Star Trek Into Darkness - Part 3

This is it, the last Sci-Fi Adventures until December, and the last part of my unintentionally epic review of Star Trek Into Darkness (no colon).

I feel like I should be bothered by that missing colon, but I can respect the choice they've made there. It separates this era from the numbered movies with the Original Series actors, and the colon movies with the Next Generation crew, so there's no confusion. Plus I like that they're owning the 'trek' part of the title more. This is going on a trek into darkness, the next movie takes a trek beyond. They're trekking. Seems like a bit of a backslide though to go dark after the last movie rejected the prevailing trend of Battlestar Galactica grittiness and turned things up so bright that you got lens flares in the face in every other shot.

This is part three of this review by the way, so if you're looking for an earlier part you can click one of these convenient links: PART 1, PART 2.

Here's the SPOILER WARNING: I will be spoiling Into Darkness, Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons, and various bits from other episodes and movies. I will not be spoiling Star Trek Beyond.

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Previously, on Star Trek Into Darkness:

The Enterprise has gotten the utter crap kicked out of it! But then it's a Star Trek movie, so what else is new?

Fortunately Kirk has a plan. He's going to team up with the son of a bitch who killed Christopher Pike in order to take down the son of a bitch who's trying to blow his ship up. They've bought themselves some time thanks to Scotty sabotaging the latest scary black super-ship, but if they don't get over there and commandeer the vessel soon Admiral Marcus will blow them up and then probably try to blame the Klingons for it so he can start a war. Admiral Marcus is a bit of an idiot.

And now, the conclusion:

Kirk goes to sickbay to recruit Khan for his daring mission and manages to get a bit of intel out of him. Turns out that he helped design the USS Vengeance to be twice the size of the Enterprise, three times as fast, built purely for shooting things, and practically empty. So the two of them could potentially take on its entire crew if they got over there.

Unfortunately convincing the Khan to come with him proves to be a little trickier, seeing as Kirk has nothing to offer to him. (He's not going to give up his antique Beastie Boy album collection, things are bad but they're not that bad).

Just then their staring contest is interrupted by some beeping. Turns out that McCoy's still playing around with Khan's blood, seeing if it can regenerate a dead tribble. Fortunately this weird 12 second interlude gives Kirk a chance to skip straight to the part where Khan inevitably agrees to come along. But it's not because it's part of his own sinister plan or anything!!

Then Kirk and Khan get ejected from an airlock and go on a three minute space flight! If you ever wanted to see two people in spacesuits dodge trash, this is the scene for you. I guess Alex Kurtzman's a fan as a similar scene happened in the first movie when Kirk went orbital skydiving, and he had Burnham and Pike dodging through asteroids in one of his Star Trek: Discovery scripts.

For whatever reason the Vengeance is now a considerable distance away and they have to hit a tiny door in order to not go splat on the other side. They're relying on Scotty to open the spacedoor in time (Star Trek III reference) and relying on their computer to plot a course to hit the target without hitting bits of their own spaceship along the way.

Of course Kirk's suit ends up being damaged, with a crack gradually spreading across his helmet and his display glitching out and Khan has to save his life. Again. All the way through this movie Kirk has to pay for each success with a sufficient number of fuck ups.

Scotty's been having his own problems, as first he has to run down a huge cargo bay to reach the console to open the door, then he has to deal with a Section 31 goon who's discovered him sabotaging the ship.

This cargo bay is another cunning use of a real location to depict part of a starship, though it's better disguised than that brewery. And all they really had to do was turn the lights down so you can't tell that the walls are made of wood! They've really gone into darkness now. This is actually the giant hangar once used to build the Spruce Goose, also known as the Hughes A-4 Hercules. The plane held the record for the largest wingspan from the 1940s up until a couple of months ago, so it needed a bloody huge hangar. In fact this room's so big that you could fit the Prime Timeline's own prototype Starfleet warship, the USS Defiant, inside it with room to spare... if you sliced it down the middle from bow to stern and stacked the two halves on top of each other. I think the building's actually a Google office now...

Oh no, I just glanced up at the screencap and saw the security guy's terrible uniform again! It's okay though as Scotty flushes him out the airlock while the other two fly in from the other direction, and all is good. They even managed to sneak in another Star Trek III reference, as the guy doesn't understand that the numbers he can hear from Scotty's communicator are counting down to his horrible death.

Meanwhile Spock has managed to arrange a surprise cameo by Spock, and despite this being a total fan film scene they've got the proper actor to play him! This was Leonard Nimoy's final appearance in the role, his final appearance in anything in fact as he died two years later. His last credit on IMDb is a mobile game called Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff, but... no.

The movie doesn't work especially hard to justify the cameo unfortunately, as the Vengeance is preventing them from contacting Starfleet Command on Earth, but they can contact New Vulcan, which is presumably further away. So you'd think 'okay, now New Vulcan can contact Earth', but nope, can't do that. The only reason Spock called him up was for advice about their enemy: Khan. Not Admiral Marcus, they don't care about him, only Khan.

In Spock's defence, if someone has information that's helpful then it's only logical to call them up and ask them about it. If Marcus had asked Spock Prime about Khan a year ago they could've avoided all of this! Except not really, as Spock Prime made a vow not to give anyone spoilers that might alter their destiny.

Which kind of sucks for the 4 billion people living in the Malurian star system, the occupants of the L-370 and L-374 systems, the crews of the Excalibur, Exeter, Intrepid, Defiant and Constellation, Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner... and everyone else who died along the path of our heroes' destiny in the Prime Timeline.

Anyway Spock Prime's going to break his rule just once to warn them that Khan is their most dangerous adversary and his defeat came at great cost. I dunno man, Khan was one of their most recurring adversaries (as he appeared twice), but he wasn't exactly a godlike superbeing. Though I can forgive Spock for being a bit biased in this case.

This corridor redress works really well I reckon, I had no idea the first time I watched the movie that these are just the Enterprise's corridor sets with bits stuck on.

Kirk's taking a huge risk here, giving Khan a pistol that's locked to stun, as he could just stun Kirk with it. Or he could take a weapon off a Section 31 officer and use that to kill Kirk. Fortunately Khan takes them down a path near the warp core where they can't use the guns at all, so they can get into a fist fight instead. It's no surprise that it's mostly Khan that gets them through the Vengeance's security officers, but Kirk actually does pretty well this time for once.

At this point it's almost certain that Khan's going to turn on them, but I didn't want him to! I would've loved to see Kirk team up with someone who I could actually picture as being the genuine Khan, but failing that seeing him team up with John Harrison still has its appeal. Sure he murdered Pike and blew a lot of people up, but he also saved a little girl. And that little girl has a dog!

Meanwhile Spock's got a sneaky plan involving the torpedoes.

Kirk, Khan and Scotty storm the Vengeance's shiny bridge and stun everyone who could potentially press a button to blow up the Enterprise (like voice actor Nolan North making a cameo appearance at the tactical console). Then Kirk gives the signal to Scotty to stun Khan! Not so stupid after all... except they just leave him there on the floor instead of beaming him to the brig, so they actually are pretty damn stupid.

In The Wrath of Khan, the Reliant's bridge was a clever redress of the Enterprise's bridge, but Into Darkness had over 20 times that film's budget, so for the Vengeance's bridge they did an even cleverer redress of the Enterprise's bridge. I honestly wouldn't have been able to tell it's the same room if I hadn't been told, partly because it's really dark.

By the way, despite being the head of the most diverse organisation in space, all of Marcus's people are older human males with dark hair, in contrast to the Enterprise crew which is currently full of aliens, cyborgs and young models of two or more sexes all sitting around looking concerned.

I feel like a point is being made here about what kind of man Marcus is, as he's surrounded himself with himself. Even the computer voice is male (just like in the Mirror Universe...)

Faced with the very real possibility that he's going to have to get out of his chair, Marcus uses the argument that without him as a leader the Federation's going to get its ass 'decimated' in the war that's coming. But he's tried to kill Kirk's crew a few too many times today for him to really be receptive to his argument.

Unfortunately Scotty takes his eyes off Khan for a moment and the man gets up and goes on a rampage, stomping Carol's ribs and crushing Marcus' skull. And then he beams them to the brig, like Kirk should've done.

But first he has a bit of a logic battle with Spock, in which he threatens to disable the Enterprise's life support unless he gives up his sleeping crew in the cryo-torpedoes... just like he did in Space Seed! Fun fact: we learn here that the Enterprise's life support systems are "located behind the aft nacelle," which puts them behind the very back of the ship as the nacelles are the two huge warp engines.

Fortunately Spock took precautions in the very likely case of Khan seizing the Vengeance for himself and removed all the cryo tubes out of the torpedoes before sending them over.

This means we get confirmation that the warheads definitely do still work, as 72 torpedoes explode inside the Vengeance's engineering hull, ending his Khan's rampage across the galaxy before it even starts. It's basically a twist on Kirk using what Khan wanted to pull a surprise attack on the Reliant in Wrath of Khan, only Spock didn't exactly lie about what he was up to here, he just embraced technicality.

So now both ships are crippled, but that's fine as they're right next to Starfleet Command and we know from the briefing at the start that there are lots of ships in the area that can provide assistance.

Except the ship's suddenly started tumbling into Earth's gravity! I feel like most viewers likely saw this coming, seeing as it's on the poster.

I'm not a scientist, but I feel that if a ship's parked close enough to the Moon for it to dwarf the Earth, then Earth's gravity is probably a secondary concern. Or else they'd be falling directly into the Sun right now instead. Incidentally it took Apollo 11 3 days to return from the moon, so it's impressive how the Enterprise is going to beat them by 2 days and 50 minutes with its engines off. Running on the corridor walls seems to make sense though as they'll still be accelerating, and even if it doesn't I don't care because it's cool. Artificial gravity failures are so rare in Star Trek that I appreciate them whenever they show up.

I bet Kirk and Scotty are appreciating that it's the Enterprise corridors they're running down right now, not the Vengeance ones with all that stuff to trip over. Though people are dying all over the place and Kirk clearly doesn't know how to deal with this. He's responsible for these people and he's feeling that more than ever.

Meanwhile on the bridge, Spock orders everyone pull a USS Kelvin and get the hell out, but the bridge crew all decide to stay, because... they all want to die with Spock I guess. There really doesn't seem to be any other reason to stick around on a sinking ship, aside from the fact that getting out is difficult when you're falling down corridors.

It does give them a chance to activate their magic fold-out seatbelts though, as the filmmakers used their blockbuster movie budget to finally put some proper seat restraints on a Starfleet bridge. Though Discovery would later one-up them with magic fold-out spacesuits.

There's no seatbelts down in the Budweiser Brewery, but fortunately Chekov's there when Kirk needs him. Seem that Khan and Spock aren't the only ones with super-strength, as he can can hold on to Kirk and Scotty when they couldn't hold on themselves.

I wonder if they deliberately took Chekov off the bridge crew for this movie because he's absent in episode Space Seed as well (even though Khan mentions remembering him in Wrath of Khan). It's a nice touch if that's the case, showing that it's very plausible he was just working somewhere else on the ship off-screen.

Chekov goes sliding down the hallway to manually redirect the power while the other two head to the warp core. Along the way they get to see that the shuttles have miraculous stayed in their racks this whole time... until right now. I guess everyone who hasn't evacuated the ship by now just missed their chance.

Unfortunately the core's misaligned and there's nothing they can do about it from out in the engine room, so Kirk decides to punch Scotty out, make sure he's safely secured in his chair by its magic fold-out seatbelts, then he goes into the heavily irradiated warp core to give the mechanism a re-boot. Khan would kill for his family, Kirk's going to die for his. It's just like how Spock went into the Spock Sacrifice Box in Wrath of Khan to fix the engines, except with more kicking. And this time we already saw how they're going to bring him back to life.

So this is probably our first ever glimpse inside a warp core! It still looks nothing like we've seen before on Star Trek, but at least some of it an actual set they actually built for once. What he's doing looks a bit weird as well, as he seems to be stomping down on the machinery instead of knocking it forwards into alignment. I think the plan is to unjam it so the core can automatically align itself.

Back on the bridge, Sulu points out that if they don't get the power back online they'll be incinerated in re-entry, but he's completely wrong as the ship makes it through just fine, give or take a few hull panels. I guess Sulu really doesn't know that spaceships are designed to survive volcano-level heat. The real concern is hitting the ground afterwards.

Kirk gets the power back on just as the ship disappears through the clouds. I'd say they're about 6 kilometres from finishing their 237,000 kilometre journey at this point, so it won't be long now.

But then the ship pops back up through the clouds again! This one's a Star Trek 09 reference, as it's like the shot of the Enterprise emerging from the atmosphere of Titan. I still think the ship could look better from this angle though. It's the flat saucer that bothers me I reckon. The original Enterprise has an inward curve to the underside that catches the light and makes it more interesting shape. Plus it has a giant number written on it, which helps.

By the way, we learn here that you need the warp core in the secondary hull to fire the thrusters on the saucer section, so there's an important fact to remember when you're watching the next movie.

This is the point in Wrath of Khan where Kirk looks over at the science station and realises that Spock is missing, but Spock's sitting in Kirk's chair right now so he can't do that. Though Scotty still has his line "You'd better get down here," and it's followed by "You'll flood the whole compartment," when Spock tries to let Kirk out of the Kirk Sacrifice Airlock.

Then the movie turns into Wrath of Khan for a bit, only backwards.

You're either going to buy into this, or you're going to hate it, and I've noticed that a lot of people hate this scene. Especially when Spock yells "Khan!" at the end, efficiently combining the two most iconic moments of Wrath of Khan into one scene. Even though Kirk was screaming Khan to trick him, and Spock's screaming it because he's absolutely furious (Marcus did the majority of the damage, but it'd be illogical to scream at him because he's dead).

I can understand why this could take someone right out of the movie, but personally I think this is the opposite of the Khan reveal scene in the brig earlier. You can appreciate it in the same way as the original Wrath of Khan scene if you haven't seen the earlier film, and you can enjoy it as a 'what if...' inversion if you have. 

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

I can't be angry at an alternate universe story for remixing events and showing how things could've happened another way! In fact it's been remixing other films all bloody movie, as you may have noticed me mentioning.

This time Spock's only realising what Kirk means to him as a friend when it's already too late. It's not an earned death at the end of a long friendship, it's an early death tragically cutting the friendship off before it could really form. It's also a way better death than Kirk Prime got in Generations. Though on the downside it does give us angry rampage Spock again, for the second film in a row.

I would say this lack of emotional control is possibly a side effect of him not having an adopted human sister who was mean to him in this timeline, but we don't actually know that he doesn't.

Fortunately Khan is still alive, so Spock has someone he can get revenge on. The Vengeance dives into Earth's atmosphere flying right past the Enterprise, but it seems to be pure coincidence as Khan is aiming at Starfleet Command to get revenge on them instead.

Though he's also getting revenge on Alcatraz along the way. The prison must have done something to piss him off at some point as it he really crushes it good.

I can tell it's Alcatraz because it's got "ALCATRAZ" written next to it in the same style of metallic text that the movie uses when it's telling us where we are.

The prison's appearance is actually an in-joke, as J.J. Abrams' production company had a TV series called Alcatraz that had been cancelled the year before.

Khan has all kinds of wrath, but he's a poor marksman and keeps missing the target, so Starfleet Command survives yet another attack. He manages to kill just about everyone else though, sending the ship through skyscraper after skyscraper, causing a ridiculous amount of casualties. He didn't even mean to do that, it's an accident!

This is the kind of mass destruction that a movie's heroes would generally spend the climax trying to stop, but it just happens for no good reason, and the Enterprise crew are miles away and can't do anything about it. In fact they barely even acknowledge that it happened. This whole scene is basically just a flashy way of having the villain crash his car and then get out to escape on foot.

If you take this destruction out of the film absolutely nothing changes, because its only purpose is to look cool in the trailers and it only has any impact there because they lead you to believe that it's the Enterprise crashing. I wish I could say that it's nice to see the scale of a starship compared to a city for once, but the Vengeance is so oversized that it spoils it.

Still it could've been worse: there could've been an anti-matter explosion that instantly vaporised the whole of San Francisco. The moral of the story: don't leave Khan lying 'unconscious' on the floor!

Spock has no intention of leaving Khan unconscious this time, as he beams down to give chase with his phaser on 'kill'. All those Section 31 officers they stunned aboard the Vengeance earlier are no doubt dead now, but Khan keeps on going, and Spock has to run after him because all problems in the Kelvin Timeline are solved by running. Though the Spock from the start of the movie would point out that they're not solved by vengeance.

Khan's also in full vengeance mode seeing as he believes Spock killed his crew, but at this point he feels like running from the pissed off Vulcan with a phaser is the more tactically sound option. No one else here seems that bothered to see him run by though.

It's funny, after the Kelvin Archives bombing we heard screams, after the attack on Starfleet Command we saw people running for their lives, but Khan just flew a starship through a skyscraper and no one in this street seems to care. I feel like there must have been a real world equivalent to this event the filmmakers could've used for reference...

Though to be fair there were a lot of people standing and staring at the beginning of the chase.

Khan and Spock end up on top of an garbage barge, which means that Spock gets to have the final fist fight of a movie for once! Khan tries to use his signature head crush on him, but Spock uses a mind-meld to make him feel the pain himself and that discourages him. That's an interesting thing to put in, because only people who've seen other Trek stories would have any idea what he just did. He also throws in a trademark neck pinch, as that's always a crowd pleaser.

Meanwhile McCoy realises that the dead tribble he was experimenting on is somehow still sitting on the table where he left it. Also it's come back to life, and that gives him an idea! He races to get another augment out of a cryo tube... to use the tube for Kirk.

The movie came this close to including another reference here as Spock's body was also resting in a torpedo at the end of Wrath of Khan. In fact it was the key to his rebirth as well. But Kirk isn't in a torpedo, those all blew up already, he's just in the cryo pod.

They never explain why they don't use the other augment's blood on Kirk instead of Khan's and they probably should've as otherwise it looks like a plot hole. All McCoy had to say was something like "We've no guarantee that their blood is anything like Khan's and we'd have to leave Kirk out of cryo while we wait to see if it has an effect. We get just one shot at this, after that he'll be too far gone to save. Bring me 72 dead tribbles and I'll keep testing, but our only sure bet is getting Khan back here alive."

Back on the garbage barge, it seems more likely that Khan's going to kill Spock... until Uhura beams down to stun him a few times! Personally if I tried beamed onto a moving vehicle I probably just fall right off the back, but Uhura keeps her balance even faced with a genetically enhanced Terminator soaking up sustained phaser fire.

This gives Spock a chance to rip a piece off the vehicle and smack Khan around with it, just like Kirk did in Space Seed! Then he demonstrates that he can actually break bones, so Khan should really just shut up. Plus it turns out that Khan finds it a lot harder to no-sell punches when they're coming from an angry Vulcan who has him pinned to the ground.

Fortunately Uhura is there to be the voice in his ear saying "Maybe don't kill Khan", like he was to Kirk at the start of the movie. I guess they need live-person blood, not dead-for-five-minutes blood... though if his blood resurrects the dead, then can they even kill him?

The blood works and the protagonist returns to the movie after his eight minute break. So Kirk's saved Spock and Spock's saved Kirk and everyone's happy. Plus now they have a cure for death to go along with their super warp drives and interstellar transporter, so Federation technology is taking a real leap this year.

I've heard a few people say how it was a shame to bring Kirk back so soon (or at all) as it could've really mixed up the alternate universe if Spock was the captain going forward and Kirk's journey was over. Personally I think the point of Kirk's journey in this movie is to suffer punishments, losses and failures, to experience fear in the face of certain death, to die saving his crew like his dad did, and then to live due to his crew saving him. He's had a physical and spiritual rebirth, and if he hadn't survived then all that humility and respect he'd learned along the way would've been pointless. If the first movie was about Kirk becoming captain of the Enterprise, this is about him becoming Captain Kirk. Someone you can actually take seriously giving orders, with an earned swagger instead of childish cockiness.

Plus imagine losing both Pike and Kirk in one movie!

Kirk's also become someone who can give speeches to an assembled crowd of Starship Troopers extras. Any moment now he's going to tell them they'll keep fighting, and they'll win! There's apparently a few real life veterans amongst all these fake officers, so there's some more Into Darkness trivia for you.

You could accuse the Trek movies of not having much of a moral to them compared to Trek episodes, but this film actually has Kirk spell out the film's moral at the end in a speech! "Don't leave Khan lying unconscious on the bridge once you've taken the ship," he tells them. "That son of a bitch will be faking it, I guarantee you."

Actually he tells them that it's natural to want revenge on the people who hurt you, but you don't want to be that person. And that's the closest the movie comes to any acknowledgement of the mass destruction caused by Khan when he dropped the Vengeance on those skyscrapers

The scene cuts to a dark room for a moment to show that Khan's been put back into cold storage with the rest of his crew, so we learn that revenge was not taken there. It's a bit of a strange punishment though. Kirk guaranteed the safety of Khan's crew and he kept his word, but they may as well be dead if they never get woken up.

In the TV series Kirk figured that Khan would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven and set his crew up on an empty planet (like some kind of 'space seed'), but this time all he's getting is a long lie in.

I suppose we also learn that war with the Klingons didn't take place in the meantime. Either that or it happened but wasn't anything worth mentioning.

Then Kirk actually admits fault to the whole crowd, including his crew, by revealing that he didn't truly get the Captain's Oath until now. Though when he recites it for them, what we actually hear is the "Space, the final frontier..." monologue. Somehow I'm thinking the movie's being cheeky with the editing there.

Though if they've gotten over their revenge and gotten rid of their evil admiral, why is everything so blue and miserable still? I expected the movie to return to the bright colours and pure whites of the prologue on the volcano planet once they made it out of the darkness, but instead they've taken every other colour away! It took me a while to notice him, but even Keenser's wearing a grey hat in this shot.

Then the movie ends almost exactly the same way the first one did, to the point where you could remove the blue colour cast, swap the endings, and then do a test to see how many people noticed that it had changed.

Kirk steps out from the airlock onto the bridge, looks around, then walks to his chair and calls down to Scotty in engineering. Afterwards he has a chat to Spock, sits down, and tells Sulu to take the the ship out. Then the ship warps away and we get Michael Giacchino's dramatic version of the original Star Trek theme as planets swoop by. I'm still not keen on the music to be honest, but then I'm always hoping for a James Horner theme at the end, so it's unlikely I'll ever get what I want.

I did like how Spock and Kirk are finally on the same page after disagreeing about absolutely everything for the whole movie though, with Spock deferring to Kirk's "good judgement".

One difference between the endings is that this time around they've given the Enterprise a bit of a refit! It's subtle, but the red impulse engines have been replaced and the panels that rise up on the back of the warp nacelles have a more angular look to them. Gotta keep changing the ship to sell new toys and show off something new on screen. Even Discovery had to have its own exclusive Enterprise to sell those Eaglemoss models and Christmas tree ornaments.

Though they're off on their five-year mission now (five years earlier than on the TV show), so really we should be looking at the Star Trek Beyond version of the ship here instead, with its skinny neck and tiny warp nacelles. I think they kind of get away with it though, as they angles they've used here don't really give us a good look at the thickness of the neck or how swept back the pylons are.

Star Trek Beyond

See, this is a brand new 3D model of a dramatically redesigned ship you're looking at here, but from this angle you can't even tell the difference.

By the way the first two Kelvin Timeline films hired ILM as their main visual effects vendor, but Star Trek Beyond brought in... okay I'm going to stop now before I end up carrying straight on into the next movie.


CONCLUSION

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Star Trek Into Darkness is basically the Star Wars: The Last Jedi of Trek movies, as it's the second film in a J.J. Abrams reboot trilogy and the fans make no secret of how much they despise it. This is not a well liked movie.

At least that's the impression I've gotten over the years, but the numbers don't seem to back it up. It's got 89% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.7 on both Metacritic and IMDb, which actually puts it up near the top of the films. And those are the user ratings, so it's not just professional reviewers who've praised it. Could it be that Into Darkness is actually... good?

I'm fairly sure I love the prologue on Nibiru at least, maybe even more than the beginning of Star Trek 09. Which is impressive, seeing as that movie has a perfect opening. Sure their attempt to plug the volcano is a series of dumb events, but the heroes face consequences for that later. In fact the whole film is about the consequences of a particularly stupid part of the first movie: Kirk's promotion to captain. The movie's in total agreement with the fans: it was a terrible idea to give Kirk the Enterprise, Starfleet clearly weren't thinking straight at the time. And that wasn't the only bad, emotional decision they made in the aftermath of Vulcan's destruction, as they also found a genetic superman who once conquered a good percentage of the Earth, gave him their technical manuals, and blackmailed him into designing weapons. Somehow this didn't end terrorism.

The film is driven by the actions of three arrogant people who all want to kill each other for various reasons, and Spock's there too! In fact the two antagonists can be seen as superior versions of the protagonist and the comparison reveals both Kirk's positive traits and the flaws he needs to overcome. Which is good because he's a whiny entitled lying git in this.

Admiral Marcus is the side of Kirk who doesn't let rules and good advice get in the way of doing what he feels needs to be done. He's a Starfleet officer but he's got far more authority, he's a captain but he's got a much better and newer ship, and even his lies are epic by comparison. But Kirk abuses his power to save a world and Marcus abuses his to start a war, and I feel that paints him in a worse light. Plus Kirk comes to feel the massive responsibility he has for the well-being of the officers under his command, while Marcus just gets irritated at how much they struggle when he tries to murder them. If there's one thing I'm learning from Star Trek, it's that you shouldn't trust Peter Weller. The dude's always building super weapons and starting trouble with aliens! Though I'm glad his Section 31 in this was portrayed to be just as villainous as his Terra Prime in Enterprise, as I'm always worried they're going to be shown as necessary in some way.

Khan, on the other hand, is the side of Kirk who thinks that he's the chosen one and manages to get through situations with his exceptional insight, cunning and resilience. But he's smarter, stronger, more ambitious and even more protective of his crew. Prime Kirk beat Original Khan because he had more experience and knew something about the ships he didn't, but this time Khan has the most knowledge and experience so Kirk loses there too. In fact Kirk loses all the time in this movie, he's rubbish. But there are three things he's got that his villains don't: compassion, a capable team of fun and lovable characters, and the potential to let a lesson sink in through his thick skull.

This version of Kirk was full of himself even before people from the future told him that he's destined for greatness and Starfleet gave him a medal for being humanity's greatest hero, and he has no idea how far from William Shatner's Kirk he is. But the film keeps hammering away at his unearned confidence until he finally admits to Spock and himself that he doesn't know what to do. His journey is the core of the movie, as he learns humility, responsibility, not to peek on women when they're changing, and that revenge is bad. By the mid-point of the film he's the one reporting on his boss's covert activities, as he's become Starfleet's conscience instead of a rebel. Then at the end he accepts that he doesn't yet have the skills and knowledge to win this, and that his great destiny is to die giving an engine a kick. So he sacrifices himself to save his crew... passing the Kobayashi Maru test properly and finally graduating! He loses two father figures and grows up to become the head of his family. I thought that was a pretty satisfying arc. Maybe he's not quite Captain Kirk yet, but now he’s on the right path to get there.

The movie might get bogged down with everyone's daft torpedo-related schemes, the actions scenes are all about the heroes getting their asses kicked, it's got a miserable blue tint to it, and who the hell prepares for a war by building just one super-ship and then destroying their second best ship with it to kick things off early? But Kirk's character arc, the fun performances, the flashy direction, and all the money on screen kept me awake and interested through all 133 minutes of it. Despite the superficial similarities it's much less dull and depressing than Star Trek: Nemesis, and it gives us more scenes of people doing Star Trek things than the last 11 movies managed. Honestly I'd put Into Darkness in my top five Trek films, above any of the Next Gen movies and below Wrath of Khan. But your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for stupidity.

Strange new worlds explored: 2. They actually visit a strange new world for once! It's a bloody miracle.
New life discovered: 2. The aliens in the intro are strange and new, and so is Kirk's ride.
New civilisations discovered: 1. I'm going to say the aliens are civilised just so I can FINALLY write a 1 here. First time in any of the movies, seriously.
Boldly gone where no one has gone before: Absolutely, the movie starts off with exactly this.
Other ships in range: Yep, though it's not a good thing in this case.

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COMING SOON

Thanks for reading! I would tell you what's coming up next but Sci-Fi Adventures is taking a two month break to help me regenerate my sanity and I've learned not to make promises I might not want to keep. Though chances are you'll be getting a lot more Babylon 5 reviews, so follow me on Twitter and/or RSS to find out when those are going up.


Anyway I'm sure you're eager to write a comment or three so I'll shut up now and let you get started on that.