Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Trek Into Darkness – or Star Trek 2 in lay parlance – is the latest shiny sci-fi to come out from behind JJ Abrams horn-rimmed glasses. As a sequel to the surprisingly adept 2009 reboot it’s another delicious slice of action-thriller pie, this time with even greater scope and ambition. Indeed, critical consensus tells of a riotously vibrant picture pertaining to Abrams and cinematographer Daniel Mindel’s stylish aesthete and bountiful use of unjarring CGI – and any film that relies so resolutely on visual effects and turns out not to be a completely shallow, emotionless sinkhole is an achievement to be praised.

The audience join Kirk, Spock et al half way through a mission, with the crew trying to defuse an angry volcano without alerting the indigenous alien tribes to their presence. It’s a thoughtful beginning: by furnishing the Enterprise with an aura of continuity it feels as if the plotline of this film is only one of their numerous adventures through space – the same veneer of authenticity that the TV series used to have in bucketloads. And then Benedict Cumberbatch appears as ‘John Harrison’, the villain. Cumberbatch is the latest graduate of the Hollywood school of English bad guys and proves he is another worthy addition to that fine tradition with disdainful aplomb, sporting the same stern face and cheekbones that Alan Rickman (Die Hard, Robin Hood) and Peter Cushing (Star Wars IV) have done so memorably in the past. Although the Sherlock star steals all the scenes he’s present in, the origins of his character are so mired in esoteric Trekkie mystique that it’s difficult for those – like myself – who aren’t familiar with Star Trek canon to understand why he does the things he does.

A brief attempt is made to explain the existence of ‘Harrison’, but in truth the relentless pacing doesn’t really allow for detailed explanations. It rips along from location to location, set piece to set piece, never at anything less than a manic breakneck speed – leaving pitifully little time for the half-baked romantic sub-plots to evolve into anything more than tokenistic segues. There are other elements of the script that are baffling or frustrating too. Spock (unerringly played by Zachary Quinto again) undermines the entire thriller/suspense genre by asking his older, parallel universe self for the cheat codes to defeat ‘Harrison’ – a contrivance that seems to have been solely motivated to give Leonard Nimoy another cameo role. But then peculiar plot contortions always seem to accompany scripts co-written by Damian Lindelof (creator of those head-mangling, thought-wrenching storylines of TV series Lost), Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who, as a duo, penned the Transformers trilogy).

The relationship that becomes central to both the central plotline and individual character development is the one between Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock, and it’s a feature that is regularly elaborated on particularly at the end when they realise that there is a great platonic love between them – and there are some amusing interchanges between human laid-back languidity and Vulcan conservativeness. The slick nature of their bromance is symbolic of the film as a whole: a highly polished, technically accomplished piece of Hollywood fun but not thought provoking nor edgy enough – nothing beyond the controversial gratuitous Alive Eve underwear scene – to become a real classic.