Star Trek Into Darkness is a tricky creature to review - largely because it feels like two potentially decent films folded together to make one that doesn't become the sum of its parts. And the more you examine those parts, the more the cracks begin to show.
It is a film that on an immediate level barrels along as a solid romp, with engaging one-liners, big explosions, solid performances and giving the audience a fair amount of bang for its buck. There's musing on the nature of friendship, loyalty, death, sacrifice and responsibility. You may remember such weighty issues from previous Trek outings such as... plucking this at random, the Wrath of Khan. As two hours of sci-fi adventure you could do a lot worse.
The casting is good. Pine's Kirk is as engaging as in the previous outing and Quinto's Spock is better than anyone could ever have originally predicted - though the brief inclusion of Leonard Nimoy's original once again feels opportunistic, unnecessary and distracting. Simon Pegg's Scotty gets more to do and ironically comes across as the most morally-centred of the characters as he spots the Enterprise's mission to explore being compromised by the desire to overtly-weaponise the starship. The likes of Weller (as Admiral Marcus) and Greenwood (as Pike) provide able support and the production values are strong. On a technical level there's much to enjoy for the running-time..
But Into Darkness is also the kind of film where you admire the view but can't help eventually noticing that you had to stand on the shoulders of giants to get there. Rather than carve its own niche, it cherry-picks some of Trek's most iconic moments and ticks them off a list, presuming that referencing them alone will carry the same specific gravity as the original. Yes, it tweaks and rearranges them somewhat - sometimes quite inventively and with a degree of gloss and style - but for all the shiny streamlining there's a distinct feeling of what I've come to refer to as 'Nostalgebra' - essentially the hook of excellent box-office potential being linked not to the new product itself but the warmer memory of the original.
Ultimately, Into Darkness doesn't have the courage of its convictions. What begins as a mixture of both the fun vibe of the original series and a growing darkness (hence the title) about the nature of terrorism and military agendas, it decides to jettison both and merely become a compromised generic actioner before the final credits roll. Cumberbatch's 'Harrison' begins by dripping deliciously confident menace with ever sentence he utters... and eventually turns into just another generic cinema thug; Alice Eve's Marcus is a brilliant scientist conflicted daughter of a hawkish Admiral, but hey, we're halfway through the piece now so let's have her strip down to her (admittedly lovely) underwear, in public no less, for no discernable reason. It's as if someone looked at an early version and literally said, '...yeah, we really need to dumb this down...'.
For better or worse, Abrams' Trek universe is led by the visual not the plot. Words give way to lip-service and imagination to basic imagery and though he's given us far better human characters to populate the adventure than Michael Bay's empty Transformers franchise ever did, he builds up his cast only to have them overshadowed by scale and a fetish for lens-flares that is verging on the blindingly pathological.
Like a synthesised remix of a classic accoustic song or anthem, older fans may well feel their childhood has been strip-mined for contemporary convenience and younger audience members won't get the gravity of some of the set-pieces that was intended. Like Pike tells Kirk "There is greatness in you, but not an ounce of humility..."
But ultimately, somewhere in the middle is the shiny demographic that will still make Trek a massive hit. One can only hope that the inevitable Trek 3 - probably without J J Abrams who is off to a different galaxy far, far away - will boldy go where no voyage has gone before, rather than staying so close to all the old familiar places and merely rearranging the furniture...
7/10
