Star Trek: Into Darkness2013's Star Trek: Into Darkness is the sequel to JJ Abrahm's Star Trek. The rebooted franchise that has done nothing more than to blind people with lens flares, in an attempt to cover up the juvenile storylines with rampant stupidity.
The opening 10 minutes of the Into Darkness movie shows the Federation somewhat meddling with a new species of humanoid, violating the prime directive in whatever ways you can think. For some reason, Captain Kirk decides that he needs to steal a scroll out of the temple of the alien's temple and run off with it whilst the natives are in hot pursuit. The escape is interrupted by a large monster that Kirk has to kill -- and Dr McCoy (standing behind the monster) informing Kirk that the monster was their getaway ride. WTF??? And if that is not enough, Sulu, Uhura, and the ever reliable Spock are trying to shuttlecraft and cable drop down into an erupting volcano to deploy a cold fusion reactor. Spock volunteers to be lowered into the volcano (nearly falling into the lava) to activate the device. I do not know about anyone else, but did they not use teleportation devices in the last movie. They could have either set the device to deploy, and then teleported the device to activate upon countdown inside the volcano. Or perhaps have Spock teleport to the volcano, deploy the device and then get out of there. Added to that was the apparent need to take the USS Enterprise out of the ocean (where it was to be hidden) just to teleport someone only kilometres away back on board the space ship.
With that mindless head-numbing scene out of the way, we cut to London. A family is going to see their dying daughter in hospital. The father is accosted by a man who claims that he can save his dying daughter. The father is given a vial of the man's own blood and something else that looks like a ring. The father later injects the blood into his daughter's IV -- with near immediate beneficial effect. The repayment the man receives is to have the father walk into his workplace to (unknowingly) conduct a bombing of some Starfleet archive.
This terrorist act means that all the starship captains are called to a meeting where they discuss what happens. Kirk, having been demoted to first officer, becomes aware that the terrorist bombing was a way of getting the starship captains to meet together in one room. The terrorist, having known this, sets to shoot up the room and kill all the officers. Kirk's commanding officer, Admiral Pike, gets killed in the attack. Kirk disables the terrorist's (John Harrison's) attack ship -- but Harrison gets away. We later learn the Harrison has transported to the Klingon homeworld of Kronos.
This schlock of a movie only gets better. Kirk gets his command reinstated. He also leads the Enterprise crew on a voyage to kill Harrison on Kronos and then flee from the system without being caught. As part of the arsenal, 72 stealth missiles are aboard the ship, to lock on to Harrison's position and annihilate him. Apparently, one of the missiles is not enough to do the job. Kirk gets a team together and orders his security team to dress in civilian clothes, so not to arouse suspicion that they are part of the Federation. Sulu, acting as captain, then broadcasts a message towards Kronos to tell Harrison to surrender or face annihilation. (If you were not face palming watching this scene play out, you really are dumb as schitt). But apparently, the message was more useful than not, as Harrison surrenders when learning more about the message from Kirk -- having just rescued Uhura and the away team from certain death.
The remainder of the movie goes to hell in a handbasket. Admiral Marcus -- the chief architect of the plan to kill Harrison -- shows up in a dreadnought version of the Enterprise. Marcus finds out that Kirk has taken Harrison prisoner instead of killing him. Marcus also learns that Kirk has found out that Harrison is actually a 300 years old super human named Khan. For whatever bloody reason, Kirk decides that running from the USS Vengeance back to Earth, so that Khan can face justice is much smarter than handing over the prisoner to Marcus for execution.
We could go on and on about this shhhtuff and how a captain of a spaceship does not know how to deal with admirality. But, basically, Kirk decided that morality of a situation trumps reality. The USS Vengeance kicks the USS Enterprise's arse to a point that only Admiral Marcus's daughter, Carol, can intervene and try and talk the admiral out of destroying Enterprise. With Marcus deciding to destroy Enterprise anyway, he does not simply recommence firing. But, he gets out the large cannons of Vengeance's weaponry to *slowly* turn towards Enterprise. Suddenly, the weapon is disabled. Scotty, who had been aboard Vengeance since it was launched, has taken out the control that work the weaponry. Somehow, it did not occur to him to disable the warp drive or other weapons systems before Admiral Marcus had an attempt against Kirk's ship.
Kirk has to take control of Marcus' dreadnought. But, he has to team up with Khan in an attempt to overpower the crew. I wonder how this will turn out. Oh, by the way, Spock decides that the time was right to prevaricate in order to trick Khan into thinking that Khan has the upper hand. That could have been useful a few days back.
Rating B-/C+ because of the special effects.