Captain Kirk loses the Captain chair after lying about breaking the Prime Directive to save Spock from a volcano (that they are preventing from erupting to save a primitive race).   Meanwhile, the Federation comes under attack from a Federation agent known as John Harrison.  Events lead to tragedy and Kirk getting the command of the Enterprise back quickly.   He is ordered to take a mission to the Klingon home world to kill John Harrison with a special torpedo only to have Kirk disobey orders and it sets the stage for the rest of the movie and a big reveal about John Harrison which has to be the worst kept secret on the internet.

 

I am a big fan of the last STAR TREK movie, but I can’t get over how disappointed I am with the sequel because it lacks so many things that the original STAR TREK movies had in addition to this sequel being a badly written homage to one or two of the original films.   Zachary Quinto is still great as Spock even though he looks a little chubby this time round, but Chris Pine’s Kirk is still a very weak Kirk compared to what William Shatner did with Captain Kirk.  The space battle in this film is pretty weak.   We don’t see much crew interaction this time around.  Peter Weller turns into a thinly veiled military villain where STAR TREK: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY did it better.   The movie is very plot driven as the Kirk and Spock friendship is cemented in this sequel.  There are some nice nods to the original Star Trek like the admiral uniforms and the Tribble bit.  Sulu has a nice moment  The engine room is again pretty lame and unwieldly again.  TSAR TREK INTO DARKNESS is just an OK and frustrating sequel which doesn’t make me feel like I want to see it again in theaters like the last STAR TREK movie.

 

Now I have some big issues and you should go away from this review now if you haven’t watched it.

 

 

 

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS turns into a very bad remake of STAR TREK: THE WRATH OF KHAN.  John Harrison is Khan and it is interesting to see Khan not being the main bad guy, but I don’t feel as much for the struggle between Khan and Kirk in this film.  The space battle between the Vengeance and the Enterprise is pretty one-sided and not the nice chess game space battle you in TWOK.   This sequel to the reboot has the weakest space battle of any STAR TREK film or TV series.  The Enterprise basically gets beaten up and doesn’t turn things around like Kirk does in TWOK.   It was nice to see the twist on the climax, but it doesn’t have the emotional impact that TWOK does when Spock dies.  Also Khan has magic blood that can bring people back to life which means Kirk isn’t dead and his kicking the warp core into place is absurd. 

 

I could go all day on beating up the sequel since it does have lots of problems like the Klingon make-up is bad even though the battle against the Klingons was one of the cooler moments of the film.   Kirk is reckless and they decide to have this movie to prove Kirk has earned the Captain’s chair finally where the romantic fighting between Spock and Uhura was irritating in addition to how annoying Kirk is.   The introduction of Carol Marcus doesn’t add much to the plot except to have a good line from McCoy and Carol Marcus has no development at all (where Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) has just a little more development).  In the end, I hope they actually make a STAR TREK movie that is more Trek than the last two movies have been and give a space battle like the old STAR TREK movies.  I want to see the human ideas and positive future values of Trek into play.  All we have now is a sequel which is more STAR WARS than STAR TREK and the next film needs better and different writers instead of an action driven STAR TREK series which misses out on some of the stuff that were in the original STAR TREK. 

 

This movie review is (c)5-17-2013 David Blackwell and cannot be reprinted without permission.  Send all comments to feedback@enterline-media.com