Review: Star Trek Into Darkness

 I realize I'm coming late to this party. After all, this was an early summer blockbuster (it was released in the spring, actually) and I'm only just watching it now in mid-September. What can I say? It's been a busy summer.

Anyway, as you have probably figured out by now, I'm a bit of a sci fi geek from way back. Space ships, ray guns, jet packs, aliens, UFOs, etc. I love it all. Growing up, people were either Star Wars fans or Star Trek fans, and there wasn't much middle ground. I was always squarely in the Star Wars camp but was fine with the other brand if that's all there was. I watched my share of the original Trek episodes as reruns when I was middle school and saw all the Trek movies in the theater until they transitioned from the original cast to the Next Generation bunch.

My gripe with Star Trek was that it was always too high minded. I appreciate that it tried to address Big Ideas like racism and individualism versus collectivism and all of that stuff. But holy crap, when you compare Spock and Kirk agonizing over the relative morality of influencing a new civilization versus Han Solo blasting Greedo's alien guts all over the wall of the cantina, there isn't much question of which is cooler, you know? Star Trek was interesting whereas Star Wars was just awesome. Light sabers and X-wings versus the Prime Directive and Starfleet? No competition.

All of this is to say that when J.J. Abrams directed the 2009 Star Trek reboot, I thought it was the best thing to happen to the franchise in decades. Abrams specializes is genre spectacle with a very human edge of sentiment. He managed to make Sydney Bristow a hardcore superspy in Alias while simultaneously making us care about her daddy issues. His take on Mission: Impossible was one of the strongest of that franchise because of the emotional component he successfully mustered between Tom Cruise and his on-screen wife played by Michelle Monaghan. Lost, one of his co-creations, was as much about the relationships between Sawyer, Jack, and Kate as it was about time travel and conspiracies.

So Abrams was able to work in the brainy, emotional world of Star Trek while still making it rock, you know? The action sequences were exciting, the effects were terrific, and the aliens were scary. More importantly, audiences cared about the people and the relationships in the midst of the action and effects. I bought into Spock's troubled backstory and conflicted relationships with his parents, and at the same time, I loved watching young Jim Kirk launch his step-dad's vintage Mustang off a cliff while being chased by a cop on a hover bike.

(This turning out to be a very long post considering it's a movie review and I haven't even talked about the movie I'm reviewing yet.)

So my hopes were high when I heard about the sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness. Abrams was back along with the cast from the first film, and the villain was going to be played by Benedict Cumberbatch, a favorite of mine from the BBC tv series Sherlock. The trailers, the posters, all the hype made it look like a sure thing.

Sadly, it doesn't live up. The film is a step down from the first one, and the problem is easy to identify. It's a question of earning the payoff. In order for an audience to care about what happens to characters, they have to care about the characters themselves. What happens to them matters because we find them believable people who are worthy of some level of empathy. Events in and of themselves don't mean much if we don't care about the people they're happening to. Earthquake? Scary. Earthquake happening to a small family we've learned about for a few chapters? Horrifying.

This is a problem my Intro to Creative Writing students often struggle with. They give their readers flimsy, cliched characters for a few scenes and then expect them to care when something tragic happens to them.

So Star Trek Into Darkness is a weaker film because it doesn't spend enough time making the characters real or relevant to the audience. It makes the mistake of trying to echo Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, the best of all the original movies. The final scenes of Into Darkness are an alternative version of the final scenes of Kahn. The problem is that in Kahn, the characters had been established for close to thirty years. Their relationships mattered. When Spock died trying to save everyone, we cared because we cared about him. When Kirk almost dies at the end of Darkness and Spock gets all weepy, who cares? We haven't seen these two do anything other than bicker like sitcom buddies. There's no investment for us  Death, near death, massive tragedy, etc. doesn't matter if we don't care who they are happening to.

So when Star Trek Into Darkness was over, my overall thought was, "Meh." Good looking but empty. Like a Kardashian, you know?

Trilogies seem to be pretty standard these days, and this one made enough money to justify a third film. Maybe when that comes around, Abrams will have recaptured his mojo or passed the franchise off to someone who's still got it. (Abrams' next project is directing the new Star Wars film due in 2015. My brain kind of collapsed in on itself when I heard he was taking that gig after this one. My thoughts about Hollywood's total lack of imagination is a post for another day.)

Anyway, the film isn't bad, it just isn't particularly good. It falls short of what was best about the first one, and just sort of leaves the viewer cold in the end. For 190 million dollars and with Abrams at the helm, I expected a little more.