Star Trek Into Darkness

All week I kept trying to find a funny story from a convention or an online chat room to use as ammunition for my jokes about Trekkies. You know, because it’s weird for them to dress up in full costume and congregate together while quoting weird one liners to one another. And then a buddy of mine pointed out to me that sports fans are just as freaky. We all get together in large stadiums wearing face paint and the jerseys of our favorite players, while doing stupid chants or cheers as dudes run around trying to grab other dudes; or if it makes you feel better about it, tackle each other. I couldn't deny that I am guilty of such acts, so here I am as a sports fan saying trek on weirdos, trek on.

I watched the television show from time to time but I really consider myself to be on the Star Wars side of the nerd wars. But I love sci-fi, have seen a few of the Star Trek movies, and J.J. Abrams did a surprisingly decent job of re-booting this franchise; so I was moderately excited for part two of journey where no man has gone before.

This movie comes out of the gate swinging with an intense action scene involving Kirk (Chris Pine) and Bones (Karl Urban) who are being chased by this indigenous tribe of a planet that they are simply supposed to be observing. But as usual Kirk goes against protocol and decides to execute this crazy plan to save the planet's people, while nearly losing the lives of his own expedition team. Well once they return to earth he is immediately suspended, until one day the Federation finds itself under attack by a new enemy that they believe to be linked to the Klingons. After a fairly predictable death, Kirk has his crew back and is sent on a mission to find and kill the man responsible for these attacks. And in the process of capturing him, realizes that he may need this new enemy’s help to get out of a fairly sticky situation.

Let me say that while I did enjoy this movie, there were far too many flaws in it to simply overlook. First of all, Simon Pegg’s toupee was distractingly bad! Alice Eve is stunningly hot, but her character was completely pointless. And while they did introduce to us a rather familiar foe from the past, J.J. blew his load in revealing who it was and then didn’t quite know what to do with him afterward. The new bad guy is really cool and they could’ve done so much more with him but in the end it felt like he was a slightly more evil version of Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. The action scenes are entertaining but with an ok at best storyline, they just fell rather flat.

Now I will say that this movie is really funny. Basically everything that comes out of Bones’ mouth is comic gold. And there are of course, the usual funny moments with Spock trying to understand humans. What I really like about Into Darkness is that they embrace what makes the franchise popular, unlike the new Bond movies where they throw out the cool gadgets and the shaken not stirred line. This movie is chock full of inside jokes and little nods to the tv show. And while some of this goes over the casual fans head, it’s not enough to where you can’t follow what’s going on. In the end, it’s the curse of J.J. He can set up cool action pieces that visually look great but he can never make a great movie.  However this is a fun popcorn movie and I rate it as barely FRESH!