Film Carew: Star Trek: Into Darkness

Though we've just started out on the American major studios' 'Summer Movie' season, already the weekly paradise of mega-budget explosion movies is beginning to blur into one general CGI-eyesore/blaringly-loud earsore haze. JJ Abrams' Star Trek: Into Darkness doesn't bring back adolescent memories of watching Shatner grapple with gladiators and exotic alien dames in endless broadcast reruns, but, rather, the far less fond remembrances of, like, Iron Man 3 and Oblivion. And it's not just in the generic sense of generalised fist-fights atop moving vehicles, or sub-Star Wars star-fighter dogfights designed for video-games. In one scene, Chris Pine explores a moment-of-detonation photo of a terrorist attack and carefully flicks through the picture, pirouetting through a 3D-rendered world like a sleuth puzzling and intuiting the clues, wondering why something smells fishy, and who the superhuman standing in the middle of the explosion is. It's a veritable replay of a scene from Iron Man 3, becoming comically so when the terrorist evil-villain mad-scientist mastermind type figure (here, Benedict Cumberbatch, playing Khan as a mystical übermenschen part whooshing ninja, part cold-eyed alien rogue, part private-school twat) sends a helicopter to blow up a glassy building containing our hero; this time a billionaire's Malibu mansion swapped out for Starfleet HQ.

Ready to fuck shit up!

Our hero is, theoretically, Pine, whose Cap'n Kirk comes in shades of Cruise: a hotheaded dickwad who plays hard, drinks hard, and hits on the dames hard; a cocky square-jaw feeling the eternal itch of a need for speed. A scene in which Bruce Greenwood - in jagging lambchops - chews out Pine for his recklessness is straight from the cache of cop-movie clichés, Brucey G throwing this “pain in the ass” off the case for his refusal to play by the book. Which leads to Pine going to drown his sorrows, idiotically enough, in a hard-drinkin' saloon where the music to soundtrack drowning-your-sorrows circa 2259 is apparently boilerplate 20th-century blues-rock (he also enjoys fucking to 1990s Beastie Boys; so maybe his whole shtick, from the frosted blonde 'do to the archaic soundtrack to the rampant chauvinism, is some elaborate three-centuries-hence throwback).

But the real hero, really, is Zachary Quinto's Spock. Theoretically, he's supposed to be the wet-blanket of the buddy-cop couple; the analytical, technical, regulation-adhering other-half to Pine's impulsive, by-the-gut, retro-masculine hero. Yet, for the army of Star Trek nerds who worship at the altar of Roddenberry as religion, Spock is a more identifiable icon: a man of emotionless eggheadery but scant social skills, who is always on the outside looking in at the humans and their emotions (and, maybe, high-school cliques and having-sex and such). Speaking of fucking: Quinto's on/off-again relationship with Zoë Saldana is a manifest fantasy of the hot girl dating the weenie; her frustrations at - but eventual embrace of - his essentially-autistic behaviour seem, here, like an olive branch to all those female filmgoers dragged into cinemas to sit alongside their very own man-of-few-feelings.

Cap'n Kirk, havin' a flirt...

Star Trek: Into Darkness kicks off with a Bond-esque pre-credit sting in which the Enterprise is on a do-or-die mission amidst an Avatar-esque foreign planet; Pine and Karl Urban fleeing through a bright-red forest on foot, chased by an alien civilisation in vivid white face-paint. The 3D/Imax camera picks its way through the ash spouted by a volcano set to blow; the heist-movie mission involving Quinto dropping a cold-fusion device inside the lava, and the crew hightailing it outta there without tipping their technologically-advanced skills off to the prehistoric inhabitants. It's the first of many, many, many scenes to involve that hoariest dramatic device, the Ticking Countdown Clock(!), which usually needs someone to manually override something to avert disaster. Were you wanting to get tanked as Kirk at an awful blues-bar, some sort of drinking game involving each overworked cliché would get all participating players plenty sauced.

Other than those old spy-movie staples, there's the generic tentpole trope: shit exploding, a parade of fistfights, major characters who tragically die only they don't really die (spoiler alert: Chris Pine's 'death scene' acting chops are beamed from a local theatre open casting), stuff that looks like it's being staged solely to be included in the video game. Trekkies may delight at seeing Leonard Nimoy cameo, again, like an aging drag queen trussed up for one last show; they'll surely delight in seeing Saldana speak Klingon; and fans of atrocious NBA GMs will undoubtedly delight in the (David) Khan meme being born-again for a new era, with, this time, Spock doing the honours.

The new 'Super Best Friends'?

Cinephiles may find a brief flutter of delight at a sequence in which the Enterprise spins out-of-control with its anti-gravity off; and, thus, the vessel tumbles over and over, throwing our heroes from wall to wall in a fashion that picks up on Inception's elaborate, elegant homage to Cocteau's The Blood Of A Poet. But, otherwise, it's a standard-issue Boy's Own adventure trussed in the CGI'd excess of the corporate-conglomerate toy-shiller: explosions, fist-fights, the world saved at the last minute. From the moment the final credits come hurtling at your face like some steroid-addled screensaver, everything that happens herein will be barely memorable. Abrams' supposed shrine-to-nerddom is, like its predecessor, imminently forgettable; an identikit 21st-century blockbuster trading under the iconic imagery of sci-fi past.