MY STARK TREK REVIEW

YOU HAVE SEEN THEM STAR

YOU HAVE SEEN THEM TREK

NOW YOU WILL SEE THEM STAR TREK. . .

INTO DARKNESS

Star Trek No Colon Into Darkness is what summer blockbusters are supposed to feel like.

 

It's a roller coaster ride in the best sense of the phrase (besides it being a terrible cliche) and, in its more unguarded moments it manages to be genuinely emotional in a way that you can't fake with hundreds of millions of dollars.

I won't lower the conversation by naming lesser big budget movies like The Hobbit: A Unexpected Journey, which warbles and shambles along its nearly three hours like a drunken prison fifi brought to life by the cruelest of frat-magic, instead, I'll say that beyond all of the action and effects which work phenomenally, Star Trek No Colon Into Darkness succeeds because it manages to get a group of characters that you instantly know and like, give them stakes and motivations and relationships and you set that in the midst of intergalactic terrorism and Klingons and phasers and Tribbles and moons and space and accents and 9/11 and double-crosses and back and side references and Sherlock and FUCK THIS MOVIE WAS AWESOME.

Eating a fish taco waiting for the movie I was sitting next to a guy and his girlfriend who were on vacation from Las Vegas. They seemed amicable so, of course, I had to ask where someone from Las Vegas possibly go to for vacation. While they did not proposition me (it was before the movie and they weren't married yet so maybe the scene wasn't right), they did make me realize something about the movies that are out right now.

Of the four major movies playing that late at night there was Iron Man 3, Oblivion, Star Trek Into Darkness, and The Great Gatsby.

One of these things is not like the other. Of the massive, popcorn smashing affairs that you typically have invading the summer-- comic books, toy properties, reboots, TV shows you forgot about, Tom Cruise vehicles, Will Smith vehicles, Xenu repulsion vehicles, more comic books-- one of them is an adaptaiton of what might be the great novel written in the English language.


Taken altogether, you have a blockbuster that the exclamation point was created to service playing against a slick version of a story about a man failing to resurrect the past and that is awesome. We're living in a pretty decent age, even if I don't want to believe it sometimes, and it's perfectly fitting that a Star Trek feature is leading the way.