Few filmmakers are quite as good at making superficially exciting, ultimately disposable blockbusters as J.J. Abrams. I remember finding his big screen debut, Mission Impossible 3, riveting at the time, but remember next to nothing about it, and haven’t been tempted to go back and watch it again. His follow-up, Star Trek, was even more suspenseful than Mission Impossible 3, but just as forgettable. The overuse of lens flares left a much stronger lasting impression than the plot, which I seem to recall involved a time portal, a planet getting blown up, and…well, that’s about it. His third movie, Super 8, was arguably his best. But apart from the early scenes where the kids make their own low budget super 8 movie, it had the same disposable quality as his previous movies. So far, nothing Abrams has done for the big screen has come close to attaining the same staying power as his haunting and enigmatic pilot episode of Lost, quite possibly the finest TV pilot of all time.
Star Trek Into Darkness is no exception. The movie is at times extraordinarily suspenseful (the middle hour especially) although 24 hours later, I’m struggling to remember what it was about.
For anyone who’s seen the trailers and promotional clips, the movie’s opening act will seem incredibly familiar. In fact, if you study those clips and trailers close enough, you could probably reproduce the first 20 pages of the screenplay with about 90% accuracy. It begins with Kirk (Chris Pine) running away from a primitive tribe Raiders of the Lost Ark-style while Spock (Zachary Quinto) tries to neutralize an active volcano in an attempt to prevent the tribe from going extinct. But in order to get Spock out of the volcano, Kirk is forced to violate the Prime Directive, which lands him in trouble with Starfleet. But as luck would have it, an enigmatic terrorist named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) is busy launching attacks against Strafleet, which provides Kirk with the perfect opportunity to redeem himself. Pretty soon Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise find themselves with 72 missiles orbiting Chronos, a Klingon planet where the terrorist is believed to be hiding. His orders are to blow up Harrison indiscriminately, but Kirk, never one to follow orders, decides instead to teleport down to the planet and take Harrison alive—a decision which has unexpected and potentially disastrous repercussions.
Most of the middle hour takes place while the Enterprise is orbiting Chronos without a functioning warp drive, and this section is by far the highlight of the movie. It’s rare to see a blockbuster of this scale confine itself to one location, and Abrams and his screenwriters deserve a lot of credit for daring to pull this off. This stretch of the movie plays a bit like Das Boot in space, and there are times where Into Darkness almost achieves the same level of intensity as that gruelling German classic. Unfortunately, as soon as the warp drive is up and running, the quality of the movie deteriorates dramatically. All that Abrams and his screenwriters can come up with for a finale is a long scene where various characters dangle off of railings, a re-enactment of the final scene in Wrath of Khan where the roles are reversed, and a long, boring action scene where Spock chases Harrison through a futuristic city by jumping from one hover car to the next (think of the opening chase scene of Attack of the Clones, only even less exciting).
Despite the extraordinarily weak ending, the movie is still worth seeing. Cumberbatch, playing a character who isn’t very interesting on the page, nearly steals every scene he’s in, and Peter Weller is almost as good in a supporting role. It’s also worth noting that not since Toy Story 3 has a movie managed to make the imminent death of all the main characters seem like a near certainty, and the way the screenwriters get the characters out of the jam is even more brilliant than what the folks at Pixar came up with. Overall, it may be Abrams’ weakest movie to date. That it still manages to be pretty good (and occasionally great) is a testament to Abrams’ consistency.
