Star Trek Sundays: "Into Darkness" is a glorious guilty pleasure
This is what dreams are made of
It’s Sunday, and we’re going through all 13 theatrical STAR TREK films, a series that includes a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with the second in the modern reboot trilogy, STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS. Enjoy…
Star Trek Into Darkness
2013, Dir. J.J. Abrams
Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on notes from 2022
I have always bristled at the term ‘guilty pleasure.’ If you enjoy something, just enjoy it – as long as it isn’t hurting anyone, I do not understand the need to feel guilty about being entertained. It is not a phrase I like to use, nor one I’ve ever really felt compelled to employ.
Then I revisited Star Trek Into Darkness.
J.J. Abrams’ second at-bat in the rebooted Star Trek universe is, to be clear, a bad movie – at times a very bad one, and at times a gross and uncomfortable one. It is obscenely sexist, brazenly and thoughtlessly violent, and has some of the stupidest plotting and worst writing in any blockbuster of the 21st century. It coaxes truly terrible performances out of several great actors, including Benedict Cumberbatch, who has almost certainly had therapy sessions about his work here. It has no clear understanding of what Star Trek is, the film’s entire prologue adventure built around an incoherent and incomprehensible misunderstanding of the Prime Directive, and I think it would be fair to argue no movie or TV show in the franchise has ever strayed further from Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic vision of the future, given that the film is built on a rabid conspiracy theory mindset and serves as a bald-faced allegory for 9/11 trutherism.
It is also gloriously, deliriously, singularly unhinged, a crazy movie made by crazy people, filled top to bottom with creative decisions that make no sense, revealing new layers of lunacy each time one revisits it – and I love watching it. Star Trek Into Darkness is not a good movie, but it is one that has lived in my head rent free for ten solid years now, and watching it again, I realized a part of me adores it, and with that realization, I suddenly understood the appeal of the term ‘guilty pleasure.’ I should hate this movie for a long laundry list of reasons, but it is simply too entertaining to watch, its many flaws too enjoyably bizarre to honestly make me mad. Even with the copious Wrath of Khan references, the film is so utterly detached from anything recognizably Star Trek that these days, I may even find it easier to enjoy on its own wavelength that the 2009 film, laughing where it gets things wrong, sitting in slack-jawed awe at its many missed swings, and admiring the few things it actually does right. I cannot say I like this movie, but it’s very possible that I love it.
When I first reviewed the film upon its release in 2013, I wrote that Star Trek Into Darkness “features about as stark a qualitative difference between plot mechanics and character work as any blockbuster in recent memory.” My thesis on the film, such as it was – my thoughts were all over the place – was that while the plot was a hot mess, it at least did some really interesting things with the characters. That’s clearly not the thesis I would embrace today, but I see where my younger self was coming from, because one of the most fascinating and frustrating things about Into Darkness is how frequently it flirts with giving Chris Pine’s Kirk a truly great arc to play.
The film is ostensibly about the humbling of a young and cocky Captain Kirk, as he learns the tough lessons of leadership necessary to command the Enterprise on its five-year mission, which is a perfect story to tell for the semi-prequel space these films inhabit. The problem is that the first movie ended with Kirk becoming the Enterprise’s permanent Captain, and his arc here simply doesn’t feel right when he’s already in the Captain’s chair. The mistakes he makes in the first act reflect less on him than on the idiots at Starfleet who promoted a delinquent cadet who hadn’t even graduated yet to Captain of their flasgship, and it just feels painfully obvious that the more fruitful path would have been to keep Pike as Captain and have Kirk as First Officer, where an arc like this could have a lot more weight (The Next Generation did this with Riker all the time, with Picard being the steady hand and Number One having more introspective challenges about the burdens of leadership). Into Darkness comes close to getting it right, with Kirk demoted after the Prologue and Pike restored to the Captain’s chair, where he invites Kirk to be his right-hand man and redeem himself. Given how they boxed themselves in at the end of the first movie, that’s a solid way to course-correct; but then they have to blow up Pike and take the great Bruce Greenwood, one of the reboot’s greatest assets in grounding this version of Star Trek reality, off the board, all for the sake of a mostly brain-dead revenge plot (which is actually a military conspiracy narrative, as the film puts hats on hats on hats). Once the eponymous trek ‘into darkness’ begins, much of the action is built on various characters – Spock, Scottie, Bones, etc. – telling Kirk how obviously dumb and wrong their mission is, while Kirk puts his fingers in his ears and ignores them. There’s a fine line between arrogance and stupidity, and they too frequently tip Kirk over into the latter.
That said, in the film’s second half, there is material that works for me here. There is a moment in the big battle between the Enterprise and the Vengeance (the Starfleet warship commanded by Admiral Robocop – er, Peter Weller’s Admiral Marcus, and then taken over by Khan) that very nearly ties the whole thing together, in which Kirk admits to Spock that he’s in over his head, and tells his First Officer to take command. Pine is fantastic throughout this entire stretch, and combined with the general balls-to-the-walls lunacy of the stakes and action here, the moment lands – it’s a version of Kirk we’ve never seen before, encountering impossible odds but without the experience necessary to, in McCoy’s words from Star Trek III, “turn death into a fighting chance to live.” And I won’t lie: the inverted version of the Wrath of Khan ending, where Kirk sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise and Spock is stuck on the outside watching him die, works for me. It’s a good scene, beautifully played by both Pine and Zachary Quinto, and they make it work on its own terms, as a culmination of the specific relationship we’ve seen play out in these two films, not just as a reference to the older movie. And I can’t help but imagine how interesting it would have been if they really had let Kirk die here. It would have been such a ballsy move, a truly compelling way to complete his two-film arc, his death mirroring his dad’s sacrifice at the beginning of the first movie, and then opening a really fascinating new dynamic for future sequels with Spock in charge. Part of me wishes they would have gone for it.
Instead, of course, we get the impossibly goofy moment where Quinto bellows “KHAAAAAAN!” well outside his vocal range, and he and Benedict Cumberbatch have a ridiculous foot chase through a half-decimated San Francisco, and Kirk is resurrected with Tribble blood, and the movie well and truly goes off the rails.
So yeah: As Benedict Cumberbatch’s therapist has no doubt said to his client on more than one occasion, let’s talk about the whole ‘Khan’ thing.
The use of Khan here is, top-to-bottom, so breathtakingly misguided that I think it may be the ultimate synecdoche for an entire era of mainstream cinema in which Hollywood forced referential nostalgia upon its audiences no matter how many contortions were required to get there. Cumberbatch is miscast on multiple levels – the first being that this is a character with an Indian name originally played by a Mexican actor now performed by an extremely white Englishman with a very posh accent – and Abrams has no clear sense of how to direct him beyond “go big or go home,” leading to an ever-expanding set of tics and gesticulations and crazy bug-eyed over-exaggerations that add up to the kind of breathtakingly terrible acting you can only get from a truly great actor getting completely lost at sea. But moreover, the film has no clear sense of what to do with the character, or why he should be here in the first place, beyond the weight of the name itself.
Case in point: I think about the scene where Cumberbatch reveals his identity as Khan at least once a week, both because it is so entertainingly batshit in its staging and because it says so much about Hollywood’s priorities in this era. We had a lot of franchise films in the 2010s that tried to hide the identities of recognizable characters so they could build to a big show-stopping reveal – see also Christoph Waltz as Blofeld in Spectre, Joseph Gordon Levitt turning out to be ‘Robin’ in The Dark Knight Rises, or Naomie Harris as Moneypenny in Skyfall – and every one of them turned on limp, awkward, painfully contorted writing and delivery that ultimately undercut whatever each film could have done with that character in the first place. But Star Trek Into Darkness was by far the clunkiest – and the most memorable. Cumberbatch is introduced to us as ‘John Harrison,’ and when Kirk has him in the Brig and finally coaxes exposition out of him, which builds to Cumberbatch saying “My name…is Khan.”
The problem is the name ‘Khan’ means absolutely nothing to the characters on screen – who have never encountered nor heard of this person before – and only has meaning to those watching in the audience. So they basically have Cumberbatch break the fourth wall, delivering the line straight to camera and talking right at us; Michael Giacchino does a soft little sting on the soundtrack, Cumberbatch nods knowingly in the silence, and then we cut back to Chris Pine, utterly stranded, having no idea how to play this unplayable moment where the information he is hearing means nothing to Kirk, but is the pivotal reveal of the entire film. There is no reason in the plot for Khan’s identity to be hidden, except as an attempt to trick the audience outside the diegesis (a trick that didn’t work, since every man, woman, and child walking into Star Trek Into Darkness assumed Cumberbatch was playing Khan – the moment got laughs every time I saw it in theaters). It’s a big ‘twist’ with no meaning for the characters and no impact on the narrative, its only potential benefit being the quick dopamine rush of viewers going “hey, I know that name!”
And here’s the thing: as dumb and misguided as this all is, the film almost does something fun and subversive with it. The idea of Khan being framed by a corrupt Admiral and helping Kirk and the crew unravel the conspiracy is genuinely fun, a good, surprising use of the possibilities afforded by the rebooted timeline. The stretch of the movie where Khan is working with the crew is about as good as the film gets, and if they stuck with that idea – if they brought in Khan but never had him make the heel-turn, had him become the Enterprise’s ally and maybe even just brought him into the crew at the end, a good ol’ enemies-turned-friends story – it would absolutely justify the goofiness of the big reveal, because the follow-through would actually be playful enough to sell it. Instead, Khan breaks bad, and generically so at that: none of the members of his frozen crew become characters, his super-strength and intellect are only marginally important, and without the ability to evoke or even gesture at Ricardo Montalbán’s iconic performance, Cumberbatch is left trying to soup up the paint-by-numbers villainy he’s been handed. As with Kirk’s arc, the film is its own worst enemy, looking a great idea in the face and emphatically saying ‘No.’
What the film says ‘yes’ to, over and over again, is instead a grand conspiracy theory narrative, one that is, to put it lightly, problematic. Co-writer Roberto Orci is well-known as a weirdo with a thin skin who argues with fans on message boards and in comment sections, and is a vocal conspiracy theorist and 9/11 truther – and while I don’t think you need to know that to see how Star Trek Into Darkness is contorting Gene Roddenberry’s vision of utopian future space communism into a story about false flag attacks where the heroes get to learn their government was corruptly pulling the strings all along, the fact is that when you do know the reasons why Orci eventually had to delete his Twitter account and move offline, there’s a lot you can’t un-see in this movie, and it’s all the more uncomfortable.
That said, there are two reasons I find the 9/11 truther allegories more amusing than aggravating: First is the Peter Weller of it all, appearing here as our very thinly-veiled George W. Bush stand-in Admiral Marcus, and doing us all the favor of refusing to take any of the material he’s given seriously. Weller goes full B-movie ham on this movie’s ridiculous ass, has a grand old time doing it, and I love every second he spends chewing up the script’s terrible dialogue and spitting it back out with obvious contempt. I particularly adore the way he plays the moment where Kirk, having figured out the conspiracy, calls him out; his response is so weird, so nonchalant, so out-of-style with the rest of the movie, as he slumps in his chair, runs his hand across his furrowed brow, and casually says “Well, shit.”
And second, because it is deeply funny that this 9/11 trutherism-addled movie ends with the enormous Vengeance warship crashing in San Francisco and doing 9/11 times 1000, sending countless skyscrapers crumbling into dust before our eyes, and it all goes completely unremarked upon, none of it ever brought up or mentioned at all. Forget the tens if not hundreds of thousands dead, or the debris field so vast that it would likely poison everyone in a very large radius – an object as big as the Vengeance crashing to earth like that would likely mess with the planet’s surface enough to alter climate patterns and cause disasters all over the globe. Zack Snyder would blush at this level of wanton destruction. And nobody ever talks about it. Imagine if 9/11 happened, but it was hundreds of times bigger and more destructive, and then immediately following that Osama Bin Laden was chased through the ruined streets of New York by a science officer with a personal vendetta, and that’s the end of Star Trek Into Darkness. It is absolute goddamn lunacy – and I kind of love it.
Much of this stems from Abrams’ hyperactive style, his need to keep things moving at a rapid clip at all times, which is a real double-edged sword. On the one hand, it leads to a problem with both Abrams films where characters are always flying by the seat of their pants, frenetically improvising instead of acting like well-trained officers who think things through and are good at their jobs. The ‘competency porn’ angle that animated classic Star Trek is very far in the rear-view mirror here, and it’s a tone that has sadly infected most of the subsequent Trek series, killing any interest I’ve had in the various Paramount+ series whenever I’ve sampled them.
On the other hand, though, the film’s action sequences are deliriously inventive and exciting. The big set-pieces here are so much better and more fun than they were in the first movie, or in either of Abrams’ Star Wars films; they’re completely unhinged, and don’t feel much like Star Trek at all, but they have a real sense of scope and imagination behind them, and always with a clear purpose and stakes. It’s frenetic, yes, but effectively so. I love the stupendously goofy piece of action that is the Vengeance chasing the Enterprise through the Warp tunnel – which isn’t a thing, but so be it – and the final stretch is basically a disaster movie aboard the Enterprise, The Poseidon Adventure but in space. Stupid? Yes. Glorious? Also yes. It’s a kid playing with hisStar Trek toys by smashing them together and breaking them into pieces. The movie has lost its mind, but you can’t take your eyes off it.
And on a purely visual level, Star Trek Into Darkness is a major accomplishment. I like the look of both Abrams films a lot, lens flares and all, and Dan Mindel’s cinematography here, particularly in the IMAX sequences, is often stunning. There is great production design all over the place, especially in the scene on Kronos and during the Prologue adventure on the new planet Nibiru, and the visual effects are second-to-none from start to finish. The IMAX version of the film with shifting aspect ratios featured on the Star Trek Compendium Blu-ray set may well be the best-looking standard Blu-ray in the format’s history, one of my go-to demo discs. And you can’t knock anything Michael Giacchino is doing on music duty, either. On a technical level, the film is rock solid.
Messy elements abound, of course, far beyond what I’ve thus far chronicled here. The scene with Spock and Uhura arguing about their relationship on the shuttle down to Kronos is one of the worst moments in Star Trek history, feeling more like a Saturday Night Live skit the show would do when the movie’s cast guest starred than an actual scene in an honest-to-God Star Trek film. And it is deeply and offensively gross just how entirely and obviously the Carol Marcus character exists here only to take her shirt off, in a moment that is breathtakingly gratuitous, all because J.J. already made Zoe Saldaña do that in the last movie, and he needs fresh meat this time. It is yucky and leering and entirely beyond the pale.
And that’s Star Trek Into Darkness – a movie that bounces wildly between the outrageously awful, actual moments of inspiration, and unhinged cinematic lunacy. What it adds up to is not something ‘good,’ in any sort of conventional sense, but it is something rather amazing, a misguided blockbuster made with lots of real talent rapidly spiraling further and further into madness. It is all so entertaining, for good and for bad, that I really do kind of love the film. In a strict critical sense, it is obviously inferior to the first Abrams Star Trek movie, but today, I find Into Darkness a lot more fun to watch. I still don’t think I believe in ‘guilty pleasures’ as a general rule of thumb, but this? This is a guilty pleasure of mine. This is what dreams are made of.
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