Movie Review: Star Trek Into Darkness

I really enjoy when J.J. Abrams directs action movies. He captures movement and fighting really well, it is always captivating cinematography. As a small disclaimer, while my family did watch some episodes of Star Trek over the years, I make no claim to be a bona fide Trekkie. So my review is based on my viewing of the most recent Star Trek movies. I thoroughly enjoyed the first recent Star Trek movie in 2009 and was eager to watch Into Darkness. I had a recent opportunity to do so when I saw that it was on Netflix and Chris was watching some football game in the living room.

Summary from IMDB:

After the crew of the Enterprise find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one-man weapon of mass destruction.

I really enjoyed watching the gang get back together again, along with a few new faces. Chris Pine does an excellent job leading the team as Captain Kirk. He and Spock have a hard time understanding each other, coming from different backgrounds, and different emotional mindsets. It was an interesting emotional connection in a piece of work that was mostly fight scene after spaceship chase scene after obligatory half naked women scene. I think Zachary Quinto does an amazing job as Spock and really helps the audience connect to the character. But by far my favorite character is Scotty. I love Simon Pegg, and as Scotty he is the perfect comedic relief in a very heavy movie. However, Scotty is more than comedic relief, he is also wise counsel at a time when Kirk is unsure who is telling him the truth.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Kahn, the movie’s antagonist. It is a wonderful role for him, but I had no doubt he would do a wonderful job. He is an amazing actor. He brought complexity and dimension to the character, and was a wonderful intellectual foil that Pine played off of beautifully. I found the exploration into the background of the Star Trek story intriguing and a great concept for a movie. The slow revelation of who Kahn was and where he came from was well played between all the shoot ’em out scenes. The movie’s pacing was executed with great precision and all the story lines come together in an epic way.

The only comment Chris made about the movie (that he didn’t watch except for the few seconds when he came to check on me during commercial breaks in his football game) was that there were a lot of casualties. Which does seem a bit of an oxymoron because the whole movie is about saving people, but the result of the crews actions are that a lot of people die. In my opinion as long as the people I want to survive do, I don’t care about civilian casualties. After all, it is just a movie. One nice thing about a prequel was that I could rest assured my favorite people would survive (unless they were rewriting the whole franchise). If I know my people are going to survive, then I can just sit back and watch a movie instead of feeling anxious the entire time.

I thought Star Trek Into the Darkness was a fun film, full of interestingly choreographed fight scenes, an antagonist and protagonist that played off each other well, and an emotional story line that added dimension to the movie.

If you want to read a very very spoiler ridden but in depth review, check out Wil Wheaton’s, he has some really great points. (I tried to find some other wordpress peeps who have done a review of the movie, because I like to support our little online community, but wordpress search engine is a joke. All I was given were a dozen spam posts about how to download the movie online for free. This. This is why wordpress is in the doghouse.)