for acronym and abbreviation that has existed ever since TWOK for that unfortunate contraction of Star Trek into Darkness (no colon). J. J. Abrams reinvigorated and rebooted an ailing franchise for the X-Box Generation when he brought his recast vision for Star Wars, I mean Trek to the screen. The 2009 Star Trek movie was probably the last film that I ventured into a cinema for, and I came away with a love hate relationship for it. It might have been a fun ride while it lasted, but it didn’t stand up to considered scrutiny all that well, and it lost one of the things that made Star Trek so special, any semblance of a message. If Star Trek was his audition for George Lucas, then job done, as J. J. Abrams did eventually land the coveted Star Wars director job. Maybe that means that there will be a little Star Trek allowed back into his vision of the franchise. Of course STiD was made before he got the thumbs up from the great bearded one, so we may have to wait for the third movie for that.


Regardless of my experience of Star Trek (2009), I still have enough of an ossified Trekkie in me to have wanted to see STiD in the cinema. The problem for me was 3D, as in I don’t want to see it. It took me ages to find a 2D showing near me, and when I did finally look at the ticket price, I had the usual yelp that I could get the Blu-ray on day of release for about the same charge. I opted for plan B, until I saw what Paramount had done with the extra features. This review is the result of Plan C then, waiting for a TV broadcast, or a bargain bucket. I paid a smidge over £5 for Star Trek into Darkness. Will it be worth more than that?

At the end of Star Trek (2009), Cadet James T Kirk was promoted straight to Captain of the USS Enterprise, with his legendary crew around him. Unsurprisingly, such a promotion results in a degree of prideful arrogance, reliance on sheer luck, and an utter disregard for regulations. It isn’t long before Kirk is removed from command, but he gets a reprieve in that he’ll get to stay on as executive officer under Christopher Pike. Such trivial personal considerations are forgotten when a terrorist strikes close to home. First, a library in London is bombed, and then, the resulting high level command meeting at Starfleet HQ is targeted, taking out most of the command staff, including Pike. Grieving for the loss of his mentor, and looking for vengeance, Kirk asks Starfleet’s Commander, Admiral Marcus for his ship back, along with permission to track down and eliminate the terrorist. For the terrorist is one of Starfleet’s own, a renegade Section 31 agent named John Harrison. But Harrison has taken refuge on the Klingon homeworld Kronos, and that might just be the excuse that some need to push the Federation into a war with the Klingons. But John Harrison is more than just a Starfleet agent.

The Disc

It’s dopey grin time when it comes to the technical qualities of this Blu-ray. It’s hard to pick nits about a Dolby TrueHD 7.1 English surround track, and it’s doubly hard to find fault with a pristine 2.40:1 widescreen 1080p transfer. The film looks and sounds flawless. You also have the choice between DD 5.1 Audio Descriptive English, DD 5.1 Surround French, Spanish and Italian, with subtitles in these languages and Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish and Swedish.

You’re left with the cinematography and the sound design to criticise, and this time lens flares are so prevalent that you actually wind up tuning them out. What I love about this film is so much of it is shot practically. You can see the prevalence of sets and sound stages in the extra features, and it certainly makes the film look grand. The Enterprise Engineering is still a brewery, but they actually got the use of an experimental nuclear fusion reactor at Lawrence Livermore to double as the warp core set, and it looks, for want of a better word, real. Audio too impresses, although once again there’s no need for the egregious hip-hop. The music score does sound very Star Wars at times, and the Klingon Birds of Prey chasing the shuttle through the abandoned city sound a lot like tie-fighters, in a scene that pays a lot of homage to Return of the Jedi’s Death Star chase. But in between all of the action, explosions and sheer audio overload, the all important dialogue remains clear and audible.

Extras

Want extra features with your STiD? Here you go...

You want more? Get the disc from Sainsbury’s... More than that? Get the disc from Tesco. You want deleted scenes? Get the X-Box Smartglass Second Screen app. You want a commentary? That’s on iTunes. You’ll probably also want to make sure that Paramount and Bad Robot are wearing prophylactics and using copious lubricant while doing all this to you. Don’t forget the 3D version of the movie on Blu-ray!

What you get on this disc presented in a standard Blu-Amaray case and with the usual good-bits animated menu are six featurettes, running to a total of 40 minutes. Creating the Red Planet, Attack on Starfleet, The Klingon Homeworld, The Enemy of My Enemy, Ship to Ship, and Brawl by the Bay all offer behind the scenes looks, with interviews with cast and crew.

You’ll also find a code for the digital copy, for which you’ll need an iTunes account. Apparently this will give you access to 5GB worth of audio commentary file as well (the only place where you’ll get to see the variable aspect ratio of the IMAX footage). The earliest expiration date for this content is 2/9/14.

Conclusion

The Reviewer

That was fun. That was the most fun I’ve had watching a Star Trek movie since the last one, and maybe even a little more. Also, unlike the previous film, which pretty much wheeled out the lunatic with a doomsday weapon trope yet again, Star Trek into Darkness goes a little beyond that, offering more in the way of complexity and motivation for its characters. It also offers a little of the ‘message’ that was so lacking in the previous instalment. Here Star Trek into Darkness takes a look at terrorism, and what might motivate perfectly normal people into doing heinously abnormal acts. The desire to protect and preserve can inspire people to great acts of self-sacrifice, or horrendous acts of violence, and you get to see both sides in this film, beginning with one man’s ultimate act of violence in the hope of saving his daughter.

John Harrison acts to preserve what he considers his family, and like many persecuted minorities, he turns to extralegal means to accomplish his aims. Admiral Marcus acts to preserve the Federation that he serves, but in doing so has to subvert the very ideals of that Federation, while Kirk has to grow beyond the seat-of-the-pants chancer, who thrives on thrill and luck, and take responsibility for his command and his crew. They are three very compelling viewpoints, and it would be easy to sympathise with any one of them, except that the film somewhat bombastically simplifies the issues and does what it can to put white hats on heroes and black hats on villains. It’s almost as if it’s fighting against itself to add a little moral complexity, and it keeps on losing.


What you do get is a great, good guys versus bad guys thrill ride, replete with action set pieces and intense visuals, never pausing for a minute, never relenting, just making sure that you hang breathlessly to the edge of the seat for its full duration. For every minute of its run time, you’re convinced that you are watching the best action movie of the year, a 9/10 experience the whole way. Just don’t actually stop and think about it. Of course, the end credits eventually roll, and you will have to think about it, you’ll start going over the plot in your mind, you’ll note how thin some of the characters are, and how anorexic their development. You’ll start questioning just why events happen in the film the way they do, you’ll realise just how lacking they are in verisimilitude, and that they are probably set up in that way just for another cool visual. While it is a little better in regards to plot development and motivation than the first film, it is still a really thin and shallow experience, and for the most part, dramatically unsatisfying. It never pauses long enough for the ramifications of the story to really sink in.

And it’s here that I turn the page over to my inner zombie Trekkie, and beware of spoilers ahead.


The Trekkie

Yes, I used to be a Trekkie, before Voyager, Enterprise, Nemesis, and the self absorbed mutual masturbation of Trek Lit turned me off the whole thing. But every once in a while I want to give it another chance, the way I gave this movie a chance after J. J. Abrams’ first Star Wars w***fest. Spoilers he said! I don’t have to give you spoilers. I don’t know why he was so circumspect about John Harrison. Just read the disc blurb on the back of the Blu-ray case. There it is, spelled out in big bold letters. The villain of this piece is Khan! Yet another Trek movie that wants to be Wrath of Khan again, because that was the only original series Trek film that fans loved. Actually this is more a cross between Wrath of Khan and Space Seed given its time frame, but seriously Khan? Have you no originality left?

I remember the hype when this film was announced. Abrams and his writers vehemently declaring, “We’re not going to do Khan, he’s too iconic, we don’t want to attempt to match the original film and fail, it’s perfect as is. We’ll do something different for the second film,” and when the second film came out, “Ooh, look, we did Khan, aren’t we clever?” Then they ran off, giggling like schoolgirls. Twonks!


None of it is really explained, just why Marcus is off militarising the Federation, just why the cold war with the Klingons, just what Khan’s background is and why he is ‘superhuman’, relying instead on the shorthand of watch the original series and TWOK to find out. It’s all presented as a fait accompli. This is how it is. Live with it! And there’s a pointless old Spock cameo that adds nothing, and is just a sop to the original series fans. And Carol Marcus? Show up, take your kit off, and then try to not get in the way of the stars.

And once again, the sci bit is sucked out of the fi, leaving just a fantasy movie where we get the magic of cold fusion, transwarp beaming, and magic blood. We had red matter the last time, but now we get magic blood, bringing the dead back to life. Speaking of which, if you’re just going to rip off the death scene from Wrath of Khan, with the schoolgirl giggly cleverness of reversing the characters, have the decency to apologise to the audience ahead of the film’s release. Don’t spring that crap on us unannounced. I could have busted my TV if I’d thrown anything harder than a cushion at it, although I would have liked to have seen cinemas erupting in close harmony profanity at that point.

At this point we delicately place the Trekkie back in his coffin, nail down the lid, and hope that he never rises again.


The Reviewer

Aw Jeez! That guy will suck the life out of any party. But I have to agree with him on the Khan bait and switch, and old-Spock, while nu-Spock yelling ‘Khaaaaannn!’ just isn’t the same without the full Shatner behind it, and is actually inadvertently humorous in the same way that pinball Yoda was in Attack of the Clones. But otherwise, get a life! Star Trek into Darkness is fun. What more do you want from a summer blockbuster? Depth, complexity, nuance, and character? Save that for the bleeding heart Oscars contenders. We want to see stuff explode. STiD has lots of stuff explode, often for no other reason than it looks good. About £5 is what it’s worth.