How do you find the
missing ingredient in a film that is undeniably fun? At a little over two hours
long, Star Trek Into Darkness moves at such a quick pace that it feels only an
hour. The film grabs a hold of you and imposes itself through a series of
action set pieces and melodramatic scenes all tinged with knowing humour;
knowing of its genre.
Yet something feels
like it is missing, something that the first of the reboot, Star Trek (2009) had, and that is two
fold. The narrative appears to lack a middle third. There is an overlong set up
and a loud and spectacular final third, yet the middle is rushed and this could
account for the incongruous seeming running time.
Additionally, as good
as Benedict Cumberbatch is a Khan, the duality of his motives falls harder on
the side of empathy than anger. Whereas Nero in the first film had
understandable motives, his actions towards Starfleet were firmly immoral.
Conversely, Khan is exacting vengeance upon a corrupt and despotic leader of
Starfleet. This is hard to ignore and consequently it is hard to root for Kirk
and his Enterprise crew. However, none of this negates from the pure enjoyable
spectacle that Into Darkness is. It
just means that it does not sit quite well afterwards.
No comments:
Post a Comment