Chris Pine (Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Spock) are best buds now. (Paramount Pictures)
An effective middle manager is taken down a notch by the front office for breaking protocol. Then top brass give him a plum assignment. Could this be more than it seems? Fanboys may cringe or cheer at Star Trek Into Darkness and its references and reinventions of classic plot lines and relationships on board the Starship Enterprise. But there’s a mundane theme running under the adventures of alien exploration and a villain who will not be named: styles of contemporary office management.
The office politics that play throughout the film resonate on a bigger scale. Screenwriters Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof reference drones and 9/11 in a conspiratorial plot line that distrusts the authorities who are supposed to protect and govern us. But the heart of Star Trek Into Darkness seems to be in the way we govern our own emotions.
Old school, follow-the rules upper management is represented by Captain James T. Kirk’s mentor, Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood), and Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller). Weller’s Marcus should remind viewers of any number of cold, unimaginative bosses they’ve had. But Kirk (Chris Pine) is the Guy Who Thinks Out of the Box, who gets things done and isn’t afraid to break things like rules. It applies to the actors assembled for J.J. Abrams’ second installment of the rebooted franchise. Much of the supporting cast performs impersonations of the original Starfleet, but PIne’s Kirk never made me think I was watching a cover band. His captain is more unhinged and feral than William Shatner’s, with the intense gaze of a quick-witted animal pouncing on his prey.
If Kirk is an animal with a heart of gold, Spock (Zachary Quinto) is the cool second banana, a foil for one of the franchise’s central conflicts—reason versus emotion. Quinto’s prosthetic Vulcan has broken further and further away from Nimoy’s classic Spock. His seemingly passionless, interspecies romance with Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is continued from Abrams’ first Star Trek film, but their relationship doesn’t seem to get any more that a restrained rise out of the uptight Vulcan. What does move him is the male bonding experience with Kirk, who on an emotional level teaches Spock how to get down and be human.
Benedict Cumberbatch is—wait for it—the bad guy. (Paramount Pictures)
If only the movie as a whole got that message. Gene Roddenberry’s original series was not a high-budget blockbuster, but its sleek mid-century design and even the cheesy special effects had a charm lacking in this bloated blockbuster. Abrams establishes a decent sense of camaraderie among his actors despite the impersonations, but he has less of a sense for action.
In one climactic fight scene choreographed on precarious moving platforms, the camerawork doesn’t effectively put the combatants in perspective with their surroundings. They fall, they get up, and we intellectually know solid ground is fatally far beneath them, but Abrams doesn’t get much visual tension out of the conflict. I recently saw a more nail-biting approach to vertical tension at a most unlikely source: a Taylor Swift show. At the Verizon Center last weekend, one of the highlights of her big-budget spectacle came when she was transported from one end of the arena to the other. Swift boarded a portable platform that was raised to the rafters and hauled by high wires from one end of Seventh Street to the other, putting the pop singer closer to her fans and giving them the sense that she was taking a risk to reach out to them. Star Trek reaches innumerable numbers of fans, but for all the risks that Kirk takes for his crew, there’s still a feeling that the franchise remains safely Spock-like in its protective cocoon.
But this is a summer action movie, and the tears shed may be too much even if it does pass for character development, albeit of a highly predictable nature. At this rate, future generations of Trekkies may be faced with Spock under psychiatric treatment, crying over the baby that he thought was a chicken. Star Trek Into Darkness is essential fuel for Trek dabblers and purists alike, but as summer entertainment it’s just passable.
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Star Trek Into Darkness
Directed by J.J. Abrams
Written by Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman and David Lindelof.
With Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, John Cho, Simon Pegg, Zoe Saldana, Anton Yelchin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Peter Weller, Bruce Greenwood, and Alice Eve.
Rated PG-13 for fighting on strange new worlds, fighting on starships, and fighting in space.
Running time 132 minutes
