REVIEW: Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013): Dir. J. J. Abrams. Written by: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof. Based on Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry. Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Benedict Cumberbatch, Karl Urban, John Cho, Alice Eve, Simon Pegg, Peter Weller and Anton Yelchin. Rated PG-13 (Bloodless action). Running time: 133 minutes.

4 stars (out of four)

Star Trek Into Darkness is a perfect summer movie. It is smart, fast-paced and emotionally engaging, grabbing your attention in the opening moments and refusing to let go until it’s over. Scene after scene, it surprises and thrills. You can’t help but get drunk off its relentlessly exhilarating energy.

The film, which is J. J. Abrams’s second Star Trek feature, begins by following what I feel is one of the cardinal rules of any great action movie: Open with a scene so good, a lesser movie would have used it as its climax. Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) runs through the blood orange jungle of an exotic planet, chased by spear-throwing natives with chalk white faces. A mostly self-contained episode, this first mission involves dropping First Officer Spock (Zachary Quinto) into an active volcano and sets the tone for the rest of the film, which oscillates between edge-of-your-seat suspense and comic levity.

This is a delicate movie alchemy and too many directors get it wrong, overloading their films with convoluted, disorienting action and occasionally punctuating the monotony with ham-handed one-liners. But J. J. Abrams makes it look simple. The comedy flows easily from his cast and the action is never difficult to follow. There is a clear sense of space and Abrams plays with it.

Take one scene, for example, when the starship Enterprise is under attack. The ship spins through space, tossing around the crew inside. This forces our heroes to run along walls and ceilings as the ship turns. Another scene gets a laugh from watching Scotty (Simon Pegg) sprint down the seemingly endless length of a ship’s hangar. Abrams delights in creating locations that feel real and lets his characters interact with the space. I’d bet half my paycheck he played with Legos as a kid.

He also uses this inventiveness to build a large, richly detailed universe. Even a relatively agnostic Star Trek fan such as myself (in my formative years as a nerd-movie padawan, I sweat and bled Star Wars) could not help but become completely absorbed by it. Along with production designer Scott Chambliss, costume designer Michael Kaplan and countless others, Abrams creates an authentic, believable world. Any given shot is packed with fun things to look at in the background. You get the sense that not a dollar of the movie’s massive budget was misspent. Even the ice cubes at the bar – little spheres of ice that spin when dropped into a whiskey glass – are cool.

But all of these details and embellishments are merely decorative, like so many ornaments Abrams hangs on this dazzling Christmas tree of a movie. The script, written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof, is the fuel that powers this warp speed adventure. Into Darkness is always two steps ahead of its audience; just when you think you know where it’s heading, it twists and turns back on itself. The stakes are always high but ever changing. Villains become allies, friends become enemies and the movie keeps cartwheeling like this until the very end.

Following the wonderfully fun prologue, the plot begins in earnest with the bombing of a Starfleet building in London. Admiral Alexander Marcus (an excellent Peter Weller, growling and snarling his lines) assembles a group of Starfleet commanders and explains who the suspect is: a disgruntled former employee named John Harrison (a steely and terrifically ruthless Benedict Cumberbatch). Harrison attacks a second time and flees to the Klingon homeworld of Kronos. Tensions are already high between Starfleet and the Klingons, and Harrison believes Starfleet would not dare risk starting an all-out war by following him there.

Harrison does not take into account, however, the daring of James T. Kirk, who offers to take the Enterprise and its crew on a covert mission to Kronos to take out Harrison. Armed with seventy-two of Starfleet’s newly developed and highly deadly photon torpedoes, the Enterprise blasts off in hot pursuit of the fugitive.

As the plot rockets down its twisty roller coaster tracks, the crew members on board the Enterprise trade snappy banter and gently poke fun at the proceedings. The dynamic between Pine’s Kirk and Quinto’s Spock is much as it was between William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (who has a brief cameo here). The cocky bravado of Kirk provides a nice foil for Spock’s rigid adherence to logic and following protocol. They frustrate the hell out of each other but they also share a deeply rooted respect and love for one another.

The beautiful Lieutenant Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is romantically involved with the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock and has her own reasons to be annoyed with him. Think your boyfriend has trouble expressing his emotions? Just imagine if his species was genetically predisposed to be devoid of emotions.

Other franchise mainstays include the ship’s doctor, Leonard “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban), and its chief engineer Scotty (Pegg, relishing the character’s trademark Scottish brogue). A few, including Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin) are present too but are featured less prominently.

For some viewers, there may be additional buzz surrounding this movie beyond the anticipation generated for a sequel by Abrams’s lively and entertaining Star Trek in 2009. Earlier this year Abrams was announced as the director of the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII. But calling this movie an audition for Star Wars feels unfair because Into Darkness, one could argue, is actually better than at least half the Star Wars movies. Prior to seeing Into Darkness, even thinking such a thing would have seemed blasphemous to me. (I believe I already mentioned my allegiance to the Force.) But perhaps the clearest sign of this movie’s greatness is its ability to turn anyone who sees it into a Trekkie.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/21/13

REVIEW: Super 8

Super 8 (2011): Written and directed by J.J. Abrams. Starring: Joel Courtney, Kyle Chandler, Elle Fanning, Ron Eldard and Riley Griffiths. Rated PG-13 (intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, some language and some drug use) Running time: 112 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

At a time when most big-budget summer movies are slick, commercialized products, here is one with an actual story and populated by characters we care about. In Super 8, a Spielbergian take on monster movies from writer/director J.J. Abrams, the characters’ actions provide the foundation for the special effects and not the other way around. I am reminded how much fun a good explosion can be when those running away from the pyrotechnics are as realistically rendered as the film’s computer animation.
 

Set largely in the summer of 1979 in a small Ohio town, Super 8 follows the 13-year-old Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) whose mother died the past winter in a factory accident. Joe’s father (Kyle Chandler) feels that a summer spent at baseball camp would be good for his son. As the town’s deputy, his work has not allowed him proper time to grieve and he needs a few months apart from his son.

Joe, however, does not have time for baseball camp. He needs to help his buddy Charles (Riley Griffiths) finish the zombie movie they have been shooting in time to enter a local film festival. An aspiring auteur, Charles is one of the film’s many pleasures. He shoots on the titular 8mm Kodak camera and while his friends double as cast and crew.

On a technical level, their film is surprisingly accomplished (they have no doubt perfected their zombie death scenes over many past summers) but Charles is unsatisfied. The film is missing something. It needs human interest. A story to make the audience care whether or not the characters’ brains are eaten by the undead. For this, they cast a girl from their school, Alice (Elle Fanning), as the love interest. This complicates matters for Joe, whose father has a past with Alice’s deadbeat dad (Ron Eldard).

The film must go on though and in one of the Super 8’s finest scenes, the sci-fi intrigue is introduced. During a late night shoot at a local train station, the kids scramble to film their scene while a train rushes past (“Production value!” exclaims Charles). What the kids wind up catching on camera is more incredible than they could have imagined. A car rushes onto the tracks to derail the train and we are treated to the first of several well-choreographed scenes of the aforementioned explosions.

What exactly the train is holding and why it is derailed I will not go into. The remainder of Super 8 follows the kids as they seek to uncover just that. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force comes into town to hide whatever it was that happened from the local authorities including Joe’s father.

J.J. Abrams has clearly taken a page (or more) from Spielberg’s book here (Spielberg also produced the film). The bobbing flashlights of government officials and overhead shots of quiet suburban sprawl are direct nods to E.T., and the charmingly ragtag band of young teens is reminiscent of the Spielberg-produced movie, The Goonies. Even as the mystery monster starts snatching up the locals, Super 8 remains focused on its young protagonists as they desperately ride through town on bikes and borrowed cars from their parents.

Spielbergian touches aside, this is also a J.J. Abrams movie. And Abrams likes to blow things up real good. After producing the 2008 shaky-cam hit Cloverfield, where a Godzilla-sized sea monster beheaded the Statue of Liberty, Abrams has again delivered a killer monster mash that reinvigorates the genre.

While Cloverfield was content to simply destroy Manhattan and nothing more, Abrams adds some of that human interest the young Charles seeks to include in his own movie. Some of that human interest is a little heavy-handed – the sentimental themes of fatherly love and overcoming grief are not subtle – and the script is hardly flawless. There are some clunky expository lines and a few minor characters are picked up and dropped at the plot’s convenience, but these flaws have a certain charm to them. I was relieved to see that only one person – J.J. Abrams – wrote the film and not the team of writers that is usually a sign of many studio rewrites. The storytelling weaknesses in Super 8 are weaknesses in their own right and not the result of story being neglected in favor of special effects.

The script may not be terribly sophisticated in its exploration of how parents and children cope with grief (Spielberg himself has handled this much better in his own films) but Abrams gives Super 8 some charming touches that set it aside from less personal summer movies. He fills the town with colorful side characters, local inhabitants wrapped up in their own lives, unaware that a monster movie is happening around them and that they are not the stars.

Super 8 is prime summer entertainment and a sign that good genre movies are far from dead. This is a film with genuine heart whose sci-fi elements stem from a love of genre flicks as opposed to a love of box office. The best advice Super 8 takes from the great Spielberg blockbusters is to embrace its appreciation for B-movie fun and to hook the audience in by offering characters that we will remember vividly long after we forget how exactly that monster looked.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/20/11