SPOILER WARNING
While the first JJ Abrams Star Trek film was far from flawless, it managed to reboot the saga in a mainly amicable light, comprising a capable cast with a sturdy story and some genuinely funny, emotional, and epic moments. Unfortunately, Star Trek into Darkness has little interest in capitalizing on those qualities, and it is much more in the mold of such blatantly insulting moves as destroying Vulcan.
While the first half of Into Darkness is a mostly-sturdy, highly entertaining, and sometimes even moving film, sadly the latter part of the film kicks off from a sacrilegious and nauseatingly predictable "twist" to delve deeper and deeper into some mind-frakkingly stupid and unintentionally comedic developments.
First, the positives: the father/son relationship between Kirk and Captain Pike, as well as the Kirk/Spock friendship, bear some winning and quite emotionally satisfying fruit in the early part of the film, sparkling with a subtle and genuine feeling that is utterly absent from the second hour. While held back slightly by some garish plot holes (but then, what in this movie isn't?), the opening bits of exposition about John Harrison's attacks and his subsequent flee to Kronos are intriguing and exciting.
It also must be said that this is a stunningly beautiful looking movie. It's sad that the gorgeousness of the movie can't be used to showcase more intellectual and character-development-based scenes rather than constantly harping on big action sequences to the point where the dialog is dialed back to a depressing minimum. Yet still, Into Darkness is a sight to behold and truly gives a visceral, yet fantastically real impression of being in space. Michael Giacchino's score is a wondrous, evocative entity that the film just can't live up to.
Cast-wise, Chris Pine gives a wonderful performance as Kirk here, despite the fact that he's been whittled down to a confused frat boy by a convoluted yet weirdly simplistic script. He hits every emotional beat with a verve that shows true commitment to the character and effort put towards the film's success. Annoyingly, his counterpart Zachary Quinto is yet again playing Spock much too emotionally. With either no understanding or no respect for the basic idea of Spock, Quinto broadcasts overt feelings at every single opportunity, even as he goes on and on about his decision to be repressive of his human side.
When Captain Pike dies and Spock briefly melds minds with him in his final moment, there lies the single moment of acting brilliance from Quinto in this movie. It's truly tragic that the actor seems so oblivious of how remarkable it can be to show the hidden, secret layer of Spock's emotions lying underneath the surface of his logical nature.
Zoe Saldana is solid enough as Uhura, yet I'm not sure it's such an upgrade to see her character so prominently featured, yet clearly designated "Spock's Girlfriend" with little to do outside of that role. Simon Pegg and Karl Urban, while both perhaps a little too gleefully hammy about it, are the only two actors who truly seem to embrace and adore the original incarnations of their roles. And the other crew members, including Alice Eve's adorable, yet basically superfluous Carol Marcus, have so little to do that there's little point dwelling on their activities.
We come now to the central problem of the film, unexpectedly and yet inevitably personified by Benedict Cumberbatch, an actor so excellent in the role of Sherlock on the BBC that many a viewer will be predisposed to enjoy his performance. Abrams clearly banks on this, cheesily giving Cumberbatch a massive close-up in his first scene while the score swells to a breaking point. This points to the directer's habit of trying to force-feed moments he hasn't remotely earned, and it just snowballs onward from there.
Over a sequence of events so unnervingly strange I can scarcely understand how they made it to the screen, Cumberbatch transforms from a rogue Starfleet officer to Khan Noonien Singh, despite having absolutely no resemblance to either the character (outside of broad strokes of origin story) or performance that made Ricardo Montalban's iconic persona the greatest Trek villain of all time. There's just nothing special enough about the portrayal of Khan in Into Darkness to surmount the knee-jerk problem most Trekkies will have with the idea of someone new and miscast playing this character.
If Abrams wanted to do a Khan movie, he needed to make it happen for real, by putting some actual damn effort into it. Instead, he's tossed "Khan" (now a curt Englishman) into the sea of a completely ridiculous story, having little to do with "Space Seed" and way, way, way too much to disgustingly rip off of Wrath of Khan.
Had a bit more time gone into the development of Peter Weller's Admiral Marcus character, there was absolutely no need to even include a second villain. John Harrison would have worked just fine as Marcus' henchman, as the Starfleet authority figure's nefarious game-plan is extremely threatening and could have been really fascinating if expanded. This disorienting cornucopia of themes and plotlines is how we end up with random Klingon cameos and such. The Klingons should not be doing cameos! They should be huge parts of the movie! And the make-up looks horrible!
Even if one is willing to accept Cumberbatch as Khan (he's a terrific actor, but he's not playing Khan), which is a huge and painful gambit to attempt, they must then be thwarted in their desperate effort to enjoy Into Darkness by the disaster that is the last half hour of the film.
It boggles my mind that any human being could actually be foolish enough to try to remake any part of Wrath of Khan, much less disrespectfully imposing plot threads from it into a story that takes place about 20 years before WOK. It further stretches my capacity for disbelief to attempt to fathom the blind, numbing stupidity which could have contrived the "role reversal" radiation poisoning scene (though, again, Pine is undeniably good in that scene - but that's no excuse, dammit!). Worst of all by a long, long shot, is the tragicomically, apocalyptically problematic moment of Quinto screaming "KHAN!" This is the single frame which undeniably ruins Into Darkness despite its early segments of genuine potential and enjoyability.
I suppose this won't exactly be a franchise killer, though it probably should be, since many of today's viewers will not have enough understanding of what Trek is actually supposed to be to comprehend the serious errors of this movie. But what with the obvious lack of care for the legacy and overall meaning one of the most important science fiction stories ever to be told which Abrams and the screenwriters disturbingly flaunt in Into Darkness, it's about time someone else got a chance to take the reigns. Now that Abrams has the job he so obviously always wanted, that of making Star Wars movies, maybe he'll be too busy doing that to keep ruining Trek, all the while cramming his embarrassing and inappropriate Wars homages into movies that disparage the essence of the job he's been hired to do.
6 pink flowers out of ten.
