A Parody with No Jokes

Rating: 4/10 (7 June 2014)

Have a look at the IMDb message boards for "Star Trek Into Darkness" and you'll see that most of the criticism from serious Trek fans focuses either on the film's plot holes or on the many ways director JJ Abrams and his writers have altered canonical Star Trek. Yes, there are plenty of plot holes worthy of nitpicking: transwarp beaming, life-saving blood transfusions, and characters with inconsistent motives. There are obviously all kinds of differences from old Trek, like the heroes' ages and accents and the size of the Starship Enterprise.
But really, none of that matters, because "Star Trek Into Darkness" is little more than an average summer action extravaganza, with spaceships instead of superheroes and aliens instead of orcs. There's a bad guy who wants to blow stuff up, and good guys who have to stop him, and there's an endless parade of chases, fights, explosions, and punch-ups. So what makes this a Star Trek movie? Not much.
Watching the film as a Trek fan is an odd experience, because even though it has Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, the Enterprise, the colorful uniforms, Klingons, and tribbles, they all feel completely out of place, like obscure cultural references randomly grafted onto a generic plot skeleton in an effort to distinguish it from every other summer blockbuster. Zachary Quinto shouting "Khaaan!" sounds more like a joke than an homage -- the sort of line you'd expect to hear dropped into the middle of a cartoon farce. The production design combines totalitarian militarism with Brutalist architecture and shiny modern interiors, while the cast charges through the breathless action sequences with barely a spark of life in them.
The pacing seems to have been designed to help numb the audience into mindless acceptance of the script's scatterbrained plot. For about 90% of the movie, the characters are running, shouting, or fighting, with lots of falling, jumping, and flying through the vacuum of space in rocket-powered spacesuits. Even when they're sitting still, the camera never stops manically whizzing around them, inducing motion sickness in any audience members who lack the intestinal fortitude of a fighter pilot. When the shooting starts, it's quite impossible to tell what's going on -- the dim lighting, bludgeoning sound, and frenetic camera-work create a jumble of images all jostling each other for our attention, and all losing.
This is the standard approach to special effects films: bigger, faster, louder. The idea behind them is to generate a sort of mental and cognitive vacuum in which the audience can wallow for about 132 minutes. Movies like this don't inspire us to think or feel, because if we do we'll realize that nothing we've been watching makes the least bit of sense. "Into Darkness" is a parody of Star Trek, an earnest TV show that, despite campy effects and clunky writing, always tried to make us think.