Into the Apt Darkness

Rating: 3/10 (19 December 2013)

WARNING - SPOILERS in this Review!
Star Trek Into Darkness is a sequel foray into the rebooted Star Trek universe where Vulcan has been destroyed and the lives of Kirk and Spock have been altered somewhat - for example Kirk being shot directly into the rank of starship captain from raw cadet whereas in the old universe he had to work his way up in the ranks.
Into Darkness picks up with Kirk violating the Prime Directive of interfering with the primitive life of an alien world to save an ungrateful Spock whose mission was also a violation of the Prime Directive but whatever... Spock rats out his good friend Kirk who gets demoted but shortly after re-promoted to head a ridiculous kill mission that should have made him suspicious from the get go which was to fire 72 special photon torpedoes at one guy - a guy who somehow teleported himself from earth all the way to the Klingon home world.
This one guy is of course Khan which come as no surprise as he is in every trailer of the film which leads you to believe he will be doing all sorts of nasty clever things (spoiler! - he doesn't).
Ultimately the problem with Into Darkness is Khan himself. It's like they wrote one story which had to do with a secret group trying to militarize Star Fleet and start a war with the Klingons then they tried to force Khan into this story but it just didn't work and it caused the first idea to unravel. Every aspect about Khan ruins the story. He's a genius but when he gets a chance at revenge he just shoots the heck out of a room and misses his main target. He then teleports himself all the way from Earth to the Klingon homeworld and does nothing until the Enterprise crew shows up.
Khan assumes his super friends dead but when he hears the Enterprise has 72 special torpedoes he assumes them to be alive and so he surrenders and spills the beans about the conspiracy to start a war with the Klingons.
That's the spoiler twist - Khan is not exactly the bad guy. Another bad guy shows but he is killed by Khan about 20 minutes later and that whole more interesting plot goes out the window as the movie focuses again on Khan as a bad guy who just wants his super friends back. Oh supposedly he is a genocidal maniac who kills others he deems inferior just like he never was in the original series.
The movie is a bizarre mishmash of Seeds of Doom, Star Trek II, and VI with very little of it being an original story in its own right. It relies heavily on the old series that it becomes only a pale imitation of it. As for the action, it has a lot of that but it becomes relentless to the point of becoming like a cartoon where the characters survive ludicrously impossible situations.