Star Trek Into Darkness


Tonight we watched Star Trek into darkness, a film so laden with cheese it probably doubled the amount of cholesterol in my bloodstream. From beginning to end it was a mess of lens-flared guff.

It was one of those films that had promise, yet wasted so much. Peter Weller, the original Robocop, now with a face like a melted candle (thank you, Scary Go Round, for that enlightening simile) chewed up some scenery, but was never properly used. Benedict Cumberbatch, a man blessed with a ridiculous name and boyish good looks, got to scowl and growl and run around, but it was never clear what he was doing, and Simon Pegg’s role as comedy Scotsman just felt horrible to witness.

On the positive side, there’s a midget with a cabbage for a head.

There’s a rather flatfooted attempt to satirise American foreign policy, if, er, Cumberbatch is Osama Bin Laden, the Klingons are Pakistan, Kirk is a Navy Seal, Cumberbatch is actually another Navy Seal and the Klingons are insurgents in Afghanistan, and … and well, that made about as much sense as the film. There’s a good half hour of the film where they batter this metaphor about the head, before it goes back to being a bog standard SciFi film, complete with people falling to their doom whenever the gravity fails.

Did I mention the excess of lens flare? Every shot has to have a line of bright light bleeding into your eyeballs, because this is the Future, and the Future has Bright Lights, and … just no. I expect in a few years this will make the film look tremendously dated. That, and the super-cliches script.

But then like I said, it does have a midget with a cabbage for a head.


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