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 21^st 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.