Star Trek Into Darkness 2013

A-

With the Marvel movies of late, it seems like they can only make a decent first movie, then once you tell the origin of the characters, they seem to have a hard time coming up with compelling storylines. That’s not the case with Star Trek. We know the origin, but they still had to set it up in 2009’s do-over of Star Trek. While there is a lot of action (a whole lot), the better story is about the very young commander, James T. Kirk, maturing as a leader. Still arrogant and prone to run off of his gut instincts, he is starting to realize that he needs to listen to his crew and keep in mind that when he risks his own life, he is risking theirs as well. They don’t hammer it home, but I like that there is more to Kirk than meets the eye. In fact, I might like to see even more of that. In the original TV series, they couldn’t afford or even produce the kind of things they are doing in this movie, so the show was always more cerebral, which is ultimately what kept the fans coming back. The Next Generation kind of got bogged down in some of the contrived geekiness of strange sci-fi concepts, but I am okay with some subtleties of good vs. evil, and don’t need to worry that much how you fix a fusion reactor. Some of what is going on in the movie resonates with news from today about the hurry to go to war.

There were a few things that I didn’t think worked that well. Spock still seems to be forced into emotional scenes, for instance with his girlfriend. Some of the plot points were either obvious or maybe could have been solved differently. Some things just didn’t seem that realistic. I won’t give anything away because I was glad not to know what to expect.

Overall this was a good movie and could be the start of a great series. I don’t know if 2-hour movies every few years can really develop the characters and ideas like the TV show did (they are mostly developed already, but there are some big differences), and I think the emphasis could be less on crazy action scenes, but the movie was solidly entertaining. A-. Follow-up: I watched this movie again in 2017 after getting the Blu-ray on sale. The Blu-ray looks really great and uses Dolby TrueHD 7.1 sound (did not seem like great use of the surround speakers on my system) so it also sounds great. I have to say this movie has some amazing action and just moves frantically from one giant scene to the next. The opening scene which has little to do with the main plot is really amazing with a weird red and white planet and the inside of a volcano. The way everything moves feels like Raiders of the Lost Ark (especially with that opening scene). I haven’t seen the third installment (which I also bought on Blu-ray) and I didn’t re-watch the first one, but this movie is really spectacular, even though maybe some of the story elements aren’t great (though most of them are) and not every action scene is equal. The Blu-ray has chapters covering the making of each big sequence and it is amazing how much of the sets they built out instead of doing purely in CGI.

Written: 18 Mar 2014

Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital