TORONTO — The long weekend — Victoria Day in Canada — kicks off early with Thursday’s opening of Star Trek Into Darkness.
A follow-up to J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot, it lands in theatres with plenty of buzz. So, what are critics saying? Will Star Trek Into Darkness live long and prosper at the box office or boldly go down in flames?
Graeme McMillan of Wired called the sequel “uneven and circuitous where the previous movie was focused and fast-moving.”
McMillan, who’s critical of the screenplay, found Into Darkness overwhelming at times but, as “disposable summer cinema, it’s certainly enjoyable.”
Writing in The Fresno Bee, critic Rick Bentley gushed about the latest Star Trek, calling it “the best work since Gene Roddenberry brought the franchise to life in the 1960s.”
Bentley offered this blurb-worthy praise: “It’s a solid summer movie thrill ride.”
Liam Lacey of The Globe and Mail called Into Darkness “more of the same” and “a bit too familiar.”
He wrote: “To anyone looking to explore new frontiers, be warned: Star Trek Into Darkness slips not into darkness, but into a dark echo-chamber of fanboy self-referentiality in Abrams’s second outing.”
Lacey opined that Into Darkness is a “coarser, less buoyant affair” than the 2009 reboot.
“That one left you leaving the theatre elated, like the sensation of re-reading a favourite book after several years and rediscovering that it still charms,” he wrote. “Star Trek Into Darkness offers much more qualified satisfaction, which, especially after the second half, is akin to the relief of surviving a long beating.”
Crave Online critic William Bibbiani has stronger words for the film, reducing it to “one of the worst films in this long-running franchise.”
He said the movie “idles its warp drive for over two hours, and disguises this laziness in a revamped classic storyline told with only a few key differences. The approach might have even worked if those differences weren’t entirely superficial.”
While not declaring it the worst Star Trek movie, Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times agreed Into Darkness “doesn’t quite match 2009’s blast from the past.” Still, she called it “a great deal of brash fun.”
Sharkey wrote: “There are times when it feels as if the director has pulled a page out of the Michael Bay playbook, taking some of the action to exhaustive extremes. At other moments, all that bravado collapses into safer-than-necessary choices.”
Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune used adjectives like “rousing” to describe Into Darkness.
“I liked the 2009 outing,” he wrote. “I liked this one a tick more.”
At the New York Post, Lou Lumenick took shots at the movie’s “surprisingly cheesy” effects and the “murky” plot, which he found is “as silly as it is arbitrary.”
According to Lumenick, “A more accurate title for J. J. Abrams’ followup to his vastly more satisfying 2009 reboot would be: If you really wanted to leave out the colon, Star Trek This Time It’s Personal.”
Fellow New York critic David Edelstein agreed, calling the plotting “clunky and nonsensical” in his New York magazine review.
He also took issue with several members of the Enterprise crew. “Anton Yelchin’s Chekhov still doesn’t look old enough to shave. And what’s the deal with his terrible accent? He was born in Russia but makes Walter Koenig look like a veteran of the Moscow Art Theatre,” wrote Edelstein.
“Simon Pegg’s Scotty is not a reassuring presence but an out-and-out hysteric. John Cho blessedly underplays Sulu—and as a result is always upstaged. The pleasure of an Uhura who takes part in the action is dampened by the rest of the role, which requires her either to entreat Spock to be careful or exhort him to get the bad guy.”
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