Just terrible

Rating: 1/10 (10 July 2018)

You probably either love or hate the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies. There's little in between. However, this second movie in the new series is the one that is clearly objectively the worst. Not only is there hardly any coherent story at all. It is also obvious that most of the elements where just shoved in for the sake of providing vague references to earlier movies for those who don't really remember them. Maybe the best example is the moment where Khan reveals his name in a big build-up, a reveal that has absolutely no meaning within the movie because neither do the characters know Khan by that point nor has the name any significance beyond that.
The actual plot of the movie goes something like that: There is a Starfleet admiral who who is plotting to start a war with the Klingons. There is a super soldier from the past who the admiral is unfreezing in order to let him fight against the Klingons but refuses. And there is the Enterprise crew who is trying to stop both of them. What sounds like something that could somehow work never manages to become a coherent story. The plans and intentions of the characters just don't make sense and there isn't any reveal that the plot is building up to. "Into Darkness" is another movie that doesn't seem to be based on an actual story but had its thin plot being thought out more or less after the fact.
But the worst part about this movie is the fact that it uses the name of a classic brand of mature and enlightened television for a downright regressive effort. There are no real motives in this movie; no different approaches to complex problems or questions; no real despair and no constraints of the human condition. No conversations about incomprehensible phenomena or dilemmas. Instead, the entire movie is solely about who has the strongest punch, the biggest starship and the most snappy line. These means are the only ways to make any impact on the course of events. And whenever the movie gets too boring a starship is dropped on a city full of people to wake the audience up again. This is not even treating the audience like children. Because children are entertained by creativity, richness, emotions and heroism. This is treating us as creatively deprived and apathetic.
What causes utter dismay is the sheer imbalance of expensive visual effects, the huge cast of high-class actors and rich movie sets on the one hand and the total absence of a good premise, capable writing or even a basic passion for telling a story on the screen and carry your audience along on the other hand. In fact this movie is one of the instances that make you think of all the great movies that could have been made if you had split the budget between five or even ten passionate filmmakers.