A Disappointment

Rating: 7/10 (26 May 2013)

Star Trek Into Darkness was releases last week of 2013 and is the sequel to 2009′s Star Trek remake. After the success in 2009, J.J. Abrams and his crew had very large shoes to fill, and didn't necessarily do the job. As much as I wanted to love this movie, it being a sequel to Star Trek and casting one of my favorite actors as the largest Star Trek villain of all time, sadly I was severely disappointed.
The acting was the strong point of this movie, aside from the special effects. These actors had done an excellent job playing these legendary characters in 2009, and had the great opportunity of reprising their roles. All of the returning actors, specifically Zachary Quinto and Simon Pegg, did very good work in their return to space making Into Darkness still and enjoyable film. The only newcomer to the leading cast was Benedict Cumberbatch playing the great Khan (I would say Spoiler Alert except everyone already knew this was going to happen.) Cumberbatch is one of my favorite currently rising actors, I have especially enjoyed him in the BBC miniseries Sherlock and in 2011′s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, so I was very anxious to see him take on a role in the Sci-Fi spectrum. Again I was disappointed, not because Cumberbatch wasn't good, honestly he did the best with what he was given, but because the writers seemed to really bring his character down. Which brings me to my next point.
In 2009, the greatest strength of Star Trek was the writers and their ability to imitate the original TV series while adding modern intrigue. In 2013 however, the writing failed and brought down the movie entirely, even though it was the exact same writers with the addition of Damon Lindelof. One of the most enjoyable parts of Star Trek in 2009 was the almost perfect replication of the characters, creating dialogue and situations that reflected the characters all those Trekkies knew so well. This success was dropped for Into Darkness, as it seemed the writers made the severe mistake of imitating the characters from 2009 rather than imitating the original characters, allowing the very few mistakes from 2009 to be maximized. The story also dropped calibers. In the remake, a very complex story that was still easy to follow and reflected all the characters personalities perfectly, yet still being believable circumstances, was made, which essentially made the movie the success it was. For Into Darkness though, the story was mediocre with often clichéd scenes, that made the story predictable and even boring. The best idea for the story was to bring the character of Khan back, which was a good idea, but that's as far as they got. Their follow through with Khan was very lousy, he was actually hardly in the movie at all. When his character was defeated, which was in a rather inconsistent way for his character, I was very surprised as I thought that the movie had plenty of time left, until I looked at my watch and realized that I had been watching zero plot or character development for two hours. Unfortunately, director J.J. Abrams never seemed to step in and make this script that had been written poorly a success, as I realize more and more that Abrams is a technical director and seems to focus more on the special effects of the film. Which I must note, was very good.
I really wanted Star Trek Into Darkness to be very good; I loved Star Trek from 2009 and the fact that they had brought Benedict Cumberbatch into the mix for the sequel excited me even more. However, I was not pleased by the product of the film-makers, and was overall very let down. Oscar nomination have not yet come out for this year, and won't for a number of months, but any real Academy Awards success for this film is unlikely. It will probably pick up some nominations for visual effects and sound work, but definitely nothing else.
I give Star Trek Into Darkness a very disappointed 7.3/10