Star Trek Into Darkness

The first thing you should know about Star Trek Into Darkness is that it is not a science fiction movie.  I mean, yes, there are spaceships and aliens and cryogenically frozen super-humans, but science fiction, real science fiction, is supposed to engage with such far-flung concepts as a way to ask and answer questions about who we are and where we’re going as a species, while Star Trek Into Darkness uses them to point the way to the next exquisitely photographed action scene.

The second thing you should know about Star Trek Into Darkness is that this is okay.  It is not a high-minded movie, but director J.J. Abrams has reassembled the likable cast from his 2009 Star Trek and thrown them into a story so fast-paced you won’t even have time to think about thinking.  In fact, the pace is so rapid that it can be disorienting, especially toward the beginning when the narrative completely reorients itself every ten or so minutes.  A playful opening that finds the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise observing an alien civilization makes it look like the movie will be about what happens when a primitive people are exposed to advanced technology.  Then it looks like it will about how Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) will deal with being relieved of his command, and finally it settles into following the manhunt for an intergalactic terrorist (Benedict Cumberbatch), with a few more twists along the way.

We’re willing to follow the knotty plot because the cast is appealing and the action sequences are entertaining.  Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, as Spock, still have a charming odd-couple rapport, although their relationship isn’t as important here as it was in the previous picture.  The scene-stealer this time around is Benedict Cumberbatch as the villainous Khan.  Like everything else in the movie, this character is introduced, developed, and denounced at an accelerated rate and could have fell flat were in not for Cumberbatch’s intensity.  He has a way of over-pronouncing his words while glaring into the camera that makes you sure he is a dangerous man.

And he is.  He leaves the Star Trek crew battled and battered but not broken or beaten, and that’s one of the movie’s problems.  This is the second of what the good folks at Paramount Pictures doubtlessly hope will be a long-running movie series, but by the end it doesn’t feel like much has changed.  The same group will be back on the same ship in a few year’s time, and unless the producers feel like putting something more at risk, return trips could quickly become tiresome.

On its own, this movie feels polished but perfunctory, with plenty of scenes that work while you watch them but without a bigger vision that will make you remember them the next morning.  You can almost see the screenwriters storyboarding the film as you watch it- something for the action junkies here, a few references to the original television series there- but there’s no through-line, no unifying idea of the kind that enervated the older Star Trek movies.  Again, that’s all okay, but that’s all it is.