Trailer Trashin’: Travel Into the Final Frontier in Star Trek Into Darkness

Merry Christmas, everyone! This column will probably be shorter than usual, but that means you can spend less time today reading it and more time celebrating with your family and friends. This week’s special holiday edition of Trailer Trashin’ brings us what is, and will probably remain as such for a while, the fastest-ever movie revisit, because it’s time once again to examine Star Trek Into Darkness.

Premise: After being called back home, the crew of the Enterprise find a seemingly unstoppable force which has attacked Starfleet and left the planet in chaos. Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and the crew of the Enterprise are tasked with leading the deadly manhunt to capture the party responsible and settle an old score.

My take: Boy, we’re back here again already, huh? It was only two weeks ago that I wrote a column about the announcement teaser for Star Trek Into Darkness, and now there’s a full teaser trailer out for the film. And gratifyingly, this teaser shows a lot of different footage than that last one. All in all, it’s just continuing to build my interest in the movie.

Compared to the announcement teaser, this one shows us some more of the rest of the crew besides Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto). We see Chekov (Anton Yelchin), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), McCoy (Karl Urban), Scotty (Simon Pegg), and Sulu (John Cho) all in quick succession. In the time since my column about the announcement teaser, it has been revealed that Benedict Cumberbatch’s villain character is named John Harrison. Because he’s apparently an original character, rather than someone from the established Star Trek canon, we’re just left to speculate even more about who and what he is, exactly – although I’m kind of disappointed that he’s not Gary Mitchell after all. It has also been revealed that Alice Eve is playing Dr. Carol Marcus, a character who first appeared in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), who invented the Genesis Device and was the mother of Kirk’s son David. Who knows what part, if any, of that might make it into this film. This teaser also gives us a brief look at Noel Clarke, whose exact role is still unknown, but the IMAX preview showed that he’s playing the father of a terminally ill child. I’m still waiting for a look at some of the other new members of the cast, such as Peter Weller and Heather Langenkamp.

This teaser also addresses one of my main concerns about the previous one, and shows us a lot of scenes in space and otherwise away from Earth. Explosions ripping through spaceship hulls, the Enterprise doing some serious maneuvering, and people in spacesuits careening through debris fields, it’s all here. And best of all, we get some tantalizing glimpses of Qo’noS (pronounced “Kronos”), the Klingon homeworld, which looks kind of like the cityscape from Blade Runner (1982) on steroids, as well as what looks like a Klingon Bird of Prey ship. For someone who loves movie spaceships and tech as much as I do, this is great stuff.

I will admit, I’m still a little concerned that the film’s tone might swing too dark. But the people involved are talented enough that I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. As someone who only got into Star Trek in the last few years, I’m optimistic about this movie and hope it will be as big a commercial and critical success as its predecessor. Come next May, you can safely assume that I’ll be beaming – in other words, driving quite fast – to my local theater to check out Star Trek Into Darkness.

ANTICIPATION: (In Captain Picard voice) I look forward to watching this motion picture with great anticipation.

Release Date: May 17^th, 2013

Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alice Eve, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Anton Yelchin, John Cho, Simon Pegg, Bruce Greenwood, Noel Clarke, Peter Weller, Joseph Gatt, Nazneen Contractor, Anjini Taneja Azhar, Nolan North, Sean Blakemore, and Heather Langenkamp
Director: J.J. Abrams
Writers: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof