Star Trek Into Darkness review

Director JJ Abrams delivers his sequel to 2009’s reboot of the Star Trek saga that imagines Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Bones and the gang in their early years aboard the starship Enterprise. We catch up with them, Raiders Of The Lost Ark-style, at the end of an adventure involving a technologically unsophisticated race of beings and an erupting volcano, but are soon back on earth and at Starfleet headquarters when a sinister baddie (Cumberbatch) attacks, blowing up everything and everyone in sight. It’s up to Kirk (Pine) and crew to chase the bad guy back to the remote planet where he is holed up, and stop him before he obliterates anywhere else.

This looks pretty spectacular as lots of things explode, phasers are blasted and punches thrown, but it never gets very exciting despite Cumberbatch’s menacing visage popping up around every corner. Although 2009’s Star Trek rewrote the series’ timeline, making it possible for anyone to be killed off (it isn’t the same reality as the classic Trek series, you see), you never get the feeling that any of the main cast are really in danger, and in fact you almost hope for Scotty (Pegg), Uhura (Saldana) or Bones (Karl Urban) to end up in a life-threatening situation just so they get some more screen time. (It says something when the only character you’re worried about is a sick Tribble).

At least Pine’s character is less annoying than he was in the first movie, there are some witty moments (including some cute funny ones between odd couple Uhura and Spock) and Cumberbatch is a more interesting villain than Part One’s Eric Bana, even if his character and Kirk never get quite the bad guy/good guy face-off that would have earned this fun but forgettable movie an extra star.