Star Trek: Into Darkness

Following the success of his 2009 reboot of the franchise, JJ Abrams is again at the helm with this follow-up to Star Trek. Sadly though, he doesn’t deliver on the promise of his first film and, despite the presence of an actor the calibre of Benedict Cumberbatch as the villain, the plot flounders around in hyperspace without ever really coalescing into something more than a framework for a lot of spectacular action sequences and over-the-top destruction. One wonders how the Federation can afford to keep rebuilding all the starships and cities that fall victim to the various baddies who mostly seem driven by little more than revenge and a need to blow things up.

Cumberbatch plays rogue Starfleet Officer John Harrison who escapes after perpetrating an act of terrorism that destroys most of Starfleet HQ and kills the Enterprise’s original Captain, Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) assumes command of the Starship and leads his crew to Kronos, the home of the Klingons, where Harrison, a one-man weapon of mass destruction, has taken refuge. But when they discover Harrison’s true identity and his connection to Starfleet’s Admiral Markus (Peter Weller) the fate of the whole Federation is suddenly at stake.

The shame of it in this case is that Abrams and screenwriters Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof have come up with a really good premise that should have capitalised on the parallel universe twist, so cleverly established in the first film, which allows Spock to exist simultaneously as both a young man (Zachary Quinto) and his older self (Leonard Nimoy). Unfortunately, their great idea for Cumberbatch’s character and how he connects to the Star Trek movies of the ‘80s doesn’t pay off and we’re left with an awkward reprise of a classic death scene from that era and a lot of astounding special effects but not much heart to flesh out the spectacle.

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