Undoubtedly the most breathless of all Star Trek pictures, Star Trek
Into Darkness is a nonstop barrage of spectacle, movement, and noise. It’s
manipulative, relentless and a fun time at the movies. It gets the job done.
With 2009’s Star Trek, director J.J.
Abrams got a great deal of entertainment value out of dropping a wormhole into Trek continuity, scattering the familiar
pieces every which way and providing a shock of delight as the pieces snapped
back into place. It’s about as clever as a combination sequel, prequel, reboot,
and remake of a nearly 50-year-old franchise could be. While Into Darkness can’t have the same
pleasurable jolts of fresh perspective, what it lacks in discovery it makes up
for in chemistry. The cast crackles through energetic banter and terse
exposition as they’re forever running up and down the gleaming corridors of the
starship Enterprise, desperate to solve the latest crisis in which they’ve
found themselves.
With a plot that’s in some ways an extended riff on a classic
bit of Trek – to even say whether
it’s a movie or a TV episode would probably be enough for Trekkers to spring
the film’s secrets sight unseen – the screenplay by longtime Abrams
collaborators Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof is packed with dramatic
incidents and fan-friendly winking. It’s an expertly calibrated event picture
that hurtles from one bit of action or humor into the next without any room to
slow down. We start urgently in the middle of a high-energy action sequence
with Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) fleeing an angry
alien tribe while Spock (Zachary Quinto) proceeds logically into a volcano to
shut it down and save this foreign world. As the sequence plays out, all of the
returning cast – Zoe Saldana’s Uhura, Simon Pegg’s Scotty, John Cho’s Sulu, and
Anton Yelchin’s Chekov – get their little moments to shine. It’s like stumbling
into the last few exciting minutes at the end of an episode and then sticking
around for the next couple in the marathon. There’s recognizability and comfortability
the cast has in the roles and with each other that provides an instant anchor and
funny rapport amidst the chaos around them.
Chaos quickly comes in the form of a terrorist attack on
Earth that blows up a Starfleet base in London. The man responsible is John
Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), one of their own who clearly has his secret
motives for turning against them. The scheming scenes leading up to and
including these surprise attacks have a scary edge. As the film progresses and
Cumberbatch gets to put his sonorous voice into full intimidating villainy, the
relationships his character develops take a few interesting twists and turns.
Meanwhile, back at Starfleet, the good admiral (Bruce Greenwood) and crusty
admiral (Peter Weller) agree to let Kirk take the Enterprise after the attacker
in a rare show of force from this research and peacekeeping group that finds a
new science officer (Alice Eve) escorting top secret missiles on board. They’re
not out boldly going where no man has gone before. They’re on a manhunt.
This streamlined feature slams through its sequences of
energetic intensity with sensational special effects and top-notch sound design
expected from a Hollywood blockbuster in this budget range. Abrams, not
particularly invested in the more cerebral, allegorical aspects of Trek lore, sees fit to deliver a
slam-bang spectacle with phaser battles, whooshing warp drives, and brusque
threats around every corner. This leaves plenty of time for the film’s politics
to be a little muddled, if benign, with the exception of a weirdly misjudged
bit of disaster overkill in the final stretch. It’s one thing for a movie like
this to destroy a chunk of a metropolis, sending skyscrapers crumbling to the
ground. It’s another thing entirely to do so almost off-handedly, skip the
aftermath, and then put a strange title card in the end credits proclaiming
tribute to post-9/11 workers. (Seriously, what’s going on there?) It’s a film
that summons up War on Terror paranoia (potential drone strikes, brief pointed
debates about killing terrorists without trial) and twisty conspiracy theories,
but uses it only as set dressing for a plot that’s all present tense forward
movement. Gone is the Cold War-era utopian optimism of Roddenberry’s original
concept. This time it’s all about fear, dread, and explosions.
But it’s amazing how far momentum alone can take you. Abrams
has made a film that’s a crackling roller coaster that’s all dips, dives, drops,
and top-speed loops with an excellent, blaring score from the ever-reliable Michael
Giacchino. The intensity never slows, even when the movie self-consciously
incorporates a debate with itself about what kind of mission this Trek is following. “This is clearly a
military operation,” Scotty disappointedly tells Kirk. “Is that what we are
now? I thought we were explorers.”
The fact of the matter is that Trek
on TV had room to be as eggheaded as it wanted (at best, thrilling so), whereas
the movies have always largely been about elaborate revenge schemes and
potentially world-ending super-calamities. This just happens to be a
particularly single-minded action adventure that’s constantly chasing the next
thrill. And that works.
It works not just because Abrams and crew are skilled
technicians, but because of the people on screen as well, with characters
filled wonderfully by the talented cast working from borrowed cultural
awareness without much original characterization in this particular script. (There’s
an assumption, rightly or wrongly, that the audience will know who these
characters are and what they mean to each other, so that all emotional
development can be left to shorthand.) These characters have lived long and
prospered in the cultural imagination for a good reason. The core of the film
is the crew, the group of professionals thrown together by duty, bound together
by the friendships that developed. Even at their prickliest, when Kirk and Spock
speak sharply to each other, engaging in their expected debate between reason
and emotion, there’s a core of respect and love that’s a comfort and a
constant, even when everything is constantly blowing up around them.
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