Star Trek Into Darkness: 3 stars out of 5
At one point in Star Trek Into Darkness, the second installment in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, an irate Scotty (played by Simon Pegg) shouts, “Are we a military order now? Because I thought we were explorers.” It is a line that speaks to a fundamental difference between Abrams’ Trek and its source material. Star Trek: The Original Series thrived on human drama, inspiring films that moved slowly even at their most action-packed. Star Trek Into Darkness, however, cements Abrams’ reimagining as an action franchise in the most monumental sense.
This would not be a bad thing were it not for the incoherence of its storytelling. The film, which follows the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise on a manhunt for a rogue Starfleet agent, starts in medias res and never once lets up. Exposition is rushed, and as a result, the majority of the film’s two-hour running length passes in a dizzying haze of explosions, warp maneuvers and shrapnel blasts—Abrams is clearly delighted to show off his arsenal of special effects. The actors in Star Trek: The Original Series made grand stages out of cardboard sets. By contrast, the actors in Star Trek Into Darkness seem dwarfed by the sparkling immensity of their CGI environment.
It is in this smallness, however, that the film finds its thematic virtue. Star Trek: The Original Series is about big men made to acknowledge their smallness. Star Trek Into Darkness is about small men who dare to be big.
While William Shatner’s Captain Kirk and Leonard Nimoy’s Lieutenant Spock are titans brought back to earth by their failings, Chris Pine’s Kirk and Zachary Quinto’s Spock are human-sized from the very start. Pine’s Kirk is an insolent rebel whose aimless aggression speaks to an adolescent crisis of self. Likewise, Quinto brings a sense of adolescent confusion to bear on Spock’s internal conflicts—his tightly-wound Spock, in the attempt to affect an emotionless façade, comes off like a nervous teenage boy in his father’s overlarge clothes. If Abrams is in need of a title for his rebooted franchise, he might want to consider Star Trek: Growing Pains.
In both cases, however, characters are ennobled through the confrontation of their vulnerabilities. When Shatner’s Kirk or Nimoy’s Spock break into mournful sobs, theirs are the sobs of Greek heroes, admirable because they strive to go beyond the limits of their existence. When Pine’s Kirk apologizes for his failings as a captain, or Quinto’s Spock admits to a loss of self-control, it is proof of their growing maturity—proof that we need not be perfect to be great.
It is in the quality of these performances that Star Trek Into Darkness both pays excellent tribute to its source material and establishes itself in its own right. The appeal of Star Trek is ultimately the same, no matter how muddled with violence and special effects. It is the sum of our exploration: we went in search of strange new worlds and alien forms of life, and what we found was invariably human.
Star Trek Into Darkness is directed by J.J. Abrams and stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and Zoe Saldana.
