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.

Star Trek Into Darkness - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still writing about Star Trek Into Darkness! If you missed the first part of my review you can find it -> HERE <- and there's still one more part to go after this. It's a long movie.

Speaking of second parts, this was the second of the Kelvin Timeline trilogy kicked off with Star Trek 2009. But it's the last movie by the Star Trek 2009 team, as director J.J. Abrams had to go off and do the Star Wars: The Force Awakens afterwards. Trek 09 writers Alex Kurtzman (current overlord of TV Trek) and Roberto Orci also returned, and were joined this time by Damon Lindelof, who had a bit of experience writing sci-fi himself as he'd just finished working on the movie Prometheus. Oh plus he'd been co-showrunner on Lost for six seasons (which is considerably longer than J.J. Abrams worked on the show).

Anyway, this review contains SPOILERS for Into Darkness, Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons, and probably other episodes and movies too. It didn't seem right to spoil anything from Star Trek Beyond though, so I didn't.

Star Trek Into Darkness - Part 1

Written by:

Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof

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Directed by:

J.J. Abrams

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Release Date:

2013

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures... is going to be the last for a while I'm afraid. I'm taking another two month break, so the site will be going into cryosleep until December. But I figured I should give you something to read while you wait, so I've written about an entire movie this time! It's the second of the Kelvin Timeline films, Star Trek Into Darkness!

Though I ran into a slight problem with the first draft of my review, as it turns out that the movie shares the record for the longest runtime of all the Trek movies with The Motion Picture, and it's about people constantly running everywhere and doing things instead of staring at the viewscreen in awe. I ended up with twice as many words as my average movie review and three times as many as my average TV review! Though my recap is still slightly too short to qualify as a novel, so I can't joke about it being the unofficial novelisation.

I never like doing this, but I've decided to split the review into three parts and publish one part a day, for the sake of all humanity. That way each post is merely excessively long, not ridiculously long. But they are all going to include SPOILERS for the whole movie, and I'm considering basically anything in Star Trek besides Star Trek Beyond to be fair game this time as well. So there'll be a few Star Trek: Discovery spoilers from its first two seasons.

Star Trek

Written by:

Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman

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Directed by:

J.J. Abrams

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Release Date:

2009

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September 8th was the day that Star Trek: The Original Series first aired on US television back in 1966 (Canada got it two days earlier, but don't tell anyone), so today on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm celebrating its 50th birthday by sharing my thoughts on the movie Star Trek! Or 'J.J. Trek' or 'Star Trek 2009' or whatever you want to call it (the DVD volume label says it's Star Trek XI). The first Trek movie is called Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so they technically haven't given two films the same title here, but it's still unnecessarily confusing and I don't like it. What was so wrong with calling it Star Trek: The Force Awakens or something?

I love that they brought the old school font back though, as it looks great with that blinding J.J. Abrams lens flare. Some people aren't so keen on the lens flares though, or the fact that this is a prequel, or that it's a semi-reboot, or that it's an action movie... in fact a lot of things about it have aggravated certain fans. Critics on the other hand seem quite fond of the film, with Rotten Tomatoes reporting that 95% of movie reviewers recommended it, which means it's beating Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (88%), Star Trek: First Contact (92%) and The One with the Whales in it (85%)! That makes this the second most acclaimed movie on my site so far, after Aliens (98%).

Right, as usual I'm going to be taking screencaps from the DVD release and writing a bunch of SPOILERS underneath them for this film and maybe even those that came before it. I'll even throw in a couple of spoilers for Star Wars as well, because this movie's begging for comparison. Into Darkness and Beyond are 100% safe though.