Star Trek Into Darkness

'I will walk over your cold corpses.'

Before I start my review you all must know that I am not a Star Trek fan. That’s right ladies and gentlemen at a young age I made that single difficult decision that Sci-Fi fans must make: Star Wars or Star Trek? I chose Star Wars. My knowledge of the series goes nowhere past this film’s predecessor. But thankfully my father is a ‘Trekkie’ so with him I boldly went and saw this film.

The plot goes that the Star Fleet is under attack from a mystery villain set on destroying Kirk and his crew aboard the enterprise.  This film is filled with excitement, drama and comedy and is immensely fun to watch.

Fun is a good word to use here because it encompasses everything a ‘summer movie’ like this should do, make you enjoy the movie-going experience. This film is full of great visuals (clearly the work of J.J Abrams) and great character dynamics that can only be down to a well-conceived script. The relationships between the characters are so interesting because we believe that they are real people with real problems despite them being strange and from the future.

The entire original cast are just as fantastic as they were previously, with every single character being relevant to the story and actually having a purpose. That is what’s exactly needed from an ensemble cast and the writers knew exactly what they were doing. Not knowing the original cast I couldn’t draw comparisons but my ‘Trekkie’ dad tells me that every actor does well to pay homage to the original actor's interpretation.

Now the main (and perhaps only) problem I had with 2009’s Star Trek was its lack of a memorable villain. And I suppose that wasn’t really the film’s main drive since its purpose as the first of a series was to set up the characters. In this film however Benedict Cumberbatch is menacing, interesting, believable and fantastic as the unnamed villain.  After Ben Kingsley and Guy Pearce in Iron Man 3 he is such a breath of fresh air. I honestly believe that he might be my favourite villain since Heath Ledger’s Joker (yes I do remember how good Bane, Loki and Silva were). Cumberbatch does incredibly well here and but I wasn’t surprised at all as I went in knowing how great an actor he is. In fact, I Max Bezant hereby predict that sometime later in his career Benedict Cumberbatch will win an Oscar.

My only real problem with the film was that I felt the ending was slightly too abrupt. There were certain elements of the story that I wanted more resolved than they were and I felt it could have been tidier than it was. Apart from that small gripe this movie is fun, action packed and has only amplified my faith in J.J Abrams in his ability to direct a certain other Sci-Fi film in 2015.  I give the film 8/10.

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